For Hollywood film, 'Die Hard' ia masterpiece of sound production. The SFX carry a huge amount of information, tone and style, and (naturally) they're all post-production, including lots of Foley. I heard the lead Foley artist give a talk on it as part of an audio-art series many moons ago, and the level of detail was absolutely fascinating. Of course, all the footfalls are walked on a Foley stage, and the Foley artists not only walk "in character" (how would Hnas walk? how would Mclane?) but select shoes that SOUND like what they imagine the character would wear. Typical of all 'realist' filmmaking, the actual thing does not function to represent itself through the process of mediation — in this case genuine expensive shoes (of the sort Hans would wear, e.g.) don't SOUND expensive, but the artist (a woman) had a pair of old thrift-store-bought shoes that had evoked luxury sonically. The Foley artists have huge kits of 'junk' purchased at thrift stores and auction for their unique sounds — more shoes than Imelda Marcos, each pair have a different sonic character. One of her prized possessions was a massive old padlock that, when dropped, sounds like what we expect a dropped gun to sound like - and when scraped over various other mundane things makes metal-on-metal sounds that work for all kinds of specialized effects — all based on the Foley artist knowing how to use them just so. For example, when the thieves lock-down Nakatomi Plaza, there are sounds of various metal gates coming down, door locking shut, etc. — all shot MOS, with the audio added in post from stuff out of her Foley kit.
An older classic film with a heavy reliance on audio for storytelling, including defining off-screen space, is 'M' where the plot revolves around a blind man as the only witness to a murder, but who can identify him by ear. As it was made very early in the sound era, Lang and his collaborators were very conscious of using sound as a creative tool, and innovated a lot of devices that became common after that. 'The Conversation' having already been mentioned, I'll note the audio work on 'Apocalypse Now' and 'Rumble Fish' is also brilliant. '2001' for the parts WITHOUT the score - especially the scene with Dr. Floyd on the shuttle with a very telling conversation just barely audible in the background. 'Touch of Evil'... Welles' b/g in radio drama also figures in 'Citizen Kane' of course. 'The Birds': absent any non-diegetic sound, but with an electronic SFX track on which bernard Hermann served as a consultant. Spaghetti westerns, Hong Kong martial arts movies, and other commercial films make explicitly for international audiences do interesting things with dubbing, score and not-very-realistic diagetic SFX and soundscapes... The classic exemplar of non-diegetic sound (narration and music) revealed as framing the meaning of images is in Marker's 'Letter From Siberia'. Direct cinema documentary typically uses 'tricky' audio editing (J and L cuts) to create the illusion of temporal continuity in sequences where the shots weren't actually contiguous in time (being single camera shoots...) 'Primary' has lots of examples if you study the sound track, and think about how the changes in visual perspective DON't correspond to changes in audio perspective at so many points. It was made pre-crystal-sync, using a cable-sync hook-up that didn't work a lot of the time, so there was even more diddling in post to get the 'fly-on-the-wall' illusion. For experimental films, the first thing that comes to mind is 'The End', by Maclaine with it's long stretches of narration over black (punctuated by a few poetic SFX) and it's use of vocal performance and music throughout. 'Christmas on Earth' has no fixed sound-track, but rather instructions on how the projectionist might come up with something to play over the PA that provides the proper "psychic tumult'. 'Meshes of the Afternoon' has an iconic music-as-SFX score that wasn't created until 16 years after the film was shot (how different might it have come across merely silent, or with a variety of other sound accompaniments during those 16 years??) Audio manipulations are central to Hollis Frampton's 'Critical Mass' and '(nostalgia)' (the later including Frampton's choice to have his narration read by the apparently under-rehearsed and disinterested Michael Snow -- which is especially weird in the segment where Frampton talks about his relationship with Snow...) _______________________________________________ FrameWorks mailing list [email protected] https://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/frameworks
