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chapter 5
Film Sound Listening to the Cinema
Jane Campion’s 1993 The Piano opens with its nineteenth-century heroine Ada McGrath’s voiceover: “The voice you hear is not my speaking voice; it is my mind’s voice.” This is the first indication of the inventive uses to which the film will put sound — for Ada is mute, and we will not hear her “mind’s voice” again until the film’s final moments. She is about to emigrate from Scotland to New Zealand to marry a man whom she has never met, and the grand piano that she takes with her becomes her primary means of expression. And even when Ada is forced to leave the piano on the beach where she lands, as it is too large to transport, the film’s soundtrack acts as a link between her and the piano. Later the piano becomes an instrument of exchange and erotic expression, when she must barter for its return from the man who buys it from her husband. The Piano recognizes from the start that film sound does not simply play a supporting role, nor is it restricted to human speech. Rather, film sound — as dialogue, music, or sound effects — can create a drama as complex as mise-en-scène, cinematography, or editing.
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he cinema is an audiovisual medium, one among many that saturate our contemporary media experience. Many of the visual technologies we encounter in daily life are also sound technologies: you choose your
smartphone’s ringtone, battle villains to the soundtrack of your favorite video game, or notice that your television’s volume soars when a commercial interrupts a program. These devices use sound to encourage and guide interaction, to complement visual information, and to give rhythm and dimension to the experience. The cinema works similarly, using complex combinations of voice, music, and sound effects. Too often given secondary status, sound engages viewers perceptually, provides key spatial and story information, and affords an aesthetic experience of its own. This chapter explores how speech, music, and sound effects are used in cinema and how they are perceived by a film’s audience.
KEY OBJECTIVES
▪ Explain the various ways sound is important to the film experience. ▪ Describe how the use and understanding of sound reflect different historical and cultural influences. ▪ Explain how sounds convey meaning in relationship to images. ▪ Summarize how sounds are recorded, combined, and reproduced. ▪ List the various functions of voice in film. ▪ Describe the principles and practices that govern the use of music. ▪ Outline the principles and practices that govern the use of sound effects. ▪ Analyze the cultural, historical, and aesthetic values that determine traditional relationships between
sounds and images.
Sound is a sensual experience that in some cases makes an even deeper impression than a film’s visuals. Viewers might cover their eyes during the infamous shower scene in Psycho (1960), but to lessen the scene’s horror, they would have to escape from the shrieking violins that punctuate each thrust of the knife. To perceive an image, we must face forward with our eyes open, but sound can come from any direction. Listening to movies, just as much as watching them, defines the filmgoing experience, and with the advent of advanced technologies, sound has helped to make that experience even more immersive.
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A Short History of Film Sound Topsy-Turvy (1999) tells the story of the collaboration between Gilbert and Sullivan, the late-nineteenth-century British lyricist-composer duo, as they brainstorm, quarrel, and finally witness the first production of their operetta The Mikado [Figure 5.1]. The behind-the-scenes story culminates in a performance of the operetta that brings together sound and image for the theater audience within the film and extends this experience to the film’s viewers. As this film dramatizes, many of the traditions and technologies that became synthesized in the institution of the cinema combined sound, especially music, and visual spectacle in public performances.
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5.1 Topsy-Turvy (1999). A film version of a filmic precedent: the making of the nineteenth-century operetta The Mikado.
Theatrical and Technological Prehistories of Film Sound It is difficult to think of a theatrical tradition that does not have its own distinctive musical conventions. The practice of combining music with forms of visual spectacle in the Western tradition goes back at least as far as the use of choral odes in classical Greek theater. Perhaps most relevant to the use of sound in early cinema is the tradition of melodrama. Popularized in eighteenth-century France, melodrama, literally meaning “music drama,” originally designated a theatrical genre that combined spoken text with music. In England, during a time when laws restricted “legitimate” theater to particular venues, melodrama permitted the mounting of popular theatrical spectacles. Stage melodrama became increasingly more spectacular throughout the nineteenth century and eventually came to dominate the American stage, where melodrama had an incalculable influence on cinematic conventions. Not only was the aural component of the form very important, but the up-and-down rhythms of melodrama’s sensational plots also drew on the strongly felt but inexpressible emotions that music so powerfully conveys. All of these qualities were adopted by film melodramas like D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920), an adaptation of a nineteenth-century play.
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Technological breakthroughs that led to such inventions as the phonograph were also important precursors of film sound. As far back as the end of the eighteenth century, inventors were engaged in the problems of sound reproduction. Thomas Edison’s phonograph, introduced in 1877, had an irreversible impact on the public and on late-nineteenth-century science.
1895–1920s: The Sounds of Silent Cinema The eventual union of film and sound haunted the medium from its inception. Edison was a primary figure in the invention of the motion-picture apparatus, and one of the first films made by his studios in 1895 is a sound experiment in which Edison’s chief inventor, W. L. K. Dickson, plays a violin into a megaphone as two other employees dance [Figure 5.2]. Sound cylinders provided a way of synchronizing image and sound very early in film history, and inventors continued to experiment with means of providing simultaneous picture and sound throughout the silent film era.
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5.2 Edison Studios’ Sound Experiment (1895). A rare film fragment with synchronized sound from the dawn of cinema. Courtesy Edison Historic Site, NPS
But before the successful development and widespread showing of films with synchronized sound, loudspeakers lured customers into film exhibitions that were accompanied by lecturers, pianos, organs, small ensembles, or, later, full orchestras [Figure 5.3]. The so-called silent cinema was often loud and noisy. In nickelodeons and other movie venues, audiences themselves customarily made noise, joining in sing-alongs between films [Figures 5.4a and 5.4b] and talking back to the screen. Often sound effects were supplied by someone standing behind the screen or by specially designed machines. Occasionally actors even provided dialogue to go along with the picture.
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5.3 Wurlitzer organ. The pianos, organs, and orchestras of silent film were often as much of an attraction as the movie itself. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS, ALA,37-BIRM,37 — 120 (CT)
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5.4a and 5.4b Early nickelodeon slides. From 1905 to 1915, films were interspersed with sing-alongs, and slides like these provided the lyrics for an interactive experience. 5.4a: from the collection of Joseph Yranski/5.4b: from Mar nan Collection/Minneapolis, Minnesota
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Music halls in Great Britain and vaudeville theaters in the United States lent early cinema popular talents, proven material, and formats such as the revue, delivering audiences with specific expectations of sound and spectacle to the new medium. Because of the preexisting popularity of minstrel shows and vaudeville, African American and Jewish voices were heard in cinema when they might otherwise have been excluded from entertainment directed at mass audiences. For his sound film debut at MGM, director King Vidor chose to make Hallelujah! (1929), a musical with an all-black cast, capitalizing on the cultural association of African Americans with the expressive use of song [Figure 5.5]. Not only musical talent but also stage performers with training and experience were now in demand in Hollywood, and they soon displaced many of the silent screen’s most beloved stars.
5.5 Hallelujah! (1929). With the coming of sound, musicals abounded, from backstage musicals to King Vidor’s film, shot on location with an all-black cast.
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1927–1930: Transition to Synchronized Sound No event in the history of Hollywood film was as cataclysmic as the rapid incorporation of synchronized sound in the period 1927–1930. Many dynamics were at work in the introduction of sound, including the relationship of cinema to radio, theater, and vaudeville, the economic position of the industry as the United States headed into the Great Depression, and the popularity of certain film genres and stars. Yet exhibitors needed to be convinced to adopt the relatively untested new technology. The expense of converting a sufficient number of theaters to make the production of sound films feasible was considerable, and the studios had to be willing to make the investment.
From 1926 to 1927, two studios actively pursued competing sound technologies. Warner Bros. aggressively invested in sound and, in 1926, premiered its Vitaphone sound-on-disk system with a program of shorts, a recorded speech by Hollywood censor Will H. Hays, and the first feature film with a recorded score, Don Juan. Fox developed its Movietone sound system, which recorded sound optically on film, and in 1928 introduced its popular Movietone newsreels, which depicted everything from ordinary street scenes to exciting news (aviator Charles Lindbergh’s takeoff for Paris was the first use of sound for a news item) and were soon playing in Fox’s many theaters nationwide [Figure 5.6]. The new technology became impossible to ignore when it branched out from musical accompaniment and sound effects to include synchronous dialogue. Public response was enthusiastic.
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5.6 Program for Fox Movietone News. Fox Studios developed a system to record sound optically on the film itself and then produced newsreels to show it off in its vast theater holdings. The newsreels ran from 1928 to 1963 in the United States. Courtesy Photofest
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Talking pictures, or “talkies,” were an instant phenomenon. The Jazz Singer, Warner Bros.’ second feature film with recorded sound, released in October 1927, is credited with convincing exhibitors, critics, studios, and the public that there was no turning back. Starring vaudevillian Al Jolson, the country’s most popular entertainer of the time, who frequently performed in blackface, the film tells a story, similar to Jolson’s own, of a singer who must turn his back on his Jewish roots and the legacy of his father, a cantor in a synagogue, in order to fulfill his show-business dreams. He introduces dialogue to the movies with a famous promise that came true soon thereafter: “You ain’t heard nothing yet!” [Figure 5.7]. In the wake of The Jazz Singer’s phenomenal success, the studios came together and signed with Western Electric (a subsidiary of AT&T) to adopt a sound- on-film system in place of the less flexible Vitaphone sound-on-disk process. The studios also invested in the conversion of their major theaters and in the acquisition of new chains to show sound films.
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5.7 The Jazz Singer (1927). Warner Bros.’ Vitaphone sound-on-disk system became a sensation because of AI Jolson’s singing and spontaneous dialogue.
1930s–1940s: Challenges and Innovations in Cinema Sound The transition to sound was not entirely smooth. The troubles with exhibition technology were more than matched by the difficulties posed by cumbersome sound recording technology. Despite such problems, the transition was extremely rapid: by 1930, silent films were no longer being produced by the major studios; only a few independent filmmakers, such as Charlie Chaplin, whose art grew from the silent medium, held out.
The ability of early films to cross national borders and be understood regardless of the local language, a much-celebrated property of the early medium, was also changed irrevocably by the addition of spoken dialogue in a specific language. Film industries outside the United States acquired national specificity, and Hollywood set up European production facilities. Exports were affected by conversion-standard problems and patents disputes. For a time, films were made simultaneously in different languages. Marlene Dietrich became an international star in The Blue Angel (1930), produced in Germany in French, English, and German versions.
By this period, the Radio Corporation of America had entered the motion-picture production business, joining with the Keith-Orpheum chain of vaudeville theaters. The new studio, RKO, quickly became one of five
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studios known as the “majors” that would dominate sound-era cinema, and RKO’s King Kong (1933) and Citizen Kane (1941) both contributed significantly to sound techniques.
1950s–Present: From Stereophonic to Digital Sound The establishment of representational norms in sound recording and mixing practices proceeded rapidly after the introduction of sound. How movies sound — the crispness of voices, the lush quality of orchestral background music, the use of sound effects in conjunction with what is onscreen — supports ideas about the complementary relationship of sound and image, listening and viewing, and the value of realism. Further technological innovations in the 1950s (stereophonic sound), the 1970s (Dolby and surround sound), and the 1990s (digital sound) brought the aural experience of Hollywood cinema to the fore but did little to challenge these ideas. More than simple technological “improvements,” these changes corresponded with historical shifts in film’s social role, as television, home video, and computer games became competitive entertainments.
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When digital sound, the most recent and radical change in sound reproduction, was introduced, the competitive formats recalled the period of sound’s introduction in the late 1920s. Just as in the 1950s, when new film technologies such as CinemaScope and stereophonic sound were used to lure customers back to the theaters, today’s digital sound systems attract audiences to theatrical exhibition. Audiophiles lead the companion trend toward home theaters with digital sound systems and speakers configured like those of movie theaters to emulate surround sound. The perpetual quest for images and sounds that are bigger, better, and louder confirms that part of cinema’s appeal is its ability to provide a heightened sensory experience that intensifies the ordinary.
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The Elements of Film Sound Despite our habitual references to motion pictures and to film viewers, sound is fully integrated into the film experience. In fact, one aspect of sound — human speech — is so central to narrative comprehension and viewer identification that we can often follow what happens even when the picture is out of sight. Sounds can interact with images in infinite ways, and strategies used to combine the two fundamentally affect our understanding of film. The song “We’ll Meet Again” — a nostalgic 1940s song used to boost troop morale during World War II — that accompanies footage of H-bombs dropping in Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) makes it impossible to read these images as noble or tragic; instead, a frame of dark satire determines our view of war [Figure 5.8].
5.8 Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). An image of aggression set to nostalgic 1940s music sets the film’s dark satirical tone.
The relationship between the original sound and its reproduction differs from that between an object and its filmed image. Although a sound is altered when it is recorded, engineered, and reproduced, we feel that we are hearing a real sound in real time. With images, we readily recognize that we see only a two-dimensional copy of the original. Sound effects of footsteps to accompany an image of a character walking are not really necessary; such an image is easily interpreted. However, the sound of footsteps heightens the sense of immediacy and presence. In recent years, improvements in sound technology and developments in sound recording practices have resulted in ever greater “realism” and intensity, making contemporary films sound much richer than those of the past. Sound has also led the way toward digitization, with digital image manipulation and picture editing following in turn. In the next section, we will explore the relationship of sound and image and the often- unperceived meanings of sound, before considering more fully the technology and aesthetics of film sound.
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Sound and Image Any consideration of sound in film entails discussion of the relationship between sounds and images. Some filmmakers, such as the comic actor and writer-director Jacques Tati, have consistently given equal weight to the treatment and meaning of sound in their films. In Playtime (1967), as in Tati’s other films, comic gags take place in long shots, and sounds cue us where to look [Figure 5.9]. In his unique films, filmmaker Jacques Demy pursues a vision of film’s musicality. In The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), all of the dialogue is sung to Michel Legrand’s music, while the candy-colored sets and costumes are designed to harmonize with this heightening of experience [Figure 5.10]. Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993), made after the filmmaker had lost his vision due to an AIDS-related illness, combines an image track consisting solely of a rich shade of blue with a soundtrack featuring a complex mix of music, effects, and voices reading diaries and dramatic passages. Gazing into a vast blue screen allows viewers to focus more carefully on the soundtrack’s ideas and the emotions they evoke.
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5.9 Playtime (1967). Jacques Tati’s comic film emphasizes sound as much as image, often cueing the gag through sound effects.
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VIEWING CUE Technologies of watching — and listening — to movies have changed rapidly in recent years. Characterize the audio experience of the last film you watched. How much of this experience was specific to the film’s sound design and how much to the format, platform, or venue through which you watched the film?
5.10 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964). The musicality of Jacques Demy’s lovely tale of a small-town romance is represented in everything from the dialogue, all in song, to the brightly colored costumes and sets.
For many filmmakers, however, as for viewers, sound functions more as an afterthought that exists to enhance the impact of the image. Many possible reasons exist for this disparity. Film is generally considered to be a predominantly visual medium rather than an aural one, following a more pervasive hierarchy of vision over sound. The artistry of the image track is perceived to be greater, as the image is more clearly a conscious rendering of the object being photographed than the recording is of the original sound. The fact that sound came later in the historical development of cinema has also been offered as an explanation of its secondary status. Yet the importance and variety of aural experiences at the movies were great even before the introduction of synchronized soundtracks.
Since the early years of sound cinema, certain directors and composers have struggled against a too-literal, and too-limited, use of sound in film, arguing that the infinite possibilities in image and sound combinations are germane to the medium and its historical development. French filmmaker René Clair feared that the introduction of sound would diminish the visual possibilities of the medium and reduce it to “canned theater.” In his musical film Le Million (1931), he uses sound in a way that makes it integral to the film. Through scenes of characters and crowds singing songs essential to the plot, Clair demonstrates that sound’s potential is more than additive; it transforms the film experience viscerally, aesthetically, and conceptually.
Synchronous and Asynchronous Sound Because sound and image always create meaning in conjunction, film theorists attentive to sound have looked for ways to talk about the possibilities of the combination of sound and image. In his book Theory of Film
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(1960), Siegfried Kracauer emphasizes a distinction between synchronous and asynchronous sound, also known as onscreen and offscreen sound. The former has a visible onscreen source, such as when dialogue appears to come directly from the speaker’s moving lips, while the latter does not. For instance, while most speech is synchronous, voiceovers are asynchronous, because they do not coordinate with the action of the scene. A shot of an alarm
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VIEWING CUE Distinguish an example of synchronous sound (with an onscreen source) from an example of asynchronous sound (with an offscreen source) in the film you are studying. Are these sounds easy to distinguish?
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clock accompanied by the sound of its ringing is synchronous. An asynchronous knock in a horror film might startle the characters with the threat of an offscreen presence.
Kracauer goes on to differentiate between parallelism in the use of sound, which occurs when the soundtrack and image “say the same thing,” and contrapuntal sound, which occurs when two different meanings are implied by these elements. In Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), as The Bride attempts to break out of a sealed coffin, the soundtrack by Ennio Morricone — music typically associated with spaghetti westerns — offers a counterpoint to this horrific situation [Figure 5.11]. Soon, the sound of the impact of her fist on the coffin lid, which parallels her methodical punching, combines with the music for heightened effect.
5.11 Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004). Spaghetti western music acts as a counterpoint to the horrific image of The Bride punching her way out of a sealed coffin.
The two pairs of terms are distinct from each other. A shot of a teakettle accompanied by a high-pitched whistle is both synchronous and parallel. The teakettle accompanied by an alarm bell would be a synchronous yet contrapuntal use of sound. A voiceover of a nature documentary may explain the behavior of the animals in an asynchronous use of parallel sound. Idyllic images accompanied by a narration stressing the presence of toxins in the environment and an ominous electronic hum would be a contrapuntal use of asynchronous sound.
A familiar example of how relationships between sound and image can achieve multiple meanings comes at the end of The Wizard of Oz (1939). The booming voice and sound effects synchronized with the terrifying image of the wizard are suddenly revealed to have been asynchronous sounds produced by an ordinary man behind the curtain. When we see him speaking into a microphone, the sound is in fact synchronous, and what was intended as a parallel is revealed to be a contrapuntal use of sound [Figure 5.12].
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5.12 The Wizard of Oz (1939). The source of the wizard’s voice is revealed, interrupting the synchronous effect that frightened the travelers.
Parallelism — the mutual reinforcing or even the redundancy of sound and image — is the norm in Hollywood. For example, a shot of a busy street is accompanied by traffic noises, although viewers immediately understand the locale through the visuals. This parallelism is an aesthetic choice. In contrast, at the dawn of the sound era, Soviet theorists advocated a contrapuntal use of sound to maximize the effects of montage.
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Diegetic and Nondiegetic Sound One of the most frequently cited and instructive distinctions that is made in sound is between diegetic sound, which has its source in the narrative world of film, and nondiegetic sound, which does not belong to the characters’ world. Materially, the source of film sound is the actual soundtrack that accompanies the image, but diegetic sound implies a visible onscreen source. Diegesis refers to the world of the film’s story, including not only what is shown but also what is implied to have
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VIEWING CUE Find an example of diegetic sound in the film you are studying, and one of nondiegetic sound. What would the movie be like without the nondiegetic sound?
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taken place. “Diegesis” comes from the Greek word meaning “telling” and is distinguished from “mimesis,” meaning “showing.” The implication is that while mimetic representations imitate or mimic, diegetic ones use particular devices to tell about or imply events and settings.
One question offers a simple way to distinguish between diegetic and nondiegetic sound: can the characters in the film hear the sound? If not, the sound is likely to be nondiegetic. This distinction can apply to voices, music, and even sound effects. Conversations among onscreen characters, the voice of God in The Ten Commandments (1956), a voiceover that corresponds to a confession a character is making to the police, and the radio music that accompanies Mr. Blonde’s sadistic assault of a police officer in Reservoir Dogs (1992) are all diegetic. Nondiegetic sounds do not follow rules of verisimilitude. For example, the voiceover narration that tells viewers about the characters in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), background music that accompanies a love scene or journey, or sound effects such as a crash of cymbals when someone takes a comic fall are all nondiegetic. Audio practitioners refer to diegetic music, such as a shot of a band performing at a party or characters listening to music, as source music [Figures 5.13a and 5.13b].
(a)
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5.13a and 5.13b Reservoir Dogs (1992). Source music provides the disconcerting soundtrack during Mr. Blonde’s assault.
The distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic sounds can sometimes be murky. Certain voiceovers, though not spoken aloud to other characters, can be construed as the thoughts of a character and thus as arising from the narrative world of the film. Film theorist Christian Metz has classified these as semidiegetic sound; they can also be referred to as internal diegetic sound. The uncertain status of the dead character’s voiceover in Sunset Boulevard (1950) is an example of this. Diegetic music — such as characters singing “Happy Birthday” — is often picked up as a nondiegetic theme in the film’s score. Such borderline and mixed cases, rather than frustrating our attempts to categorize, are illustrative of the fluidity and creative possibilities of the soundtrack as well as of the complex devices that shape our experience of a film’s spatial and temporal continuity.
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Sound Production As early as the preproduction phase of a contemporary film, a sound designer may be involved to plan and direct the overall sound through to the final mix. During production, sound recording takes place simultaneously with the filming of a scene. At the beginning of each take, a slate with the scene information is shown and the clapboard is snapped; this recorded sound is used to synchronize sound recordings and camera images [Figure 5.14]. Microphones for recording
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sound may be placed on the actors, suspended over the action outside of camera range on a device resembling a fishing pole called a boom, or placed in other locations on set. The placement of microphones is often dictated by the desire to emphasize clarity and intelligibility of dialogue, especially the speech of the stars, in the final version of a film.
5.14 On the set, Wild at Heart (1990). Clapboards are used to synchronize sound and image takes. Courtesy Photofest
Direct sound is sound captured directly from its source, but some degree of reflected sound, captured as sounds bounce from the walls and sets, may be desired to give a sense of space. The production sound mixer (or sound recordist) combines these different sources during filming, adjusting their relative volume or balance. In the multitrack sound recording process introduced in Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975), as many as twenty- four separate tracks of sound can be recorded on twelve tracks. Besides adding an audio density to the realism of the image, both direct and reflected sound can be used to creatively comment on the characters and their environment — for instance, in Altman’s films, emphasizing the complexity of communication.
When a cut of the film is prepared, the crucial and increasingly complex phase of postproduction sound work begins. Sound editing interacts with the image track to create rhythmic relationships, establish connections between sound and onscreen sources, and smooth or mark transitions. When a sound carries over a visual transition in a film, it is termed a sound bridge. For example, music might continue over a scene change or montage sequence, or dialogue might begin before the speaking characters are seen by the audience. The director consults with the composer and the picture and sound editors to determine where music and effects will be added, a process called spotting.
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Sound effects may be gathered, produced by sound-effects editors on computers, retrieved from a sound library, or generated by foley artists. Named for the legendary sound man Jack Foley, these members of the sound crew watch the projected film and simultaneously generate live sound effects — footsteps, the rustle of leaves, a key turning in a lock — on what is called a foley stage. These effects are eventually mixed with the other tracks. The film’s composer begins composing the score, which is recorded to synchronize with the film’s final cut [Figure 5.15]. The composer may actually conduct the musicians in time with the film. Postsynchronous sound, recorded after the fact and then synchronized with onscreen sources, is often preferred for the dialogue used in the final mix. Natural sound
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recorded during production may be indistinct due to noise, perspective, or other problems, and much of the actor’s performance will depend on intelligibility of dialogue.
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5.15 Scoring, Far from Heaven (2002). Director Todd Haynes and composer Elmer Bernstein recording the film’s score, which re-creates the sound of 1950s Hollywood movies. Courtesy Salt Film Productions, Inc.
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FILM IN FOCUS bedfordstmartins.com/filmexperience
To watch a video about sound and image in Singin’ in the Rain, see the Film Experience LaunchPad.
Sound and Image in Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
See also: 42nd Street (1933); The Barkleys of Broadway (1949); The Artist (2011)
Hollywood has furnished its own myth about the introduction of synchronized sound in Singin’ in the Rain. Directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, Singin’ in the Rain demonstrates an escapist use of sound in film while also being about how sound in film achieves such effects. It addresses the relationship of sound to image, the history of film sound technologies, and the process of recording and reproducing sound.
Set in Hollywood at the end of the 1920s, Singin’ in the Rain follows efforts at the fictional Monumental Pictures to make the studio’s first successful sound film. Although the film’s self-consciousness about the filmmaking process invites the audience into a behind-the-scenes perspective, the film itself continues to employ every available technique to achieve the illusionism of the Hollywood musical. One of the lessons of the film is that a “talking picture” isn’t just “a silent picture with some talking added,” as the studio producer assumes it to be. The film shows that adding sound to images enhances them with all the exuberance of song and dance, comedy, and romance. It also suggests that a great deal of labor and equipment are involved in creating such effects.
From the very beginning of Singin’ in the Rain, the technology responsible for sound reproduction — technology that is usually hidden — is displayed. The film opens outside a Hollywood movie palace where crowds have gathered for the premiere of the new Lockwood and Lamont picture. Our first orientation is aural: “Ladies and gentlemen, I am speaking to you from . . .” The asynchronous announcer’s voice carries across the crowds and seems to address us directly. The second shot opens directly on a loudspeaker, underscoring the parallelism of image and soundtrack, and then begins to explore the crowd of listeners. When we first see the radio announcer, the source of the synchronous voice, the microphone is very prominent in the mise-en-scène [Figure 5.16]. Referring to the bygone days of radio and silent movies, the film celebrates its modern audience’s opportunity to watch sound and image combined in a sophisticated MGM musical.
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5.16 Singin’ in the Rain (1952). A concern with sound recording technology is evident in the microphone’s prominence in the first scene.
Singin’ in the Rain immediately begins to exploit the resources and conventions of studio-era sound cinema. When star Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) tells the story of his past in a diegetic voiceover to the assembled crowds and the radio listeners at home, this is a contrapuntal use of sound because the series of flashback images contradict his words. When his onscreen image gives way to his offscreen voice speaking of studying at a conservatory, we see him and his buddy, Cosmo Brown (Donald O’Connor), performing a vaudeville routine instead. This scene shows that images and voices can be out of sync, a theme that will become prominent in the film as a whole. It also shows the multiple ways the soundtrack can interact with the images. The comic vaudeville routine is, in turn, accompanied by lively music and humorous sound effects — the diegetic sound of the flashback world — encouraging our direct appreciation of the number. Next we hear the crowd’s appreciative reactions to Lockwood’s narration, a narration that we know to be phony. However, we do not experience these two different levels of sound — Don’s self-serving narration and the debunking synchronized sound of the flashbacks — as confusing. It is clear that the film’s unveiling of the mechanisms of sound technology will not limit its own reliance on the multiple illusions of sound- image relationships.
Later, when Don wants to express the depth of his feelings to Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds), he takes her to an empty soundstage. Ironically, his sincerity depends on the artifice of a sunset background, a wind machine, and a battery of mood lights, which together render the very picture of romance [Figure 5.17]. Yet the corresponding sound illusion is conjured without any visible sound recording or effects equipment, much less an onscreen orchestra. Indeed, each of Don’s touches, such as switching on the wind machine, is synchronized with a nondiegetic musical flourish. It is possible to ask us to suspend our disbelief in this way because, in the film’s world, music is everywhere.
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5.17 Singin’ in the Rain (1952). The illusion of romance is visibly created on the soundstage, but the music the characters dance to has no apparent source.
Don’s real love interest, Kathy Selden, is depicted as genuine because she can sing — her image and sound go together. In contrast, his onscreen leading lady, Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen), represents an image without the animating authenticity of sound. While Lina is beautiful, she speaks with a comical accent, and ironically, her hilarious performance is one of the greatest aural pleasures of the movie. In the course of the film, Don Lockwood will learn to incorporate his true self — the one who expresses himself by “singin’ and dancin’ in the rain” — into his onscreen persona.
Nothing illustrates the film’s paradoxical acknowledgment of the sound-image illusions constructed by Hollywood and its indulgence in them better than the contrast between the disastrous premiere of the non- singing The Dueling Cavalier and the film’s final scene at the opening night of the musical The Dancing Cavalier, in which the truth of Lina’s imposture comes out. In the former, a noisy audience laughs at and heckles the errors of poor synchronous sound recording: the actors’ heartbeats and rustling costumes drown out their dialogue (for us, of course, the laughter and the heartbeats are both sound effects, the latter mixed at comically high levels). The film they have created fundamentally misunderstands the promise of “talking pictures.”
At the premiere of the musical The Dancing Cavalier, in contrast, the film finally makes the proper match, not only between sound and image (thus correcting the humorous synchronization problems of the first version) but also between Don and Kathy. After she’s forced to dub Lina “live” at the premiere, and the
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VIEWING CUE In the film you’ve just viewed, from what direction do particular sounds come? What are the most audible elements of the film’s sound mix? Is the mix full, or are there relatively few sounds?
hoax is exposed when the curtains are drawn for all the audience to see, the humiliated Kathy runs from the stage. Don gets her back by singing “You Are My Lucky Star” to her from the stage (thus demonstrating before the audience in the film that unlike Lina, he used his own singing voice during the film within a film). Cosmo conducts the conveniently present orchestra (the premiere is of a sound film that should not require accompaniment), and Kathy joins Don in a duet.
Lest we read the film as suggesting that the onscreen orchestra is more genuine than the romantic background music of the earlier scenes because it is synchronous, we must note that the film ends triumphantly with asynchronous music. A full, invisible chorus picks up “You Are My Lucky Star” as the camera takes us out into the open air, to pause on the billboard announcing the premiere of Singin’ in the Rain, starring Lockwood and Selden (who, of course, are represented by images of the stars of the movie by the same name that we are watching, Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds) [Figure 5.18]. This patently fake chorus and the billboard advertising the film we are watching are the culmination of the film’s effort to render Hollywood illusionism — so aptly represented by extravagant musicals such as Singin’ in the Rain — natural. Singin’ in the Rain dramatizes the arrival of sound in Hollywood as the inevitable and enjoyable combination of sound and image.
5.18 Singin’ in the Rain (1952). The film’s final reflexive moment is accompanied by an invisible chorus on the soundtrack.
During automated dialogue replacement (ADR), actors watch the film footage and re-record their lines to be dubbed into the soundtrack (a
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process also known as looping because actors watch a continuous loop of their scenes). Although dubbing can violate verisimilitude, in Italy and other countries it is used for all of a film’s dialogue. Dubbing often replaces the original language of a film for exhibition in another country. Other common practices, such as assembling extras to approximate the sound of a crowd (known as walla, the word they were instructed to murmur) or recording room tone (the aural properties of a location when nothing is happening), may be used to cover any patch of pure silence in the finished film. Such practices show the extent to which the sound unit goes to reproduce “real-seeming” sound.
Sound mixing (or re-recording), an important stage in the postproduction of a film, can occur only after the image track, including the credits, is complete (that is, after the picture is “locked”). All three elements of the soundtrack — music, sound effects, and dialogue — that have been recorded on separate tracks will now be combined. As the tracks are mixed, they are cut and extended, adjusted and “sweetened” by the sound editor with the input of the director and perhaps the sound designer and picture editor. There are no objective standards for a sound mix. Besides making sure it is complete and clear, the director and technicians will have specific ideas for the film’s sound in mind. The final mix might place extra emphasis on dialogue, modulate a mood through the volume of the music, or punch up sound effects during an action sequence. In a film like Barton Fink (1991), much of the sense of inhabiting a slightly unreal world is generated by a sound mix that incorporates sounds such as animal noises into the effects accompanying creaking doors. At a film’s final mix, a sound mixer produces a master track to match the final cut of the film. Optical tracks are “married” to the image track on the film print; digital tracks may be printed on film or recorded for digital projection.
Sound reproduction is the stage in the process when the film’s audience experiences the film’s sound in a movie theater. During projection, optical soundtracks are
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illuminated and read by a solar cell that transfers the light to electrical energy, which is then amplified and transferred to the speaker system. Magnetic and digital soundtracks are also converted back to sound waves by the sound system during projection.
The reproduction of a sound is undoubtedly a copy. But it seems to have the same presence or effect on the ear as the original sound, even if its source, directionality, tonality, or depth has changed. We believe we are hearing the sound right here, right now, and indeed we are, but we are hearing a recording of an airplane engine, not an actual airplane engine. Sound perspective enhances this impression of presence and can be manipulated with great nuance in digital sound mixing. The placement of speakers in the actual three-dimensional space of the theater may be used to suggest sounds emanating from the left or right of the depicted scene or from behind or in front of the audience.
Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) [Figure 5.19], adapted by David Mamet from his own play, is dominated by the sound of actors’ voices. The Terminator (1984) keys us to events in its futuristic world by noise, while the title of The Sound of Music (1965) announces what one can expect to hear on its soundtrack. Voice, music, and sound effects are the three elements of the film soundtrack, and they are often present simultaneously. In some sense a film’s image track, composed of relatively discrete photographic images and text, is simpler and more unified. Nevertheless, although these three sound elements can all be present and combined in relation to any given image, conventions have evolved governing these relationships. Usually dialogue is audible over music, for example, and only in special cases does a piece of music dictate the images that accompany it. Here we will examine each of the basic elements of the soundtrack and its potential to make meaning in combination with images and other sounds. We will uncover conventional usages of soundtracks and how they have both shaped the film experience and given direction to theorists’ inquiries into the properties and potential of film sound.
5.19 Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). Voices and dialogue describe and measure the complex action, relations, and emotions in this theatrical adaptation.
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Voice in Film Human speech, primarily in the form of dialogue, is often central to understanding narrative film. Acoustic qualities of the voices of actors make a distinct contribution to a film: Jimmy Stewart’s drawl is relaxed and reassuring; a Sandra Bullock character can range between high and low acoustic tones to create a personality that sometimes is in control and then out of control. Making an intelligible record of an actor’s speech quickly became the primary goal in early film sound recording processes, although this goal required some important concessions in the otherwise primary quest for realism. For example, think about how we hear film characters’ speech. While the image track may cut from a long shot of a conversation to a medium shot of two characters to a series of close-up, shot/reverse-shot pairings, the soundtrack does not reproduce these distances accurately through changes in volume or the relationship between direct and reflected sound. Rather, actors are miked so that what they say is recorded directly and is clear, intelligible, and uniform in volume throughout the dialogue scene. Sound perspective, which refers to the apparent distance of a sound source, remains close.
Dialogue But of course what actors say is crucial: speech establishes character motivation and goals and conveys plot information. Advances in recording technology have allowed filmmakers to experiment with how dialogue is used to tell their stories. Director Robert Altman’s innovations in multitrack film sound recording in Nashville, mentioned earlier in this chapter, allowed each character to be miked and separately recorded. One stylistic feature of this technique is Altman’s extensive use of overlapping dialogue, mixing characters’ speech simultaneously, a technique Orson Welles had attempted with less sophisticated recording technology. In Nashville, characters constantly talk over each other [Figure 5.20]. This technique, which may make individual lines less distinct, is often used to approximate the everyday experience of hearing multiple, competing speakers and sounds at the same time.
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5.20 Nashville (1975). Robert Altman’s twelve-track recording process captures each character individually, and overlapping dialogue is used in the final mix.
Dialogue is also given priority when it carries over visual shifts, such as shot/reverse-shot patterns of editing conversations. We watch one actor begin a line and then watch the listener as he or she continues. Sound preserves temporal continuity as the scene is broken down into individual shots. Speech occurs here and now, and thus it is a key support of verisimilitude. Sometimes the most outlandish plot premises and settings can be anchored by dialogue. Given the importance and authority we accord the spoken word, it is interesting that film sound often has second-class status in relation to the image.
Voice-Off and Voiceover The voice-off technique refers to a voice that can be seen to originate from an onscreen speaker or from a speaker who can be inferred to be present in the scene but who is not currently visible. This technique is a good example of the greater spatial flexibility of sound over image. The opening shot of Laura (1944) follows a detective looking around a fancy apartment as a narrator introduces the film’s events. Abruptly, the same voice addresses the detective from an adjacent room, telling him to be careful what he touches, a striking use of voice- off. Early in the film M (1931), the murderer’s offscreen whistle is heard, followed by an onscreen shadow of a man, combining the expressive possibility of sound (just recently introduced when the film was made) with that of lighting and mise-en-scène [Figure 5.21].
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5.21 M (1931). Use of an offscreen whistle first suggests the murderer’s presence in Fritz Lang’s masterpiece of early sound cinema. Coupling the whistle with the shadow of the man, Fritz Lang used both sound and lighting to heighten the suspense of the mise-en-scène.
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In an experimental film, voice-off may also serve to make the viewer/listener think about different levels of the film’s fiction. How do we know that an offscreen voice shares the same space and time as the onscreen figures? The soundtrack of Chantal Akerman’s News from Home (1976) consists of the director’s voice reading letters in French from her mother back home in Belgium [Figure 5.22]. The images depict sparsely populated New York streets and lonely subway platforms and cars. The disjunction between voice and image reinforces the distance remarked upon in the correspondence.
5.22 News from Home (1976). Letters from home are read over images of a lonely New York City, creating a poetic disjunction across the spaces of the film.
While use of the voice-off in a classical film is a strong tool in the service of film realism, implying that the mise-en-scène extends beyond the borders of the frame, the illusion of realism can be challenged if the origins of the voice-off are not clear. The voice-off of HAL 9000, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), is consistent with realism because the voice has a known source. However, the even level of volume makes it seem to
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VIEWING CUE Identify specific uses of voice in the film you will screen next in class. Is dialogue abundant? If voiceovers are used, what are their function and diegetic status?
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pervade the spaceship even as it retains its intimate quality. In the film’s uncanny combination of humanity and technology, it suggests how the voice-off can introduce distance into the customary match of sound and image.
A voice-off is distinguished from the familiar technique of voiceover by the simple fact that characters within the diegesis cannot hear the voiceover. The voiceover is an important structuring device in film: a text spoken by an offscreen narrator can act as the organizing principle behind virtually all of the film’s images, such as in a documentary film, a commercial, or an experimental video or essay film. The unseen narrators of the classic documentaries Night Mail (1936) and The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) offer a poem about the British postal service and an account of the U.S. government’s agricultural programs, respectively, while the filmmaker’s voiceover in Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) offers a somber description of contemporary torture in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay [Figure 5.23]. The voiceover device soon became the cornerstone of the documentary tradition, in which the voiceover “anchors” the potential ambiguity of the film’s images. The sonic qualities of such voiceovers — usually male, resonant, and “unmarked” by class, regional, or foreign accent or other distinguishing features — are meant to connote trustworthiness (although today they can sound propagandistic). The traditional technique of directing our interpretation of images through a transcendent voiceover is sometimes referred to as the “voice of God.” Confident male voices of this type can still be heard in nature shows, commercials, and trailers seen in movie theaters.
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5.23 Taxi to the Dark Side (2007). The somber and matter-of-fact voiceover in this documentary makes the realities it describes seem even more disturbing. © Think Film/Photofest
Voiceovers can also render characters’ subjective states. Much of the humor of Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), for instance, comes from viewers’ access to the heroine’s internal (semidiegetic) comments on the situations she encounters [Figure 5.24]. But voiceover can also be an important structural device in narration, orienting viewers to the temporal organization of a story by setting up a flashback or providing a transition back to the film’s present. For example, a voiceover narration in the present can accompany a scene from the past that uses both images and sounds from within the depicted world. Use of voiceovers to organize a film’s temporality is prevalent in certain genres such as film noir, in which the voiceover imitates the hard-boiled, first-person investigative style of the literary works from which many of these stories are adapted. Sometimes, in keeping with the murky world of film noir or the limited perspective of the investigator, such voiceovers prove unreliable, as we find out in Laura [Figure 5.25].
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5.24 Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001). The subjective voiceover of this film humorously articulates the desires and anxieties of the heroine.
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5.25 Laura (1944). Shown writing in a tub, Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) opens the film with a voiceover narration. His account of the heroine’s death proves him unreliable when she is discovered to be alive.
Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (1945) is a “woman’s film” — featuring a female star whose character faces exaggerated versions of the problems many women encounter — but it is given a film noir framework, and the voiceover is an important element in this clash of styles. In the beginning, Mildred (played by Joan Crawford) confesses to a crime we eventually learn she did not commit. However, her voiceover’s credibility is compromised by her gender as well as by genre conventions. Several flashbacks are introduced by scenes in which Mildred is interrogated by the police. “It seems as if I was born in a kitchen,” she narrates [Figure 5.26]. These voiceovers are quickly abandoned as the flashback segments revert to and play out in synchronized sound. Eventually Mildred’s version of events is discredited by the police, who use her words to convict her daughter; her voiceover ultimately confirms their point of view. In fact, critics note that in women’s pictures such as Mildred Pierce and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), female voiceovers rarely carry through to closure, violating the symmetry we have come to expect from a classical Hollywood film. Contemporary examples, such as the voiceover of Sarah Connor in The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1984, 1991), alter this formula in ways that reflect a different gender politics.
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5.26 Mildred Pierce (1945). The voiceover of Mildred (played by Joan Crawford) increases our sympathy for her situation as a wife and mother in the flashbacks.
Synchronization Synchronization, the visible coordination of the voice with the body from which it is emanating, tends to be a valued practice in Hollywood films. It anchors sound that might otherwise seem to be autonomous or even call into question the seamless illusion of reality that Hollywood films strive for. Film theorist Kaja Silverman argues that synchronization is especially enforced for characters who are culturally more closely identified with the body, such as women and African Americans; these characters have not been allowed to achieve authoritative presence through speech alone. Thus Morgan Freeman’s voiceover narration of The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and subsequent films is an important cultural shift. The narrator of Eve’s Bayou (1997) is even younger, a perspective that infuses the film with wonder and a sense of having to decipher the narrative; the fact that Eve is female and African American makes the film’s emphasis on untold stories even more urgent [Figure 5.27].
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5.27 Eve’s Bayou (1997). A little girl’s version of events gains credence through the voiceover device.
Ever since “the talkies” were introduced, the human voice has organized systems of meaning in various types of film: narrative films are frequently driven by dialogue, documentaries by voiceover; and experimental films often turn voice into an aesthetic element. Some writers suggest that a theory of “voice” can open up cinema analysis to more meanings than a model devoted to the image alone. Although we have stressed how frequently film
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sound is subordinated to the image, the realm of the voice shows us how central sound is to cinema’s intelligibility. In fact, the prevalence of the human voice is a measure of just how focused the universe of classical cinema is on depicting human experience.
Music in Film Music is a crucial element in the film experience; among a range of other effects, it provides rhythm and deepens emotional response. Music has rarely been absent from film programs, and many of the venues for early film had been musical ones first. The piano, an important element of public and private amusements at the turn of the twentieth century, quickly became a cornerstone of film exhibition. Throughout the silent film period, scoring for films steadily developed from the distribution of collections of music cues that accompanists and ensembles could play to correspond with appropriate moments in films to full-length compositions for specific films. When D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation premiered in 1915, a full orchestra, playing Joseph Carl Breil’s score in which the Ku Klux Klan rallied to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” was a major audience attraction. The architecture of the large movie palaces constructed during this period was acoustically geared to audiences familiar with listening to orchestral music in a concert setting. The Jazz Singer and other early sound films were conceived to show off the musical performances of their stars. As mentioned previously, speech made it to the screen as an afterthought — and thus the introduction of dialogue presented problems of scale and volume in the movie palaces.
Although the term “talkies” for the new sound films soon took over, movies of every genre — westerns, disaster films, science fiction films — relied on music from the beginning. Often this music contributes to categorizing such films as genre films. Vangelis’s music for Blade Runner (1982), for example, distinctly marks it as a science fiction film. In contrast, Max Steiner’s score for Gone with the Wind (1939) sets its nostalgic, romantic tone.
Narrative Music Music is the only element of cinematic discourse besides credits that is primarily nondiegetic. In the back of our minds, we are aware that the practice of scoring films with music that has no source in the story violates verisimilitude, and yet we readily accept this convention. The celebrated gag in Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles (1974), in which the musical soundtrack turns out to be coming from Count Basie’s jazz orchestra playing in the middle of the desert, is entertaining because it shows the absurdity of the convention [Figure 5.28]. Though overblown or obvious scoring of background music can jolt us out of a film, often we value the musical score as a crucial element of our affective, or emotional, response to a film. The scoring for narrative films thus presents a notable paradox: much of what is valued in classical cinema — verisimilitude, cause-and-effect relationships — is completely ignored in even the most admired examples of film music.
The conventions of musical scoring, composition, orchestration, and mixing contribute to a particular kind of experience at the movies. Film music encourages us to be receptive to the information being conveyed by the visual as well as by the other acoustic dimensions of the film. Film music encourages us to let our barriers down and experience the movie as immediate and enveloping. Set apart from the diegesis and taking place right there in the theater, music eases our transition into the fictional world.
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5.28 Blazing Saddles (1974). Soundtrack music finds its onscreen source in Count Basie’s orchestra playing in a desert in Mel Brooks’s western spoof.
Because many of the practices of musical scoring were developed in tandem with the dominant form of narrative film, we will focus this discussion on narrative film music. In Hollywood and related mainstream film practices, the musical score has a direct connection to the story. However complex or lush the music may be, it serves a dramatic purpose. The term underscoring, also referred to as background music (in contrast to source music, which is diegetic), already emphasizes this status. Music quite literally underscores what is happening dramatically.
A piece of music composed for a particular place in a film is referred to as a cue. When recording the score, the conductor watches the film for the cue to begin playing that particular piece of music. Often music reinforces story information through recognizable conventions. Action sequences in the Indiana Jones series are introduced by the inescapable “dum da-dum dum” as a parody of and a tribute to these recognizable themes.
Through the use of motifs, themes assigned to particular figures, music also participates in characterization. We know when the main character has entered the scene not only visually but also aurally, because principal characters usually have a musical motif. The presence of “bad girl” Marylee Hadley in Written on the Wind (1956) is signaled by a distinctive sultry theme. Composed by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, the music
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identified with Henry Plainview in There Will Be Blood (2007) has a dissonant string arrangement that eerily complements this troubled and troubling character. Most notably, music is subordinate to that part of the narrative that competes in the realm of sound — the dialogue. A music cue will usually be audible during sequences in which there is no dialogue, often helping to smooth a spatial or temporal transition. When dialogue predominates, however, it will fade, the music volume will drop, or it will change to be less “competitive.”
Much of Hollywood film music composition is derived from nineteenth-century, late-Romantic orchestral music. Here the term “classical” is undoubtedly appropriate for studio-era Hollywood style, for popular music was rejected in favor of classical music. The work of such composers as Wagner and Strauss was rich in its ability to convey narrative information, reliant on compositional principles such as motifs assigned to different characters, settings, or actions and lushly emotive, tonal, and euphonic. As such, it was perfectly suited to the musical experience that Hollywood was striving for with the integration of sound. This type of music was compatible with Hollywood storytelling not only because of its purely musical qualities but also because of the associations and values this music carried for audiences. These associations ranged from the high cultural status conferred on symphonic music of European origin (as opposed to the lower status of American jazz or pop) to the recognizable connotations of a particular instrumentation, such as somber horns for a funereal mood, violins for romance, and a harp for an ethereal or heavenly mood.
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FORM IN ACTION bedfordstmartins.com/filmexperience
To watch a clip of pop music in Saturday Night Fever, see the Film Experience LaunchPad.
Pop Music Soundtracks in Contemporary Cinema
Popular music can be carefully used to develop characters, themes, and narrative structures. It has been a staple of film form since The Jazz Singer (1927) [Figure 5.29a], but this type of soundtrack became more commonplace with the rise of rock music in the 1960s. One of the first films to merge prerecorded pop music with a film narrative, The Graduate (1967) [Figure 5.29b] weaves the songs of Simon and Garfunkel through the social, sexual, and emotional crisis of Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman). A major achievement of the film is the use of vocal tones and rhythms to create a world in which the aggressive and cold rhetoric of an adult generation contrasts with Benjamin’s retreats into silence.
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5.29a The Jazz Singer (1927)
5.29b The Graduate (1967)
With Saturday Night Fever (1977), John Travolta’s performance as Tony Manero and the Bee Gees’ music on the soundtrack create a now-classic merger of images and disco tunes, overlapping non-diegetic and diegetic songs to mimic Tony’s movement between his blue-collar job in a Brooklyn paint store and his fantasy life in nightclubs [Figure 5.29c].
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5.29c Saturday Night Fever (1977)
In 1994, Travolta appeared as a wildly different kind of character, hitman Vincent Vega, in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. In this film, the bizarre and violent adventures of Vincent and his partner Jules are frequently accompanied by an eclectic range of songs from different eras, recorded by singers like Dusty Springfield, Al Green, and, most famously, Chuck Berry in a dance sequence recalling Travolta’s past films [Figure 5.29d].
5.29d Pulp Fiction (1994)
With far less irony, musical disjunctions communicate a very different vision in Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 The Great Gatsby [Figure 5.29e]. This 3-D adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel features contemporary jazz, pop, and hip-hop originals and covers from Jay-Z, Jack White, and Beyoncé, as well as classic compositions from Louis Armstrong and George Gershwin — music that captures a youthful energy,
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longing, and illusions that link the 1920s and the 2010s [Figure 5.29f]. When Beyoncé and Andre 3000 cover Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black,” the sultry duet about loss and abandonment makes Gatsby’s tragedy also Daisy’s tragedy.
5.29e The Great Gatsby (2013)
5.29f The Great Gatsby (2013)
Classical film music developed practices of composition and mixing that supported the aim of storytelling and tended to efface its own presence. For example, Claudia Gorbman states in her book, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (1987), that the principle of inaudibility is analogous to the “invisible” editing style of the continuity system, meaning that conscious attention should not be paid to the score. Volume does not interfere with dialogue, the mood and rhythm of the music do not contradict those of the action, and compositions are matched to the narrative flow rather than allowed to follow their own progression. Ironically, screen music is at its best if we do not “hear” it.
Music is often used to carry a film’s emotion. Dialogue and action fall short in their capacity to convey not only particular feelings but also the experience of feeling itself. Gorbman argues that there are three ways
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music’s connotation of emotion is used. First, music conveys the irrational. In Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), for example, the mental state of the hero is conveyed by the sound of the theremin, an unusual electronic instrument whose spooky sound is also used in science fiction films [Figure 5.30]. Second, music is associated with women, who are already culturally associated with emotion. Our pejorative idea of sappy music is derived from the sound of women’s genres, where tears and musical notes fall with the same abundance; in contrast, Trent Reznor’s score for David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) creates a different kind of emotional landscape for the gendered dynamics of that film. Third, lush orchestration can ennoble specific events and make them feel timeless. In War Horse (2011), the lavish musical score adds an epic dimension to a film about a boy and his horse [Figure 5.31].
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5.30 Spellbound (1945). Gregory Peck’s character is stricken by an episode of vertigo, signaled by the theremin on the soundtrack.
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5.31 War Horse (2011). Composer John Williams’s score helps intensify the emotion in this tale of a boy and his horse during World War I.
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Narrative Cueing Narrative cueing is how music tells us what is happening in the plot. A return of the main theme signifies that Gone with the Wind is about to conclude; a western song over the credits of Rancho Notorious (1952) signifies the setting of a film of that genre. Narrative cueing is also connotative: violins on the soundtrack may indicate that the characters are falling in love; a few notes of “Deutschland über Alles” in the score of Casablanca (1942) signifies the looming Nazi threat. Music’s
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VIEWING CUE As you watch the film assigned for your next class, pay particular attention to its music. Is the film’s score drawn from the classical
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role in relation to narrative may be to point something out or emphasize its significance. The most noticeable examples are called stingers, sounds that force us to notice the significance of something onscreen — like the one in The Shining (1980) that marks the moment when Wendy, the mother, looks at her bedroom door through her mirror and sees the word “murder” [Figure 5.32]. Overillustrating the action through the score, such as accompanying a character walking on tip-toe with plucked strings, is referred to as mickey-mousing, which references the way cartoons often use the musical score to follow or mimic every action in synchronization, narrating through music rather than language. Max Steiner is particularly noted for his habit of pointing out everything in his soundtracks in this manner, and composer Mark Mothersbaugh practices a contemporary version of this practice for films like The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).
5.32 The Shining (1980). When Wendy awakens and sees through the mirror what Danny has written on the door, a shocked look appears on her face. The audience is also forced to look and note the significance of what she sees — the word “murder” — because of the stinger on the soundtrack.
Discontinuities in visual information represented by cuts and scene changes are frequently bridged by the durational aspect of sound, and this function is most easily served by music. Various arrangements
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tradition? Is popular music used? How do scoring choices contribute to the film’s meaning?
of the theme song of High Noon (1952) carry characters across space and help bridge transitions between scene changes. Although critics of studio- style film music complain that the composer’s job involves nothing more than filling up any gaps in the film with the soundtrack, providing built-in unity through a structure of repetition and variation is a basic tenet of the classical film score.
Although musical scoring conventions have evolved and changed since the classical era of studio filmmaking, we can hear in the orchestral scores of John Williams, the most well-known composer of the past three decades, an homage to the romantic styles of the studio composers of earlier decades. Williams composes heroic, nostalgic scores that support and sometimes inflate the narrative’s significance in films from Star Wars (1977) to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004). His five Academy Awards and more than forty nominations suggest that the film industry recognizes his style’s consistency with that of classical Hollywood.
In Hollywood cinema of the studio era, nonclassical musical styles, such as jazz, popular, and dance music, might be used as source music and featured in musicals, but their incorporation into background music was gradual. One of the effects of the neglect of American musical idioms in favor of European influences was that African American artists and performers were rendered almost as inaudible as they were invisible in mainstream movies. African American performers were frequently featured in musicals, but they were there to provide entertainment and were rarely integrated into the narrative. Lena Horne’s talent, for example, was shamefully underutilized because there were almost no leading roles for African American women in the 1940s and 1950s [Figure 5.33]. More recently, however, African American musicians and performers have become a key part of movies, from Beyoncé and Jennifer Hudson in Dreamgirls (2006) to Jay-Z in The Great Gatsby.
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5.33 Lena Horne. Most of the actress’s appearances in mainstream films were restricted to cameo numbers because the industry was unwilling to allow an African American a leading role. Courtesy Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images
As jazz music became more popular, jazz themes began to appear in urban-based film noirs of the 1940s. Henry Mancini’s music for Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958) effectively connotes themes of crime, violence, and sexuality in the exaggerated border-town setting. Occasionally dissonance appeared in studio scores, but usually only when diegetically motivated — for example, to signify a psychological disturbance. In keeping with this connotation, the first atonal score was composed by Leonard Rosenman for The Cobweb (1955), a movie set in a home for the mentally ill. With other changes in the U.S. film industry in the postwar period, musical conventions shifted as well. Modernist and jazz-influenced scores, such as Leonard Bernstein’s score for On the Waterfront (1954), became more common as different audiences were targeted through more individualized filmmaking practices. At the end of the studio era, the great tradition of the Hollywood musical also began to wane, but the persistence of the genre shows how central music is to the narrative film experience, even at the cost of verisimilitude.
Prerecorded Music Popular songs have long had a place in the movies, promoting audience participation and identification by appealing to tastes shared by generations or ethnic groups. Sheet music and recordings sales were profitable tie- ins even before sound cinema. In the 1980s, however, the practice of tying the emotional (and commercial) response of the audience to popular music on a film’s soundtrack was so well established that the pop score began to rival originally composed music. American Graffiti (1973) helped inaugurate this trend with its soundtrack of nostalgic 1960s tunes, and The Big Chill (1983) captures the zeitgeist of its characters’ and viewers’ generation through popular music. The centrality of prerecorded music is reflected in the increasing importance of the music supervisor, who selects and secures the rights for songs to be used in films. In youth- oriented, MTV-influenced films with pop music scores, such as Step Up 3D (2010), the promotion of the soundtrack is as important as that of the film [Figure 5.34], a tactic also at work in Sofia Coppola’s soundtrack for The Bling Ring (2013), featuring M.I.A., Sleigh Bells, Lil Wayne, and other contemporary musicians. In the 1990s, the proliferation of the pop soundtrack drew the film experience outside the theater to the record store, and music videos began to include scenes from upcoming films. Although theme songs have been composed for and promoted with films for decades, as in Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955) to name one hit, the contemporary movie and recording industries have such close business relationships that even films without pop soundtracks often feature a tie-in song in their end-credits sequences. The extremely successful film careers of musicians like rapper-actor Will Smith demonstrate the increasing interdependency of these entertainment media.
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5.34 Step Up 3D (2010). The promotion of a film’s soundtrack is crucial to the success of contemporary dance movies.
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VIEWING CUE bedfordstmartins.com/filmexperience
To what extent do sound effects add to a film’s sense of realism? Watch this clip from Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone (2010) and explain how sounds create a particular impression of location, action, or mood.
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Sound Effects in Film Although the movies can represent the world in many ways, their capacity for successful mimesis, or imitation, has always fascinated audiences. Much of the mimetic impression in cinema comes from the use of sound effects, although, like other aspects of the soundtrack, viewers may not consciously notice these effects. Dialogue in film is deliberate; it tells a story and gives information. Background music is a clear enhancement, “unrealistic” if we pay attention to it. But sound effects appear unmanufactured, even accidental. This sense of the naturalness of effects is ironic because the sound texture of a film is so deliberately crafted and because in daily life we hardly notice such ubiquitous sounds as fluorescent lights humming, crickets chirping, and traffic going by — sounds that might be added to a film to achieve a “realistic” sound mix.
In most films, every noise that we hear is selected, and these effects generally conform to our expectations of movie sounds. Virtually nothing appears onscreen that does not make its corresponding noise: dogs bark, babies cry. A spaceship that blows up in outer space will usually produce a colossal bang even though in fact there is no sound in space. If a recording of a .38 revolver sounds like a cap gun on film, it will be dubbed with a louder bang. These expectations vary according to film genre. Traffic noise will be loud in an action film, in which we remain alive to the possibilities of the environment. In a romance, the sound of cars will likely fade away unless traffic is keeping the lovers apart. The extraordinary density of contemporary soundtracks does not necessarily mean that they are more “realistic” than the less dense soundtracks of classical Hollywood; they simply make more extensive use of the particular properties of sound to convey a visceral experience of the cinema. The change in the texture of contemporary soundtracks is based in new technological capabilities, but, as in other instances of “improved” technologies, this progress is not inevitable but rather a development that follows particular ideas and goals, although these are likely to remain unstated.
Sound effects are one of the most useful ways of giving an impression of depth to the two-dimensional image when they are reproduced in the three-dimensional space of the theater. Although the screen is itself only an illusory space of action, film presentation makes use of the directional properties of sound — a gunshot may come from the left-hand side of the screen, for example. In the mix, additional diegetic sounds such as thunderclaps can be added that were not present on set at all, adding significantly to a film’s illusionism. Asynchronous sound effects, such as the hoot of an owl in a dark woods setting, both expand the sense of space and contribute to mood, often in very codified, even clichéd ways. Adding the clank of utensils and snatches of offscreen conversation to the soundtrack when two characters are shown at a table conjures a restaurant setting without having to shoot the scene in one.
The very manner in which noises are produced for a soundtrack illustrates their function in constructing, rather than reproducing, a particular experience. As we detailed earlier, incidental sounds — footsteps, the rustle of clothing, a punch in the stomach — are not even recorded at the same time as the film’s dialogue. Rather, they are added later by the foley artist by walking on gravel, rubbing together different pieces of fabric, hitting a rolled-up telephone book, and so on. Our acceptance of these simulated synchronous sounds testifies to the strength of our impulse to perceive effects realistically. The process is a meticulous reconstruction of some but
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VIEWING CUE bedfordstmartins.com/filmexperience
Watch this scene from Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) and determine which sound seems especially responsible for conveying information to the spectator. How do voice, music, and sound effects work together?
not all of the sounds that would have been present on set. The sounds selected are those that are deemed significant, if only because they establish a particular mood. Dramatic effects such as explosions are quite deliberately placed, and often enhanced, because of their narrative significance.
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At the same time that they serve a mimetic function, sound effects have become part of how the cinema experience is distinguished from the ordinary. THX is a standards system devised by director George Lucas and named after his first feature film, THX 1138 (1971), for evaluating and ensuring the quality of sound presentation. THX theaters promise to deliver an intense aural experience that is identical in each certified venue. Sound effects, like visual effects, draw in viewers. How crucial a film’s sound is to the Hollywood illusion is marked in the relatively recent Academy Award category for sound-effects editing. Audiences are increasingly trusted to discern things aurally.
In the films of master action film director John Woo, for example, each character may have a particular gunshot noise assigned to him or her so that the action can be followed throughout a protracted sequence without dialogue. The distinctive soundtrack of Jaws (1975) lent us not only what has now become the cliché of the shark’s musical motif but also a rich new standard of sound-effects use. The film acknowledges a predecessor in the genre — and in the ingenious use of sound — when the death of the shark is accompanied by a sound effect of a prehistoric beast’s death from King Kong. In these monster movies, sound effects take us beyond everyday events while also relying on their capacity to refer to familiar experiences.
As with music, the animated film illustrates the deliberately designed nature of film sound effects particularly well. In fact, most cartoon soundtracks are prepared in advance of the images, the reverse of live-action filmmaking. Cartoons thus demonstrate especially well the synchronization of sound effects to onscreen actions. Drawings do not “naturally” make sounds of their own; every sound in an animated film is conventionalized. In Duck Amuck (1953), for example, Daffy Duck is baffled by the cartoon he finds himself in and cannot follow the logic of his mischievous animator. All sorts of mishaps befall him, and the abrupt termination of the soundtrack is one of the most disturbing of these mishaps. So unused are we to complete silence, that we are likely to look around us to see whether the theater’s sound system really has gone out. Daffy holds up a sign demanding “Sound please!” and begins to play the guitar with which his animator has provided him. But the sound it “emits” is that of a machine gun, demonstrating with this synchronization error the arbitrary nature of the standard of matching image and sound. As Daffy’s misadventures suggest, sound effects appeal to the audience subtly and viscerally. In How to Train Your Dragon (2010), the musical score certainly helps to set the mood, but the sound effects are even more crucial to the film — the sounds Toothless makes help Hiccup understand and communicate with him [Figure 5.35].
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5.35 How to Train Your Dragon (2010). Hiccup is able to interpret Toothless’s feelings just from the dragon’s purrs and growls. An angelic female choir accompanied by bells adds to the mystical atmosphere.
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VIEWING CUE How does the soundtrack of the next film you view “authenticate” the image? Would the absence of sound affect the film’s authenticity? How?
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Making Sense of Film Sound Sounds are grounded in viewers’ everyday activities and contribute to movies’ immediacy and sensory richness. Whether it is the pathos lent by Louis Gottschalk’s score for D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919), the stimulating interactions between the musical quotations of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Alex North’s original music for the film, the indelible aural record of Laurence Olivier’s performance of Hamlet (1948), or the comical sounds of Jacques Tati’s Playtime, film sound can intensify our viewing experience while conveying what seem like essential truths and meanings. Paradoxically, movie soundscapes often eschew realism and plausibility in order to heighten authenticity and emotion, like foregrounding actors’ whispered conversation in a crowded room so we feel intimately connected to them.
The ways in which filmmakers choose to relate sound to image also has a distinctive effect on our viewing experience. Some filmmakers rely on sound continuity to support the narrative aim and smooth over gaps in a story. In contrast, others might remind viewers of sound’s autonomy from the image through the use of sound montage — essentially employing sound to question, or act as a counterpoint to, the authority of the image.
Authenticity and Experience Film sound, because it surrounds and permeates the body of the viewer in a way that images alone cannot, contributes to the authenticity and emotion we experience while viewing a film. Sound in film can indicate a real, multidimensional world and give the viewer/listener the impression of being authentically present in space. Additionally, sound encourages the viewer to experience emotion, depending on the kind of sound, such as a particular piece of music.
The assumption that sound gives the viewer/listener the impression of being authentically present in space is supported by the preferences established in the standard techniques of sound recording, mixing, and reproduction. As previously mentioned, though the cinematic images and sounds that we see and hear were both captured at some other moment and are being reproduced for us, sounds feel immediate. Hearing the taps on Eleanor Powell’s shoes in Born to Dance (1936) makes us witnesses to her virtuosity [Figure 5.36]. Foregrounding actors’ voices through close miking, sound perspective, and mixing that emphasizes dialogue also authenticate our perception. We are “in on” the characters’ most intimate conversations. Sounds that are synchronized with the action by the depiction of their sources in the image, or even sounds that support the action while not being themselves “authentic” — for example, background music — all give us a central place in the fictional world that begins to seem present and real. The zither theme of The Third Man (1949) makes us feel disoriented in the streets of postwar Vienna, just as the film’s characters are.
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5.36 Born to Dance (1936). Eleanor Powell’s tap dancing is a perfect display of synchronized sound.
Sound encourages the viewer to experience emotion and to see the world in terms of particular emotions. When the lovers in Now, Voyager (1942) cannot really say what they mean to each other, the string section, performing Max Steiner’s score, eloquently takes over.
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Sound reaches the viewer viscerally, seeming to involve the body directly. Excruciating suspense is generated in Jurassic Park when we hear the sound of the menacing tyrannosaurus rex [Figure 5.37]. Simply watching the dinosaur progress would be a less emotional experience.
The film environment attempts to duplicate our acoustic experience of the world, to orient us in this new space in a way that feels genuine and genuinely gets us to feel. This is not necessarily measured by strict realism. The sense of presence at the dance contest in Saturday Night Fever is better achieved through a sound mix that sacrifices background noise to focus on the Bee Gees’ music.
5.37 Jurassic Park (1993). On the digital soundtrack, the T-Rex’s footsteps can be heard approaching the truck where the children are hiding, generating keen suspense.
Although film sound can have a great deal of complexity, and realism is thrown out the window every time background music appears, authenticity and emotion are often served by a subordination of the autonomy of sound to the cues given by the image. In contrast to this practice of sound-image continuity, however, a competing approach explores the concrete nature of sounds and their potential independence of images and of each other. This practice of sound montage, which characterizes the films of Jean-Luc Godard and others, does not serve the values of authenticity and emotion; rather, it makes us conscious of their violation by calling attention to the actual sound recording process or asking us to be aware of and reflect on emotional cues.
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Sound Continuity and Sound Montage Sound continuity describes the range of scoring, sound recording, mixing, and playback processes that strive for the unification of meaning and experience by subordinating sound to the aims of the narrative. Sound montage creates collisions or overlappings of disjunctive sounds. It reminds us that just as a film is built up of bits and pieces of celluloid, a soundtrack is not a continuous gush of sound from the real world; rather, it is composed of separate elements whose relationship to each other can be creatively manipulated and reflected upon. The music of Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000) uses an eclectic mix of lushly romantic tunes to create an intense but delicate world that surrounds two lovers in Hong Kong. In Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), as in his other films, a sound montage of whispering voices, voice-off commentary, and amplified noises from nature creates a vibrating and shifting world that his characters struggle to understand. Most assumptions, shared by technicians and viewers, about what constitutes a “good” soundtrack emphasize a continuity approach. However, since the introduction of sound, many filmmakers have used it as a separate element for a montage effect. With the increasing sophistication of audio technology, it is possible that sound montage will find more practitioners.
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Sound Continuity Analyzing a film that adheres to sound continuity can be rewarding precisely because really hearing the soundtrack demands such attentiveness. As we have seen, matching up actors’ voices with their moving lips and ensuring the words are intelligible were among the early goals of sound technology. Audiences were thrilled just to see the match. Despite our familiarity with film sound today, the degree of redundancy between image and sound in the continuity tradition still
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makes it difficult to analyze the soundtrack autonomously. From the priority granted to synchronization, we can define several compatible continuity practices:
▪ The relationship between image and sound and among separate sounds is motivated by dramatic action or information. ▪ With the exception of background music, the sources of sounds will be identifiable. ▪ The connotations of musical accompaniment will be consistent with the images (for example, a funeral
march is unlikely to accompany a high-speed chase). ▪ The sound mix will emphasize what we should pay attention to. ▪ The sound mix will be smooth and will emphasize clarity. Films that adhere to the principles of verisimilitude will use sound to amplify, as it were, what is taking place
on the screen. Attention will be directed back to the characters, actions, and mise-en-scène by sound that supports it. In The Big Sleep (1946), a conversation in a car between the two protagonists, Marlowe and Vivian, begins with engine noise in the background. We see that there is a dog on the porch in the opening scene of The Searchers (1956), but when we hear it bark, the image comes alive. The relationship between image and sound and among separate sounds will also be motivated by dramatic action or information. In The Big Sleep, the engine noise will soon disappear so we can focus on the characters’ avowal of love. The continuous use of music to cover a sequence of character activity draws our attention away from discontinuity in the image track. For example, continuous orchestral music links the “training montage” in Rocky Balboa (2006) [Figure 5.38].
5.38 Rocky Balboa (2006). The Rocky film series’s iconic theme song (Bill Conti’s “Gonna Fly Now”) ties together disparate images of Rocky doing pull-ups, jogging, and lifting weights.
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VIEWING CUE Identify two or three instances of sound continuity in a film you have watched for class. How do these instances support either the narrative action or the thoughts and feelings of a character?
It may be easier to think of what sound continuity seeks to avoid than what it positively pursues. Sound should not intrude on the narrative. Unmotivated or unidentified sounds will not have a prominent place on the soundtrack. Nor will unidentified speakers be heard, unless in a conventional context such as a documentary, in which the voiceover explanation will demonstrate its own continuity with the content of the image. Characters’ speech will not break with the diegesis to offer commentary or non sequiturs. Technology and techniques have developed in consort with these aims. Dolby noise-reduction technology improves frequency response and gives an almost unnatural clarity. Noise interferes with the sound signal and can call attention to the fact that the sound was recorded and, thus, to how the film was made. These are goals of continuity rather than of strict realism.
Sound Montage Exploring the infinite possibilities of sound and image interactions, and interactions among sounds and images, is the province of montage. Often deriving its practices in direct opposition to the principles of sound continuity, sound montage calls attention to the distinct, autonomous elements that make up a film. Like the disjunctive image-editing practices discussed in Chapter 4, sound montage does not smooth over juxtapositions. In sound montage, sound may “come first,” and the borders between the nondiegetic and the diegetic may be difficult to establish. In addition, the expectation that every element of the mise-en-scène will make a naturalistic noise is frustrated, and voices, whether diegetic or nondiegetic, do not always preserve the illusion of a closed world. The music might appear and disappear, giving it a more material presence, and sound effects can be “synchronized” to arbitrary sources.
When motivated relationships — for example, the image of a dog motivates the sound effect of barking — are given up, we see and hear something onscreen that is different from an attempted extension of our natural world. The intention may be to critique, as in a disturbing sequence in Natural Born Killers (1994) when Mallory’s life at home with her abusive father is presented as if it were a situation comedy, complete with laugh track, applause, and perky theme music, directly commenting on how the media use sound to manipulate emotion. In a very different use of sound montage, the succession of still images that constitutes Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) is anchored by a voiceover that tells of the time experiments in which the protagonist is participating, identifying the film as science fiction [Figure 5.39]. Prioritizing sound makes us attend to the film’s structure; the image track accompanies or provides counterpoint to what we hear.
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5.39 La Jetée (1962). The fluidity of a voiceover accompanying a montage of still images creates a reflective distance between the two elements.
The use of the voice can be opened up to include direct address to the viewer or the use of recitation or reading instead of naturalistic dialogue, as in Godard’s Weekend (1967) or Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989). The sensual quality of sounds can be explored as it might be in a musical composition, or poetic effects can be achieved by combining different sound “images.” Voices are layered in Marguerite Duras’s India Song (1975). A film can deliver ideas through multiple channels; the sound can contradict the image. Interview texts printed on the screen are read aloud with slight alterations by the voiceovers in Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) [Figure 5.40].
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5.40 Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989). The qualities of the film’s voices — they are often accented and seem to belong to nonactors reciting — convey information that could not be gathered from images.
Overall, sound montage stresses the fact that images and sounds communicate on two different levels; rather than trying to make them equivalents, montage calls attention to what each contributes differently. Sergei Eisenstein, the primary theorist of montage, extended his ideas to sound even before the technology was perfected. In his first sound film, Alexander Nevsky (1938), he experimented with what he called “vertical montage,” which emphasized both the simultaneity of and the difference between image and sound [Figure 5.41]. He also collaborated closely with composer Sergei Prokofiev to make a film in which every picture edit was influenced by the accompanying soundtrack. German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger’s Madame X: An Absolute Ruler (1977) makes ingenious use of postsynchronous sound. Her film’s motley crew of female pirates do not speak; instead, their movements are “synchronized” with noises like animal growls or metallic clanking [Figure 5.42].
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5.41 Alexander Nevsky (1938). The editing of Sergei Eisenstein’s first sound film was planned with the score in mind.
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Experimentation with sound montage began with the introduction of sound. Filmmakers such as Jean Vigo and René Clair in France and Rouben Mamoulian and King Vidor in the United States are identified with the early sound era because of the lyrical and creative ways sound and image are combined in their films. In films such as Mamoulian’s Applause (1929), for instance, music and effects do not duplicate the image but create a more subjective and atmospheric setting.
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5.42 Madame X: An Absolute Ruler (1977). In Ulrike Ottinger’s film, the character’s movements are synchronized with a sound montage of noises like animals growls or metallic clanking, not dialogue. A Women Make Movies Release. Courtesy of
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In the post–World War II art cinema, sound experimentation was renewed. French director Robert Bresson takes apart the usual fit between sound and image by a minimalist use of sound. In spare films such as Pickpocket (1959) and L’Argent (1983), which explore themes of predestination and isolation through scrutiny of details, Bresson achieves an uncanny presence of select sounds while refusing realistic indicators of space [Figure 5.43]. In “Notes on Sound,” Bresson sums up his ideas: “what is for the eye must not duplicate what is for the ear.” Without the use of room tone or other techniques to give spatial cues or to make sounds warmer, the minimalist sounds in his films become very concrete, a practice that has influenced many contemporary filmmakers in world cinema.
5.43 L’Argent (1983). Robert Bresson’s films carefully select sound to explore themes of isolation.
Other filmmakers layer sounds in ways that collide with images and other sounds. Dziga Vertov’s early sound film Enthusiasm (1931) innovates the collection of documentary sounds, juxtaposing them as if in a collage. The sounds are not harmonized with each other or with the images but rather create disruptions or even shocks. A clock ticks over the image of a tolling bell, for example. The Soviet filmmaker was keenly interested in sound, and his work in radio and even his poetry showed a fascination with industrial noise.
Jean-Luc Godard’s many experiments with sound collage, which began early in his career, are indebted to Vertov’s. Godard emphasizes music in the organization of many of his films; a favorite technique is to interrupt a music cue so that it literally cannot fade into the background. In First Name: Carmen (1983), we actually see a string quartet playing without knowing what its relationship to the story space might be.
The abrupt cessation of a soundtrack element may be extended to voices and effects as well. In the café scene in Band of Outsiders (1964), one of the characters suggests that if the friends in the group have nothing to say to each other, they should remain silent. This diegetic silence is conveyed by the complete cessation of sound on the soundtrack, something that is rare indeed. By using nonauthoritative or noncontinuous voiceovers as well as frequent voice-offs, and by having on-camera characters address the camera, read, or make cryptic
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announcements, Godard challenges the natural role of the human voice in giving character and narrative information. Instead, language becomes malleable, an element in a collage of meaning.
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FILM IN FOCUS bedfordstmartins.com/filmexperience
To watch a clip from The Conversation, see the Film Experience LaunchPad.
The Role of Sound and Sound Technology in The Conversation (1974)
See also: Blow Out (1981); The Truman Show (1998); The Lives of Others (2006)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola in collaboration with sound designer and editor Walter Murch, The Conversation (1974) is notable because its very topic is the exploitation of sound technology. While the film’s own sound conforms to the principles identified with the continuity tradition, by virtue of its foregrounding of how sound is created and transmitted, it can also illustrate the aims of sound montage practice.
The film, set in San Francisco, follows the activities of a surveillance expert, Harry Caul (played by Gene Hackman), as he goes about what seems to be a routine job: eavesdropping on a pair of lovers in the park. Harry’s expertise and interest in technology leave little space for human contact and complement his rather paranoid character. Interestingly, Harry’s hobby is playing the saxophone. The warm sound of this instrument foreshadows his eventual awakening to the more human dimensions of the sounds he records for a living.
The first sequence of the film is a tour de force of sound and image counterpoint, which makes us partake in the activity of surveillance as we actively attempt to decode what is happening on the screen. Eavesdropping enhances the sound’s quality of presence; we feel we are right there in the scene. Yet the activities of the on-camera sound recordists make us aware of those of the recordist, mixer, and director behind the scenes of the film we are watching.
The film opens with an aerial shot over San Francisco’s Union Square; a slow zoom-in is accompanied by jazz music, while sound perspective remains constant. As the music shifts from an instrumental theme to the banter of two singers, and as the hubbub of the busy square and then the applause become audible, we recognize that the music is diegetic, coming from the scene even though we cannot at first see the source. The music’s festive and emotional connotations are immediately recognizable. Yet electronic interference comes in very early on; we begin to suspect that we are hearing the music through a device “within” the film as well as through the loudspeaker in the theater, and the emotional register turns slightly sinister.
In the next few shots, it remains difficult to tell who the object of the surveillance is and who the object of our attention should be, in part because the sound is not mixed to emphasize the action. Indeed, it is the gestures of a mime, taunting through his mimicry a figure whose crumpled raincoat suggests a desire for anonymity, that we must “listen” to in the first aerial shot if we want to pick out Harry in the crowd. The
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silent stalker is stalked. Finally, when Harry enters a van where his assistant is stationed, we learn that the target is a young couple, Ann and Mark, played by Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest [Figure 5.44].
5.44 The Conversation (1974). We eavesdrop on characters that the plot never brings us to know better.
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The sound mix in the scene is quite complicated. The cut to the first shot taken at ground level corresponds to a notable shift in sound perspective with an increase in the diegetic music volume. Quickly a snatch of random conversation is heard, followed by a snippet of another — this time, the targeted couple — but the succession has already identified for us the arbitrariness of continuity sound mixing practices that isolate immediately what we should pay attention to. The closeness of our sound perspective is then given technical justification when we see both Harry and a man with a hearing aid in close proximity to the couple. We stay with Ann and Mark as they continue a conversation about a drunk passed out on the park bench; the volume of the conversation does not change as Harry climbs into the van. Here the continuity in sound perspective signals the importance of this apparently trivial conversation. And once again, what seemed like the film’s sound — we hear the conversation — is revealed as sound produced within the story: what we hear is the recording of the conversation as we see the reel-to-reel tape recorder spinning [Figure 5.45].
5.45 The Conversation (1974). Audio technology becomes a pervasive presence in the film.
In the next scene, Harry plays a few lines of recorded conversation over and over again, discovering in the captured sounds clues to a suspicious event. Is the “guilty” party the couple, presumably engaged in an affair, or those who pay to have them watched? And what is the ethical role of the “invisible” bystander, the hired sound recordist, and by extension the film viewer? The opening scene of The Conversation functions like a puzzle as Harry and the viewer strive to find the truth behind the sounds captured in the square.
Toward the end of the scene, a new sound element is introduced. A nondiegetic moody piano theme begins as the couple parts; the music continues, with some street noise in the mix, as Harry starts home. The piano carries over the dissolve to the next scene and ends just as Harry turns the key in his door, when it is abruptly replaced by a shrill sound effect, his alarm being set off. Our newly honed attention to the concrete nature of each sound element encourages us to evaluate this nondiegetic musical theme. Associated almost
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exclusively with long shots of Harry making his way around town, the wandering theme played on a single instrument underscores his alienation, inviting us as viewers to feel the emotion Harry attempts to keep at bay.
After Harry arrives home, we see him playing the sax. The sound of the saxophone is very solitary; it connects Harry to the piano theme we’ve just heard as well as to the musicians in the park. Interestingly, however, Harry plays his sax along with a record player, syncing up his own performance of the expressive qualities of music with prerecorded sound. This is emphasized by a shot of the record spinning. Such close- ups of sound technology are frequent in the film and remind us of the source of film voices, music, and effects. Often these cutaways are unmotivated by any character’s specific attention to the sounds being emitted at that moment.
As the film progresses, Harry becomes increasingly suspicious of his employer’s intentions, and he returns again and again to the evidence gathered in the first scene, in the form of the tape. The film’s theme of paranoia finds a perfect echo in its setting in the world of sound technology, eavesdropping, and surveillance. Because of the claims to presence of sound, the incriminating audiotape, with the accidental music and noises it captures, appears “real” and convincing even in a film that is constantly showing off the paraphernalia of sound recording, mixing, and playback. By emphasizing that truth lies in the words spoken in that first conversation, the film upholds the privileged relationship between the voice and inner nature, while also facilitating Harry’s (and the audience’s) identification with other humans through technological mediation. Sound is used in service of narrative, but the narrative is about the uses of sound. Despite the period quaintness of the now-obsolete machines the film lingers on — reel-to-reel tape recorders and oversized headphones, the squeaky sound of rewinding, and the mechanical click of old-fashioned buttons — The Conversation remains an apt commentary on the values and practices of sound technology.
Several examples from Tout va bien (All’s Well) (1972), made by Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, illustrate these strategies. The film opens with an unidentified male voice-off declaring his intention of making a film. A female voice responds that making films costs money. The image shows a hand writing checks for the production of the film Tout va bien. In another sequence, one of the film’s protagonists speaks directly to the camera about his career as a political filmmaker turned director of commercials, and he is seated next to a camera as he does so. The speech makes us think about Godard’s own position. Another memorable scene is set in a supermarket as it is taken over by anarchists. To add another element, the words of the journalist character played by Jane Fonda [Figure 5.46] are introduced by loudspeaker tones, such as those that would normally direct shoppers to a special bargain. This sound element confuses internal and external sound, layering sound in a collage effect. Over a more than forty-year career, Godard has earned a reputation as probably the most exemplary practitioner of sound montage.
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5.46 Tout va bien (All’s Well) (1972). The cacophony of this setting is interrupted by the internal diegetic monologue of one of the other main characters, a journalist played by Jane Fonda.
But even in Hollywood films, sound montage can dominate. Although it is narratively motivated by the futuristic setting, the soundscape of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner resembles that of an experimental film. Sound, is at least as responsible as the mise-en-scène and the story line for the theme of anxiety in a synthetic, syncretic world. Director David Lynch’s sound designs are similarly integral to his disorienting onscreen worlds. In their richness, contemporary soundtracks draw more and more on montage traditions of layering sounds, without necessarily encouraging reflection on the discrete functions of sound and image. The continuity tradition that subordinates sound to image and accords with screen realism is still dominant. One of the most interesting films to confront questions of sound practice in Hollywood film is The Conversation. Although it does not depart from sound continuity in ways that an experimental film might do, the film asks viewers to consider the meanings and effects of sound as an autonomous element.
CONCEPTS AT WORK
From Edison’s experiments and The Jazz Singer through Singin’ in the Rain and The Conversation, films re- create sounds from the world around us and create new patterns of sound that construct or emphasize meanings and themes in the films. Listening carefully to films is a critical act that engages the films we watch in an audio dialogue that involves, as Singin’ in the Rain so clearly dramatizes, film history and culture, as well as specific formal elements and strategies. Unmistakenly demonstrated in films like Pulp Fiction and the recent version of The Great Gatsby, we listen — consciously or unconsciously — to a film
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with many layers of sound, from the dialogue to the background score and music soundtracks. While film sound may represent the
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