Use of Music and Soundtracks in Drama Films

Our film for this semester uses a soundtrack as a backbone for the visuals to be cut around.  A notable example of a film that does this effectively is the opening credits in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976).

It instantly introduces the audience to some of the themes that continue throughout the film, as well as creating tension to engage the audience from the beginning. It opens with suspense heavy music which then cuts to a romantic jazz style tune which foreshadows the theme of schizophrenia and surrealism as the two contrast in style and induce very different emotions into the audience. The use of intercutting between these two pieces of music, when synced to the reoccurring extreme close up of Di Nero’s eyes, gives the audience an insight into the character’s emotional and internal psyche. The jazz music has a very ‘sleazy’ feel to it, a theme which is continued later in the film, so the audience is already being given insight into the progression of the narrative.

The second piece of music I’ve chosen to look at is Pumpkin and Honey Bunny/Misirlou from the opening of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994). This piece of music's main purpose is to draw the audience into the world of the narrative, instead of introducing them to a character. This is largely to do with the structure and focus of the two stories, as Taxi Driver is focused around one main character and Pulp Fiction is focused around a number of stories all contained in the one world.

Our aim in 'The Conductor' is to use a piece of music to progress the narrative whilst also enhancing the themes of daydreaming and surrealism. Before the music comes in, we need to have already introduced these themes through the tone and ‘atmosphere’ of the film using the sound design“… the correct use of music, which is as a collector and channeler of previously created emotion, rather than the device that creates the emotion.”^{[1; Pg: 122]}

Due to our film not containing any dialogue, we need to use the soundtrack as the driving factor in the narrative to immerse the audience within the world of the film. To do this effectively, we will have to look at the metaphorical use of sound, which is “… the idea of emphasizing the visual by artificially focussing on a possibly disjointed or unrealistic layer of sound.”^{[1; Pg: 119]} As our films’ narrative is centred on daydreaming and ‘the unreal’, we will be mainly using this concept of metaphorical sound to not only enhance our themes, but also to allow the audience to engage emotionally with the main character to create empathy and make the story seem believable.

452 Words

1. Michael Ondaatje (2002); The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Edting Film; London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.