On Drill Team and the musicality of videographic criticism

Abstract

An article comprising the videographic study Drill Team alongside a written framing of its film studies origins and comparative methodology. The video attempts a performative audiovisual adaptation of a chapter section from Danijela Kulezic-Wilson’s 2020 book Sound Design is the New Score: Theory, Aesthetics, and Erotics of the Integrated Soundtrack. Drill Team explores both Kulezic-Wilson’s specific (if uncertain) argument about the relationship between two films, Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999) and The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer, 2015), and her general argument in the chapter about the “composed” nature of the sound (and music) design in these and other modern or contemporary films, as well as about the capacity of these films, and film generally, to use modes of embodied experience as the substance of their language.