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sider all the audio commentaries, “Making Of”
documentaries and Internet fan sites, educating
filmgoers within the production process which in
turn influences their experience and understand-
ing of films (Whittington, 2007). Only through
such processes can the start-up sound of an Apple
computer become a meaningful sonic event in the
Sci-Fi animation movie
Wall-E
(Stanton, 2008).
Through the process of cultural reception, diges-
tion, and reproduction, many of these experimental
designs have now entered our collective memories
and have become signs that are easy to understand
or even clichés. Additionally, there is a culture of
constant cross-referencing, citation, and remixing.
This began with a strong emphasis on genre in
New Hollywood, which soon turned into de- and
reconstruction and recombination of genre into
pastiche like
Star Wars
(elements of Western,
Swashbucklers, Sci-Fi, Cartoon
17
) or hybrids like
Alien
(Scott, 1979) and
Predator
(Sci-Fi blended
with Horror). This post-modern aesthetics became
a significant driving force for film sound (Whit-
tington, 2007) and is commonplace now, with
films like
The Matrix
(Wachowski brothers, 1999)
combining characteristic sonic signatures of Sci-
Fi, Horror, Film Noir, and Martial Arts.
office hits, they continued their work in relatively
small, independent teams, considering themselves
colleagues that could be trusted. Freedom in the
creative process was the result and only this way
it was possible that (for example) Ben Burtt could
spend one whole year designing the sound effects
of Star Wars through trial-and-error.
summary: seeds of change
As our little voyage through the history of film
sound has shown, the long process of “emancipa-
tion” of sound, from considerations of audio-visual
montage through to its liberation from a naïve
indexical straitjacket, has provoked a fundamen-
tal shift in aesthetic paradigms and resulted in
a series of aesthetic innovations. Asynchronity,
counterpoint and complex reciprocal image-
sound relations enriched the vocabulary of the
time-based medium leading to a reciprocity of the
influence between image and sound and a mal-
leable dominance of the one over the other. The
emancipation of sound made it possible to develop
a rich semantic vocabulary, relying on symbols,
key-sounds and so forth, establishing genre spe-
cific stereotypes. The musicalization of the sound
track has broken the barrier between musical and
non-musical, abstract and concrete, material and
synthetic, referential and non-referential sound,
naturalizing the fictional and fictionalizing the
natural. The embracing of ambiguity led to a rich
practice of sonic enunciation of subjectivity and
showed that the struggle for understanding can be
a enjoyable experience. Finally, an understanding
of sound-related discourse, emerging from the
socio-cultural process of production and consump-
tion has opened up and encouraged post-modern
playfulness with style, form, and meaning.
A few driving forces emerge as precondi-
tions for such a development. Firstly, there is
the confrontation with the artistic avant-garde
of Futurism and Musique Concrète and the rebel
attitude of “Rock'n'Roll” which leads to a critical
approach and a playful “joy of subversion” in the
brats at Work
Economical, structural and technological changes
alone would not be enough to drive a significant
aesthetic revolution. Fundamental to innovation
is the challenging of convention, developing an
attitude that rules are there to be broken. It is
probably no coincidence that this spirit flourished
mostly in communities that were driven by non-
conformist ideals, such as the Russian film schools
of the 1950s, the French Nouvelle Vague and the
“movie brats” of New Hollywood. This mindset
was linked to production systems resembling the
“Cinema Copain” ideal of the Nouvelle Vague. The
biographies of many innovative directors share
this similarity: After acquiring financial indepen-
dence, for instance, through placing some box
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