New words are official

There was a lovely piece in The Guardian this week about some new arrivals in the Oxford English Dictionary that have come from the world of film.

The compilers have added words like Tarantinoesque and Kubrikian to Visual Effects and Diagetic. I must admit I though all these terms had been around so long they must have already made it into the lexicon, but I was wrong.

Diagetic is my favourite of the new crop mainly because it covers one of the elements I really love about film: the moments when the soundtrack and the moving images coalesce. I’m thinking of the entire score to Paris, Texas or the moment in the Godfather when Michael Corleone is about to walk out of the bathroom and kill the police captain (Sterling Haydn). Just as he is about to leave, we here the crazy sounds of the New York street and the noise of a train passing by.

This scene was originally going to have music but they decided to use found sound to indicate the chaos running through Michael’s head. Marvellous.

Ciao.