Screening Sound: A Compilation of Film-Sound Examples ___________________________________________________________________________________ Transitioning to Sound I've Got A Sweetie On The Radio Lee DeForest Phonofilm sound-on-film: Gwen Farrar and Billy Meyerl sing Mayerl's song, December 1926 (5 mins) Phonofilm, which recorded synchronized sound directly onto film, was developed by inventors Lee de Forest and Theodore Case in the 1920s and used to record vaudeville acts, musical numbers, political speeches, and opera singers. Lee DeForest films include recordings of a wide variety of vaudeville and music hall acts which would otherwise have been forgotten. William Joseph Mayerl, known as Billy Mayerl, was an English pianist and composer who built a career in music hall and musical theatre and became an acknowledged master of light music. Best known for his syncopated novelty piano solos, he wrote over 300 piano pieces. In December 1926, he appeared with Gwen Farrar in a short film–made in the Lee DeForest Phonofilm sound-on-film process–in which they sang Mayerl's song 'I've Got a Sweetie on the Radio.' His song 'Miss Up-to-Date' was sung in Alfred Hitchcock's sound film Blackmail (1929). Source: Wikipedia. Tony Fletcher comments: 'This is one of my favourite phonofilms and the performance of Gwen Farrar taking off an early wireless works as well today as it did then.' ___________________________________________________________________________________ Women Compose for Sound Delia Derbyshire & Elisabeth Lutyens For Delia Dirs: Mary Stark and Delia Derbyshire, 2016/1966-7 (17 mins) Mary Stark's visuals were completed and first presented in January 2016 to accompany a collage of sounds and music that David Butler compiled from Delia Derbyshire's Archive of works that she created, primarily between 1966 and 1968. For much of this period of her freelance activity, Delia was part of the electronic music company Unit Delta Plus, alongside Brian Hodgson and Peter Zinovieff. Her work at this time included projects for theatre (Ron Grainer's 1966 musical On the Level and the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1967 production of Macbeth, directed by Peter Hall) and film (Work is a Four Letter Word, also directed by Peter Hall and starring Cilla Black and David Warner). Delia's music in these projects tends to be characterised by musique concrète, tape manipulation techniques and pre-dates her later use of synthesisers. Mary Stark (www.marystark.co.uk) is a Cumbrian artist/filmmaker based in Manchester whose work explores film projection as a site of wonder and is interested in the sculptural materiality of the filmstrip. Mary's performances often work with and address absent female voices and obsolete industries, involving film projection, light and shadow, mechanical noise and music associated with textile production. For Delia is a 35mm film work, using Delia's analogue aesthetic of 'sculpting' sounds and splicing tape, as well as absence of on-screen or printed credits for Delia's assignments at the BBC, a stragegy corresponding directly with Mary's creative practice. David commissioned Mary in 2015 to create the film for Delia Derbyshire Day, which took place at HOME in Manchester earlier this year. The Boy Kumasenu Dir. Sean Graham, Gold Coast Film Unit, 1952. Music: Elisabeth Lutyens. With Nortey Engmann, Frank Tamakloe, Dr Oku Ampofo, Rosina Oku, Angela Nanor Guy Warren (5 min extract) Produced before independence in Ghana, The Boy Kumasenu had a public impact and success with local Ghanaian audiences that other colonial films never achieved. About a boy, Kumasenu, who moves from a rural village to the city of Accra, the film attempts to represent an African experience of modern life, using a local cast. The film’s appeals lay in its inclusion of highlife, its fashions, styles and music, popular in the Gold Coast, alongside cinematic conventions of documentary, drama-documentary, neorealist film styles and the Hollywood gangster genre, already familiar to urban Ghanaian audiences. Furthermore, its theme of urban youth and citizenship evoked the concept of the 'African Personality,' an identity that, at independence, Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party would link with highlife music. By tapping into the popularity of cinema and highlife, the film promoted nascent nationalist sentiments, and became associated with anti-colonialism and social change in the newly emerging independent Ghana. It did very well at the box office, drawing 40,000 people over the first three days with further screenings demanded by the public. Bankole Timothy, the film critic of the Daily Graphic, praised the high production values within the modest budget of £30,000, mentioning the 'magnificent' photography; the 'solid realism' of the acting; the highlife, the 'brilliantly conceived sound' and the music: 'it is a film well-worth seeing and no one in the Gold Coast should miss it' (July 12, 1952, 10). The music was composed by Elisabeth Lutyens, an important English modern composer influenced by Schoenberg and Debussy. She mixes film music styles used in British and American genre films at the time, harmonizing melodramatic, narrative and action sound elements with the local Gold Coast sounds and rhythms. Her soundtrack, directed by John Hollingsworth, draws on highlife music recordings that Graham had made with a live band in Accra. It is very possible that the band was The Tempos. Guy Warren, who plays the part of Yeboah, was not only a local celebrity, but also a world-renowned drummer. He performs the wonderful dance sequence with Adobia in the middle of the film where she sings “The Torch Song” in the “Accra Royal Bar” nightclub. Guy Warren, pen-name of Kofi Ghanaba, was a member of the Tempos in the late 1940s until 1950, and imported bongos and congas as well as the western drum sets that highlife bands used. E.T. Mensah became the bandleader of the Tempos in 1949, securing a residency for the band at the Week-end-in-Havana, one of Accra’s newest and largest nightclubs. The group played jazz and calypso infused with Afro- Caribbean rhythms. It was one of the most innovative highlife groups in Accra at the time and became the first fully professional dance band. One of the original aspects of the Tempos’s sound was the contrast between Mensah’s 'sweet music' and drummer Guy Warren’s bebop styles, adopted after his sojourn in London with Kenny Graham and his Afro-Cubists. The music for the film was so popular that it was released as a disc in its own right, as Graham reports in a letter to Wright: Here, the film continues to do excellent business. You will have heard that I have asked Ken Cameron to bring out two commercial disks of the dance music of the film. Mainly the highlife samba and the variations on it. The boys who know seem to think that they can sell quite a few copies. (August 18, 1952, Basil Wright Collection, BFI) Letter from Sean Graham to Basil Wright, August 18, 1952, Basil Wright Collection, BFI. Tom Rice (2008). 'Boy Kumasenu' in Colonial Film: Moving Images of the British Empirehttp://www.colonialfilm.org.uk/node/332. Emma Sandon (2013). ‘Cinema and Highlife in the Gold Coast: The Boy Kumasenu (1952)’ in Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies, 39:3, 496-519. The Skull Dir. Freddie Francis. Amicus Productions 1965. Music: Elisabeth Lutyens. With Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Patrick Wymark, Jill Bennett. (5 min extract) Elisabeth Lutyens’s scores for British horror films, including The Skull (1965), The Theatre of Death (1966), Dr Terror’s House of Horror (1965), Paranoiac (1963) and many more, gained her the name of the ‘Horror Queen.’ Based on a short story by Robert Bloch, the story concerns a skull belonging to the Marquis de Sade, which is acquired by a collector and writer on the occult. The skull has evil powers, which ultimately drive the collector to hallucinations, madness and ultimately death. The Marquis de Sade's family took legal action against the film producers as the story had some basis in historical reality: when the body of the Marquis de Sade was exhumed from the asylum where he was buried in 1814, his skull was removed for phrenological analysis and then later went missing. The Skull was produced in colour by Amicus productions to rival Hammer Film Productions. Freddie Francis--who was also a cinematographer and worked for Hammer as well as Amicus--used strange camera angles, distorted mirrors and reflective surfaces to produce the Kafkaesque scene of the collector's (Peter Cushing) hallucinatory nightmare, which is enhanced by the fantastical set design, expressionist lighting and props: masks, sculptures, crystal balls, skulls, skeletons of animals, stuffed birds, books, paintings. However it is the film sound track that makes the film so atmospheric and scary. The music Lutyens created for The Skull was so popular that it was released as a separate sound recording. Lutyens creates extreme suspense through string and wind instruments, using twelve notes of the scale, serialism and atonality to enhance sound effects, such as wind, groans and creaking. There are whole sequences in the film without dialogue in which her affective music dominates. Her use of avant-garde techniques, though familiar in today's horror films, was radical at the time and not properly appreciated in the concert hall until the 1970s. She composed these scores alongside work for radio and live performance, producing, as she noted in her autobiography, 'various commissioned chamber works and also some six or seven film scores a year.’ These were mainly horror films but also documentaries. She did not treat them simply as hack jobs. As her biographers, Meirion and Susie Harries noted: ‘Given . her musical instincts . the only features she was likely to get were ones which in the opinion of the film industry spoke naturally with her characteristic voice–all these had ‘skulls, ‘death’, ‘paranoia’ and ‘screaming’ in their titles’ (1989, 152).