Oscar Winning Women: Film Composers (Part 3 of 3)

By Brian Skutle If I was looking forward most to revisiting “The Full Monty” (1997), I was looking forward to revisiting our final film, Todd Phillips’s “Joker” (2019), the least. I have had very mixed feelings about this film since its release- would this watch change anything for the better? The Composer: Hildur Guðnadóttir Guðnadóttir is an Icelandic cellist and composer from a family of musicians. … Continue reading Oscar Winning Women: Film Composers (Part 3 of 3)

Spotlight: Hildur Guðnadóttir

Regardless of whether you’re a fan or not of Todd Phillips’ “Joker”, I think we can all agree that Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score is phenomenal. A classically trained cellist from Iceland, she has played and recorded with various bands such as Pan Sonic, Throbbing Gristle, Múm, and Stórsveit Nix Noltes. She experiments with sound and musical instruments, using cello, warped samples, and nuclear reactor metal as her tools to compose her music. And, the end result is stunning.

Her music has a way of invading your mind, the score for “Joker” has a rawness to it, full of menace and a foreboding sense of dread. The score for “Joker” is so far from the epic orchestral scores we usually associate with comic book adaptations, and as she explained in an interview with Film Music Mag this was a deliberate decision, “we went as far in the other direction with this score as possible. Continue reading Spotlight: Hildur Guðnadóttir