Movies and Meaning- Pearson New International Edition

by Stephen Prince

  The crafting of movie music as a series of pop hits has become a permanent fixture of the industry and has had a detrimental effect on the art of film scoring. The artistry of film scoring aims to create a fusion of music and image rather than detachable songs that can be marketed on their own and have only a marginal relationship with the images on screen. It was this development that effectively ended the long-time partnership between director Alfred Hitchcock and composer Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann had composed extraordinary music for the Hitchcock films The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), The Wrong Man (1956), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and Marnie (1964) and had served as a musical consultant on The Birds (1963). Herrmann composed a score for Hitchcock’s next film, Torn Curtain (1966), which was grim and foreboding, but the producers at Universal wanted a pop song that could be hummed and played on the radio. Responding to their pressure, Hitchcock threw out Herrmann’s score and substituted a more conventional composition in its place. Miffed at this treatment, Herrmann never worked with Hitchcock again.

  Like Herrmann, most serious film composers think that the pop song approach

  compromises the integrity of their scores. Sometimes the application of pop songs PSYCHO (PARAMOUNT

  PICTURES, 1960)

  Bernard Herrmann contrib-

  uted brilliant scores for Alfred

  Hitchcock’s pictures. The score

  for Psycho, for example, used

  only string instruments. The

  shrieking strings heightened

  the impact of the film’s brutal

  violence. Frame enlargement.

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  Principles of Sound Design

  DR. NO (UNITED

  ARTISTS, 1962)

  Composer John Barry has

  created some of the best-

  known scores in contem-

  porary film. In the 1960s,

  his jazz-styled music for the

  James Bond series helped to

  immortalize ultracool Agent

  007 (Sean Connery). His

  sweeping orchestral scores

  for Out of Africa (1985) and

  Dances with Wolves (1990)

  gave those films a lush, epic

  tone. Frame enlargement.

  is done in an almost schizophrenic fashion. Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves (1991), starring Kevin Costner, employed a score that used many period instruments, but at the end of the film, over the final credits, a pop rock love ballad provided the exit music, roughly jolting moviegoers out of the medieval period of the movie.

  The cross-marketing of movies and pop songs is now a firmly established feature of the industry. To some extent, film scoring suffers from this emphasis. Many films feature scores that, musically, have little to do with the action or emotions on screen.

  Despite this, however, the art of film scoring remains very much alive. Exciting, ambitious original scores by Hans Zimmer ( Black Hawk Down , 2001; The Thin Red Line , 1998), James Horner ( A Beautiful Mind , 2001; Field of Dreams , 1989; Glory , 1989), John Barry ( Out of Africa , 1985; Dances with Wolves , 1990), Danny Elfman ( Planet of the Apes , 2001; Men in Black , 1997; Edward Scissorhands , 1990), and others continue to make a distinguished contribution to modern movies.

  Case Study NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

  Sound design on No Country for Old Men (2007),

  set the frequency of the bowls’ tone to be the same as

  directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, breaks with the

  the noise of a refrigerator.

  tradition in suspense thrillers of using a lot of music

  The goal throughout the film was to let silence and

  and relying on it to create tension and excitement.

  ambient noises create the tension that in more tradi-

  The Coens’ film has very little music, and when it

  tional films music is expected to produce. As a result,

  does appear it’s in a subliminal fashion, barely heard

  the film’s sound effects are precisely crafted and edited.

  underneath ambient sounds like prairie wind and

  Rather than taking a huge number of effects, laying

  the rumble of an automobile engine. Unless really

  them on top of one another into a dense mix, and then

  listening for it, a viewer will not hear it consciously.

  adding a lot of music, the Coens, Burwell, and sound

  Composer Carter Burwell avoided traditional instru-

  designer Craig Berkey went in the opposite direction,

  mentation and used, instead, singing bowls, used in

  toward a design that was lean and spare and highly

  Buddhist meditation rituals, that produce a continu-

  calibrated.

  ous tone. He manipulated the sonic properties of this

  Many scenes in the film are sustained entirely by

  tone in creative ways. When the hired killer, Chigurh

  image and by sonic design and feature no dialogue at

  (Javier Bardem), menaces a gas station owner, Burwell

  all. The best of these occurs in a dark hotel room, as

  ( continued)

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  Principles of Sound Design

  Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), who has stolen a suitcase

  The sound design that Berkey created for Chigurh’s

  full of drug money, awaits the approach of Chigurh,

  shotgun equipped with a silencer did not include any

  who has been hunting him. Moss sits on the edge of the

  recording of gun noises. It was a synthetic blend of

  bed, straining to hear noises that shouldn’t be there. As

  numerous high-pitched sounds, including screaming,

  in a similar scene in Hitchcock’s Rear Window , the killer’s

  blended with an acoustical thump.

  stealthy approach is betrayed by a few key, muffled

  Overall, the creative sound work on No Country

  sounds—the scrape of a chair in the lobby downstairs,

  for Old Men was intended to get the viewer to be-

  the distant ringing of the desk clerk’s phone that goes

  have as Moss does in his hotel room, sitting forward

  unanswered, the soft pad of feet on the floorboards in

  a little, listening intently to a sonic landscape that

  the hallway outside the door, the squeaking of the light-

  offers clues to the action and that in many contem-

  bulb in the hallway as it is unscrewed from its socket,

  porary films is buried under too much audio infor-

  the explosive thump of the door’s lock as the unseen

  mation that is too loud and unrelenting. The film is

  Chigurh shoots it out of the door frame. The scene is a

  about letting silences and discrete noises create the

  pure example of storytelling through sound design.

  tension. ■

  NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (MIRAMAX, 2007)

  This film’s sound design is lean and spare but highly controlled. Ambient sounds rather than music predominate in most scenes. The filmmakers elected not to use music to carry the action and comment on it. When it does appear, the music

  score is muted and subliminal. Frame enlargement.

  SOUND DESIGN

  The complexity of modern film sound, and its importance for the artistic design of a film, has brought forth a new creative member of the production team: the sound designer . Walter Murch’s brilliant work on Apocalypse Now (1979) elicited the credit

  “sound design” because of Murch’s key contributions to the film’s total artistic design. On Apocalypse Now , Murch and his crew manipulated 160 tracks of recorded sounds. These were mixed together to create the finished soundtrack. Since then, the term has come into general usage.

  Sound design goes far beyond th
e routine technical challenges of getting audible sound and mixing effects and music with dialogue. Sound designers create a total sound environment for the film’s images, an environment that not only supports the images but also extends their meaning in dynamic ways. The sound design of a film 212

  Principles of Sound Design

  builds a mix of realistic and synthetic sounds . Realistic sound matches the properties of a real source. Unlike realistic sounds, synthetic sounds are invented and have no counterpart in actual life, but they bond with the images on screen and extend their meaning. The voice of Steven Spielberg’s character E.T. resulted from a mix of human speech and animal sounds, incorporating up to 18 different sound elements. In Return of the Jedi (1983), the sounds of the laser guns and the air motorcycles were created by electronically modifying and rerecording a mixture of sound sources.

  The modern film audience is privileged to experience film soundtracks of un-

  precedented complexity and subtlety. Sound designers create highly sophisticated manipulations of sound information. These manipulations are rule-governed and exploit unique properties of sound that differentiate it from a film’s image track.

  Differences between Sound and Image

  Sound and images uniquely differ from one another. Two kinds of differences exist: (1) what viewers notice about pictures and sound and (2) how pictures and sound structure time.

  PERCEPTION OF IMAGE AND SOUND Obviously, images are visible and can be seen, and sound cannot. Image edits, whether cuts, fades, or dissolves, can be seen on screen. Sound edits are inaudible. Images can be touched. Sound cannot. As a result, viewers notice images but tend to be less aware of sound design. Viewers tend to think of cinema as an essentially visual medium, with sound as the backup element, there to support the images.

  Because of this, viewers think that they interpret sound in reference to images. In most instances, however, sound shapes the image as much as the image shapes the sound.

  Walter Murch created a memorable image-sound juxtaposition in Apocalypse Now (1979) by adding a helicopter sound to a shot of a spinning ceiling fan. Viewers hear a helicopter engine and rotor blades but see the spinning blades of the fan. In this striking contrast, sound and image are equally assertive, equally important. Viewers may think of images as being more important, but in this instance the helicopter sound contextualizes the image as much as it contextualizes the sound.

  Sound design is an extremely powerful but nearly subliminal element of film

  structure. Furthermore, sound has a fluid nature that images do not. Taken out of context, many sounds can be difficult to identify, which enables sound designers to APOCALYPSE NOW

  (UNITED ARTISTS, 1979)

  To this shot of a spinning

  ceiling fan, sound designer

  Walter Murch added the

  sound of a helicopter propel-

  ler. This audiovisual com-

  bination places equal stress

  on image and sound; each

  conditions the other. Frame

  enlargement.

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  Principles of Sound Design

  THE CONVERSATION (PARAMOUNT, 1974)

  Featuring brilliant sound design by Walter Murch, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation is that rare film that deeply probes the psychological components of sound. Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a pathologically withdrawn man who works as a professional wiretap-per. As he labors to discover the meaning behind a mysterious conversation he has taped, Murch and Coppola show the subjective nature of sound. Harry psychologically projects a meaning onto the audio information that proves to be tragically incorrect. In this scene, he crouches in a hotel bathroom to tape a conversation in the next room. Frame enlargement.

  use them with great freedom, attaching them, for example, to a variety of images, as in the sound effects used in Terminator 2 and Backdraft . Sound can stimulate the imagination in ways images do not. In The Conversation (1974), Gene Hackman plays a surveillance expert, Harry Caul. He overhears a murder committed in an adjoining hotel room. The violence of the killing is conveyed in the noises that come through the wall into Harry’s room. Sound designer Walter Murch knew that what the audience (and Harry) would imagine based on the sounds would be far worse than what a picture might show.

  STRUCTURING TIME Unless they contain explicit movement, many images are ambiguous with respect to time. They can be run forward or backward with little noticeable difference. A long shot of a forest or the exterior of a house is ambiguous in this way, but not a shot of traffic or joggers. Viewers can tell if the latter two images were run backwards, but not necessarily the first two.

  Sound adds directional time to images. With sound, viewers perceive images as moving forward unambiguously. George Stevens’s Western Shane (1953) provides an interesting illustration of this principle. Stevens realized that a man dismounting a horse looks more graceful than when climbing into the saddle. Accordingly, when the film’s villain climbs into the saddle, the editor used a shot of the character dismounting but played it in reverse. The sound in the scene—a gurgling stream, wind, off-screen dialogue from other characters—gives the shot a clear forward momentum. Viewers who are aware of the trick can see that the shot is played backwards, but for most viewers, unaware of the editing magic at work, the sleight-of-hand passes unnoticed because of the way the shot is paired with sound that is clearly directional in time.

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  Principles of Sound Design

  Sound gives images forward momentum or adds to the momentum that the shots

  already possess. Sound temporalizes images. This is the principle that underlies the codes of sound continuity. But creating continuity is only one of the achievements of sophisticated sound design, which, like image editing, is a rule-governed practice. What are the basic rules and procedures for manipulating sounds and for establishing relationships with images?

  The Codes of Sound Design

  To construct the finished soundtrack viewers hear when watching a movie, designers employ five essential codes: (1) the sound hierarchy, (2) sound perspective, (3) sound bridges, (4) off-screen sound space, and (5) sound montage.

  THE SOUND HIERARCHY Because of the variety of sounds in the audio environment and the need to organize them to facilitate the viewer’s understanding of story information, sound designers customarily treat them in terms of a hierarchy of importance.

  When filmmakers manipulate dialogue, sound effects, and music within a scene, the hierarchy of relationships typically emphasizes dialogue. A sound mixer understands that inaudible or unclear dialogue can take a viewer out of the movie and break its spell. If a viewer has to ask someone sitting next to them what a character just said, the viewer is no longer “in” the film. Thus dialogue tends to be the determining element in a sound mix. It is generally the first element to be mixed, and the volume of effects and music is usually kept at a softer level to run underneath the dialogue.

  Everyone has seen movies in which an important character dies during a noisy battle. Often, the character makes a little speech before dying. When this occurs, the volume of the battle sounds invariably drops below the dialogue. Once the character has died, the battle sounds rise again to their previous level. Prevailing assumptions stipulate that dialogue always should be clear, crisp, and understandable to the viewer.

  Filmmakers do not always construct a standard sound hierarchy; some have deliberately sought to avoid it. In the early 1970s, one major U.S. filmmaker revolutionized sound recording techniques in ways that challenged the dominant place of the actor’s voice in the hierarchy of sound. Beginning with California Split (1974) and Nashville (1975), director Robert Altman pioneered the use of multichannel, multitrack sound recording. Rather than using a boom mike—a microphone hung on a long pole suspended over a scene to record the voices of the actors—Altman employed radio mikes.

  Each actor was separately miked, their voices transmitted to a recording receiver.

&n
bsp; In the sound mix, Altman aimed to produce a profusion of voices, much as one hears in a crowded room. In the crowd scenes in California Split , for example, many actors speak at once, and the dialogue is multilayered, full of overlapping speech. In addition, the radio mikes picked up ambient noises, like the rustle of clothing, that are usually not captured by more standard recording techniques. The resulting audio mix was extremely rich and multidimensional, and a single character’s voice did not always predominate over other voices in a scene. The mix gave Altman an audio equivalent to what his images were showing, namely, many things happening at once.

  Altman’s approach frustrated critics because they were used to a more normative sound hierarchy in which all voices were clearly modulated and balanced to give a single speaker primacy of position in the audio mix. His films of the early 1970s were somewhat controversial, but multitrack recording methods are today an industry standard, even though most films do not aim for the audio density of Altman’s pictures.

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  Principles of Sound Design

  ON THE WATERFRONT (COLUMBIA

  PICTURES, 1954)

  Breaking the sound hierarchy can create startling

  effects. When Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) tells

  Edie (Eva Marie Saint) that he was involved in her

  brother’s murder, the sound mix eliminates nearly

  all of their dialogue, replacing it with loud, harsh

  sounds from the environment, the New York har-

  bor. These piercing sounds portray the characters’

  anguish and stand in for the missing dialogue.

  These sounds are the most important and promi-

  nent ones in the scene and carry its emotion, a

  function more typically performed by dialogue or

  music. Frame enlargements.

  The Sound Hierarchy in Early Cinema While contemporary sound design typically features a highly articulated mix of dialogue, effects, and music, films from the early sound period blended fewer elements to create the soundtrack. Rather than working with many tracks each of dialogue, effects, and music, early sound films mixed a couple of dialogue tracks, a mono music track, a few sound effects, and an ambient track.