The association of local cinephiles Grand Ecran offers, on Monday May 22 at 8:30 p.m., an evening dedicated to the importance of sound in cinema. Thierry Jousse, specialized journalist but also film director, will discuss this subject after the screening of the film “Blow Out” by Brian de Palma. A great specialist in film music, he has written several books on this subject.

Thierry Jousse considers that sound and music are "essential" in a film. “They lead the viewer's gaze. But the sound – a little less the music – still remains a poor relation of cinema for the general public”, estimates the one who hosts a weekly program on France Musique: “Ciné Tempo”.

For Thierry Jousse, "90% of the best memories of spectators in dark rooms are related to music". Even if he does not consider himself an "ayatollah" of music and sound, he deplores the general public's ignorance of these essential elements of a film.

The evening promises to be exciting because the film was chosen by the speaker himself and has for hero... a sound engineer!

The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria always makes a splash with its annual “See It Big” film series.

And there’s no way to make it any bigger than this year’s lineup dedicated to summer blockbusters, dating back to when they were invented in the 1970s.

The promo on the museum’s website, movingimage.us, says it all:

“Kick back in the air conditioning and enjoy these summer movies the way they were meant to be seen.”

The series began May 5. “Jaws” (1975), the original “Star Wars” trilogy (1977-83) and “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) headline the A-list offerings.

Edo Choi, MoMI’s associate curator of film, programmed the series alongside Curator of Film Eric Hynes and co-editors Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert of MoMI’s “Reverse Shot” magazine

“We researched the summer movies from each year going back to the 1973 release of “American Graffiti” which we judged to be the historical, as opposed to the mythic (“Jaws”), beginning of the summer movie phenomenon,” Choi told the Chronicle in an email. “We then tried to achieve a selection that had a good mix of mainstream blockbusters, genre films and arthouse hits.”

Choi said “American Graffiti” was not available because the studio is planning a theatrical release around the film’s 50th anniversary. But he did receive a nice consolation prize

“I’m particularly excited that we managed to arrange the loan of a 35mm print of Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out” (1981),” he said. “The digital format (DCP) has more commonly circulated in recent years and this is certainly one to ‘See Big.’”

There arguably isn’t another director who has built as prolific a filmography off the back of simply his love for cinema as Brian De Palma has. His reverence for Alfred Hitchcock is well documented and observed through Blow Out, but the plethora of pastiches in the film include nods to Stanley Kubrick, Howard Hawks, and Sergei Eisenstein amongst many others. It’s been argued extensively that De Palma’s style of chopping up what he loves and reforming it to present something new, almost as if it’s a theatrical equivalent to a hot dog, is something that works at the expense of his true personality coming through in his films. I contend that’s not really true. The approach itself is as much a reflection of his personality as any other director’s could be said to be and through Blow Out we can see just how much the arts of cinema and filmmaking mean to De Palma. It’s quite literally a matter of life and death.

Blow Out is a film that wears its influences proudly. Jack, played by John Travolta, is a sound guy who works for a studio producing schlocky horror movies on what looks like a perpetually repopulated assembly line. It starts with a POV shot that, despite its satirical nature, could have easily been stolen from John Carpenter’s editing suite. In fact, it’s so close to the opening of Halloween that it retroactively makes it funny. The point of view camera shot, the detached suburban house stalked through its windows, and the eventual reveal of the killer are all essentially satirical interpretations of it. Beyond that, though, its narrative structure has often been compared to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, while its pacing and the ways it builds tension are clearly drawn from Hitchcock’s work. Where it differs from them all and becomes its own, independent, piece of art is in what importance it gives to one particular element of it all.

The central theme between the three is that the man in the middle of them all is a loner with a specialty. He’s so enamoured with his work that he regularly finds himself isolated and pushing others away as a result of it. In Blow-Up, he’s a photographer, whereas in The Conversation he’s a surveillance expert. In Blow Out, he’s deeply embedded in the film industry.

It might be obvious to say, but a film getting nominated for an Oscar doesn’t automatically make it good.

In fact, there have been many deserving movies over the years that were somehow overlooked by the Academy.

It’s easy to assume that certain releases don’t get nominated because they’re not what Oscar voters would usually go for, but there have been some surprises in the past.

For example, pretty much every new superhero film earns a nomination thanks to the technical or makeup categories, while random animated films are acknowledged most likely because of the low number on offer in a certain year.

This means films likem say, DC’s Suicide Squad may get mauled by the critics, but they still gain recognition from the Academy (it went on to win).

This is even more ridiculous when you consider that classics such as Don’t Look Now and Blow Out didn’t even get recognised.

Shadows and Dreams: The use of sound, on and off screen, is so central to the storytelling here. What kind of work went into capturing that to everybody’s satisfaction?

Paul Hirsch: Dan Sable was our sound effects editor. They hadn't invented the term sound supervisor yet. He was responsible for recording the sounds. The placement of the sounds within the scenes was critical, and I did that. 

Dan moved some of the sounds, and I had him move them back. The picture cuts were triggered by the sound, and the temp effects I laid in had to be treated like dialogue, sync-wise. The picture cuts and the sounds are like in a dance with each other, and you can't shift the sound without spoiling the picture. 

Shadows and Dreams: Was that your suggestion to DePalma to introduce Burke, the John Lithgow character much earlier in the film?

Paul Hirsch: I think that came out of an early screening of the film for a few friends, who found a lack of tension in the early reels. Introducing the antagonist sooner was our solution to that note.

Shadows and Dreams: Another celebrated moment, the Zapruder-influenced scene where Jack syncs his recorded sound to the published photographs. Was that an example of DePalma letting you do your own thing with the material?

Paul Hirsch: Well, he always let me do my own thing unless he had a problem with something I had done. Then we would change it. 

Shadows and Dreams: Did DePalma storyboard a lot with the cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond? If so, did you reference any of that for your work?

Paul Hirsch: I only look at the script and dailies. Brian did his own boards for a long time, and they were difficult for me to decipher. Anyway, they are all about how he planned to shoot a scene. Once the scene is shot, they are irrelevant. 

Shadows and Dreams: In your book, you talk about the conflict with you and DePalma over the final movement. How did you ultimately resolve that?

Paul Hirsch: We disagreed over the timing of Travolta's run to save Nancy Allen. I recut it according to Brian's instructions. Then George Litto, the producer, saw the cut and expressed an opinion that coincided with mine. So Brian agreed to go back to the earlier structuring, although with film, you had to take apart one version to create a new one. 

So I had to try to remember what I'd done. It was all about how early or late we started John running. As for the final scene, I would have preferred a hokey happy ending, but that's just me.

Rafer Guzmán, Newsday:

There’s something Spielbergian in the suburban normalcy of Sammy’s boyhood — cookie-cutter homes, pesky younger sisters, bickering relatives. Sammy’s father, Burt (a heart-tugging Paul Dano), is an engineer who moves the family around the country to chase better jobs; his mother, Mitzi (lovingly played by Michelle Williams), was once a promising pianist. Following a screening of Cecil B. DeMille's “The Greatest Show on Earth,” a six-year-old Sammy sets about recreating its spectacular train crash with his brand-new Lionels, displeasing his pragmatic dad and delighting his artistic mom — a pattern that will recur throughout his life.

While editing a home movie, Sammy sees something life-shattering. For cinephiles, the moment will recall Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out,” but for Sammy it’s the end of innocence. His Uncle Boris, a crusty old carny (Judd Hirsch, in the kind of supporting tour-de-force that Oscars are made of), warns him that when family and art collide, “it’ll tear you apart.” That theme is echoed by his parents' friend Bennie (a terrific Seth Rogen), who at a crucial moment tells Sammy to keep making movies no matter what.

As Sammy enters high school, he meets his first love (a winning Chloe East), encounters an anti-Semitic bully (Oakes Fegley) and runs afoul of the school's alpha jock (Sam Rechner). Once again, Sammy's camera will play a pivotal role in an unexpected way. These scenes are lively and entertaining, though not as primal and powerful as the ones we’ve already experienced.

A nerve-wracking encounter with the legendary director John Ford (played by a wonderfully cantankerous David Lynch) tells us Sammy is on his way to becoming Spielberg. So what have we learned? Just that Spielberg was a talented kid who worked hard, took his punches and never stopped dreaming. It’s exactly the kind of story that would make a great movie.

We learn not all is honky-dory at home and there’s maybe something going on between mom, dad (a superbly stiff Paul Dano) and dad’s best friend (really good Seth Rogen). Audiences will not be surprised when this is revealed. And the way our hero figures it out is pure cinematic — he sees clues in his own home movies. And he confronts the offending party as only an auteur would — instead of talking, he shows an edited film.

“The Fabelmans” gets a needed jolt of energy when Judd Hirsch arrives as an estranged uncle who once was in the circus. He immediately sees in his nephew a fellow artistic spirit who will have to pick between family and his art, just as his mother has done. “It will tear out your heart and leave you lonely. Art is no game. Art is as dangerous as a lion’s mouth,” his uncle tells him. “We’re junkies and art is our drug.”

A big wet valentine to filmmaking, “The Fabelmans” fits into the latest wave of directors looking backward, including Alejandro Iñárritu’s “Bardo,” Charlotte Wells’ “Aftersun,” Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast” and James Gray’s “Armageddon Time.” And Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age “Almost Famous” just landed on Broadway in musical form.

Many of these projects seem to passionately argue for the healing and communal power of art by preaching to the converted. And they often do it with such fondness and reverence that it gets way too heady. They’re getting high on their own supply.

In the third act of “The Fabelmans,” the Spielberg family — sorry Fabelman family — moves again, this time to California and the movie angles in another direction, with an unlikely romance amid the reality of antisemitism, culminating in a lesson about the power of film to create an image. But it shares the rest of the film’s heightened mannerisms, the artificiality of its supposed madcap humor and its tendency to create little arias of theatrical speech.

The movie ends with a warning to the young filmmaker from no less than the great director John Ford (a hysterical cameo from David Lynch). “This business will rip you apart,” he snarls. And yet Fabelman is overjoyed to connect with his hero and doesn’t listen. He’s a junkie, after all. But those of us not successful Hollywood directors might like it when he turns his camera at things other than himself.