Berberian Sound Studio  

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"It goes without saying that Italian horror soundtracks were essential - Morricone, Bruno Nicolai, Riz Ortolani, Stelvio Cipriani, Fabio Frizzi, Claudio Gizzi, Goblin -but there were so many ideas in records by Luc Ferrari, The Bohman Brothers, Cathy Berberian, Katalin Ladik, Jean- Michel Van Schouwburg, Luigi Nono, Jim O’Rourke.

Nurse with Wound, Faust, Merzbow, Trevor Wishart, early Whitehouse, early Franco Battiato and Broadcast. The influence of all that music is felt throughout the film. Even the studio photographs found in some of the Battiato or Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza albums gave clues to the atmosphere and look of the film.

The biggest influence was The Cremator by Juraj Herz. Superficially there is no resemblance, but the way Herz edited some of the scenes in that film was a template for us. I also got into Peter Tscherkassky in a big way. I thought avant-garde film had lost its way in the 1990s, but Tscherkassky came along and completely split the atom. Both structurally and visually, we are paying tribute to those filmmakers - or just plainly ripping them off, depending on your point of view." --Peter Strickland interviewed in Sight and Sound[1]

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Berberian Sound Studio (2012) is the second feature film by British director and screenwriter Peter Strickland. The film, starring Toby Jones, is a psychological thriller set in a 1970s Italian horror film studio.

Contents

Plot

British foley artist Gilderoy (Toby Jones) arrives at the Berberian film studio in Italy to work on what he believes is a film about horses. During a surreal meeting with Francesco, the film's producer, Gilderoy is shocked to find the film is actually an Italian giallo film, The Equestrian Vortex. He nonetheless begins work in the studio, using vegetables to create sound effects for the film's increasingly gory torture sequences, and mixing voiceovers from session artists, Silvia and Claudia, into the score.

As time passes, and Gilderoy feels more and more disconnected from his mother at home, he begins to fear he's out of his depth. His colleagues seem increasingly rude – to both himself and to each other. The horror sequences grow ever more shocking, yet Santini, the director, refuses to admit they are working on a horror film. And, after a long passage through the bureaucracy of the film studio's accounts department, it turns out the plane ticket Gilderoy submitted for a refund can't be processed because the flight didn't actually exist.

The plot, from here on in, grows increasingly erratic. Gilderoy hears and sees things in the night. He discovers Silvia, the voiceover artist, was raped by Santini. She storms out, destroying much of their work, forcing Gilderoy to re-record the dialogue with a new actress, Elisa. As Silvia's recording sequences are revisited again, and tension grows between Gilderoy and the others, the boundaries between the blood-drenched giallo thriller and real life begin to erode. Gilderoy imagines he himself is in a film about his life – suddenly fluent in Italian and increasingly detached and vicious. After he and Francesco essentially torture Elisa during a recording session, she walks out, leaving history to repeat itself yet again, and Gilderoy to contemplate the monster he has become.

Cast

Background

Strickland made a version in 2005 as a short film, prior to working on his first feature film, Katalin Varga, in 2006. He said that with the film, he wanted to "make a film where everything that is usually hidden in cinema, the mechanics of film itself, is made visible. Berberian... turns this on its head. Here, the film is out of view, and you only see the mechanics behind it".<ref name=Quietus />

Soundtrack

The soundtrack was composed by British band Broadcast and released by Warp in January 2013.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Berberian Sound Studio" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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