More on sound in the movies

Although we've finished looking at 'Sound' as a distinct topic in my Film classes now, it continues to be a key focus - and I'm hoping that my students will see how they can apply, and expand upon, what they've learnt so far in their work on their current documentary short, and other projects later in the year.

The CineFix YouTube channel has become one of my favourite resources in the last year or so. Most of these series based on 'Top 10' lists are superficial, facile, irritating. But CineFix seems to have consistently strong content, with well argued commentary on their selections.

This item is actually a 'Top 5 Brilliant Moments' ('brilliant' for a variety of reasons), but the last two scenes analysed - below - specifically address the impact of sound editing.

Here are a couple of other very good roundups on the use of sound: a Top 10 Sound Designed Films and a Top 10 Uses of 'Silence'.

Scream, and scream again

For our Parent-Teacher Conference last weekend (it's an even bigger deal for us than it is for most schools, since our parents are all flying several hundred miles or more to visit us), I put up in my classroom as a conversation piece this picture of the ill-fated 'Private Wilhelm' - who gave his name to the scream that has become one of the most famous vocal effects in cinema history (already mentioned on this blog a couple of months ago); indeed, in recent decades it has become an industry in-joke, re-used endlessly.

Tristan Wong was the only one of my Film students to guess the picture's significance. Today he shared with us in class this amusing compilation of some of the many on-screen deaths this effect has been used for. (There are a number of others on Youtube too.)

This is a rather more comprehensive round-up that includes many earlier uses of the effect in the '50s and '60s (several in giant ant shocker Them!, which scared the bejesus out of me when I was about 8 or 10, one of my favourite early horror film experiences). Amongst these you can see the original Private Wilhelm moment in the 1953 Western The Charge at Feather River - not killed, at least, but receiving a very nasty arrow wound right through his thigh (if he's an American cavalry trooper, why is he in civilian clothes here? I've never seen this movie!), and the original original moment (the effect was first created for a scene of a man getting eaten by an alligator in the film Distant Drums a couple of years earlier; but for some reason it became permanently associated with its next incarnation as the Ooooh, that hurt! screech of poor Wilhelm).


And here's a nice potted history of the Wilhelm Scream by veteran Hollywood sound man Steve Lee (who curates the Hollywood Lost & Found blog and Youtube channel), in which he reveals that a popular singer named Sheb Wooley is the likeliest candidate to be the creator of the sound.

A world of silence

A year or so ago, upon unpacking all of my possessions after the move to my new home of Hangzhou, I discovered a DVD I had pretty well forgotten about: 11' 9" 01. I'd purchased it impulsively several years earlier and never got around to watching it. It's a conceptual project commemorating the first anniversary of 9/11, with eleven diverse film directors from around the world each presenting a personal response to the tragedy - and, to recall the date of 11th September 2001, each of these shorts is supposed to be exactly 11 minutes, 9 seconds and 1 frame in length.

There are really only a few of them that are any good (the opening piece, by Iranian director, Samirah Makhmalbaf is much the best of them, I think), but this one - by veteran French director Claude Lelouch (his 1971 crime thriller Le Voyou is an underrated masterpiece) - rather got under my skin. And I thought it particularly appropriate to share it with my current Film classes a few weeks ago because we are focusing on the use of sound in film-making, and Lelouch here rather challengingly presents us with the aural point-of-view of a protagonist who is deaf-mute (and hence is able to remain in ignorance of the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, although it is happening just a few blocks from her apartment).

Unfortunately, this version has been pulled from YouTube at the moment. I think this film's copyright is not very vigorously defended online, so it will probably reappear at some point. For now, all I can find is this Italian version (most of the dialogue is rendered in sign language, and the general meaning is clear enough, even if you can't understand the subtitles.)