Singing in the Rain was an interesting movie because of how it discussed realistic and historical moments in a way that was entertaining and without the affect of being realistic (because of it being a musical and the extreme, over the top sound effects). When watching this movie with extra attention of sound and how it is used to tell a story, a lot is revealed, especially because sound is tied into the plot itself.

In the beginning, there are a lot of scenes of how movies were watched before: with no sound. While this is true, you still hear bits of non-fidelity music playing that can be assumed to be nondiegetic. In one shot, a clip shows the audience clapping after the movie and you see that there is an orchestra completing their composition, informing the audience that it is actually diegetic.

As the story continues, we see the experimentation of sound as they try to produce a movie with sound. The scenes with Lina trying to speak into the mike were very interesting because the camera is placed in the director’s box, so we hear Lina through the mic she barely speaks in versus the camera being in the same room as her and hearing her clearly before deciding to use Kathy’s voice and have Lina lip-sync.

Illusions was an amazing film that utilized a similar idea as Singing in the Rain, having a talented singer sing for someone who cannot for the actors to take credit for and using their plot to address history. I preferred Illusions more because while it addressed history, it, unlike Singing in the Rain, discussed one of the negative historical aspects of America that Singing in the Rain completely disregarded: racism. The big scene where Ester is singing over the video of the actress mouthing the lyrics is a fidelity because we can see Esther singing, but there are a few clips of a closeup shot of the actress lip-syncing, and that would be a non-fidelity, synchronous sound because we know the singing is not coming from her.

I like that these two movies were shown when discussing sound because they not only utilize the technical sounds discussed in class, they both incorporated sound in the plot of the movie. We are learning about how important sound is in a movie and what it can do for one, but these movies show us that sound is important in several different ways. It forces us to consider what could have been used for specific sounds, what it takes to get sound, and how sound can push us to have bigger, political conversations.