The Oscars’ sound category is often the province of blockbusters, loud superhero movies, musicals, and movies like “Sound of Metal,” where sound is incorporated into the story. For the most part, it is No a category where you usually find non-English movies, though those movies pop up from time to time: “Roma” in 2018, “Apocalypto” in 2006, “Amelie” in 2001.
This year, however, Netflix has a couple of movies that represent their countries in the Best International Feature category, but are also notable enough that their sound design is a candidate for Best Sound. This year’s highlights are Germany’s Oscar entry, the brutal but sometimes lyrical war film “All Silent on the Western Front,” and the Mexican entry, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s fantasy epic “Bardo, Falsa chronicle of a handful of truths”.
Both are over two hours long (“All Quiet” clocks in at 2:27 and “Bardo” at 2:40), both are massive in scale, and both have intricate sound design that is integral to the power Of the movies.
For “All Quiet on the Western Front,” director Edward Berger turned the first German-language adaptation of the classic anti-war novel into a harrowing journey through the trenches of World War I. The film looks at the war machine and spends time with the The German high command decides, over lavish meals, where to send young soldiers to die, but its signature scenes are the ones that put the viewer alongside these young men in the mud.
That sludge, supervising sound editor Frank Kruse said, was one of the keys to the film. “We were shooting at the height of COVID, so I knew there was very little chance that I would be able to travel to the set and grab most of the original sand, dirt and sound of a hundred extras in the mud,” he said. “So I talked to our production mixer before filming and told him that we would need as much original sound as he could capture during filming.
“You can redo everything later, but the original sounds of all these bodies moving with all their equipment and with their original energy was something key to preserve. And he took a ton of original sound from the extras, the crowds, and the vehicles.”
When the sound team began planning their workflow, sound editor Markus Stemler added, the order of the scenes definitely mattered. “My first impression was, ‘Oh, this is a bit of work,’” he said with a laugh. “Looking at the schedule ahead, we knew we had to start with the battle scenes, because otherwise we would never finish.”
For those scenes, Kruse added, the idea was “not to make the movie sound too engineered.”
“We tried to keep a certain sense of realism, even though no one really knows what it sounded like,” he said. “There are almost zero recordings of that, mostly descriptions of soldiers writing to their loved ones and trying to write what the front sounded like, what kind of grenade had what feature, etc. All those details help to make your imagination fly. going. But at some point, we decided there was no way we could make it sound scientifically accurate. It’s really about the emotional impact, so we decided to give the sound work an emotional focus while trying to include as much detail as possible.”
Emotion was also the centerpiece of the intricate sound design of “Bardo,” which turns moments from Iñárritu’s own life into a fantastical, non-linear narrative that weaves in and out of dreamscapes while following a Mexican writer living in Los Angels for years. .
“Alejandro is always looking for the narrative behind the narrative, the stories behind the stories,” said supervising sound editor and sound designer Martín Hernández, a college friend of Iñárritu who has done sound for all of the director’s films. .
“He would say, ‘This is how I remember how it sounded, how it tasted, how it felt.’ How do you translate that into a soundtrack for everyone to hear? There are many different ways to approach that memory, so you keep going until you think, ‘Okay, this is good. But no, that’s just the starting point for the conversation with Alejandro.”
For example, Hernández points to a scene in which Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) returns to an apartment in Mexico City, pours himself a glass of mezcal, and looks out the window. The sound designer had recorded for 48 hours straight in that apartment to get the tone of the room and the sounds of the surrounding area, from street vendors to mariachi bands. But what the viewer hears in that scene is not what is happening outside the window at that moment; instead, “it’s something he remembers from a day in his life.”
Throughout the film, he added, “natural sounds have been modified or different sounds that don’t belong in that place have been added. We experiment with audio references in memories or perceptions, and we add those things throughout the film.
“For Alejandro, sound was a kind of driving force, the backbone of the narrative,” Hernández said. “In a way, ‘Bardo’ is a concept album: it’s a journey of music and sound like a concept album from the ’70s, or maybe Radiohead these days.”
