Joker

Hildur Guðnadóttir was no newcomer to Hollywood, thanks to her cello performance in Ryuichi Sakamoto’s score for The Revenant (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2015) and many other films. Not long after, she received an Oscar for the score she composed for Joker, making history as the first woman ever to win in that category.

Guðnadóttir’s film music is regularly cited as a prime example of the striking shift taking place in the world of film music. For a long time film scores were too often weakened into quasi-interchangeable orchestral music. Now, however, young film composers with guts, with a signature of their own and a disregard of conventions have lately been coming to the fore.

The score for Joker is a shining example of this trend. Bombastic themes are discarded to make room for an abstract, ominous sound design interspersed with trenchant solo cello playing. The score is nonconformist, does not aim to please and is arranged with singular austerity. Guðnadóttir thus single-handedly managed to lift the film, including Joaquin Phoenix’s maniacal role as The Joker, to a higher plane.

About Hildur Guðnadóttir

The 79th edition of the Holland Festival’s associate artist is Icelandic composer, musician and vocalist Hildur Guðnadóttir (Reykjavik, 1982). She is one of the leading, multifaceted composers of film scores, experimental pop and contemporary music working today. Her work, which is often intense, poetic, dark and unpolished, is inspired by a variety of sources from the founders of contemporary music, such as György Ligeti and Kaija Saariaho, to minimal music, ambient and noise. She has collaborated with artists including Ryuichi Sakamoto, Jóhann Jóhannsson, The Knife and Animal Collective.

The general public know her work from films such as Joker (2019, also to be screened at Eye), for which she won an Oscar, Tàr (2022) or the HBO drama series Chernobyl (2019). This month, Hedda premiered at the Toronto film festival, the radical adaptation on Henrik Ibsen’s play with music by Guðnadóttir.