Since the 1970s, the soundtrack in Hollywood has come of age as a complex and sophisticated site of cinematic art. Greater combinations of sounds expressing a wider spectrum of tones, textures and volumes can be heard at the movies more than ever before, while behind the scenes, the number of personnel producing them has grown considerably. Moreover, this era has witnessed a proliferation of different artistic and professional approaches to sound. This thesis provides a detailed and wide-ranging picture of these developments and how they were ultimately affected by changes within the American film industry. Drawing on a range of accounts by contemporary sound practitioners and critics, the thesis explores sound production practices, focusing on the sound designer and composer, their creative choices, collaborative relationships - or “sound relations” - and the technologies they employ. The soundtrack is also examined in terms of “sonic style”: the ways in which sound effects, music and the voice function variously in the service of contemporary film narration and genre. It is argued that Hollywood sound production practices and styles have diversified to a high degree, particularly during the last three decades. Industrial realignments on the “New Hollywood” landscape in the 1970s and the integration of the independent and major sectors throughout the 1990s have introduced greater flexibility to mainstream filmmaking norms. These events have played key roles in the expansion of its different sonic styles and working practices in contemporary Hollywood. I take George Lucas and David Lynch, their respective sound design partners Ben Burtt and Alan Splet and composers John Williams and Angelo Badalamenti, and identify distinctions between their professional modus operandi and sonic styles to illustrate the growing diversification within the industry. Most importantly, these examples are used to demonstrate both the intricacy and variety that characterises the styles and crafts of the contemporary Hollywood soundtrack.

It's a Wonderful Business: The Art of Production Sound is a documentary film that offers an inside look at what it takes to record the dialog of actors and diegetic sounds on a movie set. This is the job of the production sound crew, in charge of recording the voices of some of the most talented and prominent performers in the motion picture industry. The documentary features interviews with former and current production sound mixers and boom operators from some of the most acclaimed films in the history of cinema. The film also explores the personal demands, the working conditions, and the sacrifices sound crews have endured to succeed in the always challenging, but very exciting, world of film making.

This thesis examines a recent shift in attention to the auditory present in a strand of post-1999 contemporary European film and philosophy. It argues that noise, defined predominantly as unpleasant or unidentifiable sound, has been harnessed by particular filmmakers as a means to tune our attention to different bodies sounding in our environment. Yet while the ear is an organ we perceive to be open, it could always be receiving more. This limit to our audition is a limit the filmmakers examined here productively engage with in ways that raise questions about the politics and ethics of listening to different bodies. The thesis takes Jean-Luc Nancy's articulation of the listening body, what he calls the corps sonore, to posit a theory of a 'cinematic corps sonore' where the boundaries between on-screen bodies, medium and spectator are dissolved in the mutual vibratory soundings that characterise the state of being 'all ears'. In doing so, the thesis offers a revision of the haptic framework that has dominated recent sensuous theories of film as well as applications of Nancy's thought to film in the inter-discipline of film philosophy. The analysis proceeds via close readings of individual films to consider how noise tunes us to different bodies and the specific issues raised in doing so in ways that resonate beyond the philosophical limits of Nancy's corps sonore. Chapter one examines the 'unlistenable' in the work of Catherine Breillat and Gaspar Noé. It revises accounts of the supposed 'unwatchability' of Breillat and Noé's cinema by examining their respective appeals to volume and frequency, revealing both the possibility of intimacy and the risk of vulnerability that the corps sonore poses. Chapter two takes the corps sonore to the question of national borders and social bodies by bringing post-colonial theorist Édouard Glissant's concept of the écho-monde to Tony Gatlif's Exils (2004) and Arnaud des Pallières' Adieu (2004). It argues that both filmmakers appeal to the migratory properties of noise to think through questions of identity, relation and the different degrees of belonging that sound inscribes. The final chapter asks whether cinema constitutes a site that allows for an amplification of the nonhuman. Attention is given both to the practice of Foley and to the use of Foley in Lars von Trier's Antichrist (2009) and Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio (2012) to show how a non-coincidence between body and sound figures cinema as a place of resonance, animated by the scattered structure of dynamic relations between things that Foley brings about. Yet the chapter also casts doubt over the possibility of noise indicating something outside of human world-projection and as such, disrupts the otherwise increasingly prehensile attention that I argue filmmakers have been able to pay to the body through the auditory.

Detta kandidatarbete undersöker ljudbilder i film och vad som påverkar ljudbildens mättnad. Med stort fokus på Walter Murchs Dense Clarity, Clear Density (2005) bryter vi ner uppbyggnaden av en ljudbild för att få bättre förståelse kring detta. Med en egenframtagen analysmetod som fokuserar på filmers ljudbild analyserar vi scener ifrån flertalet filmer och tv-program, hittar mönster kring deras ljudläggning och hur det påverkar ljudbilden. Därefter bygger vi upp en lista med förhållningspunkter för olika typer av ljudbilder. Resultatet av undersökningen blir en förklaring av hur man uppnår olika former av ljudbilder i film och varför det blir så.

The thesis aims at a critical reflexion on experimental ethnography with a special focus on the role of sound. A reassessment of its predominant discourse, as conceptualized by Cathrine Russell, is paired with a conceptual approach to film sound and audio-vision. By reactivating experimental filmmaker Peter Kubelka’s concept sync event and its aesthetic realisation in Unsere Afrikareise (Our Trip to Africa, Peter Kubelka, 1966) the thesis provide a themed reflection on the materiality of film as audiovisual relation. Sync event is a concept focused on the separation and meeting of image and sound to create new meanings, or metaphors. By reintroducing the concept and discussing its implication in relation to Michel Chion’s audio-vision, the thesis theorizes the audiovisual relation in ethnographic/documentary film more broadly. Through examples from the Russian avant-garde and Surrealism the sync event is connected to a historical genealogy of audiovisual experiments. With James Clifford’s notion ethnographic allegory Unsere Afrikareise becomes a case in point of experimental ethnography at work. The sync event is comprehended as an ethnographic allegory with the audience at its focal point; a colonial critique performed in the active process of audio-viewing film.

Esse trabalho discute o foley brasileiro através da apresentação de aspectos técnicos, estéticos e históricos dessa atividade. A partir de entrevistas com profissionais da área e da experiência profissional da autora em foley, é traçado um panorama da atividade que compreende: os usos do foley na trilha sonora cinematográfica; técnicas de gravação; o desenvolvimento da atividade no país dos anos 1950 até hoje; e a observação dos estúdios e artistas de foley brasileiros mais proeminentes em atividade. / The present work discusses the Brazilian foley by presenting technical, aesthetic and historical aspects of the activity. Through interviews with foley professionals and the professional expertise of the author, this overview of Brazilian foley comprehends: the use of foley in the film soundtrack, recording techniques, the development of the activity in Brasil since the 1950´s, and the observation of the most prominent foley studios and foley artists in Brazil at the present.

Esse trabalho discute o foley brasileiro através da apresentação de aspectos técnicos, estéticos e históricos dessa atividade. A partir de entrevistas com profissionais da área e da experiência profissional da autora em foley, é traçado um panorama da atividade que compreende: os usos do foley na trilha sonora cinematográfica; técnicas de gravação; o desenvolvimento da atividade no país dos anos 1950 até hoje; e a observação dos estúdios e artistas de foley brasileiros mais proeminentes em atividade. / The present work discusses the Brazilian foley by presenting technical, aesthetic and historical aspects of the activity. Through interviews with foley professionals and the professional expertise of the author, this overview of Brazilian foley comprehends: the use of foley in the film soundtrack, recording techniques, the development of the activity in Brasil since the 1950´s, and the observation of the most prominent foley studios and foley artists in Brazil at the present.

The thesis aims at a critical reflexion on experimental ethnography with a special focus on the role of sound. A reassessment of its predominant discourse, as conceptualized by Cathrine Russell, is paired with a conceptual approach to film sound and audiovision. By reactivating experimental filmmaker Peter Kubelka’s concept sync event and its aesthetic realisation in Unsere Afrikareise (Our Trip to Africa, Peter Kubelka, 1966) the thesis provide a themed reflection on the materiality of film as audiovisual relation. Sync event is a concept focused on the separation and meeting of image and sound to create new meanings, or metaphors. By reintroducing the concept and discussing its implication in relation to Michel Chion’s audio-vision, the thesis theorizes the audiovisual relation in ethnographic/documentary film more broadly.Through examples from the Russian avant-garde and Surrealism the sync event is connected to a historical genealogy of audiovisual experiments. With James Clifford’s notion ethnographic allegory Unsere Afrikareise becomes as a case in point of experimental ethnography at work. The sync event is comprehended as an ethnographic allegory with the audience at its focal point; a colonial critique performed in the active process of audio-viewing film.

The classically idyllic, carefree world of childhood would appear to be diametrically opposed to the horrors of war and world-wide conflict. However, throughout film history, filmmakers have continually turned to the figure of the child as a prism through which to examine the devastation caused by war. This thesis will investigate the representation of childhood experience of the Second World War across six fiction films: Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan (1946) and Germany Year Zero (1947), René Clément’s Forbidden Games (1952), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962), Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night (1964) and Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985). Spanning forty years, I will examine how these films, whilst sharing many thematic and formal concerns, are unquestionably diverse. They are products of specific socio-cultural milieux, but are also important works in the evolution of cinematic style in art cinema. The films can be aligned to various trends such as neorealism (Paisan, Germany Year Zero), Modernism (Ivan’s Childhood, Diamonds of the Night) and Neo-expressionism (Come and See). Structured in four parts – on witness, landscape, loss and play – I will suggest that just filmmakers utilise childhood experience – often fragmented and chaotic in terms of temporality - to reflect the chaos of war. The first part of my study focuses on the child as witness, the child as Deleuzian seer. I draw on the writings of Gilles Deleuze as well as post-Deleuzian interventions of Tyrus Miller and Jaimey Fisher to argue that whilst Deleuze’s characterization of the child figure as passive is somewhat problematic when applied to the neorealist works, it can, however, be more rigorously applied to Come and See, a film in which, I suggest, the child embodies a much purer form of the Deleuzian seer. In the second part of my study, drawing on the work of Martin Lefebvre and Sandro Bernardi amongst others, I discuss the representation of landscape and its relation to the figure of the child. The third part will examine the representation of loss as well as the symbolic quality of water and its links to the maternal with reference to psychoanalytic theory and the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. The fourth and final part also draws on psychoanalysis in examining the role of play in the six films with particular reference to the work of D.W Winnicott and Lenore Terr. My study seeks to contribute to the comparatively under-explored subject of the child in film through close analysis of film aesthetics including mise-en-scène, editing, and film sound.

<p>This study deals with a research on what the opening sounds in movies tell us about the story that we are about to follow. The purpose is to examine if and how the sound in the first five minutes of the movie contribute in giving information about the film’s genre. The theoretical base includes both genre theory and Michel Chion’s theory on film sound. Six different movies representing different genres, countries and year of production are analyzed in an audiovisual way.</p><p>The result shows that the sound in the opening sequence could describe the genre which the movie belongs to, but it doesn’t always work like this. The analysis also shows examples on movies where the sound in the beginning of the movie focus on other things, like describing place or ethnicity. In some of the movies, especially the ones that represent adventure and action, you can hear the genre very clearly. In others, for example the comedy, there is a bit harder to decide if the sound alone could tell us about which genre the movie belongs to, and if the sound is typical for that specific genre or if it could be about almost everything. Furthermore, in some movies it was quite clear that the sound concentrates on describing something else instead, for example the place where the story is set.</p>