Film Language: Sound

                               A Clockwork Orange (1971)

The choice of music in this scene is very unexpected and contrapuntal. The audience usually connotes this type of classical music with peace and do to with the more sophisticated aspects of life. However, Kubrick has completely flipped this on its head and used it in a completely different context. He may have done this to make the audience feel uncomfortable and unaware of the events that are going to occur but to also highlight the insanity of the character who is doing the voice over as it seems like although the music is non-diegetic it is meant to be in the character's head. This goes onto further highlight the unusualness of the character and this situation. The director may have chosen this piece of music to go with scene to convey the characters feeling, as the connotations of this music piece is success and triumph which maybe how the character is feeling as he inflicting pain on his enemies. The use of increasing the volume of the music when the violence starts and putting it in slow motion may have been done to draw even more attention to the insanity and violence of the scene.

                        Once Upon A Time In The West (1968)

In this extract there is a large amount of different sounds mainly diegetic but all of them are heavily accentuated for the audience to hear. I think this is done to show the eeriness of the environment they are in that every little thing can be heard. To add to this this may have also been done to build tension as all of the sounds are simple everyday things but it seems like each character is waiting for something to happen and this creates enigma within the audience. Each sound for example the buzzing of the fly and the clicking of the fingers are all things that wouldn't be otherwise been heard unless they were deliberately increased in sound this has been done by the director to show how quite the place is. The sound bridge is near the end of the scene where the character who has caught the fly in the barrel of the gun all of a sudden hears the thundering of the train and his facial expression immediately changes. This affects the audience as they do not know what is happening as they cannot see the train yet but they do feel like this is what all the tension has been building up to once again creating more enigma codes within the audience.

                       Once Upon A Time In America (1984)

There was a wide array of sound in this extract including both diegetic and non-diegetic. There was more noticeable uses of diegetic sound such as the quiet background music at the beginning that appears to be playing outside the house, the rustling of newspaper, the voice of the man giving soup to the injured man, the fire, the fire hoses, the panicked voices of people, the clipping of the name tags on the dead men and the dialling of the phone. The main two uses of non-diegetic sound is the constant phone ringing and music being played at the funeral. The director uses the constant ringing to build the narrative starting from when we find out about the fire incident the audience may connect the phone call to that and that it could have been prevented if someone picked up the phone call. This question is then answered towards the end of the extract when we finally see someone dial a phone.