Personal blog #5

Now that our brilliant web designers have moved on and turned the helm over to us, we should climb up the rigging and have a good look around from the crow’s nest. That ought to be enough of that tired nautical metaphor, so I will say that, since retiring from teaching, I’m having a great time working on these projects. The research is certainly time-consuming, but I feel richly rewarded by learning more about old films. Surprisingly to me, it turns out that every movie clip I choose to analyze reveals different details about how the sound works. I guess I expected repeated patterns with all the sonic “food groups” in a final mix being similarly organized. But movie jobs are not homogeneously fabricated, even when forged by the old Big Studio system.

From our vantage point, ninety seven years or so since sound first haltingly joined image in the new art of Sound Cinema, we can only listen critically to the single monaural tracks that played in the theaters, and then we speculate: Do we hear a sound effect or production sound? Is that a loop when she said that? Do I hear Foley here? It is complicated, and one always has to consider the context, movie by movie, clip by clip, shot by shot. We were not there in the edit rooms. We were not there at the mix, but you can presume that mixers always attempted to bury the “brushstrokes” of their artistic technique, subsuming them into what should be seamless storytelling. And it’s the very seamless nature of professional movie sound mixes that requires us to simply speculate about what we’re hearing.

The film sound scholar Michel Chion, who is also an experimental sound creator and a musician, argued (I paraphrase from Claudia Gorbman’s translation) that a film shot has a finite length, but sound will move through a scene in a flow that defies measurement.

Status of backgrounders and video tours:

As of this writing, we have downloadable Backgrounders and Video Sound Tours ready to view for 3:10 to Yuma, A Man Escaped, Act of Violence, Across the Pacific, He Walked by Night, Svengali, and Jamaica Inn.

We are currently working on, and hope to complete soon, Backgrounders and Video Sound Tours for these titles:

Foreign Correspondent (1940, Dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

Phantom Lady (1944, Dir. Robert Siodmak)

Laurel and Hardy’s The Music Box (1932, Dir. James Parrot)

Rear Window (1954, Dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

and The Hurricane (1937, Dir. John Ford)

Let me also share a long wish list – over 50 more titles that I see as future subjects of study. These are films for which I have already examined clips and would like to begin work on Video Tours and Backgrounders when possible. Alphabetically, they are:

A Letter to Three Wives (1949, Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

À Nous La Liberté (1931, Dir. René Clair)

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, Dir. Lewis Milestone)

Arsène Lupin (1932, Dir. Jack Conway)

Cat People (1942, Dir. Jacques Tourneur)

Chimes at Midnight (1965, Dir. Orson Welles)

D.O.A. (1949, Dir. Rudolph Maté)

Dark Passage (1947, Dir. Delmer Daves)

Diabolique [Les diaboliques] (1955, Dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot)

Double Indemnity (1944, Dir. Billy Wilder)

Frankenstein (1931, Dir. James Whale)

I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932, Dir. Mervyn LeRoy)

Isle of Fury (1936, Dir. Frank McDonald)

Journey into Fear (1943, Dir. Norman Foster & Orson Welles)

Kiss Me Deadly (1955, Dir. Robert Aldrich)

Lady in the Lake (1947, Dir. Robert Montghomery)

Little Caesar (1931, Dir. Mervyn LeRoy)

M [M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder] (1931, Dir. Fritz Lang)

Moby Dick (1930, Dir. Lloyd Bacon)

Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday [Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot] (1953, Dir. Jacques Tati)

Montana Moon (1930, Dir. Malcolm St. Clair)

Mystery Street (1950, Dir. John Sturges)

Not So Dumb (1930, Dir. King Vidor)

Only Angels Have Wings (1939, Dir. Howard Hawks)

Raffles (1930, Dir. George Fitzmaurice & Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast)

Rififi [Du rififi chez les hommes] (1955, Dir. Jules Dassin)

Saboteur (1942, Dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

Scarface (1932, Dir. Howard Hawks & Richard Rosson)

Showboat (1929, Dir. Harry A. Pollard & Arch Heath)

Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932, Dir. W.S. Van Dyke)

The Big Sleep (1946, Dir. Howard Hawks)

The Bride Came C.O.D. (1941, Dir. William Keighley)

The Criminal Code (1930, Dir. Howard Hawks)

The Fallen Sparrow (1943, Dir. Richard Wallace)

The French Connection (1971, Dir. William Friedkin)

The Front Page (1931, Dir. Lewis Milestone)

The Great Dictator (1940, Dir. Charles Chaplin)

The Haunting (1963, Dir. Robert Wise)

The Hook (1963, Dir. George Seaton)

The Lady from Shanghai (1947, Dir. Orson Welles)

The Long Voyage Home (1940, Dir. John Ford)

The Maltese Falcon (1931, Dir. Roy del Ruth)

The Maltese Falcon (1941, Dir. John Huston)

The Mask of Dimitrios (1944, Dir. Jean Negulesco)

The Sea Wolf (1941, Dir. Michael Curtiz)

The Spy in Black (1939, Dir. Michael Powell)

The Third Man (1949, Dir. Carol Reed)

The Trouble with Harry (1955, Dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

The Valiant (1929, Dir. William K. Howard)

The Window (1949, Dir. Ted Tetzlaff)

Too Hot to Handle (1938, Dir. Jack Conway)

Torrid Zone (1940, Dir. William Keighley)

Touch of Evil (1958, Dir. Orson Welles)

Waterloo Bridge (1931, Dir. James Whale)

Wedding Rehearsal (1932, Dir. Alexander Korda)

Woman in the Dunes [Suna no onna] (1964, Dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara)

Back to the crow’s nest view: Just retiring from the classroom was not enough to enable this project to unfold. I have had great support from my wife Kathleen, who makes heroic efforts to keep me active and healthy. The only challenge (besides the usual, predictable moments of computer “Tech Hell”) I have encountered in making Sound of a Shot is the extent to which allergies have occasionally gummed-up my speaking voice when I want to record narrations for the video sound tours. This you will have to tolerate, I suppose.