Making Waves: behind a fascinating documentary about movie sound
Midge Costin has had it with people forgetting the difference between sound editing and sound mixing every time the Oscars roll around. Once and for all: “Sound mixing brings all the elements together, all the various recorded tracks, and synthesizes them into one soundscape. Editing covers voice, music, effects, ADR – how do they sound?” So, that should be the end of that.
Of course, the professor and audiobiz legend had more on her mind than settling cocktail party disputes when she set out to create her new documentary Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound. Her career’s emphasis on education gave her the idea to condense a semester’s worth of introductory material into one compact package, breaking down the essentials of her craft for an audience of laypeople. She introduces and defines key terms – foley work, automated dialogue replacement, mono v stereo v surround sound – in order to render visible labor that generally goes unseen and unnoticed when done well.
“I went to film school, and I hated sound,” Costin tells the Guardian by phone. “It scared me, I had panic attacks doing it, so I wanted to be a picture editor when I graduated. I was doing my thesis, and a friend called me up to tell me that none of their union guys would touch 16mm sound. I fell into it by mistake, because I needed the money. I took the sound job, and then went, ‘Oh, crap. I’m responsible for tone and mood.’ I had a conversion, once I realized that sound wasn’t just technical. It adds so much to the story.”
She took to the job like a fish in water, quickly establishing herself as a formidable talent in her field and a reliable resource for big-league productions. She later grew disillusioned with the action-adventure gigs offered to her (she mentions getting jaded after working on a Michael Bay film – The Rock, judging from her IMDb page – before adding, “Maybe I shouldn’t use any names?”) and decided to go into academia. It was at USC that she first made plans with colleague-turned-producer Bobette Buster to assemble a documentary adapting her lectures for a single bite-sized package. They floated some plans in the early 2000s, but had to wait a decade and change for the protections on fair use law to beef up so that they could excerpt major movie clips without paying an arm and a leg.
The courts have since ruled that sampling footage will be acceptable so long as it’s done in the spirit of public edification, and just like that, Costin was off. Between the connections she’d made in the industry and favors called in from fellow sound people, she put together an all-star lineup of commentators. From her former student Ryan Coogler to Steven Spielberg, who named her the Kay Rose chair at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, the deep bench of experts dissect scenes classic and contemporary to illustrate the great quantities of work that go into creating and fine-tuning a soundscape. Spielberg, for example, goes into the subtly expressionistic quality of the shellshocking beach invasion that opens Saving Private Ryan.
Just about everyone takes good audio work for granted, from the casual viewer to the budget-balancers at the studios. “They say sound is 50% of the story, but on the films I was doing, the post-production sound budget would be 1% to 1.5% of the total,” Costin recalls. “The average moviegoer thinks that when you turn on the camera, it starts also recording sound. They don’t even get that they’re recorded separately and synced. How much work going into sound, when done correctly, isn’t even perceptible.”
She organized the many different roles in the audio side of the film world within a “circle of talent” likening the conjunction of voice, sound effects and music to the cooperating sections of an orchestra. Each role requires precision, patience and perseverance. Smashing watermelons to approximate the noise of splintering femurs is all fun and games, but some tasks can be more tedious.
“When you think about doing footsteps, you’ve got to do them for everyone. Everybody has their own unique footsteps,” Costin says. “So many American films go abroad, and when you take out the production track, you lose everything. If someone’s tapping their fingers while talking, you’ll lose the tapping when they dump the dialogue for redubbing. The rerecording is extensive. They even have what’s called a ‘cloth track’, where they just rub various fabrics to get the sound of people shifting in their chair or getting up … Sometimes, the most important sound can be a creak or a breath.”
Her film concludes with an eye toward the future, focusing on technology as the driving force for sound’s advancement in the theater and the home. Unlike the film purists that continue to keep mechanical methods alive, the audio set has fully embraced the computerized era. “Some people will say it just sounds better with analog equipment,” Costin concedes. “But the variety of things you can do, what you can see on the digital readouts, it gives you so many more options. Aside from the difference, which is hard to hear for a lot of people, we’re all pretty happy to be on digital.”
On the consumer end, she’s of two minds. She’s gladly watched equipment affordable to the average family grow more sophisticated, but that’s come with its own issues. “The problem sometimes comes down to how people have their home systems set up. Theaters get carefully calibrated, but listening at home leaves a lot of room for error. I’d love for people to see movies in theaters.”
However the tools of its creation or display may change, Costin knows that her life’s passion will be secure. Cinema needs sound to be its fullest, most exhilarating self, and sound needs artists to bring it to life. “As we watch things on smaller screens, sound gets even more important. The smaller someone’s face gets, the more reliant we are on audio cues for emotion and tone of a scene.” With a laugh, she adds, “You all need us!”
Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound is released in the US on 25 October and in the UK on 1 November
ing the long-haired to school. In June 1971, the hippies were given permission to demonstrate against the Vietnam war outside the US embassy in Moscow.
This was a trap. The KGB rounded up and arrested demonstrators, with the goal of wiping out hippy culture. Some demonstrators were sent to psychiatric facilities and injected with insulin; others dispatched to the army and camps near the Chinese border. The film re-creates this grim clampdown and uses surveillance photos found in KGB archives in Lithuania.
According to Lampmann, harassment by the police and KGB was common. “One of my close friends ended up in prison,” he says. Hippies were persecuted under criminal rather than political law. They could find themselves sharing a cell with gangsters and murderers. To avoid arrest, Lampmann always kept his documents in perfect order.
By the late 70s, the hippies had developed a counterculture, with Russian slang and a music scene. There was what Toomistu calls “analogue Facebook” – notebooks listing names and numbers of contacts across the USSR, used by travellers seeking somewhere to crash for the night. This network is gloriously animated in the film, which features psychedelic drawings and cartoons.
The underground subculture connected people from different social backgrounds, the writer Vladimir Wiedemann says. It included hippies, dissidents, mystics, religious activists and human-rights campaigners. Some embraced spiritualism, others yoga and veganism. All rejected the Soviet regime and thus played a role in its eventual demise.
Wiedemann was exposed to rock’n’roll culture via Finnish TV and Radio Luxembourg, which he could pick up from his home in Estonia. “The iron curtain wasn’t that strong,” he says. Now based in London, Wiedemann wrote a book on hippies, Forbidden Union, which is currently running as a play, How Estonian Hippies Brought Down the Soviet Union!, on the Moscow stage...
The film features interviews with Wiedemann and other survivors from the “hairy underground”, as Toomistu puts it. Most are men, still espousing hippy ideas and with beards and hair still flowing but grey. There are fewer Soviet female hippies, Toomistu says; many left the scene to have children. The movement’s charismatic leaders are largely dead, often from drink and drugs.
These were widely available under Marxism. Forbidden from travelling physically beyond the eastern bloc, Soviet hippies instead became “psychonauts”, Toomistu says. They consumed weed from central Asia and the Caucasus, opium and poppy tea. Some drank Sopals, a Soviet cleaning detergent containing ether.
Toomistu grew up in post-Soviet Estonia. She was interested in the hippy scene as a teenager, and was a fan of Jim Morrison. She spent half a year in Russia as a student, and wrote a thesis about memory culture. The idea for the film came together after her own road trip in South America, she says. She is currently completing an anthropology PhD. There is little archive material on communist-era hippies, whom the Soviet press ignored, Toomistu says, erasing them from history. She retrieved a box of video footage of festivals and gatherings from a hippy who had to leave Russia in a hurry. In 2017, several of her subjects went to a hippy reunion held every year at Moscow’s Tsaritsyno Park, to mark the 1971 demo busted by the KGB.
The reunion is poignant. Russia’s war in Ukraine and its 2014 annexation of Crimea divided opinion. Some hippies support Vladimir Putin and his idea of a great spiritual Russia. Others take a more traditional pacifist view that all war is bad. The film ends with Putin’s police breaking up the party. It is a metaphor for state-hippy relations, now and then.
Soviet Hippies is being screened by Dash Café at Rich Mix, London, on 23 October.