{"id":18694,"date":"2018-12-08T02:49:54","date_gmt":"2018-12-08T07:49:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=18694"},"modified":"2018-12-08T22:58:09","modified_gmt":"2018-12-09T03:58:09","slug":"the-rebirth-of-dante-tomasellis-desecration-1999","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=18694","title":{"rendered":"The Rebirth of Dante Tomaselli’s Desecration (1999)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Time and age have a tendency to affect one’s tastes for and perceptions of art, and the preference I had in my 20s for mainstream and more formal genre efforts has shifted to enjoying less traditional, more daring attempts to build a story around a simple idea, or fragment it in image and especially sound – the latter a reflection of my omnipresent appreciation and love of good sound design.<\/p>\n

As I state near end end of my review of Dante Tomaselli’s feature film debut Desecration<\/strong><\/a> (1999), sound can be a key to understanding a work on a less conscious level; maybe because of active subtext, or smoothing jarring transitions for more traditional audiences.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I didn’t care for the film upon my first viewing more that 15 years ago, but its strange, surreal cover of four nuns in mutated states maintained a quiet attraction, and in its new Blu-ray incarnation, I have to say I’ve warmed to the concept of a narrative in which characters in a story are connected by shared traumatic memories, and nightmares which are enhanced and soon ignited by the malevolent spirit of a cruel mother.<\/p>\n

The bonding agent for Tomaselli’s scenario is his score & sound design which remain surprisingly engrossing in an era where any sounds can be shaped using myriad plugins and patches. I interviewed the writer-director-composer twice before in 2015<\/a> and 2007<\/a>, and I’ve included a short Q&A in which he describes the creation and layering of a soundtrack that remains sharp and fresh and extraordinarily clean – an ideal amalgam of digital and analogue sounds treated with great imagination, and still affecting, because of the care spent in shaping the sonic components.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"

An example of Dante Tomaselli’s stacked, edited sound elements from the WITCHES album.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

My emphasis here on sound isn’t to sideline the film’s striking imagery and colours, but highlight Tomaselli’s sound work which reflects a fastidiousness and determination to Get Things Right. The stereo 2.0 mix is also testimony that imagination, organization, and skill can negate the need for a 5.1 mix – one of the best stereo surround mixes that comes to mind is Romeo is Bleeding<\/strong><\/a> (1993), with clean, beautifully recorded, edited, and mixed material by the great Walter Murch.<\/p>\n

Desecration<\/strong><\/a> isn’t a straightforward ghost tale, and neither is its direction nor sound design, but it does offer a unique approach evoking a nightmare, and Code Red’s Blu-ray is a marked improvement over the nearly 20 year old DVD and its non-anamorphic transfer.<\/p>\n

In addition to discussing the film’s sonic design, in our Q&A Tomaselli also elaborates on the new transfer made from the film’s best source – a master digibeta edit – and the lost film elements.<\/p>\n

Transferring image to video and posting on tape for broadcast & distribution was very much the norm for filmmakers and TV producers during the late 1980s and especially the 1990s – it was a cost-effective way to avoid creating prints and mixing to magnetic film.<\/p>\n

Video offered an opportunity to never cut their negative and fix mistakes, balance colours, and create a stereo mix, with the final project elements taking up and weighing far less than cans of film and boxes of sound reels. In a pre-fully digital, non-interlace era, video gave filmmakers a method to shoot on film and have a finished product for home video and ancillary distribution, hence what was probably an easy DVD master for original distributor Image.<\/p>\n

The irony is that film became an acquisition format which was literally boxed up, stored, and forgotten once post-production moved into the video realm, so the challenge for affected filmmakers wanting to create a new HD master in 2018 is the choice between raw uncut footage and a finished film on legacy video media.<\/p>\n

Coming shortly<\/em> is a review of the Sherwood Forest quartet produced by Columbia Pictures and Hammer, which I\u2019m tying to Twilight Time\u2019s Blu-ray edition of Sword of Sherwood Forest <\/strong>(1960), the last in the series.<\/p>\n

Cheers,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mark R. Hasan<\/strong>, Editor
\nKQEK.com<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Review of Desecration (1999) on Blu from Code Red \/ KINO \/ Unobstructed View + an interview with writer-director-composer Dante Tomaselli.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18695,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[70,5902,2562,2563,5903],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/Desecration1999_featured.jpg","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8nuyW-4Rw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18694"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18694"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18694\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18716,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18694\/revisions\/18716"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}