American actor Gene Hackman passed away last month. In what was certainly one of his most iconic roles, Hackman played the paranoid surveillance expert, Harry Caul, in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974). Coppola’s film is, first and foremost, a masterful lesson in film sound. For that reason, Thai film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul considers The Conversation as one of the five artworks that inspired his own film Memoria (2021). In both films, sound opens up a mysterious third space. As Apichatpong explains: “Coppola’s The Conversation was an enigma during my teen years. I viewed the VHS copy of the film and couldn’t understand the key sentence that Frederic Forrest whispered to Cindy Williams. Gene Hackman spends the entire film trying to crack the phrase. I spent more than 10 years, with countless re-watchings, until the film blossomed in me like a beautiful infection. Despite the VHS’s humble sound quality, this film triggered my infatuation with sound design in cinema.”
David Lynch, who was the subject of many homages and retrospectives after his passing, was equally adept at the use of sound in his films, which straddle the line between reality, the bizarre and the dreamlike – most notably in Mulholland Drive, arguably his most confusing film, where sound plays a crucial role in shaping the film’s amnesiac structure. Perhaps best exemplified by the “Club Silencio” scene where Betty and Rita find themselves in front of a spectacle of filmic sound devices: No hay banda!
Our final film predates the advent of synchronized film sound but still deserves a special mention. During the Japan-Square Festival, Studioskoop in Ghent is screening a 35mm copy of Fûun jôshi [The Castle Under the Wind and Clouds] from the CINEMATEK archive. The Castle Under the Wind and Clouds is a great example of the Japanese jidai-geki [historical drama] genre. It follows a samurai who returns to his homeland after three years, only to discover, to his dismay, that his fiancée has become a concubine of the prince. As part of the festival, you can also enjoy a delicious Japanese curry beforehand!
