Saving Private Ryan and Sound Essay Example

Since the beginning of narrative cinema war films have been created. There have been a countless number of films produced about the Second World War. Certain philosophies have been integrated into the war film as trends have moved into showing the truth about war and not the glorified and exciting action adventures of past decades. Saving Private Ryan (1998), directed by Steven Spielberg has possibly made the most impact out of any war film. Gary Rydstrom created the sound for the film and won an Academy Award for best sound and best sound editing. The sound that was created and used in Saving Private Ryan created authenticity by using realistic sound, narrative and dialogue. Sound in particular has been influenced in numerous ways, and primarily naturalistic in sound design. Attention has been paid to the qualities of the sound of battle; gunfire, explosions, ricochets. It is key for the sound design of Saving Private Ryan to aim for sound to be as realistic as possible using various forms of reality and point-of-view. The search for authenticity was found in the sound of guns being fired since Rydstrom used recordings of the same guns used at Omaha back in 1944. A hell of a war is really like is what Saving Private Ryan portrays. War is not exciting or fun; it is the most horrifying place to be. From the film it is also evident that Spielberg knows all this, so Saving Private Ryan plays out like a documentary, but it is not one. Sound in war films are fairly straightforward, therefore films share a variety of sound trademarks: gunfire and explosions being the primary ones. “In the early years of film, sound effects libraries were devised to hold a catalogue of sounds, engineers could quickly draw upon” (Palmer). The sounds of gunfire and ricochets have been re-used and recycled for decades in hundreds of films.
The biggest problem with discussing realistic sound in a war film is one of authenticity. Gary Rydstrom has never seen combat, so how did he know