![]() ![]() Many seemingly innocuous situations are imbued with creeping dread from the soundtrack and Gilderoy’s increasing paranoia and alienation. The film itself is about the behind the scenes aspects of filmmaking, and the merging of the worlds of the film and real life. Because of its self-referential construction and Strickland’s clear reverence for film as a medium, “Berberian Sound Studio” explores the nature and expectations of film as a medium in both a literal and meta sense. The choices of what is heard but not shown leads to a transfiguration of common associations of slasher films and films in general. And by subverting film’s tendency to be a show-not-tell medium, “Berberian Sound Studio” really becomes an interesting experiment. ![]() But the interesting tension in the film comes from what is shown and not shown, what is seen and what is heard. During all of this, we see Gilderoy react to the violence, and we also see him participating in it vicariously, which all leads to his mental deterioration. Throughout the film, many a slow pan over rotting, gnarled vegetables become unsettling by their association with violence. We never see the violence being committed, but hearing it becomes almost as bad. By the end of the film, lettuce, radishes, squash, and watermelons take on a sinister tone as they stand-in for brutalized flesh. Because the acts are never shown on screen, we as an audience experience them through the sound, which all happens to be made by vegetables. We hear women having their hair ripped out, women being stabbed, drowned, tortured, chopped to bits, pushed out of windows, and several even more grisly fates. “The Equestrian Vortex”, for all of Santini’s philosophical and historical justifications, mostly seems to consist of horrible acts of violence against women. But the majority of film is spent in observance of the foley work. The voice dubbing is primarily the female actors screaming, as well as a man playing Goblin obscenely raving. Other than a cool retro title sequence, film-within-a-film is never shown, but the audience gets an idea from its content from watching the process of recording its sound. His skills got him the attention of Italian auteur Giancarlo Santini, whose film “The Equestrian Vortex” is much different from anything Gilderoy had previously worked on. He lives in the English countryside with his mum, doing sound work primarily for children’s programs and nature documentaries. With his baby face and nervous mannerisms, Jone’s Gilderoy is a cautious man of simple pleasures. It’s light on plot and relies primarily on visuals and sound to drive the movie forward, which gives the film a very atmospheric, moody vibe.Īlthough the visuals and music carry most of the film, the human side of the movie is driven by the nuanced performance of Toby Jones. ![]() Directed by Peter Strickland, it tells the story of a shy sound engineer named Gilderoy and his slow descent into madness while he mixes the sound for a Gothic Italian Horror film. One that stood out was “Berberian Sound Studio”, an independent British film from 2012. As both time and realities shift, Gilderoy finds himself lost in an otherworldly spiral of sonic and personal mayhem, and has to confront his own demons in order to stay afloat in an environment ruled by exploitation both on and off screen.I’ve been watching a lot of horror movies lately in anticipation of Halloween. His mother’s letters alternate between banal gossip and an ominous hysteria, which gradually mirrors the black magic of Santini’s film. The longer Gilderoy spends mixing screams and the bloodcurdling sounds of hacked vegetables, the more homesick he becomes for his garden shed studio in his hometown of Dorking. Thrown from the innocent world of local documentaries into a foreign environment fuelled by exploitation, Gilderoy soon finds himself caught up in a forbidding world of bitter actresses, capricious technicians and confounding bureaucracy. Gilderoy, a naive and introverted sound engineer from England is hired to orchestrate the sound mix for the latest film by horror maestro, Santini. Only the most sordid horror films have their sound processed and sharpened in this studio. Giallo Synopsis 1976: Berberian Sound Studio is one of the cheapest, sleaziest post-production studios in Italy. Illuminations Films, Warp X Genre Mystery. ![]()
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