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

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…”

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