Abstract
Somewhere or nowhere in the middle of 1970s Italy, Gilderoy’s mind is losing and even loosening him. In Peter Strickland’s film Berberian Sound Studio (2012), Gilderoy, a British natural history sound engineer, travels to Italy to work on the post-production of a film about horses only to discover he has unsuspectingly been scouted to work on an Italian giallo film called ‘The Equestrian Vortex’. We never see The Equestrian Vortex; we only hear it being recorded and edited, erased and remade. Everything that Gilderoy hears we hear too—Berberian Sound Studio’s audio is completely diegetic, originating from the on-screen ‘reel’ world of the film. Through a manipulation of screams, slashes, and sore throats, both Gilderoy and its audience become transformed by the giallo seeping out of the sound studio.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Giallo’ is a particular genre of Italian thriller-horror films known for slasher violence and eroticism, at the height of its popularity during the 1970s.
- 2.
A distinction between “the ‘real,’ as in that which the camera has filmed, and the ‘reel,’ by which they mean the image on the screen” (Aitken & Dixon, 2006: 327).
- 3.
In comparison, Donna Haraway (2011) introduces her notion of ‘speculative fabulation’ to a multispecies populated planet Earth as a tool to redirect the course of the Anthropocene.
- 4.
In Deleuze’s reading of Plato, simulacra are things which are neither perfect ideals nor their copies—they are a third, subversive category, which undermine the ideal-copy relationship. Simulacra distort the distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’ because they relate to each other not through identity, but rather through difference, and in these systems “unfolds the power of the false” (156).
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Jeyasingh, T.E. (2022). Foley and Fabulation: The Production of Screams, Sound, and Subjectivity in Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio. In: Williams, N., Keating, T. (eds) Speculative Geographies. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0691-6_10
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