BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE FOR LEVEL AND GAIN
Joy is the last thing you might think about when considering dead animals being stuffed.
Taxidermy is certainly a practice that hides under the radar, perhaps because the overt connection to death is too confronting, or perhaps because it seems…well, gross.
The new film Stuffed challenges this stigma and introduces taxidermy as a true artform for highly skilled practitioners. But beyond this, it offers a surprisingly uplifting tale of life itself.
American composer Ben Lovett wrote the score and — probably just like you — had absolutely no idea what taxidermy was all about. Here’s what he learnt along the way.
Ben, in the trailer to Stuffed, a taxidermist says that when she tells people what she does for a living, they think she’s joking. Did you have the same experience when telling your friends what soundtrack you’re making?
Generally speaking, I’m fascinated by subjects I know nothing about. As a storyteller, that can be the best point of entry into something you hope to objectively explore and discuss.
When I was approached about Stuffed, they had not yet shot the film and I remember thinking: ‘Is taxidermy really compelling enough for a feature-length film? Is there enough there to make it interesting for people who don’t already have an interest in it?’.
Once I started seeing footage and interviews, I quickly realised how complex and detailed and nuanced the artform is, and how interesting and passionate the characters were about it.
Despite the obviously macabre subject matter, Stuffed also seems to be about respect for life. How did you work to produce an uplifting score to a documentary dealing with some dark themes?
There’s a line in the film from one of the characters that explains that best, which is: ‘Taxidermists do what they do, not because they see death; they do what they do because they see life.’
Their affinity is for life, and in the same way, I never really saw this as a film with dark themes, but a story about a unique subculture of artists with a profound love for preserving the beauty of the natural world.
Talk me through your composition itself. Because taxidermy is so much a visual art, how did this affect the instruments you chose or motives you created? Did you ‘reimagine’ the craft of taxidermy into musical form, or did you represent the human stories rather than the taxidermy itself?
It’s visual art, but it’s not static. It tells a story. Taxidermists want to do more than simply reassemble the pieces of a dead animal: their goal is to create a work that captures the spirit of that animal in the imagination of the viewer.
In the same way, I hoped the music could describe the passion these people have for that challenge; something that captured that distinct child-like wonder that comes through when they talk about animals.
Some of your music has an acoustic and even folk-like vibe. Is this representative of taxidermy as being a traditional craft? Or more about creating a happy feeling to represent the artists’ joy?
The first thing I was connected with was the detail and complexity of the work, and specifically the tools these taxidermists used to create it. In all of the footage, I noticed the process seemed to involve a variety of very small tools and an endless series of tiny, very precise movements. That inspired the instrumentation for me, and I gravitated towards a lot of very tactile, small-sounding folk instruments in the beginning, which became sort of a through-line for the score.
It was certainly a goal of the director Erin Derham to capture that taxidermy is rooted specifically in the love these characters have for the life of these animals. Erin wanted music that was upbeat and fun; something that brought out that joy the characters embody.
There is so much music in the documentary, and its shape changes along with the different stories within. What are the things that go through your mind when scoring a film of this form?
Usually, I’m trying to convince the filmmakers to take music out. As the composer, I’m not really in charge of where the music goes, so much as what it is, and often there’s just too much of it. There’s probably too much of it in Stuffed, but the huge variety of styles and sounds in this score did seem to really help communicate that we’re not telling you one specific story revolving around one specific character, but rather it’s a journey into a diverse subculture that’s full of many different species of human personality.
These folks are all very different from one another, but they all that share that unique and powerful obsession with animals and nature. So there was a focus for the music to try to capture these different personalities in their natural habitat, and give each a distinct feeling, in a way similar to what they aim to achieve with the animals in their work.
Read the full story over at Level and Gain, our new sister publication dedicated to screen music.
Images supplied.
