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When making ‘patient cinema’ you are left scantily clad. There is no recourse to batches of sparkling dialog, or to bone-crunching car crashes, there are no loving, soft sequences of bodies. You are left with the story, and the basic tools of cinema, photography, sound and score, performances, and the edit.
But this is also the strength of patient cinema: because you have nothing else you’re left to concentrate deeply on what you do have. Sound is one of these tools. What becomes important is to work in the details. To polish and shape the small amount of actual stuff in the film to significance.
Score
Initially I didn’t want a score for at all. Music is such a powerful, affecting medium in its own right that it felt like cheating to use it. Or it felt like it would overpower the delicate balance of the film. But as I was writing the script the Indian classical ragas that I was listening to slowly seeped into me. I realised that the minimalism of Indian ragas, their slow and stately development, their emotional complexity was the perfect accompaniment to the slow process of realisation that the characters go through in the film.
The work of Ravi Shanker and Vilayat Khan for Satyajit Ray (Jalshaghar for example), or Ali Akbar Khan are key touchstones. But Omission is about the difficulties that come out of the mixture of two cultures and I want some minimal electronic stuff reminiscent of Low End Theory (http://www.lowendtheoryclub.com/podcast/) to battle on the sound track with the Indian Classical ragas. Nosaj Thing is a good artist to look at for what I’m thinking electronically: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LZgINyGTV0
There are large areas of silence in this film where the score needs to create a texture of longing, of melancholy, of threats, and possibilities. Of lives being lived quietly. It’s a soundtrack for Monir to contemplate his new life.
Sound
I think that with sound you can be far more experimental than you can with visuals. Sound is subtler than visuals, sound is intuited and so there is latitude to do things that may be unnatural in the scene, to add sounds that may not be there at all, or to distort the sound that is there.
The Bengali family in Omission are dislocated from their culture. Sounds are unnatural here, either really quiet, or strange electronics and machines. Back in Bangladesh, sounds are natural and they are dense. There are always people around everywhere. Here there is less people, less activity, more space. For Rajun, and Monir there are attractive worlds of desire like the games arcade, or decadents partying on the streets at night. Sounds they can hear all too clearly, but that are foreign, and unreachable somehow. This long performance by Shahid Parvez is a good example of the pace: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2047781053200757696#
Some key references for me are the work of Leslie Shatz in Elephant and Paranoid Park, or the Assassination of Jesse James, and Alan Splatz’s work for David Lynch. Their use of other worldly electronic hums, and clicks, and clangs create an emotional ecosystem of unease without being gauche or mawkish. They create a rich underworld of feeling and counter-feeling that is barely noticed, but even more powerful for being understated. That’s what I’d like for Omission.
Posted 1 year ago
