Soundscapes of Trauma and the Silence of Revenge in Peter Strickland's Katalin Varga

Abstract

In a climate where abstinence from using non-diegetic music seems to be the only form of resistance to the mainstream practice of excessive, exploitative employment of music, Peter Strickland's film Katalin Varga represents an unusual phenomenon in both British and European cinema. Winner of the Silver Bear for outstanding sound design at the 2009 Berlinale1 1 Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution (Sound Design)., greatly influenced by the director's passion for electroacoustic music and informed by his experience of creating musique concrète with the Sonic Catering Band, Strickland's debut also features striking musical material which engages with the film's emotional core through daring and unsettling audio-visual juxtapositions while its elaborate sound design reflects the ambiguity with which the film explores its themes of morality, trauma and revenge. My article looks at the musical aspects of Peter Strickland's working process and explores different modes in which sound design and the musical layers of Katalin Varga's soundscapes relate to the emotional and moral aspects of the story in the context of an interrogative text. It also reveals how non-diegetic musical material takes part in constructing the temporal arc of the protagonist's psychological journey while diegetically performed folk music destabilises the film's primary genre of revenge thriller by introducing the air of a folk-tale and an out-of-time quality.

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