BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO – A Study Of Violence By Proxy

By Nick Day

BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO has made some significant waves on the festival circuit, and it won several awards during 2012’s British Independent Awards ceremony, beating out the other festival darling, SIGHTSEERS, in multiple categories. This weekend, you can check out the film in New York City and Los Angeles, or catch it at home on VOD.

The film concerns itself with the trials and tribulations of meek Gilderoy, a British sound engineer working on an ultra-violent Italian horror film, The Equestrian Vortex. Though the film’s narrative deals with the ideas of horror and exploitation cinema, I think it is unfair to label this a horror movie. It’s very much a psychological drama, having more in common with film noir than outright horror or the Italian giallo. Writer and director Peter Strickland has crafted a tightly wound story that blurs genres, with rich cinematography by Nicholas Knowland and a central performance by Toby Jones that is to be savored.

I had the opportunity to speak with Peter Strickland about BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO.

The film is such an immersive experience, that I wondered if Strickland said all he wanted about the world of sound with this film, or was there something more to explore?

“Yeah, there’s definitely more to explore. Definitely. I mean, as soon as I finished, I’d just walk down the street and went, ‘Ah, we could have done this. We could have done that.’ There’s just a whole world of stuff to sift through. I might need to do one more attempt at this kind of thing, but it would be great if someone else came along and dipped their toe in this.

I wanted to try something reduced somehow because, especially in the last four or five years, you know, violence on screen has become incredibly flamboyant. I’m putting that politely. All these torture porn films; I just don’t see the point in going further and further and further. Why don’t we just go the other direction, still see if an audience can respond somehow?”

“I don’t know if you got this thing about the Balkan Wars, really unpleasant stuff. Ten years later I met someone who’d been through the whole thing. I think just listening to that person speaking about her experiences was much more disturbing. I think there is a danger of just seeing images again and again and again. You just become numb somehow.

I didn’t want to make a didactic film, and moralize. I love horror films. I think the problem is, when you find all the arguments about it, they’re usually in two extremes. One extreme is that these are terrible and these should be banned. Or, no, they don’t influence anyone. No, they don’t do any damage whatsoever.”

“I just thought we should acknowledge, at least, that the moving image is profoundly powerful. I’m not saying it can influence, but it’s something that you have to treat with caution. People sort of defend it by saying that film is just a series of images put together. I think that’s what Francesca [a character in the film] says at one point. I remember a famous actor saying that in defense of a violent film he was in. But actually it’s not. It’s so much more than that.”

Our conversation drifts to Werner Herzog’s GRIZZLY MAN, and I mention that the scariest, most mortifying part of that film is Herzog talking about the audio recording(which the audience never hears) of two people’s death during a grizzly attack.

“I remember that so clearly. I think all of us have been there, when we’ve heard something from a neighboring room. I remember when I was quite young, sometimes I wasn’t allowed to see films that my brother was watching. He’s older than me. But I’d just go by the door and have a listen and I think the sound could be a lot more disturbing when it’s compensating for what you’re not seeing.”

And really, that’s what BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO is about. It speaks to the power of imagination, the influence of images, and the power of suggestion. There is a scene with a red hot – you know, I say it’s a scene with a red hot poker, but you never see the red hot poker. The Equestrian Vortex, the movie-within-the-movie, reminds me an awful lot of the shark in JAWS. You don’t really see it, and it’s more powerful because of it. There is a scene where Toby Jones’ character is firing up grease in order to simulate the sound of a red hot poker on flesh. You never see the image, but the picture you paint with your mind is going to be infinitely more vivid than whatever you could hope to come up with.

“Yeah, and we’d never want to show that. What’s very sad about that scene, very tragic about that scene is, he kind of thinks he’s saving this woman by refusing to squirt that thing. But the more he reviews it, the more she suffers again and again and again. We never actually see the water going on that pan, but you still hear that scream, all this suffering without seeing the mechanics of it. To me, that scene is the whole pivot of the film and I think at that point you kind of reached the tipping point. He’s kind of become used to deciding on violence by proxy, that he can harm people through a table of vegetables.”

BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO is certainly deserving of the accolades it has gotten and will continue to get. If you’re a fan of slow burn thrillers or intense psychodrama, then I’d highly recommend catching this crackling, beautifully realized movie. It is a smoldering masterpiece of British noir.

BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO opens June 14 at the IFC Center in New York, and in Los Angeles at the Arena Cinema in Hollywood, Downtown Independent in Downtown LA. If you can’t make it to one of those, it is also available on VOD.

Overall Rating: 5 out of 5 stars