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

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

19. The Cinema: Focus Space

In a recent conversation Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa considers the shared social experience of the cinema space:

“Now we have many different opportunities – TV, streaming services, websites, depending on what you like. It’s different though, because you watch films alone. You don’t feel the way the audience is receiving the film. I’m a little afraid of that, because I always make films for big screens with a good 5.1 sound and I like to feel the emotions of the viewers. Watching films together triggers immediate discussions afterwards. On the other hand, when you watch films alone or just with very few people, you have very limited possibilities to talk and to listen to what others have to say. In the future, cinemas may be like opera houses – something very special and unique. That’s why festivals are so crucial. They have to keep that possibility of watching films on a big screen. “

In a cultural landscape engineered to satisfy consumer demand, it is easy to feel that nothing in the world shows up as having any more value than anything else. All is simply a matter of choice according to the prevailing mood of any given moment. The apparent ‘levelling’ of meaning that pervades our culture expresses itself, in part, as the never-ending, accelerated consumption of private, portable and disposable media content. This is the raison d'etre of todays Content Industry.

Writing in the 1980s, Albert Borgmann presents a philosphy of focus things and practices to re-examine the instrumental rationality of our technological living. He writes:

"A focus gathers the relations of its context and radiates into its surroundings and informs them". 

One of the examples Borgmann uses is the “culture of the table”; the table that gathers together the active participation of the family, its traditions, cultures and the gits of nature.

The cinema is a publicly accessible place for the coordination of a focal event - a unique kind of viewing and listening space. A site for shared and private performance spectatorship, “a paradoxical mass-intimacy” as Walter Murch describes it. It gathers the scattered people around the glow of its screen, bringing into focus our private and shared condition.

Inside spectators submit themselves to the uninterrupted flow of time that constitutes the film performance. This collective experience, as with all socially sanctioned rituals, manifests the spectator’s shared ‘horizon of significance’; that which shows up in the world at that moment as significant and meaningful.