Video essay: active ambiance in No Country For Old Men: written statement

Mera, Miguel (2023) Video essay: active ambiance in No Country For Old Men: written statement.

Abstract

The Supervising Sound Editor for No Country for Old Men (2007), Skip Lievsay, noted that the film required carefully crafted aural contrast: ‘[…] you have to be quiet before you are loud’ (2009). It is also possible to identify a range of other detailed sonic strategies in relation to timbre, the balance between sound-design elements, and punctuation as fundamental drivers of the narrative arc. Sonogram analysis, showing variations in the frequencies of an audio signal over time, reveals how ambient sound is organised structurally as a character and is juxtaposed with more concentrated sonic materials. The sophisticated management of spectral energy shapes narrative intensity with the sounds of room tone, whistling wind, car engines, guns, footsteps, and the pulsing of a tracking device controlling tension and release. The film does not feature a conventional musical score but I argue, after Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (2015; 2019), that its sonic structure is fundamentally musical, articulated through aural contrast as well as agogic and dynamic accentuation. As such, the ambient sound in the film represents more than just the stasis of landscape or location. It is active, meaning that it is not purely an environmental, background, or an ‘unheard’ element, to use a foundational audiovisual term (Gorbman, 1987), but rather is used in carefully constructed phrases that are dynamically engaged in shaping narrative, in a state of progress, motion, and musical flow. Using several graphical representation approaches, I open a methodological door to an understanding of long-form processes of sound mixing as musical phrasing, as well as providing new mechanisms for analysing the integrated soundtrack.

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Contributors

Author: Miguel Mera

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