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. 

8. Listening: Quiet Silence

The quiet can be unsettling, disorientating. The absence of sound can suggest social isolation, remoteness.

Such spaces can reveal the sonic activity already present within them; a naked cough is exposed in the hush of the library, a shuffling of feet suddenly violates the quiet. 

Carnival of Souls [1962] dir. Herk Harvey

Sudden unexpected changes to a sensory input arouse attention. These can manifest as feelings of discomfort and fear. In the 1962 horror film Carnival of Souls, organist Mary Henry emerges from a department store changing room only to discover that the world has suddenly fallen silent. She no longer can hear anything from the environment around her. All is mute. The only sounds she can hear are her own voice and footsteps. Later she reports to the doctor:

"It was more than just not being able to hear anything. Or make contact with anyone. It was though...as though for a time I didn't exist. As though I had no place in the world. No part of the life around me.”

Derealisation is described as an alteration in one's perception of the world. Depersonalisation is an alteration in one’s perception of self, often observing the body and mind from outside at a distance. Such dissociative disorders are ways for the mind to cope with stress and trauma. Manipulation of mental dissociative states through targeted sound design (e.g. changing sound levels, use of silence) is commonly used to heighten subjective states in many genres of narrative filmmaking.

Ikiru [1952] dir. Akira Kurosawa

In Ikiru [1952], director Akira Kurosawa allows the dreaded news of the protagonist’s health to hang in the air in silence. Lost in thought Watanabe leaves the hospital, slowly exiting out on to a city street devoid of all sound. A large truck suddenly passes by, awakening him from his introspection. The cacophony of the city violently returns.

For Alfred Hitchcock, the artificial silencing of a victim at a particular moment operates at the most provocative level - the spectator is affected not by what is seen or heard, but what is imagined. In a famous scene from Frenzy [1972], Hitchcock abruptly cuts the sound of the outside world after Barbara "Babs" Milligan enters the murderer’s flat. As the door closes, the camera smoothly and silently tracks back down the stairs before slowly returning to the bustling city life outside. In this sequence the use of silence over the continuous tracking shot heightens the grim, inevitable fate that awaits Babs. She is alone and helpless. No one outside is aware of what is about to happen. No one, that is, except the spectator, who plays out the scene in their own mind.

Discussing the unique role sound performs in his own equally violent film Benny’s Video [1992], Austrian director Michael Haneke elaborates on this Hitchcock approach:

“With an image, you cut the imagination short. With an image, you see what you see and its 'reality'. 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.”

Frenzy [1972] dir. Alfred Hitchcock