Because we cannot see its source, asynchronous
sound seems mysterious and raises our curiosity
and expectations. Thus it offers creative opportuni-
ties for building tension and surprise in a scene.
Asynchronous sound was used expressively in
some of the first sound movies by such innovators
as King Vidor, Rouben Mamoulian, and René Clair.
For example, in his classic Le Million(1931), director
René Clair uses asynchronous sound for humorous
effect when we see characters scrambling to find
a valuable lottery ticket and hear the sounds of
a football game. Another classic example (with a
variation) occurs in Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps
(1935; sound: A. Birch). A landlady enters a room,
discovers a dead body, turns to face the camera,
and opens her mouth as if to scream. At least, that’s
what we expect to hear. Instead, as she opens her
mouth, we hear the high-pitched sound of a train
whistle, and then Hitchcock cuts to a shot of a train
speeding out of a tunnel. The sound seems to come
from the landlady’s mouth, but this is in fact an asyn-
chronous sound bridge linking two simultaneous
actions occurring in different places (see page 417).
Most movies provide a blend of offscreen and
on-screen sounds that seems very natural and
verisimilar, leading us to almost overlook the dis-
tinction between them. Some uses of sound, how-
ever, call attention to themselves; for example,
when a scene favors offscreen sounds or excludes
on-screen sounds altogether, we usually take
notice. The total absence of diegetic, on-screen
sound where we expect it most can be disturbing,
as it is in the concluding, silent shots of a nuclear
explosion in Sidney Lumet’s Fail-Safe(1964; sound:
Jack Fitzstephens); or comic, as it is at the conclu-
sion of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb(1964;
sound: John Cox), when the otherwise silent
nuclear explosion is accompanied by nondiegetic
music (Vera Lynn singing “We’ll Meet Again”).
In Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped(1956; sound:
Pierre-André Bertrand), a member of the French
Resistance named Lieutenant Fontaine (François
Leterrier) is being held in a Nazi prison during World
War II. Once he has entered the prison, he never
sees outside the walls, although he remains very
much aware, through offscreen sound, of the world
398 CHAPTER 9SOUND
outside. In fact, sounds of daily life—church bells,
trains, trolleys—represent freedom to Fontaine.Internal versus External
An internal soundoccurs whenever we hear what
we assume are the thoughts of a character within a
scene. The character might be expressing random
thoughts or a sustained monologue. In the theater,
when Shakespeare wants us to hear a character’s
thoughts, he uses a soliloquy to convey them, but
this device lacks verisimilitude. Laurence Olivier’s
many challenges in adapting Hamletfor the screen
included making the title character’s soliloquies
acceptable to a movie audience that might not
be familiar with theatrical conventions. Olivier
wanted to show Hamlet as both a thinker whose
psychology motivated his actions and a man who
could not make up his mind. Thus in his Hamlet
(1948; sound: Harry Miller, John W. Mitchell, and
L. E. Overton), Olivier (as Hamlet) delivered the
greatest of all Shakespearean soliloquies—“To be,
or not to be”—in a combination of both spoken lines
and interior monologue. This innovation influ-
enced the use of internal sound in countless other
movies, including subsequent cinematic adapta-
tions of Shakespeare’s plays.
External soundcomes from a place within the
world of the story, and we assume that it is heard
by the characters in that world. The source of an
external sound can be either on-screen or offscreen.
In John Ford’s My Darling Clementine(1946; sound:
Eugene Grossman and Roger Heman Sr.), Indian
Charlie (Charles Stevens, uncredited) is drunk and
shooting up the town of Tombstone. The townspeo-
ple are afraid of Charlie, and the sheriff (actor
uncredited) resigns rather than confront him, so
Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda)—who is both on- and
offscreen during the scene—is appointed sheriff
and takes it upon himself to stop the chaos that
Charlie has created.
The scene effectively combines both on- and off-
screen sounds. The characters (and the viewer)
hear the offscreen sounds of Charlie shooting his
gun inside the saloon followed by the offscreen
sounds of women screaming; then the women
appear on-screen as they run from the saloon with