Soundtrack, The - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2019

This article is a discussion piece that reflects on the authors’ video article ‘Obsession: Redux – Sounds from a Garage-Film’ (Cumming and Potter 2019) and the digitized soundtrack of co-author John Cumming’s film Obsession (1985). The authors explore the processes of, and concepts behind, creating the original multi-layered analogue soundtrack for Obsession, an artefact of creative practice from a specific moment on film culture and of filmmaking within Melbourne ‘post-punk’ culture of the early 1980s. As a personal and self-reflexive work, the Obsession soundtrack is replete with memory, both personal and popular, local and global. It is a collection of oral objects – an audio archive of live recordings and media samples made in Melbourne, Australia, between 1978 and 1985. The discussion piece revisits the Obsession soundtrack, alongside the redux of this film, in the context of contemporary literature and practice in sonic thinking. The representation of the self and relationships in sound is underpinned by Michel Chion’s (1994) understanding of palimpsest and Raul Ruiz’s (1995) ideas on poetic objects and shamanic films. The purpose of this investigation is to link sonic memories and subjective self-representation to specific practices of soundtrack composition and specific sites and moments of cultural history. The synthesis of concepts, methods and works that we examine here contributes to an emerging discourse around embodied and reflexive sound.

The 1970s and 1980s inner suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, in Malcolm (Tass, 1986) and Mary and Max (Elliot, 2010) are places of banality and imprisonment that beg for imaginative escape. This article argues that the distinctive Penguin Café Orchestra (PCO) music on the soundtracks of both films defines, facilitates and celebrates this escape as a product of a child’s imaginary. The shared use of PCO in both films creates a lingua franca between the titular characters of each film and a Melbourne that is redefined in these imaginary spaces by characters it ultimately cannot contain. In contrast to the liberatory and irrational pleasures of child’s play in Malcolm, in Mary and Max PCO connotes a wonderment borne from an entrapment in disappointment and loneliness. The need to contain the imaginary of Melbourne’s outcast daughter, unlike its son, is rendered explicit through the use of Barry Humphries’ voice-over narration.

This article uses the science fiction film Predestination (Spierig Brothers, 2014) to examine the combined role of sound and image in the subjective ‘home movie moment’. Vivian Sobchack argues that even within a fiction film, an audience member might recognize a familiar location, momentarily pulling them out of a fictional engagement with the screen text and instead facilitating an engagement more aligned with that of a home movie. Given Sobchack’s interest in phenomenology, it is noticeable that she focuses exclusively on the cinematic image in this particular work. I argue that liminal blurring can occur between modes of engagement, triggered by both image and sound. In Predestination, the puzzle narrative that colludes with the uncanny voice is paralleled by the way that the sights and sounds of Melbourne facilitate uncanny home movie moments, shot through with science fictional estrangement.