Professional paper
The power of silence and sound in Brokeback Mountain
Aleksandra Kovač
orcid.org/0000-0003-2715-2103
Abstract
The paper analyses the score made of music and the one made of music silence in Ang Lee’s 2005 drama Brokeback Mountain, and tries to prove how skillful, precisely and emotionally navigated use of both, can accentuate all the important ideas of a film. The way we experience this story, and how strong we react to it, is partly due to its sound, musical and ambient, and the lack of it. The sharp contrast between sound and music, and the way it is used to accentuate important emotional relationships, as well as the atmosphere in this film, is as important for the storyline and the emotional engagement of the audience, as the script and the way Lee directed the film. This film features musical silence as an important tool which allows the superb dialog to unfold, giving the narrative space it deserves, and defines the atmosphere and mood of the film, as much as the music score. We notice each occurrence of every music theme and each one has a more profound meaning, when it appears after a long period of silence. The melancholic and intimate music score of this film is congruent with the narrative, providing all the emotional and cinematic cues, and determining the atmosphere and the mood of the film, but unlike the big and lush orchestra scores, which define classical Hollywood mainstream cinema, Santaolalla’s intimate music introduces a new and different approach
to film scoring. But what stands out in the soundtrack is the effective use of musical silence. The absence of musical sound in some of the key moments of the narrative proves to be essential to this film and emotions it produces.
Keywords
Film music, sound, silence, Brokeback Mountain, Gustavo Santaolalla, Ang Lee
Hrčak ID:
279555
URI
Publication date:
15.6.2021.
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