Perhaps we should do more work on the importance of music in film narratives. Anthony commented in his log this week that upon re-viewing The Inner Life of a Cell, the importance of musical cues was made more than obvious to him.
I just downloaded one of my favorite soundtracks to my iPod: Bernard Herrmann's score for The Day the Earth Stood Still. The Day the Earth Stood Still was the first science fiction film I ever saw and I can't emphasize enough what an impression it made on me at a very young age---and most of that impression was via the soundtrack. To say those sounds haunted me is not even close to the effect they had.
Herrmann is one of the classic soundtrack composers, forming in my mind a trinity with George Delarue and Peer Raben. (While I respect Herrmann's overall achievements, my heart is more truly given to Raben and Delarue. Raben for his entire work with Fassbinder and Delarue for the single most important cinema music in my life: the score to Godard's le Mepris. Two stills from it have pride of place on the right hand side of this blog, followed by several images from Fassbinder's work).
Anyway, walking around Nassau today with everything scored to the anxiety-producing theremin tones of Herrmann's score was quite an otherworldly experience.
And in some ways very fitting.
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