Filmtracks: Images (John Williams)

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Written 6/4/24

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Buy it... only if you have witnessed the hysterically awful movie and can embrace the reason for the score's highly disturbing and discordant, avant-garde stylings.

Avoid it... unless you want to hear music so terrible that it's funny, including the sounds of a man taking a shit (or having an orgasm) during murder scenes.

Williams

Images: (John Williams) Acclaimed director Robert Altman was long known for his intense interpersonal dramas, but rarely did he venture into the straight horror genre. His most psychologically disturbing movie was 1972's Images, a strikingly weird exploration of mental instability. A London children's author played by Susannah York is a leading basket case, suffering hallucinations of herself and her male lovers to the extent that obsession, schizophrenia, and personality disorder all collide to compel her to grisly duties. Her husband takes her to the countryside so she can work on her book while escaping her increasingly disturbing visions, which are never really explained aside from the stress of her own pregnancy. That second home becomes a hell hole of murder as the author battles her hallucinations by killing the visions with a shotgun, knife, and car, leaving a trail of corpses that may or may not include most of the other, real characters in the tale. While mind-twisting thrillers of this sort have their potential, Images is a wreck of film because of its lack of empathetic connections to the supposed protagonists and Altman's truly bizarre shooting methods, the latter proving that he wasn't entirely adept at capturing shock value effectively. Also a distinctly oddball aspect of the movie is that the characters use first names of the actors playing their inverses in the story, something of a confusing in-joke for audiences. The film's only Oscar nomination came for John Williams' highly unconventional and thus memorable score, displacing the far more deserving The Cowboys. The composer was in the midst of a transition from his 1960's jazzy incarnation and the large-scale orchestral maestro that awaited later in the decade. In some ways, you could consider Williams' music for Images highly appropriate in context, but only because both the movie and the score in it are utterly terrible and distracting. The music represents perhaps Williams' most avant-garde career work, and it was an assignment that the composer enjoyed because of Altman's liberal instructions. The music was to be as strange as humanly possible, and Williams obliged with good cheer.

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The end result of Williams' toil is music that is hysterically awful in context, badly overplaying the mental disorder with tones so disorienting and foreign from the very outset that there is no hope for the protagonist nor steady decline towards insanity. The sound effects-like portion of the score simply hits you like brick in the face from the opening credits onward. Those credits, "In Search of Unicorns," contains some of the laughably worse combinations of music and cutaway shots ever to grace a main title and credits. Some of the cues Williams wrote were applied by Altman where intended, included this opening scene, but otherwise the director took the recordings and sprinkled them throughout the film without much protest from the composer. The assignment was already unusual because Williams collaborated with Japanese percussionist Stomu Yamash'ta to produce the strikingly disparate clash for the score. The composition provided the orchestral and other soloist contributions while leaving specific passages open for Yamash'ta to supply whatever odd sounds he could muster to a certain length of time between synchronization points, usually with instructions about the intended tone of his performances. The string orchestra was recorded first, with acoustic guitar and Williams' own performances on piano, harpsichord, and celesta mixed in. For the Yamash'ta portion of the recordings, Williams rented sound sculptures from museums for the artist to create the eerie, scraping metallic noises, a momentary fascination for the composer. Yamash'ta also performed on timpani, hand drums, blocs, bells, marimba, and Kabuki percussion, the last of which responsible for much of the wild clicking you hear in the soundscape. Inca flutes are also a central part of the panic element in the horror cues, typically flailing wildly. Most of these sound effects, credited to Yamash'ta simply as "sounds" in the credits, are unlistenable, but they sometimes meander into the realm of the comedically bizarre. Such is the case with Yamash'ta's primal grunting noises, which are humorously wretched when employed and sound like a man either taking a painful shit or having a painful orgasm. For some men, these two primal noises are largely the same, and we get to hear Yamash'ta perform both.

The two distinct inflections of the score in Images don't interact as much as hoped, never helping to address the "is she crazy or is she not" question. The work is essentially a tediously obnoxious sonic battle between its two personalities. Williams supplies a main theme for the author that is an attractively lyrical fairy tale-like melody with deftly repeating phrases and fleeting warmth. It is developed with increasing intensity in "In Search of Unicorns" amongst Yamash'ta's ridiculous outbursts. The theme's passages would be quite lovely if edited together on their own. Celesta, guitar, and strings take the theme in a slightly warmer direction in "Dogs, Ponies, and Old Ruins" before the horror strikes again, this time more conventionally. The strictly classical, accessible performance in "Blood Moon" went unused, Williams taking the idea into a newer, heavier direction that is his most palatable and stylistically recognizable moment in the work. The theme is resolved on piano with suspenseful string interjections in "The Waterfall/Final Chapter." The Yamash'ta material dominates, however, interrupting "In Search of Unicorns" senselessly for shots of random possessions in the room and occupying all of "The House" before building up to the Inca flute shrieking. Metallic groaning effects haunt the main theme in "Dogs, Ponies, and Old Ruins" while clicking Kabuki percussion opens "Visitations" prior to grinding metallics and piano runs that eventually culminate in the straining defecation sounds near the end. Frantic strings alone carry the horror of "Reflections" as they did at the end of "Dogs, Ponies, and Old Ruins," but the cue was not used in the picture. The music for the Marcel murder scene (by which point the author seems to be really enjoying her homicidal tendencies, judging from her sly grins) is among the most hysterically terrible ever to accompany a bloody assault depiction on screen; when the author stabs her lover in the neck and blood starts flying everywhere, Yamash'ta responds with extreme defecation noises capped by a schoolyard whistle, and when York looks back past the camera after the whistle blow, one almost wonders if the grunting and whistle are meant to be heard in her mind. Regardless, when combined with the "boing" sound effects like a sprung jack-in-the-box, the murder music in "The Killing of Marcel" is cheaply outrageous and greatly diminishes the scene, though more conventional string tension carries the rest of the cue.

While the intensity of Yamash'ta's noisemaking for Images is indeed cranked up for the killing scenes, the score never quite shakes it elsewhere. The least romantic sex scene music of all time is "The Love Montage," the Kabuki clicking and tense strings creating a wash of unknown emotional intent. Later, the Inca flute and metallic scraping create a very eerie atmosphere in "Land of the Ums," part of which unused in the picture. Plucky banging and outright sound effects, including Yamash'ta's heavy breathing, persist in "The Night Witch Ride." The Inca flutes occupy the start of "The Waterfall/Final Chapter" before the cue goes full horror mode with Yamash'ta's groans and percussion. (Incidentally, Altman's shot of a fake body being thrown down the cliffside and waterfall is equally silly, defying the laws of physics for a human body at a few junctures.) Notably, at 1:16 into this cue, Williams takes the tone slightly euphoric as the author has completed her killings and is relieved to take a mentally-cleansing shower. Here, Yamash'ta's voice transitions to pleasant sighs in a nice turn. As mentioned before, the relationship between Williams' own material and the Yamash'ta improvisations isn't always comfortable in the mix; the opening credits, for instance, sounds artificially edited in the film and on album whenever the lyricism returns. Overall, though, the sound quality is appropriately archival. Had it been recorded a few decades later, Yamash'ta's contribution may have sounded far more resounding. As it is, it's just plain weird and makes the film laughable, its tone simply too disparate from Williams' struggling heart for the main character to really function as a whole. The entirety of the soundtrack is problematic in the picture and obviously presents some listenability issues on album as well. The score was only released on a promotional LP record for the awards season in 1972 and bootlegged from there. The same program was transferred to a bootleg CD in 2000 and a 2007 Prometheus Records album before a remastering in 2021 by Quartet Records. That 35-minute presentation includes the clear orchestral highlight of "Blood Moon" that did not feature any of Yamash'ta's sounds and was not used in the picture. Along with this cue, a listener could edit together the lyrical portions of "In Search of Unicorns," "Dogs, Ponies, and Old Ruins," and "The Waterfall/Final Chapter" to form 8 to 10 minutes of quite attractive, restrained Williams lyricism for piano and strings. But unless you want to hear music so awful that it's funny, including the sounds of a man taking a shit or having an orgasm, it's best to avoid the rest. @Amazon.com: CD or Download

Music as Written for the Film: *
Music as Heard on Album: **
Overall: *

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For John Williams reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.68 (in 91 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.54 (in 363,716 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.

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