CINEMA OF NOISE PART 9: #81 - 90
Listening to films.
CINEMA OF NOISE #90 - May 18th 2016
+ The Godfather [1972] directed by Francis Ford Coppola
- footsteps • toilet flush • passing train • restaurant • plate • cutlery • chair • voice • train screeching • tracks • metal • gun shots • body fall
"You provoke the audience to complete a circle of which you’ve only drawn a part. Each person being unique, they will complete that in their own way. When they have done that, the wonderful part of it is that they re-project that completion onto the film. They actually are seeing a film that they are, in part, creating: both in terms of juxtaposition of images and, then, juxtaposition of sound versus image and, then, image following sound, and all kinds of those variations."
"I always try to be metaphoric as much as I can and not to be literal. When you’re presented with something that doesn’t quite resolve on a normal level, that’s what makes the audience go deeper. Again, that train screech in Godfather is a good example. It doesn’t make any sense from what you’re looking at. You haven’t been shown a train anywhere in the neighborhood. The loudness with which you hear it is too loud. Even if you were in a restaurant right under an elevated train, it wouldn’t quite be that loud. So the audience is presented with a discontinuity. They’re looking at very still images, close-ups of people talking in a foreign language, and yet they’re hearing something completely different. That forces them to say, "What is that? What could that be?" Again, not consciously but subconsciously. And, as a result, they come up with a feeling about Michael’s state of mind, and then they re-project that feeling onto his face. And in addition to what Al Pacino was doing, there’s this whole other dimension that gets added to that." [Walter Murch, Sound Doctrine: An Interview with Walter Murch]
Sound Department [IMDB]
Charles Grenzbach ... re-recordist (as Bud Grenzbach)
Christopher Newman ... production recordist
Richard Portman ... re-recordist
Howard Beals ... sound effects editor (uncredited)
Steve Cook ... adr mixer (uncredited)
Pierre Jalbert ... assistant sound editor (uncredited)
Les Lazarowitz ... boom operator (uncredited)
CINEMA OF NOISE #89 - May 16th 2016
+ Barton Fink [1991] directed by The Coen Brothers
- footsteps • suitcase • fan • voice • elevator • door • metal • bell • floorboard • wind • keys • backgroud traffic • spring bed • movement • window • squeaks • typewriter case • waves • music • seagulls • exhale • fly • clangs
Randy Thom discussing the use of the long bell in Barton Fink [1991]:
"Obviously, the Directors wanted to make this place, this hotel lobby, feel odd. They had a variety of tools at their disposal to accomplish that goal. Many less imaginative directors would have chosen to use an odd piece of musical score as their main sonic tool. The Coens chose to use no score at all. Instead, they staged the entire scene around a bit of sound design. The strangely lengthy bell ring, and the odd twist it gives to the place, are the focus of the sequence. The actors, the cameras, the lights, the props, etc. were directed to serve the performance of that bell. Why aren’t more scenes structured in this way, allowing a sound idea to influence the creative decisions in all the other crafts? One reason is that we, and the directors we work for, are used to thinking of sound as icing on the cake. The last thing in the process. The best sound is baked into the cake beginning in pre-production, from the earliest…. possible…. time." [Randy Thom, 2013 Designingsound.org article]
Sound Department [IMDB]
Allan Byer ... production sound mixer
Jean Marie Carroll ... sound recordist
Missy Cohen ... apprentice sound editor
Randall Coleman ... assistant sound editor (as Randy Coleman)
Marko A. Costanzo ... foley artist
Lee Dichter ... sound re-recording mixer
William Docker ... assistant sound editor (as Bill Docker)
Harry Higgins ... sound re-recordist
Bradford L. Hohle ... stereo sound consultant: Dolby
Kerry Kelley ... sound re-recordist
Frank Kern ... sound editor
Peter F. Kurland ... boom operator
Blake Leyh ... sound editor
Skip Lievsay ... supervising sound editor
Marissa Littlefield ... sound editor
Bruce Pross ... foley supervisor
Anne Sawyer ... assistant sound editor
Gail Showalter ... adr editor
Philip Stockton ... dialogue supervisor
Dominick Tavella ... foley mixer
Steven Visscher ... sound editor
CINEMA OF NOISE #88 - May 13th 2016
+ Easy Rider [1969] directed by Dennis Hopper
- music loop • birds • prayer • voices • traffic • siren • noise • crying • shouting
"Why is 'Easy Rider' relevant today? What matters is the spirit, the idea of using the medium of film to truly create something revolutionary." [Tom Folson, 2013 indiewire article]
Sound Department [IMDB]
James Contrares ... boom operator
Le Roy Robbins ... sound mixer
James Nelson ... supervising sound editor (uncredited)
CINEMA OF NOISE #87 - May 11th 2016
+ Koyaanisqatsi [1982] directed by Godfrey Reggio
- crowd • radio • voices • television • music • electronic messages • machines • news report • telephone • electronic beep
Sound Department [IMDB]
David Brownlow ... sound effects recording
Doc Goldstein ... audio technical assistant
David W. Gray ... stereo sound consultant: Dolby
David B. Hancock ... organ location recording
Joe Lopes ... recording engineer: RCA Studios
Dominick Maita ... recording engineer: RPM Studios
Steve Maslow ... re-recording mixer (as Steve Maslow C.A.S.)
Tom Meloney ... dubbing machine recordist
David Rivas ... sound effects editor / sound effects recording
Thomas Scott ... sound consultant (as Tom Scott)
Michael Stocker ... audio and electronic engineering / sound effects recording
Randy Thom ... sound effects recording
CINEMA OF NOISE #86 - May 8th 2016
+ Eraserhead [1977] directed by David Lynch
- hum • noise • drone • voice • baby crying • organ • rumble • whoosh • wind
"[Sound] can add so much emotion to a film. It’s a thing that can add all the mood and create a larger world. It sets the tone and it moves things. Sound is a great 'pull' into a different world. And it has to work with the picture – but without it you’ve lost half the film [...] But it has to do with the way cinema can work, it’s really a rare event, because there’s not that many people experimenting with cinema – it’s gone down to telling a surface story. But there’s this form – people, the audience, now know the form. They know that there’s a certain amount of time spent introducing this, then there’s this, and then there’s the next part – so they feel the end coming. And so there’s not a lot of room for surprises. There are a lot of ways to make the cinema. There are stories that will change the form and those are the kinds of stories I really love. And these stories make you work with the sound. When it works, it’s a thrill, it’s a magical thing and it takes you to, you know, a higher place." [Larry Sider interview with David Lynch, from Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures 1998-2001]
Sound Department [IMDB]
David Lynch ... sound effects
Alan Splet ... location sound (as Alan R. Splet) / sound editor (as Alan R. Splet) / sound effects (as Alan R. Splet)
David Lynch ... music
CINEMA OF NOISE #85 - May 4th 2016
+ Code Unknown [2000] directed by Michael Haneke
- passing truck • construction site • machinery • wind • voice
"My films are intended as polemical statements against the American ‘barrel down’ cinema and its dis-empowerment of the spectator." [Michael Haneke, Film as Catharsis]
Sound Department [IMDB]
Franck Cartaut ... fragment sound assistant
Edouard d'Heucqueville ... sound mix technician
Dominique Eyraud ... boom operator
Eric Ferret ... sound mixer
Judith Guittier ... assistant foley artist
Jean-Pierre Laforce ... sound mixer
Lionel Lebras ... boom operator: post-synchronisation
Laurent Lévy ... sound effects editor
Nadine Muse ... sound editor
Guillaume Sciama ... sound engineer
CINEMA OF NOISE #84 - May 1st 2016
+ The Survivalist [2015] directed by Stephen Fingleton
- stream • splashing • shouting • footsteps • movement • grass • birds • trees • gun handling • breeze • breathing • loading gun • gun shot
"The script didn’t have a lot of dialogue to begin with. We actually ended up taking out most of it during rehearsal. We found ways of telling the film silently, which we all thought was more effective [...] One of the biggest issues we had was in post-production. Creating the sound of the film was kind of uncharted territory because we didn’t have any music. We told the story of the film through the sound design. It sat in a world where there’s no traffic, no cars; so the sound was very exposed. It’s very unusual to hear true silence in our modern age. " [Stephen Fingleton interview in Screendaily]
Sound Department [IMDB]
Simon Diggins ... adr mixer
Peter Gleaves ... adr mixer
Gareth Rhys Jones ... foley artist
Julien Pirrie ... foley mixer
Jamie Roden ... sound re-recording mixer / supervising sound editor
Mathias Schuster ... foley editor
Michael Suarez ... sound effects editor
Chris Woodcock ... production sound mixer
CINEMA OF NOISE #83 - April 27th 2016
+ King Kong [1933] directed by Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack
- music • roars • screams • rumble • body hits • earth • tree bark • ripping • breaking
"Another first came from RKO sound department head Murray Spivak, who for the first time in history made sound effects specifically to match the score. For Kong’s growl, he mixed a tiger growl played backwards over a lion roar. Spivak achieved this by recording the sounds onto three separate audio tracks, which pioneered the way sound design was done for years to come. " [Article on King Kong at The Film Spectrum. Additional references: Filmsite.org]
Sound Department [IMDB]
Murray Spivack ... sound effects
Earl A. Wolcott ... sound recordist
Walter Elliott ... sound effects associate (uncredited)
Eddie Harman ... sound recordist (uncredited)
Clem Portman ... sound re-recording mixer (uncredited)
Murray Spivack ... sound designer (uncredited)
Harold E. Stine ... boom operator (uncredited)
Richard Van Hessen ... boom operator: visual effects unit (uncredited)
Max Steiner ... composer
CINEMA OF NOISE #82 - April 24th 2016
+ Tokyo Fist [1995] directed by Shinya Tsukamoto
- rumble • punch • shout • splatter • liquid • boxing ring floor • footsteps • breathing • punching bag • wind • noise • bell • referee • crowd
Sound Department [IMDB]
Kenji Shibasaki ... sound
CINEMA OF NOISE #81 - April 21st 2016
+ The Wizard of Oz [1939] directed by Victor Fleming
- wind • chickens • shouting • horses • bangs • wooden door • rumble • crash
Sound Department [IMDB]
Douglas Shearer ... recording director
James Burbridge ... sound technician (uncredited)
G.A. Burns ... production sound mixer (uncredited)
Earl Cates ... playback operator (uncredited)
O.O. Ceccarini ... sound designer (uncredited)
Bill Edmondson ... boom operator (uncredited)
James F. Gaither Jr. ... boom operator (uncredited)
James Graham ... sound effects editor (uncredited)
T.B. Hoffman ... sound editor (uncredited)
Van Allen James ... apprentice sound editor (uncredited)
Lowell Kinsall ... sound mixer (uncredited)
Standish J. Lambert ... sound re-recording mixer (uncredited)
Frank McKenzie ... sound re-recording mixer (uncredited)
Franklin Milton ... special sound effects (uncredited)
Ralph A. Pender ... dialogue editor (uncredited)
Julian Powell ... boom operator (uncredited)
George G. Schneider ... sound mixer (uncredited)
Douglas Shearer ... sound designer (uncredited)
Robert Shirley ... sound re-recording mixer (uncredited)
Ralph Shugart ... sound effects editor (uncredited)
Newell Sparks ... sound re-recording mixer (uncredited)
William Steinkamp ... supervising re-recording mixer (uncredited)
Michael Steinore ... supervising sound editor (uncredited)
P. Richard Stevens ... sound recordist (uncredited)
R.L. Stirling ... assistant sound editor (uncredited)
Don T. Whitmer ... sound mixer (uncredited)
John A. Williams ... sound mixer (uncredited)