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This chapter examines the second decade of cinema, which runs approximately from 1905 to the start of World War I in 1914. This period sees the establishment of an industrial organisation for film, both in Europe and the USA. The development of the industry involves two key concepts in film studies: vertical and horizontal integration. Essentially, as the industry developed and firms grew larger, they attempted to exert ever greater control on the market. The key was exhibition, which is where the actual money from admissions was made. Both France and the USA are interesting models for study in this development, and each has distinctive features. The study should include as many of the key factors that enabled this growth in monopoly. These include the development of the dedicated film theatre, the introduction of a rental system, and the developments in programming and film form. Also, there is the rich area of stardom as this period sees the establishment of the film centre Hollywood.

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.

Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) introduced a new sort of movie music resounding across Hollywood war films for the last thirty years: the elegiac register. Composer Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, heard repeatedly in Platoon, proves the musical source for this slow, strings-only, contrapuntal, harmonious, sad, and mournful music. This chapter describes this new sort of movie music in musical terms and identifies moments in later films when composers model their original scores directly on Barber’s Adagio. Film form often follows musical form when elegiac music is used. Multiple scenes from combat films are described visually and sonically, showing how the elegiac register has been put to varied ends: to foster reflection in combat film audiences, to put a pause on the action, and, most significantly, to frame the repeated images of dead and injured American soldiers’ bodies which lie at the heart of the cultural work done by serious war films in the post-Vietnam era.

This chapter offers an introduction to film analysis and aesthetics. It includes sections on cinematography, editing and all aspects of mise en scene including costume, lighting and sound. It also includes a case study to indicate how film analysis can be undertaken, how the film form can be explored and how different filmic elements can be analysed separately and collectively.

Ozu Yasujiro wanted to make a “new form” of silent cinema before it disappeared, something sophisticated in a fragile medium that was forced to do obvious things. His goal was to create, for the first and only time in Japanese cinema, films in which audible dialogue was displaced in favor of the intertitle as a form of “visual repartee.” After Western cinema switched to the talkie and while Japan was in the process of converting, Ozu took advantage of the transition from benshi-dialogue to actor-dialogue cinema to invent something like Hollywood silent film: a visual mode of narration with musical accompaniment and speech carried as intertitles. Ozu used the “sound version” to shut the benshi up, allowing emotion in An Inn in Tokyo to “float” as the unspoken disappointment behind banal dialogue, heard synaesthetically in the rhythm of alternating titles and images in a lyrical mise en scène.