New Topoi Through Electracoustic Sound: The Alienated Condition in Italian Auteur Cinema of the 1960s

We define ‘electroacoustic’ a sound or set of sounds resulting from processes of electronic synthesis and/or manipulation. At the turn of 20th century such technological processes matched with certain ‘tropes’ of western culture such as vibration, inscription and transmission that were subsequently developed in sonic arts. These tropes find a privileged field of application in the domain of audiovisual media, to the extent that some scholars place them at the origin of the theoretical and technical debate concerning the birth of American talkies. It is indeed the fictional cinema that since its beginnings contributed, through the means of electroacoustic sound, to the development of those tropes towards narrative configurations such as automation and perceptual alteration and eventually to the profound characterization of genres like science fiction and horror-thriller. In an ideal itinerary leading from Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) to Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Fred Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (1956), the topical connotation of electroacoustic sound become well established in the American cinema. I argue that Italian auteur cinema of the 1960s rearticulated such topoi under new perspectives and through an approach to electroacoustic sound strongly mediated by the reception of contemporary avant-garde music. Drawing on two case studies––The Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964) and The Seed of Man (Marco Ferreri, 1969)––this paper analyzes how Italian auteur films used electroacoustic sound and music (in these cases pre-existent compositions) to give expression to the alienated condition of a generation facing dramatic disillusion after the post-war ‘economic miracle’. In such contexts, electronics are used not merely to produce uncanny effects but as processes of musical construction that challenge artistic creativity and expression, eventually representing tools of hermeneutical interpretations of the films themselves.