Deploying Hitchcock to get your message across

"I think what sound brought of value to the cinema was to complete the realism of the image on the screen. It made everyone in the audience deaf mutes." -Alfred Hitchcock

Would Psycho be the terrifying movie it is without the soundtrack?  There are countless theses and probably thousands of undergraduate dissertations written on the subject of using music to set the scene.

However, if you want to get a real life example of deploying music to set the scene then you need go no further than the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ieper (Ypres).  This is a stunning and incredibly moving museum that takes you through the horrors of the Great War on the Western Front and in particular around the Ypres Salient.

By itself it would be difficult not to be moved by the museum, the sheer sense of futile loss the hundreds of thousands of lives sacrificed for no real purpose.

However, throughout your visit to the museum there is a constant background music that manages to get into your head and burrow into both your brain and your heart.

I thought I might just have been me imagining it, but part way round they had a fault with the sound system and the music stopped for about 5 minutes.  During that time I felt I didn’t have such an emotional attachment to the artefacts – that’s all they became, just artefacts.  However, within a minute or so of the music starting back up again that sense of foreboding, fear and hopelessness is back.

Perhaps I was just imagining it, but by the time I left the museum – nearly 3 hours after entering – I was emotionally drained, and at the end of the day that’s probably exactly how you should feel after reading about the horrors of the Western Front.

If it wasn’t for the internet

As I was leaving Santa Maria delle Grazie having taken in Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper, it struck me how much of a leveller the internet has been to enable people to see things they otherwise might not have been able to.

To get to see the mural you have to book in advance (the signs out today showed that it was fully booked until November!). Prior to the real take off of the Internet you would have had to have phoned up the booking line to book tickets. This requires two important things

1 – the ability to make (or pay for) a long international call, or make a call whilst in Italy
2 – a firm grasp of the Italian language to make the booking in (making sure you don’t get dates and times muddled up)

Alternatively, you could have booked a guide, or paid one of the tour companies through the nose (€50 I saw being advertised in a lot of places) to get you in on an organised tour.

Now, you can go online in advance, in a choice of languages, and book your ticket in advance for a time and date that you stipulate, not a tour company.

It’s the same with the Hypogeum in Malta, again booked on line in advance (though there the language barrier as an English speaker wouldn’t have existed)

Access to the sites has to be limited to prevent damage (The Last Supper only allows around 850 people a day in, in groups no larger than 25, thought that’s positively heaving compared to The Hypogeum’s maximum of 80 per day), and the internet allows the sites protectors to balance the needs to protect the site with the needs to get the tourists money to pay for its upkeep.

It might only be a small way, but the internet is helping to preserve these sites, and create a level playing field for access.