The Shout (Jerzy Skolimowski, 1978)

_{[This essay was originally published as CD sleevenotes for Rupert Hine’s soundtrack for the film, released by Buried Treasure records in 2025 https://buriedtreasure.bandcamp.com/album/the-shout]}

‘I think you’ll have a very interesting time…’

An electroacoustic composer who is fascinated by the tiniest of sounds risks his life to hear a shout that can kill. The Shout is one of the great films about sound, and I never tire of it. It was adapted from a 1924 short story by Robert Graves, and both are steeped in dream-telling, magic and delicious ambiguity.

When directing the film in 1978, Jerzy Skolimowski utilised new Dolby technology to build The Shout’s soundtrack of wide and complex frequencies, rendering a detailed audio world that is punctuated with outbursts of complex noise. Sound is used with the utmost care throughout, from the uncanny opening dream in which an eerie synthesiser melody fights to be heard under the sound of a wind storm, to the pitch perfect evocation of cricket on a thunder threatening day, with peacock calls and batting thwacks gently invaded by non-diegetic electronic sounds, or in a sleepy village mix of soft voices, bicycles and bells, hymn singing, and watering plants. Each sound in each space is distinct, but not overdone, almost drawing me into those spaces myself. Soft boundaries between dream and reality, past and present, diegetic and non-diegetic music, ‘real’ sounds and processed sounds, are all part of what gives The Shout a perpetual Möbius strip quality, impossible to pin down.

‘I’ve heard your music. It’s nothing. It’s empty’

The studio of Anthony (John Hurt) is an incredibly authentic depiction, providing a rare cinematic glimpse of musique concréte in process. It’s a space of reel-to-reel tape, EMS synths and vocoder, delays and reverbs, with composition notes pinned to the wall amidst random items of taxidermy and Francis Bacon images of distorted figures. We are taken into Anthony’s way of engaging with the aural world - listen, catch small sounds, amplify them, process them, and create newness. In several sequences he plays with sounds: marbles rolling in a tin tray with water, bowing a cut up sardine tin, recording a bee in a jar, burning a cigarette close to a mic, even mic’ing the fur of his dog. We’re drawn into the mindset of an otherwise rather flawed individual who is captivated by noises. These, and similar sounds throughout the score, were created by musician and producer Rupert Hine.

With the exception of the main musical theme, which was composed by Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks from Genesis, Hine’s inventive film score combined experimental electroacoustic music with synths and organ melodies, reflecting Anthony’s position as church organist. While Anthony’s studio methods are suggestive of both the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concrète, Hine’s use of synthesised chords in the non-diegetic music evokes an eeriness also found in Brian Eno’s 1970’s scoring for Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway.

‘I’d very much like to hear your shout, Mr Crossley’

Crossley’s (Alan Bates) shout itself is of course pivotal, and was achieved by complex multi-tracking. Skolimowski stated the importance of using Dolby to create a hybrid sound: ‘the shock of the sound is not a question of loudness or richness - it is sudden and it is complex, because the human voice is helped on 40 or more tracks by all the things that came into my mind that might be helpful, the Niagara Falls, the launching of the Moon rocket, everything. But over the top is the real human voice of a man shouting like hell.’¹ In his studio, Anthony tries to create his own shout with reverb and vocoder, but his sonic failure merely highlights his own weak position within the film’s disconcerting triangle of dominance, masculinity, and sexuality.

Crossley’s shout could easily have been an anticlimax. But through Skolimowski’s careful handling of dynamic contrast and visual montage it achieves awesome power. Air, then noise, bursts out out of Crossley, and across the sands. Bates’s imposing body is silhouetted at an uncanny angle, and his face is a visual rhyme of the Eisenstein-inspired screaming pope painted by Francis Bacon, pinned up in Anthony’s studio. We see sheep fall down dead, and Anthony helplessly rolling down the dune, visibly blown away by the sound. The shout dies down, we hear the wind pick up, and church bells ringing, as if in Anthony’s ears. We see John Hurt expressing physical vulnerability so well as he huddles, eyes closed, cradling his ears. We intuit his aural shock, his damaged ears, and the trauma of being unable to ever un-hear the terrible sound.

‘you’d be wise to bring some wax or some cotton wool to stop up your ears’

One could say that The Shout is a warning tale about curiosity. Anthony’s desire to collect and master the sounds of the world, and his fascination for what Crossley can offer, leads this usually passive man to brave the noise, putting wax in his ears like Odysseus’s crew sailing past the Sirens. Graves was an authority on comparative, particularly Greek and Celtic, mythology, and though his story deals with (unqualified) Australian magic, his text itself references various European instances of terrifying shouts - in the Trojan war, of the Greek god Pan, of ancient Irish warriors, and in the Welsh Mabinogion. There is a kind of recurrent warning tale that trails through Western storytelling, about people who are too curious for their own good - of Pandora opening the jar, of Bluebeard’s wife unlocking the door, or even MR James’s ghost stories about incautiously curious antiquarians. The distinction here is Anthony’s overwhelming desire to hear, rather than see, the danger. It was essential that the screenplay expanded his character from the ‘musician’ of the story to the concrète composer of the film in order that the sonic temptation would be irresistible. Aural fascination lies at the very core of this film, a film itself so fascinating, but rewarding, to listen to.

Thank you for listening. Follow The Film in the Other Room on Bluesky @theotherroom.bsky.social