ABSTRACT

When the jury of the 2009 Berlin Film Festival awarded Peter Strickland’s debut film Katalin Varga a Silver Bear for ‘outstanding artistic contribution’ in sound design, naming only two people as the recipients of the award—Gábor Erdélyi and Tamás Székely—the director felt compelled to respond by publishing a long article on his blog that acknowledged the contribution of the many others who were part of the prolonged process of sound postproduction. He credited all the professionals involved in recording, editing, and mixing the sound but also revealed that the final result included a number of preexisting tracks of musique concrète and electroacoustic music. Some of those tracks were created specifically for the film by friends of the director, including Roy (Richard Stevens), Tim Kirby, R. R. Habarc, én (Pál Tóth), James Blackhouse, and Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg. Other tracks came from Strickland’s record collection, like Nurse with Wound’s “Ciconia,” which provided the soundtrack for one of the film’s crucial scenes. “Some people regard this [‘Ciconia’] as the highlight of the film’s sound design,” wrote Strickland in his blog, “but it is actually a ‘song’ from my record collection used in the film in the same manner as say, Kenneth Anger using The Paris Sisters for his Kustom Kar Kommandos [1965]” (Strickland 2009a).