Peter Strickland, the EFA’s Discovery of the Year award in 2009 and Silver Bear (Berlin Film Fest) winning director for Katalin Varga, has began shooting his sophomore project in London and not Italy as some wad been reporting. Toplined by Toby Jones who finds himself in the engineer’s chair, Berberian Sound Studio is going to be a hot title for 2012 as it is being produced by some interesting names in Keith Griffiths (he works with Thai Joe) and Mary Burke (who is coming off the extremely popular festival title, Submarine). Hans Geissendoerfer is co-producing alongside Film4’s Katherine Butler, Warp X’s Robin Gutch and Screen Yorkshire’s Hugo Heppell are serving as executive producers.
Gist: Berberian Sound Studio is one of the cheapest, sleaziest post-production studios in Italy. Only the most sordid horror films have their sound processed and sharpened in this studio. Gilderoy (Jones), a shy and nondescript sound engineer from the UK is hired to mix the latest giallo film by horror maestro, Santini (Antonio Mancino) and he soon finds himself caught up in a forbidding world of bitter actors, capricious foley artists and confounding bureaucracy. The longer Gilderoy spends mixing screams and the bloodcurdling sounds of hacked vegetables, the more homesick he becomes for his garden shed studio in Dorking. His mother’s letters alternate between banal gossip and an ominous hysteria, which gradually mirrors the black magic of Santini’s film that Gilderoy is responsible for orchestrating. As both time and realities shift, Gilderoy finds himself lost in an otherworldly spiral of sonic and personal mayhem.
Worth Noting: I found this press release from Warp which cites that Strickland made a number of short films and produced several records of abstract music, field recordings and spoken word. So the director might be particularly strong in visually representing the “sound” elements.
Do We Care?: Berberian Sound Studio belongs to one of my favourite subgenres – films about moviemaking process. I imagine this will fall somewhere between Shadow of the Vampire (where horror creeps in when filming horror), this amusing short I found and of course will borrow from the library full of obscure Giallo film references.
