![]() But Berberian Sound Studio opens with a lovingly crafted credit sequence for the film, establishing an attention to detail that obtains throughout, especially in the camera’s fetishistic lingering over racks of analog audio equipment. It’s left to the viewer to imagine the horrors that Gilderoy witnesses on screen as he labors on the sound mix for The Equestrian Vortex because we never see a single frame of it. At times, the Italian characters are drawn so broadly that a certain British comedy series from the Sixties and Seventies comes to mind: one wonders if Strickland might not have toyed with Carry On Screaming as an alternative title. There’s Francesco (Cosimo Fusco), the glowering producer who, when he’s not bawling out the actresses, is berating Gilderoy for his bad manners the playboy Fabio (Salvatore Li Causi), always crashing the studio bearing chocolates and champagne a taciturn engineer (Guido Adorni) constantly nibbling pumpkin seeds and the elusive Santini himself (Antonio Mancino), a diabolical charmer and sex pest. Strickland has fun with the cross-cultural comedy that sees Gilderoy finding his feet among the Italian crew. ![]() But Gilderoy’s a pro, “a magician” according to Santini, the director who’s hired him specially, and he gets down to sorting out mics to capture the full-throated howls of terror the actresses strain to produce in the grueling dubbing sessions that make up the bulk of the film. An innocent abroad in the visceral world of Seventies giallo filmmaking, Gilderoy’s a long way from the leafy Surrey home he shares with his mother and the garden shed studio where he normally creates sound effects for children’s TV programs and nature documentaries. We’re introduced to the withdrawn, middle-aged sound engineer Gilderoy (played with eloquent reserve by Toby Jones) as he arrives in Italy to work on a film called The Equestrian Vortex, which he thinks might have something to do with horse riding but turns out to be a grisly horror movie. I wonder if Peter Strickland, the writer-director of Berberian Sound Studio, had a similar aural epiphany in his youth. I owe to those sessions the traumatic revelation of the power of sound to create mental images, even though the liner notes explained that the sinister sonics had been conjured in a studio by, for instance, a bloke setting about a cabbage with a hatchet. The opening cut? That old standard, “Execution and Torture,” including such perennial favorites as “Sawing Head Off,” “Red Hot Poker into Eye,” “Neck Twisted and Broken,” and “Burning at the Stake.” The purpose of the exercise was to freak ourselves out, and it worked a treat. ![]() Among the 40 or so recordings that the BBC released on Pye Records, there was one disc in particular that we listened to-or tried to listen to-over and over again: Vol. We’d draw the curtains, turn off the lights, and play sound-effects records. As a kid in the Seventies, I had a friend whose father was an art director at Pinewood Studios in southern England and I was a regular visitor to his home. I suppose I could be Berberian Sound Studio’s ideal viewer. ![]()
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