Videographic Scholarship: The Body in the Soundtrack

The body is a potent site of signification and affect in horror film. The body in horror is both a metaphor and acutely corporeal; it is a center of vulnerability and violence. The body of victims and the body of monsters are both central to horror and its agenda. But as audio-viewers of film, what is our awareness of the body in the soundtrack? In this project, I use the term “musical body” to accentuate and expose the unseen materiality of music making in horror film soundtracks.

When we hear the rhythmic slap of a bow on cello strings in the soundtrack (a technique called col legno battuto), an awareness of the musical body asks us to recognize the materials and actions of this sound. Col legno battuto translates literally as “with wood hitting”: the curved wooden backside of a cello bow meeting tensioned metal strings, produced with an arm raised and a blow reigning down on the instrument. A material, and an action. This is the musical body. But the musical body is not a seen body and thus too often non-existent in a critical discourse on film. This project asks us to consider what exposing the musical body might bring to that discourse.

I ground this project in existing scholarship on film sound and its materiality. Roland Barthes famously recognizes the role of the body in music in his essay “The Grain of the Voice,” and I begin my video essay with Barthes. Michel Chion also highlights music’s tangible materiality with his theory of “materializing sound indices,” which he names as those material aspects of music that exist from “zero to infinity, [and] whose relative abundance or scarcity always influences the perception of the scene and its meaning” (Chion 112). Lastly, I am indebted to Miguel Mera’s recent work on materiality in the film scores of Johnny Greenwood. Where Mera focuses on film music’s ability to extend from screen to spectator, I move in a slightly different direction, noting how the soundtrack moves from the musical body of its creation, into the film. But there are many bodies involved: the musical body, the filmic body, the spectator body, and while this project’s focus is not on spectatorship, it is no doubt in play.

I begin my study outside film and its soundtrack, noting the use of the musical body in the avant-garde concert music of Helmut Lachenmann. Lachenmann, a stalwart experimentalist, has since the 1960s placed an acute focus on the body in a musical tradition that has long attempted to conceal it. One need only consider the homogenized, pristine technique of the symphony orchestra, or the conformity of all black clothing on the concert stage to recognize an attempt to hide the body. The pianist Glen Gould’s humming is famously audible in his recordings of the music of J.S. Bach. This “intrusion” of materiality, of Gould’s musical body, is something many in the classical music world have never been able to accept.

Helmut Lachenmann and other post war experimentalists moved in a new direction with their relationship to concert music and the body, attempting to liberate it, forcefully inserting the body into their music, notably through extreme instrumental techniques. The violin was no longer a vessel for soaring melodies, but a tool to be struck, scraped, hit, and manipulated by the player in all manner of new ways. Abigail Heathcote, in her study on the body in Lachenmann’s music observes

It is important to realize that for a player some of the actions in themselves constitute a form of transgression of the instrument’s essential ‘nature.’ …this sense of violation can best be sensed either by a player himself or by an audience watching a performance of a Lachenmann piece where the player’s physical engagement with the instrument… is immediately apparent. (Heathcote 40)

(Interestingly, Heathcote, in using words like “transgression” and “violation” to describe the body in Lachenmann’s music, begins to move the conversation into the realm of horror and its agenda.) But of course, in film music, we cannot embody this materiality as the person doing the musical action, or as an audience watching these actions. As such, this study asks us to listen deeply for the body in film music.

This video essay examines three films which each represent compelling uses of the musical body in the soundtrack: Under the Skin (2013, Mica Levi, composer), The Witch (2015, Mark Korven, composer), and Hereditary(2018, Colin Stetson, composer). These films are associated with the studio A24 and its prestige horror movement of the past 10 years, and to these we can add other A24 horror participating in similar sound practices, if to a lesser extent, including Saint Maud (Rose Glass), Midsommar (Ari Aster), and The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers), all from 2019. Beyond A24 I would add the films of Julia Ducournau, notably her electrifying body horror, Titane (2021). All these films and their soundtracks represent an energizing use of the body in recent horror.

I conclude my video essay by presenting the final scenes, uncut and in their entirety, from Under the Skin and The Witch. The bodies in this study are inherently politicized, and these two endings show both the power of, and the stakes involved for those bodies. In the video I pose the question: “What is at stake for the musical body? The filmic body? The spectator body?” The final moments of Under the Skin pose a potent response, and Ara Osterweil vocalizes this poignantly in her essay, “Under the Skin: The Perils of Becoming Female”:

…Under the Skin advances a genuine phenomenology and politics of desire: to be human is to be embodied. To be embodied is to experience corporeal sensations that create the conditions for desire. To experience desire is to begin to see the world differently. To do so is to threaten conventional hierarchies. In the end, this is a form of agency often met with violent resistance. (Osterweil 47)

The ending of The Witch presents another lone female in the woods. If Under the Skin signals the vulnerability of the body, The Witch presents an alternate version, not of the body silenced, but of the body liberated. To end the video, I bring the focus back to the musical body, asking: How might we hear the body in film? Listen for it, and listen to it?

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. “The Grain of the Voice.” Image, Music, Text, edited by Stephen Heath, Hill and Wang, 1977, pp. 179-189.

Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. 2nd ed., Columbia University Press, 2017.

Heathcote, Abigail. Liberating Sounds: Philosophical Perspectives on the Music and Writings of Helmut Lachenmann. 2003. Durham University, MA thesis.

Kassabian, Anahid. Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music. Routledge, 2001.

Mera, Miguel. “Materializing Film Music.” The Cambridge Companion to Film Music, edited by

Mervyn Cooke and Fiona Ford, Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 157-172.

Osterweil, Ara. “Under the Skin: The Perils of Becoming Female.” Film Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 4, 2014, pp. 44-51.

Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. University of California Press, 2004.