44. Film: Contrapuntal / Asynchronous

Since the advent of the moving image, filmmakers, theorists and critics have been interested in the question concerning naturalism: To what extent is filmmaking required to aspire to the rules and conventions of our everyday, sensorial experience. Is film to mimic reality?

This in turn reveals a more fundamental question concerning the medium and its artistic and social significance within the wider culture: What is film, what does it express? Is it a truth-revealing technology, a means of accurately recording the raw facts of life? Or is its primary role that of a magic-making machine, the elaboration of special effect trickery to dazzle audiences with fantastical experiences of imaginative worlds?

The talkie heralded a new era of synchronous image and sound filmmaking. Soon critics began to question the slavishly, naturalistic role sound was now performing in service to the moving images. For some, the technological innovations of synchronous picture and soundtrack was in danger of contaminating the ethereal dimension of the silent film. The talkie presented the problem of inviting in too much sensory experience; what would be left to imagine? As Walter Murch comments:

“The weakness of present-day cinema is paradoxically its strength of representation: it doesn’t automatically possess the built-in escape valves of ambiguity that painting, music, literature, black-and-white silent film, and radio have simply by virtue of their sensory incompleteness—an incompleteness that automatically engages the imagination of the viewer/listener as compensation for what can only be suggested by the artist.

In his 1929 article The Art of Sound, Réne Clair lamented the realism of the talkie. In grounding the spectator in a consistent audiovisual storytelling space, synchronous sound threatened cinema’s much celebrated capacity to transport and transcend everyday reality. Clair writes:

“Through such "progressive" means the screen has lost more than it has gained. It has conquered the world of voices, but it has lost the world of dreams. I have observed people leaving the cinema after seeing a talking film. They might have been leaving a music hall, for they showed no sign of the delightful numbness which used to overcome us after a passage through the silent land of pure images. They talked and laughed, and hummed the tunes they had just heard. They had not lost their sense of reality.”

René Clair had been experimenting with offscreen sound since the early 1930s. In this famous scene from Sous les toites de Paris [1930], Clair replaces the sounds of the men fighting with the nearby, but unseen, screeching of a passing train. The combination of raw industrial sound and physical brutality must have had a powerfully violent effect on his audience at the time.

Despite, or perhaps because of this fear, Clair would go on to direct a series of successful talkies between 1930 and 1933. Each of these four films was an opportunity for Clair to create and experiment with innovative film sound techniques. Among many of his achievements as a filmmaker and artist of the avant-garde, Clair demonstrated that this new technology could be effectively integrated into the poetic language of cinema.

The Godfather Part I [1972] dir. Francis Ford Coppola. The technique of parallel editing is used in the famous baptism scene to produce stark contrast in tone and concept across separate, but interwoven scenes. “The essence of cinema is editing. It’s the combination of what can be extraordinary images of people during emotional moments, or images in a general sense, put together in a kind of alchemy” - Coppola.

Contrapuntal

In 1928 Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Podovkin and Grigori Alexandrov had already issued their “statement” on sound, decrying the use of the synchronous soundtrack in terms of its diminishing efficacy within the soviet theory of montage:

“To use sound in this way will destroy the culture of montage, for every adhesion of sound to a visual montage piece increases its inertia as a montage piece, and increases the independence of its meaning-and this will undoubtedly be to the detriment of montage.”

They proposed a contrapuntal, non-synchronous method in which “sound, treated as a new montage element (as a factor divorced from the visual image)” that will “give the necessary palpability which will later lead to the creation of an Orchestral Counterpoint of visual and aural images.“

The Girl Chewing Gum [1976] dir. John Smith. A unique approach to asynchronous sound.

Asynchronism

A year after the statement was published Vsevolod Podovkin further refined his own ideas of Asynchronism - the precise juxtaposition of images and sounds and how they relate to everyday human sensory experience. Here Podovkin somewhat distinguishes his own film sound ideas from Eisenstein’s musically analogous countrapuntalist method.

In his essay Asynchronism as a Principle of Sound Film Podovkin reiterated the problem of a faux naturalism that emerges when sound and image reinforce one another in the illusionist fashion of the talkie. He describes how:

“the role which sound is to play in film is much more significant than a slavish imitation of naturalism on these lines; the first function of sound is to augment the potential expressiveness of the film's content […] Unity of sound and image is realized by an interplay of meanings which results […] in a more exact rendering of nature than its superficial copying.”

Juxtaposition

Audiovisual montage, in which both the image and sound material operate juxtapositionally, presents the filmmaker with an opportunity to forge new associations to generate and reorganise meaning and significance. Such elasticity under certain filmic conditions, opens the sound film up to embrace more poetic forms that aren’t grounded in linear, synchronous reality.

Good kid, m.A.A.d city [2014] dir. Kahil Joseph. A slick audiovisual collage artist, Joseph combines different video formats, visual choreography, music and asynchronous sound to create his unique, part music video / part docu-fiction, cinematic style.

Sound not merely mimicking the image but functioning as a counterpoint, or asynchronously, can unify the temporality and spatiality of a sequence of moving images that otherwise may feel disconnected and rhythmically inconsistent. In this regard, non-diegetic musical score is commonly deployed as an effective tool to achieve this sense of unity and cohesion across film time. Both the use of sound and music in this manner can assist in emotional and intellectual modes of audiovisual association and meaning-forming in which the sum effect is far greater than its constituent parts. 

Optical Sound: Material Displacement

In some sense the decoupling and breaking of sound from its visual counterpart emphasises the fundamentally illusionary nature of the sound film as defined by the synchronous bond of sound to image. The illusion is perceptual, constructed in the brain of the spectator as it processes these two streams of sensory information simultaneously. This perceptual activity suggests that what one sees and hear is happening at the same time; i.e. a talking head produces a seemingly synchronous and therefore naturalistic set of vocal sounds.

But the photographic information of a film in its most material sense - as a tangible, celluloid filmstrip - is at physical odds with this experience. The optical soundtrack does not correspond to the filmstrip’s adjacent image(s); the variable waveforms are not positioned horizontally alongside their corresponding images, but instead precede them. The two strands of information are actually displaced by a number of frames due to the film projector’s soundtrack head being positioned after the lens for the film’s image track. For 16mm optical, the soundtrack is read 26 frames in advance of the images. In this way, materially, on celluloid, sound and image remain essentially misaligned, out of sync.

Beyond sound-on-film technology, where sound accompanying a picture is recorded photographically, the operation of magnetic tape and later digital sound recorders untethered from the camera enforce the separation between sound and image; they function separately. It is only through the post-production process that these two discrete sources of audio and visual information are physically forced into synchronous marriage.

Film Selection:

Good kid, m.A.A.d city [2014] dir. Kahil Joseph
The Family Album [1988] dir. Alan Berliner
San Soleil [1983] dir. Chris Marker
The Girl Chewing Gum [1976] dir. John Smith
Walden [1968] dir. Jonas Mekas
Unsere Afrikareise [1966] dir. Peter Kubelka
Ako [1964] dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara
Report [1963-67] dir. Bruce Conner
Listen to Britain [1942] dir. Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister.
The Deserter [1933] dir. Vsevolod Podovkin
Sous les toites de Paris [1930] dir. René Clair

43. Film: The Sensorial

"Any understanding has its being in an act of understanding" (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, p.118-19)

The Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) is an experimental laboratory based at Harvard University that promotes innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography. SEL projects encourage “attention to the many dimensions of the world” […] “taking as their subject the bodily praxis and affective fabric of human and animal existence”.

In recent years the academic lab has produced a number of experimental films that challenge the anthropocentric and linguistic-based conventions of traditional approaches to ethnography and documentary filmmaking. Lab director Lucien Castaing-Taylor describes these works as:

“attempts to use filmmaking, not as a way of illustrating written ethnography, but rather to evoke the sensory experiences of certain kinds of lives in particular places.”

In the article The Flesh of The Perceptible: The New Materialism of Leviathan author Max Bowens draws a comparison between the film practices of the ethnographic lab and the New Materialism of philosopher Jane Bennet. He writes:

“The philosophical origins of both Sensory Ethnography and New Materialism bare enticing similarities to each other, most acutely in their advocacy for Nature's intrinsic vitality, the necessity for humans to have a more sensorial engagement with it, and for a relational, systems-based phenomenology […] Lived experience becomes a necessity for the filmmakers to endure and to capture simultaneously.”

De Humani Corporis Fabrica [2022] dir. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel • Levaithan [2012] dir. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel

This interest in the sensorial aspect of experience is particularly notable in such film works as Leviathan (2012), Expedition Content (2020) and De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022), each of which explores perspectives on a new type of immersive ethnographic cinema through innovative approaches to filmmaking technology. In an overview of the lab for the 2016 Porto/Post/Doc festival retrospective, Daniel Ribas writes:

“There is, therefore, a technological side to the films produced by SEL: smaller, portable digital cameras, more effective and “invisible” audio capture systems allow a close monitoring of ritual practices or certain locations and their communities.”

In Leviathan and De Humani Corporis Fabrica, small, portable camera and microphone technology facilitate a highly dynamic capture of reality from unusual angles and physical perspectives - underwater, airborne, inside the body.

Unlike choices of cinematography that efface the presence of the filmmaker’s camera, these films do not attempt to conceal the use of the filmmaking technology in motion. Instead the spectator feels the operation of camera and microphone, probing with intent into tiny crevices, strikingly close, in and out of focus, roaming into odd angles, revealing hidden sounds and textures. This calls to mind the handheld, running-camera approach pioneered by film diarist Jonas Mekas who in 1959 wrote:

“There is no other way to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses.”

Such derangement of the senses is produced by the probing film apparatus, revealing a unique sensorial experience of an all too familiar, and overlooked, reality.

Cow (2021) dir. Andrea Arnold

This particular approach to location filming emphasises the unique role that innovative production sound techniques perform in the sensorial realisation of the total audiovisual work. The use of experimental microphone techniques in films like De Humani Corporis Fabrica highlight a rare point of contact between the domains of sound art - under the rubric of 20th century experimental music and sound practices - and that of film sound. Such interaction emphasises how an explorative and inventive approach to production sound can yield exciting new possibilities for creating a unique type of deep sonic cinema.

Film Selection:

De Humani Corporis Fabrica [2022] dir. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel
Cow (2021) dir. Andrea Arnold
Expedition Content (2020) dir. Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati
Levaithan [2012] dir. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel
Sweetgrass [2009] dir. Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor

References:

In Search of the Sensory Experience: The Sensory Ethnography Lab / Focus SEL by Daniel Ribas
The Flesh of the Perceptible: The New Materialism of Leviathan by Max Bowens
Vibrant Matter, 2009, Jane Bennet

42. Film: Science, Horror, War

In a number of recent posts I sketched out how certain film locations, story themes or scenarios open up interesting sound design opportunities for filmmakers. Surveillance, telecommunication technology, tales of survival, body horror, stories set in remote natural landscapes or in industrial spaces; these are all examples of film situations and environments that are designed for sound - films conceived with sound and attentive listening as essential component to the experience of the work.

By focusing on such film scenarios I have consequently so far put aside talking about particular film genres and how these afford different approaches to using sound. While any such detailed discussion lies outside the scope of these brief notes, in the wider context of film as a medium for sound and listening, the broader discussion here would feel incomplete if I didn’t allow some space to linger on a few key genres, if only briefly.

Science-fiction, horror and war are three genres that, in terms of soundtrack design, demand a great deal of attention. Both in literarature and film, historically these genres arrive readymade with a striking level of auditory associations - an active and audible soundscape baked into these story worlds.

THX 1138 [1971] dir. George Lucas

Science Fiction

In the late 1940s technical innovations in electronic synthesizers and magnetic tape recording technology began to arrive in Hollywood. These new tools immediately expanded the sonic possibilities for scoring films with new sound effects, noises and electronic music. In traditional science-fiction tales, new and inventive sounds began to accompany moving images of spaceships, robots, alien creatures, machinary, weapons, radio communication as well as the operation of buttons, dials and all manne of electronic control surfaces.

From Bebe and Louis Barron (Forbidden Planet, 1956), Walter Murch (THX 1138, 1971), Eduard Artemyev (Solaris, 1972) and Ben Burtt (Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, 1977) through to modern Hollywood movies involving large teams of sound editors and mixers (The Matrix, 1999; Gravity, 2013; Arrival, 2016 etc.), the ever expanding ambition of science fiction filmmakers has always presented sound designers and electronic composers with exciting opportunities for creating new and unusal soundworlds.

Traditionally the science fiction film allows for a close interplay between sound and music. One isn’t quite sure where the sounds of one department begins and the other ends. In some filmmaking contexts (e.g. independent and experimental filmmaking practices) it’s not unusual for both sound design and music duties to be performed by a single individual. In addition to shooting and writing the film, director Chris Marker performed and recorded the electronic score for his sci-fi travelogue Sans Soleil (1983). Pierre Bertault and Antoine Bonfanti are credited with what appears to be location sound roles for the project.

This ambiguity between sounds, noises and music is deliberately explored in Andrei Tarkvosky’s two science fiction films from the 1970s - Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979).

In a 1979 interview Tarkovsky discussed the sonic ambiguity of Stalker, describing his intention to merge the music and sounds together to create an experience that the audience would not completely understand or be aware of:

“It seemed to me that it could - that it must even - rely solely on sounds...But this music must be barley heard beneath the noise, in a way that the spectator is not aware of it. Moreover, I would like most of the noise and sound to be composed by a composer. In the film, for example, the three people undertake a long journey in a railway car. I'd like that the noise of the wheels on the rails not be the natural sound but elaborated upon by the composer with electronic music. At the same time, one mustn't be aware of music, nor natural sounds.”

Horror

Such ambiguity helps define another important type of sound film - horror. A genre whose defining feature is the experience that surreptitiously emerges through an engineered atmosphere of instability and uncertainty. Here the soundtrack’s potential for subliminal stimulation operates on the spectator to stir emotional states of fear, dread and anxiety without conscious recognition.

In Silence of the Lambs (1991) consider the changing roomtones and background ambiances as Clarice enters Hannibal Lecter’s maximum security cell for the very first time. The film’s sound designer Ron Bochar illustrates how such sounds are often composed from disparate sound sources before under going post-production processing and treatment:

“I can't begin to list the material that went into all that. But there were animal screams and noises built into the ambience itself downstairs there. From a little movie I had made years ago called Little Monsters I took this lunatic kind of screaming that I had recorded; I took track, processed it, slowed it down, and played it in reverse. That became one of the ambiences in the room, too. It's the room tone, but the room tone has been made from some guy screaming in pain.”

Silence of the Lambs [1991] dir. Johnathan Demme

In his book Occult Aesthetics, Kevin Donnelly uses the term “the occult” to describe any “hidden workings or processes that are unable to be observed.” He writes:

“Aesthetics can work in mystical, magical, and unapparent manners, and the synchronization of sound and image in the cinema is an exmplary case in point […] Horror films appear to know more about the occult of aesthetics than other film: They play around with this lynchpin of cinema far more than other genres. There is something potentially disturbing about the cinema’s illusion that has a determinedly supernatural character.”

The atmospheric tension and mood of a horror film is shaped by the precise placement and manipulation of diegetic sound elements and non-diegetic music/sound design score. Working in tandem, both elements of the soundtrack can thus be designed to operate on the spectator’s reptilian brain, exploiting our core instinctual responses for survival and safety.

Audiovisual immersion into a convincing story scenario sets the stage for the spectator’s willing suspension of disbelief. Neurologically, the horror soundtrack is processed by the auditory cortex which communicates messages to the amygdala, the brain’s neural core for processing fearful and threatening stimuli. Sudden loud noises or ominous low frequency rubbles activate the brain’s fight or flight response as the threat of danger is triggered. Discordant, chaotically structured bands of high frequencies replicate human screams and cries of pain, heightening a feeling of deep discomfort and distress. Horror music in particular exploits this upper register to great unsettling effect.

Apocalpyse Now [1979] dir. Francis Ford Coppola • Saving Private Ryan [1998] dir. Steven Spielberg

War

Distress and discomfort are very much part of the vocabulary of the loudest, most sonically omnipresent film setting - the war film. In his unique 2015 study Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma and Survival in Wartime Iraq, “The Belliphonic” is how author J.Martin Daughtry describes the spectrum of sounds produced by armed combat - the combination of two latin words for war (bellum) and voice (phone).

At certain moments in war film history, the brutal sonic violence of the battle field reaches its logical extreme in breaking the combatant’s threshold (ear drum) for basic auditory perception. Here momentary hearing loss is expressed as a sustained high pitched tinnitus tone, used to illustrate the resulting auditory damaging of a nearby explosion. This subjective perspective is further emphasised by attenuating the sounds of the surrounding environment, often by rolling off high frequency content. Such extreme moments of psychology and impaired perception are masterfully exectued with changes in sound in scenes from war films Apocalpyse Now (1979), Come and See (1985) and Saving Private Ryan (1998).

The 2005 Persian Gulf war film Jarhead offers an interesting example of warfare noise, and how sound and camera choreography working in tandem can effectively move the perspectives from the objective space of the world to the subjective mental space of a charcter.

Jarhead [2005] dir. Sam Mendes

In one famous battlefield scene the film’s protagonist, Anthony Swofford, finds himself standing, transfixed in a state of stupor, as gunfire and bombs explode all around him. As the camera smoothly tracks towards his face the sounds of the battlefield diminish in audibility. The character’s voice-over soon breaks the quiet, followed then by the naked granular sounds of falling sand showering over his face. Here, framed visually in the close-up shot, the same technique of attenuating the environmental sounds communicate a shift in storytelling perspective. To the spectator such a sonic device feels familiar, commonly used across different film genres, but no less effective and emotionally engaging.

Film Selection:

Arrival [2016] dir. Denis Villeneuve
Sans Soleil [1983] dir. Chris Marker
THX 1138 [1971] dir. George Lucas
Forbidden Planet [1956] dir. Fred M. Wilcox

The Babadook [2014] dir. Kristina Ceyton
Paranormal Activity [2007] dir. Oren Peli
The Exorcist [1973] dir. William Friedkin
The Innocents [1961] dir. Jack Clayton

Son of Saul [2015] dir. László Nemes
Saving Private Ryan [1998] dir. Steven Spielberg
Come and See [1985] dir. Elem Klimov
Apocalpyse Now [1979] dir. Francis Ford Coppola

40. Film: Noise of the Medium

"One day in 1948 while riding a crowded subway I came up with the idea of mixing random noise with composed music. More precisely, it was then that I became aware that composing is giving meaning to that stream of sounds that penetrates the world we live in." [Toru Takemitsu, Confronting Silence, p 79]

Outer Space [1999] dir. Peter Tscherkassky

Mainstream film production values demand a kind of maximum closeness. Every image and sound sparkles with reassuring clarity and sharpness. In post-production dialogue editors surgically remove undesirable elements from the production sound. Clicks, pops, lip-smacks, microphone bumps, passing planes, belly growls, all such extraneous sounds are suitably air-brushed out to create an intelligible, clean dialogue track. Careful balancing of levels and use of background fill tracks help to stitch together picture cuts, smoothly unifying the action in time and space. At every such stage throughout the post-production sound process, clarity and consistency is sought towards the creation of a coherent, unified soundtrack, a highly organised composition of sounds serving a narrative arc.

Filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky presents an altogether different kind of audiovisual experience. A central figure in the Austrian avant-grade, Tscherkassky has been making films since the early 1980s. Often using found 35mm footage as his source material, he constructs densely layered textures through extensive editing, celluloid maltreatment and film processing from his dark studio in the remote Austrian countryside. Out of these long seasons of labour emerge films of incredible beauty; twisting, repeating and fragmenting found narratives into new and unusual compositions. From the outset he writes:

“I wanted to unravel and dissolve the medium, “destroy” is not the right expression, but, yes, some type of “breaking”, and in breaking, allowing something else to become visible”.

These are dynamic film soundtracks of volcanic surfaces; the delicious crackle and hiss of celluloid, like the turntable escapades of Christian Marclay or Otomo Yoshihide. What we hear are the raw optical distortions of the medium itself, breaking up and contorting into new sonic shapes. From within these granular nettles emerge fragments of original soundtrack - grainy voices and snatches of music, footsteps, sounds of doors, broken glass and gunshots. These ghostly sounds of the past surface and resurface through a sea of optical clicks and pops, sometimes drifting into the foreground or repeating in time with the images. Elsewhere they erupt in violent bursts, building into chaotic layers of percussive noise.

Dresden Dynamo [1971] dir. Lis Rhodes

Tscherkassky’s work can be situated within a whole history of avant garde and experimental filmmaking practices that stretch back to the early 1900s. Many filmmakers exploring the moving image technology of the time arrived at film with a background in fine arts, and so perhaps naturally graviated to exploring the purely visual potential of the medium. However, a number of individuals turned their attention towards investigating the synesthetic dimension of the image and soundtrack of celluloid. Many of these early experiments were described as a kind of “visual music”. What follows is a very brief historical overview of some of the major innovators in the field of film and optical sound.

Early innovations in optical sound began extensively in Russia and Europe. Russian composer and theorist Arseny Avraamov was a major pioneer in sound-on-film techniques, experimenting in the early 1930s with hand-drawn soundtracks directly on to film. In 1930 Evgeny Sholpo developed the Variophone, an optical synthesizer that used sound waves cut onto rotating disks. The resulting sounds were photographed on to 35mm film stock and reproduced via a projector and loudspeaker system.

Other notable works to emerge during this time are Rudolf Pfenniger’s five-part documentary film series Tönende Handschrift (Sounding Handwriting) and Oskar Fishchinger’s Ornament Sound, both from 1932. At the National Board of Canada in the mid-1940s, Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren began experimenting with “animated sound”, photographically shooting prepared graphic cards, frame-by-frame, on to the optical soundtrack area of a 35mm film strip.

In 1959 ex-BBC Radiophonic composer Daphne Oram began developing her Oramics optical sound instrument. For this she employed a drawn sound technique that was performed directly onto 35mm film. As the film strip passesd through the machines various photo-electric cells, different geometric shapes and patterns produced different sounds.

1966 and The London Film-makers' Co-op is established, where artists such as Lis Rhodes and Guy Sherwin produced filmworks that explored the interplay between sound and light. Super16 film technology was commonly used, allowing artists to translate an image into sound as the picture track passed through the exciter lamp of the projector’s optical sound head. Many of Guy Sherwin’s early structuralist films explore this synesthetic relationship.

Film Selection:

Outer Space [1999] dir. Peter Tscherkassky
Perfect Film [1986] dir. Ken Jacobs
Soundtrack [1977] dir. Guy Sherwin
Dresden Dynamo [1971] dir. Lis Rhodes
Schlechter [1958] dir. Peter Kubelka
Tönende Handschrift [1932] dir. Rudolf Pfenniger
Ornament Sound [1932] dir. Oskar Fishchinger

39. Film: Subjectivity

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

38. Film: The Experimental Soundtrack

One of the ways in which the film work of avant garde and moving image artists differs from narrative-based filmmaking is how sound and music is used. In rejecting concerns of story or character development, filmmakers operating in this interdisciplinary region between cinema (film), performance (expanded cinema) and gallery exhibition (video installation) free themselves to examine the medium inside and outside the confines of linear time. *

The Movement of People Working [2003] dir. Phil Niblock (2 stills from DVD version)

An elastic approach to the temporal arrangement of moving images and sounds opens up opportunities for interesting and unusual audiovisual juxtapositions. The use of contrapuntal sound in this way can have the effect of registering a floating, dream-like atmosphere that departs from the grounded, synchronous interaction of image and sound. Located within such a dreamscape lies the mind of the filmmaker who, in the expressive stream of consciousness, is capable of achieving a highly personal sensibility to filmmaking. In this space images and sounds drift in and out of focus like fading memories, fragments of a passing life. Here the expressive diarist work of Jonas Mekas comes to mind. 

With the freeing up of time and the relinquishing of synchronous image-sound relationships, the conventional distinctions between diegetic/non-diegetic, music/sound, signal/noise begin to unravel and blur. Operating in this sonic territory - one that historically covers video art, sound art and experimental music - we locate moving image artists and filmmakers, many of whom arrive at film with a background in fine art or contemporary and experimental music. In some cases respective film and music activities co-exist (e.g. Phil Niblock), while for others, an interest in sound and music is a starting point in a trajectory that moves them further towards moving image and video installation (e.g. Bill Viola). 

The Birds [1963] dir. Alfred Hitchcock • The Red Desert [1964] dir. Michelangelo Antonioni

The electronic film score belongs to any discussion concerning alternative and experimental approaches to working with film sound and music. Amongst some of the most famous examples of commercial films that deploy a purely electronic palette of sounds is Alfred Hitchcock’s horror classic The Birds from 1963. Utilising the Mixtur-Trautonium electronic synthesizer, composers Oskar Sala and Remi Gassmann were commissioned to produce the eery, atonal textures that would score the birds fluttering and cawing. In her book The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock's Sound Track Elisabeth Weis writes about the relationship between the film’s atmosphere of fear and the uncanny quality of the electronic sounds:

"The Birds deals abstractly with fear; thus it is especially dependent on sound because of the non-specific quality of sound effects."

We find the “non-specific quality” of electronic noises and tones put to novel use in other films of the time, such as Forbidden Planet (1956), considered the first completely electronic film score, Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Red Desert (1964) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972).

In Jack Clayton’s gothic psychological drama The Innocents (1961), electronic feedback and delay effects are put to great effect in a memorably tense and atmospheric sequence midway into the film. Described as the sound of the governess’ encroaching madness, "…what really disturbs us, at the very moments when the film is at its most disturbing” writes Robert Barry,

“are the eerie electronic noises that creep around the edges of Auric’s lush impressionistic score. These noises, though unmentioned in the film’s credits, were created by Daphne Oram.”

Oram (1925-2003) was a pioneering British electronic composer, inventor of the Oramics Machine and co‑founder of the highly influential BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Often where experimental and electronic music interacts with film we might find the use of continuous sustained sounds. Whether such soundtracks are considered music, sound or noise is prone to subjective standards and an unimportant here. Instead, what remains significant in this context is the non-diegetic, sound or music, dimension of what's being heard and how this correspondingly relates to what is being seen.

How does the image and soundtrack synthesise in film to express something - a meaning or a sensorial experience - for the spectator? Consider the use of sustained, layered drones in Phil Niblock's video work The Movement of People Working (2003). This ia an extended 16mm piece in which the camera records the repetitive manual work of labourers working in fields. Faces cropped, location sound mute, silent moving limbs set to the sounds of shimmering microtonal drones. (Or perhaps the other way round). What is this experience? +

Film Selection:

Tectonic Plate [2016] dir. Mika Taanila
The Movement of People Working [2003] dir. Phil Niblock
In Absentia [2000] dir. Quay Brothers
The Black Glove [1996] dir. Maria Beatty
Solaris [1972] dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
Entrance to Exit [1965] dir. George Brecht
The Red Desert [1964] dir. Michelangelo Antonioni
The Birds [1963] dir. Alfred Hitchcock
Ai [1962] dir. Takahiko Iimura
Speak {1962} dir. John Latham

Notes:

* Hitting the 'non-linear button' in film school was often an indication that it was time to depart from script and begin experimenting temporally in an attempt to uncover new ideas in the material.

+ Additional Thoughts: In some sense continuous sound has the uncanny effect of delineating the soundtrack from the image, setting up independent streams of sensory information; a return to a more primitive state in which film sound and image are decoupled from one another. In such instances, the absence of any significant points of audiovisual synchronisation can perceptually suggest a flattening of a sequence of moving images. The image lacks a kind of acoustic depth. Consequently, it seemingly lacks a three-dimensional presence (an inability to conform to realism) in the listening space of the cinema. Perhaps the sum effect of this is to establish a soundtrack that acts as a spatio-temporal frame through which the changing images are performed. 

37. Film: Listening in Time

Between points there necessarily yawns an empitness, an empty interval in which nothing happens, in which no sensation takes place. In mythical and historical time, by contrast, no emptiness emerges, because neither picture nor line is interrupted by intervals; both of these form a narrative continuum. Only points allow empty in-between spaces to appear. These intervals in which nothing happens cause boredom. Or they appear threatening, because where nothing happens and where intentionality can find no object, there is death […] Point-time does not permit any contemplative lingering. (The Scent of Time, Byung Chul Han, 2017)

Film is a visucentric medium. But sounds do indeed affect the way we read its imagery. What one hears and how one listens is ultimately shaped by what the filmmaker chooses to reveal or conceal from the spectator.

Two Years at Sea [2011] dir. Ben Rivers

This dynamic interplay between presence and absence is achieved visually through choices of camera framing, composition, movement, choreography and mise-en-scène. In this way the spectator’s film listening only ever begins with what they first experience visually. And what is shown and correspondingly seen is always temporally framed.

Editing interrupts the flow of time in a given film shot. Classical continuity editing unifies images and sounds into a continuous and consistent sense of time and space. The synchronous pairing of sounds with images suggests a temporal realism that feels consistent with our perceptual experience of everyday reality. 

In contrast to the rhythm and pace of conventional film editing, the long take provides a continuous, uninterrupted experience of time. Often demanding precise blocking and complex camera choreography, the long take remains one of film’s most enthralling showpiece moments. Perhaps its allure for audienes is twofold: First, the expressive temporal quality of the long take to further heighten the spectator’s sense of immersion - of actually feeling like one physically inhabits a place in the film - through the experience of unfolding, continous real time (notably when the camera suggests a pseudo first-person perspective). Second, a sudden or gradual awareness of a shift in visual language, marked by the dizzying flair of an athletic camera that invites the viewer into hiterto unimaginable visual perspectives.

This sense of uninterupted, unfolding time is tested at its extremity in so-called “Slow Cinema” - what Jonathan Romney, writing in Sight and Sound, has characterised as a "varied strain of austere minimalist cinema".

In a 2012 Guardian article on the subject, author Sukhdev Sandhu writes:

“the cinema that Romney describes in terms of austerity can also be seen as a form of cultural resistance. What links otherwise distinct films such as Jia Zhang-ke's Still Life (2006), Carlos Reygadas's Silent Light (2007), and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Palme D'Or-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) is the extent to which they opt for ambient noises or field recordings rather than bombastic sound design, embrace subdued visual schemes that require the viewer's eye to do more work, and evoke a sense of mystery that springs from the landscapes and local customs they depict more than it does from generic convention.”

The Passenger [1975] dir. Michelangelo Antonioni

Consider the opening of Orson Welle’s Touch of Evil (1958) * (refer to audio excerpt above and notes below) or the famous crane shot in Mikhail Kalatozov’s Soy Cuba (1964), the camera seemingly floating to unprecedented elevations. The penultimate shot in Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger [1975] is seven-minute, seemingly impossible, long tracking shot that moves from Lock's hotel room through the iron railings and outside into the road, before returning back to the hotel.

As with the use of the long take by directors like Tarkovsky, Tarr and Weerasethakul, time here acts as a container for sound: time articulated through what is seen, heard and subsequently felt - the framing, composition and movement of the camera. Wind, voices, car engines, distant music, birds, footsteps on gravel, all precise sonic elements organised into a cohesive soundtrack, that still have the semblance of a “symphony of the sound of life” in which “the rhythmic cadence is not predictable, there is no search for a rhyme” (Chion). These techniques of uninterrupted spatio-temporal development would lead to further innovations with the emergence of Steadicam, Gopro and Drone camera technology.

Within the confines of the frame, the long take does more than reveal a smoothly changing visual landscape. It widens the scope for a continuously changing acoustic environment both inside and outside what is visibly present.

Memoria [2021] dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul

The camera, like a painting or still photograph, appears to contain a world within its frame. This world within implies a world outside, one unseen and existing beyond the film frame. At any given moment sound exists both inside and outside what we see. Michel Chion has described how the audiovisual medium of film actively explores the visualised and acousmatic sound through an interplay of tension and resolution of meaning. This forms the fundamental basis of the offscreen sound space, underpinning its interpretive ambiguity.

Consider sound as an expression of time. Film time therefore functions as a container for sound, the emergent space of an audible world and the invitation to attend to it. Andrei Tarkvosky wrote extensively on the unique temporal qualities of film:

“No other art can compare with cinema in the force, precision, and starkness with which it conveys awareness of facts and aesthetic structures existing and changing within time.”

Always we listen to what time permits.

Film Selection:

Memoria [2021] dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Two Years at Sea [2011] dir. Ben Rivers
Sweetgrass [2009] dir. Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Enter the Void [2009] dir. Gaspar Noé
Werckmeister harmóniák [2000] dir. Béla Tarr
The Sacrifice [1986] dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
Stalker [1979] dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
From the East [1993] dir. Chantal Akerman
Le Dormeur [1974] dir. Pascal Aubier
Wavelength [1967] dir. Michael Snow

Notes:

*Touch of Evil (1958): Different genres of music are heard from multiple sources, each treated differently according to the playback device or acoustic location of the sound source relative to the moving camera position. Walter Murch would later explore this kind of complex treatment of multiple diegetic music sources in George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973), coining the phrase worldizing to describe the process of “playing back existing recordings through a speaker or speakers in real-world acoustic situations, and recording that playback with microphones so that the new recording takes on the acoustic characteristics of the place it was "re-recorded."

The initial studio-release version of Touch of Evil employed a music score that departed from Welle’s original direction. He outlines his diegetic design for this opening scene in the famous 1957 response notes addressed to Edward I. Muhl, Vice-President in charge of production Universal-International Pictures at the time:

“I assume that the music now backing the opening sequence of the picture is temporary...As the camera roves through the streets of the Mexican bordertown, the plan was to feature a succession of different and contrasting Latin American musical numbers - the effect, that is, of our passing one cabaret orchestra after another. In honky-tonk districts on the border, loudspeakers are over the entrance of every joint, large or small, each blasting out it's own tune by way of a "come-on" or "pitch" for the tourists. The fact that the streets are invariably loud with this music was planned as a basic device throughout the entire picture…”

36. Film: The Industrial Symphony

In 1913 the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo famously wrote in his Art of Noise manifesto:

“Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibilities of men.”

The Red Desert [1964] dir. Michelangelo Antonioni

The history of film sound is set to the industrial symphonic soundscape. To witness human activity is to encounter the incessant noise of war, mechanised extraction and global commerce. Thrown into the machine age modern man is violently forced into a radical ontological reorientation.

More than anywhere else this is located in the emerging urbanised cauldrons of the metropolis, where the intensification of stimulation is at its most demanding. Here the acceleration and compression of commercial, social and political activity bear down on the individual, threatening “the independence and individuality of his existence against the sovereign powers of society” (G. Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903). Jacque Tati succeeds in examining the amusing confusion and alienation of this modern landscape with trademark wit and humour in his 1967 feature film Playtime.

If 20th century film is a story set admist the cacophony of the modern city, how might the soundtrack of the industrial symphony change, if at all, in a digitally connected, disembodied age? Combustion engines replaced horse-drawn carts, and in doing so radically altered the urban soundscape. Will muted electric cars and server farms housing cloud services located in far flung places similarly transform the sights and sounds of the 21st century city?

Film Selection:

Broken Spectre [2022] dir. Richard Mosse
Good Luck [2017] dir. Ben Russell
Leviathan [2013] dir. Verena Paravel, Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Eraserheard [1977] dir. David Lynch
Playtime [1967] dir. Jacques Tati
The Red Desert [1964] dir. Michelangelo Antonioni
Snow [1963] dir. Geoffrey Jones
The Junction [1961] dir. Kazimierz Karabasz
Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass [1930] dir. Dziga Vertov

35. Film: The Tactile Dimension

Film sound serves the illusion of embodied presence. In particular, synchronous sound that feels tightly bound to onscreen movement creates the impression of a natural and familiar multi sensorial experience of the world. And yet, there is nothing intrinsically natural about synchronous sound that has been post-produced or dubbed in the studio.

Conventionally the marriage of film sound and film image is an artificial arrangement; each is recorded separately, employing a different technical process. It is the operation of the spectator’s brain that processes the optical and acoustic information it receives into a single cinema event of moving image and sound. It therefore might be more accurate to attribute any sense of audiovisual naturalism or realism to the conventions of film language.

Post-produced sound effects and foley serve to heighten or exaggerate the presence of the things we see onscreen. This amplified presence assists in directing the spectator’s auditory attention to particular dramatic events at particular moments in time. As with other aspects of the designed soundtrack, sometimes this is performed beneath the spectator’s conscious awreness. In conventional narrative filmmaking this in turn assists in shaping how the spectator engages with the film’s storytelling.

This sense of expressing presence with sound may reflect a filmmaker’s own particular style and intention. Different approaches might also reflect the conventions of particular genres and their respective stylistic tropes. Alternatively they might differ according to the practical and technical challenges of post-synchronisation sound - historically and within different regional film industries (film cultures that are more accustomed to voice-dubbing practices for example than others).

The process of re-recording and post-synchronising sound effects is often as much a reflection of a director’s desire for finer control in post-production as it is in having to contend with the technical challenges of direct sound recorded on location. During the film shoot many filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky and Jacques Tati tended to prioritise the camera. In the article Jacques Tati: Composing in Sound and Image, Jonathan Rosenbaum writes:

“The fact that he always shot his films without sound and composed his soundtracks separately made it easier for him to use images and sounds interactively, employing sound in part as a way of guiding how we look at his images, by stimulating and directing our imaginations. This means that any discussion of Tati’s mise-en-scene has to cope with the reality that he effectively directed each of his films twice—once when he shot them and then once again when he composed and recorded their soundtracks. Adding sound often served as a way of “retouching” his images by directing our eyes, sometimes by complicating or even undermining the visual evidence.”

Rosenhaum here highlights how post-production sound can further “reframe” the image, generating new ideas that might not have been in the original script or visual storyboard.

Tetsuo: Iron Man [1989] dir. Shinya Tsukamoto • Tetsuo: Body Hammer [1992] dir. Shinya Tsukamoto

Some genres like Body Horror, a sub genre of horror, or martial arts movies, lend themselves well to an exaggerated, grotesque treatment of sound to help enrich the tactile, corporeal dimension of the onscreen action. Similar to and no doubt inspired by the work of David Cronenberg, the late-80s and early-90s Japanese cyberpunk films of Shinya Tsukamoto and Shozin Fukui depict characters experiencing episodes of psychosis or deep metamorphosis; their bodies audibly transforming into fleshy new creatures or hybrid man-machines whose metallic surfaces rattle and creak.

Free of any direct sound, animation films provide the widest range of interpretative possibilties with sound and presence. One of the most striking examples are the films of Czech animator Jan Švankmajer. Both in his stop-frame animation shorts and live action feature films, Švankmajer and his sound designer Ivo Špalj sculpt a sountrack style of hyper-presence and granular detail, devoid of any musical score.

These soundtracks are of a grotesque, even cartoonish proximity that feel strangely intimate and discomforting in all their naked, tactile rawness - a soundscape of creaking surfaces and fleshy, organic tissue. Evoking what the filmmaker has called these “neglected or hidden tactile feelings”, Švankmajer’s approach to sound mirrors his artistic and philisophical interest in the tactile dimension of perceptual experience. He writes:

“Touch played a significant role even in my older films (for instance the emphasis on the detailed structure of close-up film objects) but since the 1980s […] I worked deliberately on evoking these neglected or hidden tactile feelings and tried to enrich the emotional arsenal of filmic expression. I became increasingly conscious that to revive the general impoverishment of sensibilities in our civilization the sense of touch can play an important part, as so far it has not been discredited in artistic endeavours.” (Touching and Imagining, p.3).

Now Hear This [1962] dir. Chunk Jones

In discussing sound for animation it is easy to overlook the pinoneering work of sound editor Treg Brown (1889-1984) who, despite the impact of his work, sadly very little has been written about. He was responsible for creating and editing many of the Warner Brothers’ iconic cartoon sound effects used in hundreds of animation films from the 1930s onwards. Brown must be considered one of the most original and innovative individuals working with sound in film history. His sonic arsonary of wild crashes, bangs, twangs and whallops is quite literally the sound of cartoon in motion, the soundtrack of material life for millions of 20th century television viewers.

Film Selection:

Cold Meridian [2020] dir. Peter Strickland
Bait [2019] dir. Mark Jenkin
964 Pinocchio [1991] dir. Shozin Fukui
Tetsuo: Iron Man [1989] dir. Shinya Tsukamoto
Alice [1988] dir. Jan Švankmajer
Street of Crocodiles [1986] dir. The Quay Brothers
Last Hurrah for Chivalry [1979] dir. John Woo
Once Upon Time in the West [1969] dir. Sergio Leone
Playtime [1967] dir. Jacques Tati
Now Hear This [1962] dir. Chunk Jones

34. Film: Beyond the Anthropocene

Photographer Jerry Thompson worked as Walker Evans' principal assistant from 1973 to Evans' death in 1975. In his 2013 publication Why Photography Matters, Thompson writes the following:

"Fox Talbot, and the cohort including Evans and Cartier-Bresson seven decades later, proposed a new kind of epistemology, a new, hitherto impossible way of learning about the world [...] The opposite of Mathema (a model projected to enable understanding), Pathema is an experience passively received: acquiescence to what is seen [...] When a pathema holds sway, the artist will no longer be Master of the Universe. He or she will be instead an attentive observer, a willing participant in, perhaps a servant of, a system larger than that artist's individual, personal, particular needs." (Jerry L. Thompson, Why Photography Matters, p.14-15)

How might this epistemological perspective be relevant to filmmaking with sound?

Homo Sapiens [2016] dir. Nikolaus Geyrhalter

“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.” - John Cage, Lectures and Writings

A lack of dialogue suggests a kind of silence. But the world beyond human language is anything but silent. The absence of words, or any sense of overt musical score, discloses the space for the sounds of the world, both real and imagined, to be heard and felt.

Film Selection:

Il Buco [2021] dir. Michelangelo Frammartino 
Cemetery [2019] dir. Carlos Casas
Homo Sapiens [2016] dir. Nikolaus Geyrhalter
A Spell to Ward Off the Darness [2013] dir. Ben Rivers & Ben Russell
Le Quattro Volte [2010] dir. Michelangelo Frammartino 
Hukkle [2002] dir. György Pálfi

33. Film: Communication and Surveillance

Many films involve situations in which different characters communicate with one another through telephones and recorded media. Telecommunication technology establishes multiple sound spaces inhabited by different characters. Each voice is inscribed with its own particular acoustic qualities. These pertain to the sonic characteristics of the environment the character inhabits at the moment of recording or transmission (the audible background activity, the acoustics of the space), as well as the way in which they interact with the audio technology in use (microphone type, proximity, transmission interference). 

The Conversation [1974] dir. Francis Ford Coppola

A recorded or transmitted voice is never heard in complete isolation. A background ambience, an acoustic space, even the audible presence and interference of the audio technology itself always forms part of the message. As listeners these auxiliary elements inform how both onscreen characters and the audience respond to what they listen to.

The Vast of Night [2019] dir. Andrew Patterson

One of the most interesting film scenarios that illustrates this kind of telecommunication listening is the surveillance setup. Such stories might involve eavesdropping, clandestine recordings, the deciphering of cryptic communication, as characters secretly discover messages and remote audible activity not intended for their ears. This semantic and causal onscreen listening has the effect of framing the spectator’s own listening; we listen to what they’re listening to.

In the 2007 horror film Paranormal Activity, Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat are haunted by a supernatural presence in their home. The couple decide to rig up a camera and microphone in their bedroom to try and record any evidence of unusal nocturnal activity. This act of self-surveillance not only successfully records the strange offscreen sounds and evanescent visitations, it also acts as an accurate audiovisual document of the character’s own reactions to these strange disturbances. This kind of atmospheric, acutality horror relies on the audience registering the plausibility of the setup through a strong emotional investment in the story and characters.

Shot on a budget of $15,000, Paranormal Activity became the most profitable film of all time. Much of its success is attributed to the sense of believability created by the film’s home movie / found footage style, used in tandem with cheap, but highly effective post-production sound design.

Paranormal Activity [2007] dir. Oren Peli

Dial M for Murder [1954] dir. Alfred Hitchcock

Some 40-years ago Philip K Dick said:

“There will come a time when it isn’t - they’re spying on me through my phone - anymore. Eventually, it will be my phone is spying on me.”

Today in the age of Surveillance Capitalism and Big Data, these tales of widespread information monitoring, eavesdropping and surveillance are not fictional episodes limited to the novels of John le Carré or Geroge Orwell. Surveillance is very much an articulation of how we live and operate today in the digital information landscape.

Film Selection:

The Vast of Night [2019] dir. Andrew Patterson
Paranormal Activity [2007] dir. Oren Peli
The Lives of Others [2006] dir. Florian Henckel
Bennys Video [1992] dir. Michael Haneke
Pump Up the Volume [1990] dir. Allan Moyle
Blow Out [1981] dir. Brian de Parma
The Conversation [1974] dir. Francis Ford Coppola
Ucho [1970] dir. Karel Kachyňa
Dial M for Murder [1954] dir. Alfred Hitchcock
Rear Window [1954] dir. Alfred Hitchcock

32. Film: The Absent Image

Michel Chion writes:

"concrete music, in its conscious refusal of the visual, carries with it visions that are more beautiful than images could ever be."

In 1928 German cinematographer and filmmaker Walter Ruttmann was commissioned by the Berlin Radio Hour to produce an innovative collage of recorded voices and ambient sounds depicting the activity of Berlin life over one weekend.

Weekend [1930'] dir. Walter Ruttmann - score extract

Recorded and edited using the Tri-Ergon sound-on-film optical film sound technology, Ruttmann described the 12-minute radiophonic work as:

“a study in sound montage. I used the film strip to record the sound exclusively, yielding what amounts to a blind film.”

In both its conceptual artistry and technical achievement, Weekend would become an important landmark work in the rapidly developing field of radiophonic art and later musique concrète tape composition. Walter Ruttmann was an important abstract filmmaker who in the early 1920s worked alongside Hans Richter and Oskar Fischinger in producing a number of innovative animation films. In 1927 he directed what became his most well-known work, the city symphony feature film Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis. He went on to direct the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935), before later being replaced by Leni Riefenstahl. He died in 1941.

Since Ruttmann’s time a number of moving image artists and filmmakers have explored the possibilities of an image-less film. During the 1960s, several artists affiliated with the interdisciplinary art community Fluxus produced films that explored perceptual change over time. These suggested something close to a sound film ‘absent’ of image. Perhaps of note from this period is the short Entrance to Exit (1965) by George Brecht as well as the Cagian film work Zen for Film (1964) by Nam June Paik.

The pioneering flicker films of Peter Kubelka (Arnulf Rainer, 1960) and Tony Conrad (The Flicker, 1965) offer a structuralist exploration of the film medium itself. These works demonstrate a granular inter-cutting technique, combining black and white frames of image and light, sound and silence, to a produce an intensely rhythmic audiovisual sensory experience. Paul Sharits’ own 1968 flicker film T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, further expanded these ideas, exploring what Sharits believed was the medium’s unique ability to reorientate perception in ways classical narrative film could not achieve.

Blue [1933] dir. Derek Jarman

In the UK artist Derek Jarman’s final film Blue (1993) was a radical experiment in light and sound. At the time Jarman was suffering from partial blindness due to AIDs-related complications; apparently only able to see shades of blue. Visually, the 80-minute film consists of a single, static shot of saturated blue. In contrast the soundtrack is made up of a complex tapestry of composed music, borrowed score and sound effects. These elements weave around a reflective narration performed by Jarman himself together with a number of his longtime collaborators. In addition to its theatrical release, the film was presented as a simultaneous collaboration between BBC Radio 3 (broadcasting a stereo version of the soundtrack) and UK Television’s Channel 4 (broadcasting the static blue image).

Examples of sound used in the offscreen sound space of narrative filmmaking offers another perspective on sound and the absent image. Following Robert Bresson’s suggestion that “the ear goes more towards the within”, Michael Haneke in his 1992 film Benny’s Video deploys offscreen sound to activate the imagination and implicate the spectator in the act of violence.  Commenting on this strategy, Haneke remarks:

“with sound, just like words, you incite the imagination. And that’s why for me it's always more efficient, if I want to touch someone emotionally, to use sound rather than image.”

More recently, Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati have explored a unique sonic ethnography in their feature film Expedition Content (2020). Comprised almost entirely of audio recordings made by Michael Rockefeller and sourced from the 1961 Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea, the film explores encounters with the local Hubula people and reflects on the field practices of ethnography in the context of anthropological studies and post-colonialism.

In the context of film, absent, distorted or reimagined imagery undoubtedly opens up new sonic terrain, renewed auditory possibilities for both filmmakers and audiences.

Film Selection

Answering the Sun [2022] dir. Rainer Kohlberger
Expedition Content [2020] dir. Ernst Karel, Veronika Kusumaryati
Blue [1993] - Derek Jarman
Benny’s Video [1992] dir. Michale Haneke
Entrance to Exit [1965] dir. George Brecht
Report [1963-67] dir. Bruce Conner
Arnulf Rainer [1960] dir. Peter Kubelka
Weekend [1929] dir. Walter Ruttmann

31. Film: Audiovisual Ambiguity

In his essay Womb Tone, Walter Murch discusses the use of metaphor and abstraction in film and how contemporary filmmakers can overcome the challenges of a medium that seemingly lacks the ambiguity of other art forms. He writes:

“The weakness of present-day cinema is paradoxically its strength of representation: it doesn’t automatically possess the built-in escape valves of ambiguity that painting, music, literature, black-and-white silent film, and radio have simply by virtue of their sensory incompleteness—an incompleteness that automatically engages the imagination of the viewer/listener as compensation for what can only be suggested by the artist. In film, therefore, we go to considerable lengths to achieve what comes naturally to radio and the other arts: the space to evoke and inspire, rather than to overwhelm and crush, the imagination of the audience.”

In her 1992 essay And Then There Was Sound: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Andrea Truppin discusses "sound's potential for ambiguity and abstraction" and how this is commonly deployed by Tarkovsky in evoking the existence of unseen objects to penetrate into an invisible spiritual world. Truppin writes:

"Allowing a sound source to remain a figment of our imagination, mystifying rather than orienting, subverts sound's traditional role in film.”

The real uncertainty of sound itself - the ambiguous, inexactness of auditory perception - is felt, perhaps most profoundly when unknown or unexpected sound activity is heard in familiar settings. 

During the school shooting scene in Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003) we hear the sounds of unseen insects and birds. These particular sounds - both raw and processed field recordings - consist of extracts from composer Hildegard Westerkamp’s soundscape compositions. Throughout the scene Westerkamp’s composed material intermingles with the diegetic sounds of voices, footsteps, doors and gun shots emanating from inside the building. The intentional distancing of association and meaning between what we see in this sequence and what we hear has the effect of accentuating the uncanniness of the violence suddenly now unfolding. Abstraction here provokes active listening and excites the imagination through perception of change and novelty. This has the sum effect of further immersing the audience into the audiovisual spectacle. Walter Murch describes this active participation as the viewer completing a conceptual circle that the filmmaker has only partially drawn.

Leslie Shatz, the Elephant sound designer, discusses the effect of such radical audiovisual juxtapositions:

"…you take a sound that’s a complete juxtaposition of what’s going on in the image and it forces you to listen — you have to look to the sound for the cues of what’s going on. Even if the sound doesn’t give you a specific direction, it gives you a sort of broader experience than if it was just the dialogue being repeated over and over again. I think that filmmakers are having trouble making this break. They think of film as a visual medium."

Abstraction and ambiguity is also explored in situations where familiar sounds behave in unusual ways. Consider the timeless appeal of post-production treatment of sound sources with artificial echo and filter effects to suggest altering states of subjectivity (anxieties, hallucinations, psychedelic experiences), or to express supernatural elements sounding in the environment. Through time such techniques inevitably form conventions that inform film language. These in turn affect how audiences form associations and meaning.

Today, such overt deployment of echo effects, for example, inevitably conjures up impressions of bygone science fiction and horror films. Echo treatment, in this case, partially operates as temporal transformer in the inter-textural landscape of culture, association and consumption.

Michel Chion writes that through an interplay of tension and resolution of meaning, the interaction between a film’s moving image and its accompanying soundtrack actively explores both visualised and acousmatic sound. In film this helps establish the fundamental basis of the interior landscape of the mind, as well as the exterior landscape of the offscreen sound space, underpinning the interpretive ambiguity of both.

Film Selection:

Elephant [2003] dir. Gus Van Sant
The Sacrifice [1986] dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
Stalker [1979] dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
Ako [1964] dir. Hiroshi Teshigahara
Sous les toites de Paris [1929] dir. René Clair

30. Film: Language and Thought

"I've often said that our thoughts are very different in a lot of ways from what we actually say. And our thoughts about what we hear are very different from what is being said, so there are lots of stories going on in our mind as we try and read people. Usually, sound will fall into a predictable relationship with the image: this is what is happening and this is what is being said. But we're really just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of sound reaching up to become equal with the image; not abandoning the image, but equal with the image in a different way." - The World is Ever Changing, Nicolas Roeg

Tree of Life [2011] dir. Terrence Malick

Terrence Malick explores the limits of verbal language by removing performed dialogue at particular dramatic moments. This is an effect unique to filmmaking in which words can be precisely erased or repositioned in order to reconstruct meaning. Malick’s post-production treatment of specific words and phrases often seems designed to emphasise a look or a gesture registered visually. Over the shoulder we glimpse moving jaws where there is no sound.

But this is not new. The technique of dubbing and editing voices in post-production is as old as the first sound films. In Jean Rouch’s seminal 1958 documentary Moi, un Noir, what is seen and heard occur in different times and places. On screen we witness the daily lives of Tarzan, Eddy and Edward as they seek work in the Ivory Coast capital. Rouch captured these images over a period of six months. What we hear in the soundtrack are the asynchronous, re-recorded voices of the characters themselves providing a running commentary on their own lives as depicted by the film. These combine with an array of location sound recordings captured separately from the images. Both voices and sound edits were constructed in Paris many months after the film shooting. Rouch’s method illustrates how the particular marriage of recorded sound and moving images in film is an artifical arrangement.

Reservoir dogs [1992] dir. Quentin Tarantino

Rouch’s method is an example of what Soviet filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin’s described in 1929 as Asynchronism - sound deployed beyond the “slavish imitation of naturalism” but rather used “to augment the potential expressiveness of the film's content.” Writing two years after the first talkies, Pudovkin' describes how the spectator can experience a greater emotional or intellectual engagement with a sequence of images through the asynchronous use of sound. He writes:

“…a scene in which three or more persons speak can be treated in a number of different ways. For example, the spectator's interest may be held by the speech of the first, and with the spectator's attention we hold the closeup of the first person lingering with him when his speech is finished and hearing the voice of the commenced answer of the next speaker before passing on to the latter's image. We see the image of the second speaker only after becoming acquainted with his voice. Here sound has preceded image.”

In this context, consider the diner conversation in the opening sequence in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs [1992]. Note how the camera rotates round the table, lingering on the faces of the listeners instead of remaining fixed on the speaker.

Film Selection:

Notes on Blindness [2016] dir. Peter Middleton, James Spinney
Tree of Life [2011] dir. Terrence Malick
The Girl Chewing Gum [1976] dir. John Smith
Morning [1966-69] dir. Phil Niblock
Moi, un Noir [1958] dir. Jean Rouch

29. Film: Quietly

To speak is to reveal one’s presence. A character held captive like Fontaine in Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1955) evades detection by remaining as quiet as possible. For the film’s Criterion Commentary David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson write:

"At certain points in A Man Escaped, Bresson even lets his sound technique dominate the image. Throughout the film we are compelled to listen. Indeed, Bresson is one of a handful of directors who created complete interplay between sound and image."

The centrepiece of Rififi [1955] dir. Jules Dassin is a 30-minute long heist sequence notable for its lack of dialogue or music.

Reflecting off surfaces, vibrating through walls, sound desires to free itself in space. It reveals presence. 

To attempt to mute any audible activity is to inevitably enter into a tension between a person and the immediate environment they inhabit. In such film scenarios the spectator is invited to actively listen to the character’s own causal listening - they’re listening of themselves and the space around them. This heightens the spectator’s sensitivity to what is audible in the film world.

Film Selection:

In a Quiet Place [2018] dir. John Krasinski
Room [2015] dir. Leonard Ian Abrahamson
Zen for Film [1965] dir. Nam June Paik
A Man Escaped ([955] dir. Robert Bresson
Rififi ([955] dir. Jules Dassin 

28. Film: The Still Image

The spectacle of twenty four animated images a second suggests a familiar sensorial experience of everyday reality. This establishes the suspension of disbelief, the fundamental condition for attentional immersion in the flow of images. What the film re-presents appears to be happening in the present. 

La Jetée [196]) dir. Chris Marker

The photograph often has the feeling of depicting something that happened in the past. Frozen in time, photography suggests a thing that “is already dead” (Barthes).

Filmmaker Peter Kubelka describes time as “a measuring system for a change in position of material objects.” Sound is an articulation of time. In and out of synchronous allignment, from jack-hammer to synesthetic rupture, the temporal unfolding of the soundtrack re-imagines what we see through rhythm and meter.

The contrapuntal use of sound infuses a series of still images with a unifying atmosphere and emotional tone. Elsewhere it performs the intellectual montage. Discrete sonic events direct attention to visual details, while unfolding sound, located both within and beyond the frame, spatially and temporally expand each image. This summons all the movement and activity attributed to familiar reality. 

Film Selection:

GUO4 [2019] dir. Peter Strickland
Nostalgia [1971] dir. Hollis Frampton
Viet Flakes [1965] dir. Carolee Schneemann
Ishi no Uta [1963] dir. Toshio Matsumoto
Salut les Cubains [1963] dir. Agnes Varda
La Jetée [1962] dir. Chris Marker

27. Film: Survival

The survival story might depict a single isolated character struggling to survive in a hostile environment. In these kinds of films there is an notable absence of dialogue. Overt musical score too is often muted, or at the very least understated and effacing, as if intended to erase the presence of any hint of civilisation, the promise of human community. Here sound and music coalesce, producing a subtle soundtrack of tone and texture emerging out of the desolate landscape.

The Survivalist [2015] dir. Stephen Fingleton

In an interview with Screendaily, director Stephen Fingleton talks about the sound world of his film The Survivalist [2015]:

“Creating the sound of the film was kind of uncharted territory because we didn’t have any music. We told the story of the film through the sound design. It sat in a world where there’s no traffic, no cars; so the sound was very exposed. It’s very unusual to hear true silence in our modern age.”

Absent dialogue and music serve to enhance the intensity of the character’s physical and psychological encounter with the unfamiliar atmosphere of isolation. Free from dialogue, the spectator, in unison with the central character, is inexorably drawn to the sounds of life itself.

Film Selection:

The Survivalist [2015] dir. Stephen Fingleton
All is Lost [2013] dir. J. C. Chandor
The Quiet Earth [1985] dir. Geoff Murphy
2001 Space Odyssey [1968] dir. Stanley Kubrick

26. Film: Compelled to Listen

Film can compel us to listen. The idea to listen begins with the idea of the film.

Berberian Sound Studio [2012] dir. Peter Strickland

Filmmaker Peter Strickland understands the unique interplay between image and sound in film:

"I learnt from the age of 16 that you could convey an inner world after hearing Alan Splet’s sound design on Eraserhead. I also soon realised that it’s rare to find film people who are also music people or vice versa. It’s so strange — you could meet someone into Feher Gyorgy or Béla Tarr, but they listen to very middle-of-the-road music. So I was aware of this unexplored niche in terms of informing film with a whole new world of sonic ideas. Hearing is a far more active human sense than sight. As a filmmaker, your potential to ignite an audience’s imagination is far greater through using sound. With images, most of the work is done for us, but with sound, you´re filling in the gaps and that is very exciting and provocative for an audience. Sound also offers the spatial dimension that the image can’t always do. Bresson gave us a whole outside world in A Man Escaped, and we yearn for it even more since we’re trapped inside a cell." - Portrait of a Soundscapist: An Interview with Peter Strickland