Graham Dunning

Record players and other audio technology often crop up in feature films. My favourite examples are those when they’re essential to the plot. Like the secretly-taped confession at the end of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil – a small portable tape recorder being somewhat of a rarity in 1958. Or the lathe cutting / record skipping plotline in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (different in the book and the film), written when recording your voice to disk was a novelty accessible on the pier for a few pence. 

One example I found particularly intriguing recently was watching It’s A Wonderful Life over Christmas. Somehow I’d never got round to watching it before. In a scene towards the end, the lead couple set up a romantic scene in a derelict house with no electricity: a portable wind- up gramophone is used to turn a chicken on a spit in front of a wood fire. As someone so invested in extending the mechanical capacity of turntables through silly mechanisms I nearly jumped out of my seat. There’s a nice record-smashing scene earlier in the film too. I’ve had a half-hearted idea of documenting such instances for a while, not for any specific research purpose but more as a fun side project. The first instance of this sort that set off the idea was a scene in the 1955 film noir Kiss Me Deadly. In an act of bullying coercion, a copy of a Caruso shellac record is snapped in two. “That’s a collector’s item,” the villain states before breaking it. I mentioned these both on Mastodon in December and was helpfully pointed to this lovely web1.0 page, Phonographs in the Movies: Movies with phonograph scenes and machines. As is often the case on the internet, someone else got there first – their list doesn’t include the Caruso snap though. I never got round to such a formal and organised list, but might highlight a few examples on here as and when they come up.

I don’t go to the cinema particularly often but both of the most recent films I’ve seen have had very minor turntable errors, which I don’t think most people would notice, but I couldn’t help but pick up on. I’m not relating these here in a smugfaced ‘continuity spotter’ mode, more to highlight instances of old technology used as a signifier without the filmmakers minding too much whether they were using them properly – I think it’s quite an interesting phenomenon. (One of my favourite vintage audio gear youtubers Techmoan mentions some examples in a recent video too) Getting it Back: The Story of Cymande was a brilliant portrait of the black British funk band that were shunned at home, broke big in the US, were forgotten for years before being rediscovered through play at early New York loft parties and copious sampling on various hip-hop tracks. I genuinely enjoyed the film, but the b-roll footage of a close-up cheapo Crosley turntable used as an apparent zoom shot of someone playing a record on a 1210 irked me. I also finally got round to seeing Openheimer this week. Early on in the film is a closeup of a gramophone platter in action – which is spinning in the wrong direction. I wondered whether there was some allusion to turning back time (putting the genie back in the bottle?) but it didn’t seem a deliberate move in context with the rest of the film. 

David Lynch makes use of vinyl several times in Twin Peaks. Audrey Horne dancing to the jukebox in the Double R Diner. The repeating record in Jacques Renault’s cabin in the woods, “where there’s always music in the air.” And the awful scene in the Palmer house where Leyland attacks Maddie – soundtracked by the runout groove of the record. Another subcategory of the broader ‘turntables on the screen’ umbrella is the use of record crackle as sinister sound effect. Often signifying the inevitable, the relentless advancing of the timeline to an inevitable conclusion, we know it’s unstoppable. It’s like a ticking clock, an endless countdown and a repeating cycle. Bjork’s Scatterheart from the soundtrack to Dancer in the Dark follows in the aftermath of another upsetting and violent scene, with record crackle underpinning the tragic song as the rhythm.

I’ve come to the end of the examples I had listed now, but don’t really want to end the post on such a miserable note. Perhaps also worth mentioning the various physical media artefacts represented in Minecraft. ‘Music discs’ look a lot like vinyl records, and are playable in craftable jukeboxes. The records are usually found in loot chests in various structures out in the world. Most are whole discs but there’s a broken one to collect too. The introduction of the Deep Dark biome in Minecraft 1.19  was particularly of interest to me: shards of broken records could be uncovered from beneath the earth, and pieced together again to form a unique, playable music disc. As someone who did basically the same thing for an artist residency in 2010 – excavating broken shellac pieces from an industrial site and setting them back together into a new record – I was over the moon.