When rescoring someone else’s work it is very important to understand the context of the work, what time period the work was made in, where the film was made, and the artist’s intention. If all these go ignored, it feels disrespectful to create your own art on top of someone else’s, because you do not understand the whole context of the movie.
10/65 Self Mutilation has no score, much like all the other films created by the Vienesse Actionists. I personally prefer working with films with no score, as I cannot be inspired in any way other than the visuals. It gives me more free range to compose what I think this would sound like if it had sound. When conceptualising how my composition would sound I made a playlist of music that I played alongside the film. You can see this playlist here. I was inspired by a mixture of drone, noise, and ambient. I did not want this composition to rely heavily on drones, as I used lots of drones in my previous composition. I structured the composition into 3 parts. The first part being more noise heavy to emphasise the pain and distrubing nature of the opening of this film. The second part being more drone based to change up from the heavy noise use in the first half, while still emphasising the anger and torment. The third part will be more ambient to work with the melancholy ending of the film.
There are some great examples of rescores of already existing movies. One of them would be Nicolas Jaar’s rescore of the Soviet-Armenian film ‘The Colour Of Pomegranates’. The Colour Of Pomegranates (released in 1969) is a surreal art film directed by Sergei Parajanov and is about the real-life Armenian ashug (a singing poet/bard) called Sayat-Nova. The film walks us through Sayat-Novas’s life in a very experimental way, instead of using a traditional film where it is primarily dialogue and structured in a typical way. Instead, the film is told in a much more poetic way by mainly using visual storytelling with minimal dialogue. The original sound for the film relies more on sound design than traditional music, but music is featured throughout the film at points. The way Nicolas took this film and reworked the sound to an even more experimental but not overbearing soundtrack was really inspirational to me. Jaar mixes sound design and these mixtures of ambient music and glitchy avant-garde beats that Jaar is known for.