SHARING WORLDS THROUGH FILM SOUND
An acoustic journey where blindness leads the way
Case Studies: The Color of Paradise (1999), Dancer in the Dark (1999), Un Lac (2008)
Master Thesis; University of Amsterdam MA Media Studies: Film Studies
June 2014
Author: Marta San Vicente Feduchi Email: martasanvi@gmail.com
Table of contents
Introduction ……….
5
1. Theoretical Framework ………..
8
1.1. Sharing perceptive worlds ...
8
1.1.1. Intersubjectivity: Seeking the “common sense”….……..………...
8
1.1.2. Phenomenological attitude in Film Studies……….………...
11
1.1.3. (Un)learning how to listen……….……….…
13
1.2. Film sound terminology ……….……….
16
1.2.1. Basic categories for studying film sound ………..………..
17
1.2.2. Three modes of listening ……….…..
19
1.2.3. The embodied perception of sound ………...…………
20
1.2.4. The system of audition ………..…
21
2. Analysis of the case studies ……….. …..
25
2.1. Being born blind: The Color of Paradise (1999) ………….………..
26
2.2. Becoming blind: Dancer in the Dark (2000) ………. …..
36
2.3. Being raised by a blind mother: Un Lac (2008) ………. 47
Conclusion ………. 57
Introduction
The first idea for this research project was conceived after watching an online conference by musician Evelyn Glennie entitled “How to truly listen”1. After suffering from an acute loss of hearing when she was a child, she discovered that she could nonetheless perceive sound through her skin and through vibrations in her body. Thereby, what at first looked as a paradox surprisingly gave rise to an eye-opening conference —or better, a body-opening one; I was not only able to discover a new way of experiencing sound in my own body with all its senses, but also to briefly grip Glennie’s unusual and fascinating mode of being in the world through a somatic understanding of the way she interacts with it. This two-fold experience ―a newly bodily self-awareness and a deeper comprehension of an “other”― led me to investigate the complex concepts of empathy, intersubjectivity and embodied experience from a phenomenological perspective.
Without intending to make a direct comparison between the senses —for this would neglect obvious differences regarding their inherent psychophysical properties—, I started wondering what would happen if a visual impairment were taken into consideration in cinema, a medium that has predominantly been theorised as a visual one. Perhaps, a film that portrays blindness would stimulate the audience to watch and listen to films (and to the world) in ways that are somewhat different from the ones they already know. And in this way, would not the extension of one’s ability to sense and perceive the world constitute not only an enriching experience in itself for the audio-viewer, but also an incentive for understanding unusual ways of perception that may seem so foreign at first?
Besides the initial thoughts regarding blindness, acoustic perception and cinema, the main drive behind my research project was to fight against the tendency of film sound being seen (rather than heard) as something additional to the images, and treated as a mere doubling or echoing of the visual meaning. In this regard, there was a very pertinent assertion made by Thomas Elsaesser in his book Film Theory, an Introduction through the Senses, where he states that “in classical cinema sound is usually analyzed strictly in relation to (and in dependence on) the image” (2010, 134). For this very reason, film scholars such as Michel Chion or Rick Altman have dedicated their careers to further investigate sound in cinema and extend the discussion about the act of listening to a film2, and their works will be duly revised in this thesis.
Considering that “the history of philosophy since Aristotle seems largely bound to sight and light” (F. J. Smith 1967, 188)3 this research project pretends to criticise the so-called
ocularcentrism in Western thought (Janus 2011), which includes Film Studies. Therefore, my intention was to think in terms of darkness instead of light as a way to fight against the narcissistic film image and promote a mode of filmmaking, of film analysis and of film audio-viewing that would be more acoustically attuned. While looking for some interesting insights that could follow a similar train of thought, I found an interesting article by the philosopher F. J. Smith: in the task of building a phenomenology of sound, he suggested that “in the area of darkness and the vague (…), where eyes and vision fail us (and thus every theory of knowledge or philosophy build there on) we must, like the ‘blind’, learn to feel our way through the
1 See: http://www.ted.com/talks/evelyn_glennie_shows_how_to_listen (last accessed 26th June 2014)
2 Apart from the role of music in most feature films and musicals or the voice over in essay-films and documentaries,
the comprehensive and analytical study of sound in a film is a minority case within Film Studies to date.
darkening night, to listen our way through enveloping shadows” (1967, 196)4. Consequently, the
very idea of “learning to feel our way” made me consider cinema as a “teaching tool” that may incite (sighted) audiences to pay better attention to a perceptive world that is built outside the outskirts of vision. Furthermore, I was also inspired by the idea that the act of listening is “based on the notion of diffused subjectivity: through listening, an individual is extended beyond the boundaries of singularity (…) toward a broader space necessarily multiple” (LaBelle 2006, 245). It was this sense of openness and opening of the self through listening —found as well in Jean-Luc Nancy’s book Listening (2007) — what introduced me to the concept of intersubjectivity developed by Edmund Husserl and others, for it allowed me to investigate the possible sharing of different subjective worlds through cinema —and especially through film sound.
Thereby, two main research questions were formulated so as to structure and guide the thesis towards a more concrete goal: How does film sound (speech, sound effects and music) contribute to sharing with the audience a particular way of being in the world5? And, does the audience feel more identified with the characters’ due to the understanding of their unusual acoustic perceptions —and if so, in which ways? Therefore, an interdisciplinary attitude was required so that these questions would be adequately responded; an attitude that would start a dialogue between theories of sound and of different conceptions about intersubjective and empathic feelings in cinema. Bearing in mind that “current empathy research in psychology and neuroscience connects again with the philosophical tradition from the beginning of the 20thcentury” (Stueber 2004), this text will include concepts coming from disciplines that have
different but somewhat compatible insights.
Following these premises, the thesis has been divided into two main parts, but nonetheless interconnected throughout the whole text. Firstly, the required theoretical concepts will be accordingly framed: the notion of intersubjectivity, the embodied perception of cinema, the philosophical aspects of the act of listening, and a specific terminology for the study of sound in cinema. The second half of the thesis is constituted by the analysis of the case studies and the application of the theoretical concepts. Three films were carefully chosen for this matter: The
Color of Paradise (M. Majidi, 1999), a film about a child born blind; Dancer in the Dark (L. Von
Trier, 2000), which portrays how a woman is gradually becoming blind; and Un Lac (Ph. Grandrieux, 2008), a film dealing with an epileptic boy who was raised by a blind mother. Throughout the analysis of these films, the fundamental and obvious visual component of cinema is not be overlooked in any case, but its sonorous dimension should not be overheard either; in this sense, the sounds of these films will be listened to with due attention by promoting an analysis that “understand[s] the senses in their interplay and perception as embodied” (Elsaesser, 2010, 110).
The cited case studies were selected by following two main criteria. The first was that there should be an intention or desire on the maker’s side to share with the audience the uncommon sensorial perception of its main characters, as a different experience of being in the world. Therefore, in each of the films there is at least one person who has an odd perception due to some peculiarity pertaining to the senses, mainly visual impairment, but also acute hearing or
4This idea reminded me of the popular game known as the “Blindman’s buff”, which teaches a child with a blindfold
how to find the other children by using only the available acoustic information. This simple game teaches in an engaging and playful way how to experience a different mode of perceiving (and hence another mode of being in the world) without leaving one’s own body.
5 Without fully engaging with the ontological and existential implications of the term coined by Martin Heidegger, in
this text I use the term in a more basic level, considering that the way we make use of our senses contribute to create different modes of perceiving, which then correspond to different modes of being in the world,
extremely sensitive touch. The second selection criterion was that the films should be produced within the past two decades; not only has the development of digital audio-visual technologies created new aesthetic effects in certain films, but it has also incited “the emergence of a new kind of aural space” (Elsaesser 2010, 142). Whereas in the pre-digital scenario the main focus was on the dialogues or on the music score, nowadays the soundtrack consists of many different layers that are able to evoke abstract mental spaces or even provoke emotional reactions on a physical and corporeal level.
In sum, the purpose of this thesis is to provide a clear picture of cinema by paying careful attention to the richness of film sound and devote ourselves to the act of listening. An enhanced experience of cinema should come out of this true communion and conversation between the aural and the visual realm, one in which sound is conceived as an essential part of cinema, instead of as an added characteristic of it.
1. Theoretical Framework
The theoretical half of the thesis is constituted by two main sections. The first one attempts to build an attitude and mind-set based on the most relevant concepts developed by phenomenologists and film scholars in regard to the sharing of different perceptive worlds, with a special focus on the act of listening. The second section will describe with thoroughness the specific film sound terminology that will found the case studies.
1.1. Sharing perceptive worlds
Philosophers in the 19th century realised that using the rational mind alone, as Descartes had postulated, was not enough to grasp the truth or essence of things and beings in the world6. In
the task of overcoming traditional dualisms such as mind/body and self/other, as well as of studying the perception and experience of phenomena, one of the most interesting approaches was that of phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Bearing in mind the research questions formulated in the introduction, some of the most relevant and revelatory notions of those thinkers, along with recent discoveries in neuroscience that have rekindled a similar debate, will be explained below. Another section will be dedicated to those film scholars who have used phenomenology as their framework to describe a more embodied awareness of film audio-viewing, by distancing themselves from other theoretical approaches such as psychoanalysis or structuralism. A third and final section will discuss the particular role of cinema as a “teaching” tool, considering that we may need to unlearn some of our conventional rules in order to better attune with other modes of perception.
1.1.1.
Seeking the “common sense” through intersubjectivity
Inasmuch as an important part of this research questions whether a foreign perceptive world can be shared through film sound, there are a few considerations about intersubjectivity that are worth reviewing from different perspectives. According to Dan Zahavi —one of the most prominent figures regarding the study of empathy and intersubjectivity from a modern phenomenological perspective—, “Husserl (…) wants to emphasize the interrelation between the experience of others and the constitution of a shared world” (2012, 244) —or the constitution of a “lifeworld” 7, as appears in Husserl’s late works. Considering that “empathy is
what allows us to know the experiential life of the other” (Zahavi 2012, 228), Husserl admits that the “bodily self-experience constitutes a foundation for the perception of embodied others, which is why I first have a perception of my own body, before any experience of other subjects can arise” (Zahavi 2012, 238). Therefore, it is implied that only after a common ground has been established between the subjects (inter-subjective) may a basic empathic feeling arise.
However, what are the conditions of possibility for this world to be shared in an intersubjective way? Apart from a cultural, social or historical identification between the
6 Art critic and scholar Jonathan Crary explains how most philosophers and scientists during the 19th century were
fully committed to discover the intricacies of human perception; at the same time, new technological devices were being developed and hence a systematic separation and unification of the senses took place. Consequently, during the late Romantic period there was a desire to decentralise the previous monocular worldview so as to yield new ways of perceiving, studying and representing the world. See: Crary, J. (1988) “Modernizing vision”. In Hal Foster (ed.)Vision
and Visuality (29-49). Seattle, WA: Bay Press.
7 The concept of “lifeworld”, somewhat influenced by Heidegger’s concept of “being-in-the-world”, was explained in:
Husserl, E. (1970). The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology: An introduction to phenomenological philosophy. Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
subjects, Husserl argues that “the perception of the other presupposes an understanding of the other’s [sensing] body”, and this is why “he claims that the most fundamental form of empathy is one that targets this somatological level” (Zahavi 2012, 242). Consequently, the importance of one’s own body and the individual awareness of the senses come to the fore whenever there is an interaction with the other, whether there is an affective or emotional value at stake or not8. In
this sense, the influence that the psychologist and philosopher William James had in Husserl is remarkable9; in his Principles of Psychology, James wrote that “emotion is a consequence, not the
cause, of the bodily expression” (1890, 449).
At this point, it is almost impossible not to draw some comparisons between those ideas and the recent discovery of the mirror neurons10 —which has had a big influence on many fields
of research, including Film Studies. Regarding its many differences among their methodological approaches, there are basic notions shared by many phenomenologists and neuroscientists11.
One of the many interesting implications of such finding is that, in order for mirror neurons to fire, there should be at least some recognition in what the subject perceives as a foreign action, i.e., that the observed behaviour matches to some extent with the observer’s own motor repertoire due to a similar previous experience (Gallese 2011; Zahavi 2012). In this same regard, Husserl had noticed that “in coming to understand the other, I draw on what I know from my own case, but through my encounter with the other, my own self-experience is also modified” as a sort of simultaneous “mutual awakening” (Zahavi 2012, 236). This point is highly interesting for the present thesis inasmuch as it accounts for the after-effects that a film may have on the spectator’s subsequent (acoustic) experiences. In that sense of modifying the experience due to the encounter with the other, Heidegger contributed as well to this debate with his ground-breaking insights about human existence. In the words of philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, “Being
and Time is supposed to make manifest what we are already familiar with (…) and in so doing to
modify our understanding of ourselves and so transform out very way of being” (1991, 8). Overall, and without going into further details about what exactly allows empathy to take place, it would be too ambitious to say that there is already an emotional response or understanding in such a neuronal mirroring via a familiar analogy12; there is always that “something else” that
remains unexplained, which is why both scientists and philosophers need to keep on asking questions.
That being said, a much less-cited discovery has opened a truly interesting path in understanding how the acoustic dimension is involved in the recognition of and identification with foreign acts. According to the fascinating article entitled “Do We Really Need Vision? How Blind People ‘See’ the Actions of Others”, there is a passage with similar questions to the ones indicated in the Introduction:
8 Since there are so many different uses of the term empathy, it is necessary to distinguish between several levels of
empathic responses, such as emotional contagion, affective empathy, sympathy and personal distress. See: Stueber, K. (2004, Spring). "Empathy", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
9 For an interesting comparative analysis of both authors, see: Cobb-Stevens, R. (1974). James and Husserl: the
foundations of meaning. The Hague : Martinus Nijhoff.
10 A group of Italian neuroscientists have recently found “mirror neurons”, which fire both when an animal makes an
action and when the animal observes the same action being performed by others. For more detailed information, see: Rizzolatti, G.; Craighero, L. (2004) “The mirror-neuron system”. Annual Review of Neuroscience , 27, 169–192.
11 For a thorough revision and comparison between mirror neurons and intersubjectivity, see: Gallese, V. (2011).
“Neuroscience and phenomenology”. Phenomenology and mind, (1), 34-47; and Zahavi, D. (2012). “Empathy and mirroring: Husserl and Gallese”. Life, Subjectivity & Art, 217-254.
12 For a brief and clear description of the Theory of Mind debate regarding empathy, see: Stueber, K. (2004, Spring).
"Empathy", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Edward N. Zalta (ed.). There is also an interesting study on the cross-modal sensory system regarding vision and hearing in: De Gelder, B., & Vroomen, J. (2000). “The perception of emotions by ear and by eye”. Cognition & Emotion, 14.3, 289-311.
Though humans rely greatly on vision, individuals who lack sight since birth still retain the ability to learn actions and behaviors from others. To what extent is this ability dependent on visual experience? Is the human mirror system capable of interpreting nonvisual information to acquire knowledge about the others? (Ricciardi, E. et al. 2009)
This revealing study concludes that there is no need for visual input to activate the so-called “auditory mirror neurons”, since the “mirror system is based on supramodal sensory representations of actions and, furthermore, (…) these abstract representations allow individuals with no visual experience to interact effectively with others” (Ricciardi, E. et al. 2009). Another crucial fact is that the mirror system cortex “showed a significantly greater response to motor familiar than to unfamiliar action sounds in both sighted and blind individuals” (Ricciardi, E. et al. 2009); such a claim brings back the Husserlian discussion about the shared world and the importance of previous experiences in the understanding of a world based on foreign perceptions and expressions. Hence, the more one shares with and knows from the other’s way of perceiving (and being in) the world, the more one is capable of relating to something foreign and thus feel a basic identification that may (or not) lead to empathy. As the ethnomusicologist Steven Feld has said, “we make meaning of sounds due to our own acoustemologies, or different ways of knowing and being in the world through sound” (Feld 1996) that are shaped by an embodied listening in the midst of cultural, environmental and historical factors. Although this research is more focused on the (individual) embodied listening than on the other (social) factors, the phenomenological notions described earlier in the chapter were precisely aiming at understanding such different modes of “being in the world through sound”.
Considering that hearing is the “common sense” shared by both sighted and blind people, the sharing of the different ways of listening may establish an identification between those characters (hypersensitive to sound) and a (well-attuned) spectator, through an embodied audiovisual experience.
1.1.2. Phenomenological attitude in Film Studies
As Sigfried Kracauer had rightly noticed, “unlike the other types of pictures, film images affect primarily the spectator’s senses, engaging him physiologically before he is in a position to respond intellectually” (1960, 158). However, films studies have not engaged with the bodily and affective responses until very recently, focusing more on an intellectual and disembodied mode of spectatorship. In order to overcome the fact that “most theorists still don’t know what to do with their unruly responsive flesh and sensorium” (Sobchack 2004, 59), many film scholars have drawn their attention to phenomenology since the past three decades, especially to Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology, which is considered more of an attitude than a method for epistemological reduction. By considering consciousness as the embodied awareness of primordial experience, this new approach in Film Studies has introduced new concepts into film theory that incite theorists and audiences to analyse and enjoy the almost-primitive sensorial, bodily and emotional reactions while watching/listening to a film.
One of the most important figures regarding the phenomenological approach in Film Studies is Vivian Sobchack. Similarly to Kracauer’s observation, she claims that “we do not see any movie only through our eyes”; rather, we “feel films with our whole bodily being” (2004, 63). In her ground-breaking text The Address of the Eye, Sobchack expresses the essential idea that “[in] its modalities of having sense and making sense, the cinema quite concretely returns us, as viewers and theorists, to our senses” (1992, 44). Mostly drawn on Merleau-Ponty’s complex theory of perception, Sobchack states that there is a “concrete ‘reversibility’ of perception and expression that constitutes both the moving picture and our experience of it”
(1992, 37). Considering that cinema expresses life with life itself, “it is this mutual capacity for and possession of experience through common structures of embodied existence [seeing, hearing, touching] through similar modes of being-in-the-world, that provide the intersubjective basis of objective cinematic communication” (Sobchack 1992, 38). Moreover, Sobchack suggests that perception and expression (in both film and life) are “complementary modalities of an original and unified experience of existence that has long been fragmented and lost to those interested in the ontology of the cinema and its structures of signification” (1992, 45). All these concepts are highly interesting for analysing how a certain (acoustic) perception is expressed in the film and how the spectator experiences and interprets that particular expression of perception, as this thesis intends to do.
More relevant insights can be found in the book Feeling Cinema, where Tarja Laine points out that when film scholars think of the emotional aspects of cinema, there is a tendency to focus “either on the affect (the Deleuzian tradition) or on the emotion (the cognitivist tradition) as separate, rather than unified states” (2011, 2). Instead, she proposes the concept of the “cinematic emotion” as a way to cover both sides of a two-fold process that engages, on the one hand, the pre-cognitive affective appraisals (occurring directly in our bodies), and the emotional evaluations (mediated via the memory and the structures of language) on the other. Very much in line with the phenomenological attitude cited above, Laine considers that cinematic emotions are addressed at the audience by “that which can only be detected by means of intersubjective sharing of experience” (2011, 4), and thus take place in a shared space between the film and the spectator. Furthermore, and under the conviction that “a mimetic response to the film is more a cause for the spectator’s sympathy rather than a consequence” (Laine 2011, 5) —as William James had also claimed—, Laine bases her film analyses on Gerard Genette’s focalization13 and
on Murray Smith’s alignment14 rather than on empathic identifications with the characters.
Despite this thesis will incorporate the fundamental contribution of those two authors, a more basic level of empathic identification (as explained in the previous chapter) will be also taken into account in the film analyses15.
To put it briefly, the spectator needs to surrender to the film and accept her vulnerability to be really touched by it, accept that cinema is able to “merge the fearful and the pleasurable, the abject and the sublime, and affect us viscerally as well as intellectually” (Beugnet 2008, 184). In this sense, titles such as The Skin of Film and Video Haptics and Erotics by Laura Marks or The Tactile Eye by Jennifer Barker have opened a field of study that “negotiates and re-distributes the relation between inside and outside; it designates a transitional and uncertain liminality with respect to where the self becomes the world and vice versa” (Elsaesser 2010, 111). Regarding such transgression of boundaries, screens and skins, the present thesis is more focused on the haptic aurality16 rather than on the haptic visuality, insofar as “haptic sound also allows us to move away from questions of signification towards a closer understanding of our embodied
13 The focalization refers to the point of view (and audition) from which the story is told in specific moments. See:
Genette, G. (1988). Narrative Discourse Revisited. (J. E. Lewin trans.).
14 According to Smith, on the one hand, the deliberate sharing of the protagonist’s goals and feelings with the
audio-viewers will incite alignment with her; on the other, such identification could also provoke a bigger or smaller sense of
allegiance, depending on the “moral and ideological evaluation of characters by the spectator” (M. Smith 1994, 41).
15 As stated in her book Shame and Desire, Laine draws mainly on the Sartrean phenomenology in her notion of
intersubjectivity. Although it would be highly interesting to incorporate this other trend of French phenomenology, this thesis will remain within the notions developed by Husserl and the new discoveries in neuroscience, as well as the influence of Merleau-Ponty in Film Studies. For further research, see: Laine, T. (2007). Shame and Desire: Emotion,
Intersubjectivity, Cinema (No. 3). Peter Lang.
16 Lisa Coulthard has written on the haptic aurality in Haneke’s films, especially on the power of silence in them. See:
engagement with the acoustic world” (Lovatt 2013, 66). The next section will expand on the intricacies of the act of listening and how it can be sharpened by cinematic means.
1.1.3. (Un)learning how to listen
In the mid-sixties, avant-garde musician John Cage not only turned over the artistic panorama but also achieved a noticeable effect among the audiences with his irregular performances, where music was merged with dance and theatre. During an interview, the American composer and artist admitted that “[m]any people have told [him] after a concert that they notice changes in perception of everyday life” (1965, 65). When asked about such a successful awakening of the spectator’s perception, Cage replied that his music could somehow be compared with Pop Art, inasmuch as this artistic movement had “more and more trained our eyes (…) on the things generally overlooked (…), [so] than when we face them again in reality we’re looking at them as themselves and not as what they’re luring us to do” (1965, 66) —i.e., a billboard that has been estranged from its usual space does not intend to sell anything anymore, so that it is allowed to express something else than the expected message.
This anecdotal mention to John Cage is being brought up for two main reasons: on the one hand, there is a special emphasis on the enriching (transcendental?) effect produced by the sheer awareness of ignored sounds, usually considered as mere noise and without having any egotistical or authorial trace17; and the other is Cage’s mention to the “training” of the senses of the spectator, and thus implying a certain intention of the author behind the work of art —even if that consists in removing himself from it. Although his ideas about the author’s goals may seem rather contradictory—“You won’t find me logical” replied Cage to such an accusation (1965, 65)—, in my opinion, they are also indispensable for engaging in a profound inquiry about things as we experience them, and as they are in themselves —an common idea in the Buddhist tradition, which very much influenced Cage. In another context but with a similar background thought, Merleau-Ponty stated that “the most important lesson which the [phenomenological] reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction”, which is precisely “why Husserl is constantly re-examining the possibility of the reduction” (1962, xv). Without this being the right place to discuss Husserl’s reflections upon Buddhism18, perhaps it is in the light of such a never-ending re-examination of our (embodied) experience of and existence in the world, that Cage’s “training” of the senses and his desire for looking/listening to things “as themselves” should be understood.
In regard to an eventual “education” of the senses through cinema, Elisabeth Stephens has used feminist phenomenological film theory to consider this medium as a sensation machine19 by
claiming that it is “not simply the technology through which our senses are cultivated; rather, our senses are themselves forms of technology, the means by which our bodies and selves come to make and have sense” (2012, 537). Hence, just as John Cage’s music, it could be said that cinema is able to stimulate and to teach audiences how to awaken their sensorial perception; and
17 As stated in article about silence in John Cage’s music —including the composer’s famous theories about music
based on the principles of Zen Buddhism —, “intentional sounds and egocentric actions have no place here. [The piece called] 4'33" requires a serious, reverent, focused, and open mind that is willing to put aside preconceptions and embrace the universe of sound as music” (Solomon, 1998).
18 In an article titled “Husserl on the teachings of the Buddha”, it is claimed that “the Buddhist method of
introspection, for example, recognized the importance of moving beyond discursive thought, utilizing awareness, intuition, and resulting insight. A Buddhist context may be a way of solving the mystery of the transcendental reduction.” (Hanna 1995, 366)
19 The term is based on the book The Vision Machine by Paul Virilio in which he analysed the transformations of the
visual perception along with the development of new technologies in the mid-nineteenth century. See: Virilio, P. (1994). The Vision Machine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
due to the combination of sounds and images that are somewhat estranged from their original appearance in the world, the audio-viewer’s usual codes of meaning-making can be distorted and enriched by the film. In this regard, and based on Merleau-Ponty’s idea that we should “act therefore as if we knew nothing about [the world], as if here we still had everything to learn” (1967, 4), some film scholars have claimed that we need to “unlearn before we learn to see and feel again” (Beugnet 2008, 184), or that “[h]aptic images can give the impression of seeing for the first time” (Marks 2000, 178). Perhaps, then, an education of the senses (of both filmmakers and audiences) through cinema could be easily achieved by means of unlearning how we normally make use of them, in order to rediscover one’s individual worldview. But however transgressive the idea of “unlearning” may sound —and although these theorists aim to fight against the dominant ocularcentrism by drawing their attention to the sense of touch—, expressions such as “worldview” and “seeing for the first time” demonstrate how vision still prevails over the other senses.
One way of fighting against such ocularcentrism would be listening to Jean-Luc Nancy’s thoughts on sound and music. The French philosopher “not only critiques ocularcentrism, but also attempts to develop a philosophy or mode of thinking that attends to the possibilities offered by listening —that attempts to reintegrate modes of sensual perception excluded by ocularcentrism and the conceptual abstraction associated with it” (Janus 2011, 185). According to Nancy, the act of listening encourages to “enter that spatiality by which, at the same time, I am penetrated, for it opens up in me as well as around me, and from me as well as toward me (2007, 14). Such a (con)fusion of the membranes of human (and filmic) bodies suggests that film sound could also activate a sort of sensorial (even carnal) desire for getting closer to (and becoming one with) the film and its characters20. Moreover, the inherent unattainability of the (haptic) desire to reach the film’s world through its sounds is very much related to Nancy’s idea that “to listen is to be straining toward a possible meaning (…) that is not immediately accessible” (2007, 6). In this case, it is the straining toward ―and training of?― an unknown acoustic realm what demands from the listener a sort of entanglement with the sonorous source, like a two-way movement from inside to outside the “self” so as to experience sound as if one was the “other”.
These notions hint at the initial questions about the act of listening and the eventual identification towards the characters. Once more, Nancy’s musings and wonderings are most pertinent here:
“Why, in the case of the ear, is there withdrawal and turning inward, a making resonant, but in the case of the eye, there is manifestation and display, a making evident? Why, however, does each of these facets also touch the other, and by touching, put into play the whole system of the senses?” (2007, 3)
Hence, considering cinema as a “teaching” medium that engages with sight, hearing and touch —and that also calls for such constant movement between inward and outward of the audio-viewer’s perceptive world—, the most genuine movement toward the foreign subjective acoustic perception (“not immediately accessible”) may give rise to empathise with the character. At the same time, an intersubjective listening, which engages with the many different points of audition present in the film, will modify and relativize the listener’s own subjective awareness. In this way, the audio-viewer does not need to have had the same experiences as the characters in order to understand or feel “inside” their way of being in the world at certain moments; if she is willing to “unlearn” her own rules and step into the other’s subjective world
20 “To listen means to be open for one’s own ontological being and that of the other; without this sort of existential
hearing there can be no “communication”, no sharing of world, no communing with one another, i.e. no becoming one
(although never truly becoming the “other”), she then may be able to “meet the film ‘halfway’” (Laine 2010, 4) and be truly touched by it.
In sum, in situations where the sensorial paradigms or worldviews are in conflict with each other, the conventional way of approaching reality is not valid anymore. Instead, a more “untrained” or “indisciplined” way of expressing and perceiving the world may give rise to an unknown and hopefully fruitful experience (for filmmakers, theorists and audiences). Such a raw approach and open attitude toward foreign conceptions is precisely what the characters of our three films need, since they all yearn for diegetic characters and extra-diegetic audiences that are able to change their already-known rigid systems of perception and surrender in turn to a perceptive world that works under a different set of rules.
1.2. Film Sound Terminology
This theoretical section is dedicated to establish the required terminology for studying the many uses of sound in films in an accurate manner. In such an engaging task, French composer and sound theorist Michel Chion has been chosen as the main reference throughout this text. In the 1980’s, Chion started writing about the use of sound in films as a serious and fascinating subject matter, while establishing a whole new terminology and mind-set for anyone interested in doing an audiovisual analysis of film ―from film theorists and cinephiles to musicians and sound designers. However, Chion was perfectly aware of the complexities of dedicating a scholarly research project to film sound in a field where the prevailing focus had always been on the image, namely, the “shot”: “Audiovisual analysis does not involve clear entities or essences like the shot, but only ‘effects’, something considerably less noble” (1994, 185). Therefore, the desire to expand the awareness of the cinematic aural field requires from theorists to take “a leap of faith” in that which is not seen (on the screen or in the world) and hence take those “less noble” effects very seriously.
In the 1990’s, not only were Chion’s books translated into English, but this decade also saw the publication of the pioneering book Sound Theory/ Sound Practice, edited by Rick Altman. Above all, the latter had great success in Anglophone film departments: it included many essays from different scholars, including Chion, who were extremely sensitive to the different roles of sound in cinema. Regarding the complex communicative process between the addresser and addressee of any film, Altman introduced the concept of “cinema as event”, in opposition to the more traditional notion of “film as text” (1992, 2): such a multi-dimensional analysis required “the development of a new vocabulary for sound analysis, for sound itself is particularly event-oriented itself” (1992, 15). Such a mentality allowed him to think about the multiple ways of producing and receiving a film in all its complexities ―including the economic conditions that made it possible, the spatial and technical qualities of the screening and even the state of mind of the audience in the moment of watching it. Consequently, as Chion and Altman have stressed in their books, the elaboration of a comprehensive set of concepts regarding film sound goes hand in hand with the heightening of our general awareness of its implications; there is no one thing without the other.
1.2.1. Basic categories for studying film sound
As mentioned in previous chapters, sound in film has been mostly theorised according to its relation to the image: nonetheless, such a relation is still fundamental in many cases, and therefore terms like onscreen and offscreen are still worth using in an audiovisual analysis. In this sense, it also seems mandatory to account for the great contribution of narratology to Film
Studies; i.e., the analysis of the diegetic levels within the story and distinguishing between the different narrative modes and voices (Genette 1988). However, once it is determined whether the sounds are diegetic or nondiegetic or from whose point-of-audition is a sound coming from, there are other useful categories to study film sound in more detail.
According to Bordwell and Thompson, there are three perceptual properties of sound that “define the overall sonic texture of a film” (2008, 268): loudness, pitch and timbre. The first refers to the psychoacoustic perception of the sound’s intensity and depends upon the amplitude (dB) of the sound waves; the second describes the highness or lowness of the tone that is heard (distinguished with more or less acuteness according to the listener’s musical training), and results from the different frequencies (Hz); the third property is based on those qualities that are specific to every (musically) produced sound, based on the harmonic spectra and sound envelope ―i.e. “the stages of attack, sustain and decay” (Altman 1992, 18)― that confers a certain tone colour. Regarding such properties of sound, Altman rightly comments on the fact that almost all the existing vocabulary used to analyse the sound in cinema “is based on the apparent assumption that all film sounds have the nature of musical notes” (1992, 15); therefore, there are more elements and categories that need to be taken into consideration.
The most basic classification of a film soundtrack is that one which distinguishes between speech, music and sound effects. Although each of these elements could still be divided in many sub-categories and layers, they provide film scholars with a first schema for an audiovisual analysis. In this regard, Chion points out that we are able to discern the different elements of film sound “in the same way we perceive them in everyday experience” (1994, 45), depending on the attention, the mode of listening and the ear-training of the audio-viewer21. Thus, without
us even noticing, we already have some techniques to differentiate between several sound elements that resonate outside and inside us. But we might nonetheless need to pay better attention to those sound operations occurring in our mind/body system in order to make a richer experience of our human embodied perception, so they can be later applied to the aesthetic experience of the film as well.
Whereas the traditional categories based on narratology, psychology or musicology are very helpful when writing about the elements of speech and music, they can barely describe the terrain of the so-called sound effects. The third element of the film soundtrack is thus the most abstract of all and is sometimes even inexplicable through words. As opposed to the other two elements, sound effects do not follow a well-known language or syntax that simplifies the theorist’s analytical job. In order to remedy the traditional way of speaking about and conceiving sound and music, Pierre Schaeffer wrote in 1966 his Treatise on Musical Objects (Traité des objets
musicaux) —a ground-breaking book that is still considered a fundamental source of information
regarding those sounds which are neither music nor speech.
Therefore, in order to define the degree of interaction between the three basic elements of the soundtrack, Chion coined the term consistency; music, speech and sound effects “may combine to form a general texture or, on the contrary, each may be heard separately, legibly” (Chion 1994, 189). Such intelligibility depends on the spatial reverberation and the innate ability of the spectator to mask the general sounds and highlight others, all contributing to a better or worse understanding of the audiovisual message. Moreover, the technical properties of the sound recording systems have changed the existing methods and created new possibilities of making the elements interact between each other; from mono or stereo recording to Dolby
21 Nowadays, for instance, it is not rare to be listening to music with a pair of headphones while being aware of the
surrounding noises in the street and, at the same time, hearing our inner voice talking non-stop about that important meeting.
surround or listening through headphones, the evolution of the sound technology has provoked several inherent characteristics that affect both the visual and the aural worlds of a film. Compared to the pre-digital era, nowadays it is easy and possible to include many different layers of music, speech and sound effects that can be fused or detached according, for instance, to the sound designer’s will.
That being said, and based on Altman’s belief that “it is no longer sufficient to analyse a musical score or a written text to understand the effects of a particular performance event” (1992, 19), the following paragraphs will set forth a few more concepts that are relevant for studying in which ways film sound is used to convey the sensorial perception of the characters and how this is shared with and received by the spectator.
1.2.2. Three modes of listening
How is the sound of a film received by a spectator? Are there different modes of listening to a film, as it happens in everyday life? Although some attitudes and philosophical mind-sets regarding the act of listening have been described above, a more specific classification is needed here so as to give an answer to such questions. After years of scholarly and practical investigation Chion established three modes of listening that are somewhat reversible, simultaneous and interchangeable during the audio-viewing of a film: based on Pierre Schaeffer’s terms, Chion had differentiated between the causal, the semantic and the reduced listening.
The term causal refers to the way in which the audio-viewer finds a cause/source for a certain sound. However, as in many other aspects in cinema, “[m]ost of the time we are dealing not with the real initial causes of the sounds, but causes that the film makes us believe in” (Chion 1994, 28). Since our senses are intertwined during our perception of a film or of the world, and the film only provides us with an approximate representation of those perceptions, it is not enough “to film and sound-record an event if you want to convey the event’s impact and even its appearance” (Chion 2009, 237). Thus, the common technique of rendering consists of articulating the sounds and images according to well-studied simulacra and codes. As Chion insists, “a film’s sounds can give us a vast array of luminous, spatial, thermal and tactile sensations that extend far beyond realist reproduction” (2009, 240). Therefore, the appropriate use of those conventions within filmic representation and human perception can certainly modify our expectations of that which is presented as “real” 22. One of these conventions, for
instance, is the territory sound that “inhabits the space without raising the question of the location of its specific source(s) in the image” (2009, 467); that background noise would be somehow part of the causal mode, for it is that which needs to be masked and put aside in order to focus on a more meaningful source of sound, as in a dialogue scene. Nevertheless, in all three case studies, the special attention that the hypersensitive characters put to such territory sounds will encourage the audio-viewer to not consider them as ambient sound anymore.
The second mode takes the understanding and the hermeneutics of sound a bit further than the causal mode. By “tuning in” to the semantic listening, the listener will not only intend to identify the source of the heard sound ―and the spatial signature that defines the “sound’s placement in a particular physical environment” (Altman 1992, 241) ―, but also the code of a certain language that she is able (or unable) to interpret. Hence, no matter whether its signs are
22 Chion discusses with thoroughness the set of assumptions and beliefs that the film creates for the audience under
spoken, musical or mimic, an audio-viewer attuned to this second mode of listening would try to decode the message that the sound carries, along with its implicit relation to the image23.
Last but not least, there is probably the most demanding mode of all three: the reduced listening “focuses on the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause and of its meaning” (Chion 1994, 29). Although the French theorist admits that the musical training or the sole individual perception constitutes a very subjective interpretation of sound, he is convinced that “perception (…) partakes in a particular kind of objectivity, that of shared perception (…), [and] it is in this objectivity-born-of-intersubjectivity that reduced listening, as Schaeffer defined it, should be situated” (1994, 29). Given the fact that “the adjective ‘reduced’ coined by Schaeffer was borrowed from Husserl's phenomenological notion of reduction” (Chion 1994, 216), the phenomenological approach described above may as well contribute to better understand Chion's audiovisual analysis. In the task of being as objective as possible in the description of film sound, Chion requires “the fixing of sounds, which thereby acquire the status of veritable objects (1994, 30)24. Furthermore, it is no surprise that Jean-Luc Nancy, much influenced by
Heidegger’s phenomenology, ponders in the first pages of his book Listening, “What secret is at stake when one truly listens, that is, when one tries to capture or surprise the sonority rather than the message?” (2007, 5). This mode requires from the listener to be open to the unknown and to break the rules of his normal perception, similarly to the approach introduced in the section “(Un)learning how to listen”.
Considering that film sound is mostly charged with “a figurative, semantic or evocatory value” (…), film and video makers, scholars and technicians can get to know their medium better as a result of (…) [a] disciplined attention to the inherent qualities of sounds” (Chion 1994, 31). Consequently, a dynamic attunement between the three modes of listening (and of being) will expand the awareness of the most sensitive and attentive spectators, and reveal the many interesting ways that a film’s soundtrack can be heard.
1.2.3. The embodied perception of sound
After having established three different mind-sets for listening to film sound which are to be intermingled and fused with each other in different moments of the film, we will now focus on the way in which audio-viewers receive and perceive the sound in a more physical or concrete way. If the act of switching between the modes of listening could be considered as a rather active perception (due to the inherent meaning-making process), there are some reactions experienced by the audience that would involve a much more passive (yet more embodied) perception of film sound. In regard to such passivity, it is worth noticing that sound is somehow “imposed to the ear”, since there are no “eyelids for the ears” (Chion 1994, 33) that would impede it from coming inside our body. This situation leaves the audio-viewer in a quite vulnerable position that ―depending on her openness and malleability toward the filmic material― could lead to a quite intense sensorial experience: by admitting the fact that “sound works on us directly, physiologically” (Chion 1994, 34), we can easily say that the audio-viewer is expected to imitate the loud breathing of an anxious character or even feel in her stomach the
23 In regard to the semantic message of sound, there have been interesting studies on the meaning of voices in cinema
and the construction of subjectivity through sound: scholars such as Kaja Silverman (1988), Mary Ann Doane (1980) or Robyn Stilwell (2001) have shown astute and critical observations drawn on psychoanalytic, feminist and phenomenological models.
24 In the same way as Merleau-Ponty had considered Husserl’s reduction an impossible but a fundamental
philosophical approach (1962, xv), this text does not deal with a specific method for obtaining a supposedly
“veritable” truth of sounds, as Chion intended. Instead, in the aspiring to such a reduced listening, the film analysis will focus more on the inherent curious attitude than on the transcendental method.
bodily pressure that is also being felt in the film’s diegesis, e.g. after an explosion or an earthquake. Therefore, and as many of the mentioned film phenomenologists had noticed, despite sound appearing as an invisible substance to our eyes, it actually consists of many tiny particles of matter that are able to (figuratively, yet physically) caress, scratch, stretch or punch our body, while we are in turn letting ourselves be touched (emotionally) by them. Such intense bodily responses will be very present, for instance, during the analysis of Un Lac.
Furthermore, there is a certain added value of film sound that is responsible for that surplus of meaning that the spectator bestows on whatever the image already carries in itself (Chion 2009, 466). Nonetheless, due to the unconscious synchresis (synchronism and synthesis) between sound and image, the spectator will think that the overall audiovisual meaning is coming from the image alone; such a psychoacoustic (mis)perception is explained by Chion with the notion of
spatial magnetization (2009, 491). In more practical terms, the added value is achieved through the
expressive choices taken by the filmmaker (and the sound designer) in regard to a specific sound effect, so that we can “see in the image what we would not otherwise see, or would see differently” (Chion 1994, 34). Regarding these powerful effects on the audiovisual perception, Chion has distinguished between the empathic and anempathic responses to music, occurring when the mood of the (heard) music and the (shown) actions are (or are not) attuned. During the audiovisual analysis of the case studies, all these peculiarities between sounds and images will be properly described in relation to the audience’s experience of the film.
1.2.4. The system of audition
The moment of wondering who is actually listening to a concrete sound, or how the audio-viewer perceives the acoustics of the diegetic world, are the type of matters encompassed in the film’s system of audition. Chion describes it as “the logic created by the compartmentalizations and porosities of listening in a film, and by the relationship the characters maintain with the sounds of which they are (or are not) the source” (2009, 492).
Firstly, the auditory compartmentalization creates a sort of sound boxes that are shaped by diegetic elements that somehow block the arrival of certain sounds to a character – e.g. glass windows or the loud music in a room can problematize the clarity of the acoustics. Such compartmentalization would arrive in different degrees to the audio-viewer’s ears depending on the narrative focalization – who is the focalizer and what is the focalized object? The term was coined by narratologist Gerard Genette to specify the perspective through which a character is presented, being this zero, external or internal (1988). In sound terms, these three categories would correspond respectively to an omniscient voice, the establishing sound of a scene or the subjective point of audition of a character. As Altman rightly says, the point of audition “promote[s] identification between audience and carefully selected characters” (1992, 251) and this will surely be an important aspect to take into account in the case studies.
Technical decisions that intend to share or isolate the characters’ perceptions are fundamental in films that pay special attention to sound. The mental comprehension of the sounds and images that are given or not given to us, leads the audio-viewer to wonder: “Who is hearing this?” or, “Am I listening to such sounds as an external listener or am I inside the subjective perception of some character, via a particular point-of-audition?” There have been several categorisations as an answer to such common questions. For instance, Bordwell and Thompson made up two categories for those sounds that appear inside the diegesis but are not equally heard by all the characters: on the one hand, the external diegetic sound is “that which we as spectators take to have a physical source in the scene” (2008, 284), and is supposedly heard by all the characters appearing onscreen; on the other hand, the internal diegetic sound is “that which
comes from inside the mind of a character; it is subjective” (2008, 284). Another possible category regarding this subjective acoustic perception of the character, was proposed by Chion with the internal sound, i.e., “a sound which, although situated in the present action, corresponds to the physical and mental interior of a character” (1994, 76). As opposed to Bordwell and Thompson, Chion does not engage with the concept of the diegesis, but he differentiates between two different types of internal sound. On the one hand, the noises and sounds whose source indicate a physical and rather “realistic” cause, are called by the French theorist
objective-internal sounds that have a direct physiological effect on the audience ―e.g. loud heartbeats
anticipating an extreme danger, or the intense breathing of someone having a panic attack25; on
the other hand, the subjective-internal sounds may describe the usual situation where the audience hears mental voices of some characters or past recollections presented by an offscreen voice over (Chion 1994, 76).
The second main element that is considered to be essential to the film’s system of audition is the so-called porosity of the sound. According to Chion’s definition, it refers to the degree of flexibility that exists between the real and imaginary acoustic spaces in a film; i.e. when the nondiegetic music develops a song that someone has started singing on the diegetic space. Another example of these aural confusions or porosities could be done by creating “a recognizable continuum among audio elements of speech, noise and music” (2009, 487). This can be achieved by experimenting with the pivot dimensions of the sound elements, which describe the smooth or abrupt passage between their pitch (a car horn and a trumpet “sung” in a close tone), rhythm (a typewriter’s noise becoming a musical percussion) and register (high or low sounds confusing music or speech with each other, as the screams emulated by Psycho’s famous piece of violin strings). Consequently, and related to the discussion of the internal perception of the characters described in the previous paragraph, the porosity and the pivot dimensions also contribute to the sharing of particular subjectivities. Especially when music comes into the subjective perception of a character, there are some mixed cases in which it is very difficult for the theorist to categorise under the restricted variables of diegetic (onscreen and offscreen) or
nondiegetic (e.g. external narrator or pit music). What happens when there is diegetic “music
framed by a pit music cue with ampler orchestration” (Chion 1994, 80)? In most film musicals, for instance, there is an ambiguous acoustic terrain where the diegetic worlds are much more flexible and allows reality to merge with fantasy: for instance, Dancer in the Dark will be analysed under the awareness of all these complexities, for it is a film where the internal subjective sounds and the diegetic instances operate freely without such rigid boundaries.
In the study of the awareness of sounds of the characters, there is one special observation that very much concerns this thesis. Among the various parameters that define the system of audition, Chion includes the presence of those characters which are differentiated from the rest by their special sense of hearing, such as “a hyperacousic character, a quiet one, an unconsciously noisy one” (2009, 493). In the case of the selected films, the huge contrast between the sound awareness of the protagonists and that of relatives or friends is of extreme importance so as to understand their individual perceptive worlds. Especially in the cases where the film persuades the audio-viewer to experience a similar perception as its characters, the latter are given a certain capability to communicate to the former the awareness of the surrounding sounds —i.e., sensory naming in Chion’s terms (2009, 493). Not only is important for the theorist
25 Such a bodily and physiological response makes even more sense when one conceives the act of listening as Michel
to recognise the characters’ verbalization of their acoustic perceptions, but also to infer whether the characters are conscious of the fact of being heard when they are doing a sensory naming.
Another element that helps to delineate the film’s system of audition is the appearance of technological devices. As David Lynch had demonstrated in the “Silencio Club” of Mulholland
Drive, the presence or absence of a “listening-machine” or a “sound-detection device” (Chion
2009, 493) can lead to diverse expectations and interpretations of the audio-viewer regarding the
who’s, when’s and where’s of sound. In fact, in The Color of Paradise there is a simple tape-recorder
that serves to replace someone’s physical presence by means of a recorded voice. The peculiarity of sound-recording technologies resides in the fact that it resonates in present tense in the ears of the characters and of the audio-viewers, while the recording has an inherent past tense implied, working like an aural flashback.
Last but not least, the amount of audio elements presented acousmatically in the film should be taken into account. Highly influenced by the theories of Pierre Schaeffer and the musique
concrete, Chion analyses with accuracy the so-called acousmatic sounds, which do not reveal the
sound source in a visual way (2009, 465); and it is precisely when something is not said or not shown when the audio-viewer starts questioning and finding a meaning from the available elements, whether aural or visual. The intriguing effect provoked in the spectator’s imagination in regard to the unseen source of sounds, makes it a very powerful technique for creating suspense or uncertainty; “In other words, acousmatization is a process whereby we are made to hear without seeing, after having first been allowed to see and hear at the same time” (Chion 2009, 465).
After having explained the terms and mind-sets that seemed relevant to study how the sensorial experiences of the main characters are shared (or not) with the audio-viewers, we can proceed to the analysis of the case studies.
2. Analysis of the case studies
As mentioned earlier in the Introduction, three films were selected so as to put into practice the ideas thoroughly explained in the previous theoretical chapter; both the phenomenological attitude and the film sound terminology will be incorporated and embedded in the film analysis. The aim of this section is hence to closely examine the acoustic dimension of the main characters’ perceptive worlds, in order to see (and hear) how the audio-viewer may incorporate (and embody) a different awareness of sound to their way of being in the world through a well-attuned sense of hearing.
Given the fact that the case studies are very different in both their ethics and aesthetics, the method of asking the same questions to all three films seemed the most adequate way of “letting the film speak by itself”, on the one hand, and having some common categories based on the main theoretical framework, on the other. Therefore, after a short introduction to the film — synopsis, about the director and main interest for this thesis26— every film analysis will be
structured by following these questions:
a) How does the film introduce the protagonist’s unusual perceptive reality, in terms of her hearing, sight and touch?
b) What role does each audio element play in the characters’ perception?
c) Does the film’s system of audition encourage the audience to “tune in” with the characters?
26In each case study, there will be images (screenshots) of the film accordingly numbered and referenced throughout
