Primary navigation
The Best Music in Film
Isaac Julien
(Looking for Langston, Young Soul Rebels)
- S&S: What is your favourite film soundtrack music and why do you like it so much?
- "Miles Davis Lift to the Scaffold (1958) musical score quintessentially represents French new wave as its best transcendental character. Davis uses African American musicality that becomes the hallmark of French cinema."
- S&S: In what ways does music best enhance a film?
- "Music enhances a film in two ways it either directs the audiences attention to what it wants it to feel and think in relationship to mood and character identification and this general theory is applied to most narrative films. Or it subtly alludes, sometimes in contradiction or creates a sonic space in the film itself, creating another larger meaning of interpretation, forcing the spectator or audience to think and feel between the images and its content creating that third meaning. To enhance a film it has to have music which either can direct the scene or create an unconsciousness to the world, if it is depicting. Some of the most powerful films are films that don't have musical scores in the traditional sense but nonetheless create a space for its own narrative of filmic music /space to enhance its sonic vision, to exist and to inhabit a haptic space, for the viewers identification, the best music in film is when it consciously moves the audience to think and creates a space of disidentification for its spectator while making he or she identify somehow with a poetic musicality examples Jean-Luc Godard's Éloge de l'amour (2001), Touki Bouki (1973) directed by Djibril Diop Mambety, Terence Davies' Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), Charles Burnett Killer of Sheep (1977)."
- S&S: What is the most effective sequence of music in your own films?
- "The most effective sequence in music in my own films would be the approach to something like Looking for Langston where I got a jazz quartet headed by Julian Joseph to improvise a year before I shot an inch of the film and then got the musician Blackberri to compose the actual scoring of the film & he sang the title song 'Blues for Langston'. Then my most recent film installation pieces which utilised for one of the first times Video Art 5:1 surround sound in its soundtrack creating a sonic landscape as a sculptural presence in the experience of watching the film itself."