Last weekend, I attended a "live cinema" rendition of the classic animated film Kan Kluay (known as Blue Elephant in its international incarnation) at Kantana studios. There had already been five performances the previous weekend and I was catching one of the second set of five.
We've become quite familiar with these events as there have been a number of high-profile performances of blockbuster films with live orchestra in Thailand, so maybe people might not realise that Kantana has done something quite revolutionary that we haven't seen in the past.
The live music, conducted by celebrated Thai musician Trisdee Na Patalung, was great as expected and added a dimension of excitement to the movie, but what was new was that Kantana gave equal prominence to a live Foley section.
Foley is one of the most important aspects of movie postproduction, yet it is the one least noticed by regular audiences. Most moviegoers don't know that in the recorded soundtrack of a movie, gunshots don't really go bang and swords don't clang but are likely to thud or squeak (because they are props of wood or plastic, not actual sharp dangerous killer metal things). Also, people's footsteps don't actually echo across marble floors because it's probably a painted plywood floor built on a soundstage and doors don't slam, the wind doesn't whistle, and on and on. All these effects are put it by a team of Foley artists.
In a Foley studio, there are boxes with different floor textures to record footsteps, pieces of cloth to wave about that will sound like a flock of birds in flight, instruments to bang and bash and blow on that look nothing like what you see on screen. And thousands upon thousands of these sounds are added, painstakingly, to a film's soundtrack in order to complete your suspension of disbelief.
The highest success of a Foley studio is when the audience believes that all the sounds are completely real. In other words, if no one ever noticed their work, they are doing a brilliant job.
For Kantana to highlight the Foley Department in a live film screening is an original idea I've never seen before. In post-production, Foley is synchronised with great precision, but not in real time. It's done over and over until the timing is correct.
In this kind of live performance, it becomes essentially a new subset of performing art. The Foley artists have to do every footstep, every sound, in perfect synchronicity with the film and they're relying on a profound inner musical sense to do it -- it is as though Kantana had invented a brand new genre of music. I can't overemphasise just how innovative it is and how brilliantly the Foley artists metamorphosed into performers. I understand it took them months of rehearsal.
New though this is, there is something profoundly Thai about it. I remember as a child when Thai movies were shown in theatres without a soundtrack. Instead, two people in a little booth did all the dialogue and performed all the sound effects using a panoply of household objects while also operating the music cue by hand-dropping the needle on a record player (remember vinyl?). You went to the movie as much to enjoy this live show as the visuals. No performance was ever the same, because the live movie-dubbers loved to adlib little in-jokes.
They didn't have synced sound in many European film industries then either. I remember this was particularly true of Italian cinema. But what they did was record an entire separate soundtrack with dubbed dialogue. This art of improvised live-dubbing was something uniquely Thai I believe. So performing the sound effects live actually mirrors a lost tradition of Thai cinema from well over half-a-century ago.
It's worth reminding people that this movie is quite a classic. Some might criticise its portrayal of the Burmese as being no longer politically correct, but it was still a trailblazer.
Watching the Foley artists on stage dart about, banging, blowing and shaking various objects was an entertainment as thrilling as Trisdee's meticulous musical direction and the emotional singing of Well Disakorn Disayanon that opened and closed the show.
S.P. Somtow is a novelist, composer and a Thai National Artist.
