An Introduction to Film

Charlie right behind them, still shooting his gun.
When Earp, on-screen, starts to enter the building
through an upstairs window, we hear the offscreen
screams of the prostitutes who are in the room as he
says, “Sorry, ladies.” Offscreen, Earp confronts
Charlie and conks him on the head, for we hear the
thud of Charlie falling to the saloon floor. This is
followed by an on-screen shot of Earp dragging
Charlie out of the saloon to the waiting crowd.
This use of sound not only demonstrates Earp’s
courage and skill but also treats his serious
encounter with Charlie with a comic touch.

Types of Film Sound

The types of sound that filmmakers can include in
their sound tracks fall into four general categories:
(1) vocal sounds (dialogue and narration), (2) envi-
ronmental sounds (ambient sound, sound effects,
and Foley sounds), (3) music, and (4) silence. As
viewers, we are largely familiar with vocal, envi-
ronmental, and musical sounds. Vocal sounds tend
to dominate most films because they carry much of
the narrative weight, environmental sounds usually
provide information about a film’s setting and
action, and music often directs our emotional reac-
tions. However, any of these types of sound may
dominate or be subordinate to the visual image,
depending on the relationship that the filmmaker
desires between sound and visual image.

Vocal Sounds

Dialogue, recorded during production or rere-
corded during postproduction, is the speech of char-
acters who are either visible on-screen or speaking
offscreen—say, from an unseen part of the room or
from an adjacent room. Dialogue is a function of plot
because it develops out of situations, conflict, and
character development. Further, it depends on
actors’ voices, facial expressions, and gestures and is
thus also a product of acting. Expressing the feelings
and motivations of characters, dialogue is one of the
principal means of telling a story. In most movies,
dialogue represents what we consider ordinary
speech, but dialogue can also be highly artificial.

During the 1930s, screwball comedies invented a

fast, witty, and often risqué style of dialogue that

was frankly theatrical in calling attention to itself.

Among the most exemplary of these films are

Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise(1932; screen-

writers: Grover Jones and Samson Raphaelson),

Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby(1938; screen-

writers: Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde), and

Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve(1941; screenwrit-

ers: Sturges and Monckton Hoffe), each of which

Internal sound in Hamlet

To be, or not to be; that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And, by opposing, end them.^4

Few lines cut deeper into a character’s psyche or look more

unflinchingly into the nature of human existence, and yet

it’s not hard to imagine how ineffective these well-known

lines might be if simply recited at a camera. In his Hamlet

(1948), actor-director Laurence Olivier fuses character and

psyche, human nature and behavior, by both speaking his

lines and rendering them, in voice-over, as the Danish

prince’s thoughts while simultaneously combining, in the

background, music and the natural sounds of the sea.

Olivier’s version of Hamletwas the first to apply the full

resources of the cinema to Shakespeare’s text, and his

innovativeness is especially apparent in the sound.

(^4) William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Den-
mark, act 3, scene 1.
TYPES OF FILM SOUND 399