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This part begins by summarizing a foundational example of postcolonial film theory: “Colonialism, Racism, and Representation: An Introduction” by Robert Stam and Louise Spence. After generating some questions about sound tracks from this article, it then briefly surveys the history of marginalizing and demonizing Aborigines in Australian cinema. In this context, the sound tracks of two contemporary, independent Australian films—Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) and Ten Canoes (2006)—are analyzed. Both of these films attempt to empower the voices of their main Aboriginal characters, thus “speaking back” to the national cinematic history that predates them. However, Ten Canoes emerges as the more radical of the two: where the world music, English-dominated dialogue, and sound effects of Rabbit-Proof Fence demand an emotional focus on its relatively quiet Aboriginal characters, the authentic Aboriginal music, and entirely Aboriginal language of Ten Canoes makes for a more extreme, and uncompromising introduction to traditional Indigenous life.

Chantal Akerman’s work of the 1970s is a sustained dissection of the connections and separations between sound and visual tracks within film. Indexicality comes under intense pressure, but is never dismissed, and the question of diegetic sound is permanently in play, as Akerman undermines easy distinctions between what is inside or beyond the accepted conventions of a film’s visual borders. This chapter argues that sound becomes a mode of structuring events and their perception, allowing a rigorous formalism to suggest not only meaning but also its fractalisation. Hearing underneath the visual and political strategies of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and News from Home (1976) via Saute ma ville (1968), Je tu il elle (1974) and Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978), we can sense a pulsing of meaning that expands the film event into intermediality.

In this chapter, I explore the audible link between masculinity, silence and soundtrack by focusing on a selection of silent, alienated male characters from renowned New Hollywood films. In this discussion, the ‘type’ of silence I often refer to is that described by Paul Théberge as ‘a kind of silence that is produced when, for example, music is allowed to dominate the soundtrack while dialogue and sound effects – the primary sonic modes of the diegetic world – are muted’. I explore the specific use of silence in these texts as well as the ways in which non diegetic music and diegetic sound are used to express meanings not divulged by the male characters, due to their limited dialogue. I argue that this acoustic construction contributes to a projected sense of alienation of male characters and that it can also be linked to the blurring of gender boundaries often accounted for by the counter-culture movements taking place in America throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

This chapter considers the sonic representation of the helicopter in combat films set in Vietnam and the Greater Middle East. The sound of unseen helicopters has frequently been used as a kind of effects-made music underlining tense narrative moments or dialogue. The sound of helicopter rotors in scenes set on or near helicopters has often been modulated (lowered in volume) or replaced entirely by music. Special attention is given to scenes of soldiers inside helicopters riding into battle and to how music has been used to shape the cinematic experience of helicopter-borne battle. Film form often follows musical form when helos take to the skies on-screen. The helicopter attack on a Vietnamese village to the supposedly diegetic sound of Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” in Apocalypse Now is analyzed in detail. The editor Walter Murch built the sequence on Wagner’s musical form, expressing an equivalence between musical pleasure and the pleasures of firing weapons.

Having set aside the military march, serious post-Vietnam war films have explored other strongly metrical musics. Three World War II films have turned to triple-meter, or waltz-time, themes. Band of Brothers and Flags of Our Fathers alike use tuneful waltz-time music to support a sentimental transgenerational agenda linking fathers and sons. The Thin Red Line supports the philosophical ruminations of soldiers with a group of triple-meter melodies that create a zone of quiet reflection. Twenty-first-century war films use beat-driven music to excite the audience physically and also to characterize new sorts of soldierly action—such as work at a computer—as exciting combat action. Beat-driven combat film scores for Black Hawk Down, United 93, and Green Zone are compared. Finally, an extended combat sequence from The Thin Red Line scored to a stately ostinato musical cue is considered as an extreme case of music taking the place of diegetic sound.

This chapter outlines ways Paweł Pawlikowski's Ida is a unique feature film, such as its cinematography and use of diegetic sound that differentiate it from contemporary films. It points out how Ida is a rare film in the Holocaust genre as it never mentions Nazi concentration camps or the Jewish ghettos that were created by the Nazis in large cities in Poland. It also analyses the unique storyline that may seem implausible to audiences that a girl could grow up in a convent without any knowledge that her family is Jewish. The chapter discusses how Ida was compared to documentary films, which is one of the most significant aspects of its reception as a film. It mentions Pawlikowski, who emphasized that it is only in art that filmmakers have the luxury of being true-to-life, despite his earlier success as a documentary filmmaker.