Striking though it may be, it’s difficult to see Under the Skin’s music having any real influence over the future of movie scores. For one thing, not many actually watched the movie containing it, so the listener base is inherently smaller, and for another, science-fiction movies/games of the 21st century are up against steep competition from both within themselves and from the general independent music scene; I enjoy Under the Skin’s music, but I also find it fairly repetitive, with a lack of content and internal development preventing it from being enjoyable as an album, and the obfuscated movie it’s attached to preventing me from enjoying it as a score.
The score for Jackie, on the other hand, is positioned in such a way that it could very well have a huge influence on the future of historical dramatization. It rejects the period music approach and straightforward emotive score for something much more emotionally opaque, functioning alongside the movie in an attempt to make the old feel new and fresh, make the historical figures on-screen feel present and contemporary; it’s a bigger gamble than you give it credit for, and in a genre as stagnant as that of the historical drama, it stands head and shoulders over its competitors.
In a nutshell; I have no intention of ever listening to Jackie’s score in isolation, but if more films adopted its audacity, I’d probably go out to the movies a lot more often.
i think the idea of “real influence” on movie scores is already happening, and that Mica Levi’s score for Under the Skin is an integral part of it. To be clear, i’m not claiming this to be anything new – more experimental approaches to soundtracks in more mainstream movies have been an undercurrent going back to the early 1970s at least (think of the ‘score’ in Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre) – but its prevalence and acceptance, both in film and TV for that matter, is definitely on the rise in recent years. Not, of course, in pretty much anything to come out of Hollywood – that’s not what they’re driving at – but beyond this examples are numerous, and are not simply restricted to certain genres: The Forest (Bear McCreary), Ex_Machina (Ben Salisbury & Geoff Barrow), Drag Me to Hell (Christopher Young), Only God Forgives (Cliff Martinez), The Girl with all the Gifts (Cristobal Tapia de Veer), Maps to the Stars (Howard Shore), Byzantium (Javier Navarrete), Macbeth (Jed Kurzel), A Field in England (Jim Williams), Let the Right One In (Johan Söderqvist), Antichrist (Kristian Eidnes Andersen), The Witch (Mark Korven), Morgan (Max Richter), Goodnight Mommy (Olga Neuwirth), Anthropoid (Robin Foster), White Bird in a Blizzard (Robin Guthrie & Harold Budd), The Revenant (Ryuichi Sakamoto & Alva Noto), Upstream Color (Shane Carruth), Gravity (Steven Price), plus Mica Levi’s Under the Skin of course. A mixture of mainstream and independent films, but which together point to an important, meaningful shift away from more conventional approaches to scoring a narrative and which embrace the more “emotionally opaque” attitude you mention. Furthermore, they’re all engrossing in their own right, away from the screen, which can’t be said for the majority of mainstream soundtracks these days.
In terms of the repetition in Levi’s Under the Skin score, that’s surely symptomatic of the repetitious nature of the film’s first half (i actually think of it as being variations on a theme)? But more broadly, it isn’t repetitive at all; if you haven’t listened to the score in isolation, you may be surprised at the overall lack of repetition.
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Striking though it may be, it’s difficult to see Under the Skin’s music having any real influence over the future of movie scores. For one thing, not many actually watched the movie containing it, so the listener base is inherently smaller, and for another, science-fiction movies/games of the 21st century are up against steep competition from both within themselves and from the general independent music scene; I enjoy Under the Skin’s music, but I also find it fairly repetitive, with a lack of content and internal development preventing it from being enjoyable as an album, and the obfuscated movie it’s attached to preventing me from enjoying it as a score.
The score for Jackie, on the other hand, is positioned in such a way that it could very well have a huge influence on the future of historical dramatization. It rejects the period music approach and straightforward emotive score for something much more emotionally opaque, functioning alongside the movie in an attempt to make the old feel new and fresh, make the historical figures on-screen feel present and contemporary; it’s a bigger gamble than you give it credit for, and in a genre as stagnant as that of the historical drama, it stands head and shoulders over its competitors.
In a nutshell; I have no intention of ever listening to Jackie’s score in isolation, but if more films adopted its audacity, I’d probably go out to the movies a lot more often.
i think the idea of “real influence” on movie scores is already happening, and that Mica Levi’s score for Under the Skin is an integral part of it. To be clear, i’m not claiming this to be anything new – more experimental approaches to soundtracks in more mainstream movies have been an undercurrent going back to the early 1970s at least (think of the ‘score’ in Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre) – but its prevalence and acceptance, both in film and TV for that matter, is definitely on the rise in recent years. Not, of course, in pretty much anything to come out of Hollywood – that’s not what they’re driving at – but beyond this examples are numerous, and are not simply restricted to certain genres: The Forest (Bear McCreary), Ex_Machina (Ben Salisbury & Geoff Barrow), Drag Me to Hell (Christopher Young), Only God Forgives (Cliff Martinez), The Girl with all the Gifts (Cristobal Tapia de Veer), Maps to the Stars (Howard Shore), Byzantium (Javier Navarrete), Macbeth (Jed Kurzel), A Field in England (Jim Williams), Let the Right One In (Johan Söderqvist), Antichrist (Kristian Eidnes Andersen), The Witch (Mark Korven), Morgan (Max Richter), Goodnight Mommy (Olga Neuwirth), Anthropoid (Robin Foster), White Bird in a Blizzard (Robin Guthrie & Harold Budd), The Revenant (Ryuichi Sakamoto & Alva Noto), Upstream Color (Shane Carruth), Gravity (Steven Price), plus Mica Levi’s Under the Skin of course. A mixture of mainstream and independent films, but which together point to an important, meaningful shift away from more conventional approaches to scoring a narrative and which embrace the more “emotionally opaque” attitude you mention. Furthermore, they’re all engrossing in their own right, away from the screen, which can’t be said for the majority of mainstream soundtracks these days.
In terms of the repetition in Levi’s Under the Skin score, that’s surely symptomatic of the repetitious nature of the film’s first half (i actually think of it as being variations on a theme)? But more broadly, it isn’t repetitive at all; if you haven’t listened to the score in isolation, you may be surprised at the overall lack of repetition.