When we were discussing the difficulty of portraying the inner thoughts of a character on film, without using the crutch of a voice over I began to think of what artistically do film-makers do to solve this problem. Early Cinema is full of this problem and gradually film-makers have developed “answers” to this problem. For me the most effective way of portraying feeling and emotion across film without using a voice over goes beyond what can be seen or acted, it lies in the music. Over time film-makers and composers have gotten better and better at creating music that not only allows us to identify with a character, but allow us to sense how they are feeling in each moment. The earliest film that I can truly see this working in the way that it does in most good movies today is in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West. The plot in the movie involves many main characters and by using themes for each main character and intertwining them as well as slightly modifying them, Ennio Morricone creates a fluidity and a sense of emotion unlike any other film before it. While some may argue that this is more limited than the voice over and not as precise, I believe if it is done properly the soundtrack of a movie can portray emotion better than words on a page. The limits of this technique, I believe, are only constrained by the imagination of the composer. Long before we had words on a page and written narrative, humans had sound and music. Sergio Leone is noted as saying that sound is 40% of a film. At the very least it is 40% and his approach can be seen in Star Wars, and has been continued up to our very day. There is an instinctual connection between sound and emotion, and the great musical artists can tap into this and transfer the emotion that is written explicitly in text, to emotion felt by an audience watching a movie. Below is an example of the power of music to display emotion in film from Once Upon a Time in the West. Pay close attention to when the music comes in and how it makes you feel compared to how you think the characters would feel/ how that might have been written if this had been a text narrative. Remember that all sound is music and has a purpose in movies, every sound in Leone’s movies was added after the fact, and therefore has a purpose. Sorry there are portugese subtitles but this is the only version of this scene on Youtube. Enjoy.
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