Prehistoric Cinema

Sound of Cinema

Host Matthew Sweet explores how film composers have scored prehistoric settings and dinosaur narratives, tracing the evolution from early avant-garde experiments to modern blockbuster orchestration. The

Key takeaways

• John Williams established the iconic three-note Jurassic Park theme in 1993, effectively reviving the neoclassical orchestral style for modern blockbusters alongside George Lucas's Star Wars.
• Mario Nascembani pioneered experimental scoring for Hammer's One Million Years B.C. using a self-designed analogue multi-track system called the Mixorama and a custom sound device named the Rastrofon.

Main topics

• Prehistoric cinema scoring
• Jurassic Park franchise music evolution

Notable quotes

"They lived, he said, in an enormous present, which also contained past and future."

Conclusion

The episode demonstrates how musical approaches to prehistoric cinema have evolved from experimental

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Speaker 2 (0:06) I'm Matthew Sweet and this is Sound of Cinema, which brings you the best of contemporary film music and classics from the archive. Fifteen years ago, the German director Werner Herzog went down a deep hole in the ground in southern France to film the oldest known human art, cave paintings from 32,000 years ago. He noticed how the light from his torch made these images of rhinos and horses seem to move like Speaker 1 (0:37) a form of proto-cinema. And Speaker 2 (0:40) he found himself speculating about the cultural lives of the first humans, what it meant to make art and music in prehistoric times. They lived, he said, in an enormous present, which also contained past and future. We are locked in history. They were not. And what music did he choose to underscore his speculations? This by his long-time collaborator Ernst Reisiger, with the voices of the Netherlands Chamber Choir, finding the 21st century avant-garde in the Paleolithic past. That's what we're investigating on this week's Sound of Cinema, how movie composers have responded to images that take us to a time before records began. Never mind CDs. So come dig our strata and find Creatures the World Forgot. Speaker 2 (1:44) The people that time forgot. Speaker 2 (1:54) and world upon Jurassic World. Speaker 2 (2:04) There's a new Jurassic film out this week, a series that now has layers that go down 32 years. We'll hear Alexandra Desplat score for the latest, but we'll open with that moment when John Williams began it all, with a simple three-note theme that lives in history. Speaker 2 (2:55) The theme from Jurassic Park by John Williams. And we'll be tracing the evolution of the Jurassic scores in the second half of the programme. For Williams and his director, Steven Spielberg, the prehistoric creature is a source of wonder. Those three notes reach upwards, high as the neck of a brachiosaurus, high as the inspiration to coax dinosaurs back to life from the blood of mosquito entombed in amber. But awe and wonder aren't the only ways to approach these beasts. Remember the dinosaur in King Kong? It's a pitiless monster that gets its jaw broken by the mammal whose side the film knows we're on. And the King Kong tradition of depicting such creatures, carried principally by the great animator Ray Harryhausen, tended to emphasise danger and cold-bloodedness over delight. You can hear that in the score of Harryhausen's The Valley of Gwangi from 1969, which takes us to a lost Mexican ravine where a knot of allosaurs has survived. One gets lassoed by cowboys and