Sight & Sound. The Film Music Special.

Just yesterday, I noted the passing within just a few weeks of three great film composers: Jerry Goldsmith, David Raksin and Elmer Bernstein. George Thomas adds, and he's probably right, that these losses reverberate in some way with the recent deaths of Ray Charles and Rick James as well. Regardless, the obits and appreciations have cinephiles considering the role of music in film all over again and, as it happens, the September issue of Sight & Sound features a special section on film music.

A total of four questions are posed, three each to directors and a slightly tweaked trio to musicians, and here's the really smart move: the editors haven't limited to the roster of musicians to film composers in the strictly classical sense. They have, for example, also queried Coldcut, who happen to mention in one answer a project they're working on, NOW!, which is introduced at the site with a quote from Francis Ford Coppola: "The kind of motion picture I am interested in will be like creating the modern LP record. It will be mixed into ways of thinking rather than cut linearly."

I wonder when and where that quote comes from... Anyone? I'm guessing late 70s or early 80s, around the time that he gave a lengthy interview to Rolling Stone that made quite an impression on my young mind at the time (there was quite a bit about video messages replacing the letters we write to each other, for example, the sort of thing people snickered at then, but here we are).

At any rate, Coppola is one of the four dozen or so directors interviewed, the sort of round-up you'd expect S&S to be able to muster, and many more musicians are contacted (the range somehow seems wider, too). I'd start plucking quotes, but then, I'd never stop.

Also in this issue:

• Julian Graffy on Aleksandr Sokurov's Father and Son.
• Kim Newman on Hellboy.
• Mark Cousins on Fahrenheit 9/11.
• Liese Spencer on Spartan.

Posted by dwhudson at August 20, 2004 8:11 AM