Joachim Wichman Strand

Writing Cinematic Sound: hearing the soundscape in the screenplay

University of Western Australia

This paper aims to investigate the emergence of cinematic sound on the screenplay
page. Shifting from hegemonic ocularcentrism to the openness of the soundscape
complicates dominant definitions of the diegetic and the nondiegetic as it blurs the
edges of exterior and interior perception in screenwriting. Accordingly, the poetics of
cinematic sound becomes an essential requirement for understanding the meanings,
methods, and materials of screenwriting practice, and for the creative mapping and
technical execution of the screenwork that brings cinematic audio-vision to the screen.
The paper achieves using information gathered from practice-based research that
involves both original creative screenwriting and critical analysis of theoretical and
artistic texts to answer a single question: how the screenplay functions as hypertextual
monstration of cinematic sound that informs the representation of narrative elements
and the interior emotional geography of characters via formalised literary devices.
Thus, the paper is informed by comics, literature, screenwriting, sound design, and
draws on a case study of the writing of sound in Robert & Max Eggers The Lighthouse
(2018). The case study shows the connections existing between filmic sound events
and their presence and formal manifestations in its corresponding screenplay. These
events all contain soundscapes in which the compositional elements not only
represent environments but are also de- and re-materialised to afford subtle shifts and
complex displacements to both dislocate and re-connect the filmic character and the
cinematic viewer and disrupt and make plastic the limits of exterior and interior
perception. Consequently, diverging from the prevailing view that representation in
contemporary cinema, in general, and screenwriting, in particular, is visual and that it
comes into being by virtue of the lens, this paper demonstrates that, on the contrary,
the written representation of cinematic soundscapes in the screenplay is as creatively
and technically consequential for the construction of cinematic audio-vision.

Dr Joachim Strand is a film practitioner, screenwriter, and academic who achieved his
Masters of Creative Arts in 2006 (published 2007) and his PhD in 2024. He has worked
for the Curtin University Film department, and as a lecturer in film at the SAE Institute,
while also editing, writing, shooting, and directing a variety of short narrative and
corporate work. Joachim currently works as a lecturer in Media and Communication
in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia.