Sound



AESTHETIC DEBATES

It was by no means a foregone conclusion that sound would be used unobtrusively. When it became obvious that talkies were the sound wave of the future, filmmakers and theorists alike worried that their art form would lose its expressive potential. They worried films would become "canned theater," in the words of the French director René Clair (1898–1981), that the camera's enslavement to the microphone would necessarily stifle the eloquent camera movement, lighting, and montage that many considered the unique language of "pure" cinema.

Dialogue came under the most direct attack. In Germany, Rudolf Arnheim (b. 1904), who valued film for those formal properties that differentiated the image from mere naturalistic reproduction, maintained that dialogue "paralyzed" visual action and reduced the gap between film and reality. The German theorist Siegfried Kracauer (1889–1966), whose contrasting aesthetic favored the "redemption of physical reality," suggested that dialogue could be used cinematically by deemphasizing its meaning and treating voices as pre-linguistic sound. The Hungarian theorist Bela Bálázs (1884–1949) lamented the way spoken language eliminated the universality of the silent screen. However, he suggested ways in which sounds could "educate our ear," for example, by providing the aural equivalents of photographed close-ups or by exploiting the dramatic value of silence, which can be "heard" only in the context of sound.

Much debate has focused on exploring ways in which sound might be associated with the image. One of the earliest formulations came from the Soviet filmmakers S. M. Eisenstein (1898–1948), V. I. Pudovkin (1893–1953), and G. V. Alexandrov (1903–1984), who issued a joint Statement on Sound in August 1928. Warning against the development of "talking films," which would lead to "highly cultured dramas" and "the 'illusion' of talking people, of audible objects," the statement called for a "contrapuntal" use of sound that treated it as an element of montage. Pudovkin later came out in favor of an approach to disparate sound and image that he labeled "asynchronism," a distinction that paralleled that between Eisenstein's "dialectical" and Pudovkin's "associational" approaches to silent montage.

Just as initial debate about the function of sound accompanied the coming of talkies, a second surge of theoretical writing accompanied the "second revolution of sound" in films of the 1970s and early 1980s, an extraordinarily creative period for sound in narrative films. It has been argued that the ideological implications of Hollywood practice extended also to the techniques of sound editing and mixing, which traditionally efface evidence of their construction. Psychoanalytic and feminist critiques have often focused on the gendered voice: the female voice is characterized either as the voice of the mother or as a means whereby a female character tries to express her subjectivity while patriarchal codes of the image and soundtrack try to "contain" it. Rick Altman in the United States and Michel Chion in France have done the most sustained and nuanced analyses of sound aesthetics, challenging long-held assumptions about the relations between image and sound. For instance, Chion's writings on "audio-vision" explore the ways that sound and image transform each other. And both writers have extensively investigated audience position with respect to sound, demonstrating, for example, that aural and visual point of view do not follow the same conventions. Other scholars, including Alan Williams, have focused on ways in which even direct recordings are not mere reproductions but representations mediated through choices such as microphone placement and recording equipment.



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