Sound and Genre

As we discussed in class, genre conventions play a particularly significant role in creating film viewer response and expectation; or, in other words, genre constructs practices of spectatorship. We'll discuss the cinematic vocabulary of genre in depth later, right now I just want to include it in those formal features we're learning to become aware of and think about. To make visible what elements elicit the most powerful genre responses, it might be helpful to look at a few brief experiments in genre-bending. These are recut trailers for existing films that rework them as distinctly different, if not "opposite" genres: the horror film, The Shining becomes the wacky family romance comedy, Shining, the children's fantasy, Mary Poppins re-imagined as the horror film Scary Mary, and the love story musical, West Side Story, turned into a zombie film.

(The frenzy of genre recuts of varying quality that are now found on YouTube was started in 2005 when Robert Ryang won a small contest for editor's assistants held by the New York chapter of the Association of Independent Creative Editors. As recounted in The New York Times, "The challenge? Take any movie and cut a new trailer for it — but in an entirely different genre. Only the sound and dialogue could be modified, not the visuals. Ryang chose The Shining, Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall. In his hands, it became a saccharine comedy — about a writer struggling to find his muse and a boy lonely for a father. Gilding the lily, he even set it against “Solsbury Hill,” the way-too-overused Peter Gabriel song heard in comedies billed as life-changing experiences.")

What's interesting to note is how much of a role music and sound play in recoding the images. Obviously editing and specific styles of editing play a role, as do rewritten descriptive narration, but look how much is conveyed at the level of the soundtrack: incidental music and noises, specific songs, even the sound of the narrator's voice:

Shining:

Scary Mary:

and the zombie-fied West Side Story:


In thinking about the important function of the audio track I'm always reminded of an absolutely astonishing bit of animation: The Inner Life of a Cell. It's an 8-minute teaching tool created by XVIVO, a scientific animation company for use in Harvard's undergraduate Biology classes. The link above takes you to a short version with soundtrack that XVIVO released to show their skills.

While the version that will be used in Biology courses runs a bit longer and has a voice-over narrative that talks science, it's the sound-tracked one that blow me away. It looks and feels like a narrative film, some kind of avant garde sci fi fantasy. Structurally it is a narrative---it's a series of (molecular) events arranged in an order, after all. But it seems like much more: some of those cells almost read as characters. And I think its the soundtrack that gives the video its overwhelmingly cinematic feel. (The image at the top of the post is a screen capture of one of the "characters" in the video.)