Sound For Screen – Ⓡⓐⓤⓛ 'ⓢ Ⓢⓞⓤⓝⓓ Ⓙⓞⓤⓡⓝⓐⓛ

SMELLS LIKE SULFUR: session 3.3: SFX: Sound Design

In the 3rd “studio session” of this project, I’ve dedicated mainly to editing SFX. In this category, three main subgroups are edited separately but mixed all together. Those are:

BACKGROUNDS/AMBIENCES (BG/AMB): sounds that build each scene’s location and consist entirely of elements, not scenes on screen. Some editors prefer to differentiate BGs from AMBs. The only thing that might differ is their visibility on camera.
HARD FX (FX): realistic sounds that are driven by what’s on camera or action.
SOUND DESIGN: elements that need to be created from scratch or a lot of processing to fulfil its function.

SOUND DESIGN

The only relevant sound design present in the film so far is the whisper. Nevertheless, I count the handy camera scenes as sound design, even though there isn’t a lot of processing, and it’s only a matter of layering the right effects.

It was pretty challenging for me to come with an idea for the whisper. First, I was working alongside the director to develop a scary sound full of layers and processing and chaos. It didn’t work well. It didn’t manage to fulfil the film’s ideas. There was too much conceptualisation towards that sound design, and in my opinion, Mario was too involved in the process. A movie is a product designed by seven departments, not only one – the director. I think that the idea of the Author film should’ve died in the last century. A film set is not a dictatorship. However, I’m not comparing that case with this one. Mario is a very ambitious audiovisual artist, and he wants to have a snippet of his ideas in all departments. The sound design for the whisper started to take a better form when I first decided to use this film for the assignment. This course is helping a lot to see the sound from different perspectives in a post-modernist way – decontextualising things from their original significance. It was the same thinking process behind the idea of doing silence design instead of sound design.

It doesn’t sound good, but these are mainly the director’s ideas.

The whisper is a sound that brings terror with it. How can I show that with sound? Is it by offering terrifying sounds such as screams, roars, gore sounds? Or is it something that is created through time and by little glimpses that are presented sporadically? Gary Rydstrom, while talking about the sound design of the first T-Rex scene on Jurassic Park (1993), he explains why it is so iconical and effective:

“That scene where the T-Rex shows up is another example of planning a scene for sound. I think other directors would have had maybe a shocking moment where you see the T-Rex suddenly appear out of the blue. Hitchcock would say that you can either show the bomb under the table and have 5 minutes of tension or have the bomb explode as a surprise and get one second of shock. Spielberg did great by getting several minutes of tension because you knew what was coming and knew it because you heard it before you saw it. It was cleverly planned to scare people that way. It’s nice when movies think about sound ahead of time.”

I introduced the whisper that way. The whisper comes in the very first scene of the short: We see Emilio filming the forest with his handy camera, and before the scene ends, we get a glimpse of this human-like sound from within the forest. However, the way I came up with that sound was by accident. I went through my sound libraries, looking for a background that matched the handy camera scene ideas – exaggerated and very detailed. I found one good atmos of a pseudo tropical forest with a curious bird sound that recalls a common potoo. I dragged the clip into the scene, and when I listened back, the bird sound sounded haunting and frightening, and it looked like it was perfectly cut without even touching it.

I kept listening to that scene back and forward, and it sounded so good that I didn’t want to get rid of it. I decided to use it. Nevertheless, I need more repetitions of that same sound. By isolating it, I realised it sounded like my colleague Travis Yu, a vocal performer. We analysed the sound, and we agreed that we would recreate the sound through his voice and hopefully, that will function and work well within the final scene. Travis wanted the sound of the actual bird, but we couldn’t find it. They asked me: Why don’t you use the bird voice instead of mine. I don’t know how to answer them, but I will use their question in future experimentation.

The rhythmic constant bird sound is a European turtle dove. The sound that I’m talking about is the one that sounds like a bird, a fox and possibly a human, difficult to miss.

Apart from that sound, I used two other elements. I liked the idea of minimal sound design already discussed before. So I used forest tones with maxed gain and accompanied with dozens of limiters that distorted the source completely. I’ve only needed a low pitch and high pitch from this experimentation, so I could later mix it creatively and enhance the story after the whisper’s appearance. In the scenes that proceed with the whisper’s appearance, I “crossfaded” both sounds with an HPF and LPF, resulting in an almost deaf and dead atmosphere. I later named the sounds dead atmos.

SMELLS LIKE SULFUR: session 3.2: SFX: Hard Effects Editorial

In the 3rd “studio session” of this project, I’ve dedicated mainly to editing SFX. In this category, three main subgroups are edited separately but mixed all together. Those are:

BACKGROUNDS/AMBIENCES (BG/AMB): sounds that build each scene’s location and consist entirely of elements, not scenes on screen. Some editors prefer to differentiate BGs from AMBs. The only thing that might differ is their visibility on camera.
HARD FX (FX): realistic sounds that are driven by what’s on camera or action.
SOUND DESIGN: elements that need to be created from scratch or a lot of processing to fulfil its function.

In this post, I’m mainly going to expose my ideas on Hard Effects.

HARD EFFECTS

The editing of these was straightforward. There were only a few moments where hard effects were necessary.

Handy Camera Scenes: Regarding these set of two scenes, I have recently watched a sound design case study of Jurassic Park, where Gary Rydstrom, the sound designer, was confronted by scientists about whether the sound of the T-REX was authentic or not. They claimed that the animal didn’t add the ability of roaring, while in the film, for a long time, the sound of the animal was highly connected to what Gary Rydstrom designed. The scientists were demanding Gary to fix it and make it more realistic and scientifically correct. Gary responded: “Well, it’s a movie.”. This example is vital to refer to my process while editing the sound for the handy camera scenes. When editing sound, the editor needs to remember what he is doing: Is he/she/they helping the story? Is he/she/they damaging it? I did exaggerate the notion of space and acoustics to fulfil the story’s desire. I add several effects to intensify the feeling of watching a video poorly recorded. Apart from the usage of RC-20, I added the sound of me handling a microphone with LPF and an effect of the character zooming in. The bulls that he is filming sound too close, and the ambiences sound too present. These are obviously decisions mainly to enhance the story.

In this video, Gary Rydstorm debunks the sounds used to create T-REX‘s voice.

Cow field: The cow field is, for me, a pretty exciting scene. It shows both characters on a wide shot entering the forest from an area full of cows. They are everywhere. As previously discussed, cowbells are a significant detail to that scene. However, the background needs more depth. A lot more cow sounds were added, such as breathing and mouth sounds. I still intend to record a cow walking as I couldn’t find any sound that could do the job. I also added fly sounds.

Forest: If we could separate the film into two worlds, there would be the Outside of the Forest and the Inside of the Forest. They are sonically different, but both help each other to become one. Although, the forest is more hostile and eerie than the outside. There’s barely a sign of life apart from some birds and bugs. What provokes its eerieness is the sound of trees and how the whisper interferes with them. Apart from the creaking, I used the sound of broken sticks to tell the spectator that something was coming. It already has the information that a so-called whisper has been after them for a long time. The first snap comes right before the Title when both characters are already out of the frame, and the camera panned and zoomed on a specific point of the woods. This would be the second interaction and fear-inducing sound. It would appear again in the whisper, followed by numerous other sounds of wood cracking and snapping and later the falling of trees and destruction. Nevertheless, there’s no information on these sound elements in the script, and it was pretty challenging to decode it. The idea behind the inclusion of these sets of sounds among the whisper scenes, came from the 2019 O que arde (Fire Will Come) film directed by the three-time award-winning Galician film director, Oliver Laxe. David Machado was the sound supervisor for this film, and he explains, in an interview with Óscar de Avila for Bobina Sonora, a blog magazine dedicated to Sound for Film in the Spanish Film Scene, the world inside O que Arde, and how eclectic it sounds. The most enigmatic and atemporal scene is the opening one. In the sequence, we see a couple of shots of trees being lightened by some sort of light source as if they were being exhibited. Suddenly, trees start falling, followed by visual and sonic information. Then a slow fade-in in sound introduces machinery as an acousmatic sound. Then, the machine is introduced. And then another one. The soundscape becomes an orchestra of organized sound and ends with the encountering of another tree which seems to be held like a reliquary of that environment transitioning to another world of the storytelling.

SMELLS LIKE SULFUR: session 3.1: SFX: Backgrounds

In the 3rd “studio session” of this project, I’ve dedicated mainly to editing SFX. In this category, three main subgroups are edited separately but mixed all together. Those are:

BACKGROUNDS/AMBIENCES (BG/AMB): sounds that build each scene’s location and consist entirely of elements, not scenes on screen. Some editors prefer to differentiate BGs from AMBs. The only thing that might differ is their visibility on camera.
HARD FX (FX): realistic sounds that are driven by what’s on camera or action.
SOUND DESIGN: elements that need to be created from scratch or a lot of processing to fulfil its function.

In this post, I’m mainly going to expose my ideas on backgrounds.

BACKGROUNDS

I am pretty happy with the result that I’ve got with ambiences so far. The production sound was good on certain occasions, but overall it sounded bland – no depth nor exciting elements that could enhance the story. For each sequence, there were different solutions. Here’s a list of all the locations relevant for this editorial:

Digital Processed Ambiences: At first, I considered using an actual recording of a handy camera in a forest near London. However, I remember that solving sound editorial issues is not always objective as it might look. For example, my first ever foley session was chaotic because I didn’t have enough knowledge to understand that some sounds aren’t reproduced only by their source. Furthermore, not all handy cameras have that retro feeling that the spectator is expecting. Cinema not always uses truth to be truthful. Cinema is a clever lie developed by professionals. Therefore, for all scenes with the handy camera, I used one of RC-20 presets (Retro Color 20 by XLN Audio) and applied it in the other food groups for those scenes only.

*Editorial Screenshot* showing *RC-20* the plug-in used for the digital processing sound

Mountains: There were only two scenes with this shot. A big mountain can be seen with some low clouds. Some electrical interference damaged the production sound, so I had to recreate the ambience. Nonetheless, I didn’t particularly appreciate how it sounded concerning the film’s leitmotif. This scene is quite essential to establish a modality. I added wind sounds, made it more airtight, and gave it a little time location. Time is an interesting topic to debate about this film. There’s no perception of time throughout the whole short film.

Inside the Forest: Most of the actions where the characters interact are taken place inside the forest among tall pines. Some shots portray a confusing and labyrinthic forest which the production sound couldn’t express. I decided to recall my personal experiences whenever I was in a pine forest. They are quite common in Iberia, but they all differ in terms of the soundscape. One of the most characteristic sounds related to them is the wood creaking by the force of the wind. It reminds us of a woodpecker or something big moving. When we try to locate those sounds, we can’t trace what’s provoking them. Therefore, I decided to add them dispersed throughout all the scenes that became silent. It gave a different perspective towards the story and the action and helped engage the eerieness out of those sequences.

Outside the Forest: These scenes were crucial to separate the two worlds represented in the short film. Inside the forest seems like there’s something very obscure lurking in the shadows. Whereas outside of it, there is an entirely different world, full of rich sound elements that relocate the characters in a wild but yet familiar scenario such as the cow fields. When I showed my editorial to Harry Charlton, a course colleague, he was intrigued by the cowbell sounds that were “everywhere”. I didn’t realise how powerful that sound was in terms of geographical context. I did a little research on cowbells usage, and I came across something like a founding for me – the traditional usage of cowbells are almost exclusive of the Iberian Peninsula. Could it be confusing for other spectators? I think not. I think it’s part of its identity.

Iberian Heritage

SMELLS LIKE SULFUR: session 2: dialogue editing

Even though it wasn’t requested to students to do dialogue editing to their projects, it would be complicated to deny that factor in my project. I recognize the time implications it takes in others to perform a good session of precise noise cleaning and room tone fluidity, however, this project is also a good way to practice and to make mistakes. Another mistake I took was selecting a film of 8 minutes to edit instead of 3-4 minutes. By the time that I’m writing this post, I already edited dialogues, and I’m organizing and spotting my backgrounds and hard effects. Nevertheless, and as I referred previously, learning is a process of irregular successes and failures, and again, today (18/11) I fell into another of my mistakes: I forgot to update my Pro Tools Ultimate subscription and now I have to wait 48 hours for AVID to accept my academic version request. I’ll use this time to write my process in the project so far and explain my intentions.

Last Tuesday I had a tutorial with Tim Harrison. He told him about all my ideas and discussed my projections for the whisper. We discussed the idea of making a non-humanized sound so it maintains its ambiguous and hermetic language. If I use recognisable sounds, the spectator will try to visualise its form and ways of being. The sound must be unrecognisable for us, but not the characters – because they are the only ones who know what to expect. I also told me about other examples of sound design that uses the opposite technique to trick the spectator. One of them was the bear scene on Annihilation by Robert Eggers – the film gives the spectator the information that one of the characters didn’t die through sound, but then it’s struck by the surreal alternative of a bear-like creature adopting the missing character’s voice. It expresses antagonistically the idea that I want to produce: I don’t have a plot twist nor a surprising sound that might trigger the viewer’s imagination. I want total confusion and no sense of understanding. However, the characters perfectly know what to expect. They are the only ones who know how it sounds and how it behaves and even if it has a form. They are the only ones who possess knowledge.

My way of editing dialogues, and other groups in general, starts with the premise “Story Drives Every Decision” and I keep asking myself throughout the editorial whether the decision helps or hurts the story. So, mostly, my decisions consider the plot and concept. After, preparing my session with all the tracks I needed, I started arranging the clips for continuity purposes. This short film doesn’t have many extra possibilities in case it lacks something specific. In this case, the film was recorded with only one boom, and even though it is very well recorded, some things must be overedited in order to reach a decent result, which is the case when some strange production sound steps dialogue. In that situation, my only option is to go through all takes and see which one is “cleaned”, but the problem of having only one boom means that for each take there’s only one recording – actors don’t do the exact same acting 5 times in a row unless they are really professional (the actors used were amateurs and non-actors because that’s the way the director likes to work). When there’s no way of fixing audio, my very very last option is Izotope Rx. This program doesn’t do miracles but one can take advantage in order to have decent results. If RX is not sufficient then there’s nothing else I could do (unless I had time to do ADR and money to pay tickets for the Ecuadorian actors fly all the way to London).

RX saved me from saving the story. The film atmosphere is “almost” dead, so I proceeded to delete all the bird and dog sounds existing in most of the scenes, even though there are cows in one of the shots (the film suffered many alterations due to post-production problems; many scenes were deleted as well as many ideas I had back in March when we were on pre-production). It took me at least 4 hours to arrange everything without accessing the studio at any of those times. I’m also reconsidering mixing the film in 5.1 for the assignment. I don’t see myself having the time to do everything I want for this film. I have to be more conscious of it in the future so I don’t have any surprises. Hopefully, backgrounds and effects will only need one session to edit.

Removing Unwanted Sounds from the one of the scenes with De Rustle, De Click, and Spectral Repair

SMELLS LIKE SULFUR: session 1: background ideas about pre-production, production and post-production: organizing and opening the session

This small excerpt is taken from Post Sound Design: The art and craft of audio post-production for the moving image by John Avarese explain really well the logistic problems that inherently come from different workflows and departments inside the post-production phase on a film. Ideally, sound editors want the AAF to be organized as well as for the sounds they select to edit their films. Many times Directors, Producers and Editors don’t take into consideration the hard work driven by the sound department. Sometimes, even sound recordists ignore the importance of making a clean and efficient session out of their job, hoping that any sort of issues might and will be solved in post-production. In the first lecture with Tim Harrisson, he noted down the importance of the relationship director-sound supervisor, and eventually crew-sound supervisor, quote:” You should start doing your sound libraries before production. By establishing a good relationship with the director, you will be able to participate in the pre-production process, alongside the rest of the crew. Later you will be able to hand in your sound library to the editor so they can start using your sounds instead of something that they find.

In Smells Like Sulfur, I’ve had the privilege to start working with the director, Mario A. Arias, a long time before pre-production in February 2021. He showed me the script; we talked about some ideas; made some decisions about some sound concepts we would like to produce. Because it was a small production, I didn’t have difficulties in talking with my other colleagues from other departments. We all knew each other, which made it easier, and my sound recordist, Sergio Argüeso, was very capable and knew what he was doing. We analyse the script together; I warned him about some very important scenes that he would have to make sure sound was recorded immaculately. The film was recorded in Madrid, and by that time I was in Porto, Portugal, with almost no way to be there for the production process and help Sergio with the recordings. He had to “improvise” and be creative as usual. Listening back to production sound I can proudly say that he managed to get a really good result out of the shooting. Nevertheless, the only problem I can point out occurred in pre-production: we started to do sound design for the feature too early. When the film was shot, and later went to post, the sounds we’ve made didn’t match intentionality or concept. I’ll have to redo the sound design for the whisper and a new approach.

My notebook with the notes from the first session

For this assignment, I was asked to be consistent with my blog posts in order to report my process. It’s ironic because I’ve never documented my process before when it comes to sound post-production for film. I did take notes when I was in Film School, paying attention to my tutor’s sessions, shortcuts, ideas, workflow, learning as much as I could to be good at it. Now, I’m taking notes on my own process and reading them back looks like I’m writing down a tutorial. In a academic context, studying film can be overwhelming, and sometimes he can erase your passion for it – which was what happened to me. However, now that I’ve put myself again on the processes I was used to, I’ve got my passion for sound for film again, and consequently, cinema. I retrieved my need to express myself through sound and image.

Luckily, the AAF handed by the editor, Angela Delgado, was perfect, very well organized, and the sounds she used weren’t awful. I also opted to redo my Pro Tools templates for either 5.1 and Stereo. I pretended I was ignorant to the eyes of sound editing as a way to refine my ways in the process – I’m available again to learn more about sound for film and its language. I’m trying a new way of dialogue editing organization: separate the tracks for A and B so I can divide sequences and lately have a more organized session when I start mixing.

In the image, we can see sound groups organized in folders, which are sent to a group of 5.1 STEMS and lately compressed with a Down Mix plug-in for Stereo editing.

Here are the Dialogue Tracks divided by A and B

SMELLS LIKE SULFUR: introducing picked film: first ideas : logistics: & more

It’s a film directed by a friend of mine who asked me to be in charge of the sound post-production. The film is called Huele a Azufre (Smells like Sulfur), a post-apocalyptical scenario where there is no information about what happened and what is happening on the planet. The film also questions itself about the state of things by presenting an ambiguous and hopeless perspective over the two main characters: two young men (Emilio and José) that don’t seem to be lost. Still, at the same time, they resemble Vladimir and Estragon from Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. There is also a huge reference to Pude ver un Puma (Could see a Puma) by the Argentinian Eduardo Williams (https://vimeo.com/404428912).

Visual References, Motifs and Inspiration

*Pude Ver un Puma* (Could see a Puma) by Eduardo Williams – 2011. Visual Reference and identical leitmotif.

*Waiting for Godot* by Samuel Becket. The dialogues in the film are inspired by the piece

Eventually, Emilio and José run away as soon as they hear an eerie sound coming from the woods that seems to haunt them everywhere they go. However, the film doesn’t give the spectator the answers for what could be that noise. While at talks in pre-production with the director and writer, Mario Alejandro Arias, he described the sound as a susurro (a whisper) similar to the biblical one: 1 Kings 19:12 – After the earthquake, there was a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire, there was a voice, a soft whisper.

I don’t have any complicated deadlines for this film, which is perfect for this assessment because I’ll be able to experiment and be creative. Nevertheless, the film is 8 minutes long, with a part in it that has great interest for this unit – a long wide shot of the woods with a bull approaching the camera very subtly and slowly at the same time we hear the sound of the susurro coming closer towards the camera (duration: 2 minutes). Apart from general sound editing, there’s a potentially interesting spatialization, sound design, and foley. In terms of format, I was requested to edit in 5.1, but I assume there will be no problems with downmixing it to stereo. In terms of available resources, I will be working with the material given by the sound recordist and the script for the intentionality guidance.

“We Need to Talk About Kevin” by Lynne Ramsay (review)

We need to talk about Kevin, a film directed by Lynne Ramsay and released in 2010 in a British-American co-production, starring Tilda Swinton, John C. Riley and Ezra Miller. Sound design was conceived by John Davies, who had already collaborated with Ramsay on We were never really here. The film talks about Eva Khactchadourian’s awful experience raising a child, which undertook to the toxic relationship between both and consequently ended up in a tragic and horrific scenario.

The film could be separated into three parts:

1st – in the first minutes of the film, we get to know Eva Khactchadourian’s current state: she’s emotionally affected by one happening in her life; she is living by herself and just moved into a new neighbourhood; Eva doesn’t have a good relationship with her neighbours; she’s looking for a job.

2nd – raising Kevin, from the fecundation to adolescence. It explores Eva’s emotional relationship with her son, with her past, present and future. We get to know how badly she thinks her life is over after the birth of her first child. It is more abstract and surreal. The spectator understands Eva’s perspective on how fleeting was her life when she was happy and how ambiguous it became after Kevin’s appearance. This part builds up to the bigger reveal: the massacre.

3rd – rationalisation of Kevin’s crime; the conscious perspective of reality and present; The film no longer goes under a post-modern veil. Actions develop more avidly and consciously. Both Eva and the spectator know what is about to come.

4th – the massacre; ending. The film goes back to step 1, and the spectator goes again through Eva’s lucid realisations of her past and present self. It has all the information needed to understand Eva’s struggle. The last scene could be considered the dismantling of all this anxious belief that she held till that final moment.

As Brett Ashleigh states in her article A Feminist Approach to sound in ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’, the film is a multidisciplinary audiovisual piece. It tells the main character’s story through all the different stems. In the first 30 minutes, the film goes through Eva’s flashbacks, which mix both emotional, sensory, and psychological. It was a pure audiovisual piece where sound and image communicated perfectly, giving the storyline a lot more intensity. The sound design exists almost separately from the visual narrative, as though the same story were told from divorced perspectives. Ashleigh also separates the different speeches present in the film: the female narrative and the patriarchal linearity. This idea is reinforced by the book The Laugh of the Medusa, written by Helen Cixous, which explains that l’ecriture féminine “is the practice of writing in spiralling compositions to move the writing outside the sphere of patriarchal linearity to alter the narrative structure. The use of non-vocal or non-linguistic sound elements representing feminine cinematic art is predominant throughout the film.

Nevertheless, this type of language could be resumed as the point of view, which assumes in We Need to Talk About Kevin an essential role to demystify the world from Eva’s perspective. In this case, it could be the point of audition: “In films and television, a diegetic sound that is perceived by a particular character. The aural equivalent of a point-of-view shot: e.g. if a person is hiding under blankets, the sounds heard by them, and the audience is muffled. (Oxford, 2021).

point-of-audition sound. Oxford Reference. Retrieved 23 Oct. 2021, from https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100333623.

The Nine Muses (2010) by John Akomfrah (review)

The Nine Muses, directed by John Akomfrah, is a 90-minute experimental documentary with traces of essay film that resumes the departure of many African-Caribbean people to the United Kingdom in the 60s and 70s. The film is composed in remembrance of Homer’s Odyssey. It is divided into nine chapters, each dedicated to one of the nine Muses, the daughters of Mnemosyne, the personification of memory in Greek mythology. Akomfrah uses an amalgam of visual sources, either recorded on location or from archives, and it is sonically defying as it comprises texturised noise sounds, with archive sounds and recorded music from Paul Robeson, Arvo Pärt, Leontyne Price, Handel, and his collaborator from BAFC (Black Audio Film Collective) Trevor Mathison. It also has an ongoing speech with quotes from Nietzsche, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Joyce, Emily Dickinson, Cummings, and Samuel Beckett. It is a difficult film to swallow, not because of its imagery but from the constant content conflict in the movie. Each part makes expositions through metaphors and riddles that force the viewer to comprehend the migrants’ reflex immediately.

It wasn’t straightforward for me to follow its pace, realising that the spectator needs to be prepared and energised to be as quick as the film goes. Its audience must be literate and knowledgeable, which is not very inclusive. Bringing complexity, in my opinion, is a misuse of the format because it is overloading the eyes who sees it with too much information. Despite the excellent montage, the images weren’t coherent to the overall aesthetics. A 1 minute long shot with a Dutch angle and a sepia filter with a terrible composition? However, this shot is inserted in the middle of really well-composed images of the Alaskan landscape and the man standing contemplating them. I’m expecting more avantgardism for a 2010 experimental film. Maybe I expect too much from artists as Alexandre O’Neill once said in Periclitam os grilos. I believe in a more modernised definition of cinema, similar to Ricciotto Canudo, where apart from being a compilation of all the other arts, it is also its balance, and I am afraid The Nine Muses isn’t. I feel that it has powerful research and critique behind it, but the concept is not everything, and in this case, it lacks artist consistency and coherence.

“Takhté Siah” (2000) by Samira Makhmalbaf (Film Review)

Takhté Siah or Blackboards is a late neorealist film with snippets of doc. and post-modernist features. Samira Makhmalbaf gives us a face-to-face reality, driving the spectator towards the paths of refugees and poverty at the same time she explores metaphorical and surreal scenarios as a way to describe the social reality of the Kurdish people. It was, indeed, an aesthetic purpose quite obsolete for its time. For a late neorealist attempt, it didn’t derive much from L’albergo degli zoccoli (eng.:The Tree of Wooden Clogs) directed by Ermanno Olmi in 1978, also considered late for the movement, which surprises me because Takhté Siah was released in 2000. However, this cinema must have been needed for the time it was released, because of its protesting and social awareness qualities.

Samira doesn’t want to drive the spectator away from the action itself. There was little time to rest your eyes over those border’s hills. She gave herself entirely to the refugees and the picture was dilated to them exclusively. No time for reflection. I believe that most of those intervenients were non-actors, which thrived and erupted neorealistic vibes from the 40s. A very crude and raw cinema purposely made for the people and to give them a voice, using them as a way to evoke reality itself speaking to itself and educate the masses. Nevertheless, in the middle of that whole intense scenario, there was space for exposition and comprehensiveness: the very first shot with all those blackboards dispersing in a different path, the mules avoiding the teachers, a wife that doesn’t have the headspace for teachings and love at a very critical episode of here life – all metaphors that caricature the film’s subject.

The sound was as true as the images were to reality. There were clear signs of doc. microphoning techniques, and, again, there was no time to do second perfect takes. The boom operator was currently trying to accompany the acting voices, even tho he/she missed a few times, but that was part of the process and was indeed rationalised and intentional – naysayers say it was a low-budget film (when in reality it was an international co-production). Improvisation was part of the creative and acting process. To interrupt it would be a crime against the whole purpose of the film. Apart from that, I consider that there was little editing, and it must have been very difficult for the sound editor. I believe this was the type of production where the director is annoying every single department and trying to impose their own aesthetic and ideas like a show-runner.