Film Theory: Ch. 6, Cinema as Ear - Acoustics and Space

Elsaesser & Hagener

Introduction Chapter Summary

• Emphasizes the importance of the body to perception and to three-dimensional orientation, further undermining the previous theories’ almost exclusive concentration on visual perception, whether two-dimensional or three-dimensional
• Ear as interface between film and spectator
• An organ that creates its own sonorous perceptual envelope, but also regulates the way that the human body locates itself in space.
• Draws attention to sense of balance and equilibrium, organized not (only) around space and the frame but around duration, location, interval, and interaction.
• The spectator is no longer passively receiving optical information, but exists as a bodily being, enmeshed acoustically, senso-motorically, somatically, and affectively in the film’s visual texture and soundscape
• Technological developments since the 70s relate directly to theoretical advances in psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and sound studies
• Her

Her (Jonze, 2013)

• “Not only can the love-struck Theodore not get enough of the virtual but all too virtually present Samantha; she, too, wants to give her voice a bodily presence” (146)
• Samantha acquiring real body goes horribly wrong
• “The ontological bond between a voice and a body cannot be dissolved or the gap overcome, at least not in a deep and emotionally fulfilling relationship” (146)
• Sound: a three-dimensional phenomenon of immersion and enveloping presence
• “...the rubric of ear and sound belong, within this scheme, to the paradigm where the phenomenological and sensory embodiment of cinematic experience is central” (148)

“Not only the skin but the body as a whole is a sensuous surface enveloping the body and granting a remarkable array of sense experiences, but such exposure of the senses makes humans also more vulnerable and emotionally volatile”

Intro

• Film Studies acknowledges that cinema is a multi-sensory experience
• Ongoing research on:
• Synaesthesia: the coupling of two separate domains of perception
• Intermodality: the capability of linking sensations from different domains into a coherent schema
• The exact role of the different perceptual channels (visual, acoustic, tactile, etc.), as well as the ways they relate to each other in the cinematic experience, is still in dispute

Preface

• “Before beginning to examine the soundscapes of cinema, we should stress the fact that by using the word ‘ear’ in the title of this chapter we do not think of acoustics in terms of an information carrier and communicative channel that complements the image, that is, as a pure appendage and supplement to visual information.
• Rather, as outlined in the opening discussion of Her, we believe that sound has a much more encompassing role of actually and metaphorically anchoring and stabilizing the spectator’s body (and self-perception as a perceiving subject) in space” (148).

Introduction Cont...

• “Whereas the eye searches and plunders, the ear listens in on what is plundering us. The ear is the organ of fear” (148).
• Allows 3-D experience of the world
• Ears, along with the rest of the body, represent a central element of perception, knowledge, and experience
• The skin is still an outer surface. The ear allows cinematic experience to probe deeply into the spectator’s (and listener’s) inner self
• Spatiality of the cinematic experience as well
• Ear provides sense of balance and spatial sensibility
• Spectator is not passive recipient of images, rather a bodily being enmeshed acoustically, spatially, and affectively in the filmic texture
• Sound technology since the 1970s improved/heightened these discussions

Chapter Sections

• Chapter divided into three parts:
• 1. Silent Cinema and the introduction of the sound film - synchronize visuals and acoustics
• 2. Sound in Classical cinema and its ability to give body, extension, and shape to the image
• Sound subordinated to image
• 3. Film-historical perspective on the age of blockbusters, when technological sound improvements largely restructured the cinematic experience and upset many of the hierarchies of classic cinema, including those between sound and image
• Dolby, Surround Sound, THX, Sound Design, etc.
• Leads into modern digitization and spatial relations (mobile phones, iPods, smart phones) - sound no longer implies an anchoring in a fixed spatial position

Silent Cinema

• Cinema has never really been “silent”
• Benshi in Japan, grand symphony accompaniment, cinema organ, foley artist
• Before the standardization of sound, each and every film was a unique performance
• It was the space of the auditorium, not only the space of the film, where meaning was created
• Synchronization was an endeavor dating back to the beginning of cinema
• Edison’s Kinetoscope as a complement to his phonograph
• Moving image as supplement to sound
• Contrast to the notion that sound merely complements (or distracts from) the image

Hugo (Scorsese, 2011) & How To Train Your Dragon (Sanders & Deblois, 2010)

Silent Cinema Cont...

• Visualizations of sounds and people reacting to sounds were all over silent cinema
• Critics of the sound transition said with it came the loss of purity and expressivity
• Sound betrays and corrupts an art form that was on the verge of maturity, reducing it to banalities of “ordinary talk”
• Arnheim was a convinced proponent of sound
• Transformed film into 3-D illusory perspective - “Acoustics completes the illusion to perfection”
• Reproduction of images entails a loss of dimensionality (from three to two), but that is not the case with sound reproduction
• Can bring the mechanical copy, in a certain sense, closer to a performed repetition of the original than a reproduction or representation
• Sound transforms film from a formally abstract mode of 2-D representation into a medium of 3-D mimetic realism

Silent Cinema Cont...

• Arnheim also argued against sound to film - highlighted issues of medium specificity and intermediality
• Two incompatible systems of artistic expression - image track as silent film and the sound track as radio play
• Montage guided by sound concepts such as rhythm, interval, and beat
• For critics of the 1920s, “sound film did not represent the perfection of film as an art form, but rather as merely adding a layer of (vulgar) illusion to film” (152).
• Loss of cinema’s special aura - silenced the already (too) loud and noisy world of modernity
• Asta Nielson’s gestures, Greta Garbo’s face, or Louise Brooks’ physiognomy captured the “essence” of cinema

The Jazz Singer (Crosland, 1927) & The Public Enemy (Wellman, 1931)

Melancholia (Von Trier, 2011) Trainspotting (Boyle, 1996)

Silent to Classical Cinema

• Technology for sound equipment put in place rather quickly
• Singin’ in the Rain - stages in various ways the collapse between the body and voice
• “The ontological bond between a sound and its origin that appears so self-evident to us in everyday life, is cancelled out and annihilated in the technological set-up of sound cinema” (153-154).
• “In classical cinema, sound is usually analyzed strictly in relation to (and in dependence on) the image” (154).
• Diegetic or nondiegetic, on-screen or off-screen, synchronous or non-synchronous, and the relationship between these parameters
• Sound analysis often framed in terms of a power struggle with the image between dominance and dependency
• Illustration, accompaniment, counterpoint, conflict, etc.

Funny Games (Haneke, 1997) & Inside Llewyn Davis (Coen Bros, 2013)

Classical Cinema

• Narration (filmic realization of the plot) is usually that to which other parameters (editing, camera work, and sound) are subordinated
• The chapter focuses on the separation and connection between the body and voice, which already preoccupied early theoreticians like Arnheim who rejected the combination of voice and body as unnatural
• Images are recorded, stored, processed, and displayed in a completely different way than sound (the former a chemical process, the latter an acoustic-electronic one)
• Popularity of musicals highlighted interaction or discrepancy between body and voice

Singin’ in the Rain (Kelly & Donen, 1952) & Les Miserables (Hooper, 2012)

Classical Cinema Cont...

• Marketability and commodification of the human voice
• “Sound engineers...always have to choose between intelligibility and fidelity when aiming at a ‘realistic’ sound: in everyday life, dialogue is often muffled or inaudible, something not easily accepted by film viewers” (155).
• Sound manipulated just as much as the image
• Sound gives film a “body,” a third dimension
• Film also threatens the integrity of the body, as shown in Singin’ in the Rain
• Sound also has tactile and haptic qualities, since it is a phenomenon related to waves, hence also to movement in space
• “In order to produce a sound, an object must be touched (the strings of an instrument, the vocal cords, the wind in the trees), and sound in turn makes bodies vibrate” (155).

Shadows (Cassavetes, 1959) & Scott Pilgrim vs The World (Wright, 2010)

Sounds Effects on the Body

• Sound covers and uncovers, touches and enfolds even the spectator’s body (relate to Ch 5)
• “In many ways, we are more susceptible to sound than to visual perceptions, a fact on which horror films capitalize when sound is used to evoke a threatening and yet unseen presence” (155).
• If we can’t see the origin of sound, our directional grasp of aural information (identification, designation) is much weaker than with information perceived by the eye
• Sound is also fleeting - escapes our desire to capture, fixate, and freeze it - opposed to an image
• Sound can be reproduced only in time - can’t be reduced to a single moment
• Irreversibility of time, often associated with fear and danger

A Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven, 1984) A Quiet Place II (Kraskinski, 2021)

What is Sound?

• Sound can carry meaning, enable communication, and create reference
• Sound can destroy or distort meaning as noise and interference
• It can hover on the border between meaning and non-sense (babbling or muttering)
• These boundaries are blurred of course
• Sound is more malleable than image - it can alter its form at any time
• Sound is polysemic when it comes to its emotional effect
• Sound is both material and and immaterial - cannot be produced anew
• Sound is both directional and enveloping, both inside and outside

The Last Man on Earth (Ragona & Salkow, 1964) & The Basketball Diaries (Kalvert, 1995)

(Laugh to a cry…)

(Cry to a scream…)

Key and Peele (2012-2015) & Lost in Translation (Coppola, 2003)

(Whispered words drowned out)

(Crying and Comedic Tone)

Aly, Walk With Me (The Raveonettes, 2007) & Silver Rocket (Sonic Youth, 1988)

(Music and “noise”)

Classical Cinema Cont...

• Classical Hollywood renders sound “inaudible” to a certain extent
• Sound as purely auxiliary role
• Sound and image rearranged across temporal markers
• Sound asks “where” and the image says “here”
• Relation of sound and image also creates a tension: they both dance around each other in a perpetual question-and-answer game
• Sound attaches to the image mimetically
• Scores to duplicate or enhance affective states the narrative is trying to evoke
• Mickey-Mousing - sounds imitate the visual action
• Sound is active, as something travelling or being sent - emanates from an object and has an origin/source (unlike color)

Chion

• A force or special carrier of authority
• Acoustmetre: the bodiless voice in cinema that apparently has no origin yet is powerful and ubiquitous
• Combining acousmatic (an archaic term describing something that one hears but whose origin is invisible)
• And etre (the French verb ‘to be’)
• Active force of sound - “possesses the power to attack, invade, or manipulate, rather than just being a transitory aural whiff carried by the wind” (157).
• “The place and origin of these ‘vocal characters’ lie neither within film nor outside it: ‘The acousmetre is this acousmatic character whose relationship to the screen involves a special kind of ambiguity and oscillation...We may define it as neither inside nor outside the image’” (157).

Little Shop of Horrors (Oz, 1986) & Amelie (Jeunet, 2001)

(Omniscient Narrator)

Chion Cont...

• “The acousmetre can see everything, know everything, and have an impact on everything, and it is also ubiquitous” (157).
• The Wizard in The Wizard of Oz
• The voice of Mother in Psycho
• Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Mabuse in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
• All these voices must be exposed and broken within the diegetic worlds, “de-acousmatized,” in order to neutralize the threat they pose to the (symbolic) order (of classical narration).
• Highlight the dark side of sound’s ability to embody agency - like ventriloquism
• The Exorcist (original scene, real voice)
• Frowned upon by musical performers, but “dubbing” is ok
• All of this highlights the tension between 2-D image and 3-D sound

The Wizard of Oz (Fleming, 1939) & Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960)

2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968) & The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Lang, 1933)

“When a film performance is no longer limited to the screen alone, by virtue of the spatial extension brought about by the envelope of sound that is omnipresent in the room, then it becomes indeed difficult to decide whether the cinematic experience takes place ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ the body” (158).

1970s Blockbusters

• New and emerging audio/sound technologies as one way to get people back to the movies
• Nashville, Star Wars, Apocalypse Now, etc.
• Films like The Conversation and Blow-Out dramatize and foreground the capabilities of new sound technologies
• Sound becomes mobile with the transistor and car radios, 1950s
• Private, individual act to a more public, communal act
• Dolby enabled the separation of various tracks and accelerated the composition of overlapping soundtracks
• Entered the cinemas in combination with surround-sound systems, altering the cinematic experience forever
• Transgress the boundaries of the screen and ‘enter’ into the spectator’s space

Star Wars (Lucas, 1977)

The Conversation (Coppola, 1974) & Blow Out (De Palma, 1981)

La Boum (Pinoteau, 1983) & Say Anything (Crowe, 1989)

Garden State (Braff, 2004) & The Vast of Night (Patterson, 2019)

Sonorous Envelope

• Film experience was “in front of” the spectator. Now it’s all around them.
• Zizek employs the acoustmetre to open the notion of the gaze toward the acoustic dimension of the (psychoanalytically understood) scopic regime
• Hearing is more crucial than seeing for our bodily sense of orientation, even from a physiological standpoint: It is through sound that we first come into contact with the outside world
• Mary Ann Doane examined such liminal cases as under the aspect of sound as “sonorous envelope”:
• Voice-off: origin of voice is in the diegetic space, but not within the actual frame
• Voiceover: origin of voice is beyond the boundaries of the diegesis
• Interior monologue: character is visible, but not the creation of sound as the sound is interiorized
• Experience similar to sonic experience in utero

“Queen of the Senses”

• Chion inverts the traditional hierarchy of image and sound
• Sound as “Queen of the Senses” according to Chion for three reasons (163):
• Cinema is an audio-event before it becomes a visual one
• Repeatedly stresses the ubiquity and materiality of sound in relation to the image, which crucially depends on the sound to give the image body and substance
• His concept of “rendering” points to a central characteristic of contemporary (digital) film sound, now regarded more as a substance, a filler that is being molded and shaped, before it is “laid down” and applied to the image track
• Terminator 2
• Chion: it is the ear that renders the image visible

David Lynch

• “...Lynch has upset the ‘power relations’ between image and sound more than any other filmmaker and inverted the characteristics of sound and image” (63)
• Typically in horror and fantasy, special effects applied to the image generate the uncanny side of reality “as a ghostly or haunting presence”
• “...in Lynch’s films, reminiscent of the cinema’s nineteenth-century predecessors, it is often sound that creates phantasmagoric effects through acoustic ghosts and aural apparitions” (163)
• Image often on the verge of disappearing whereas sound remains stable
• Referential, articulated, with clear borders and contours
• Club Silencio sequence in Mulholland Drive (2001)...

“Related as it is to the reversibility of active and passive, of subject and object, of living and inanimate, a spectacularly protracted play between sound and image is staged, for instance, in the Silencio club sequence in Mulholland Drive, where almost all the features we have been discussing in this chapter - separation of body and voice, of material support and aural apparition, of ventriloquism and the supernatural - are demonstrated in exemplary, almost textbook fashion” (164)

Mulholland Drive (2001)

“...if sound and image have become indispensable to each other, then their mutual untrustworthiness acts as the new ‘ground’ of representation. Yet what exactly is this ‘ground’ in an environment that is becoming ever more mobile, fluid, and unstable?” (164)

The “Ground”

• This battle is between:
• A sound-and-image combination stabilizing our balance and “centering” our vision in the geometry of perspectival space
• “Aural objects” thanks to Dolby and surround sound’s three dimensional soundscape
• “Because sound fills space with reverberation, its meaning is perceived to reside in the image, even though it may ‘come’ from elsewhere” (164)
• “Thus, sound ‘stands for’ the space implied by the image, since listening pulls one in, while seeing creates distance” (164)
• Sound and image having become “mobile” in our technical devices, as well as mobile in how they “transport” our senses and bodies
• New problem created by mobile technology: how do we locate our bodies in this aural space?