In 1928 Soviet director and montage theorist Vsevolod Pudovkin, together with Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, issued their statement on film sound. A year later Pudovkin expanded upon on these ideas in the article Asynchronism as a Principle of Sound Film. There he outlines the difference in the rhythmic structuring of experience between man’s objective and subjective perspectives on life. He writes:
“Always there exist two rhythms, the rhythmic course of the objective world and the tempo and rhythm with which man observes this world. The world is a whole rhythm, while man receives only partial impressions of this world through his eyes and ears and to a lesser extent through his very skin. The tempo of his impressions varies with the rousing and calming of his emotions, while the rhythm of the objective world he perceives continues in unchanged tempo.”
Let us consider these different rhythms as we briefly examine how sound and image shape both the character and audience’s understanding of experiential perspective.
The various sound levels of a film are manipulated to shape the spectator’s attention over time. Mixing therefore is the art of attention-shaping, controlling what needs to be heard at any particular moment in time in service to the film's overarching conceptual or narrative intention. This can operate on the spectator-auditor at both the conscious and unconscious level. In a famous scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929) the word “knife” from a nearby conversation is unnaturally foregrounded in order to expressionistically heighten the anxiety of the stories murderer. The spectator’s attention is directed towards the psychological state of the character, the internal struggles of their mind.
Top-left clockwise: The Godfather [1972] dir. Francis Ford Coppola • Clean, Shaven [1993] dir. Lodge Kerrigan • Jarhead [2005] dir. Sam Mendes • Yella [2007] dir. Christian Petzold
Character subjectivity in film is often presented in the close-up. The use of a voice-over track further reinforces this. Close-up tracking or zooming-in on character faces further emphasises this shift in perspective. Correspondingly, varying sound levels over such a shot help expresses this increasingly heightened depiction of subjectivity. These filmic ideas have evolved into conventions which over time have been integrated into the wider audiovisual language of modern filmmaking and spectatorship.
In practice, presented with a close-up shot of a character, sound designers understand how manipulating the sounds of the surrounding environment (amplitude, timbre, reverberence - acoustic indicators of physical proximity) can communicate a general shift in perspective from objectivity to subjectivity. The spectator registers, perhaps unconsciously, a gradual change in auditory perspective from the exteriority of the world into the interior landscape of the subject’s mind.
This can be achieved by attenuating, dampening or “reverberating out” the sounds of the environment. Consider Raging Bull (1980) and how the ringside sounds of the boxing match recede into the background as LaMotta waits for his final beating from Sugar Ray Robinson. The scene’s subsequent sequence of rapid picture cuts and unusual sound effects has clearly inspired similarly visceral fight moments in popular films like Fight Club (1999) and Snatch (2000).
Raging Bull [1980] dir. Martin Scorsese
Conversely, in the famous Sollozzo killing scene in The Godfather (1972), accentuating and manipulating the diegetic sounds of the environment, in this case the screeching sound of the offscreen elevated train, can achieve a similar effect. Walter Murch has discussed the way the seemingly mysterious sound is used in the scene:
“It’s a mysterious sound that is nibbling away at their subconscious, and people, being people, like to resolve things in some way. So subconsciously they will say, "What is that sound?" Because there’s nothing in the picture that is anything like a train—although it’s reasonable that a train might be heard in that part of the Bronx—the emotion that comes along with that sound, which is a screeching effect as a train turns a difficult corner, gets immediately applied to Michael’s state of mind.”
Murch goes on to describe the ambiguous character of this kind of juxtaposition of image and sound in terms of audience participation:
“You provoke the audience to complete a circle of which you’ve only drawn a part. Each person being unique, they will complete that in their own way. When they have done that, the wonderful part of it is that they re-project that completion onto the film.”
In Asynchronism as a Principle of Sound Film Pudovkin reaffirms the scope of the contrapuntal method as it relates to the delineation between the interior and exterior experiences of reality:
“It is possible therefore for sound film to be made correspondent to the objective world and man's perception of it together. The image may retain the tempo of the world, while the sound strip follows the changing rhythm of the course of man's perceptions, or vice versa. This is a simple and obvious form for counterpoint of sound and image.”
The history of film sound is full of examples of sound that successfully heighten expressive psychological states. A key reoccurring feature throughout many such moments is the choice of the character close-up. This particular shot has come to function as a visual cue for framing the moment and priming the spectator for the transition from an objective into a subjective storytelling perspective. In conventional filmmaking practice this can be considered another example of how opportunities for crucial sound design ideas are generated by, and respond to, a film’s particular cinematographic design: listening shaped by what we see.
Film Selection:
Memoria [2021] dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Sound of Metal [2019] dir. Darius Marder
Notes on Blindness [2016] dir. Peter Middleton, James Spinney
Yella [2007] dir. Christian Petzold
Clean, Shaven [1993] dir. Lodge Kerrigan
Raging Bull [1980] dir. Martin Scorsese
Ikiru [1952] dir. Akira Kurosawa