New Approach: A Turning Point

Sadly, I didn't consider the fact that I would eventually run out of Nicholas Ray films to watch. So now instead of focusing on one director I'll use a couple of blogs a week to dive into films that have caught my attention. 

This Week: No Country For Old Men... The Sound of Perfection

In No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers are clearly genius in their attention to detail. The entire film is a masterpiece and the sound design is nearly perfect in my opinion. Even the weakest scene in the film still holds up under scrutiny. Each scene has several interesting sound motifs. The two main characters weapons’ have motifs. The sound of flies always accompanies death. Each character has a wind motif as well. It uses over 40 sound bridges in scene transitions alone. I thought the use of sound to aid editing was clever and it took the film to a higher level. The film also employs a strong sound perspective. It's always heard from the viewer’s POV. It was delicately and realistically done.

Even though they never actually share any screen time, there is an electric scene where the two main characters have an incredible exchange. Anton Chigurh played by Javier Bardem is a hired assassin who finally meets up with Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) because there is a transponder in the two million dollars he stole from a Mexican drug deal gone bad. In the scene Chigurh has a shotgun with a silencer and a captive bolt pistol (an air tank and hose that shoots out a small metal disc and sucks it back in.) Moss’ only weapon is a shotgun.

The design of this scene is an interesting look at complexity vs. simplicity. Even though something relatively simple happens in the clip, forty-three different diagetic sounds are heard and there are over eighty different sound transitions. In this clip the wind motifs for both characters meet for the first time. The fidelity of the clip doesn’t hold up, but it works nevertheless. The gun's clicking, the wind, the lock hitting the ground, and the sound of the trigger are louder than they would be in reality but the shotgun blast is much quieter. These little details become one intense scene that is full of a tension I've never experienced before in the movies...

Where will it go from here?