sound
Though film began its life as a visual medium, spending the first thirty years of its existence without synchronized sound, the vast majority of its lifetime as an art form has combined images with some sort of sound. The foundational theorists of the medium have consistently been interested in the art form’s use of images and its capacity for juxtaposition through editing, but according to V.F. Perkins, the medium’s auditory element has always proved more difficult: “The champions of montage and the image have never known what to do about sound.”
As with music, sound in cinema can be divided into two categories: diegetic sound, which appears within the world of the characters, and non-diegetic sound, which is a stylistic intervention of the filmmaker, who uses sound to express some specific emotion or idea.
diegetic sound
Filmmakers have two kinds of sound at their disposal when constructing their work. The first is diegetic sound, which refers to any sound or music that the characters can hear, motivated by the world they inhabit.
Most often, these kinds of diegetic sounds are used to facilitate the film’s gestures towards realism; a scene set on a city street, for instance, might feature a variety of sounds, which are then included on the soundtrack to achieve verisimilitude, even if that city street scene is shot on a soundstage. Passing cars, honking horns, people talking, footsteps clicking on concrete, sirens blaring, and more—all of these are sounds one might expect to hear on a city street, so sound effects artists generate (or pull them from a pre-existing library) those sound effects, and they are then imported into the film. In some cases, those sound effects are captured live, but in most instances, filmmakers prefer greater control, and add them in later where their volume and character can be adjusted more easily.
Sound is particularly important to certain types of films—war movies like American Sniper (2014, Eastwood) rely on sound to establish their authentic point of view. Like many war films, American Sniper is shot in a near verite style designed to create the impression of an actual war zone. Sound effects signal the practical features of an active combat situation, with truck engines roaring, gunfire popping in the distance (and often getting incredibly close), and other sounds one expects to hear in a live fire situation.
Watch the clip at right from American Sniper, and listen for all the different kinds of sound effects that you hear. As the soldiers ride in the truck, the film's soundtrack is full of practical, ambient noise; the truck's engine and the rumble of its tires on the road are most prominent. Diegetic sounds occur within the diegetic space of the frame - they flow logically from the visual information available to the viewer.
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Though many filmmakers use sound effects to establish the reality of the world they are creating, there are also thematic possibilities of sound effects that are motivated practically. In some cases, sound effects that would realistically occur in the setting where a scene is taking place can be manipulated for metaphorical impact, in some way commenting on the action within that scene.
In Glengarry Glen Ross (1992, Foley), a drama based on a play about real estate salesmen hustling to beat one another to the best leads, the action is set almost entirely inside the sales office. Because of the limited setting, the sonic possibilities might seem quite small; however, early in the film, director James Foley establishes that the office is situated near the elevated subway train line in Queens, New York, which means that at regular intervals, the subway train roars by.
The roar of the subway train itself is a realistic sound that would be heard inside the office; but Foley is not bound by the realism of the train’s actual schedule. Because much of the interior office action is shot on a soundstage, he is able to control the arrivals and departures of the train along dramatic lines.
Watch the clip at right from a sequence midway through Glengarry Glen Ross, in which two salesmen, Dave Moss (Ed Harris) and Ricky Roma (Al Pacino), are having a loud, heated argument. At a particularly dramatic moment, the subway train happens to “pass by” the office, which forces Moss to yell over it. Think about the ways in which the specific deployment of that sound effect contributes to the emotional stakes of the scene, enhancing its meaning-making capacity.
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Diegetic sound is here used to achieve something more dramatic than simple realism; it’s a recognizable, realistic sound effect that is established early in the film, but it is used to raise the dramatic tension in the scene; the sound is both naturally occurring and also used in a highly artificial way.
non-diegetic sound
The other kind of sound available to filmmakers is non-diegetic sound, which the characters cannot hear, but we can. While most non-diegetic sound is musical in nature, filmmakers will also occasionally use sound effects non-diegetically.
According to Walter Murch, the legendary film editor of Apocalypse Now (1979, Coppola), who also designed and edited sound for many of the films he worked on, effective use of sound in cinema is about careful layering. Murch says, “Sound editors have always thought in what I would call the vertical and horizontal dimensions at the same time. The sound editor naturally moves forward through the film in ‘horizontal’ time—one sound follows another. But he also has to think vertically, which is to say, ‘What sounds are happening at the same time?’ There might be, for example, the background sound of a freeway along with birds singing, a plane passing overhead, footsteps of pedestrians, etc. Each of these is a separate layer of sound, and the beauty of the sound editor’s work, like a musician’s, is the creation and integration of a multidimensional tapestry of sound.”
What Murch is getting at here is the possibilities available to a sound editor and director for creating multiple layers of meaning. That might mean that naturally occurring sounds, meant to establish realism, might co-exist alongside sound effects that occur non-diegetically.
Take an example of Murch’s work from Apocalypse Now, which is set during the Vietnam War. Throughout the movie, there is a repeated motif of helicopters, which are the centerpiece of a highly elaborate action sequence early in the action; they recur throughout the movie for obvious reasons, as a technological symbol of the war—Vietnam was the first major U.S. conflict in which helicopters were used in such a broad capacity. Murch and director Francis Coppola play with the sonic possibilities suggested by the helicopter, creating a visual pairing between whirring helicopter blades and the spinning blades of a ceiling fan in the Saigon hotel room of the film’s protagonist, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), who is waiting for his orders.
Watch the brief clip at right from this scene in Apocalypse Now, which pairs the visual of the ceiling fan spinning above Willard with the sound of a helicopter blade. The effect is psychological—the idea here is to communicate something about Willard’s point of view. Though he is stuck in the relatively safe confines of his hotel room, he can’t stop thinking about the place he’d rather be: in the middle of the fighting.
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There’s a deliberate confusion in this scene in Apocalypse Now between the image and the soundtrack, which creates an opportunity for a cross juxtaposition between video and audio. This is a disruption of expectations, something that sound can do quite effectively.
Most films mix diegetic and non-diegetic sounds in an effort to do two things at once: on the one hand, they’re trying to establish an authentic sense of the environment that the characters inhabit, which is mostly served by diegetic sounds; on the other hand, they try to use non-diegetic music to express the point of view of those characters, manipulating sounds to create identification with the people in the films.
The commentary at right focuses on a sequence from Ridley Scott's science-fiction/horror classic Alien (1979); the film uses sound and music to striking effect, especially in the sequence I've highlighted where one of the crew members, Brett (Harry Dean Stanton), goes looking for a missing cat with the monster hiding somewhere on the spaceship. Watch the clip and pay attention to the interplay of sound effects and music that I've highlighted. Because the video analyzes sound, I've restricted my commentary to text subtitles rather than voice.
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voice over
As a sound technique, voice over has a long cinematic history. Obviously, it comes after the arrival of sound in 1927, but it took until the 1940s for it to become a widespread feature in mainstream cinema. During that decade, a number of films use voice over narration to shift narrative time. Often, films of the 1940s rely on a flashback structure wherein the story is narrated by one of its participants, looking back on the action from the present.
The clip at right opens Young Man With a Horn (1949, Curtiz). Though it begins with a fairly innovative stroke, having its narrator speak directly to the camera, the voice over begins in a more traditional form once the film shifts to the past. The images of Rick Martin's childhood, which Smoke the piano player relates to us, take place well in the past. This style of voice over is very common in 1940s Hollywood.
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When most directors rely on voice-over, it is to move narrative pieces around the board. Voice-over narration can be a valuable way of clarifying story or character detail to audiences. For example, a narrator can tell us when or where something is happening without the benefit of specific images or dialogue to communicate that information. However, this tendency has also led many to view voice-over as a lazy narrative cheat; if you can have characters tell us something in narration, then you don’t have to use images to tell the story efficiently, the criticism goes. Nervous producers have occasionally inserted voice-over narration after the fact in order to solidify a story, making it clear for the audience. One of the most famous examples is director Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), a science fiction/film noir hybrid in which the protagonist, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) has to hunt down and kill five escaped androids on police orders. After director Ridley Scott turned in his initial cut of the film, the studio forced Ford to record a narration that would clarify what was happening in the movie because they were afraid the audience wouldn’t be able to follow it. The narration seems ill-suited to the story, and feels grafted on unnecessarily in the theatrical cut of the film. Scott’s later director’s cuts of the movie remove the narration, and improve the film drastically. You can watch this video explainer on the different cuts of Blade Runner below, which touches on the voice-over and includes a pair of examples illustrating the difference:
Some films are unimaginable without their use of voice over; they rely on it so heavily that it becomes a stand-in for the point of view they are trying to establish. One such film is Taxi Driver (1976), directed by Martin Scorsese and written by Paul Schrader. The film follows lonely New York cabbie Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) as he tries (and fails) to make connections with the people around him, before eventually falling into an obsession with pornography and guns that leads to an outburst of shocking violence. In Taxi Driver, Travis is a repellent character that audiences are very unlikely to empathize with; the film’s use of voice over allows the viewer access to his inner monologue, which actually convinces them to build that bridge of empathy anyway.
Watch the commentary at right, which focuses on the use of voice over in Taxi Driver in a variety of its scenes. Writer Paul Schrader’s use of voice over is deeply confessional, as Travis confesses his darkest secrets to the audience in the guise of writing in a journal; when De Niro performs the voice over, he adopts a somewhat flat affect, as though he were writing only for himself, with no expectation that anyone would ever read his thoughts. Rather than pushing the viewer away, this slyly invites them in.
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Though voice over can often get a bad rap as a crutch for lazy screenwriters who are unable to generate emotion through dialogue, or as a last-minute addition to clarify messy plot details that audiences can’t understand, in the right hands, it can be a valuable addition to a film’s soundtrack, deepening the thematic possibilities of what the medium can accomplish from an auditory perspective.
Above all, sound works alongside the image in any work of cinema; in some cases, that soundtrack is designed to support the images, and in other cases, it’s designed to clash with them. Sound deepens the layers of meaning available to filmmakers, as they can use the audio track to express emotions and ideas that are not always present in images alone.
clip quiz - sound
Review the following clips and answer the questions on Blackboard.
A MAN ESCAPED (1956, Bresson)
Make a list of all the diegetic sounds you hear in this clip from A Man Escaped. Listen carefully and describe them in detail. |
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ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968, Leone)
How does this scene from Once Upon a Time in the West use sound effects to create a particular rhythm? What is the ultimate effect on your experience of the scene? |
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PANIC ROOM (2002, Fincher)
This sequence from Panic Room contains a particularly bold choice in the use of sound. Describe what the sound is like, and explain why you think the filmmakers might have done it this way. |
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SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998, Spielberg)
How does sound capture the point of view of Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) in this battle sequence of Saving Private Ryan? |
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sound in undine
Some filmmakers are more attuned to the possibilities offered by the soundtrack than others; German director Christian Petzold is well aware of what sound can do. His quiet dramas about people passing between literal and figurative borders tend to play out in stolen glances and emotional revelations expressed in stunned silences rather than giant outbursts. Because his films tend to be quiet, the sound that does appear takes on outsized significance.
This approach to sound is on full display in his film Undine (2020), a fantasy about the title character, Undine (Paula Beer), who may or may not be a mermaid, and her romantic involvement with two men—a diver called Christoph (Franz Rogowski) and her erstwhile lover, the married Johannes (Jacob Matschenz).
Like many of Petzold’s films, the conflicts between the characters are largely understated, with dramatic moments heavily underplayed; Undine’s promise to Johannes that she will have to kill him (so goes the legend) if he leaves her does not come with fire and brimstone, but quiet intensity.
The film’s default setting is at a whisper; that means that in the few moments where it shouts, it really makes an impact. Early on in the action, something changes dramatically between Undine and her new romantic interest, Christoph, when the latter accidentally shatters an aquarium in a restaurant they both frequent. The glass explodes, sending the water and the fish inside all over the floor—this is the loudest moment of the entire film, signaling a dramatic shift in the relationship between the two characters. Watch the clip at right from this sequence, paying particular attention to the way the explosion of the aquarium shatters the quiet mood.
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Where the use of sound in Undine really shines, however, is in the film’s extensive underwater sequences, as Christoph dives in the lake by the dam where the mystical Undine lives. Under the dark water, where visibility is limited, the film strips away recognizable sound effects, everything shot through with the alienating, distorted garble of echoes and clanks heard throughout the murky lake.
Because Christoph is entering into this new relationship with Undine, a woman he does not know, a woman he cannot really ever know, because she is a creature from another world entirely, the sonic properties of the underwater sequences reflect his uncertainty; he might as well be walking on the moon.
Watch the clip at right from one of the underwater sequences in Undine, and pay close attention to the way the sound both feels somewhat natural, but also strangely unnatural. Think about the times you’ve gone swimming, whether in a natural body of water or in a pool, and dunked your head under the water—the sound manages to capture that uncanny feeling. A voice, muffled and changed by the water into something almost alien.
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Though sound was not initially a feature of the cinematic art form, it has insisted upon its importance to the medium through filmmakers’ careful deployment of diegetic and non-diegetic sound in service of the art’s larger goals—to make meaning.