Designing Sound

Audiovisual Aesthetics in 1970s American Cinema

By Jay Beck

SERIES: Techniques of the Moving Image

Rutgers University Press

The late 1960s and 1970s are widely recognized as a golden age for American film, as directors like Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Martin Scorsese expanded the Hollywood model with aesthetically innovative works. As this groundbreaking new study reveals, those filmmakers were blessed with more than just visionary eyes; Designing Sound focuses on how those filmmakers also had keen ears that enabled them to perceive new possibilities for cinematic sound design.

Offering detailed case studies of key films and filmmakers, Jay Beck explores how sound design was central to the era’s experimentation with new modes of cinematic storytelling. He demonstrates how sound was key to many directors’ signature aesthetics, from the overlapping dialogue that contributes to Robert Altman’s naturalism to the wordless interludes at the heart of Terrence Malick’s lyricism. Yet the book also examines sound design as a collaborative process, one where certain key directors ceded authority to sound technicians who offered significant creative input.

Designing Sound provides readers with a fresh take on a much-studied era in American film, giving a new appreciation of how artistry emerged from a period of rapid industrial and technological change. Filled with rich behind-the-scenes details, the book vividly conveys how sound practices developed by 1970s filmmakers changed the course of American cinema.

Presenting strong, original research, Designing Sound examines a period of remarkable and often overlooked experimentation with sound in American cinema during the 1960s and 1970s. Steve J. Wurtzler, author of Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media

Jay Beck puts in perspective an influential turning point in cinema's storytelling with sound, examining how young directors of the 1970s working with monaural soundtracks took on new aesthetic challenges...a critically important historical work! David Stone, Savannah College of Art and Design

JAY BECK is an associate professor of cinema and media studies at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. In addition to co-founding the Sound Studies Special Interest Group of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, he is the American coeditor of the journal Music, Sound, and the Moving Image. He has also coedited Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound.

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction: The State of the Art

Part One General Trends (1965–1971)

2 The British Invasion

3 TV and Documentary’s Influence on Sound Aesthetics

4 New Voices and Personal Sound Aesthetics, 1970–1971

Part Two Director Case Studies (1968–1976)

5 Francis Ford Coppola: American Zoetrope and Collective Filmmaking

6 Robert Altman’s Collaborative Sound Work

7 Martin Scorsese’s Dialectical Sound

Part Three The Dolby Stereo Era (1975–1980)

8 The Sound of Music: Dolby Stereo and Music in the New American Cinema