A film is a collaborative artwork

Composer Sanna Salmenkallio does not want to strangle films with music. She describes her taste as ascetic, regarding both the quantity and the texture of her music. To date, she has mainly written music for documentaries and for contemporary stage plays. This autumn saw the premiere of the first feature film for which she has scored, Erottamattomat (Dead Ringers) directed by Hanna Maylett.

Salmenkallio’s best-known work is probably her score for the documentary Melancholian 3 huonetta (The Three Rooms of Melancholia, 2004) directed by Pirjo Honkasalo, for which Salmenkallio received a Jussi Award (the ‘Finnish Oscar’).

“Melancholia is a good example of a script that would never get into production as a work of fiction, because it has no plot and no lead character. In music too, there is a much broader range available in documentaries,” Salmenkallio says.

For Salmenkallio, it is important to be a member of the production team from as early on as possible. “The collaboration of the director and the composer is so close that I would talk about the dramaturgy of music or the dramaturgy of sound. You can even sort of re-edit the film using music.”

“Sound has a lot to do with how the audience perceives time. When you look at a scene without the music, it feels amazingly slow. You always have to remind the editor that when you add the sound, it will not feel as long any more,” she explains.

Mutually supportive

Concerning the differences between documentary and fiction, Salmenkallio says: “When the characters are fictitious, you can consciously manipulate their characteristics and their focus through the music and do a lot more than in a documentary, where you naturally have to respect the actual people who are depicted in the film. You cannot just invent new characteristics for them, although you can of course reinforce their personality through music.”

Sanna Salmenkallio has also studied visual arts, which helps her put the need for music in a film into perspective. “I trust the impact of an image a lot. If an image is strong in itself, there’s no point in killing it with sound. In real life, everything important happens in silence. No one breaks out the violins when someone is born or dies.

“A film is a multi-sensual artwork. I often find that visuals automatically begin to generate music in my head. And when I hear music, I often see it as images too. There are things that cannot be explained through one sense alone. That’s why it’s important that the music in a film does not just lurk in the background; it must communicate with light, words and movement.”

Simply put, there are two types of music in films: music that the characters in the film also hear (source music), and music that only the audience hears. Salmenkallio considers that using existing music, originally written for some other purpose, is a challenge:

“Whether it’s a three-minute punk song or Mozart, it’s always an independent piece of music in its own right. Besides, you can rarely fit a three-minute song into the structure of a film. You can give it a great entrance, but then it has to sort of fizzle out. It is not unusual to have a music cue of only about 40 seconds for one scene. In that sense, this is quite a bizarre genre to compose in: you get pieces like ‘17 seconds of transition’,” Salmenkallio says with a laugh.

Dance as a film academy

Sanna Salmenkallio trained as a musician but has worked a lot with dancers and actors.

“It has been hugely instructive to be able to work on different types of project. Dancers are always ready to improvise and try out new things in combining sound and movement. What else is a film but sound and movement? I feel that without knowing it I learned a lot about writing film music through my work with dancers.”

Dance highlights the communication between sound and movement, because music is present throughout the performance. On a film soundtrack, on the other hand, there is also dialogue and ambient sound, or 100% sound. Sanna Salmenkallio prefers to collaborate closely with the sound designer too. Sometimes, the boundary between musical sound effects and effective music becomes blurred.

“I loved it when in one film the sound designer changed the sound of an engine so that it matched the key of the music. The sound and the music were in really close interaction in this film. The entire soundtrack is like one huge musical score.”

Salmenkallio says that in Finland people already know how to make fiction films. What is needed now are stricter criteria for content and courage to make films on topics that do not guarantee automatic commercial success.

She also feels that courses on musical dramaturgy and on various musical traditions should be added to the training of film directors. The world of cinema tends to be rather narrowly focused in its conception of music. “A film can be set in different geographical locations, different social classes, in the country, in the city, or in a historical period. You need to be able to pinpoint the coordinates of the film in the music too.”

Sanna Salmenkallio is casting her net wider to Norway and Denmark, and she is looking forward to writing for the stage in France.

“When you are in such a marginal genre, you need to look far and wide. I’m still keen on film music, and I see a lot of potential in it. I’m comfortable with linking my music to words or images. Pure concert music is rather an alien concept for me.”

Text: Elina Roms
Translation: Jaakko Mäntyjärvi
Photo: Maarit Kytöharju