5 Movies that Teach You Sound Design: FilmStack Challenge #4

Musing Outloud about the Other Half of the Image.

The FilmStack Challenge is back and this month was handed off to

Swabreen Bakr

of the exquisitely-titled Substack Anti-Brain Rot:

For this month's challenge, I've been thinking a lot about sound in film.

For this challenge, you can choose to share either your favorite needle drops, composers, themes, monologues, usage of voice-over narration, or directors who use soundtracks to further their storytelling. Expand upon how these key moments of sound usage helped to shape a scene or contributed to the emotions you had while watching it.

I’m artificially keeping this list to 5 selections, because the previous challenges were 5 and because I need a place to stop with these sorts of lists or else I’ll never finish writing.

As it turns out I’ve been looking critically at sound design a lot over the last year. Earlier on in my film career I didn’t want anything to do with the sound department — it wasn’t that I didn’t think it was important, I learned the elder knowledge that sound is (more than) 50% of the movie. It’s because I didn’t feel capable of expanding into it with so many other technical investments in mind. I thought it would be better to focus on the stuff I had good command over, and hire or collaborate with sound people to really do the rest.

However, I now regret that decision and have been working on projects to learn more, as well as studying the theory more, as well as been listening more to movies to try to parse the sound design decisions and how they affect the story, tone, and how we perceive the imagery on-screen. I’ve been experimenting with sound design in my own movies and am currently developing a project to print two short stories to vinyl with voice actors and sound design.

As I’ve developed as a filmmaker, I’ve discovered that the ideas, the scenes, and moments that I imagine in my mind are accompanied with sounds… and the problem is that it’s really difficult to communicate what those sounds are, much less create them as waveforms from scratch. I’m hoping technical sound design and some amount of music theory knowledge should help, but in the meantime I’m learning how to create foley and work with canned sounds to make a full experience out of the flickering images that pass our eyes.

Here’s 5 movies that important to study if you want to learn about sound design:

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Blackmail (1929) — dir. Alfred Hitchcock, sound editor Harry Miller (uncredited)

I could have started with The Jazz Singer (1927) as the first synchronized soundtrack¹ movie, but Hitchcock’s first synchronized sound movie is really important because he locked in very early on how sound can affect perception. The Jazz Singer invented talkies but Blackmail invented sound design.

It’s all about the birds. 34 years before Hitchcock released The Birds, he already showed his fear of them. In the sound version of Blackmail,² several sequences raise tension not with a bombastic score but with the levels amping up over birdsong.

In one particularly memorable scene, Alice is alone in a room, fretting over getting caught killing the man who attempted to rape her, and the soundtrack is overloaded with sharp, screeching birds. The emptiness of the room contrasts with the fullness of the birdsong, making Alice feel both completely alone… and surveilled.

Birds as harbingers of doom continued throughout Hitchcock’s filmography, from the stuffed birds in Norman Bates’ office through the titular and numinous entities of Birds, which itself adapted the chirps and clucks and other rustling sounds to create almost abstract, ambient soundscapes of eeriness so famous that the Simpson’s referenced it in “The Longest Daycare.” But Blackmail was an early movie where Hitchcock’s ornithophobia had not yet been established, and there was nothing about birds specifically stated in the plot of the story, so the mental connection Hitchcock was running between ambient birdsong and terror was entirely poetic. For a first sound film, it shows an incredible leap of faith in the audience’s ability to interpret a sound device and how to manipulate their perception.

In a dinner sequence, subjective sound design is used with Hitchcock’s smirking dark humor. As Alice enters the shop she works at, she overhears a female customer discussing the murder. Every time the woman says the word “knife”, the word gets louder and louder as the woman’s other dialog fades away, until all Alice hears is a brittle, demanding, “Knife! Knife! KNIFE!!”

Early sound films in general are useful to watch for their stripped down, no-nonsense sound design: a ripping canvas is a ripping canvas, a car horn is a car horn, a song a song. Sound ruined cinema for a good portion of the 30s, constricting camera and actor movements and struggling with coherence and clarity, as well as it’s own sync. It’s amazing that before those issues became cliche, Hitchcock was on top of it and asking how not only to make sound work, but make it expand cinema.

Blackmail, by the way, is public domain, and you can watch it here.

Not discussed above: how much of Blackmail depended on Anny Ondra’s crazy eyes.

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The Conversation (1974) — dir. Francis Ford Coppola, sound design Walter Murch (uncredited)

We skip ahead. Way way ahead. We have a lot of territory to cover in just 5 brief selections. But let’s just say that after the ‘30s, sound design iterated in quality and complexity until The Conversation arrived and introduced what we consider to be modern sound design.

The Conversation is a story that investigates the concept of recordings. It’s a haunted movie, in both the moral and the hauntological sense. The main character, Harry Caul, runs a surveillance business and lives a controlled, solitary life. In sound design we talk about finding “the isolated audio of…” a subject, and Harry is all about isolating things to find their meaning… isolating the audio from a busy Union Square to find what a young couple are talking about, isolating himself from the world to keep control of his own life, and isolating the moral consequences of his business from himself.

But as that isolation breaks down and the consequences start to come to light, and as his business partner Stan gets pushier about getting him out of his house, Harry becomes fixated on the danger he may have created for the young couple and finds himself delving even deeper into the audio recordings he made to find a way to save them.

It’s a paranoid thriller, a favorite genre of the 1970s, that stands out for the way we watch Harry pull apart soundwave after soundwave looking for meaning, and instead burying himself further into noise. Many of the editing techniques and mixing Murch used were quickly adapted by other sound designers, and sound design has chased The Conversation ever since.

Sound as layered as the imagery

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Blue Velvet (1986) — dir. David Lynch, sound design by Alan Splet

I started thinking about sound design in a different way when I read Room to Dream last year and revisited Lynch’s movies in tandem. What I discovered from that career review was how significant Alan Splet was to Lynch’s overall quality of work, to the degree that I question if Lynch’s work would have been as successful without him.

Splet was introduced to Lynch early on through the AFI program that Lynch used to produce Eraserhead. Splet was an at-the-time experimental sound designer and vibed well with Lynch’s experimental flourishes, and the two of them worked side-by-side in creating the chaotic industrial soundscape of the Eraserhead world while Splet taught Lynch a lot of techniques on how to get natural wind tunnel, electrical snaps and drones, and reverb effects. Their collaboration carried over to Lynch’s next two films, at which point Splet split with Lynch during Blue Velvet: it affected him too much. “I can’t stand Frank,” Lynch claims Splet said, “I won’t spend any more time with him.” After this point Lynch became his own sound designer, carrying through to Twin Peaks: the Return.

Obviously I could say Eraserhead is the movie to watch, but because it’s so graphically nightmarish to match its sonic nightmarishness, it’s easy to get mixed up on where you’re responding to the sound and where you’re responding to the image. The Elephant Man also has this issue via its somewhat gaspunk, retro black-and-white grainy cinematography.

Blue Velvet is the one to study for sound design, because, meaningfully, if you split the sound design from the image, I think you’ll find the movie functions very differently.

I discovered as I watched along Lynch’s filmography that some of his scenes aren’t actually as weird as you remember. Sometimes they can be outright goofy, or play like soap operas or worse, except that the sound design elevates them — camp becomes absurdist wink, soap operatic wailing becomes disturbing mental breakdowns, even something like a wall or a little gadget feels distressing because of a grinding subwoofer drone laid underneath.

You see that in Blue Velvet when Jeffrey collapses on top of Dorothy over a raging hiss, or a police radio chirps underneath the coat of an immobile standing corpse, or the ambient roomtone clears out when Frank first appears. Whether adding or reducing sound, Lynch and Splet are dramatically altering the feelscape of Blue Velvet from the campy boy caper it’s sometimes written as to a full blown thriller to hold up the strength of Dennis Hopper’s deranged performance.

Without the sound design, Blue Velvet would be an infamous flop. I would also suggest that you can actually tell which scenes Splet wasn’t around to work on, the same way you can tell when Mulholland Dr. switched from a television pilot to a feature film. It’s just a half-stop tonal difference, whenever the movie gets goofier or the sound design more obvious.

It’s also when Lynch started collaborating with Angelo Badalamenti to score what he needed to create his audio experiences. According to Room to Dream, an early request he made of Badalamenti was to provide ‘kindling’, synth tracks to lay under scenes to create certain moods, which basically was Lynch re-inventing music beds in his own quirky nomenclature. “Like starting a fire with,” he explained.

The difference between this and the Hardy Brothers Meet Nancy Drew is that vibes disturb you before you even see the horrible crimes being committed.

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Upstream Color (2013) — dir., composing, and sound design by Shane Carruth

Every now and then you get a director like John Carpenter who is also a musician and scores his own movies, but Carruth is an absolute nutjob who manages to make the flex also an intricate and irreplaceable part of the narrative.

Upstream Color is a $50k movie that Carruth almost killed himself making, as he was trying to edit and shoot in tandem to the point where he was sometimes only getting an hour or two of sleep per day. He eventually accepted indie director / editor David Lowery’s offer to help out on the edit, but the point is that this is the type of movie where all parts were handled not only aesthetically but technically by the filmmaker, and that includes not only the sound design, but how the sound was a feature of the writing.

The story follows a couple, Kris and Jeff, both of whom are recovering from identity theft that was executed via mind-control worms, who have found each other and seem to have other strange parallels to each other in mood and movement. As they rebuild their lives and try to resolve their shared trauma, they eventually began to investigate upstream of the mindcrime, eventually leading them to a pig farmer with some strangely familiar swine.

Integral to that investigation is the pig farmer’s hobby as a field recordist / ambient musician. You not only get to see the farmer explore nearby woods and streams, finding interesting sounds and recording them, you get to see him process them bit by bit into notes and tones and eventually mix them into music. Kris and Jeff find that music, and through immersing themselves in it are able to transcend space and time to see the pig farmer himself, as well as deconstruct its various field recordings into separate landmarks that help them trace his movements.

That music, of course, is the score of the movie. So the sounds of the movie become the diegetic thread of clues of the plot which also underscore the emotional tone and cognitive space of the characters.

There’s a lot of other ways in which music and sound design within the movie bring characters together or initiate movement of them, but to describe all of them would require a detailed scene-by-scene breakdown. At any rate Upstream Color is sort of like a reverse The Conversation, where the surveilled couple investigate the waveforms in order to hunt down the spy.

This man is transcending space and time.

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Piaffe (2022) — dir. Ann Oren, sound design by Robert Hefter & Jonas Vicent

The word “foley” comes from sound effects artist Jack Foley, and by any rights one of his works should be here. But which one? This movie, Piaffe, is topically about foley artistry, and in this case combines it with the ASMR trend of social media video for a wholly different experience. It’s the evocation of Foley’s spirit to a new level of sound design.

Piaffe is about an introvert named Eva who takes over her sibling Zara’s job as a foley artist for a commercial featuring horses, after Zara is institutionalized. As Eva works through the foley of the horse bit by (actual reins-in-mouth teeth-clacking) bit, she starts to feel herself embodying the horse, to the point where she grows a tail and starts an affair with man who helps her indulge in horseplay kink.

The sound design doesn’t end in Eva’s on-screen foley-making but is an integral part of the surreal kink sequences. Let’s just say the sound of Eva urinating on the ground in one erotic sequence is very crisp and clear. The foley of this movie itself pushes the eroticism, much as ASMR creates its own form of frisson. In quite a few scenes you’re not really looking at much, but the sound makes you want to coyly cover your eyes.

Piaffe is a movie I felt the need to talk a lot about when I saw it, but didn’t really know what to say or who to talk to. Now sound design has given me my chance: you should see it, it’s an amazing piece of art. But much like the other four works here, that artistry is dependent on the sound design in a significant way where I’m not sure the movie would have succeeded, story, performance, and over reception-wise, if it wasn’t for how the sound supported imagery that wouldn’t necessarily land without it.

The bit about the bit was not a bit, she literally chomps at a bit.

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Originally this list would include Memoria (2021), which involves Tilda Swinton waking up to a strange sound and then pursuing it across Colombia to figure out where it originated, including an excellent sequence where she sits down with a sound designer to try to recreate it; but because Apichatpong Weerasethakul is so insistent that the movie looks and sounds the way he intends it, he does not allow it to play anywhere but in cinemas. It’s not accessible enough to offer for study.

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Previous FilmStack Challenges:

To watch some of my own movies:

https://open.substack.com/pub/polarisdib/p/touch-grass-touch-everything-wash

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1. Emphasis mine, because there was synchronized sound before The Jazz Singer, but not recorded into the plastic medium of film for as a track for playback.

2. There was a silent version released at the same time; Blackmail was the UK’s first talkie.