Musica che affronta il silenzio - Scritti su Toru Takemitsu - Pavia ...

Music Facing Up to Silence. Writings on Tru Takemitsu
Figure 4. First episode of Kwaidan.
In dramaturgical terms, the alternation of these typologies gives rise to a dialectic typical
of film music in which single, isolated sounds occur amid other articulated sounds. The
former are static and foster a contemplative state of mind, whereas the latter are dynamic.
In the explicit pursuit of synaesthesia which characterises this music even the opening
titles can contain surprises.
The opening title and credits sequence […] instantly throws you into a state of disequilibrism.
Delicately, elegantly, sublimely, shots of ink dropping into a swirling expanse of
clear water are intercut with full-screen images of written credits. This oscillation between
legible, stable inscription (kanij characters) and a liquefaction of the act of
inscription (calligraphics brushwork) is of considerable importance. It signifies not simply
a collapse or detonation of coded meaning, but a dynamic transformation as
container within the action of slipping between potential meanings. In a perverse play on
the Western notion of an aspect of the animation process – ‘in-betweening’ – these
cinematographic captures of ‘in-betweened’ calligraphic veins neither destroy meaning
nor posit a replacement: they serve as psychic squiggles, phantom doodles, automatic
scribbles that refuse to attach themselves to intention, projection, communication. Their
beauty is in their deft escape from overt signification through their dynamic presence and
the totality of their motion. If those mesmerizing swirls of inky threads recall the animatic
base, cinema’s prime mechanical pleasure, the accompanying soundtrack just as
effectively exposes what I earlier described as ‘the absolute rupture’ that gapes and
throbs at the audiovisual core of cinematic experience. (Brophy 2007: 143)
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