![]() ![]() “Oh, I’d rather not get technical,” he murmurs at one point, desperate to avoid another intense, Latin conversation. Gilderoy is a quite brilliant portrait of a particular type of near-extinct British boffinry beloved of hauntologists. In this sense it taps into an aesthetic current in British music known as hauntology: the artists involved (centred on the Ghost Box label) use loving pastiche to recreate a milieu that, since Thatcher, has seemed improbably antique in its commitment to egalitarian modernism and public service fostered in such institutions as the pre-marketised BBC. In fact the soundtrack is largely British, with original music composed by James Cargill of Broadcast, and Nurse With Wound and Roj used elsewhere. ![]() There are pitch-perfect pastiches of the soundtracks created for giallo by Italian prog groups such as Goblin (Argento’s Suspiria and Deep Red most famously) – ambitious collages of synth, exotic percussion, musique concrète, electronics and rock that scaled the full heights of hysterical bombast. The music matches, or rather bleeds seamlessly into and through, the playful use of sound and sound effects. Is Jones overdubbed, you wonder, trying to track the movement of his lips to his lines? Is it a meta-comment on how ‘embedded’ and native Gilderoy has gone, how thoroughly absorbed into giallo he has become? ![]() The dialogue is increasingly in Italian rather than English. As the film progresses and Gilderoy unravels, the weight of these sonic illusions and tweaks begins to play on the viewer’s mind. Numerous scene shifts pivot on a shared sound: a shriek that spooks Gilderoy in his apartment might gutter out to become the beginning of a scene with him behind the mixing desk once more, about to press rewind on the same shriek. ![]() At one point Gilderoy demonstrates a device called the Watkins Copicat for lead actor Silvia, dazzling her with the uncanny way in which its simple tape-looping mechanism doubles, triples and quadruples her voice, its echo and its echo’s echo to create a sonic hall of mirrors. It fetishises unashamedly the look, feel and sound of vintage analogue recording gear: valves hum, metal reels revolve, spiderwebs of tea-brown tape loop round the room, recalling those lingering shots of what was then cutting-edge tape technology in other films of the 1970s: Coppola’s The Conversation or Alan J. It zooms in lovingly on the moment of projection itself: the glare of white light, the dust dancing, the click and whir of wheels, reels and spindles.īut above all, of course, this is a film that revels in sound, its production, its recording and mixing. The camera roves over Gilderoy’s charts, his maps of how sounds and effects will overlay the visuals. As a film about a film genre it hits all the notes of classic giallo: Santini’s project, The Equestrian Vortex, is an outrageously sexploitational potboiler, overflowing with blood, nubile young women, undead witches, horrific torture and an ‘aroused goblin’.īerberian Sound Studio is also fascinated by the mechanics of its own form. It’s an intensely inward-looking piece: in contrast to Katalin Varga (2009), a revenge narrative shot on location with natural lighting, Berberian Sound Studio is entirely enclosed, taking place within a claustrophobic handful of rooms and corridors under electric light. The film opens with Gilderoy arriving at the reception of the Berberian Sound Studio to work on the post-production of Santini’s latest picture, and once there it never leaves. Like Dracula’s Harker, Gilderoy is an innocent abroad, a Home Counties product bewildered by Continental sophistication, an employee increasingly aware that there is something not very… nice about his new employers. It follows Gilderoy (Toby Jones), a tweedy, buttoned-down sound engineer, as he leaves the cosy quiet of his home in 1970s Surrey for Italy, to work with Santini, fictionalised giallo producer and impresario. This second feature by Katalin Varga director Peter Strickland is a love letter to the weird territories of foley and film sound and also to giallo, the Grand Guignol horror genre carved into the flesh of Italian cinema by Argento, Fulci, Crispino, Avati et al in the 1970s. A cabbage, a kitchen knife and a microphone: what untold depths of horror can be delved into using just these items? In a parallel dimension it could be a task from Blue Peter. ![]()
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