Clayton George Wickham - final thesis

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the off screen space of a film. However, as the sound is not visualised, it retains
some ambiguity as to the sound’s diegetic reliability. As this deviates slightly from
Chion’s interpretation of “acousmatic”, I will call this an unverified diegetic sound.
René Clair, writing on the potential of sound to enhance cinema, details a
sequence from Broadway Melody (1929; dir. Beaumont) which articulates my
concept of unverified diegetic sound:
For instance, we hear the noise of a door being slammed and a car driving
off while we are shown Bessie Love’s anguished face watching from a
window the departure which we do not see. This short scene in which the
whole effect is concentrated on the actress’s face, and which the silent
cinema would have had to break up in several visual fragments, owes its
excellence to the “unity of place” achieved through sound. In another
scene we see Bessie Love lying thoughtful and sad; we feel that she is on
the verge of tears; but her face disappears in the shadow of a fade-out,
and from the screen, now black, emerges a single sob. (1929; 94)
This chapter will discuss alternating uses of visualized and unverified
diegetic sound as they appear in the death sequences in the Friday the 13 th films,
with a particular focus on the sound used to indicate the death blow or blows,
contextualizing this within the overall sound design of the sequences. The
visualization of the death sequences has been partially addressed in the previous
chapter, however, the overall visual design analysis that accompanies the
visualized/unverified diegetic sound comparison in this chapter is demonstrated
through an explication of the editing of these sequences. By doing this, I will