Sound

 Sound

Music

Music can just very gently suggest that what you’re seeing has got a larger resonance than just the two or three people there.

The Double Life of Veronique (Kieslowski 1991)

Kieslowski once claimed that Preisner would recommend including music in unexpected moments in a film, and excluding it where one might expect to find it.

Watch the ending of the film without sound.

What emotions/Feelings are present when watching it in silence?

A lot of confusion

Contrapuntal Sound​

Music that contrasts the action in the scene

Music that seems to clash with the onscreen action, thereby creating a particular effect on the audience (compare parallel sound) 

Non-Diegetic sound and voiceover

Non-diegetic means that the characters in the movie aren’t hearing the music, only the spectators. Voiceovers are classed as non-diegetic.

Whilst there are many memorable passages of dialogue, and some extraordinarily photographed extended action sequences, the heart of the movie is carried by Malick's favourite cinematic technique, the voiceover. This is worth considering in some detail, for, as Michael Filippidis has argued, the voiceover provides the entry point for all three of Malick's films. In Badlands the voiceover is provided by Holly (Sissy Spacek), and in Days of Heaven by the child Linda (Linda Manz). The voiceover allows the character to assume a distance from the cinematic action and a complicity with the audience, an intimate distance that is meditative, ruminative, at times speculative. It is like watching a movie with someone whispering into your ear. 

If the technique of the voiceover is common to all three films, then what changes in The Thin Red Line is the subject of the narration. Badlands and Days of Heaven are narrated from a female perspective: it is through the eyes of two young, poorly-educated women that we are invited to view the world. In The Thin Red Line the voiceovers are male and plural. The only female characters are the wife of Bell (who appears in dream sequences and whose only words are 'Come out. Come out where I am'), the young Melanesian mother that Witt meets at the beginning of the film, and Witt's mother, recollected in a death-bed scene. Although it is usually possible to identify the speaker of the voiceover, their voices sometimes seem to blend into one another, particularly during the closing scenes of the film when the soldiers are leaving Guadalcanal on board a landing craft. As the camera roams from face to face, almost drunkenly, the voices become one voice, one soul, 'as if all men got one big soul' -- but we will come back to this.

The powerful effect of the voiceovers cannot be distinguished from that of the music which accompanies them. The score, which bears sustained listening on its own account, was composed by Hans Zimmer, who collaborated extensively with Malick. The latter's use of music in his movies is at times breathtaking, and the structures of his films bear a close relation to musical composition, where leitmotifs function as both punctuation and recapitulation of the action -- a technique Malick employed to great effect in Days of Heaven. In all three of his movies, there is a persistent presence of natural sounds, particularly flowing water and birdsong. The sound of the breeze in the vast fields of ripening wheat in Days of Heaven finds a powerful echo in what was the most powerful memory I had from my first viewing of The Thin Red Line: the sound of the wind and soldiers' bodies moving through the Kunai grass as Charlie company ascend the hill towards the enemy position. Nature appears as an impassive and constant presence that frames human conflict.

Synchronous sound – sounds that match what we can see on screen 

Asynchronous sound – sounds not matched with a visible source 

Dissonance – unpleasant sounds lacking harmony 

Sound bridge – where sound carries over from one scene to the next 

Ambient sound – sounds of a given location (e.g woodland sound) 

Soundscape – a sound or combination of sounds arising from a particular environment  

Background music - Non-diegetic music or soundtrack in the background of the action

Diegetic/non-diegetic - Diegetic = Characters in film can hear it, Non-diegetic = characters in film can’t hear it.