Wilhelm shouted in an inhuman voice: the secrets of sound engineers in the cinema
Elena Maslova, a sound engineer with 30 years of experience, has written an almost exhaustive guide to all stages of film production in which a sound engineer is involved, including the preparatory, filming, and editing and toning periods (the latter is now commonly referred to as postproduction or simply post). Lydia Maslova, a critic and namesake, presents the book of the week, especially for Izvestia.
Elena Maslova
"Sound in cinema: How illusions are created"
Moscow : Alpina non-fiction, 2025. 320 p.
The author of the book primarily assigns the mission of controlling and manipulating the audience's emotions to the sound engineer. The first chapter is called "How to evoke the viewer's feelings" and reveals some clever ways in which "the sound engineer makes us hear what he wants."
Using specific examples of the sound design of a particular scene, Maslova outlines the essence of the profession of a sound engineer in two words that are understandable even to a reader who is far from the world of cinema: "What the members of the film crew heard during the recording of the scene and what the viewer of the film hears are not always the same. The sound in the film is more precise, it fulfills its special role and sounds more emotional, because it is given a certain character using professional techniques and instruments." At the same time, an experienced moviegoer may recall how annoying it is sometimes to have a tactlessly and carelessly chosen sound sequence of a film, unnecessarily chewing on an already understood director's idea or compulsively squeezing the right emotion out of you.
Maslova, of course, builds her book mainly on examples of the high skill, ingenuity and hard work of her colleagues, starting with Robert Redford's debut film Ordinary People in 1980, where the filming of the episode in the psychiatrist's office took place in a warehouse near the airport — apparently, there was no other place for some financial or technical reasons. As a result, during the installation of dialogues, the sound engineer had to perform a professional feat, for several weeks cleaning out warehouse noises and the sound of flying planes from a 10-minute conversation between a psychiatrist and a patient.
This case is mentioned twice in the book, first in the chapter "The preparatory period: the beginning of the work of a sound engineer on a film," which, among other things, discusses the desirability of carefully choosing locations from the point of view of sound recording. In real practice, as Maslova writes, "the sound engineer may choose not to go and limit himself to examining the location already on site before filming. It depends on various reasons: the production complexity of the picture, the relationships of the people in the group, the budget and the filming country. But the lack of a sound engineer in choosing a nature can affect the quality of the finished sound recording in the future."
And the second time, an example from Redford's film comes in handy already in the chapters devoted to the filming period and the work of sound engineers on the set, or rather in the sixth chapter, "Rough and final sound recording." This is where the emotional climax of the book takes place, when Maslova bravely admits to her own mistake, which cost Rashid Nugmanov's cult film "The Needle" a valuable acting episode. "Rashid based some episodes of the film on improvisation, using the principle of documentary films described in Dziga Vertov's book Life by Surprise," says Maslova. "That's why they didn't do takes for such scenes and didn't conduct acting rehearsals."
In one scene, the king of improvisation, Alexander Bashirov, who plays the eccentric bandit Spartacus in the Needle, delivers a long impromptu monologue while lying at the bottom of an empty pool covered with autumn leaves. "It was almost a subconscious stream of words, not written in the script. Bashirov has the ability to create a strange attraction with his seemingly incoherent harsh statements," Maslova aptly describes the nature of Bashirov's talent. However, now we can only guess and imagine what gems popped out of the actor's subconscious at that moment, because the sound engineer's assistant forgot to check how much film she had left in the Nagra reel—to-reel tape recorder, and only the image remained of the ingenious, unique take- a fragment of it can be seen in one of the scenes before the end credits."Needles."
Concluding this dramatic episode, the memory of which still makes her heart ache, Maslova draws a pedagogical conclusion: "I am an adult and I know that everyone learns from their mistakes, but suddenly a miracle happens and the one who reads this book and becomes a sound engineer will not repeat mine?!" Alas, the human foresight has rather modest limits, but to expand them and for the edification of posterity, of course, it is worthwhile to include in the textbooks of sound engineering the blunder described by Maslova, codenamed "The Silence of Spartacus." Sound engineers, judging by Maslova's book, generally like spies, like conditional code designations for, say, various noises collected in a special Mosfilm music library for all kinds of artistic occasions. One of them, for example, is called "The Wind in the Temple House" and is characterized by a "howling and frightening texture," although it is now quite difficult to establish what kind of infernal Temple paintings they are and from what work they came.
But the origin of the famous scream, known to movie fans as "Wilhelm's Scream" and first heard in the 1951 western "Distant Drums", where one of the minor characters is grabbed by a crocodile, is well known. In the Warner Brothers music library, the scream was originally called "A man was bitten by an alligator, and he screams," after which he became very fond of cinematographers, and about the third time he was used, he was forever glued to a character named Wilhelm. The popularity of the scream increased even more after its use in Star Wars: sound designer Ben Burt quoted this scream, according to Maslova, to pay "tribute to the legacy of the great days of Hollywood sound films." I must say that this chilling echo of the Hollywood golden age has not lost its peculiar charm to this day. Having settled down over the years, the cry of the unfortunate Wilhelm has only acquired an additional charm: it consists in the fact that at present he no longer seeks to influence any spectator's emotions, but appeals exclusively to the cinephile sense of humor.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
