Over the next ten days or so I shall be posting a wide range of video essays. The series begins with this superb work from Alex Hobbs

Mandy: The Film-Concert – Creator’s Statement

This video essay explores the use of music and sound in Mandy (2018) in order to gain a greater understanding of how modern film scoring and sound design can be used to extract and/or enhance a film’s deeper themes and meanings.

I was particularly drawn to the term ‘film-concert’ – originally coined by Laurent Jullier – after reading Emilio Audissino’s definition:

“the sound track embraces the viewer and occupies the frequency spectrum almost entirely; coming out from loudspeakers, the sound track plunges the audience into a sound atmosphere from which it is impossible to escape.”[1]

The idea of an immersive and overwhelming ‘aural experience’[2] intrigued me, and it seemed like the perfect way to…