Seeing, hearing, feeling: sound and the despotism of the eye in ‘visual’

anthropology.1

Paul Henley.

“The ear goes more to the within, the eye toward the outer”. Robert
Bresson.

Sound and experience

Any documentary film-makers who learnt their craft before the advent
of video will remember the thrill of synching up their first batch of
rushes. After the anxiety of waiting to discover whether there was
anything good at all in the film material as it came back from the
laboratory, followed by the sheer tedium of transferring reel-to-reel
tapes to 16mm magnetic tape stock and then edge-numbering it, the
moment when you finally threaded both sound and image track
through the pic-synch was genuinely exciting. For then, Lazarus-like,
the original experience of the scenes that you had filmed was
miraculously and uncannily restored to life, before your very eyes. The
images which on their own had been thin and shallow - even if they
had turned out much better than you had dared hope - had somehow
become thick, rounded, embodied. This thrill derived, I would contend,
from more than just an acknowledgement of the increased reality
effect of putting sound and image together. For there was something
more to it than a purely cognitive, intellectual appreciation of the
fidelity of this synchronous representation to the exterior properties of
the world. It was a reaction that was not so much cognitive as
sentimental, a reaction of pleasure and even in some senses of joy.

All this may seem rather mystical to the documentarist practised in

what Bill Nichols famously called ‘the discourses of sobriety’ 2 but it is a
reaction with which many feature film-makers would surely identify.
‘The most exciting moment’, Akira Kurosawa once remarked, ‘is the
1
This article originated in a presentation that I was invited to give at the workshop I
saperi dello sguardo, held at the University of Sienna, Italy in March 2004. I am very
grateful to the organiser Riccardo Putti, and to Cristina Grasseni for extending this
invitation to me as well as to other participants in the workshop for their kind
comments on my presentation. I am also very grateful to my colleagues Rupert Cox
and Rane Willerslev at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of
Manchester for encouraging me to think more seriously about the role of sound in
visual anthropology and for pointing me in the direction of a stimulating body of
literature. I regret that this article can only cover a small part of the ground that
these various colleagues have sketched out for me. Any deficiencies in this or any
other regard are, of course, entirely my responsibility.
2
Nichols 1991: 3 ff.
2 Seeing, hearing, feeling: sound and the despotism of the eye in
‘visual’ anthropology
- Paul Henley

moment when I add the sound … At this moment, I tremble’. 3 Many

other feature film-makers would appear to agree with the view of
Robert Bresson, as expressed in the remark quoted in the epigraph
above, that sound can have an impact that is somehow more visceral
than vision. In a much-quoted passage, Helen van Dongen, the editor of
the Robert Flaherty classic Louisiana Story, has described the intentions
underlying the cutting of the famous scene in which the boy witnesses
the oil derrick in operation at night and it becomes clear that the
Arcadian world of the bayou is confronted by a powerful new threat. The
italicized words are hers rather than mine:

Picture and [sound] track, to a certain degree, have a composition of their own
but when combined they form a new entity. Thus the track becomes not only
an harmonious complement but an integral, inseparable part of the picture as
well. Picture and track are so closely fused together that each one functions
through the other. There is no separation of I see in the image and I hear on the
track. Instead, there is the I feel, I experience, through the grand-total of
picture and track combined.4

More recently, Francis Ford Coppola has commented that "sound is half
the movie... at least"5, a view also echoed by David Lynch, who goes
even further, claiming:

In some scenes, it’s almost100%. It’s the thing that can add so much emotion
to a film. It’s a thing that can add all the mood and create a larger world. It
sets the tone and it moves things. Sound is a great ‘pull’ into a different
world. And it has to work with the picture – but without it, you’ve lost half the
film.6

In a feature film, a large component of the soundtrack is often music

that has been specifically composed and placed at the appropriate
point in the narrative to communicate particular meanings and/or to
induce a particular range of sentiments in the spectator. But in the last
analysis, music is neither more nor less than a series of sounds
organised in a particularly systematic way so as to appeal to the
listener’s senses. In recent years, feature film-makers have become
increasingly aware of the way in which sounds which are neither
musical nor verbal can also be systematically organised so as to
enhance both the connotative and experiential texture of a film for the
spectators. To achieve this effect, the production of most modern

3
Cited in Bordwell and Thompson 1997:350
4
See Reisz and Millar 1999:155
5
Cited in Bordwell & Thompson 1997:352
6
Lynch 2003:52
3 Seeing, hearing, feeling: sound and the despotism of the eye in
‘visual’ anthropology
- Paul Henley

feature films will usually involve a highly skilled ‘sound designer’

whose role is to combine all these different sources of sound into a
coherent, carefully balanced and seamless whole.

What all the above comments by feature film-makers point towards is

the conclusion that sound has a particularly important role to play in
provoking a sentimental reaction in the spectator that represents a
rather more bodily form of experience than the predominantly
intellectual, cognitive operation involved in the visual apperception of
a film. This conclusion, arrived at on the basis of practical film-making
experience, finds further confirmation in the views of those who have
considered the relative impact of the visual and the aural from a more
philosophical or psychological point of view. For example, in his classic
work of the 1950s, the music philosopher Victor Zuckerlandl contrasted
the experience of a world ‘out there’ that the human subject has
through vision with the experience given through hearing of a world
coming ‘from-out-there-toward-me.and-through-me’. More recently,
Walter Ong has argued that whereas vision places the observer clearly
outside of what he views, ‘sound pours into the hearer … you can
immerse yourself in hearing, in sound’. 7 For his part, the English-Irish
poet Tom Paulin has commented that sound has all manner of
‘ontological meanings’ for human beings since it is intimately
implicated with our ‘dwelling in the world, with our being’. Adopting a
phrase used by the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, he
urges us to resist the ‘despotism of the eye’ and remain open to the
particular experiential resonance that sounds may have for us. 8

In this article, I want to suggest that those of us who make films in

some sense under the umbrella of ‘visual’ anthropology should take a
leaf out of the book of feature film-makers and, liberating ourselves
from the ‘despotism of the eye’ that is implicit even in the title that we
give to our arena of anthropological endeavour, should pay much more
attention to sound as a means of communicating both experience and
meaning. For the truth is that, with one or two notable exceptions,
neither documentary film-makers generally, nor ethnographic film-
makers in particular have paid much attention to the use of sound, be
it in practice, in method or in theory. 9 If there is any discussion of
sound amongst ethnographic film-makers, it tends to revolve around

7
See Zuckerlandl 1956:368, Ong 1982:71, both cited in Willerslev, ms. p.12. See also
Feld 1996:96-97
8
Paulin 2003:36,47.
9
One notable exception to this generalization is Jeffrey Ruoff’s excellent article on
sound conventions in documentary film. See Ruoff 1992.
4 Seeing, hearing, feeling: sound and the despotism of the eye in
‘visual’ anthropology
- Paul Henley

either verbal or musical sound, both of which are generally viewed in a

negative light: words are often regarded with suspicion as being
somehow inappropriate to a medium that is supposed to be primarily
‘visual’ whilst music, unless it is diegetic, i.e. performed in synch by
the subjects, is often considered as being completely beyond the pale,
at best a sort of sense-dulling drug - ‘opium of the cinema’, as Jean
Rouch once described it 10 - and, at worst, a form of cultural
imperialism.

It is not, however, my intention to focus on either music or speech in

this article. Suffice it to say that whilst I must confess to sharing, for a
variety of reasons, the general aversion to extra-diegetic music, I would
firmly reject the tedious anti-verbal bromides that one so frequently
encounters in the literature on ethnographic film. It is certainly true
that to use film merely as a means of retailing information verbally - as
academics are all-too-prone to do on account of their text-based
background – represents a very unimaginative as well as highly
inefficient use of the medium. But film also has great potential as a
medium for the ethnography of all forms of speaking, particularly in
representing the immediate performative context in which speech acts
take place. For film can show, with a comprehensiveness and
experiential quality that goes far beyond anything that could be
achieved either by a merely textual transcription or by a sound-
recording on it own, how the meaning communicated by a speech act is
endorsed, enhanced, or, alternatively, undermined by a whole host of
paralinguistic features to do both with the performance of the speaker
(accent, speed of delivery, tone of voice, hand gestures, posture and so
on) and with the circumstances and manner in which this information is
received and responded to by the interlocutors. Whole social worlds are
created by a multitude of such individual acts of speech, and film, as
both an aural and a visual medium is well-placed to show how this
process of world-creation is effected.

These are issues that would certainly merit more extended discussion
elsewhere.11 But in this article, my concern will be neither with musical
nor with verbal sound but rather with what feature film sound designers
10
See Rouch 1995.
11
William Rothman suggests an interesting point of departure for such a discussion in
proposing a parallel between the arguments associated with philosophers such as
Ludwig Wittgenstein and J.L.Austin regarding the role that everyday language plays
in creating the conditions of any given form of human life and the prevalence of
speaking in the synch-sound based ‘cinema vérité’ approach to documentary film-
making that emerged at approximately the same time as this philosophical current.
See Rothman 1997:110 ff
5 Seeing, hearing, feeling: sound and the despotism of the eye in
‘visual’ anthropology
- Paul Henley

call ‘effects’, i.e. sounds which arise from the environment, be it natural
or human-made, in which the action of the film is taking place. In
effect, these ‘environmental’ sounds, as I shall call them, constitute
what one might term the ‘soundscape’ of the film, following the usage
first coined by R. Murray Schafer. My argument will be that by taking
greater care to record these environmental sounds in the field and by
handling them in the edit suite with the degree of attention that is
normally reserved for images, we should be able to improve the quality
of our films in three related ways, i.e. by ‘thickening’ the ethnographic
description on which they are based, by enhancing the spectators’
understanding and vicarious experience of the subject matter being
presented in the film, and finally, by refining the modes through which
the film-maker can propose an interpretation of the significance of that
subject matter.

Sound and empirical modes of documentary

Since the development of portable synchronous sound technology

towards the end of the 1950s, a number of different approaches to
documentary-making for ethnographic purposes have emerged in
Europe and North America.12 But all of them, albeit in varying degrees,
are predominantly realist with respect to their style and predominantly
empirical with respect to their rhetoric. That is, whether the film
purports to be a document or a documentary, ‘observational’ or
‘reflexive’, authored or ‘subject-generated’, the film-maker typically
seeks to convince the spectator of the validity of his or her
understanding of the subjects’ world by re-presenting evidences of that
world in a naturalistic manner.13 Where these various approaches differ
is in the degree to which the manipulation of those evidences in the
process of representation is considered legitimate and, relatedly, the
degree to which they require those manipulations to be flagged in the
filmic text itself. But given that all approaches involve the presentation
of aural as well as visual evidences, and that all involve some degree
of manipulation (even the most unsophisticated positivist film-maker
has to decide where to place his or her recording equipment and when
to begin and end the recording), then all would benefit from greater
attention to the process of both recording and editing sound, including,
of course, environmental effects.

12
See Loizos 1993, Piault 2000, Grimshaw 2001
13
See Nichols 1991: 134 ff for a discussion of rhetoric in documentary that is more
developed than is possible here.
6 Seeing, hearing, feeling: sound and the despotism of the eye in
‘visual’ anthropology
- Paul Henley

The approach to ethnographic film-making in which I myself was

trained was observational cinema, as formulated by Colin Young, David
MacDougall and others.14 A fundamental precept of this approach is
what MacDougall has called ‘a stance of humility before the world’.
That is, although observational film-makers would certainly not make
the naïve claim that their representations are objective in any sense,
or that the evidences that they present of the world have not been
manipulated for the purposes of analyzing and presenting them within
the necessarily artificial constraints of a film, they do aspire to remain
‘open to categories of meaning that might transcend the film-maker’s
analysis’. Crucially, this involves the recognition that the subjects’
stories might be more significant than those the film-maker might wish
to tell and, very importantly for present purposes, respect for the
‘distinctive spatial and temporal configurations’ of the subjects’
experiential world.15 This is an aesthetic posture, but it is also an
ethical posture and one that I have elsewhere argued is particularly
appropriate to anthropologist film-makers.16

The advocates of observational cinema have frequently commented on

how this aesthetic-ethical posture should translate into practical
strategies for shooting and editing images. Thus they have written or
spoken at some length on matters such as the ‘unprivileged’ camera,
the long take, the undesirability of using zooms or cutaways, the
disadvantages of tripods, and, more generally, of the importance of
allowing the audience ‘to see for itself’. In a relatively recent article
written in connection with this current Doon School project, David
MacDougall has gone somewhat further, underlining ‘the multi-
dimensionality’ of film as a medium, suggesting that this makes it well-
suited to an exploration of social aesthetics - defined in a broad sense
as 'culturally patterned sensory experience' – since it has the power to
evoke not only the visual domain of the subjects’ experience, ‘but also
the aural, the verbal, temporal and even (through synesthetic
association) tactile domains.’ As such, he proposes, film has the
potential to restore the material world in which culture is embodied to

14
See Young 1995, MacDougall 1997, and the various articles gathered together in
MacDougall 1998. I was fortunate to be one of four anthropologists to be trained in
documentary film-making at the National Film and Television School (NFTS) in the
mid 1980s under a scheme specially devised by the Royal Anthropological Institute
and funded by the Leverhulme Trust. At that time, observational cinema was the
‘house-style’ of the documentary department of the NFTS for not only was Colin
Young the head of the School as a whole, but the distinguished observational film-
maker Herb di Gioia was the head of the documentary department.
15
MacDougall 1998:156
16
Henley 2004
7 Seeing, hearing, feeling: sound and the despotism of the eye in
‘visual’ anthropology
- Paul Henley

that arena of study that ‘has long been inadequately called “visual”
anthropology’.17 But this relatively brief consideration of film as an
aural medium represents an exception that proves the more general
rule, namely, that in comparison to their extended reflections on
image-making, the leading observational cinema theorists have had
relatively little to say about the reproduction of their subjects’ acoustic
environment.

This is particularly true with regard to practical strategies for recording

sound in the field. In the 16mm era, when observational cinema first
developed, it was conventional for there to be an independent sound-
recordist who recorded most of the synch sound onto a reel-to-reel
tape-recorder using a highly directional microphone. Although there
was much talk of the need for camera operator and recordist to work
together, the practical reality was that most of the time, it was the
camera that led and the microphone that followed. In certain
situations, for example when the film-makers wished to capture their
subjects having a conversation in a very noisy environment, the
camera operator might frame the shot very tightly so as to let the
recordist get in as closely as possible with the microphone. But more
generally, the commitment of observational film-makers to the
principle of the mobile, hand-held camera meant that in order to
minimize ‘wobble’, the framing had to be relatively wide. As a result, in
order to remain out of shot, the microphone had to be further away
than was usually necessary to capture the optimal quality of sound.
Moreover, this way of working meant that not only the quality but also
the degree of complexity of the soundscapes that the recordist could
capture was necessarily limited. By concentrating on the all important
sound being emitted by the person or object that was the central focus
of interest of the camera, the highly directional microphone necessarily
neglected and minimized environmental sounds, often resulting in a
relatively thin, unidimensional sound-track.18

Nowadays, many ethnographic films, perhaps even the majority, are

shot on digital video by a solo director-cameraperson who records
sound through a combination of on-board directional microphones and
radio microphones. Compared to the analogue sound of the hey-day of
16mm, digital sound represents a great leap forward from a purely
technical point of view. But the quality and complexity of the sound-
tracks recorded by solo digital camera operators is, if anything, even
less than in the 16mm era since the on-board microphones generally
17
MacDougall 1999:16
18
See Ruoff 1992:224-225.
8 Seeing, hearing, feeling: sound and the despotism of the eye in
‘visual’ anthropology
- Paul Henley

lack discrimination, whilst the radio microphones attached to principal

subjects lack perspective. However, given the considerable advantages
that arise from working alone in terms of mobility and cost, not to
mention access,19 it seems unlikely that it will ever again become the
general practice in ethnographic film-making that there should be an
independent sound-recordist.

Given that this is the case, the only way that ethnographic film-makers
will be able to come close to rendering the soundscapes of the worlds
that they portray in anything like their true complexity is if they pay
greater attention to sound-editing. But in order to add significantly to
the aural quality of a film through sound-editing, it is necessary to
have a good range of sounds to deal with. So, even whilst still in the
field, the ethnographic film-maker should take care to record a wide
and diverse selection of wild-tracks of the environmental sounds that
correspond to each of the principal scenes of the film. Care should be
taken to record these at the appropriate time of day and under the
same circumstances, ideally and usually most conveniently just before
or just after the synch action has been recorded. Back in the edit suite,
subject to various technical constraints, these additional sound tracks
may be mixed with the synch tracks - once the latter have been
suitably filtered and balanced to overcome problems of perspective - in
order to augment and complexify the overall soundscape represented
in the final film.

This frank admission of the manipulation of the sound-track sits rather

uncomfortably with the empirical rhetoric not just of observational
cinema but with most contemporary modes of ethnographic
documentary-making. However what is potentially problematic is not
the fact of manipulation, since all documentary films involve
manipulation to some degree, but merely the extent of it. At the
simplest level, this editorial manipulation of the sound-track could
entail no more than making up at post-production for the inadequacy
of the sound recorded on location, i.e. interpolating the existing sound-
track with the environmental sounds that would have been there had
the recording conditions in the field been optimal. This process of
‘sweetening’ the soundtrack, provided that it does not involve
introducing sounds that were alien to or would never have occurred in
the original environment, would be considered contentious only by the
most puritanical of present-day ethnographic film-makers. Prior to the
development of portable synch sound technology, the entire
soundtrack of a documentary film would have been made up in this
19
See MacDougall 2001a.
9 Seeing, hearing, feeling: sound and the despotism of the eye in
‘visual’ anthropology
- Paul Henley

way from asynchronous sounds recorded in the field, even perhaps

assisted by some extra-diegetic sounds borrowed from an effects
library.20

Equally unremarkable for most contemporary practitioners would be

editorial manipulations of the soundtrack for the pragmatic purpose of
balancing discordances of volume or texture between the soundscapes
of adjacent shots. Sometimes this is necessary to give a certain sonic
coherence to all the shots within a given scene, whereas in other
instances, it may be required to ‘feather’ an abrupt sound transition
between the last shot of one scene and the first shot of the next, e.g.
in a cut from a busy street scene to a peaceful shot of the countryside.
This may involve simply fading synch tracks in or out, but it could
equally well involve the use of filters and/or the introduction of
additional tracks to create a bridge between discordant sounds. If
these adjustments are not made, the viewing of a documentary film
becomes a disagreeably syncopated experience. This form of editorial
manipulation of the soundtrack is therefore standard practice amongst
documentarists, including those who are the most dedicated followers
of the precepts of observational cinema.

But where the manipulation of the sound-track becomes more

debatable, but also more interesting, is when it is carried out not just
to enrich the description of the acoustic environment or to fulfill certain
functional requirements within the structure of the film of the kind that
I have just described, but rather to offer some sort of comment on the
action of the film by giving a certain meaning to a particular scene
and/or by provoking a particular range of sentiments in the spectator.
This is where sound-editing moves from being a merely technical or
functional process to being genuinely editorial and it is specifically in
this arena that I suggest that documentarists may have something to
learn from the sound designers of feature films.

20
Few anthropologist film-makers today would be as self-denying as Karl Heider who
in 1974, on grounds that to do so would involve an unacceptable degree of
manipulation, refused to use wild-track to support two films he released on Dani
agriculture and house building even though, as he acknowledges, this means that
‘the two films seem tedious and empty to some viewers’. See Heider 1975:7.
10 Seeing, hearing, feeling: sound and the despotism of the eye in
‘visual’ anthropology
- Paul Henley

Soundscapes and the ethnography of place

The study of what has been termed ‘auditory culture’ is an

underdeveloped field, even though there are signs that it is on the
increase.21 I suspect that one of the reasons why this area of study is
underdeveloped is because an adequate means of describing and
analyzing auditory culture has yet to be identified. Text is obviously of
very limited value for this purpose and although sound-recordings have
the merit of obliging the listener to attend very closely to the sound
itself, their value as ethnography is limited by virtue of the fact that
they are presented in isolation from the physical context in which the
sound is being produced. For if it is true that visual images are
experientially ‘thin’ for the spectator when presented without an
acoustic complement, then sounds, even when experientially rich in
themselves, do not have their full impact when presented without a
visual complement. Film, in that it allows both visual and aural
properties of a social world to be communicated in tandem, would
appear to be the ideal medium for developing an aurally adequate
ethnography. But if it is to become so, it is first necessary for the
‘despotism of the eye’ to be set aside, and for anthropologists to think
of film as being as much an aural as a visual medium. One arena of
ethnographic description that could undoubtedly be made more ‘thick’
through the combination of the visual and the aural offered by film is
the ethnography of place.

It is a commonplace of feature film sound design that the sound-track

can be used to communicate a sense of space to the spectator by
suggesting the presence of a sonic world beyond the relatively
constrained physical limits of the visual image on the screen. However,
as anthropologists, we are aware that the soundscapes in which
human beings live are very varied and that these soundscapes are
often culturally marked in very specific ways, either because they are
human-made in some regard or because certain of their features have
particular cultural significances to the subjects. This insight of the
sound designers can therefore be used by ethnographic film-makers to
evoke not just an unmarked sense of space, but rather a distinctive
sense of place, i.e. a sense of space that is culturally specific to the
particular location in which the film has been shot.

Amongst anthropologists, the ethnomusicologist Steven Feld has been

a pioneer in the study of the role of sound in creating a sense of place.
Since the mid-1970s, inspired by the World Soundscape Project of
21
See, for example, Bull & Back 2003, Rice 2003.
11 Seeing, hearing, feeling: sound and the despotism of the eye in
‘visual’ anthropology
- Paul Henley

R.Murray Schafer, Feld has been studying how the Kaluli, a subgroup of
the Bosavi people of the Southern Highlands in Papua New Guinea,
have used aural means to create a sense of place amidst the dense
rainforest which they inhabit. He has described how the Kaluli, in the
relative absence of visual variety in their environment, have developed
an acute awareness of its highly variable acoustic properties,
particularly of bird-song and insect noises, and has coined the term
‘acoustemology’, a portmanteau combination of ‘acoustic’ and
‘epistemology’, to refer to this ‘sonic way of knowing’. He has shown
how the Kaluli draw upon this acoustemology in the poetry and song
through which they give an embodied meaning to their experience of
living in that particular place.22

Regrettably however, although Feld is one of the leading

commentators on the works of Jean Rouch, he has not, to my
knowledge, produced a film about the Kaluli in which he explores these
matters.23 But the possibilities that the medium may offer in this
regard are suggested by Making Time, a film by Humberto Martins, a
Portuguese anthropologist studying at Manchester (Martins 2004).
Humberto shot this film during the course of doctoral fieldwork in
Tourém, a small village in Trás-Os-Montes, northern Portugal, close to
the border with Spain. Like many villages in the region, Tourém has
been subject to the wholesale migration of the younger population to
the towns and cities, sometimes even abroad. The older people remain
behind, or in some cases, have returned from their own migrations, to
see out their last days in this time-worn village of ancient granite
houses and cobbled streets, with only their livestock and their
memories for company. Everything about life in the village is subdued
and reserved, both visually and aurally. The predominant range of
colour in the village lies between grey and green whilst the
soundscape is particularly muted, notable for the almost complete
absence of any loud noises of young people behaving energetically or
the sounds of modern technology such as traffic-noises or the babble
of modern media.

22
See particularly Feld 1990, 1996.
23
On the other hand, Feld has released a number of sound recordings, including
Voices in the Forest, a 30-minute audio cassette released in 1987 featuring a dawn-
to-dawn aural day-in-the-life of a Kaluli village, and Rainforest Soundwalks, a CD
released in 2001 and devoted exclusively to natural rainforest ambiences. Both of
these works have involved the editing and mixing of field recordings and in this sense
represent, in Feld’s own words, ‘a cross between soundscape documentary and
electroacoustic composition’. See the discography below for further details of these
recordings. See also Feld (2003) in the bibliography for an example of his writing
about the work of Jean Rouch.
12 Seeing, hearing, feeling: sound and the despotism of the eye in
‘visual’ anthropology
- Paul Henley

Through presenting a series of vignettes from the everyday life of

certain members of the community, Humberto’s aim was to show how
the people of Tourém construct a sense of time through the manner in
which they relate their memories of the past orally and through the
enactment of certain ‘physical memories’, namely, time-honoured and
quasi-ritualized subsistence activities such as pig-slaughtering,
sausage-making and weaving wool. In all these activities, as in all their
daily interpersonal interactions, the movements of the elderly
inhabitants of Tourém are deliberate, measured and clearly practised
in a highly skilled way. They speak quietly, slowly and elliptically, with
long pauses between speech acts. It is through such rhythms, the film
suggests, that the sensation of time is established in Tourém.

The communication of this sensation of time passing slowly but

ineluctably is greatly aided by the environmental sounds on
soundtrack. For although the soundscape is notable for the absence of
loud environmental noises, it is also marked by certain subtle aural
presences. Most obviously, there is the ringing in the background of
the church bell which strikes, in reality, every quarter of an hour. In
the film, it is heard recurrently as a clanging, fractured sound,
punctuating conversations or echoing in counterpoint to the clatter of
cattle hoofs on the cobblestones, the occasional distant barking of
dogs, the crowing of cocks and the blustering of the wind. But the most
effective sound of all is the one that is the least obvious whilst being at
the same time the most present. This is the sound of constantly
running water, rushing and gurgling in the stone guttering along the
side of the streets, carrying fresh water from the mountains to irrigate
the meadows and the kitchen gardens around the village. It is
established early in the film when we see two women washing out
pig’s intestines in the water in preparation for making sausages.
Thereafter it remains as a constant, indistinct and undifferentiated
background sound subliminally working on the spectator to reinforce
the sensation of time as an irresistible stream bearing all of its sons
and its daughters quietly away.

Sound, meaning and experience in ethnographic film

In editing Making Time, all Humberto had to do was enhance certain

sounds and refine certain transitions with the aid of the sound editor.
But the editing of environmental sounds can also be used in a more
active way to communicate specific meanings. To illustrate the point, I
can draw on the example of another Manchester student film shot in a
13 Seeing, hearing, feeling: sound and the despotism of the eye in
‘visual’ anthropology
- Paul Henley

village in northern Portugal affected by the emigration of the young

people. This is Going Back Home by Catarina Alves Costa (1992), which
was made somewhat further north, in the village of Arga. Whereas
Making Time was shot in the winter, this film was shot in the summer
when the young emigrants return to the village for their holidays. This
return, which makes up the main body of the film, is framed by scenes
of life in the village before they arrive and after they leave. The sharp
contrast between the period when the emigrants are present and
normal life in the village is evoked in the film by both aural and visual
means.

Thus the scenes of life in the village when only the old people are
resident are composed of long shots and, most significantly for present
purposes, a muted soundscape of largely natural sounds, save for the
light tinkling of goats’ bells. In one striking image, an elderly
shepherdess, dressed in black from head to toe, takes a midday siesta
stretched out on a smooth rock in the dappled shade of a tree. The
shot seems to hold for a long time, given that the woman is not
actually doing anything, but aided by the subtle sound of a lightly
playing wind and insect noises, it has the effect of establishing the
somnolent pace of life in the village prior to the arrival of the
emigrants. This arrival is signalled by an abrupt change of rhythm: not
only do the shots become shorter, but the sound-track becomes more
active too. One of the first shots is of lithe young people going to swim
in the river to the sound of a scattering of electronic beats emanating
from a ghetto-blaster. Music, singing, dancing, then dominate the main
body of the film before the film returns, once the emigrants have left,
to the slow pace and muted soundscape of the first part of the film.

By using the combined effect of the aural and visual properties of film
in this way, Catarina is not merely aiming to communicate an
analytical, informational point about the difference in the quality of life
in Arga when the emigrants ‘go back home’. She is also seeking to do
something rather more ambitious, namely, to evoke a vicarious
experience of this difference in the spectators.

The potential role of sound in evoking experience in this way has also
been commented upon by the North American documentary editor
Tom Haneke. His films are noted for their dense sound-tracks but in an
interview with Gabriella Oldham, he says that he always seeks to use
these in a discrete way that does not distract the spectator even whilst
affecting him or her at the same time. As an example of this technique,
he cites the case of a film that he cut about the work of Mother Teresa
14 Seeing, hearing, feeling: sound and the despotism of the eye in
‘visual’ anthropology
- Paul Henley

and her order of nuns during a period of civil war in the Lebanon. At a
certain point in the film, there are two consecutive scenes of their work
with children. In the first scene, the nuns are shown going to collect a
group of children from a bombed-out local hospital in Beirut, whilst in
the second, Mother Teresa is shown looking after the children back in
the nuns’ shelter. Visually, Haneke explains, the two scenes were very
similar in that they simply showed nuns interacting with children. So in
order to differentiate them, he gave them very different sound-tracks.
In the first scene, he raised the sound-track so that it was very loud,
busy and echoing, almost ‘red-lining’, i.e. distorting, whilst for the
scene in the shelter, he kept the soundtrack very quiet. His aim was
not introduce variety for its own sake, but to evoke a vicarious
experience. For, as he puts it, “the soundtrack makes you feel the
effect Mother had on those children”.24

If they are to exploit the potential of film as medium of ethnographic

exposition to the maximum, anthropologist film-makers need to pay
much more attention to the potential of sound to communicate
meaning in both an experiential and connotative manner. John
Marshall has recently set a good example to all of us by involving a
highly skilled sound editor on A Kalahari Family, his recent five-part
series recapitulating his work over some fifty years with one particular
group of Ju/’hoansi living in the Kalahari desert (Marshall 2002).
Coupled with the restoration of the colours of the footage that he shot
in the 1950s, the new sound-track, mostly based on the post-synching
of wild-tracks recorded in the field, gives the material an experiential
impact that this same selection of footage with its earlier, technically
more primitive soundtrack, did not have.

However, it is arguable that of all the best-known ethnographic film-

makers, the one who has used soundscapes in the most imaginative
way in his work is Robert Gardner. From an aural point of view (and
perhaps all others as well), his most complex work to date is Forest of
Bliss (1985), a life-in-a-day portrait of the funeral ghats of the Hindu
holy city of Benares.25 In this film, sound is used in a relatively
straightforward way to evoke a strong experiential sense of ‘being
there’ amidst the almost overwhelming busy-ness of the narrow
alleyways, the temples and the crematoria sites of the city itself or, in
contrast, amidst the relative tranquility out on the river or in the
24
Oldham 1992:58-59.
25
At the time of its original release, this film provoked a heated debate in the pages
of this journal, see Vol.4, no. 2 (Fall 1988) and Vol.5, no.1 (Spring 1989). More
insightful commentaries on the film were published in connection with its re-release
on DVD in 2001. See particularly Gardner and Östör 2001, and MacDougall 2001b.
15 Seeing, hearing, feeling: sound and the despotism of the eye in
‘visual’ anthropology
- Paul Henley

surrounding countryside. But sounds are also used in a more

metaphorical sense to suggest abstract, connotative meanings. Thus,
for example, although sounds of the chopping or splitting of wood are
heard often enough in synch with the appropriate action in vision, they
are also used intra-diagetically, i.e. elsewhere on the sound track,
independently of any such visible action, as a sort of memento mori on
account of the association of wood with the funeral pyres.

Similarly, the barking or howling of dogs does not merely signify the
presence of a particular canine species prowling somewhere nearby.
For, in Gardner’s mind, the dogs that roam the shores of the Ganges,
scavenging amidst the ashes of the cremation pyres or gnawing at the
cadavers of paupers disposed of directly into the sacred river,
represent something more, namely, a sort of symbolic equivalent of
Cerebus, the hellhound who guarded the entrance to the Underworld in
Greek mythology. Meanwhile, the river Ganges itself is presented in
the film as the symbolic equivalent of the Styx, the river across which
all the dead are doomed to travel. 26 Through these associations, the
rabid curs that we see throughout the film are thus liminal creatures
guarding the frontier between life and death. This explains why it
should be that in the shot in which we see, from afar, and for the first
and only time, a Brahmin priest set fire to a funeral pyre, there is a
howling of dogs on the soundtrack when it is quite clear, given that we
are looking at the scene from an off-shore boat, that there could not
possibly be any dogs in the immediate vicinity.

The tolling of bells, the chanting of funeral chants, the swishing of

water and the squawking of birds are all also used throughout the film
in a highly metaphorical sense to emphasize and reinforce the
juxtaposition of the symbolic opposites of life and death, of sky and
water, of purity and pollution. But of all the aural metaphors used in
Forest of Bliss, undoubtedly the most striking is a strange, creaking,
somehow ominous sound which occurs mysteriously in an intra-
diegetic form a number of times before, finally, about 30 minutes in
the film, we discover that it is produced by the grating of bamboo oars
in the small rope lassos that serve as rowlocks on the boats bearing
the logs of wood downstream to the cremation grounds for use in the
funeral pyres. In a remarkably aware early review of the film, Michael
Oppitz called this acoustic device a ‘coup de maître’, suggesting that it
acts as ‘the musical leitmotiv of the entire film, a sound metaphor for
terrestrial suffering, pain, labour, and disharmony’. The most sustained
use of all is saved for the long final shot of the film in which a rowing
26
Gardner & Östör 2001:16-17,105-6.
16 Seeing, hearing, feeling: sound and the despotism of the eye in
‘visual’ anthropology
- Paul Henley

boat slowly disappears into the mist on its way to ‘the far side’ of the
river, associated metaphorically in the film with boundary between the
living and the dead. With this deployment of the sound, Oppitz rightly
comments, ‘Gardner strikes his best transcendental string’.27

Film as a medium of aural ethnography

In the various examples that I have cited above, we might note a

gradation from, at one extreme, Humberto Martins’ film in which
environmental sound is used primarily to evoke the experience of
‘being there’, through the examples of the films of Catarina Alves
Costa and Tom Haneke, in which environmental sound is used to evoke
experience but is associated with certain connotative meanings to, at
the other extreme, the example of Forest of Bliss in which
environmental sounds have become almost completely detached from
their physical source and are used in a highly symbolic, metaphorical
manner. Not all ethnographic film-makers will want to follow Gardner
quite so far in the manipulation of the sound-track of their films. But
surely all with a genuine sympathy for the use of film for ethnographic
purposes will applaud the attempt to push the potential of the aural
properties of the medium of film to its limit.

In this article, I have argued that ethnographic film-makers should free

themselves from the despotism of the eye and think of themselves as
working with a medium that is as much aural as visual. I suggest that it
is particularly important for documentary film-makers of all kinds to
bear this in mind now that sound synchronicity is automatic with video
and that many films are shot by solo camera operators. For, under
these circumstances, it is all too easy to treat the sound-track as if it
were merely along for the ride, as it were, without reflecting on the
distinctive contribution that it can make to the development of an
‘experience-rich’ ethnography.

Exactly how this proposition should be translated into a practical film-

making strategy in terms of such matters as the technical attributes of
microphones used, how they should be handled or placed on location,
or which particular techniques one should use in the sound-editing
suite, is something which deserves much greater scrutiny than I have
been able to give here, partly on grounds of space, partly on grounds
of competence. But if, collectively, ethnographic film-makers were to
give as much attention to these matters as they customarily give to
27
Oppitz 1988:212.
17 Seeing, hearing, feeling: sound and the despotism of the eye in
‘visual’ anthropology
- Paul Henley

issues of technique, methodology and style in use of the camera, or to

theories of editing images, then both the quality and complexity of the
films that we produce would, I contend, be greatly increased.

In this connection, I can think of no better way to end than by citing

Randy Thom, who was the sound designer of the Star Wars films and
who learnt his craft under Walter Murch, doyen of the metier. At a
lecture given at the School of Sound in London, Thom concluded with
the following remark:

I want to make one last statement about this ridiculous idea that film is a
visual medium, which still seems to be so popular. Sometimes they may not
be able to admit it, but all the great directors, or almost all of them, know
that that’s not true. It’s certainly true that our visual perception of things
commands our conscious attention more often than our aural perception of
things .... But that just makes sound all the more powerful, because we’re not
aware that it’s affecting us in the way that it is. 28

Although we work in a completely different arena of film-making, all

anthropologist film-makers would certainly do well to reflect carefully
and at length upon this statement.

28
Thom 2003:156-157.
18 Seeing, hearing, feeling: sound and the despotism of the eye in
‘visual’ anthropology
- Paul Henley

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Filmography

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Discography
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