must be seen in its lunatic entirety to be fully
appreciated but nonetheless provides countless
rich individual exchanges. Today the screwball-
comedy genre has been transformed in such
movies as Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail(1998)
and Joel Coen’s Intolerable Cruelty(2003). David
Mamet, who writes and directs his own movies
(e.g., The Spanish Prisoner, 1997; and Heist, 2001), is
noted for dialogue that calls attention to itself with
its sharp, terse, and often profane characteristics.
Movie speech can take forms other than dia-
logue. For example, French director Alain Resnais
specializes in spoken language that reveals a char-
acter’s stream of consciousness, mixing reality,
memory, dream, and imagination. In Resnais’s Prov-
idence(1977; screenplay: David Mercer; sound: René
Magnol and Jacques Maumont), Clive Langham
(John Gielgud), an elderly novelist, drinks heavily
as he drifts in and out of sleep. Through the inter-
twining strands of his interior monologue, we learn
of his projected novel—about four characters who
inhabit a doomed city—and of his relationships
with members of his family, on whom his fictional
characters are evidently based. Langham’s mono-
logue and dialogues link the fantasy to the reality of
what we see and hear; in this way, sound objectifies
what is ordinarily neither seen nor heard in a movie.
Narration, the commentary spoken by either
offscreen or on-screen voices, is frequently used in
narrative films, where it may emanate from a third-
person narrator (thus not one of the characters)
or from a character in the movie. In the opening
scene of Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing(1956; sound:
Rex Lipton and Earl Snyder), when Marvin Unger
(Jay C. Flippen) enters the betting room of a race-
track, a third-person narrator describes him for us.
This offscreen narrator knows details of Unger’s
personal life and cues us to the suspense of the
film’s narrative.
In Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973; sound:
Maury Harris), the character of Holly (Sissy Spacek)
narrates the story in first-person voice-over, help-
ing us understand her loneliness, her obsession
with Kit (Martin Sheen), her participation in a
series of brutal murders, and her inability to stop.
This technique enhances our appreciation of her
character because rather than simply reinforcing
what we are seeing, Holly’s understanding and
interpretation of events differ significantly from
ours. She thinks of her life with Kit as a romance
novel rather than a pathetic crime spree.
In The Magnificent Ambersons(1942; sound: Bailey
Fesler and James G. Stewart), Orson Welles uses
both offscreen and on-screen narrators. Welles him-
self is the offscreen, omniscient third-person narra-
tor who sets a mood of romantic nostalgia for the
American past while an on-screen “chorus” of
townspeople—a device that derives from Greek
drama—gossip about what is happening, directly
offering their own interpretations. Thus, the towns-
people are both characters and narrators.
Multiple voice-over narrators are also used
effectively in two movies where such narration
underscores the solitude and stress of characters
living in small towns: Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s
Padre Padrone(1977; sound: Petrantonio Federico,
Giovanni Sardo, and Adriano Taloni), a documentary-
like account of the lives of sheepherders in the Sar-
dinian countryside, and Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet
Hereafter(1997; sound design: Steve Munro). Egoyan’s
eloquent, disturbing movie concerns the fatal crash of400 CHAPTER 9 SOUND
On-screen narration Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity
(1944; sound: Stanley Cooley and Walter Oberst) uses
on-screen narration in a unique way. Walter Neff (Fred
MacMurray), a corrupt insurance investigator, is pictured
here recording his confession of murder on an office
Dictaphone. His story leads to flashbacks that fill us in on
events leading to that confession.