Angels in the Architecture, Archetypes in the Archive: Finding ‘South Africa’ in the Production of Dario Marianelli’s Score for Goodbye Bafana

Dario Marianelli began the process of composing a score for the film Goodbye Bafana, the semi-fictional tale of a white South African prison officer who guarded Nelson Mandela on Robben Island for 20 years, with several days’ immersion in “old field recordings” of South African music in the British Library Sound Archive. Marianelli’s search for an “archetypal African sound” to use in his score for the film was thwarted to an extent when he went to South Africa to record South African musicians; he discovered that while

"there still are traces of an older music, which predates the European melodic and harmonic influences introduced by missionaries, unfortunately, it is not easy at all to find, and I could not find one single CD of that type of music in its pure form, except for some of those recordings in the British Library". (Marianelli, quoted in Beek 2007)

This paper considers the composer’s pursuit of a “pure” South African music for the film, and closely examines the resulting soundtrack and its signifying work in the film: the asymmetries of ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ musics, and the gradual ‘writing out’ of ‘local’ musical elements in favour of a more generic orchestral film music style. I also explore issues of authorship in working with the archive; ways in which composers have assimilated ‘exotic’ sounds into their musical language; the signifying properties of reverberation and sampled sound; and the ethical implications of sounding the archive on screen, particularly in relation to transnational cross-cultural music production contexts.