An Introduction to Film

Continuity

Sound can link one shot to the next, indicating that
the scene has not changed in either time or space.
Overlapping soundcarries the sound from a first
shot over to the next before the sound of the second
shot begins. Charles Laughton’s The Night of the
Hunter(1955; sound: Stanford Houghton) contains
an effective sound bridge: Harry Powell (Robert

Mitchum), a con man posing as an itinerant

preacher, has murdered his wife, Willa (Shelley

Winters), placed her in an automobile, and driven it

into the river. An old man, Birdie Steptoe (James

Gleason), out fishing on the river, looks down and

discovers the crime.

Through shot A, an underwater shot of great

poetic quality in which we see Willa in the car, her

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Sound and characterizationThe opening montage in
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now(1979; sound
designer: Walter Murch) sets a high visual and sonic
standard. But Coppola and his collaborators meet and
perhaps exceed that standard during the “Helicopter Attack”
scene, in which the lunatic Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore
(Robert Duvall, standing, in image [6]) leads a largely aerial
raid on a Vietnamese village. Accompanying horribly

magnificent images of destruction and death are the sounds

of wind, footsteps, gunfire, explosions, airplanes, helicopters,

crowd noise, shouting, dialogue, and Richard Wagner’s “Ride

of the Valkyries.” Although the grand operatic music gives

unity, even a kind of dignity, to the fast-moving, violent,

and disparate images, what it mostly accomplishes is to

underscore Kilgore’s megalomania.