41. Film: Cinema of Atmosphere

David Lynch describes how a particular approach to film sound can create the possibility of a certain mood or atmosphere emerging in film. Films like Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001) are full of scenes that feel tense and claustrophobic. Much of that atmosphere is achieved through the sound design.

Lost Highway [1997] dir. David Lynch

Electronic composer Kim Cascone was assistant music editor on Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart and describes this cinema of atmosphere in an encounter he had with the films of Andrei Tarkovsky:

“I detected a sound field surrounding the screen similar to the ones involved by Lynch. A layering of unidentifiable sounds defined the space around the screen and deftly drifted to various parts of the theater [...] Foggy off-screen evocations of a type of space always existing beyond our periphery, just out of reach or dismissed as background noise.”

Audible tones and drones exist on a spectrum somewhere between sound design and music. Sometimes they appear to naturally emerge, almost imperceptibly, out of a scene’s particular soundscape. Here we might consider these sound elements belonging to the diegesis of the soundtrack, the film world inhabited by its characters. Elsewhere, such sounds appear to lack any identiable source. Instead they linger somewhere closer to the non-diegetic space of the musical score.

The expressive potential of this ambiguity between what is considered sound design and music is furtile ground for creating engaging and unusal sonic atmospheres and moods. Horror pictures, psychological dramas and science fiction films lend themselves particularly well for this kind of cross-synthesis of noise, sound and music.

The general consistency and eveness of such continuous or steadily evolving tones and drones contrasts with what Michel Chion has termed “Materializing Sound Indices.” These are the details of sounds that draw us towards the material aspects of the scene; “that cause us to ‘feel’ the material conditions of the sound source, and refer to the concrete process of the sound’s production”. Chion identifies Tarkovsky and Bresson as two directors who have a predilection for materializing indices “that immerse us in the here-and-now”. Jacques Tati on the other hand dampens material reality with all it’s creaky and uneven detail by supressing such indices, and instead, “subtly gives us an ethereal perception of the world”.

Inside the cinema space a running celluloid film performs an audible materialization of the mechanical process of 24 animated film frames a second. The accompanying rumble, click and hiss - these uneven artefacts of the optical sound process, made audible as the film print’s waveform passes through the projector’s exciter lamp - acts as a constant reminder of the “here-and-now” materiality of the living film medium itself.

Film Selection:

The Eyes of My Mother [2016] dir. Nicolas Pesce
The Babadook [2014] dir. Kristina Ceyton
Enter the Void [2009] dir. Gaspar Noé
Lost Highway [1997] dir. David Lynch
The Sacrifice [1986] dir. Andrei Tarkovsky

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…”

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

13. Spectatorship: The Transsensorial

“The eye carries information and sensations only some of which can be considered specifically and irreducibly visual (e.g. color); most others are transsensory. Likewise, the ear serves as a vehicle for information and sensations only some of which are specifically auditive (e.g., pitch and intervallic relationships), the others being, as in the case of the eye, not specific to this sense […] In the transsensorial or even metasensorial model […] the sense are channels, highways more than territories or domains.” [Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, 1994, p137]

We see and hear through a web of senses. Neurological research suggests that lived experience occurs where mind, body and world converge. 

In a 2005 paper titled Why Seeing is Believing: Merging Auditory and Visual Worlds, IIana Witten and Eric Knudsen question the traditional reasoning that visual capture reflects an inherent physiological advantage that favors visual over nonvisual spatial information. The authors suggest that:

“visual capture occurs not because of any inherent advantage of visual circuitry, but because the brain integrates information optimally.”

9. Listening: Evolution

Humans are accustomed to hearing sounds from everywhere at any time. The sources of these sounds are not always discernible to the eye. 

A developed auditory sense has allowed humans to gather information from their surroundings. Hearing acts as a kind of early-warning system, enabling humans to identify the general direction of a sound and react to it before the need for visual confirmation.

Our causal mode of listening has helped humans evade predators and navigate through hostile environments. Language introduces semantic modes of listening that has supported mankind’s growing need to understand and cooperate with one another in an increasingly complex and socialised world. 

In the course of everyday life these habitual listening modes - the causal and semantic - are often activated and combined simultaneously. Chion writes: “We hear at once what someone says and how they say it“.

5. Listening: A Brief History of 20th Century Listening

The Sound Object

In the early 1950s, inspired by Phenomenology, French composer and engineer Pierre Schaeffer coined the term Reduced Listening to describe the new field of acousmatic research he was investigating.

“[He] gave the name reduced listening to the listening mode that focuses on the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause and of its meaning” (Chion).

Schaeffer developed the idea of the l'objet sonore as the smallest self-contained acoustic element for analysis, categorisation, organisation and manipulation. A new magnetic tape music was born. 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 developing his ideas on Reduced Listening, Schaeffer was influenced by ancient accounts of the Pythagorean order. In his book Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice, Brian Kane writes how:

“followers of Pythagoras underwent a three-year probationary period, directly followed by a five-year period of ‘silence’, before being admitted to Pythagoras' inner circle as mathêmatikoi (learned). The use of silence related to the protocols of rituals connected with the mystery-like instruction and religious ceremonies of the Pythagorean order. These ceremonies took place behind a veil or curtain with only those who had passed the five-year test being allowed to see their teacher face to face; the remaining students partaking acousmatically.”

Schaeffer coined the term the Acousmatique to define the listening experience of this new tape-based music that reached the listener via loudspeaker technology. The word comes from the Greek Akousmata (“oral saying”), considered to be the collection of all the sayings of Pythagoras as divine dogma.

A Purposeless Play

In America composer John Cage was interested in Eastern thought. Around the late 1940s an important influence on him was the art historian and philosopher of Indian art Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. Borrowing ideas from Coomaraswamy as well as from the Indian musician Gita Sarabhai, who Cage met in 1946, the composer claimed that the purpose of art was to imitate nature in her manner of operations. He went on to propose that the purpose of music “was to quiet and sober the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences”. In his 1961 book Silence: Lectures and Writings Cage famously wrote:

“Let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories of expressions of human sentiments.”

The Soundscape

Beginning in the late-1960s, Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer began to examine the relationship - mediated through sound - between human beings and their environment. This led to the development of Acoustic Ecology and Soundscape studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Schafer referred to the Soundscape as an acoustic environment consisting of events heard, rather than objects seen. In his 1977 book The Tuning of the World, Schafer describes Hi-Fi soundscapes as those spaces that preserve sonic clarity and perspective as a result of low background noise. Lo-Fi soundscapes on the other hand are found in loud, busy urban centres where there is “no distance, only presence”.

Writing in the early 1990s, electroacoustic composer Barry Truax, who along with Schafer was one of the original members of the Vancouver soundscape project, describes the variance in contextuality of acoustic sounds when compared with their electronic reproductions:

“In the acoustic world, sound is constrained by being tied to its context, in relation to which it derives at least part of its meaning. In the electroacoustic world, sound can be taken out of its original context and put via a loudspeaker into any other, where its meaning may be contradictory to that environment.”

For Schafer, the splitting of sound from source is a pathological (“schizophonic”) product of modern technology and mass urbanisation.

Deep Listening

In 1989 composer Pauline Oliveros coined the term Deep Listening to describe a radical practice of auditory attentiveness. She writes:

“Deep Listening involves going below the surface of what is heard, expanding to the whole field of sound while finding focus. This is the way to connect with the acoustic environment, all that inhabits it, and all that there is.”

Oliveros shared Cage and Schaeffer's interest in attending to the sounds themselves. However, she was also actively engaged in the neuroscience of various meditation practices, as well as the wider ecological field of all acoustic activity; the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment.