Sound Design of the Film 'Hanna'

This paper will be analyzing the sound design of the film Hanna. Original Motion Picture Soundtrack is the soundtrack album to the 2011 American thriller film of the same name, directed by Joe Wright. The original score was composed by the British big beat duo The Chemical Brothers. Initially, the album was only released digitally, but it was released on CD on July 4, 2011 by Sony Music. The soundtrack received mostly positive responses from music critics, with many praising The Chemical Brothers for producing solid background music. However, a few critics have cited a lack of experimentation as its flaw. According to Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album holds a score of 64/100, indicating "generally favorable reviews", based on six reviews compiled from critics. Chad Grischow of IGN reserved high praise for the soundtrack, feeling the "duo nail the mix of violence and innocence".

Although sound and image, as they relate to an actor's performance, are separated in the cinematic recording process, mainstream Hollywood film tends to hide this separation to preserve the illusion of "reality." That is to say, careful attention is paid to synchronizing the sound track and the visual track, so that the correspondence of the actor's spoken words with his or her moving lips will create the semblance of a live, natural performance rather than an artificial, recorded one. This fusion of sound and image tends to generate more full-blown analyses of actors' performances-analyses that tie the sound or vocal aspect of the performance to the visual or bodily one.

Trouble In Paradise illustrates, however, that as early as 1932 Hollywood was experimenting with foregrounding the vocal track by separating it from the visual representation of the actors speaking. Although this technique is used in only one brief-though memorable-scene in Lubitsch's film, full-length voice-over narration quickly became a convention at Hollywood's disposal. Sarah Kozloff's filmography of the "traditional" voice-over, included in her study of the history of voice-over narration in the American fiction film, illustrates the frequency of this technique from its inception in 1932 to its peak in 1948 and through to the publication of her book in the late.

As it relates to acting, voice-over allows an actor to construct a dualistic performance unique to film. The actor has the potential to create two performances, separated within the diegetic space but joined together in the temporal unfolding of the film. These performances can either minimize the distance between sound and image by complementing each other, or they can create a space between sound and image by contradicting each other. Although many films explore the ironic or subversive effects of having a character say one thing in the voice-over while doing another on screen, rarely does an actor employ a vocalperformance style significantly different from the physical style he or she uses on screen. For example, in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), William Holden's performance as Joe Gillis has a consistency in its vocal and visual ...