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