Music in Film – Part 2: Gustavo Costantini

Two talks designed to be viewed together.

Music in Film focuses on music in film and audiovisuals – as opposed to film music – which means they’re not only about original, composed scores, but also any kind of music present in a production. Through the two talks, Costantini explores the many forms of music found in film (original music from popular or academic composers, pre-existing music from a variety of genres, etc.), the variety of functions music performs, and how music interacts with the editing, establishing an interesting syntax between image and sound. And he explains strategies for creating these structures through an analysis of the connections between music and edited images.

As in Costantini’s previous talks, the concepts are supported through detailed analyses of excerpts from classic films:

• Comparing Hitchcock’s Psycho with Gus van Sant’s remake, we’ll explore what happens when the music is ‘in sync’ with the edit and when is not;
• How songs can create a ‘dialogue’ with the action as in Zodiac, or how they could give us ‘false’ information in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart;
• Or how pre-existent music establishes counterpoint in Kubrick and Tarkovsky;
• We’ll deconstruct what happens when you slow down a song to an extremely slow speed as in Inception;
• Find effective ways of using songs in television series;
• And we’ll discuss how the feeling of empathy that music creates is not a mere Pavlovian reflex, but a very complex sensation, created and manipulated to produce a certain emotional response, an effect that we experience ‘live’ in The Truman Show.

Over the two days the aim is to create an awareness of the multiple roles music plays in film.

3 hours including Q&A.

Argentinean sound designer, musician, professor, and researcher, Gustavo received his PhD in Sound Design from the University of Buenos Aires (under the guidance of Michel Chion), and is now professor of Sound and Editing at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and at the National University of the Arts (UNA). As visiting professor he has taught at University of London (Goldsmiths and Royal Holloway), University for Creative Arts, London Film School, International Film School (Cologne, Germany), European Film College (Ebeltoft, Denmark), John Cabot University (Rome), and at ORT University and the University of La Republica (Montevideo, Uruguay), among others. He has worked in cinema, video, theater, and radio, in Argentina and internationally. He was a member of the Editorial Board of The Soundtrack and The New Soundtrack journals, along with Walter Murch, Michel Chion, Roberto Perpignani, Carter Burwell, among others.