a school bus and its aftereffects on the townspeople
who have lost children. Two principal characters
voice the narration—the bus driver Dolores Discolt
(Gabrielle Rose) and Nicole Burnell (Sarah Polley),
a teenager who survived the crash. In scenes where
these two are giving sworn testimony, Egoyan bril-
liantly employs the contrasts between the women
in age, experience, and honesty. Since we have seen
the crash in flashback, we know that Dolores gives
an accurate account of the last moments before the
crash; however, Nicole, who has promised to tell the
truth but is determined to cover up her incestuous
relationship with her father, deliberately lies as she
accuses the bus driver of speeding and causing the
crash. Nicole’s narration is made all the more
haunting because she reads (both on-screen to two
children and offscreen to underscore the narrative)
from the Robert Browning translation of The Pied
Piper of Hamelin(1888), the legendary German folk-
tale about a piper, masquerading as a rat catcher,
who lures a town’s children to their death in a river.
Although there are parallels between this story
and the movie narrative, Nicole’s voice-over at the
movie’s conclusion shows that she has mixed fiction
and fact, truth and lies. Angry about what life has
handed her—an abusive father and an accident that
has crippled her for life—she reads the fictional
account of a “strange and new... sweet hereafter”
and lies not only to conceal the secret and save her
father from the consequences but also to prevent
him from gaining damages from a lawsuit. The sound
of her innocent, pure voice reading the grim folktale
masks a tragedy as powerful as the bus crash itself.
Environmental Sounds
Ambient sound, which emanates from the ambi-
ence (or background) of the setting or environment
being filmed, is either recorded during production
or added during postproduction. Although it may
incorporate other types of film sound—dialogue,
narration, sound effects, Foley sounds, and music—
ambient sound should not include any uninten-
tionally recorded noise made during production,
such as the sounds of cameras, static from sound-
recording equipment, car horns, sirens, footsteps,
or voices from outside the production. Filmmakers
regard these sounds as an inevitable nuisance and
generally remove them electronically during post-
production. Ambient sound helps set the mood and
atmosphere of scenes, and it may also contribute to
the meaning of a scene.
Consider the ambient sound of the wind in John
Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940; sound: Roger
Heman, Sr. and George Leverett). Tom Joad
(Henry Fonda), who has just been released from
prison, returns to his family’s Oklahoma house to
find it empty, dark, and deserted. The low sound of
the wind underscores Tom’s loneliness and isola-
tion and reminds us that the wind of dust-bowl
storms reduced the fertile plains to unproductive
waste and drove the Joads and other farmers off
their land. In Satyajit Ray’s “Apu” trilogy—Pather
Panchali(1955), The Unvanquished(1956), and The
World of Apu(1959)—recurrent sounds of trains
establish actual places, times, and moods, but they
poetically express characters’ anticipations and
memories as well. These wind and train sounds,
respectively, are true to the physical ambience of
Ford’s and Ray’s stories, but filmmakers also use
symbolic sounds as a kind of shorthand to create
illusions of reality. In countless Westerns, for exam-
ple, tinkling pianos introduce us to frontier towns;
in urban films, honking automobile horns suggest
the busyness (and business) of cities.
Sound effectsinclude all sounds artificially cre-
ated for the sound track that have a definite func-
tion in telling the story. All sound effects, except
those made on electronic equipment to deliberately
create electronic sounds, come from “wild” record-
ings of real things, and it is the responsibility of the
sound designer and the sound crew to pick and
combine these sounds to create the hyperreality
of the film’s sound track. (Wild recordingis any
recording of sound not made during synchronous
shooting of the picture.) In Ray’s Pather Panchali
(sound: Bhupen Ghosh), two children, Apu (Subir
Bannerjee) and Durga (Uma Das Gupta), find their
family’s eighty-year-old aunt, Indir Thakrun (Chu-
nibala Devi), squatting near a sacred pond and
think she is sleeping. As Durga shakes her, the old
woman falls over, her head hitting the ground
with a hollow sound—a diegetic, on-screen sound
effect—that evokes death.TYPES OF FILM SOUND 401