{"id":70788,"date":"2014-05-13T11:00:53","date_gmt":"2014-05-13T15:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=70788"},"modified":"2014-05-14T09:30:08","modified_gmt":"2014-05-14T13:30:08","slug":"snapping-humming-buzzing-banging-remembering-alan-splet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/05\/13\/snapping-humming-buzzing-banging-remembering-alan-splet\/","title":{"rendered":"Snapping, Humming, Buzzing, Banging: Remembering Alan Splet"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Lynch<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Millions of Americans heard the name Alan Splet (1940\u20131994) for the first time as a punch line on television. The occasion was the 1980 Academy Awards, where his sound design the previous year, on Carroll Ballard\u2019s <\/em>The Black Stallion, had earned him a special Oscar. Citing prior commitments, Splet did not attend the ceremony. When the presenter held up the statuette and the honoree failed to appear to accept it, the evening\u2019s host, Johnny Carson, turned this perceived snub of Hollywood taste back on the truant. \u201cIt always happens,\u201d he deadpanned to the audience, \u201cfirst George C. Scott doesn\u2019t show, then Marlon Brando, and now Alan Splet.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Splet deserves better. He was no joke. In fact, to an exclusive circle of independent filmmakers who know how much his collages of sound and musical refinement added to their movies from the late seventies to the early nineties, his name is still invoked with an affection verging on awe. Tributes can be found on YouTube from Ballard, Peter Weir, Caleb Deschanel, and Philip Kaufman, with whom Splet collaborated on three films. Splet\u2019s sound design and editing on <\/em>The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) ranks among the most haunting and sophisticated of its day\u2014or any day. Leo\u0161 Jan\u00e1\u010dek\u2019s string and piano music is as ravishing as Sven Nykvist\u2019s cinematography, underlining not only the distinctly tart Czech melancholia of the novel, but also serving, notes Kaufman, to \u201csupplant Kundera\u2019s voice as the narrator and give the film its drive.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

No filmmaker in those years bonded more intensely or productively with Splet than David Lynch. The two met in 1970 when the writer-director needed a sound track for his short film <\/em>The Grandmother. (Splet was then employed at a Philadelphia industrial film company, having bailed on a career in accounting.)<\/em><\/p>\n

With no money to foster the visions Lynch had in his uncompromising young head, the pair spent twelve-hour days inventing effects on the cheap, recording human mewls and gurgles and hissing machine-made sounds. Not until their concoctions matched the images on the editing table and the pairing created an elusive \u201cmood\u201d (a key term for Lynch) were they satisfied. Thereafter, until Splet\u2019s death in 1994, he partnered with Lynch on every major film project, those that were completed (<\/em>Elephant Man, <\/em>Dune, <\/em>Blue Velvet, <\/em>Wild at Heart) and those that weren\u2019t (<\/em>Ronnie Rocket).<\/em><\/p>\n

In the opinion of some, however, their masterpiece of \u201caudio surrealism\u201d remains <\/em>Eraserhead. Begun in Philadelphia and finished in Los Angeles, its atmosphere is as marked by the sooty poverty of the filmmakers as <\/em>The Grandmother had been. It was during this time (around 1973) that Lynch, who could not afford paints, did two meticulous drawings in ballpoint pen: a crucifixion, in a style that combines Mattias Gr\u00fcnewald and Francis Bacon, and a resurrection, now lost. Hoping to raise money to finish the film, they had prints made, an enterprise that was rewarded with total failure.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

That despondent result did not prevent Splet from buying the original of the crucifixion drawing, framing it, and hanging it over the mantelpiece in the Berkeley, California, house where he lived with his wife and fellow sonic explorer, Ann Kroeber. (Planning to auction it off, she has interviewed Lynch on film about the background of the piece and his friendship with her husband\u2014watch an excerpt of that film below.)<\/em><\/p>\n

My only relationship with Splet was over the phone, while I was writing several articles about Lynch in the early 1990s, as <\/em>Twin Peaks was altering the sensory pathways of America\u2019s network-television audience. I proposed a piece about Lynch\u2019s unique conception of sound and image to the <\/em>Village Voice; the editors liked what I wrote and then decided not to run it because they judged too many adulatory words were being published at the time about Lynch. (In addition to his TV and film projects, he was exhibiting his art at the Leo Castelli Gallery and teaming up with composer Angelo Badalamenti on a symphony at BAM.)<\/em><\/p>\n

In asking the editors of <\/em>The Paris Review if they might publish an article written more than twenty years ago, I couched the appeal as a way to revive interest in Splet. He died much too young, left an audible signature on every film he touched, and should be remembered as an artist of stubborn integrity, not as the butt of a Hollywood joke.<\/em><\/p>\n