A history of creative sound in film

When it comes to using sound in film, directors of Hollywood blockbusters rarely do subtle

Ronald Bergan, The Guardian, July 17, 2008 3:14 PM

'The supreme master of creative sound', Andrei Tarkovsky. Photograph: Kenneth Saunders

"There were an enormous number of elements encompassed in the sound mix and there are moments where it's hard to detect what is sound design and what is music," asserts Christopher Nolan, the director of The Dark Knight. Leaving aside the quality of the film as a whole, the "sound design", like most contemporary Hollywood blockbusters that suffer from the Spielberg-Lucas Syndrome, is deafeningly bombastic and unsubtle, assailing the viewer for 142 minutes.

The cinema is considered essentially a visual medium, more sight than sound. Yet, the fundamental importance of the latter (apart from straight synchronised dialogue and music) as part of the texture of any film has preoccupied the best film directors from the beginning of the sound era, when they had to rethink the nature of cinema... [continued]