Pervert’s guide to Cinema is a documentary by Slovenian philosopher and psychologist Slavoj Žižek where he analyses films through psychoanalysis concepts, to argument how Cinema is a medium where humans express their deepest and darkest desires. Žižek in this documentary also includes sound and music to his analysis and how it evidences his point. When watching this documentary I became aware of psychoanalytical traits in the narrative of the short film I am scoring and I decided to approach the sound design for it with this concepts in mind.

The most important concept and idea I learned from the documentary was between the 14:10 min and 31:00, where he discusses the role of the voice in films and connecting it to Freudian concepts. Žižek references films like The Exorcist, Mullholland Drive, Alien and Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. In a short summary Žižek argument that the voice is not an organic component of the body and that the voice works as an autonomous entity that live inside of us, humans have been constantly trouble by the internal conflict between the self and this autonomous entity and this concept is currently expressed in films. For example in The Exorcist, the voice of the demonic being possessing the girl changes from her normal voice and by so separating the two individuals. Žižek finishes his point explaining that the only way to get rid of the autonomous entity is to become it, referencing the psychoanalytic concept of catharsis.

Now connecting what I learned to my own project, in the movie I’m using the main character is always in conflict with the figure of the city and the isolation it provokes. There is a distinctive separation between the character and the city, this can be seen by a reoccurring motif of a building every time the character is in distress. At the end of the film the character faces the building and it that way becoming it, achieving catharsis. Even though the scene I’m working on is not the ending scene it is important to acknowledge this concept, specially because the whole film including my scene has no dialogue but only narration, that is in a way the voice that Žižek was referring to. The way I’m going present this sonically is to alienate the narrative voice to make it sound fake or unreal, but the effects I will use will be very subtle, so the audience only perceive it in the subconscious and not be distracted it. Aesthetically I’m gonna achieve this with some slight pitch modulation and phasing manipulation.