Sound for Screen Week 4 – We need to talk about Kevin

This is a follow up to the We need to talk about Kevin series. Before I started working on this clip, I had read a text by Brett Ashleigh.

In her text she mentions Helen Cixous. Helen Cixous wrote a theory in her essay named ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, “Feminine Writing”. She defines this as the practice as the purposeful writing of spiraling compositions, which aims to liberate writing from the traditional linear narrative structure. These ideas have helped me in my work, because the film is narrated from Eva’s point of view. In dealing with the sound, we had to take into account Eva’s subjective world of sound. In addition to the objective voices in the picture, we give more space to the subjective voices and try to use them to arouse the audience’s empathy and even to influence their thoughts and emotions.

In her text, I also came across a quote that I really liked. “talking about communication, talking about language [are] not the same thing. It’s about inspiration…the thoughts and experiences that we don’t have a word for.” This quote is from the fourth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, psychology professor Maggie Walsh.

The combination of non-verbal sound and the misalignment of images can really produce a lot of unexpected effects.