Remi Gassmann - quotes

Quotations relating to Remi Gassmann...

Film Post-Production

Herrmann biographer Smith describing how the soundtrack of the film was created...

It would appear that Hitchcock first became interested in using electronic sounds in place of a score for the Birds in, uh, April of 1962, when he received a letter from a man in Germany named Remi Gassmann. Gassmann was the co-designer of something called the studio tratonium. This was a device created by another man — I believe his name was Dr. Frederick Trautwein.

And it basically was the forerunner of many modern keyboard instruments, in that it was able to take sounds — commonplace, ordinary sounds — and by playing the keyboard, or playing the instrument, you could manipulate the sounds. Gassmann contacted Hitchcock and alerted him to the fact that there was this creation, it had been used by the New York City Ballet, and it would allow Hitchcock to manipulate sounds in a way that could be very musical in effect. This was intriguing to Hitchcock, and he brought it to Bernard Herrmann's attention.

One might think that Bernard Herrmann would be angry that he would not be writing music for the film, but Herrmann was intrigued by this invention and its application on the Birds. So Hitchcock and Herrmann travelled together in 1962 to West Berlin to meet Remi Gassmann and to explore the possibility of using the studio tratonium in the film.

It was a very happy trip, and later Herrmann regarded it as one of the most pleasant times that he ever spent with Alfred Hitchcock. They got along very well, and they were both very impressed by the results of this machine. So from that point on, Herrmann became basically an advisor on the film — a consultant — to work with both Hitchcock and Remi Gassmann and decide where they wanted to use this effect in the place of where they would have used a conventional score.

Throughout the Birds, during the various attack sequences, sound plays a very important part. The sequence, however, that probably employed the most subjective use of sound is the attack on the Brenner house. First, of course, the characters are inside, just waiting. And very gradually, you begin to hear the sounds — the various sounds — from the fluttering to the chirping and then the cawing, until, of course, it turned into a full-blown attack.

Hitchcock, wherever possible, eliminated dialogue from his films, and the attack on the Brenner house is a sequence that could virtually be a silent movie with the exception of the fact that he uses the bird sounds so brilliantly and dramatically, so that you have these bursts of sound with visual shocks, like the darkness that they're engulfed in.

Throughout "The Birds", Alfred Hitchcock experiments very interestingly with silence. There is the sequence in which Tippi Hedren is attacked in the attic. Hitchcock said that he wanted to create a silent murder. In the shower sequence in "Psycho", he originally wanted to just have the sound of the water running and Janet Leigh's screams and the sounds of the knife. They ultimately decided music would be more effective. But in "The Birds", Hitchcock creates a very sinister sound of flapping bird wings and creates one of the most intense sequences of violence but without any music.

Hitchcock wanted to communicate the sense that the birds were thinking at the end of the movie when, uh, when everybody is leaving the Brenner house. They created this tremendously unsettling effect that is very quiet but does give these creatures much more of a personality... of a far more sinister quality.

Secondly, he creates a, uh, a kind of almost final note by increasing the sound of those birds under the final shot, and it's very ambiguous as to whether they're on the verge of another major attack, or if this is just a sort of, you know, almost psychological effect. So this very experimental technique that they used did, in fact, turn out to be very successful, and Herrmann and Hitchcock were both apparently very pleased with the result.

— Steven C. Smith (2000)

source: Documentary: All About The Birds

keywords: Alfred Hitchcock, Bernard Herrmann, Remi Gassmann, The Birds (1963), music scores, and post-production