EPISODE 38 — Psyché Tropes

Psyché Tropes Episode 38
11pm, 27 April 2026 on Resonance 104.4 FM

Presented by Steven McInerney, Psyché Tropes Episode 38 continues downstream to Dronemance IV, Our investigation of drone as a cinematic device throughout history. This episode sails toward a single director whose entire body of work is built upon a method that inverts the orthodoxy of synchronised sound. The British filmmaker Mark Jenkin.

A filmmaker who shoots silently on a clockwork camera engineered before the filmmaker's own conception. The Bolex H16, hand cranks and runs at an unstable frame rate emitting a mechanical clatter that renders any attempt at location sound near impossible. Every audible element in his films — dialogue, foley, atmosphere, and music — is built from a small studio in west Cornwall, after the picture has been hand-processed and edited.

The drone is not an aesthetic choice in Mark Jenkin's cinema. It is a structural consequence. When location dialogue is void from production, what remains between the elements added in post-production is not the natural silence of a recorded room, but the absolute silence of digital nothing. The process of adding dialogue back into a silent picture only makes the silences around the dialogue more deafening. Something – has to fill the space. The score-as-drone, in his films, is the answer to a problem that the method itself created. Drone not of a composer but of a sound designer working in a studio he calls the analog room, half-wet for processing 16mm film, half-dry for processing audio. The drone, in this environment, is not music laid over the picture. It is the acoustic floor on which the rest of the soundtrack stands.

Jenkin's mid-length film Bronco's House, released in 2015 and forty-four minutes long, was shot silently on the Bolex and post-synced in its entirety. This was the prototype for a process he had been developing across years of experimental short film work on Super 8 and 16 millimetre. Bait, released in 2019, was the first feature application of the method. A black and white study of class displacement and gentrification in a Cornish fishing village, won the BAFTA for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer.

During the post-production winter of 2018, Jenkin acquired a Korg Volca Keys, a small monophonic analogue synthesiser, intended only as a distraction from the labour of hand-processing the film's negative. The drones he produced on the synth were recorded onto quarter-inch tape and played back in the studio while he edited. He found himself watching silent sequences of the film with the drones unintentionally laid over them, and discovered that the combination worked. The score that ended up on the Invada Records vinyl release of Bait derives from a single twenty-minute drone, titled "the gaps," sliced and embedded across the picture edit alongside the sound of the sea and the sound of the wind. An audience member at a later Q & A observed that the drones resembled a discordant accordion — an instrument with deep maritime associations. The connection had not been deliberate but it became retrospectively, the score's organising principle.

Gus Van Sant's 2003 film Elephant relies heavily on the use of environmental drones combined with its cinéma vérité, non-narrative style to capture the mundane, everyday life and horror experienced by high school students during the 1999 Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado.

Considered one of the greatest anti-war films of all time, the 1985 film Come and See, directed by Elem Klimov, follows the footsteps of a young teenager who joins a Soviet partisan unit and witnesses the Nazi atrocities inflicted upon the Belarusian people. The film exemplifies the powerful use of diegetic sound throughout, as the constant background hum of Nazi bombers, distant screams, and swamp-like groans, smudged with bursts of Mozart strings, create a hellish and hyper-real soundscape with additional drone composed by Oleg Yanchenko.

Klimov and Yanchenko's understanding of the relationship between physical sound properties and the psychological experience of hearing is evident with the use of a 4 kHz drone following a cacophony of bombing. 4 kHz is considered the most susceptible area on the basilar membrane within the inner ear to damage from excessive noise exposure. This temporary threshold shift inextricably forces the sound of terror to the auditory cortex of the audience.

A remarkable Finnish film that heavily utilises drone, which centres around man's survival one hundred thousand years into the future, is the 2010 documentary Into Eternity, directed by Michael Madsen. The original soundtrack composed by Karsten Fundal with sound design by Nicolai Linck, sends chills down the spine, acting as a sober realisation of how our consumption of energy and management of its waste will have long-lasting effects on civilisation. Far beyond our comprehension. In the 1971 film The Andromeda Strain, directed by Robert Wise, based on the novel by Michael Crichton, an existential dread threatens the mortality of man when an extraterrestrial virus that thrives on nuclear energy attempts to transform into a super-colony that would destroy life on Earth once a nuclear bomb is detonated.

The drone now pervades as a cinematic trope in almost every horror, science-fiction, and war film, becoming an invaluable device in the language of cinema, heightening the awareness of the viewer both physically and mentally—activating the thoracic and lumbar regions of the spinal cord while endogenously secreting norepinephrine and adrenaline into the bloodstream. Like an intoxicating substance, audiences return to it time and time again.

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