The Sound of Movies

You may go to "see" a movie, but to sound mixer Mark Berger, who won Oscars for Apocalypse Now and The English Patient, film is just as much about what you hear. "People are not as aware that sound is as highly manipulated" as the images, Berger says. "The visual sophistication is supposed to draw attention.Sound is meant to be subtle, subliminal and not noticed."

Rock me Amadeus

Details

Mark Berger kicks off the reopening weekend of Brown Auditorium by introducing Amadeus on Friday, November 17, at 7 p.m. $25. Tom Verlaine, formerly of Television, and longtime partner Jimmy Ripp will compose and play music for the avant-garde silent films of Fernand Léger on Saturday, November 18, at 7 p.m. $50. Writer-director Tim McCanlies will introduce Iron Giant on Sunday, November 19, at 6 p.m. $25. $50, for the weekend. Proceeds benefit the film department. Museum of Fine Arts, 1001 Bissonnet. For more information, call (713)639-7571.

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More About

• Mark Berger
• Prague
• Museum of Fine Arts
• Academy Awards
• Visual Arts

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Most of Amadeus was shot in the castles of Prague with floors that creaked as if the actors were wearing wicker underwear. When certain scenes had to be overdubbed in the studio with dialogue, Berger used a small weather-beaten wooden rocking chair to re-create those sounds in the foley recording studio. Even something as simple as a falling sheet of paper takes hours of work, research and electronic sculpting. These nuances can play a large role in how an audience reacts emotionally to a scene. "We treat sound like an orchestra," Berger says.

Oddly, Berger's first career was doing brain surgery on rodents. "Working on rat brains wasn't as exciting as I thought it would be," Berger admits. So he took a friend's offer to do some recording for a civil rights documentary, and moved on to the big screen.

Originally released on 70mm celluloid, Amadeushas been dragged into the digital age, thanks to Berger; a new version of the 1984 Oscar-winner for best picture will make its debut at the reopening of the Museum of Fine Arts' renovated Brown Auditorium, in order to show off the new sound system. With Berger's Academy Award-winning sound and a music track that almost becomes a third character, listening to this film will be as much of an experience as seeing it.