GRAVITY (Alfonso Cuaron, 2013) Experimentation and sound

Note: Originally written as a short post for a experimental video class.

Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity contained a surprising amount of experimentation for an $80 million Warner Bros. film. First, the film features just two actors, and focuses mostly on Sandra Bollock’s character, completely isolating her for the bulk of the film. Although the two actors are two of the most bankable stars working today, the film toys with audience’s expectations greatly, removing George Clooney from the film around the halfway point, leaving Sandra Bollock, the lesser of the two personalities (both off-screen, and even on-screen, as Bollock’s character is nervous and soft-spoken, unlike Clooney’s charismatic natural leader) to carry the rest of the film.

 Cinematically, the camera flows loosely through the film, flipping with the characters sometimes, and other times locked onto them. The film begins with a seventeen minute long take, guiding the viewer through space, starting focusing on the different angles of the ship, alerting us to the subjectivity of direction and orientation in a zero-gravity environment.

The film’s most fascinating, and ultimately most frustrating, aspect is its use of sound, based heavily on how sound acts in space. Unlike the traditional space film, explosions, destruction, and movement make no sound on the film. The film’s promotional trailers actually include the typical booms of explosions in space. The film’s microphone seems to be within Bollock’s helmet, providing some noise to the environment- beeps from her oxygen tank, hisses, breathing, and radio cracks. The use of sound here works thematically and aesthetically- the film is about Bollock and her experience, at one point even using a hallucination, so it makes sense that we hear what she hears and not the harsh “true silence” of space. In a climatic scene, Bollock struggles to enter a ship while her surroundings are destroyed by space junk. We hear Bollock’s panicked breathes and some whirring, but not the typical booms and crashed.

However, in that scene, and many others throughout the film, we hear a loud orchestral score, there to soften the film’s tone and make it more conventional. However, the score takes away from the power of the image and the originality of the environment. It would not surprise me if some people didn’t notice the film’s lack of booms and crashes  because the score was so overbearing and conventional, even though the rest of the film seemed to defy convention.