Part One: Burial and Cinema
Even the beautiful Mary Anne Hobbs desires the impossible—Burial on the big screen. But why does she and so many others long for what precisely his music does not need? On the screen it would lose its intensity, its power, its magic. On the big screen Burial would become secondary rather than primary.

A movie privileges the moving image. Next in line is the script. Last of all is the music, which is stripped down to accommodate the image and the words. You must think of a score in the way you think of a rap track; in the way a beat makes room for the rapper, a score provides psychological room for the image—specifically the image of the actor. Because the fullness of Burial’s music would overwhelm an image, a director would flatten it, reduce it, turn it upside down and empty all of its surprises and beauty.

Film music does not attract attention to itself but to the image it scores. Burial’s music could not be a score because it’s already a movie, already a cinema: a cinema of echoes, suffering whispers, bike chains, rattling rain, wet roads, bus lights, night trains, empty shops, rooms, voices, halls, lost thoughts, fleeting feelings. It’s all there. No need for an image.