Soundtrack, The - Screenwriting Sound and Music, Nov 2023

In this article, I analyse sound and music in two unfilmed screenplays written by filmmakers Sergio Person and Jean-Claude Bernardet: SSS against Jovem Guarda (1966) and The Plague of the Ruminants (1967). Why would two leading figures of the politically engaged Cinema Novo jump into a commercial project with the ‘alienating’ leader of the Americanized Jovem Guarda? Their next project, The Plague of the Ruminants, contested the dictatorship. Inspired by magical realism, it would use Hollywoodesque fantastic spectacle. Through interesting interventions on the soundtrack, Person and Bernardet subtly denounced Jovem Guarda’s support for the military regime. This ironically contrasts with the soundtrack to SSS against Jovem Guarda. The article contributes to studies of sound and music in screenplays. I analyse different aspects pertaining to sound and music, compare these screenplays to other completed film projects by Person and Bernardet and place them in the context of Brazilian culture and politics.

In 2000, Rick Altman, McGraw Jones and Sonia Tatroe presented the term mise en bande, or ‘putting onto the soundtrack’, as a framework to analyse the relationship between a film’s sound and its accompanying image. This article proposes an additional term for the study of sound on-screen – ‘son sur le scenario’ – the consideration of writing sound through the pages of a screenplay. Using the script of writer/director Mark Jenkin’s folk horror Enys Men (2023) as a case study, we consider cinematic sound through the perspective of its representation on the page, prior to its actualization through the subsequent processes of production, recording, design and postproduction. Under consideration is the manner that the written soundtrack can be used to articulate and evoke the complex temporal and spatial interrelationships with an imagined image at this stage of film development and its association with the visual realization of cinema’s characters, locations and narratives.

Despite the rich literature on both film sound and screenwriting, there is a paucity of practical advice in current Hollywood screenwriting guides on how to write sound into scripts. This essay encourages the work of screenwriters, screenwriting teachers, students and cinema scholars in two ways. It both reviews the traditions for integrating sound into screenplays and introduces innovations in the classical script format for writing sound. A sequence of off-screen sounds can convey a whole series of actions, while sounds in an outline or synopsis can structure an entire film narrative. As in past screenplays, sounds can again be written side by side in tandem with yet independently from images. Finally, the article makes original emendations to the classical master scene format for writing dominant sounds that fill a scene as well as indications for movie music. At a time when both film production and the screenplay itself are being transformed, this essay rejuvenates both film scholarship and practice by bridging historical traditions with practical innovations for screenwriting sound.

The article focuses on the screenplay’s ‘afterlife’, as a (re-)creative product of captioners and a text for reading by the d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) audience. In particular, it explores captioning practices that textualize aspects of the soundtrack crucial to screenplay meanings. Close study of horror series Stranger Things (ST, Netflix) and The Last of Us (TLoU, HBO) reveals how their closed captions represent the end in a unique chain of mediated translations between the script’s written word, the media form’s soundtrack and the captions’ screen text. Comparing ST Season 4, Episode 9 with TLoU Season 1, Episodes 3 and 6 uncovers the different approaches to captioning music and sound effects adopted by captioners. Moreover, juxtaposing the ST Episode 9 music and sound captions with its screenplay by the Duffer Brothers discloses the considerable gap between screenplay and captioned text, which argues for the significant contributions of captioners to media meanings initially created by screenwriters.