the leader the courage to resist death and thus
save the group. The other men awaken; they, of
course, have not seen or heard any of this. We then
hear muted trumpets, horns, and Alpine music—all
nondiegetic sounds signifying the climbers’ victory
over the weather and death. Ironically, when they
awaken in the bright sunshine, the climbers recog-
nize that they have slept in the snow only a few
yards away from the safety of their base camp.
What is the meaning of this dream? Perhaps that
life equals consciousness and, in this instance,
awareness of sound.
While movies such as Dreams, Jean-Pierre
Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge(1970), or Patrice Chéreau’s
Gabrielle(2005) are important for calling our atten-
tion to the imaginative use of silence, no other con-
temporary movie has done this better than Joel
and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men(2007;
sound designer: Craig Berkey). Although Carter
Burwell is credited for the score, there are only 16
minutes of music on the sound track of this tense,
bloody thriller. Likewise, there is very little dia-
logue. In this absence, the sound effects are partic-
ularly striking and memorable: gunshots, the
prairie winds, car doors slamming and engines
roaring, the scrape of a chair or footsteps in a
creepy hotel, and the beeping tracking device that
facilitates the movie’s violent ending. When long
sections of a movie are as conspicuously silent
as this one, audiences automatically are obliged,
perhaps ironically, to listen more carefully. How-
ever, unlike the approach in many thrillers, where
sound creates suspense and even helps the audi-
ence to anticipate what might happen, we don’t
have that to guide us here. Indeed, many of the
movie’s characters also have to strain to hear and
identify sounds. With No Country for Old Men,
Lance Hammer’s Ballast(2008; sound designer:
Kent Sparling)—another outstanding movie with
little dialogue, music, or sound effects—suggests a
reawakened interest in telling a story primarily
with visual images.
In Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
(2010; sound Richard Hocks), the acclaimed Thai
director Apichatpong Weerasethakul has made a
film about reincarnation that may also seek to
transform cinema itself by emphasizing silence
rather than sound. Significantly, it won the Palme
d’Or for the best feature film at the 2010 Cannes
Film Festival, and it is like nothing you have ever
seen or heard on the screen. The story, based on the
Buddhist belief in reincarnation, is about Boonmee,
who is dying of a kidney disease and who believes
that he can see ghosts from his past. His belief is
powerful enough to call forth apparitions of his wife,
with whom he has a discussion of the afterlife. It’s
all very matter-of-fact, with superimposed images
of the dead appearing on the screen. Thus, we (and
some other characters) see her too, just as she was
in life. One ghost returns reincarnated as a monkey,
another as a catfish. The director’s radical vision
involves a careful observation of ordinary life in
scenes shot in long takes and real time and using a
very austere sound design. He does not reject sound,
for we hear the standard types of film sound, all of
them diegetic, including vocal sounds (some dia-
logue, a short offscreen interior monologue, monks’
prayers), music (from a TV melodrama, a stringed
instrument), and environmental sounds of all
kinds, including jungle noises, insects, water, and
rainfall. Indeed, the combination of long takes in
which there is little action and the soft, low tones of
these sounds is hypnotic. Perhaps ironically, the
overwhelming and calming silence of this place
defines it. The silence of the perceivable world and
the afterworld is Weerasethakul’s most powerful
sound.Types of Sound in Steven
Spielberg’s War of the Worlds
Let’s take a close look at how important sound is to
one movie in particular: Steven Spielberg’s Wa r o f
the Worlds(2005; sound designer: Richard King;
musical score: John Williams). To do this, we’ll
catalog the types of sounds we hear in the movie.
Because the sound design of this movie is so com-
plex, it would be impossible to identify every sound
that we hear, but the following discussion will pro-
vide a sense of the numerous types of sound incor-
porated into the overall sound design.
The movie begins with shots of protoplasm as
seen through a microscope, accompanied by the410 CHAPTER 9 SOUND