Sound

MAJOR ACHIEVEMENTS

While the first few years of synchronized sound generated many painfully static films that were effectively filmed stage plays, the challenge and limitations of the new technology stimulated some directors to use sound in ways that remain benchmarks of creativity. In Great Britain, Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) experimented with varieties of subjective sound in Blackmail (1929), Murder! (1930), and Secret Agent (1936). In Germany, Fritz Lang (1890–1976) showed in M—Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder ( M , 1931) how sound could be used as a leitmotif by associating the murderer with whistling. Many of the early sound filmmakers made a virtue of technical limitations by adopting an asynchronous approach. In their highly stylized earliest sound films, directors like Ernst Lubitsch (1892–1947), René Clair, and Lang dared to accompany silently shot images with sounds other than dialogue. Thus, counter to the sync talkie craze (films proudly advertised as "100 percent talking!"), these films experimented with a variety of sound-image aesthetics. About half of King Vidor's Hallelujah (1929) was shot silent and on location, with its African American cast accompanied by spirituals or naturalistic sounds (such as bird screeches and labored breathing to evoke realism and menace during a chase through a swamp). Rouben Mamoulian (1897–1987), whom Hollywood brought from Broadway because he was supposed to be an expert in dialogue (like George Cukor [1899–1983], whose earliest title in Hollywood was "dialogue director"), was consistently innovative with sound. Mamoulian's Applause (1929) is a compendium of experiments that create the sense of a three-dimensional space, including the first use of two-channel recording by microphones set in separate locations, tracking shots with synchronized sound (created by wheeling the massive soundproof booths in which cameras were placed), and a densely layered sound track. If Mamoulian creates a spatial continuity in Applause , Russian director Dziga Vertov (1896–1954) does everything he can to break the pretence of real space in his documentary Entuziazm ( Enthusiasm , 1930), which demonstrates a wide assortment of ways to associate sound and image that are anti-illusionistic.

It was nonfeature films that most creatively explored the potential of sound in its first decade. Animated shorts, not so bound to a realist aesthetic, gave rise to inspired meetings of sound and image. For instance, Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies find unlikely visual sources for familiar sounds, such as the skeleton played as a xylophone in the cartoon The Skeleton Dance (1929). In the 1930s, producer-director Alberto Calvacânti (1897–1982) shepherded into being a series of creative nonfiction films made by Great Britain's GPO (General Post Office) Film Unit. These experimental

documentaries often make rhythmical use of sound, as in Night Mail (1936), a "film-poem" that edits images of a mail train to natural sounds, to the verse of W. H. Auden, and to the music of Benjamin Britten (1913–1976). Avant-garde films have always been a rich arena for experimentation with unconventional relations between sound and image. A notable example is the short film Unsere Afrikareise ( Our Trip to Africa , 1966) by Austrian filmmaker Peter Kubelka (b. 1934).

One might think that narrative filmmakers would have used sound more adventurously once the full capability of sound editing was realized (about 1935). However, sound was for the most part used unimaginatively. Two glorious exceptions were Jean Renoir (1894–1979) and Orson Welles (1915–1985), two masters of sound as well as mise-en-scène . Renoir's films in the early 1930s include virtuosic uses of offscreen and naturalistic sound. The films he photographed in deep focus, such as La Règle du jeu ( The Rules of the Game , 1939), create aural as well as visual depth. Citizen Kane (1941) extended Welles's experiments with sound in his earlier radio dramas, including echoes that complement the deep focus photography, rapid shifts in tonal quality, overlapping dialogue (which, as in other newspaper films, imparts a sense of simultaneous activity and quick pacing), and aural bridges that compress time and suggest causal connections by linking words or sounds over different years and locations, as well as a brilliant score by composer Bernard Herrmann (1911–1975). In later Welles films, such as Touch of Evil (1958), sound is often spatially mismatched with its apparent source, creating a sense of dislocation and disorientation that help define a nightmarish world.

For economic reasons, Italy's neorealists in the 1940s had no choice but to shoot silently and add sound later, a tradition that remains today except for some international productions. Usually, the result is thinner sound mixes and less adherence to the precise sync than Hollywood produces. Italian audiences have become acculturated to sparse sound tracks and speech that does not match lips. Moreover, minimalist approaches to sound, if

thought out, can be a virtue, as in the brilliantly stylized sound of Sergio Leone's C'era una volta il West ( Once Upon a Time in the West , 1968), which has aural close-ups as striking as its extreme visual close-ups. The French director Jacques Tati (1909–1982), also using only post-synced sound, makes us hear afresh the sounds of the modern world. Playtime (1967), like Tati's other films, has almost no dialogue; instead it foregrounds sound effects, often focusing on synthetic materials like plastic, glass, and fake leather in a comedy about modern architecture and interior design.

At the other extreme from the dubbing tradition are those directors who prefer to use only production sound. Jean-Luc Godard's (b. 1930) early films, and those of Lars von Trier (b. 1956) and his Dogma 95 circle usually avoided postproduction refinement of the sound tracks. The Dogma 95 filmmakers required in their 1995 "Vow of Chastity" that "sound must never be produced apart from the image, or vice versa." Godard's films wage frontal attacks on the conventions of mainstream sound (and picture) editing, including the usual hierarchy of dialogue over effects or music. In a typical Godardian caféscene, pinball machines and traffic noise intermittently dominate conversation. Whereas Godard's Brechtian aesthetic is antiillusionistic, however, the Dogma filmmakers insisted that their approach was in the service of purity and realism.

In general, cinemas in non-English-speaking cultures are less concerned with transparency. Directors whose films consistently reveal the expressive potential of sound include Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998, Japan), Robert Bresson (1901–1999, France), Alain Resnais (b. 1922, France), Leonardo Favio (b. 1938, Argentina), and Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986, Russia).

Perhaps the most distinctive contemporary US sound stylist has been Robert Altman (b. 1938), who, with Richard Portman, developed a system to keep every actor's dialogue on a separate channel so that he could interweave and overlap simultaneous conversations among his large ensemble casts in films such as Nashville (1975). Like Altman's, Francis Ford Coppola's exceptional soundtracks cannot be separated from the work of a longtime collaborator, in his case Walter Murch (b. 1943), the doyen of film sound designers. The Godfather films, The Conversation (1974), and Apocalypse Now (1979) are exemplars of organic sound design. Indeed, the most memorable soundtracks in the United States are often the product of collaborations between sound designers and directors who are open to sonic experimentation. Notable collaborators include Gary Rydstrom (b. 1959), who designed sound for Steven Spielberg's films Jurassic Park (1993), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Artificial Intelligence: A.I. (2001); Ben Burtt (b. 1948) and George Lucas (the Star Wars series); Randy Thom and Robert Zemeckis ( Cast Away [2000] and The Polar Express [2004]), Alan Splet (1939–1995) and (early) David Lynch; and on the East Coast, Skip Lievsay, who has worked frequently with the Coen brothers, Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, and Jonathan Demme.

Films most likely to use sound creatively within the classical transparent mode are science fiction films or those with a major psychological component such as The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and surreal films, such as those of David Lynch, whose sound is consistently distinctive without being obtrusive. Lynch is fond of sound motifs such as the industrial noises (without any apparent source) that are heard at a very low level under the villain's scenes in Blue Velvet (1986). Subjective or dreamlike scenes are allowed great latitude within Hollywood practice because the distorted sound is attributed to a character's perception or a phantasmic environment.

Conventional US soundtracks are characterized by density. The growing sophistication of multitrack and digital techniques has had both a stimulating and a stifling effect; although sound departments of the last few decades have had access to ever more advanced technologies, this capability does not necessarily mean that the sound is used more wisely or creatively. Digital technologies, along with the audience's experiences with popular music, have tempted many recent filmmakers to overwhelm the audience with density, loudness, and wall-to-wall sound effects. In a sense, sound films in the last quarter century have come full circle from the early talking period. Rather than 100 percent talkies, some action films have effectively become 100 percent car crashes and fuel explosions, the embodiments of the "audible objects" predicted by Eisenstein and his colleagues. But even big action pictures such as the Matrix and Terminator series can have elegant and inventive tracks when their sound is judiciously created, selected, and modulated.