11/23/2023 0 Comments Berberian sound studio movieEventually he reaches his limit when he has to drop oil into a pan to suggest a witch getting a red-hot poker shoved up her vagina. When the witches are having their hair torn out by inquisitioners, Gilderoy rips the leaves off radishes, and when a character is being stabbed, he hacks away at some cabbage with a knife (his vicious chopping and grinding makes you wonder just how disgusting the visual is). “Sounds a little watery,” he says after one of them hurls a melon onto the floor to simulate a woman’s body shattering as it hits the ground. He gives it his best, though, and there are some funny scenes of him recording the Foley artists. Back in the UK he’s specialized in nature documentaries, and he arrives at the studio expecting The Equestrian Vortex to be about horses, not witches and warlocks. Gilderoy is a gentle man, unaccustomed to this sort of gruesome fare. Later he plays a long tape loop that stretches back and forth across the control room like a spider web, a coffee cup serving as one roller and a wall crucifix as the other. Back in his hotel room he dips into his personal library of sound effects, which he’s recorded himself on magnetic tape, and creates new ones, pointing a microphone at an electric blender full of tomato sauce to replicate a chainsaw murder (and splattering sauce all over himself). “This guy can turn a lightbulb into a UFO,” Francesco announces to the actors during a power outage, and Gilderoy does, blowing onto the bulb and rubbing it gently against a metal file rack to create a weird singing sound. “A new world that requires all your magic powers.” Gilderoy seems to have plenty-he’s one of those people who’ve mastered an obscure and idiosyncratic art to the point where their talent seems a bit otherworldly. “A new world of sound awaits you,” declares the macho producer, Francesco (Cosimo Fusco), when Gilderoy (Jones) turns up with his bags at the studio. It’s grotesquely violent, but we have to fill in the visual ourselves as the actors and Foley artists incongruously go about their business. Most of the action consists of them dubbing what seems like the entire movie, but the screen they’re watching is always out of frame, and apart from a lurid (and hilariously dead-on) red-and-black title sequence near the beginning and a brief scene near the end, we never see the movie within the movie. Toby Jones stars as a timid English sound engineer in the 1970s who arrives in Italy to mix a schlocky horror movie and gets pulled into a web of intrigue with the producer, director, and cast. Berberian Sound Studio, a crafty second feature by British writer-director Peter Strickland, turns that dynamic inside out, to surreal and often comic effect. Yet the aural element in movies, half the sensory experience, is seldom remarked upon-the measure of its excellence is how little you notice it. The moaning wind, the creaking door, the step on the stair-this was the stuff of real dread. As scores of radio writers learned in the 1930s and ’40s, banging out hit anthology programs like Suspense and Inner Sanctum Mystery, you could forgo the ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties as long as you had things that went bump in the night. In the whole history of horror and suspense drama, there’s never been a more promising line than “Did you hear that?” Sound leaves too much to the imagination, which is where fear takes hold. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreation.
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