The Bride

By Stella Chang

Stella's film The Bride is actually half of a video art piece, to be projected side-by-side with a separate, totally different set of footage. For our purposes, I wrote music dealing with just this one first, while she completes her editing on the second. Eventually the two will be merged and the score re-worked to allow for both films.

The Bride is a series of shots, taking place over about eighteen minutes, which show the build up and eventual destruction of a woman preparing for her wedding. It begins with her dressing herself and putting on makeup (which Stella describes as ritualistic suicide), followed by attempts to escape her imprisonment (throughout the film, she's encased in a large, gradually shrinking sphere). By the end, surrendering to her fate, she gives up and returns to preparing for the wedding. Most of the visual elements in it are completely metaphorical, and like most video art, this is not a narrative film.

The music was approached as a concert piece; I decided to just tackle an analagous emotional world rather than try to score the film as if it were a narrative. What resulted was a rather other-worldly wall-to-wall orchestral score (done on synthesizers, and electronically tweaked a bit).