By Kate Rix
When Slumdog Millionaire swept eight Academy awards at the Oscars in February, it was an amazing accomplishment for a foreign film.
One of its Oscars was for best sound, which came as no surprise to Mark Berger, an adjunct professor in the Film Studies program, who has won four Oscars himself for best sound in Apocalypse Now, The Right Stuff, Amadeus, and The English Patient.
“Slumdog Millionaire had a lot of different sound layers going on between the television studio and the slums,” he says. One of the film’s most memorable scenes is of a boy locked into a latrine, who escapes by jumping through the toilet into the pit. “As sound editors, they had to ask what it’s going to sound like when he jumps in. It’s got to sound like it smells really bad, but you can’t overdo it.”
Berger teaches the film program’s course in sound, taking students through the history of film from the silent era (which wasn’t really silent at all) all the way up to contemporary “ride” or action films, which features extra-loud soundtracks that bring viewers right into the heart of the explosions, crashes and roaring monsters those films often feature. Berger even discusses the neurophysiology of hearing, and how sound perception influences our emotional responses to visual images.
“I want students to understand the capabilities of our auditory system,” he says. “We do exercises in class to find out how precisely you can locate a sound in space. “What I teach is a course on how to understand what’s going on in the film soundtrack — the dialogue, music and sound effects — in relation to the images,” says Berger. “It’s conceptual, but not based on a particular theory of film criticism, but rather comes out of my experience working in the industry. There’s a practical aspect to why film decisions are made.”
Students in the course watch film clips in order to study film sound from a literary point of view, examining the effect of first person narration (as in Apocalypse Now and Dr. Zhivago) as opposed to third-person narration (as in Amelie or The Royal Tenenbaums).
Students also develop an ear for the physical qualities of sound, for the volume and dynamic range cues that identify a narrating voice to the audience. Berger provides examples of how music is used to underscore a film’s narrative, as in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, when a waltz in 3/4 time plays under a scene when patients in a mental hospital are receiving their medication.
“We associate the waltz with a very specific choreography,” Berger notes. “Then we see how all the patients line up to get their pills. Everybody knows the drill. In class, we talk about the tempo being very slow in order to maintain an even, calm atmosphere, setting the audience up for Jack Nicholson’s character to come on the scene.”
Berger is part of an innovative generation that put the Bay Area on the filmmaking map in the 1970s. Directors Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, producer Saul Zaentz and sound designer Walter Murch, among others, set up sound mixing and editing facilities in the Bay Area, which helped filmmakers in the region work independent of Hollywood studios. Working outside of the established studios, Berger says, created more creative and professional freedom. Berger’s own first job on a feature film was on The Godfather: Part II, recording, editing and mixing the sounds for scenes in the film that take place in Cuba.
“This was part of the reason the Bay Area was unique. Everybody did everything. We would record the sounds, edit the sounds and mix the sound. In Los Angeles, those crafts were very separate,” Berger says. “Up here, there is an integrity and cohesiveness in soundtracks. Everybody was aware of everybody else’s job.”
Coming as it does after all the film has been shot, sound editors are sometimes confronted with challenging “fixes” or changes in the film. In Apocalypse Now, the name of Marlon Brando’s character was changed after the film had been shot, from Lallie to Kurtz. Berger had to go through every scene where that character’s name was used and replace one name with the other.
“This work requires the ability to focus on minute, tiny qualities of sound, and at the same time have the whole film in mind,” he says.
Berger received his degree from Berkeley in the mid-1960s in experimental psychology, but he also took a number of courses in music history.
He teaches his course in the evening and continues to work as a sound mixer during the day. Half of his students in the film sound course are film studies majors, he says. The other half come from a range of disciplines in the humanities, social sciences and sciences. Students prepare a short presentation of recorded original dialogue with music and effects to demonstrate the sound elements they have studied in class.
Berger recommends that young people interested in actually making films study history, literature, music, science, business, engineering, or anything else, in addition to film studies.
“You can see a lot of films to build up your vocabulary — the Media Resource Center and Film Archive here have everything you could ever want to see,” he says. “But filmmakers and critics will have something more to say if they’ve explored the world and studied a variety of disciplines.”
