EXCLUSIVE: Composer Daniel Blumberg won the Best Score Oscar earlier this year for The Brutalist. He now heads to Venice with two anticipated Competition movies: Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary Below The Clouds, and a re-team with Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet on The Testament Of Ann Lee.
Italian Rosi is one of Europe’s pre-eminent documentary filmmakers, known for features including Oscar nominee Fire At Sea and 2013 film Sacro GRA, which achieved the rare feat of being a documentary winner of Venice’s Golden Lion.
Rosi’s latest, Below The Clouds, sees the filmmaker delve into Naples and its suburbs, “a region whose inhabitants for almost three millennia have, sometimes uneasily, co-existed with the nearby volcano of Mount Vesuvius and where many of the challenges of the modern age are informed by a complicated past.”
Blumberg’s contribution – recorded underwater on location in Italy and created in close collaboration with the film’s team – will unspool on the Lido this week. The composer’s work spans experimental song writing, free improvisation and film scoring, and he is known for his raw, expressive style. He also collaborated with Fastvold on The World To Come.
Speaking about the collaboration with Rosi, Blumberg said: “I was honoured to make a soundscape for this film as I’ve admired Gianfranco’s work for a long time. We worked closely together in London and then with his Italian team – assistant director Alberto Landolfi in Baia and sound designer Stefano Grosso in Rome – to integrate my sounds into the fabric of the film.
“I recorded the seminal saxophonists John Butcher and Seymour Wright in London and then amplified these recordings in a speaker submerged in the sea in the volcanic region of Baia, next to Pompeii, using specialised microphones – geophones, which are used to measure earthquakes; and hydrophones which are used for recording underwater.
He continued: “It was important to me that the music was whispered in the same landscape that Gianfranco has worked for the past three years, so that you can hear the volcanic air gulping, the lapping of the waves, the steam and bubbles popping against John and Seymour’s saxophone breaths – an echo from a suspended time.”
Rosi added: “I have known Daniel for more than 14 years and I really love his experimental music. When I thought of the music for the final scene of the film I could only think of him. My need was not to have a soundtrack, but rather to imagine a soundscape capable of creating a suspended space in certain moments of the film. A fabric of traces, sounds, music where the instruments themselves become unrecognizable while drawing a sonic landscape.”
Pic is produced by Rosi’s company 21Uno Film in collaboration with Donatella Palermo’s Stemal Entertainment and Paolo Del Brocco for RAI Cinema. As previously announced, The Match Factory is handling international sales. Below is the film’s first trailer.
