Sound and Music 8Is a scene spooky Funny Violent Sad .docx

Sound and Music 8
Is a scene spooky? Funny? Violent? Sad?
Whatever the feeling , a good film
matches sights with sounds
to make the scene come alive.
—Geoffrey Horn
Still from The Hurt Locker (2008). ©Summit
Entertainment/courtesy Everett Collection
What Does Sound Contribute to Movies? Chapter 8
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the
following:
• Describe how sound contributes to the overall impact of
films.
• Trace the history of sound from the Silent Era through
talkies.
• Describe the basic types of sound recording and playback
technology used for films, past
and present.
• Explain how dialogue, sound effects, and music work
individually and together in a film’s

soundtrack, and understand the difference between a score and a
soundtrack.
• Identify and appreciate how various sound production
techniques contribute to what you
experience in a finished film.
8.1 What Does Sound Contribute to Movies?
At the beginning of Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope, we
don’t see Darth Vader, Luke
Skywalker, Han Solo, or any of the other soon-to-be-iconic
characters. No, instead, we see words.
The backstory about the Empire and the resistance scrolls up the
screen, telling us that we’re
watching a story set “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.”
It sounds like a rather dull start for
what would become the most lucrative series of films in movie
history. But it’s not. Instead, it’s
exciting, making us anticipate what we’re about to see (that is
certainly the case the first time we
see it). It’s not the visuals, certainly. What is it, then?
It is the music. John Williams’s stirring score (the background
music) grabs us by the collar
and forces us to sit up in our seats; it demands our attention,
drawing us in from practically the
first note. Try watching the opening of Star Wars with the
sound turned down, and you will be
startled. Williams’s score is our introduction to the film, and it
is a magnetic one.
Once the film starts, it’s not just the music that thrills us. The
sound effects are also essential to
our enjoyment of Star Wars—the mechanical, menacing
breathing of Darth Vader; the electronic
hum of the light sabers; the roar of the enormous space ships;

even the silence of space. The same
applies to the dialogue, which includes any num-
ber of memorable lines and helps to advance the
plot, explain relationships, and establish charac-
terizations. In fact, the personality of robot C3PO
comes just as much from the dialogue and its
delivery as from the movements of the actor in
the distinctive costume.
As hard as it may be to fathom, movies were once
silent, at least in the case of having no recorded
dialogue or sound effects. There was always,
however, a musical accompaniment to help inter-
pret the moods for the audience, just as today’s
movies often rely upon evocative music scores
to intensify dramatic impact. But instead of
being pre-recorded, the music was played live at
each showing in the theater. Many of these so-
called “silent” films are without question great—
Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton are among
Courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ Silent films such as Sherlock Jr. were accompanied by
live music. Director and actor Buster Keaton was a mas-
ter of deadpan reactions and physical comedy.
The History of Sound in Film Chapter 8
the geniuses who worked their comedy magic without the use of
sound. Directors such as F. W.
Murnau, Sergei Eisenstein, Abel Gance, and King Vidor created
compelling visual dramatic mas-

terpieces with no need for spoken dialogue or audible sound
effects. But once the technology
became available to marry sound with pictures, the medium of
film was reborn. Audiences didn’t
just expect sound; they demanded it. And yet, for such an
essential part of a film, audiences today
often take sound and even music for granted. Certainly, they
miss it if it’s not there, but it is far
too easy to overlook the important role sound, and especially
music, plays in movies.
8.2 The History of Sound in Film
Musical accompaniment that supports a film’s moods and
actions is really just an artificial con-
vention to help manipulate audience response. While heard by
the viewers, it does not exist in the
story world inhabited by the characters and thus is termed non-
diegetic. Other non-diegetic ele-
ments in a film might include superimposed titles, title cards, or
voice-over narration by someone
who is not a character in the story. By contrast, sounds of
spoken dialogue (or narration by a char-
acter in the story), natural sound effects matching sources seen
on the screen, and any music that
is being performed or heard by characters in the story is called
diegetic. Today’s movies usually
employ both sorts of sound, and filmmakers have the option of
using only diegetic sounds, only
non-diegetic sound, or a mix of both at once. Before the
refinement of recording technology, it was
much simpler for filmmakers to rely not only upon non-diegetic
sound alone (a musical score and
in certain theaters, especially in Asia, also a narrator), but also
upon the exhibitors to supply it.
The Silent Era

We live in a world in which we can shoot and edit movies on
our smartphones and email them to
our friends. Moving pictures are an established part of our lives,
a fact of our existence. But imag-
ine a world in which images were stationary, in which pictures
did not move. And then, one day,
they did. This bit of magic alone was good enough for
audiences, who at first were simply amazed
at what they were seeing. When movies first moved from
scientific experiment to entertainment
product in the 1890s, it seemed like a miracle.
However, as with any art form, some people began to push
further. Filmmakers began using the
medium to tell stories. The invention of sound recording
actually came well over a decade before
the invention of motion pictures. However, during the first few
decades of movies the technology
to synchronize sound with the picture was too inconvenient to
make films with recorded sound
practical. Instead, filmmakers embraced the technical
limitations of the medium to tell stories
visually; where dialogue was necessary, title cards were used—
a character would speak, those
in the audience would see his or her mouth move, and a card
with whatever the character said
would appear in print on screen. Seen today, this practice seems
quaint—funny, even—if one is
unfamiliar with the convention. At the time, it was as cutting-
edge as the medium allowed.
Today, lack of sound would be considered an almost
insurmountable handicap; yet some of the
filmmakers who worked during the Silent Era, when films didn’t
have recorded sound (a time

period that lasted from the invention of movies through
approximately 1930), thought the lack of
a need for carefully scripted dialogue was something of an
opportunity. They enjoyed the free-
dom. “The great advantage of silent films was that they didn’t
have words, so not everything was
literal,” said the director King Vidor, whose sound films include
Duel in the Sun, The Champ, and
War and Peace. “The audience could make up its own words and
dialogue, and make up its own
meaning” (as cited in Stevens, 2006).
Such an idea may seem inconceivable now, when studios
go to great lengths to ensure that audiences do not have
to work much at all to understand what is going on, leav-
ing nothing to chance. Yet Vidor and others, working in
a new medium, used this latitude to their advantage. It
also permitted them to give the actors precise directions
while the cameras were actually rolling, as no sound was
being recorded. Some of the greatest films ever made were
produced during the Silent Era, including Vidor’s The Big
Parade and The Crowd, D. W. Griffith’s controversial The
Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush,
Keaton’s The General, and Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last! (in
which he famously dangles from the hands of a clock
high above the street). F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh and
Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness managed to tell
their stories without even using title cards.
As noted previously, “silent” films were not typically
shown in complete silence. Most theaters employed at
least a piano player to accompany the film. Better theaters

installed pipe organs or added another instrumentalist
or two with the pianist (often a violinist and drummer,
perhaps a few more) to have more of an orchestral sound.
Large theaters in major cities had full pit orchestras of 20
or more players and a large music library of specially com-
posed “photoplay music” to match various moods, situa-
tions, and nationalities. Important Hollywood releases
sometimes had custom-commissioned
scores composed for them, with the sheet music sent out to the
theaters. Whether or not a new
original score was composed for a film, the filmmakers
expected that theaters would provide
appropriate music, and many moviegoers decided where to
spend their money as much by the
reputation of a theater’s music quality as by what film was
playing. At theaters with a single
accompanist (piano or organ), the live interaction between the
musician and both the screen and
the audience was never exactly the same twice, more akin to a
live theater performance. Music
became not just an added attraction but an integral part of the
filmmaking process and moviego-
ing experience—which it remains to this day.
Acting Styles in Silent Films
Because audiences couldn’t hear what was said during films,
actors often relied on overstated
gestures and heightened mannerisms, especially early on, before
filmmakers grew to trust the
audience more and tone down theatrical-style performances for
the more intimate camera.
Thus, some dramatic silent films may seem almost comical
today because of what appears to be
overacting. Some of it was, even at the time these films were

made. But all of it was a distinc-
tive stylization, much of it following an accepted catalog of
conventional gestures and move-
ments—melodramatic facial expressions and more—that had
been in use since the 19th century.
Especially when coupled with an appropriate musical score, it is
perhaps more akin to ballet or
opera without words than to modern movie acting. It was all
done with the knowledge that the
audience would not hear what actors were saying but would
instead rely on title cards, music, and
long-established acting technique to follow the story.
Photo by Mary Evans/Ronald Grant/Everett Collection
▲▲ Shown here is Harold Lloyd in Safety Last! Of
the three great silent clowns—Chaplin, Keaton,
and Lloyd—Lloyd is the least known today. A
great star and daredevil, he made more films
than Chaplin and Keaton combined.
It must also be said that the speed at which
silent films are projected today, typically fixed at
an invariable 24 frames per second, with some
projectors offering an alternate so-called “silent
speed” of 16 or 18 frames per second, also has
an impact on the modern audience’s reception
of them. Because sound was performed live
rather than pre-recorded, films could run at any
speed. Camera operators would typically hand-
crank the film relatively slower for action scenes
(thus speeding up the motion when projected on

screen) and faster for dramatic scenes (slowing
down the motion) but there was no set speed.
Projectionists in the theater would usually run
the film at a speed that seemed appropriate on
the screen, sometimes changing it from scene to
scene, although sometimes orchestra conductors
could adjust the speed during a show to fit the
music they’d selected.
James Card, in his essay “Silent Film Speed” from Image, also
points out that silent films were
often shown at different speeds in the same theater on the same
day. Theater managers would
sometimes project the films more slowly during the afternoon
when there were fewer customers,
and speed it up at night so that they could work in an extra
showing when the theater was more
crowded.
When silent films are run on modern projectors without variable
speed control, the action typi-
cally looks sped up to various degrees, and occasionally too
slow. When silent films are trans-
ferred to video, they must run at the standard sound speed.
Sometimes they are converted to 24
frames per second by duplicating every third or fourth frame,
which results in a more normal
speed of the action but also introduces an unnatural jerkiness
that modern viewers mistakenly
attribute to “poorer technology back then.” The variable silent
speed issue, combined with the
older stylized acting and today’s fascination with technological
advances (digital CGI and 3-D,
for example), often results in silent films not being given their
due. But they were so unlike any-
thing people had seen before that it is not overstating the case

to call silent cinema a revolution-
ary form of entertainment. And then, with the advent of sound,
film would undergo a revolution
of its own.
Talkies
Technology would eventually catch up with movies, and sound
would become a part of them. But
sound wasn’t exactly the foregone conclusion that we assume it
to be now. Some believed silent
film to be the purer art form and had no interest in making the
change to sound (and some still
believe this). Others had more businesslike interests. Wendy
Ide, writing in the Sunday Times,
reports that Jack Warner, the head of Warner Brothers Studios,
declared in 1926 that talkies, as
films with recorded dialogue were called, would never succeed.
“Silent films,” he argued, had “an
international appeal, a visual language that transcended the
spoken word. They allowed the audi-
ence to invest their own meanings, imagine their own dialogue”
(Ide, 2008). Jack Warner recalled
in his 1964 memoir My First Hundred Years in Hollywood that
his brother Harry, when pitched
▲▲ A classic vampire film such as Nosferatu is a perfect
vehicle for what today would be considered exagger-
ated overacting.

the potential for sound films, retorted, “Who the hell wants to
hear actors talk?” (Warner, 1965).
Rarely would a studio executive be proven so wrong.
Studios had experimented with synchronized sound, which
matched the dialogue with the
movement of the characters’ mouths, in short films since the
1890s, and in the mid-1920s some
feature-length films had rudimentary sound effects. Warner
Brothers’ Vitaphone technology was
introduced in 1926 as a way to allow small towns the chance to
experience full orchestra accom-
paniments with their movies, recorded on disks played in
perfect synchronization with the film,
and to present famous New York vaudeville acts as prologues
before the feature, all much more
affordably using film rather than hiring live performers.
Audiences and theater owners weren’t so
sure about it, as recorded sound at the time could not come
close to replicating the experience of
live music. That is, until The Jazz Singer, released
in October 1927—only a year after Warner made
his mistaken pronouncement—finally managed
to capture the public’s imagination and has inac-
curately gained a reputation as the first true
“talkie.”
The Jazz Singer is a sentimental story of a Jewish
boy rising to fame as a Broadway entertainer
after rejecting his religious father’s wishes that
he become a cantor, and it is really just another
silent film for the most part. It has a prerecorded
soundtrack of music and a few sound effects,
plus several songs and some brief segments with
audible spoken words. The first bit of dialogue

comes 17 minutes and 25 seconds into the film,
when star Al Jolson as the title character utters
the fitting words, “Wait a minute, wait a minute,
you ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” Jolson performs six
songs during the course of the movie, periodi-
cally adding some ad-libbed lines, as he’d been
accustomed to doing in his stage performances.
Thanks in no small part to the charismatic per-
sona Jolson was able to communicate on screen,
the film became a hit, and its unexpected success created a huge
public demand for recorded
sound. The death knell for silent films was not sounded
immediately, but the end was coming
soon. (Note: Some modern viewers find themselves
uncomfortable with the use of blackface
makeup in certain scenes of The Jazz Singer, and its central
function in the plot, interpreting it as
a racial slur. The “Wikipedia” article on the film discusses this
in detail with references for further
reading, as well as noting the film’s favorable reception in the
African-American press of 1927.)
Throughout 1928, theaters rushed to install sound systems.
Studios rushed to add sound to
silents already in production, whether reshooting the entire
picture or merely including dialogue
or songs in a few scenes—“part-talkies,” as these hybrid films
were called. By summer of 1928,
the first 100 percent all-talking feature, The Lights of New
York, was released. Sound now permit-
ted faithful film versions of stage plays and created the brand-
new genre of the movie musical,
discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4. Viewers rushed to see
films advertised as “all-singing, all-
talking, all-dancing,” many of them with the added attraction of

Technicolor for certain scenes
or the entire films.
▲▲ The Jazz Singer included a title character whose
stage act was derived from the traditional blackface
minstrel show. In this silent melodrama with synchro-
nized music and sound sequences, popular stage star Al
Jolson brought his vaudeville dancing and singing to the
silver screen.
After sound was introduced, the behavior of the audience had to
change. Before, as the piano,
organ, or orchestra played, people watched with rapt attention.
Vidor, the famous director, has
argued that the audience’s attention waned when sound came to
pictures:
In silent pictures, you couldn’t turn away from the screen as
much. When sound first came
in, that’s when popcorn and all the drinks started, and necking
in the theater, because you
could turn away and do all sorts of things and still hear. You
wouldn’t miss anything—the
sound would take care of it. But in silent pictures you had to
just sit there and try to figure it
out. (Stevens, 2006)
Robert Sklar, in his book Movie-Made America, notes another
interesting change. “During the
silent era it was considered acceptable for members of the

audience to express audibly their views
about the action on the screen,” Sklar says. He explains further
as he writes:
Sometimes this might cause disruption or annoyance, but it also
had a potential for forging
a rapport of shared responses, a sense of community with
surrounding strangers. . . . With
talkies, however, people who talked aloud were peremptorily
hushed by others in the audi-
ence who didn’t want to miss any spoken dialogue. The talking
audience for silent pictures
became a silent audience for talking pictures. (Sklar, 1975)
Despite the deep-seated love audiences had developed for silent
movies, only two years after the
release of The Jazz Singer the revolution was nearly complete
in the United States, and a year or two
later in much of Europe. In Asia and third-world countries,
filmmakers continued making silent
films into the mid-1930s. There were actually early 1930s silent
films, by Japan’s Yasujiro Ozu for
instance, that showed movie posters for American talking
pictures. (It is also instructive as to just
how widespread the influence of Hollywood movies became
after World War I and remains to
this day.) Although a few American films would be released
with little or no dialogue (Chaplin’s
City Lights in 1931 and Modern Times in 1936 being the most
famous), the last year mainstream
silent movies were produced by major Hollywood studios was
1929. For the next couple of years,
many films produced with sound had silent versions prepared
for theaters that had not yet con-
verted to the new technology (especially for foreign export), but
from here on, there would be no

looking back. Sound was here to stay. Or so it seemed. In 2005,
independent filmmakers Sean
Branney and Andrew Leman made a low-budget but multiple
award-winning version of the clas-
sic H. P. Lovecraft horror story The Call of Cthulhu as a black-
and-white silent movie, shot on
digital video and shown primarily at film festivals. In 2011,
French director Michel Hazanavicius
made a comedy-drama homage to classic Hollywood studio
moviemaking and the conversion
to sound. To help capture the period flavor, he chose to make it
as a silent movie in black and
white using the classic 1.33:1 aspect ratio, with a brief talking
sequence in the final minutes. The
film he created, The Artist, found international distribution,
went on to earn widespread critical
acclaim, and won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
The same year, Spanish director
Pablo Berger made his own ambitious silent, black-and-white
1.33:1 feature called Blancanieves,
a clever updating of the “Snow White” fairy tale to 1920s Spain
and the culture of bullfighting.
While it was well received by critics, Blancanieves had only
limited theatrical distribution dur-
ing 2012 and was largely unseen by the general public. In 2009,
American director Gus Van Sant
shot a silent version as well as the sound version of his quirky
independent feature Restless, but
he used the same color film and widescreen aspect ratio rather
than imitating the fashion of the
1920s. The sound version was released theatrically in 2011, but
both versions were included on
the 2012 Blu-ray/DVD edition. These remain rare cases in
today’s commercial cinema, however.
In the rest of this chapter, we will explore the impact sound has
on movies, both in production

practices and in dramatic potential.
Sound Technology and Equipment Chapter 8
8.3 Sound Technology and Equipment
It was the continually evolving technology of sound recording
and reproduction that kept talking
pictures in the experimental realm from the 1890s until the mid-
1920s, as no system was com-
patible with any other. Just as with digital technology many
decades later, once quality reached
a certain level and standards were finally agreed upon, it
became much easier to commercial-
ize talkies, and eventually to arrive at the movies filled with the
digital surround sound that we
expect today. It is useful to have a general familiarity with the
most common recording processes
used for movies in order to understand how various inherent
byproducts of the technology can
affect the sound you hear, especially with older films.
Acoustic and Electro-Mechanical Sound
Sound is perceived by the brain when the ear detects vibrations
in the air. The earliest sound
recording machines in the 1870s and 1880s used large cone-
shaped horns to pick up those vibra-
tions, connected to a needle creating ridges in a rotating wax
cylinder or disk. Playback sim-
ply reversed this completely mechanical process, reproducing a
crude recording of the original
sounds. Acoustic recordings required no electricity, but their
fidelity and volume were limited.
Electrical research during the first two decades of the 20th

century led to microphones, ampli-
fiers, loudspeakers, and radio. Adding sound to films became
more feasible with electrically con-
trolled higher-fidelity recordings that could fill a large
auditorium.
Optical Sound
In the mid-1920s, Warner Brothers developed its Vitaphone
sound system, which recorded
sound electro-mechanically onto large 16-inch disks. At the
same time, Fox Pictures was devel-
oping a rival Movietone sound system that used optical
recording and playback technology.
Instead of using a mechanical disk as a recording medium, the
electrical signals from a micro-
phone recorded a photograph of the sound wave onto film. With
only light shining through the
soundtrack instead of a heavy needle resting in a record groove,
a film soundtrack did not wear
out nearly as fast as the disks did. Although a portion of the
image area had to be sacrificed to
make room for the optical soundtrack, having the sound on the
same piece of film as the pic-
ture meant it could never go out of sync.
Optical sound soon became the worldwide
standard still in use today for theaters that
still run 35 mm or 16 mm film. See Figure
8.1 for an illustration of this technology.
◀▲Photograph of a Vitaphone camera booth,
with soundproofing, c. 1928. Early sound
recording required isolated, locked-down
cameras. Active, mobile camerawork gave
way to static shots of actors speaking into

microphones sometimes hidden among the
props—for example, in a flower pot placed on
a table.
Magnetic Sound
During the 1930s, scientists developed a means of using the
electrical signals from a microphone
to control a magnetic field that could magnetize particles on a
moving metallic ribbon. This was
able to record a wider frequency range of sounds from low to
high than was possible with optical
sound, and without the noticeable background hiss inherent in
sound on disk. After World War
II, higher-quality magnetic recordings of film dialogue, sound
effects, and music would be used
to master a standard optical sound negative that could be
printed beside the picture so theaters
would not need to install new sound equipment.
Nevertheless, the CinemaScope widescreen process introduced
in 1953 included magnetic stripes
coated onto the film that could record up to four separate
soundtracks. Theaters that installed
magnetic sound heads on their projectors were able to play back
four-track stereophonic sound,
with three channels located behind the screen (left, center,
right). The fourth channel ran through
speakers placed all around the auditorium walls for surround
sound effects. (See Figure 8.2 for an

illustration of stereophonic sound.) Because it was much more
expensive, magnetic stereo sound
soon became reserved for big-budget films, especially epics and
musicals.
Figure 8.1: Traditional optical sound reproduction technology,
the world standard from the
1920s to the 2000s
A very narrow beam of light focuses on the film’s soundtrack,
and the solar cell behind the
film turns the varying light into electrical signals that an
amplifier sends to the theater’s
loudspeakers. A misaligned lens might read the edge of the
sprocket holes, resulting in
a loud hum, or part of the image, resulting in noise. Any dirt or
scratches on the film are
read as noisy static, clicks, and pops with analog optical sound.
Severe dirt or scratches on
digital optical sound render the track unplayable, and the film
defaults back to the analog
audio. Most modern theaters now have a “reverse-scan”
soundhead with a red LED where
the solar cell had been, focusing a slit of red light onto the film
that is picked up by a “red
reader” located where the exciter lamp’s lens had been. This
makes it easier to play films
with the cyan-colored soundtracks used since the mid-2000s,
and it may also allow for
decoding digital soundtracks. Otherwise, a separate digital
sound head with a red LED is
also attached to the projector.
Solar
cell

Sound
drum
Film
Lens & slit
Exciter
lamp
Figure 8.2: Stereophonic sound
Stereophonic sound is directional sound, with two or more
individual audio recordings
playing through different loudspeakers arranged behind the
screen and throughout the
auditorium. The “point one” in a digital stereo sound mix
consists of low-frequency sounds
amplified separately and sent to large subwoofer speakers. The
original 1950s four-channel
magnetic stereo and 1970s Dolby optical stereo had three
speakers behind the screen, and
the fourth channel, if used, went to all the surround speakers.
The old 70 mm six-track
magnetic stereo audio format, used from the 1950s through the
1990s, had five individual
channels behind the screen, with the sixth used for all the
surround speakers, rather than
splitting the surrounds into two or four separate channels, as is
done with modern digital
formats and many modern home theater systems.

Screen (speakers behind)
Subwoofer x2
Le
ft
w
a
ll
s
u
rr
o
u
n
d
s
p
e
a
k
e
rs
R
ig
h
t w

a
ll su
rro
u
n
d
sp
e
a
k
e
rs
Left rear
speaker
Right rear
speaker
Typical movie
theater layout
Seating area
(equipped with
7.1-Channel
stereo sound)
Film platter
35 mm film
projector

Digital
projector
Audio &
computer
entertainment
Left Center Right
Projection booth
The Dolby Corporation developed noise-reduction systems that
greatly improved the quality of
optical soundtracks and in the 1970s refined some late-1930s
technology into a four-channel
optical sound system that could be inexpensively printed on the
film with the picture. (See Figure
8.3 for an illustration of an optical soundtrack on a modern
filmstrip.) After its effectiveness was
demonstrated by George Lucas’s Star Wars in 1977, studios and
theaters alike started jumping
back onto the stereophonic sound bandwagon. With optical
stereo, any theater could still play
a film in monaural sound, or sound that comes from a single
(mono) source, if it didn’t have
stereo equipment. The superior magnetic sound became reserved
only for 70 mm film releases,
and those were phased out as various digital sound systems for
film became widespread during
the 1990s.

Figure 8.3: Optical soundtrack
Shown here is the latest optical soundtrack variation on the film
format standard, which
has seen only minor modifications since 1894! An optical
soundtrack is a photograph of the
sound wave, printed onto the film beside the picture. The right
and left stereo tracks are
processed by a special electronic circuit to extract a center
screen channel and a surround
channel. By 2014, most commercial movie theaters had
switched to digital projection, but a
number are still capable of running 35 mm film prints.
DTS digital
timecode
(between
standard
optical
soundtrack
and picture)
to sync audio
on CD-ROM
with film
Dolby digital
audio data
(between
sprocket
holes)
Variable-area optical stereo
(left and right soundtracks decoded into 4-channel sound)
Sony’s SDDS digital audio data
(on right and left edges)

Digital Sound
Digital recording systems convert the analog electrical signals
from a microphone into an arbi-
trary code of ones and zeroes that another converter can decode
back into audible sound. The
result is the elimination of all analog background noise, whether
a faint hiss from magnetic
media, periodic clicks and pops from flaws or dirt on optical
film, or a needle scraping against a
disk. Digital recordings’ dynamic range from dead silence to the
loudest possible recording was
drastically improved over analog systems. Filmmakers started to
record digital audio in the 1980s
and theaters started adding digital sound playback capability in
the 1990s.
The increased abilities of digital audio often inspire filmmakers
to exploit them for truly spectac-
ular soundtracks that seem to put the audience in the center of
the action and have them literally
feel the rumbles of thunder or blasts of explosions. But there’s a
downside to this: If the digital
track becomes damaged or worn beyond the capacity of the
system to recognize the ones and
zeroes, there simply is no sound at all. Thus, all current digital
film processes use the standard
analog optical soundtrack as a backup. The shift toward digital
cinema projection in the 2010s
does away with film copies and puts the entire movie, both
picture and sound, into a digital file

played from a computer hard drive.
Modern Sound Technology and Consumer Demand
Recorded sound synchronized with movies began as a novelty, a
gimmick to attract more
ticket buyers, but once sound quality reached a certain point,
audiences began to demand it.
Hollywood added sound to its films in order to make more
money, and the evolution of tech-
nology to provide better sound continued apace. After sound
became the norm, stereo sound
became a promotional gimmick until eventually it was expected,
first for major pictures and
then for all movies. The 1974 film Earthquake was shown in
some theaters with accompany-
ing Sensurround, which is basically a pumping up of bass
sounds so that they would be felt
as vibrations in the theater. This technology was used for a
handful of other films, but it faded
quickly. The concept later returned with the advent of digital
technology and a separate sub-
woofer audio track that could create vibrations in the theater
and more intense sound. This abil-
ity to reproduce ultra-low-frequency sounds is now
commonplace in consumer sound systems
for homes and cars.
Surround sound involves placement of speakers all around the
theater so that audiences get the
impression that some sounds are coming from all around them.
It was pioneered by Disney’s
Fantasia in 1940, became an increasingly frequent option with
CinemaScope’s magnetic stereo
sound in the 1950s, was integral to Dolby’s optical stereo in the
late 1970s, and remains an impor-

tant part of our moviegoing experience. By the 1990s, stereo
and surround sound became popu-
lar enough that they soon were routinely used in home video
systems, consequently motivating
more theaters to install better sound to compete with the home
experience.
Clearly, the careful use of sound is essential in modern films.
Whether it is something as chal-
lenging as creating the sound of space (and the silences that go
along with that) or something as
seemingly simple as footsteps on pavement, sound is one of the
movie industry’s most expressive
tools. Among the elements that make up the magic of movies,
sound and its many varied uses is
among the foremost.
Three Basic Categories of Film Sound Chapter 8
8.4 Three Basic Categories of Film Sound
Once sound became an established part of moviemaking,
individual elements of it became
increasingly important. Indeed, sound production would become
as important a part of making
a movie as any other—if not as well known or well respected.
During the Silent Era, the respon-
sibility for adding music to films (and sometimes limited sound
effects) lay with the theaters.
Sound technology suddenly enabled the filmmakers to have
control over these, as well as adding
audible dialogue. The three basic categories of film sound—
dialogue, sound effects, and music—
require careful balancing to serve the story; because of this,
each category is typically recorded

separately and mixed together during the final editing process.
We will discuss the importance
of each of these three elements and the function that they each
serve now.
Dialogue
Characters talking to one another in films, known as dialogue,
is now so much a part of the
movie experience that audiences take it for granted. But
creating scenes in which characters talk
to one another as they do in real life is no easy task. This was
especially the case early on, when
filmmakers often used the new technology basically as a way to
show it off. For a couple of years,
background music was considered an old-fashioned relic of the
Silent Era. Films exploited natu-
ral sound effects, but especially dialogue (hence the term
“talking pictures”). Now that spoken
dialogue could be heard, numerous films were quickly made of
stage plays, but the results often
looked more “stagey” than cinematic. Settings were generally
limited to a few rooms instead of
numerous indoor and outdoor locations as with silent films. The
camera had to be confined within
a soundproof booth so its mechanism wouldn’t be recorded,
instead of free to move throughout
the set like in silent films. Actors suddenly needed to stay close
to the microphones instead of
being free to move around.
As with most new art forms, the writing of dia-
logue improved quickly. Instead of using a for-
mal, theatrical style, many films more closely
reflected the everyday speech of their times.
This, of course, may make films appear dated

within a few years, but it also makes them a valu-
able record of cultural norms at the time they’re
created. The popularity of films soon reached the
point that films would eventually influence per-
sonal communication, instead of the other way
around. Countless phrases uttered in movies
have become a part of our everyday conversation.
How many times have you said things like, “Go
ahead, make my day” or “Hasta la vista, baby” or
“We’re not in Kansas anymore,” with the sure
knowledge that the person you are talking to will
recognize it and instantly know what you mean,
no matter what the context? Dialogue from mov-
ies has become so well known that it is used as a
form of cultural shorthand.
Bryan Crable, the chairman of the communications department
at Villanova University, said in
an interview with The Arizona Republic,
©Warner Brothers/courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ The film The Shining is perhaps best known for char-
acter Jack Torrance and his phrase, “Here’s Johnny!”
Sometimes a catch phrase and the character become
interchangeable.
When we cite bits of movie dialogue, we’re using a bit of
shared culture to do the same thing.
. . . [M]aybe something goes wrong unexpectedly . . . I can just
turn to someone and say:
“Houston, we have a problem.” If a movie moment is able to

capture a situation or an emotion
that really hits home, then a catch phrase is born.
(Goodykoontz, 2010c)
There is no shortage of a desire among audiences to see action
films; however, there have been
and presumably always will be films in which dialogue is the
most important element. Perhaps
the most distilled example of this is My Dinner With Andre
(1981). It basically consists of Wallace
Shawn and Andre Gregory playing ver-
sions of themselves, talking for nearly two
hours over dinner. It sounds as if it would
be a horrible bore, yet many found it a fas-
cinating film; critical reception was glow-
ing. My Dinner With Andre may well stand
as the purest argument for dialogue in film.
“It should be unwatchable,” famed critic
Roger Ebert wrote, “and yet those who
love it return time and again, enchanted”
(Ebert, 1999).
Although Andre is an extreme example, any
number of films—you can practically name
one at random—rely on dialogue to estab-
lish character and advance the story. If well
used, it can be a richer way to move the plot
along than by simply showing what hap-
pens. This doesn’t mean it is more impor-
tant than what we see—if that were true, we might as well read
a book. But the dialogue and the
visual action work together to create the entire film experience.
In film, there are three basic reasons to use dialogue:

1. to further the development of the plot
2. to enhance characterizations
3. to establish very quickly important information the audience
needs to know to understand
the action (e.g., names, locations, dates, motivations, backstory)
The most effective dialogue often does two or all three of these
simultaneously. Effective movie
dialogue expands or elaborates upon what is visible on the
screen and does not simply repeat in
words what is already obvious in the action (which is what TV
dialogue often does so viewers can
easily follow programs while they’re doing something else).
Here is something to keep in mind about dialogue: What you
hear coming out of the mouths
of characters, which may appear to be perfectly synchronized
with their lips, is often not what
was recorded during filming. Instead, in a post-production
process called automated dialogue
replacement (ADR), or looping, actors often re-record their
lines so that they can be heard more
clearly. (Background noises during filming on location can
make the originally recorded dialogue
unusable.) The actor watches footage of the scene in a studio
and re-creates the dialogue, a pro-
cess that often requires multiple efforts. Thus, what we see and
what we hear may actually have
been created at different times.
▲▲ A theatrical, dialogue-heavy film like My Dinner With
Andre

owes much of its success to the writing and to Andre Gregory’s
many years of experience as a theater director and actor.
Besides traditional dialogue, the voice-
over is used in some films. This is when a
character’s voice narrates the action to help
the audience understand what is going on.
The technique is often criticized as a short-
cut to avoid depicting something visually,
a way of not trusting the audience’s intel-
ligence, of spoon-feeding information that
the film itself would make clear with time
and thought. Among the most criticized
examples is the 1982 theatrical release of
Blade Runner, in which the protagonist,
Deckard (Harrison Ford), provides narra-
tion throughout the film.
Other films revel in using voice-over as
part of their style, letting the viewer in on
character thoughts that cannot easily be
dramatized, or, as in Fight Club, providing
information by the narrator that the viewer later realizes is not
always trustworthy.
Sound Effects
In Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the hugely successful
2009 sequel to the first Transformers
movie, in which cars and trucks are revealed to be aliens who
have disguised themselves, the
sounds of explosions might as well be a credited member of the

cast, so ubiquitous are they.
The bone-crunchingly loud, theater-rattling explosions serve
one purpose only: to enhance the
action. The sound of these explosions simply does not allow the
audience to passively watch the
film; it serves instead as a rush of adrenaline. The film received
an Oscar nomination for Best
Sound Editing (its only nomination); nevertheless, it was
lambasted by critics.
The sound of explosions is also inte-
gral to another 2009 film, The Hurt
Locker. This critically acclaimed
movie tells the story of a U.S. military
bomb-disposal unit working in Iraq.
Explosions here mean something far
different than they do in an action-
adventure movie. Here, they often
mean death. The sound ratchets up
the tension to an incredible degree, as
the audience watches the soldiers do
their work. One false move, one small
mistake, and things can end in trag-
edy—loud, violent tragedy. The Hurt
Locker won the Academy Award for
Best Sound Design, one of six Oscars it took home (including
Best Picture). Both Hurt Locker
and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen illustrate, in different
ways, the importance of the use
of sound effects in films. For all their varying quality, neither
film would have been nearly as
effective without the expert use of sound effects and sound
editors. Films with explosions are
TM & ©20th Century Fox Film Corp./All rights
reserved./courtesy Everett Collection

▲▲ The unreliable narrator in Fight Club uses voice-over to
lead
us through the story and to explain how Tyler Durden inspires
him to abandon his old life.
©Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures/courtesy Everett
Collection
▲▲ In Wall-E, the first third of the movie is without dialogue.
The
story is told as much by the sound effects as by the images.
only the most extreme and obvious examples of their
importance. Films such as Master and
Commander and the remake of 3:10 to Yuma include
explosions, but they have other scenes full
of subtle sounds that establish the environment, carefully placed
in the stereophonic sound field
to enhance the viewers’ identification with what they are
seeing. Every film uses sound in some
way to draw the audience into the movie and keep it there.
Foley Artists and Unconventional Sound Effects
Recording natural sound in a usable way while filming a movie
can prove almost impossible.
Many movies are shot on large soundstages—vast warehouses in
which sets are built—which
are not exactly the place to find realistic sound. Additionally,
often a clear recording might be
impossible without a microphone in the shot. Thus, sound
effects typically have to be recorded

separately and added into the final film in post-production (as
with ADR dialogue and voice-
overs). Before their use in film, sound effects were used in
radio for years to add realism to the
broadcast. Crumpling cellophane may have been used to make
the sound of fire, a doorbell in the
studio might indicate the arrival of a visitor, and more. This
process was adapted and used to add
everyday sound to films and is now referred to as Foley, after
Jack Foley, who developed a studio
for creating appropriate sounds while watching the film
projected on a screen. People who make
these everyday sound effects are now called Foley artists.
Indeed, Foley artists and sound editors
often go to unusual, sometimes humor-
ous lengths to achieve the effects they are
after. Producer Frank Spotnitz says that the
sound of the boulder from which Indiana
Jones flees in the opening of Raiders of the
Lost Ark is actually a recording of the sound
editor’s Honda Civic rolling down his drive-
way (Spotnitz, 1989). In Terminator 2:
Judgment Day, the T-1000 robot is made of
a sort of liquid metal that allows it to change
shapes and absorb blows and bullets and
such. According to Tom Kenny, the sound
of the T-1000 going through metal prison
bars is actually dog food being sucked out
of a can. “A lot of that I would play back-
ward or do something to,” sound designer
Gary Rydstrom said. “But those were the
basic elements. What’s amazing to me is . . .
Industrial Light & Magic using millions of dollars of high-tech
digital equipment and computers

to come up with the visuals, and meanwhile I’m inverting a dog
food can” (Kenny, 2000).
Popular Sound Effects
There is also a need for more mundane effects, of course. What
about the murmur of a crowd in
the background of a scene, heard mostly as unintelligible
sounds? That is known as walla, and it
dates back to radio days. In films, background crowds are
usually instructed to keep completely
silent so that clear recordings of the actors’ dialogue can be
made. The crowd noises are recorded
separately and mixed in during post-production and the sound
editing process.
In addition to sound recordings made for individual movies,
there are certain stock sound effects
that editors use over and over. These may be nature sounds,
mechanical noises, door creaks,
©Lucasfilms/courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ The sound of the light sabers in the Star Wars films was
created by recording and processing the hum of a projector
motor found at the University of Southern California, where
director George Lucas had been a student.
and many sounds that might otherwise require new Foley or
ADR recordings. One of the more
unusual, and most interesting, is the Wilhelm scream. Since its
original recording in 1951, the
Wilhelm scream has been used in more than 200 films,

including Star Wars, Toy Story, Reservoir
Dogs, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Iron Man, and Iron Man 2.
Music
At the end of Fight Club, director David Fincher’s 1999 film
about an office drone (Edward
Norton) who becomes friends with a soap salesman (Brad Pitt)
through underground fighting,
we learn that the protagonist’s friend is really the protagonist
and is a creation of his own imagi-
nation. Yet it is too late for him to stop his army of followers
from bombing office buildings. After
a suicide attempt, he sits in the dark with his girlfriend, holding
her hand, as the explosives go
off and skyscrapers all around them crumble. Simply by
description, this scene is pretty creepy.
However, Fincher ratchets up that feeling considerably by his
choice of music for the final scene.
As the protagonist and his girlfriend watch the destruction of
the world around them, the atmo-
spheric, almost drone-like “Where Is My Mind,” by the band the
Pixies, plays. It is an unusual
choice—the Pixies are more of a cult favorite than a mainstream
band, and “Where Is My Mind”
is far from their most popular song. Yet the selection is perfect,
with the haunting vocal sounds,
the cacophony of the drums, the repeated refrain, “Where is my
mind.” It is, one might say, the
perfect soundtrack for the end of the world.
Music has been a crucial part of the moviegoing experience
since before the advent of recorded
sound in films. So important was its use that over time directors
began inserting indications
for specific music to be played at specific times. After the

conversion to talkies, music became a
basic element of constructing a movie, as essential an element
as lights and cameras. However,
sometimes even the best directors have a hard time keeping that
in mind. There is a famous story
about the making of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 film Lifeboat, set
at sea. Author Tony Thomas, in
his book Music for the Movies, related the incident:
An intermediary informed the composer, “Mr. Hitchcock feels
that since the entire action
of the film takes place in a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean,
where would the music come
from?” Replied (composer David) Raksin, “Ask Mr. Hitchcock
to explain where the cameras
come from and I’ll tell him where the music comes from.”
(Thomas, 1997)
Hitchcock knew, of course, the importance of music and would
use it to brilliant effect in later
films such as Psycho. Any good filmmaker knows how
important music is to the success of a film.
We will examine the use of score and soundtrack and their
effects on moviemaking, and we will
see how contemporary films could not exist without them.
Score
Basically, the film’s music score is what plays in the
background of a scene while action takes
place. It is NOT the film’s soundtrack (which includes all
dialogue, music, and sound effects), and
it is not even the “soundtrack recording” or album, though the
two are often confused. What is
popularly known as the soundtrack, which we will discuss
momentarily, is a collection of songs
used in the film (or, sometimes, “inspired” by the film, if they

are included on the soundtrack CD
but not heard in the movie). The score is music usually
written—though not always—specifically
for a film. Most often it is played by a full symphonic orchestra,
but it may be played on a synthe-
sizer, by one solo instrumentalist, or by a small group of
instrumentalists.
Sometimes a film’s background music has a
recognizable style; at other times it has an
almost anonymous feel, perceived more on
a subconscious level. David Bondelevitch,
who teaches film at the University of
Southern California’s School of Cinematic
Arts, in an interview made scoring a film
sound almost like refereeing a basketball
game—if you do it right, no one notices.
“Most composers would say if you notice the
music, something is wrong,” Bondelevitch
said. “And most people don’t think about
what they’re hearing; we’re trained to notice
what we’re seeing” (Nilsen, 2008).
At its root, film is a visual medium, after
all. But scores are not just tossed-off dit-
ties; some become classics in their own
right, and composers become important assets to interpreting
the film. Some Blu-ray and DVD
editions of movies include a listening option of an isolated
music score without the dialogue
or sound effects. These can be instructive in illustrating how a

composer approaches a scene
and how the music enhances the action. As noted earlier,
background music was not used in
many early sound films as it was considered unnatural and old-
fashioned, but the success of Max
Steiner’s evocative scores to The Most Dangerous Game (1932)
and King Kong (1933) helped revive
the tradition. Herbert Stothart, who wrote the Oscar-nominated
score for Mutiny on the Bounty
(1935), is quoted in Music and Cinema, by James Buhler, Caryl
Flinn, and David Neumeyer, from
his writings about that work:
I saw in the scope and magnitude of the story an opportunity for
something new in music of
the screen. I approached the task with the intention of having
the score actually tell the story
in psychological impressions. The listener can, without seeing
the picture, mentally envision
the brutalities at sea, the calm, the storms, the idyllic tropics,
mutiny, clash of human wills,
retribution. I drew on ancient ship chanteys, music of old
England, carols, and other authen-
tic sources, and used these as a pattern to weave together my
musical narrative. (Altman,
Jones, & Tatroe, 2000, p. 189)
Some scores actually prove so important to a film that they
become well known themselves. That
is certainly the case with Bernard Herrmann’s score for Alfred
Hitchcock’s Psycho, released in
1960. The famous scene in which Marion Crane is stabbed to
death in the shower—certainly one
of the most famous murders ever committed on screen—could
not be nearly as effective with-
out Herrmann’s famous strings, which seem to stab at the air

itself, the short, rhythmic notes of
screeching high-pitched violins mimicking both the jabs of the
knife and the screams of the vic-
tim. So memorable was the music that it is used as a kind of
pop-culture shorthand in other films
and television shows, relating in just a few notes a feeling of
terror. “The shrieking dissonance of
‘The Murder,’ surely the most imitated and instantly
recognizable film cue, is the cinema’s primal
scream,” Jack Sullivan writes in The Wall Street Journal
(Sullivan, 2010).
Some scores contain music that was not written specifically for
the film. Yet sometimes they
work so perfectly with the movie that they become forever
identified with it. This is certainly the
case with Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space
Odyssey. One well-known sequence
©Columbia Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ The Big Chill evokes the lost youth and idealism of baby
boomer radicals with a soundtrack of “classic rock” and
Motown hits.
shows space ships docking set to the Johann Strauss waltz On
the
Beautiful Blue Danube, written in 1866. Even more famous, and
forever after identified with the film, is Richard Strauss’s sym-
phonic poem Thus Spake Zarathustra, written in 1896, which is
used during the opening titles and then throughout the film
during

crucial scenes.
Soundtracks as Promotional Products
The soundtrack, technically, is the band of optical, magnetic, or
digital data containing the sound for the film. In this section,
how-
ever, we will discuss the more common musical genre
definition.
The soundtrack, as we discussed earlier, differs from the score
in
that it consists of a selection of songs (and sometimes dialogue)
used in the film. And the films for which soundtrack recordings
are released are not necessarily musicals, which obviously rely
on
songs. Soundtrack albums for non-musicals contain popular
songs,
usually not orchestral music; though, to confuse things further,
selections from the score are sometimes included in soundtrack
compilations. Again, as with scores, some are written
specifically
for films and some are previously existing songs used because
the
director believes that they fit the tone or mood of a particular
scene.
Occasionally the “soundtrack” includes music inspired by rather
than included in a film, as with the extra songs by Madonna on
the
Dick Tracy soundtrack album.
This concept of commercializing a film’s music separately from
the film itself goes as far back as the Silent Era. The love theme
composed for D. W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation
became a popular hit under the title
“The Perfect Song,” and much later it was used as the theme
song for the radio sitcom Amos
and Andy. The song “Whistle While You Work” is an integral

part of the 1937 Walt Disney film
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. For the 1942 classic
Casablanca, rather than composing an
original love theme for his Oscar-nominated score, Max Steiner
used the 1931 show tune “As
Time Goes By” that was indicated in the script (which suddenly
became a huge hit after the
film), as well as incorporating many other then-current pop
songs. Motifs from “As Time Goes
By” are interwoven throughout the entire score, and that song is
now inextricably connected
with Casablanca rather than the stage show it was originally
written for. See Table 8.1 for a
sample of films with hit songs throughout the decades.
Table 8.1 Movies with hit songs through the decades
The Birth of a Nation (1915) “The Perfect Song”
What Price Glory? (1926) “Charmaine”
The Wizard of Oz (1939) “Over the Rainbow”
Holiday Inn (1942) “White Christmas”
High Noon (1952) “Do Not Forsake Me”
The Graduate (1967) “Sounds of Silence”
Saturday Night Fever (1977) “Stayin’ Alive”
©Orion/courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ A music bio like Amadeus has the
luxury of creating a score directly
from Mozart’s compositions, but

choosing the best arrangements and
editing music that is so well known
presents its own challenges.
(continued)
Rocky III (1982) “Eye of the Tiger”
Top Gun (1986) “Take My Breath Away”
The Little Mermaid (1989) “Under the Sea”
Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves (1991) “I Do It for You”
Dreamgirls (2006) “Love You I Do”
A more contemporary example is the film
Garden State, written and directed by and
starring Zach Braff. A single song sets the
tone for the movie. Andrew, the main char-
acter, played by Braff, is waiting in a doc-
tor’s office when he sees a young woman,
Sam (Natalie Portman) waiting also, lis-
tening to headphones. She sees Andrew,
hands him the headphones, and says, “You
gotta hear this one song, it’ll change your
life, I swear.” The song is “New Slang” by
the Shins, and Braff lets it play as Andrew
listens. It perfectly captures the sensibil-
ity of the film—catchy, off beat, different.
The song was not written for the film, but
thanks to its inclusion in it, it easily became

the Shins’ bestselling song and made the
band much more popular as well. At times,
such a use of a song is done specifically to
cover holes in the plot and story, but in this case it set a tone
that the movie would follow
throughout.
Indeed, soundtracks are often closely identified with the movies
they support, and vice versa.
Easy Rider, Dennis Hopper’s seminal 1969 film about two
hippie bikers riding from Los Angeles
to New Orleans “looking for America,” makes the music heard
on the soundtrack an essential
part of the film. So important was the music to the film that
securing rights to the songs used up
more of the movie’s budget than anything else. It was also
something of a happy accident. Laszlo
Kovacs, the director of photography on Easy Rider, told
MovieMaker:
The editor, Donn Cambern, . . . transferred contemporary rock
and roll songs to magnetic
tape, and synched it randomly to the film, so every shot had
music behind it. Originally, he
was just making it more interesting, but the music became
inseparable from the pictures.
When the film was cut there was a discussion about who was
going to score it. They ended up
licensing the music that Donn was using. They spent $1 million
licensing music, which was
about three times the budget for shooting the rest of the film.
(Fisher, 2004)
Another influential soundtrack is the one for A Hard Day’s
Night, the 1964 film loosely based on

the crazy experience of living inside Beatlemania, starring the
Beatles themselves and directed by
Richard Lester. The John Lennon and Paul McCartney songs
written for the film would become
some of the band’s best-loved hits. The album’s popularity (it
spent 14 weeks at No. 1 in the United
States) as well as the quality went a long way toward
establishing the soundtrack as an accepted
©Universal/courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ Mamma Mia! is one of the highest-grossing movie
musicals
of all time. Its soundtrack, based on Abba songs, includes pre-
viously released music as well as new compositions created for
the film.
Sound Production Techniques Chapter 8
musical endeavor for bands, not just a tossed-off
side project. This was certainly the case by the
time of The Graduate (1967), directed by Mike
Nichols and starring Dustin Hoffman as a recent
college graduate. Songs such as “Mrs. Robinson”
and, especially, “The Sounds of Silence,” writ-
ten by Paul Simon and performed by Simon &
Garfunkel, were integral to the film. They helped
to establish the feelings of confusion and dissatis-
faction Hoffman’s character feels throughout the
movie. They also became major hit records, which
in turn promoted both the film and the band.
Saturday Night Fever, director John Badham’s
1977 film about a young, disaffected Brooklyn

man whose only escape from his dead-end life
is dancing in discos on the weekend, used its
soundtrack to capture not only the film’s moods
but also a moment in both music and society.
Soon would-be dancers were wearing white suits
with wide lapels in homage to Tony Manero, the character
played by John Travolta in the film. The
soundtrack would sell more than 15 million copies, and for a
time was the bestselling soundtrack
album of all time, besides immensely helping the emotional
content of the film.
Soundtrack songs enjoy a unique place in popular culture, in
that the best of them can stand
alone as art in their own right, yet when a soundtrack fits with a
movie just right, both the music
and the film become better than they would be alone.
8.5 Sound Production Techniques
Viewers may take for granted the use of sound with films, but
all the sounds must first be recorded,
and then added to accompany the picture. Unlike a home
camcorder, all films do not record all
sounds along with the picture. Next we will discuss some of the
techniques that make sound in
films possible.
Live Recording
The earliest experimental sound films either recorded
everything live as it was filmed or filmed
actors lip-synching to pre-recorded songs or dialogue scenes.
Both techniques continued after
sound technology became widely adopted, with live recording
being the most common. This is
one reason many early sound films avoided background music,

because to get the best quality it
had to be recorded during the scene with the orchestra off
camera, with a perfectly balanced mix
of the microphones recording the dialogue. Today, even though
many filmmakers have actors
record their lines in post-production, dialogue is still usually
recorded live as the camera films
the scene, using what is called double-system sound. This uses a
separate audio recorder (tape or
digital) connected by cable or wireless transmitter to a boom
microphone held by a boom opera-
tor just out of the camera range. The clapboard, a hinged board
connected to the slate listing the
film’s title, scene number, and take number, is used to
synchronize the picture and sound later.
The editor matches the first sound of the “clap” with the frame
showing the clapboard making
▲▲ Elvis Presley updates a folk ballad, “The Yellow Rose of
Texas,” in the romantic musical Viva Las Vegas.
contact, and then the recording remains in sync. With digital
pro-
duction, however, sound and image are usually recorded on the
same medium and transferred to computer together. Sometimes
live sound is recorded when the camera is not filming. This is
done
for sounds such as traffic, crowd walla, and nature sounds that
do
not need to be perfectly synchronized with the picture but

instead
provide background ambience. This may also be done for lines
of
dialogue that will occur off screen. Sound recorded this way is
called wild sound.
Post-Dubbing
Dubbing is the post-production process that records new sounds
(dialogue or sound effects) to match the picture. If anything
goes
wrong with the live recording, rather than taking the time for
retakes, individual lines or entire scenes will often be re-
recorded
using the ADR technique discussed earlier. Some directors use
the
live recordings as what they call a scratch track—to remind
them
of exactly what was said—but use ADR because of the greater
con-
trol it offers. ADR gives directors the ability to change lines or
inter-
pretations, or even to re-dub an entire actor’s performance with
another actor. Director Blake Edwards did this with actor
Claudia
Cardinale in The Pink Panther because she did not yet speak
English
fluently, and Producer Ray Harryhausen notes it happened with
the
two American leads on Jason and the Argonauts because their
accents did not fit with the other-
wise British cast. For many decades after sound was introduced,
Italian films usually recorded the
entire soundtracks after the fact, partly so international casts
could speak their own languages on

set, and partly so there would be no need to deal with hiding
microphones while shooting.
Even when recording live sound, many of the sound effects a
director may want are simply not
picked up by microphones positioned specifically to record the
dialogue. These are added later
through the Foley technique or mixing in stock sound effects or
wild recordings as described
previously. The background musical score is almost always
recorded after the film is edited, and
then mixed in with the dialogue and sound effects. Dialogue
tracks for foreign countries are often
post-dubbed (added after a film is shot and edited) in the
appropriate language. For this reason,
filmmakers are careful to prepare separate master recordings for
the music scores, the sound
effects, and the dialogue, to simplify the process of making
alternate versions. For instance, occa-
sionally the music rights cannot be cleared for TV or home
video versions of theatrical films
without great expense, so studios simply replace parts of the
music track with different songs.
Prerecorded Playback
While music scores are typically played in front of a screen
running the finished movie (just as
silent films were performed) and recorded for later post-
dubbing, songs that characters perform
on screen are more often pre-recorded in a sound studio to get
the best quality sound. Actors
then lip-synch the song as the director shoots it numerous times
from different angles. This
eliminates not only the need to hide microphones but also the
need for multiple cameras (as

required to film a live concert), keeping a consistency to the
sound from shot to shot that would
be impossible with a single camera shooting multiple
performances recorded live each time. It
Photo by Ray Tamarra/courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ Electronic clapboards use digital
readouts, which are useful in syn-
chronizing the different frame rates
of film and video.
also permits actors with mediocre singing ability to appear to
have the voices of professional
singers. Rare exceptions to this standard practice include the
2012 film version of Les Miserables
and Peter Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love (1975), which
recorded actors singing live while the
film was shot.
Multitrack Mixing (Mono and Stereo)
After all the film has been shot and sounds have been recorded,
the sound editor first builds
layers of different sounds to get the desired effect, combining
many different audio tracks each
containing individual sound effects, dialogue recordings, or
pieces of music that play back simul-
taneously while the volume of each can be adjusted separately.
He or she then must mix these
multiple tracks (known as multitrack mixing) into a finished
soundtrack of either a single audio

recording (in the case of mono sound), or more typically today
to a carefully designed and bal-
anced stereo track of six or eight separate channels, each
intended to be played back through a
different speaker. Often dozens of individual sound effects
tracks must be adjusted so each effect
has just the right volume at just the right time and comes out of
just the right speakers behind
the screen or around the auditorium. Music is seamlessly
combined with the rest of the sound
so audiences are often unaware of when it starts and finishes.
Sound effects and music must not
obscure important dialogue, an easier task when dialogue,
music, and effects are all recorded
separately. Dialogue can have its volume, tonal effects, and
apparent screen position manipulated
in the mixing process so that the soundtrack becomes an organic
blend of sounds that expresses
just what the director wants the audience to hear at any given
moment.
Skillful use of the soundtrack adds
immensely to the power of a film, support-
ing and enhancing the visual elements. The
control of volumes and stereo placements
can greatly affect how an audience per-
ceives the screen space. Special audio effects
might suggest characters’ subjective points
of view, flashbacks, dreams, or intoxica-
tion, or a scene may have completely real-
istic sounds. Some scenes may fade out all
dialogue to emphasize sound effects, such
as a beating heart or a noisy environment,
while other scenes will use only music to
carry the action, just as with silent films. Sound can be edited
independently from the picture, so

that the sound for one scene can begin slightly before the
previous scene has finished, or continue
after the next scene has started. Repetition of sounds may give
the audience audio flashbacks,
reminding them of scenes that already happened, or audio flash-
forwards, which may be confus-
ing until the scene they match finally appears.
When analyzing the impact of a film, it is important to consider
how the director’s use of sound
(or lack of it) intensifies, manipulates, and possibly even
defines the film’s overall content. Brian
DePalma’s Blow Out showcases how movies use sound
creatively with a plot about a film sound
technician (John Travolta) who believes he has accidentally
recorded a murder while recording
wild location sounds. Films such as Twister might almost be
considered demonstration films for
spectacular digital stereo sound mixes, and if seen on a TV set
or computer with a single tiny
speaker, the entire intent of the film may be lost.
©Warner Bros. Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ Gravity takes place in outer space. Sound plays an
important
role in shaping our perceptions of a world that is alien, unfa-
miliar, and actually mostly silent.
Summary and Resources Chapter 8
Summary and Resources
Chapter Summary

Sound is one of the most overlooked elements of making a
movie—and one of the most important.
Filmmakers can control the sounds audiences hear while they’re
watching the picture, using only
natural diegetic sounds such as dialogue and sound effects,
using complementary non-diegetic
sounds such as background music or enhanced sound effects to
intensify the moods, or using
unrealistic sounds for dramatic or comic counterpoint to the
image.
Even during the Silent Era, films were not truly silent. Acting
and filmmaking styles took into
account the absence of audible dialogue and sound effects, but a
musical accompaniment was
always expected. Theater musicians played scores that helped
audiences become emotionally
involved in the story. When recorded sound was finally
introduced, the spoken word and sound
effects would become central to the story of almost every
movie. Audience demand for “talk-
ies” was so great that silent film production was abandoned by
about 1930 (with a few notable
exceptions).
Sound recording technology evolved quickly from acoustic and
electro-mechanical processes
to optical and magnetic analog processes, to digital processes.
Theaters initially played sound
through a single speaker (mono sound), but later multi-track
stereophonic sound allowed film-
makers to exploit directional audio in telling their stories. First
used as a gimmick, stereo sur-
round sound with low-frequency subwoofers eventually became
the norm, and the impact of
movie sound technology would become so great that it would

carry over into homes.
The three categories of movie sound—dialogue, sound effects,
and music—work together with
the picture but are treated separately during production. Good
movie dialogue may become so
popular that it enters everyday conversation as a cultural
shorthand. While dialogue conveys
much story information, the best dialogue enhances the image
rather than replacing it. Sound
effects, likewise, can be used merely to intensify action or to
enhance the sense of environment.
Music, as it has since the Silent Era, pulls viewers into the
mood of scenes, but it may also be used
to identify characters and situations with popular songs. Movie
soundtrack recordings, the music
used in or inspired by a film, would become key marketing
elements; soundtracks would often
become bestselling albums, CDs, and, eventually, downloads.
Dialogue is usually recorded live while a film is shot; however,
most sounds heard in films are
added later (often including dialogue) using post-dubbing
processes such as ADR and Foley
recording. Background music is usually recorded after the film
is edited, while songs performed
on screen are typically pre-recorded for actors to lip-synch to
while filming. All of a film’s indi-
vidually recorded sounds are mixed together into its final
soundtrack. Sounds may be added,
subtracted, and manipulated to suggest states of mind, to
anticipate or recall other events of the
story, or any other reason a filmmaker decides upon.
In sum, it is almost impossible to overstate the importance of
sound in film—and equally dif-

ficult to explain why it is so rarely given its proper due. The
contemporary film is inconceivable
without it.
Questions to Ask Yourself About Sound and Music When
Viewing a Film
• What kind of sound is present in the film? (dialogue,
sound effects, music)
• Whose dialogue do you hear in the film?
• When and where do sound effects appear?
• What kind of music is present? When does it appear?
• Is there a voice-over narrator, and if so, is it one of the
film’s characters or some omniscient
storyteller? What effect does this have on your understanding of
the film?
You Try It
1. Watch a silent film, such as Buster Keaton’s The General,
Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights,
William Wellman’s Wings, or F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, and
compare the acting styles,
camera movement, and overall style of the filmmaking with a
contemporary film. With
The General, Wings, or Nosferatu, watch it with two or more of
the alternate music scores
included on the DVD (or get multiple DVDs with different
scores) and compare the differ-
ences in its effect.

2. Using an action film of your choice, cue up an intense action
sequence—but do not watch
the screen. Instead, listen only to the sound, and discuss the
experience of how it shapes the
scene. Then play it again with the sound turned off, and again
with both sound and picture,
and compare the three. Does the version without sound have the
same impact as the version
with it? Could you tell what was occurring in the sequence
when you could hear the sound
only and not see the picture? Go to www.movieclips.com and
search for the following clip
from the film Jaws to view an effective scene for testing this:
“Predator in the Pond”
3. Watch a scene from a film made before 1960 and listen to
the score—the orchestrated
music that accompanies the action in the film. Now do the same
for a scene in a film made
after 1980. Are the scores produced any differently? What
differences do you notice? For
examples, go to www.movieclips.com and search for the
following clips in order:
“Leaving for Battle” (from Gone With the Wind, 1939)
“Across the Moon” (from E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, 1982)
“Dream a Little Bigger” (from Inception, 2010)
4. Try to think of five films that use popular (contemporary)
songs to help tell their stories.
Do they rely too much on the music as a narrative device? Or do
the songs legitimately help
advance the plot?

5. Try to recall a scene in a film that uses sound effects in some
unrealistic way—either raising
one or more sounds to a much louder volume than you’d expect
from the camera position
(e.g., a loud clock ticking in a long shot, heartbeats, or
breathing) or completely eliminating
sounds you’d expect to hear. For example, in Saving Private
Ryan, much of the invasion of
Normandy is conducted in silence. What effect does it have on
the scene, and why do you
think the director did it? Go to www.movieclips.com and search
for the following clip to
view a sequence from the scene:
“Omaha Beach”
Key Terms
automated dialogue replacement (ADR) Computer-based post-
production process for re-
recording dialogue that for some reason is unsatisfactory.
http://www.movieclips.com/
www.movieclips.com
http://www.movieclips.com/
www.movieclips.com
www.movieclips.com
www.movieclips.com
http://www.movieclips.com
www.movieclips.com
clapboard A device that can make a loud sound used for
synchronizing separately recorded

sound and picture and that has an attached slate to note which
scene and take is being
recorded.
dialogue Spoken words by two or more characters in a scene.
diegetic Existing within a film’s story world; its opposite is
non-diegetic, which refers to some-
thing experienced by the audience but not the characters (such
as background mood music or
title cards).
dubbing See post-dubbing.
Foley artist Someone who watches a scene and makes
appropriate noises that are recorded
close up, permitting better clarity than possible with live
recordings when microphones are out
of range.
monaural sound Sound that comes from a single (mono) source,
although it is often mixed
from multiple sources.
multitrack mixing Post-production process of combining
multiple recorded sounds into one
finished soundtrack.
non-diegetic Not existing within a film’s story world;
experienced by the audience but not the
characters (such as background mood music or title cards). Its
opposite is diegetic, which refers
to something experienced by both the audience and the
characters.
post-dubbing The process of adding sound to a film after the

picture has already been shot
and edited.
score The background mood music that accompanies the action
on the screen, usually com-
posed specifically for a film but sometimes partly or entirely
compiled from existing music.
scratch track A temporary soundtrack used during editing,
consisting of the live recorded
location sound before any ADR or Foley has been added, and
generic background mood music
to indicate where music will be after the composer has finished
the score.
Sensurround Short-lived technical process for providing extra-
loud low-frequency sound
effects to movies.
Silent Era A period from approximately 1893 to 1929, when
commercial movies did not
include recorded sound. Music scores and sometimes limited
sound effects were performed live
in the theaters at each showing.
soundstage A large, soundproof, warehouse-like building used
for building movie sets that
require live sound recording.
soundtrack The part of the film containing all the recorded
sound (music, dialogue, and sound
effects), typically recorded to a digital, analog optical, or
magnetic format that may be on the
film itself or played in synchronization with the picture. Also
used as a term for a separate com-
pilation of songs and music selections used in the film and sold

as a promotional tool for both
the film and the songs.
stereophonic sound Sound that comes from two or more sources,
creating a more realistic
sound field in which the ears can locate the direction from
which sounds are coming. Stereo
sound for films typically has three speakers behind the screen
(left, center, right) and two or
more surround speakers on the auditorium walls.
surround sound Movie sound that comes from speakers
throughout the auditorium rather
than from behind the screen.
synchronized sound Sound played back in perfect
synchronization with the picture, whether
or not it was recorded at the same time.
talkies The first movies with recorded sound. Silent movies had
always had music scores and
sometimes sound effects (performed live), but talkies
introduced audible dialogue. Short for
“talking pictures.”
title cards Printed words that appear on the screen between
shots of the action, often used
to introduce scenes and in the case of Silent Era films to display
critical lines of dialogue; also
called subtitles or inter-titles.

voice-over Words spoken by a narrator not seen on the screen,
who may or may not be a char-
acter in the film.
walla Generic crowd noises.
wild sound Sound recorded when no picture is being
photographed and for which precise
synchronization is unnecessary (e.g., crowd noises, wind,
traffic), added to the film during
post-production.
Editing 7
The essence of cinema is editing.
It’s the combination of what can be
extraordinary images of people during
emotional moments, or images in a general
sense, put together in a kind of alchemy.
—Francis Ford Coppola
Still from 127 Hours (2010). ©Fox Searchlight Pictures. All
rights reserved./courtesy Everett Collection
What Is Editing? Chapter 7

Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the
following:
• Describe how editing can affect a film’s pacing, plot
structure, and perception of its mise en
scène.
• Explain how editing can juggle plot threads and rearrange
the order of story content for
dramatic effect.
• Identify the basic building blocks editing uses to tell a
story, including how a variety of
transitions can affect perception of time.
• Define systems of editing, such as continuity editing,
discontinuity editing, and the mon-
tage theory, and describe how editing guides what a viewer is
seeing and hearing in order
to refocus attention and to enhance or even completely change
what was in the script.
7.1 What Is Editing?
In narrative movies, the story idea usually comes first, and the
screenwriter puts his or her vision
into words, describing what will be seen on the screen. With
most movies, the director chooses
and arranges what will actually be in the scene (the mise en
scène) and how it plays out. The cin-
ematographer composes various images in the camera that force
the audience to view only part
of what is in the scene, and to view it in a specific way with
each shot. The editor then decides
which of those shots to use, in what order they appear, and how

long they are on the screen. This
can have a critical effect on how well an audience can pick up
on what the director has put into
the scene. Directors typically work closely with both the
cinematographer and editor to make
sure their visions coincide. There are cases, however, when a
director who wants to maintain
personal control may shoot a scene in such a way that it can be
edited in only one way, or is in one
continuous take with no alternate angles to cut to. Alfred
Hitchcock’s Rope is a rather extreme
example, an 80-minute film with only 10 individual shots
running 5 to 10 minutes each and five
of the cuts disguised to make it appear like only five individual
shots. Sometimes viewers of Rope
have the impression that the entire film was shot in one long
take because the few cuts it employs
seem so natural that they’re not perceived as cuts. Effective
editing is sometimes called “invisible”
editing. This is because viewers often do
not even realize when a shot changes from,
say, a two-shot to a close-up of one actor,
or even from one location to another, if the
editor appropriately anticipates what view-
ers want to see and when they want to see
it, and remembers to maintain a plausible
continuity between shots.
Some films take the opposite approach and
use certain scenes to show off their abil-
ity to edit numerous shots together, as in
the battle scenes of 300, action sequences
in XXX and Star Trek Into Darkness, and
party scenes in Baz Luhrman’s remake of The Great Gatsby. A

film such as Run Lola Run (Lola
Rennt) looks from beginning to end almost like an exercise in
all the possible techniques of edit-
ing. The montage theory of editing, which will be discussed
later, is a rebellion against the idea
of invisible editing, and instead considers that not only is
editing the most important aspect
©Warner Bros. Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection
▲▲ In Baz Luhrman’s The Great Gatsby, a flurry of short shots
edited together adds to the quick-paced, almost frenzied
nature of the party scenes.
What Is Editing? Chapter 7
of filmmaking but that the joining of shots should intentionally
juxtapose disparate images to
create new meaning. Most standard character dramas and
comedies, however, tend to use func-
tional continuity editing that serves the story and does not call
attention to itself. Editing can
shorten scenes that were shot, tighten them to pick up the pace
and increase dramatic tension,
and lengthen scenes, stretching out reactions longer than they
were originally delivered by the
actors on the set and so slowing the pace for dramatic emphasis.
Typically, using fewer and lon-
ger takes in a scene slows the pacing, while using more shots of
briefer screen time quickens the
pacing. (Compare, for example, the divergent editing styles in
the 1974 and 2013 versions of The
Great Gatsby.) Editing can even rearrange or eliminate words,
actions, or entire sequences—

segments made up of closely related scenes. For example, the
last scene in the script might be
split in half, with the first half placed at the beginning of the
film so that the middle of the picture
becomes an extended flashback. The entire plot structure can be
changed through the editing.
Quentin Tarantino has stated that the edited movie is really the
final draft of the script. And of
course editing can change the film yet again through various
stages from “roughcut” to “preview
print,” undergoing revisions for the “premiere” version and
often a shortened “theatrical cut”
(sometimes slightly different for different countries), then a
revised “director’s cut” for home
video, and sometimes even a later “definitive director’s cut.”
Changes in different editions may be
due to ratings or censorship concerns. They may be made to
make story clarity more obvious for
certain target audiences. Or scenes may be deleted simply to
shorten the running time so theaters
can schedule more showings per day.
To understand what goes into editing, it can be a useful exercise
to read original screenplays in
various drafts, and then to compare them with the finished film,
if possible, in its various cuts.
A select few DVDs and Blu-ray discs include the film’s
screenplay, sometimes as a DVD-ROM
file (as with Nurse Betty, The Stunt Man, and Peter Jackson’s
2005 remake of King Kong) and
occasionally as a file designed to appear on screen while you
watch the film (as with Pirates of
the Caribbean, Taxi Driver, Pleasantville, and American
Beauty). Articles and entire books have
examined particular films from script to screen in their many
different incarnations along the

way. A few films are available on DVD or Blu-ray in multiple
versions that can allow you to trace
the modifications in two or more different cuts for yourself,
including Steven Spielberg’s Close
Encounters of the Third Kind, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Luc
Besson’s Leon: The Professional,
and Oliver Stone’s Alexander, among others. Many foreign-
language films are drastically recut
for American release, primarily to shorten them and speed up
pacing, but also to eliminate char-
acter development and subplots deemed unnecessary for the
basic storyline or too confusing for
American audiences. It can be instructive to compare the very
different versions of films such as
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard and
Senso, or Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla
(a.k.a. Gojira), to name just a few. Do the changes improve the
films for an audience with a differ-
ent cultural background, do they destroy the director’s original
intent, or do they merely present
the same basic story differently?
Another useful exercise is to watch your favorite films over
again, picking out an especially impres-
sive scene to view repeatedly, sometimes in slow motion, so you
can observe all the different shots
that make up the scene. Try to understand how the editor’s
choices affect how you perceive the
scene’s pacing, and how you notice specific props or actions
more clearly at key moments than if
different shots were used or a different number of shots were
cut together over the same screen
time. Additionally, if a DVD or Blu-ray edition of a film offers
the opportunity in its supple-
mentary features, it can be very instructive to watch unedited
takes of a scene and then see the

complete edited scene (and possibly alternate edited versions)
immediately following. Certain
DVDs include bonus features that break down selected scenes
shot by shot, explaining how a
sequence is constructed, sometimes comparing it with the
shooting script and “storyboards” or
Rearranging the Story Into a Plot Chapter 7
“animatics” that directors use to pre-visu-
alize the scenes. Others give you the option
of viewing alternate camera angles during a
scene. Sometimes (as with the Men in Black
Deluxe Edition) they even let you rearrange
shots or remix the audio to see the effect
that has.
In this chapter, we will examine some of
the basic tools of editing, which is one of
the elements of filmmaking that occurs in
post-production, or after principal pho-
tography is completed. However, some
aspects of editing may begin before film-
ing ends, as the director will look at dai-
lies, or the footage shot during a given day.
Every editor, like every director, has his or
her own style. And, as with the director’s
relationship with the cinematographer, his
or her relationship and level of cooperation and supervision
with the editor vary from film to
film. But most editors operate with these tools at their disposal,
so a working knowledge of them
should help us to understand how the film is put together.

7.2 Rearranging the Story Into a Plot
Before we get into the technical details of what goes into
editing, you must understand the pur-
pose of editing; briefly, it is to arrange the screenwriter’s story
and cinematographer’s shots into
the film’s final plot. The writer puts story elements into a plot
in a certain order, the director
oversees their filming, but the editor is the one who assembles
everything into the final movie. Directors rely upon their
editors
to make sense of all the little pieces, not only to bring out the
best
performances of the actors but also to enhance the themes of the
story and ensure the audience can follow what is going on.
Because
most films are not shot in chronological order, but in the order
in
which scheduling, weather, and other factors make the most
sense,
it is crucial for the editor to put the story back together for the
audience.
For instance, in a huge, epic film like The Right Stuff, in which
par-
allel stories of the men first assigned to the Mercury space
program
and test pilot Chuck Yeager are told, it is essential that the
various
storylines hold together. Otherwise, the audience is left
confused,
making the film unnecessarily complicated. The editing team of
Glenn Farr, Lisa Fruchtman, Stephen A. Rotter, Douglas
Steward,

▲▲ Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange was originally
released with an X rating. Because of concerns about sex and
violence, some VHS editions were later edited and released
with an R rating.
◀▲The complexities of the parallel stories in The Right Stuff
(1983)
have roots going back to D. W. Griffith’s 1915 and 1916
masterworks.
Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance were films that
pio-
neered multiple-storyline filmmaking.
©Warner Bros./courtesy Everett Collection
and Tom Rolf had to keep the stories flowing in a sensible
order, even as focus shifted from Yeager
to the astronauts and back, while also incorporating historical
footage of space shots. The editing
team clearly excelled at this, as they won the Academy Award
for their efforts, and the film, all
193 minutes of it, was nominated for Best Picture.
Importance of the Editor
Film editing is a somewhat different discipline than what we
think of as editing in other art forms.
One thinks of the editor of a book, for instance, checking for
grammar and spelling errors, but
also ensuring that the writer has constructed a story that makes

sense, that one chapter reason-
ably follows another (unless there is an artistic reason for it not
to), and that the assorted chapters
hold together as a whole work. The film editor’s role parallels
this to some degree, but he or she
does more: The film editor helps create the film, literally
constructing it, piecing together differ-
ent takes of individual scenes and then placing the selected
scenes in the order that tells the story
the director wants to tell. The editor’s role is crucial to the
making of a successful film. Editing
determines not only the order in which elements from the story
occur in the film’s plot, but also
the frequency (how many times we see them) and the duration
(how long they last on the screen).
And yet the best editing doesn’t call attention to itself (unless
the story calls for it). Instead, even
if it involves incongruous editing, or putting sequences together
out of order, it is still done
in service to the story. Poor editing does the audience the
ultimate disservice when it comes to
film—it makes its members aware that they are seeing a film,
taking them out of the transforma-
tive experience going to the movies should be.
How important is the editor’s job? Actress Natalie Portman was
asked in an interview whether
she could tell if a film was good or bad while she was in the
process of shooting it. “I can’t at all,”
Portman said. “It really, I feel like, always happens in the
editing room. That’s why, whether it
comes out good or bad, you sort of can’t take credit for it”
(Goodykoontz, 2009d).
Chronological Order

Often a film is cut with the scenes arranged in
chronological order. This makes sense; most
stories are told in this way, and they are easy to
follow. We simply watch one scene unfold after
another, from beginning to end. Don’t mistake
this for simplistic storytelling, however. Some
are complex stories, such as Miller’s Crossing,
the Coen brothers’ 1990 film about a gang-
ster (Gabriel Byrne) who plays two rival bosses
(Albert Finney and Jon Polito) against each
other. There are numerous twists and turns as
loyalties shift to suit the whims of the charac-
ters. Yet the film has a clear beginning, middle,
and end. This is also useful when a scene refers to
another that has gone before it. For instance, at
one point Byrne’s character is dispatched to kill
a crooked bookie (John Turturro). The bookie
pleads for his life, begging Byrne’s character to
“look into your heart.” Seemingly moved, Byrne
Mary Evans/C20TH FOX/Ronald Grant/courtesy Everett
Collection
▲▲ In the film Miller’s Crossing , the Coen brothers push
the familiar gangster genre in new and unexpected direc-
tions. The brothers are best known for breathing new life
into familiar formulas.
lets him go. Later in the film, however, Byrne’s character is
again about to shoot the bookie.
Again, he pleads, “Look into your heart.” Byrne’s character

says dismissively, “What heart?” and
shoots the bookie between the eyes. The scene is much more
effective and powerful because of
our knowledge of what has come before, informing us that in
the previous scene, Byrne’s charac-
ter let the bookie live temporarily to serve his own purposes.
Incongruous Editing
Other films make intentional use of incongruous editing, or
jumping around in time. Quentin
Tarantino rearranges story events in Pulp Fiction so that we see
some things long after they’ve
already happened in the plot thread we’ve been following, and
we see certain things a second
time from a different point of view. In 1941, Orson Welles’s
Citizen Kane became famous for the
way it told the life story of its title character through multiple
flashbacks, some of them overlap-
ping, from different points of view, using a framing plot thread
that shows a reporter interview-
ing people who knew him. Not nearly so influential but several
years before that film, The Sin
of Nora Moran related most of its story through flashbacks
within flashbacks and even dreams
within those flashbacks, sometimes making it a challenge to
keep track of what was going on
until the end.
In Don’t Look Now, discussed earlier for its use of color, there
is an intense sex scene between
Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. It drew attention in part
because of the frank and rela-
tively explicit way in which it is shot, especially for the time.
But the scene is also notable for the
unusual way in which it is cut. Director Nicholas Roeg cuts

between shots of the couple making
love to scenes of them dressing for dinner afterward, then back
again. The unorthodox editing
helps to further establish a central theme of the film, which
plays with the idea of time through-
out. Sutherland’s character seems to have the gift of
premonition, though he is skeptical. Still,
he sees things that others do not, and it is unclear to him and
the audience when these events
are taking place. The jumping around in time during the sex
scene helps to accentuate the fluid
nature of time in the film.
Sidney Lumet’s complexly plotted heist thriller Before the
Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007) con-
stantly jumps back and forth in time, repeating scenes or partial
scenes but following different
characters, slightly overlapping some of the action before
continuing with the story and jumping
back again to where a previous scene had left off. To avoid
audience confusion, often a superim-
posed title lets the audience know when a new scene is taking
place and which character will
be the focus. We know most of the basic story within the first
10 minutes, but we learn more
and more details about things that were happening
simultaneously, until we finally see how it
all ends in the very last scene of the movie. Vantage Point, a
2008 action thriller about a plot to
assassinate the president, has a similar structure of repeating
scenes from different viewpoints,
adding new layers to the story information until finally allowing
the end to unfold chronologi-
cally. In Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), the basic story is shown
chronologically, but we sometimes see
a shot of Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) followed by flashbacks of

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