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CHAPTER 19

SENSORY ASPECTS OF

CONTEMPORARY CINEMA

MICHEL CHION

THis chapter focuses not so much on digital sound's specific contribution to cinema as on certain aspects of cinema's evolution that have been made possible by digital technol- ogy and its capacity to transform and multiply data. Digital technology has aided the continued development of cinema as a sensory experience, a tendency that was already present in its early stages but has become much more pronounced.

We are all familiar with the contributions digital sound and imagery have made to cinema. I have written about it in my book Film, a Sound Art.1 The sensory spectacle offered by cinema, as I argue in that book, is audio-visual, but to be more precise, it is audio-visiogenic. Although technically speaking it may be composed of sounds plus images, in reality it consists of sensations created by combinations of sounds and images, greater than the sum of the parts.

Involved here is the notion of rendering, which I have been writing about since the late 1980s. Here I take up the idea again, based on something I witnessed during a stay in Montreal a few years ago.

In the main atrium of the vast Desjardins shopping mall in downtown Montreal is a large circular fountain, from which very clear water shoots upward in various shapes (jets, sheets of water, bubbling). From the bench where I was sitting, I watched a woman in a motorized wheelchair move toward the fountain. She went right up to its rim and surrendered to the sensory spectacle the fountain offered. From her position she was able to capture sound, image (which almost surely filled her visual field, because she was so close to it), humidity, and coolness. From time to time she would make the whole circuit around the fountain, as if around a merry-go-round or a circus ring. Her sensory spectacle was thus both interactive and three-dimensional, because she was

' Michel Chi on, Film, a Sound Art, trans. Claudia Gorbman [Le Cinema, art sonore, 2003] (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). Cf. especially chapters 8 and 14.

3 26 MICHEL CHI ON

essentially performing the equivalent of the circular tracking shots seen so frequently in films of the past 20 years, which almost seem to have been helping prepare cinema to go three-dimensional.

Let us imagine that I wish to transcribe cinematically the sensations this paralyzed woman is experiencing. I am paralyzed, as is any person who sits in a movie theater, with the difference that the movie spectator has chosen to be immobile and can stop being so at will. All I have to work with is sounds and images, but through particular ways of treating and combining them, I strive to render wetness and coolness, the moments when droplets reach the skin. For example, a momentary increase in audio intensity or a sudden transfer of sound from one channel to another might render the rush of cool air that can be felt near moving water.

For over 20 years I have been struck by the fact that some narrative films do not try to reproduce sounds that would be heard in the same real situation; rather, the sounds in combination with images try to re-create an overall sensation or even an emotion, while

also vaguely resembling real sounds:2

[T]he film spectator recognizes sounds to be truthful, effective, and fitting not so much if they reproduce what would be heard in the same situation in reality, but if they render (convey, express) the sensations-not necessarily auditory-associated with the situation.3

As an example of rendering (i.e., of a sound that "translates" not another sound but speed, or a force, etc.), think of the sound effects that punctuate action scenes in many movies: the whirr and clank of swords and sabers in martial arts films translate agility; the sounds of punches in fight films translate the violence the characters experience (whereas in reality the impact of bodies might make less or different noise). There are also sounds that are intended to translate impressions of materiality or immateriality, fragility or resistance, sensuality or austerity, hollowness or fullness, heaviness or lightness, something threadbare or brand new, luxurious or spartan. They are created with this in mind and not the reproduction of the real sound of the object or character in question. A rendering is always the rendering of something. 4

We might wonder why cinema, relying as it does on sounds and images, is not content with representing the sounds and images of a reproduced or invented reality. As I see i~ this is because any art based on imitation (what the Greeks called mimesis) tries sooner or later to reproduce what is sensorily unavailable to it. An art that solely addresses the eye will try to suggest sounds; some music tries to conjure up images; a text meant to be read in silence attempts to evoke the specific presence of a voice. Literature endeavors to make the characters' sensations seen and heard, starting with Balzac and especially Flaubert. (In Madame Bovary, for example, Flaubert gets us to smell

2 Mi~hel Chion, Audio- Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman [Audio -Vision , 1990] (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

3 Chion, Audio- Vision, 109. 4 Chi on, Film, a Sound Art, 488.

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SENSORY ASPECTS OF CONTEMPORARY CINEMA 327

dust.) Purely instrumental music, lacking text and voice, tries to speak as an articulate language. The monocular painting of the quattrocento aims to translate the perspec- tive, relief, and depth it lacks, as well as movement. Classical sculpture strains to convey motion, showing Hercules fighting lions; Rodin and Degas depict acrobats and dancers; Giacometti creates a man walking; and so forth.

Silent film took an interest in conveying music visually, but also in translating sounds through images. Monocular sound film often works to re-create a sense of three-dimensionality. Real three-dimensional cinema, as is obvious in 3D screenings of Jim Cameron's Avatar, tackles the tactile, suggesting richer sensations than mere three-dimensionality.

I do not believe that this pursuit of rendering complex sensations, in auteur as well as popular cinema, merely serves the film's narrative or message. Do filmmakers show and create sensations to tell the story more clearly, better illustrate an idea or a message, or create a dramatic effect? I think not: in film there is an inherent pleasure in the sen- sory per se. I argue that people go see certain films also to enjoy figurative pleasures: to get the feeling of the wind (whose coolness they can't feel on their skin) and the rain (whose drops don't reach them). We find this appeal in Spielberg, and also in films by Kurosawa and Tarkovsky, who, if only because of their training as painters, are great sensory filmmakers.

One could just as easily make the opposing claim (although it would be somewhat excessive): that people tell stories in film merely as a pretext for reconstituting, rep- resenting, and imitating: to induce dreaming, transport the spectator into a world of pleasure and sensuality, and give us the impression of sleeping with the characters in beautiful beds with silk sheets, but also to give us physical sensations, frissons with no danger. And also for the sole pleasure of imitating.

It is significant that one of the first successful films using computer-generated anima- tion, Toy Story, affords pleasure by making us feel that the small industrial toys made of plastic, fabric, or cardboard that we see on screen, and that we know are digitally syn- thesized, are real. In other words, Toy Story delights through conveying the toys' tex- ture, which in real life we don't notice or consider interesting. Pascal accused painting of "vanity" because it entices us by resembling originals that in everyday life do not interest us.

A few years ago I wrote about the way computer-generated images can emphasize textures, which were originally the weak point of animation. 5 But now I am struck by the fact that newer animated movies, such as A Bug's Story, Ice Age, Robots, and Up, rich with details, volumes, modeling, and textures (snow, earth, sand, clouds, animal furs, met- als, etc.), paradoxically have not hindered the success of other films that are by contrast roughly sketched, with a very simplified texture, and make no attempt to depict volume; for example, those of the great Hayao Miyazaki. Indeed, one current in contemporary

s "Image, rendu, et texture"; see http:/ /www.michelchion.com/cours/echelle_au_cinema.pdf (accessed March 3, 2012).

328 MICHEL CHION

art aims to provide us with fewer sensations, fewer effects of matter and depth; in short, it aims to work on the side of what we can call sensory fasting.

As a composer of musique concrete, which is music that comes from loudspeakers, I have refused for 20 years to contribute to films or to present my work in conjunction with visual effects (laser shows, projections, choreography, etc.). My music, which is made exclusively of recorded sounds, is thereby on the side of sensory fasting. However, having only sound at my disposal has stimulated me to create rich sensations that are no longer just sound sensations but also tactile and trans-sensory. I have often observed that when there is nothing but sound, the sound becomes all the sensations and ceases to be "just" sound.

Even the films with the greatest sensory richness trigger in us a feeling of lack, of incompleteness. That is because they highlight one of the things we tend to forget: that they are based on what I call sensory isolates. (In chemistry, an isolate is a substance that the chemist manages to purify from another, more complex substance.)

The sensory isolate-sensation directed at just one of the senses and taken out of a multisensory context-is a phenomenon made possible by the way sound and image are recorded. In the case of sound recording, independently of the question of "fidelity" to the original, we are dealing with a sound phenomenon that is isolated from the condi· tions and sensations normally associated with it. For example, the noise a train makes when heard through a loudspeaker, even if recorded and reproduced in high definition and in stereo, becomes what I call an acoustic isolate, as opposed to the sensations we experience when riding in a train, where this noise is associated not only with visual sensations but also with phoric sensations (being carried, jostled). More simple is is the case of a familiar noise you hear but whose cause you cannot see. This audible isolate may partially awaken the original global sensations in the listener's body via a condi· tioned reflex.

Systematic "acousmatization:' which by definition characterizes media such as radio and telephone, but also such expressive forms as Horspiel and musique concrete, gener· ates specific effects of the acoustic isolate. Sound is divorced from thermal, tactile, and visual sensations that would normally be most commonly associated with it.

The acoustic isolate is only a particular case of what can be called sensory isolates. I use this expression to designate the technical process through which video and sound recorders and players "artificially isolate some types of sensations (taste, sound, etc.) which would normally cluster around objects:'6 Of course this concept aims only to describe, not to judge and even less to deplore or condemn (as if we automatically pre· ferred the natural form), a phenomenon that has become routine, mechanically gener· ated through video and sound recording.

Cinema is by no means alone. Modern windows, which let light through while insu· lating us ever more efficiently from temperature and noise, are systems that create a sen· sory isolate. I am writing this in a cafe on rue Saint-Denis in Montreal, sitting next to a

6 Michel Chi on, Le Promeneur ecoutant: Essais d'a coulogie (Paris: Plume, 1993), 178.

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SENSORY ASPECTS OF CONTEMPORARY CINEMA 329

large picture window through which I can see the street as a visual isolate. In the winter in Canada and parts of the United States (unlike what we experience in most European dwellings), inside and outside are two separate worlds, strongly differentiated by tem- perature, because of the great differences between interior thermostatic control and the heat or cold outside. The soundproofing and insulating glass, protecting me at the same time from sound and cold, makes a sensory isolate out of my view of the street. It is no accident that the double- paned window was developed in the twentieth century.

Even in sensorily rich films that aim to immerse us in a world "as if we were there:' we get the feeling ever more strongly that something is missing, something is "insulating" us from this world, protecting us from it, giving us the sense of visiting Niagara Falls without having to wear rain gear.

Cinema that reconstitutes or renders a reality through multisensory technical imita- tion creates, at the same time, an awareness of sensory isolates. With a film like Avatar, which gives me three dimensions, image, and sound, where it is as if I am "in reality" more than with a monocular film, I feel all the more protected from the world I am observing, insulated from temperature and tactile sensations, and of course from pain. If films in the future are made in 3D but also with thermal effects, alternating among warm, hot, cool, and cold sensations, I will certainly be immersed in this world, but then I will always be insulated from some other perceptions, such as smell.

Who knows whether the filmgoer we can no longer simply call the spectator seeks not so much the feeling of sensory immersion as the feeling of protection, particularly with respect to algesic sensations (pain), that the genuine experience brings. If digital video games sometimes seem to present simulations of the real world that are capable of leading some weak-minded individuals astray and blurring the difference between the imaginary and the real, I believe that it is because of their interactivity. Interactivity alters our perception. In a film screening, interactivity doesn't exist or at least is quite limited.

Some movies, particularly thanks to the digital synthesizing of sounds and images and the sensory multiplicity this makes possible, appear as sensory feasts, nourishment for the senses hungry for sensory variations. But other films operate in the mode of sen- sory fasting, mentioned previously. We can appreciate spare images and rare or nonex- istent sounds in a film, whereas everyday reality, media and advertising permeated as it is, solicits us with a cacophony of sounds and a plethora of colors.

Why has it taken so long for film theory to acknowledge and consider this dimension "beyond sound and image?" Why do we continue to speak of"the cinematic image" (fol- lowing Deleuze), or of"the sound track:' as is still often done in France? It seems to me that this stems from a desire to keep identifying cinema with its technical basis, that is, its visual and sound recording apparatuses.

Cinematic images and sounds are produced by machines that seem to imitate human organs of perception, but the apparatuses and the organs are in fact quite different. This tendency to liken the camera to the eye, even to a pair of eyes for 3D, and the microphone to the ear, or to a pair of ears for stereophony, is misleading. Not only is the camera's sight not as acute as our eyes, and microphones and sound recording systems, no matter how

330 MICHEL CHION

perfect, do not have the acuity of our ears, but the human ear and eye are connected with the person and the body as a whole. What we perceive through our eyes quickly ceases to be just "for our eyes:' because machines are ignorant of the trans-sensory:

TRANS-SENSORY PERCEPTIONS: I call trans-sensory those perceptions that belong to no one particular sense but which may travel via one sensory ~hannel or another without their content or their effect being limited to this one sense. Everything involving rhythm may serve as an example. But other cases involve spatial perceptions, as well as the verbal dimension. A word that is read or spoken belongs to the same sphere of language, even if the modes of its transmission (handwriting, vocal timbre) run in parallel sensory channels.

Rhythm is the essential trans-sensory dimension, since we experience it before we are born. The fetus encounters rhythm in the form of variations in pressure on the body wall, parsed with the combined beats of the mother's heart and its own. Rhythm is everywhere. For example, at night in the days before electric lights, it was present in the subtle pulsations of candlelight, in one sensory variation that we have lost and have replaced with others .7

Texture and grain are another category of trans-sensory perception. The idea of the trans-sensory (called the inter-sensory in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's

phenomenology) should be marginalized no longer. Those who make cinema and who actually deploy trans-sensorial effects unwittingly may be excused for ignoring it, but those who study the sensory dimensions of cinema would do well to explore these phe· nomena further.

NOTES

This chapter was translated by Claudia Gorbman.

7 Chi on, Film, a Sound Art, 496.