Screen Sound and Theater Sound

I first saw The Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003) in a multiplex theater. Most of this historical costume drama was shot on a somewhat claustrophobic set depicting neighborhoods in a Dutch city during the lifetime of the painter Vermeer, but a very few scenes were done in landscape settings. During one of these, I was impressed by a sound track detail -- faint, distant thunder heard against a clear sky, an effect that subtly hinted at the emotional turmoil in which Griet (Scarlet Johannson) would shortly find herself. Only later, when the thunder reappeared nonsensically during an interior scene, did I realize that the sound was the bass bleeding through the walls from the action film next door. (We discuss multiplex theaters in HtM, chs 13 & 14.)

Woody Allen plays on this confusion of real-world and diegetic sound near the end of Bullets Over Broadway (1994), an inspired farce in which backstage comedy and 1930s gangster films collide. An actress's bodyguard is pursued by two members of his own gang and killed offstage while a play is being performed. The next day the producer reads aloud from glowing reviews. A particularly enthusiastic critic writes that "One of the greatest moments in this reviewer's experience is in act 3, when the lieutenant returns and confronts his mistress. We hear distant gunshots, which get louder and louder, bringing the lieutenant's twisted military past and violent tendencies into bold bas relief." The urge to interpret is strong, but the result may just be fodder for ironic humor.

5.1 Fetish

In the text, we note that The Godfather (1972) provides only a 5.1 sound track mix despite the fact that the film was originally released in mono. Here is a screen grab of the audio menu:



I have no objection per se to remixing and cleaning up sound tracks for release on DVDs, just as I have no objection per se to pan-and-scan versions or to colorization, for that matter—so long as the altered version does not make the "original" version inaccessible. Those original sound track mixes are often of great historical interest and, among other things, we lose a lot of lose information about how film makers thought about sound when a sound track is remixed according to today's standards.

I much prefer it when DVDs provide an option for the "original" theatrical sound track, as for instance, this one for Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).



Yet even when given the appearance of a choice we must be careful. Here is a shot of the menu of the sixth installment of the series Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991).



The claim that the "stereo" mix represents the theatrical release is misleading inasmuch as the original theatrical release was in Dolby Stereo (actually Dolby SR), which in fact carried four channel (left, center, right, surround) stereo. Here, the 5.1 mix might in fact come closer to the theatrical SR mix than does the two-channel stereo. Yet this stereo mix is no doubt of historical interest itself since it most likely reproduces the two-channel stereo of the original VHS release.