Rampo Noir, hyperrealism and the speaker problem [video]

I'm not sure I'm going to make it through Superman Returns. So far it's like a xerox of the Richard Donner versions in which Bryan Singer mistakes seriousness for grandeur. I feel like someone should be paying me to watch this.



So I went on to Rampo Noir. This excrutiatingly beautiful and painfully grotesque Japanese film screams art horror at you for two hours. The symbolism is trite--butterflies evoke transformation, mirrors evoke vanity--but if you're watching this for the story and not the luscious cinematography, you might be disappointed anyway.

I've been thinking about the speaker scene problem all day. I keep talking about it so here's a link with temp audio [view].

In the speaker scene a wave of sound disrupts a radio broadcast and ends up destroying the spinner. When I first shot this, there were two things in my mind: build suspense and visualize the sound. That's why I shot the slow push-ins and the shaky table and the shaky spinner. I thought the smoke blowing out of the spinner was a bit much but what the hell, this is just a rough version. You'll also see the rack focus that seems like it took 30 minutes to shoot. The temp audio is Organic from Koyaanisqatsi. There's also primitive cricket-like temp sound design. Look closely at the beginning of the sequence and you'll see Erik's head in the bottom lefthand corner.

When I've thought of hyperrealism in the past, it's usually been in terms of movies like The Matrix--obvious examples of films that are essentially photoreal cartoons. But I'm realizing that hyperrealism is a concern even on this microlevel. The question is this: how do you visualize malevolent sound? I originally wanted to have the radio or the speaker vibrate but that seemed like too much. So I ended shaking the table. The problem is this approach doesn't exhibit any real understanding of sound. This depiction is a cartoon, sort of like indicating "smelly" by using stink lines. The scene visualizes sound. But the relevant question in our case is the phenomenological question: what is sound and how does it present itself via cinema? So I've been thinking of other ways to replace or augment the shaking table approach.

I was recently looking through some of my posts and discovered a reference to the problems with this scene on November 13. So I've been pondering this for two weeks already. Get a life!