EDITED BY

PHILIP BROPHY
© Philip Brophy 1999
First published in 1999
Australian Film Television & Radio School
PO Box 126 North Ryde N SW Australia 1670
www.aftrs.edu.au

Cinesonic: The World of Sound in Film.

Includes index.
ISBN 1 876351 08 X.
1. Sound motion pictures. 2. Motion pictures - Sound effects. 3. Motion
picture music. I. Brophy, Philip. II. Australian Film, Television and Radio School.
✓
778.5344
Printed by Soulhwood Press, Sydney, Australia
Design: Liz Seymour, Seymour Designs
 Introduction v
Contributors vi

PART ONE:
Issues in Film Scores and Sound Design
Composing With a Very Wide Palette 1
Howard Shore in Conversation
{Referenced films: Crash, Naked Lunch, Videodrome, Ed Wood,
Silence O f The Lambs)
Music for the Films of Joel and Ethan Coen 15
Carter Burwell in Conversation
(Referenced films: Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Blood Simple,
Barton Fink, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing)
From Analogue to Digital 40
Yasunori Honda in Conversation
(Referenced films: Macross —Do You Remember Love?, Ninja Scroll,
Tenchi Muyo In Love)

PART 2:
Sensations of Voice and Speech
i Scream in Silence:
Cinema, Sex and the Sound of Women Dying 51
Philip Brophy
(Referenced films:Bad Girls Go To Hell, Carnival O f Souls, The Exorcist,
1 Spit On Your Grave, Georgia, Ninja Scroll, Vampire Princess Miyu, Blue Steel,
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Twin Peaks)
Eavesdropping: An Aural Analogue of Voyeurism? 79
Elisabeth Weis
(Referenced films:Careful, He Might Hear You, Stella Dallas, Addicted To
Love, M*A *S*H, Klute, Another Woman, Godfather ILL, Red, Calendar)
Genre Talk 108
Sarah Kozloff
Red River, The Magnificent Seven,
(Referenced films:
Camille, The Awful Truth, The Godfather)
 Threads of Voice 129
Adrian Martin
(Referenced films: Carlito's Way, Antoine et Colette (Truffaut's episode of Love
at Twenty), Cruising, When a Stranger Calls Back, The Magnificent Ambersons)

PART THREE:
Excursions in Music and Modernism
Reelin' in the Years: Cinematic Documentation
of American Vernacular Music 149
David Sanjek
(Referenced films:Say Amen Somebody, Mississippi Blues,
The Search For Robert Johnson, Deep Blues, High Lonesome)
The Legacy of Modernism: Peer Raben,
Film Music and Political After Shock 171
Caryl Flinn
(Referenced films: Pacific 231, Mother Kuster Goes To Heaven, Lili Marleen,
The Marriage of Maria Braun, Power of Emotion, Kuhle Wampe, Yesterday Girl,
Our Hitler, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Chinese Roulette)
Sound Music in the Films of Alain Robbe-Grillet 189
Royal S Brown
(Referenced films: Glissements progressif du plaisir, L ’Homme qui ment,
L Année dernière a Marienbad, L ’Eden et Après)

PART FOUR:
Histories of Song and Sound
Ornament, Entrance and the Theme Song 213
Will Straw
(Referenced films: 12 Angry Men, Bachelor In Paradise, Kiss Me Deadly,
Teacher’s Pet)
The Raw and the Coded:
Sound Conventions and the Transition of the Talkies 229
Alan Williams
The Jazz Singer, Questions Indiscretes, The Singing Fool,
(Referenced films:
White Shadows In The South Seas, Disraeli)
Nickelodeons and Popular Song 244
Rick Altman
 Sound in the cinema is a beautiful mutant. It is visceral,
abstract, poetic, material, eventful, spatial, psychological, temporal,
narrational. It is greater than the ocular algae that swim within the
pictorial frame; it is more expansive than literate imagination
allows; it engulfs us in its audio-visuality.
As the deep oceans of the planet remain unexplored, so does the
world of sound in film exist as a deep, moist terrain, submerged by
the weight of literary and visual discourse. And just as film theory
and cinema studies shudder in crisis as to what to say about the
acceleration of cinematic effects over the past twenty years, the
soundtrack lies quivering - awaiting our critical exploration of its
neglected depths.
Nowhere near enough has been said about sound and music in
the cinema. Scarce utterance has been made of the weight of music,
the character of voice, the smell of atmospheres, the presence of
effects. Nickelodeons, silent projection, live accompaniment, radio
production, credit sequences, sound effects editing, post-dubbed
voices, folk musics, documentary soundtracks, non-Western and
non-European modes of narration - all are embraced by this
collection of essays and interviews.
I hope you find enjoyment, stimulation and even inspiration in
this slight trickle of writing from the unspoken fountain of noise
that is the film soundtrack.
Philip Brophy
May 1999
RICK ALTMAN
Author of The American Film Musical, editor of Genre: The
Musical, CinemafSound and Sound Theory/Practice. Professor of
French and Communication Studies, University of Iowa.
PHILIP BROPHY
Dkector/composer/performer. Author of series of articles in
The Wire (London) and Real Time (Sydney). Lecturer in Media
Arts, RMIT University, Melbourne.
ROYALS BROWN
Author of Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music.
Professor in the Department of European Languages and
Literatures, Queens College.
CARTER BURWELL
Film composer. Scores include: Fargo, Rob Roy, Kalifornia, The
Hudsucker Proxy, Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Barton Fink,
Millers Crossing, The Chamber, Jackal, Conspiracy Theory and The
Big Lebowski.
CARYL FLINN
Author of Strains of Utopia: Nostalgia, Gender and Hollywood
Film Music. Associate professor, Graduate Centre for the Study of
Drama, University of Toronto.
YASUNORI HONDA
Sound designer. Credits include Mermaid Forest, Violent Jack,
Urotsuki Doji, Vampire Princess Miyu, Ninja Scroll, Dangaio, Giant
Robo, Tenchi Muyo and Psycho Diver.
SARAH KOZLOFF
Author of Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American
Fiction Film. Associate professor, Department of Drama and Film,
Vassar College.
 CINESONIC vi

ADRIAN MARTIN
Author of numerous works on popular culture, including
Phantasms: Essays on Popular Culture and Sergio Leone's Once Upon
A Time In America.
DAVID SANJEK
Director of BMI Archives, New York and co-author of The
American Popular Music Business in the 20th Century.
HOWARD SHORE
Composer. Scores include Crash, Ed Wood, Silence o f the Lambs,
Videodrome, The Naked Lunch, Dead Ringers, The Fly, The Client,
After Hours, Philadelphia, Seven, Looking for Richard.
WILL STRAW
Author of numerous articles/essays/chapters on pop music and
culture. Associate professor, Graduate Program in Communic­
ations, McGill University.
ELISABETH WEIS
Author of The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock’s Sound Track,
co-editor of Film Sound: Theory and Practice. Professor of Film and
Head of Film Studies, CUNY Graduate School, Brooklyn College.
ALAN WILLIAMS
Author of numerous articles/essays/chapters on film sound.
Professor, Department of French and Program in Cinema Studies,
Rutgers University.
PART ONE:
HOWARD SHORE

rn
i ; :■ - ■■■■ : ■

^1 « 1 ;!- |i v- ••' ' ^■

A widely accomplished composer and orchestrator, Howard

Shore has composed the music for seven films directed by
David Cronenberg, many of which are ground-breaking
explorations in contemporary film scoring. Fusing Bernard
Herrmanns modernist, economical approach to the leit motiv
with an awareness of studio recording techniques, Shore has
defined a uniquely atonal style of psychological inquiry. His
themes —apparently simplistic, never obtrusive - do not
merely express emotion, but rather capture the often dark
resonance that hums deep within a character s psyche.

How did you get into composingfor films?

It was something I thought about while I had different careers.
I had a rock ’n roll career when I was young and on the road for
years. Then I did television in Canada and eventually the United
States, where I did Saturday Night Live. As I was doing that I
thought television was really not something I was going to stick
with. I had also done some music for theatre and had developed
ideas about writing pieces. I wrote them in my head but didn’t have
an avenue for them, so I thought film scoring might be a good way
to express some of my musical ideas: like, for example, the idea for
the score to Crash [1996] with the electric guitars, harps, prepared
CINESONIC: The W o rld of Sou nd in Film

piano and so on. If I had an idea like that, I didn’t know how I
could get to perform it, so I looked at films to do it. That’s how I
got into scoring music, through this sort of experimental level. The
early David Cronenberg films like The Brood [1979], Scanners
[1979] and Videodrome [1983] are all pretty experimental. I
thought of movies as being film scores. That’s what I was interested
in, so that’s how I got into composing.
Could you say something about your musical influences for Crash/’
I was certainly aware of the composer Toru Takemitsu who did
a lot of work with sound and electronics as the well as composed
music. That influenced me a lot in the sixties when 1 started
listening, on one hand to rock ’n roll and on the other to a lot of
avant garde material, so a bit by accident I started listening to
electronic music. He [Takemitsu] might have had an influence on
me to write Something like Crash because he was doing it many
years ago.
How do you and David Cronenberg work together? When do you
come in on one of his projects?
David and I work pretty close together. He sends me a script as
soon as he writes it. In fact, I may well be the first or second person
who gets his writing after he has completed it, and from that point
we start our dialogue about the film. His most recent film, Existenz,
is an original science fiction script. After he sent me the script we
talked about many things besides music and making movies, from
casting onwards. Once the shooting starts I always visit the set.
Existenz was shot in Toronto so I went up there and hung around
the set for a day to get the feel of it. We have some more talks about
the movie, but not so much about the music. That comes a little
later on.
After he finishes shooting he does his director’s cut and that is
where the process resulting from our early dialogue starts. I will look
at Davids directors cut and then we start formulating what we
might do. About a month later we do a spotting session where we
get inside the movie and talk about it scene-by-scene, and how we
might use the music in the scenes. When I started composing music
for Davids movies in the late seventies, it was like guerilla movie­
 C om p o sin g with a V ery Wide Palette

making because of their low budgets. We didn’t know what it was

like to have money to make movies, so we just did what we could
and created the work that we could within the budgets that we had.
Later we actually had money when we made our first studio-
financed picture, The Fly [1986]. It was a big symphonic/operatic
type score and we went to London to record the London
Philharmonic. After that we did a lot of orchestral scores: Dead
Ringers [1988], M Butterfly [1983], Naked Luncb[ 1991] - all done
with the London Philharmonic, and all fairly expensive recordings.
Not expensive for films in general, but for once we had sizeable
budgets to do what we wanted with orchestras.
When we got to Crash we were back to the earlier ways of
working. The smaller non-orchestral ensemble was built out of
necessity, because this time we couldn’t afford the London
Philharmonic. Once you go outside the realm of both the orchestra
and electronics - but still want to do something acoustically in
preference to using synthesizers and the like — you find some
interesting solutions.
For Crash, 1 found it was better to go with numbers, so instead
of using one guitar I used six guitars and so on. The original piece
was written for three harps, which still remain the backdrop in the
whole piece, and each pair of guitars functions like the
amplification of the harp parts, transposed up an octave. All the
electronics’ - the amplified sounds of the guitars, the delay units
through which they are playing - are applied to the guitars alone.
The guitars then perform a ‘harp sound’. When I recorded the
harps in the studio, I amplified them along with the guitars. So this
was a piece that was created in the studio using acoustic
instruments like harps, whereas the orchestral scores for Davids
films previous to that were all done live. Crash is like Scanners and
Videodrome, and Existenz follows along similar lines.
How do you conceive the relationship between image and sound
when you are composing music for a film?
Its a fairly intuitive thing, and not too intellectual. When you
look at a scene in a movie, there is a visceral feeling you can have,
particularly with Cronenberg. I sometimes watch the movie once
and then get so stimulated musically and creatively that I just go
CINESONIC: The W o rld of Sou nd in Film

and write a piece based on what I have seen. Naked Lunch was
certainly like that, and with quite a lot of David’s movies, my
process starts as soon as I have seen the movie.
From that point, a whole chain of events is set in motion which
is not so much about sound, but more about notes. Ideas for scores
originate compositionally for me: it’s not about what the sound is,
but about what the notes are and how should they relate to the
movie. Crash was written as a long piece that I analysed after I
wrote it so as to make it work in the film. This is opposed to the
method of looking at a scene and wondering what does this scene
need?’ and then writing 40-50 minutes of music to organize the
movie. There were certain pieces which were moved around
because I would hear them differently in the studio from how I
wrote them, or where I thought they should go. The opening
section which is used for the titles was originally written for a scene
where they recreate the Jayne Mansfield crash. But then once I
heard it performed and recorded, I thought it would be really good
for the opening of the movie, and another version of it was used for
the Mansfield crash.
So, to answer your question about the sound-image
relationship, I perceive it as a gathering process: you see the image,
ideas start to flow, and you should not restrict them in any way. I
just let it all flow and then, on a more analytical level, I try to figure
out what the ideas are. David writes in the same way, with a very
wide palette where everything is possible. We keep narrowing it
down, editing it until we end up with the score of the movie.
Actually, movies are about editing, which is generally a reduction
process. You have a lot of film that’s slowly made into a ninety
minute piece, and the score is reduced in the same way. Having said
that, I should point out that not all movies are the same. I’ve done
movies in Hollywood where it is a very different process. You look
at it in maybe a more traditional way, and you think about how to
use music in this scene or that scene, and the director may not be
as experienced as David Cronenberg, so you are dealing with
different types of things in different movies. Cronenberg has an
extremely creative sensibility which is the best situation that you
could have as a composer. I am lucky to have worked on so many
of his movies.
 C o m p o s in g with a V e r y W ide Palette

Does Cronenberg hand over the control of the music to you or is

some sort of collaboration involved?
He stays out of the way, and there are no disagreements as such.
He does the same thing with me that he does with actors, the
cinematographer, production people, and so on —most of whom he
has known and worked with for over twenty years. He just says
'that’s your area, you do that’. Most of the scores I’ve written have
gone straight into the movie, and sometimes he will say to me
afterwards you know, I didn’t really understand why you did that
at the time’. It might take him a while to get it, though that
happens a lot faster now. But what he will do sometimes is edit a
little bit, like a director or a good editor would do.
In Dead Ringers I think he changed four bars of the entire score.
In Videodrome he did not change a note. It was funny because I
recorded that score without him being present at most of the
sessions. I gave it to him and he put it in the movie, and I knew he
felt that it was strange —even for him. Another director would have
asked me to think about changing it, but not David. To his
complete credit he just put all the music in. He is a very intuitive
filmmaker; he likes to play with filmmaking, and he likes to edit
that way as well. I have seen him edit scenes and take out a whole
reel of a movie - he can be extreme like that - and then he might
put part of the reel back again. In Naked Lunch, I had written two
pieces for one scene and we could not decide between the two, so
we just mixed the two pieces together and we were happy with
them. That was the spirit of Burroughs with Naked Lunch: you
could do a lot of things like that.
I ’d like to know what kinds of music you listen to in your own
space and time? What are your preferences?
My wife thinks I’m not listening to music anymore. It’s hard to
listen because there is so much music coming at you all the time
and I do not really understand it. I am the kind of person who
does not want to listen to music in a restaurant because I don’t
really understand why I’m supposed to be listening to that. I’m
constantly telling people to turn the music off in cabs and
airplanes. I don’t understand why you have to have music when
you land on an airplane. So, I’m incredibly conscious of music all
CINES0N1C: The W o rld of Sou nd in Film

the time and I’m a quick study: I can hear something once and I
get it. I don’t need to hear it over and over again. I don’t like
oldies’ radio stations because I’ve heard it once, I’ve lived it, I
don’t need it. So I find myself mostly listening to new
contemporary music because I’m interested in what people are
creating with new music. I’ve studied a lot of nineteenth,
twentieth century music, so I’m particularly interested in what’s
going on now: Christopher Rouse, John Adams, and so on. I want
to know what people are creating now.
I m interested in the relationship betiveen sound design and your
work. How do you view that in relation to the music you write?
That’s a good question. Often it depends on the relationship the
composer has with the sound designer. Skip Lievsay — who has
done a lot of very good work with Scorsese, the Coens, and so on
- worked with me on Jonathan Demme’s Silence o f the
Lambs[ 1991]. We*first started working together on a documentary
by Diane Keaton called Heaven [1987], and there we devised a
method whereby we actually built the score. I had a sixteen-track
machine and we dubbed the score and the sound design on the
same sixteen-track. That was the ideal way of working. So when we
got to Silence of the Lambs we did exactly the same thing, and quite
often I would take my score to the studio on my twenty-four track
tape, and Skip would bring his twenty-four track tape and we
would lock them together and listen to them both and start
eliminating things. He’d say ‘I don’t need that because you’re doing
that’ and I’d say 'I see what you’re doing now, so I won’t even play
my cue there’ and so on.
Before we even got into the dubbing session —where we decide
on what sounds will be used for the final mix —we had everything
figured out. And in a way, that’s an ideal position. As a composer,
you do not want to be at a dubbing session with the sound designer
and the director hearing the sound design with the music at the
same time. Quite often the sound design might be 40, 50, 60
tracks. How can a director listen to 60 tracks and listen to the
music at the same time, plus try to understand how all of it fits
together? It can lead to disaster. So I recommend a unity between
the composer and the sound designer wherein they can figure out
 C o m p o s in g w ith a V e r y W id e Palette 7

what they are going to do. Sometimes its not always possible due
to distance and time, and now the schedules of movies are
incredibly tighter. But there are situations in which the relationship
between the composer and the sound designer works out very well.
In Crash there is a scene which takes place inside a carwash. I
constructed a musique concrete piece with the sound designer. I
took his sounds and built a piece around his carwash sounds.
How much music or how many scores would you be working on
at the moment?
I’m writing a piece now for piano and orchestra, and I’m writing
a few film scores, so I’d say maybe three at the moment. Besides the
fact that you are a film composer, let us say you were a composer and
you woke up every day and you said Tm a composer and I have to
write music’ - which is what people did for hundreds of years.
They wrote a lot of music, so why would you not write three or
four or five pieces a year, whether they were film pieces or for
concerts? I think that is probably what you would do if you were
writing music full time. Anybody who wrote orchestral pieces in
the nineteenth century also wrote chamber works, pieces for solo
piano or flute, and so on. If you look at the works of someone like
Takemitsu, he wrote 94 film scores in his life. He also created a
body of concert work that matches almost anything that has been
created in this century. He was not tired; that was simply what he
did, what he thought about all day. Ornette Coleman is the same.
If you look at the amount of music that he has created, it is
amazing —but then again, that is what he does every day. He writes
music every day.
You have obviously enjoyed a special working relationship with
David Cronenbergs but you have worked with many other
directors? Do you find it more difficult to work with them, are
some jobs more bread and butter work, or do you enjoy working
on any project that shows up?
Yes, I have worked with many different directors, but nothing
quite matches the relationship I have with Cronenberg. That work
constitutes some great, fantastic years. Composers like to work
with directors who do not get too involved in the music, and who
•
8 CINESONIC: The W o rld of Sou nd in Film

Sarah Jessica Parker and johnny Depp in Ed Wood

they can really trust. Tim Burton was wonderful to work with on
Ed Wood[ 1994]. He just loved anything I did. During the recording
sessions, I would want to give it another take and he would say no,
we got it, its great’. Composers like to work with directors who
have good ears and who know how to use film music without being
afraid of it.
Could you say something about the differences or restrictions
between concert music and film scores?
I have written 45 movie scores and I started to do it because, as
I mentioned earlier, it was an outlet for the things that I wanted to
do. I was in front of an orchestra three or four times a year, and it
gave me a lot of experience and knowledge about the orchestra and
about recording which you would not obtain otherwise. Now I am
applying that experience to longer pieces. They are not so different
from the film music that I write, but its a way to expand on that
experience. I’m not locked into a timing or a scene; I can create my
pieces with more freedom, and I can develop things a little
longer than I would be able to do with a movie. Im essentially
using all the techniques that I learned doing movie scores: studio
 C o m p o s in g with a V e r y W id e Palette

techniques, conducting, ail the writing and orchestrating. All of

which I have learnt from movie scores and which I’m now applying
to pieces that are much more personal.
Is it hard to fin d the opportunity to perform those concert pieces?
Writing film music is a commission, but the pieces that I am
writing now are purely for record. I do not really need the
orchestra, nor am I writing purely orchestral pieces. I am not trying
to go totally into the world of contemporary classical music; I am
just writing for record which is really what I have been doing all
along because all my soundtracks have been released on CD
I did a retrospective concert in Seville, Spain, a couple of years
ago. It went for two and a half hours and was with the Seville
Symphony and their choir. It involved quite a lot of music that
went back about eighteen years, and after I did that concert I
thought ‘there’s some pretty good music here’. I considered the
various pieces, thinking I could have done something really great
with this idea; this was a great piece for orchestra; this was a
wonderful string quartet; and so on. I could see what I was doing
but I was just treating it as commissioned film music. So what I
would like to do now is record my music, because recordings are a
pure form. In the twentieth century, that is all anybody has ever
done: compose records then play them live, or play them and then
think about making the record. Composing and recording are
intertwined like that. The retrospective piece written for Seville was
not a piece written for a concert: it was written as a set of fdm
scores after which I figured a way to do it live, so I am using this
same idea of intertwining composing and recording.
D id the location recordings of a particular film affect the final
outcome of your compositions?
Well, with the example I mentioned from Crash, the location
recording became the piece. I thought of it like sampling: I would
sample certain sounds and compose with them. For the score to
Crash I sampled maybe 25percent of it after I had recorded it and
manipulated it in the studio - you can hear it all on the CD. So
with the last few movies I did like Copland [1997] and The Game
[1997] I used a similar process.
10 CINESONIC: The W o r l d of Sound in Film

I actually stopped recording in a full orchestral context because I

had done so much of it. After fifteen years I felt I had reached a
point where I had done as much as I could in a live situation. O f
course, there is certain joy in just having an orchestra there and
conducting it: you do a take and it is finished. It is a wonderful
thing. But the technique I have been using since Crash is to record
part of the orchestra. I think of it like a big sound gathering session.
I will then go in and spend six or seven hours working with different
sections of the orchestra and then take it back to the studio and do
quite a lot of post-production work on the recordings. At least a
quarter of Crash was created after the initial recording.
A lot has been made recently about how over half o f the best­
selling albums in the US are movie soundtracks. Do you think
this is a good time for film soundtracks generally?
It is a good time for composers because its now easy to get a
performance of one s music because of what has happened with the
popularity of filmMnusic in general, and, say, Titanic [1997] in
particular. James Horner obviously benefited from the movie and
the score, but I think it has had an effect on the whole business of
film music.
For somebody like me who is on the fringe of it, this is okay
because I am not trying to do something on such a mass and
popular level. Yet this success of film music filters out. The record
companies are now interested in film composers so, as somebody
who has had experience in that field, if I say I want to do a piece,
there is some interest. If you were in the recording business I think
you would probably want me to keep on doing something because
its perceived that people are interested in film music. Whether its
true or not I don t know but the interest from huge record labels is
currently there.
Can you outline the collaboration between yourself and Ornette
Coleman for Naked Lunch?
Ornette Coleman made a recording with Robert Palmer in the
sixties in Joujouka, Morocco called Midnight Sunrise. He went up
into the mountains in Morocco outside ofTangiers and recorded
with a group of about 18-20 musicians known as the Master
 %
C o m p o s in g w ith a V e r y W id e Palette

Musicians of Joujouka, who are now very popular and make their
own records. Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones also did a record
with them around the same time. So, when we started to do Naked
Lunch, David and I thought of using some jazz. I scoured the book
for jazz references and there was very little in it. Burroughs talked
about ‘cocaine bebop’, but there was not too much that you could
really latch onto. So I asked David to ask Burroughs what did he
listen to, and it turned out that he had conventional taste. He liked
Stan Getz, stuff like that. So I said to David, ‘Well, I don’t know,
Stan Getz in Naked Lunch is not going to do’.
But I kept thinking jazz. W hat can we use? So I thought it has
to be bebop: it comes from the fifties - the birth of bebop - so that
would be Charlie Parker. It has to be Parker, what else can it be?
So I got a set of recordings made by Benedetti: a famous Italian fan
of the music who had a wire tape recorder at the time and who
would frequent the jazz clubs in New York and stick his mike in
front of Parker whenever he played. In fact, he would just stick the
mike in front of him and whenever anybody else played he would
stop recording to save tape! The tapes are now available on CD
called The Benedetti Tapes and they are fantastic recordings of
Parker playing in clubs. But because of the nature of the
recordings you do not hear much else beside Parker’s playing on
this mono wire tape recording.
So I started playing around with those tapes. I wrote material
around the Parker pieces which themselves are very fast, with his
notes all moving very quickly. My material ended up being these very
slow tangos which, when played behind the fast Parker solos,
sounded interesting. But I kept trying to figure out what would be a
fusion or a mix of jazz bebop and Moroccan music. The only thing
I could think of was Ornette Coleman s Midnight Sunrise, so I played
it to David and he said ‘That’s the interzone national anthem’.
So then I thought about taking the Parker solos from my multi­
track sketches and replacing them with Ornette Coleman. I knew
Ornette from when I booked him on Saturday Night Live. I was very
young at the time —a real fan of Ornette, actually —and he said to
me that week ‘I want to produce your show band’ (that is, the band
that played on the show each week). I was honoured, but couldn’t
believe it. It didn’t make sense to me, so I didn’t think much of it.
 «
1 2 CINESONIC: The W o r l d o f Sound in Film

Fifteen years went by, and I called Ornette in Amsterdam, and it was
like we had just talked yesterday. I told him I was doing this movie,
Naked Lunch, and asked him if he wanted to play the Parker stuff,
because I knew that he really knew the Parker material. Charlie
Parker was Ornette’s muse: it was the Parker music that got him into
music; it was when he heard Parker that he got his mother to get an
alto out of a pawn shop in Texas. He said that the first day he played
that alto, he sounded exactly like the way he plays now He said it
was tactile, and if you watch and listen to Ornette, you can see it
really is, the way he holds it and the way his hands move.
So, I said Are you interested in doing this?’ He said ‘Yeah’. I said
‘Okay I’m going to write the score, lets meet in London a week
before the recording; I’ll start to give you some music and I’ll tell
you what I’m doing’. We met In London, and after many meetings
back and forth in hotel rooms, I asked him ‘Do you want to re­
record these Parker tunes?’ He said ‘Let me think about it’. The
next day he called me and said ‘Mmm, no, I dont think so. They’re
too good. I could never do them better than that5. But he can play
them which is something that hardly anybody knows. He played
those Charlie Parker solos for me at my hotel room note-perfect. He
said ‘Insteacl, I’ll write some bebop tunes’. And he did, and those
are the tunes that are in the movie and on the record.
He did them with a trio at my suggestion. I didn’t want piano or
any electronic or electrical instruments, so he did it with a French
bassist, Barre Phillips, and Denardo Coleman played drums. I
booked the London Philharmonic and we recorded Ornette live. I
had Denardo in a sound-proof booth. Ornette taught Denardo how
to play - he’s an amazing jazz drummer. Ornette would be giving
really slow, beautiful tempos to the band, and Denardo would be in
the booth going crazy, just burning, playing double triple time. I fed
a line of Denardo s drumming to Ornette on headphones, because
he plays to the drums, as any jazz player would. If he played with
the orchestra you would hear very slow melody lines, but I had to
have him play the fast beat. He responded to Denardo s playing and
matched his own playing to the tonality of the orchestra.
What happens if you come across a scene where your gut feelings
tell you that no music is required, but the director insists on some
 C o m p o s in g w ith a V e r y W id e Palette

being there? How do you creatively deal with that type

o f situation?
It is a real struggle. When you are trying to score a scene that
you do not think needs music, it has to be a struggle. There are so
many different situations in front of you when you are composing
music for a film, and so many different ways to approach them. If
you have a director who insists there should be music in a scene, its
best to try and write music for the scene. Then later you might be
able to successfully suggest that the scene does not need that music.
All in all, you have to go along with what is asked of you.
I learnt quite early on in spotting sessions with directors that it is
best just to listen to what they say and try to sort it out later, because
if you try telling him that this music is needed in a particular scene,
you might have picked a scene with which he has a problem due to
bad acting or bad writing. In fact, directors usually complain about
the writing, and ponder: 'Maybe music could help it here?’
Could you tell us about the music you did for Ed Wood? What
instruments did you use and how did you create the score?
Ed Wood was a fifties project and a real labour of love for Tim
Burton. So I wanted to recreate music from the era, to retain that
flavour, and I decided to use instrumentation typical of the jazzy
exotica of the period. I thought that a theremin simply had to be
incorporated, but I needed a classically trained theremin player who
could read the parts I had written. It transpired that the only trained
theremin player was Lydia Theremin — the daughter of Leon
Theremin who invented the instrument. But she lived in Moscow.
I told Tim this, and he agreed to get her into a studio to record the
session. I certainly loved him for that. One of the great things about
working in Hollywood is that you could come up with something
that wild and it was okay. I got used to it, you know.
So the production people arranged visas —it is not that easy to
get a player from Moscow to come to London, where we were
doing the recording sessions. Anyway, we had started the recording
sessions and Lydia still had not arrived, so I had hired somebody to
cover for her - Cynthia Miller, who had played the ondes martenot
on some Elmer Bernstein scores in the fifties. Now the ondes
martenot is a keyboard instrument with a ribbon strip which you
CINESONIC: Th e W o rld of Sound in Film

press with your fingers. It sounds like a theremin, but it is kind of a

cheating, because the theremin you play without actually touching.
So Cynthia did three sessions before Lydia arrived. I figured that
if Lydia did not show up I would at least have the ondes martenot
on the score. But I kept assuring Tim that Lydia was coming, that
she was going to make it, and I even kept showing him pictures of
the theremins. But I showed him pictures of the models RCA made
in the twenties, huge things with dials and rings, with people
playing them and everything. He was amazed with all the designs,
because he loves those sort of things. Finally, through a series of
motor cycle couriers across East Germany, Disney managed to get
Lydia to London. So she showed up for the last session in the studio,
alone with just a knapsack. Tim looked at her and he was obviously
thinking ‘Where s the theremin?’ and Lydia goes ‘Here it is’. She
takes it out of her knapsack. One of her uncles had made it for her.
It was a very fifties-looking thing, like a cross between a radio
receiver and a hot plate! Tim looked at it, then he looked at me and
I thought ‘Oh, God’ - and then after a second he said ‘That’s cool!’
So she did a day of recording with the orchestra live, and then
we went to a studio on the other side of London and recorded a lot
of solo stuff with Lydia. We loved her; she was wonderful. And she
could really play - she is a virtuoso and maybe one of the best
theremin players in the world. She tours and writes her own pieces
for theremin and orchestra, and she also plays the ondes martenot.
One other thing about Ed Wood. It is essentially a Latin score
and it has a very big percussion section. There are nine
percussionists on the score —and they are all very square. To me it
is the most wonderful part of the score because that squareness is
the real ‘Ed Wood’ part of it. I used a very small orchestra to try to
capture the sound of film music you would have with those
Universal Studio orchestras from the fifties. I really tried to
replicate that Universal sound by organizing the orchestra in a very
special way and even miking it in a very special way.
The music of the fifties in America is so interesting to me —the
convergence of Cuban music with American jazz, the great
creations of Bernard Hermann. My score is dedicated to one of the
masters of that period, Henry Mancini. In all respects I realize that
this was a great opportunity to express my ideas about this
particularly wonderful period of music and filmmaking.
CÁRTER BURWELL

si rS
I!

The relationship between composer Carter Burwell and

writer/directors Joel & Ethan Coen is rare. Burwell s music —
chameleon-like, eclectic, unexpected - perfectly matches the
many genre-bending excursions of the Coens’ projects. Often
working at a meta-textual level, the Coens’ films are acutely
aware of an audience being conscious of the story-telling
manipulations that drive contemporary cinema. To this end,
the Coens’ use of Burwell s music always seeks ways to side­
step conventional methods of ‘emotionally cueing’ an audience
with snippets of mood music. Burwell s prime eclecticism lies
in a strange mismatching, whereby his cues at first appear to
not fit’ —but eventually reveal a depth that is rooted in the
complex story-telling craft of the Coens’ narratives.

THE PROCESS OF FILM COMPOSING

I’ve known Joel and Ethan Coen for a long time. Their first film
was my first film. It’s that simple. Their films are good for
discussing the types of choices a film composer has to make, and
they range over a wide variety of musical genres. For people who
are not very familiar with film scoring, let me go through a little of
the process involved.
CINËSONIC: The W o rld of Sou nd in Film

First, Joel and Ethan write a script and give it to me. We’ll talk
about what type of music might be appropriate, a conversation
which continues through the shooting process. I usually go and
watch some of the shoot —partly to see what visual environment is
involved. I don’t really start writing until they finish shooting. Prior
to that, the most specific we’ll get about the music is to consider
the type of orchestra that might be involved, so that they can
budget it properly. Once they have a rough edit of the film, we have
a meeting called a spotting session where we decide on the most
elemental level where each piece of music begins and ends.
O f course, more important than that is the question of what the
music is actually supposed to say: what the point of it might be.
One of the most enjoyable things about working with Joel and
Ethan is that they don’t have any preconceived answers to these
questions. Occasionally they might have an idea about the scale of
the music, but I don’t think they’ve ever come to me and said ‘Yes,
this is the type of music that we need’. In fact, that is more typical
of situations in which a director is uncomfortable with some aspect
of the movie. Such a director wilksay ‘This scene really needs this
because the chemistry between the actors didn’t work’ or ‘It really
needs this because we couldn’t get the camera shot I wanted’.
Conversely, Joel and Ethan are very thorough, so it is rarely the case
that when the film is finished, something they wanted has not
already been taken care of.
After the spotting session I go back and I do some writing.
Initially, I try to think for myself what the music needs to do for
the film: what it can contribute, and how I can translate that into
melodies. I’m a bit of a sucker for melodies, so usually there are
melodies involved — but at this early stage I’m also considering
what ‘sound palette’ I’m going to use. I’ll use synthesizers to put
together a sketch of my ideas - partly for Joel and Ethan’s sake, or
any directors sake, so they can come and hear what I want to do.
This is because its terrible to be at a recording session with an
orchestra of a hundred musicians and have the director hear the
music for the first time and say ‘That’s not what we’re talking
about’. Also, using orchestras is very expensive on a minute-by-
minute basis. I always produce synthesized versions of my musical
ideas —not only for the director, but also for myself. It’s a great
 Music fo r the Films of Jo e l and Ethan Coen 17
luxury to use synthesizers and samplers for orchestration. I can hear
a version of what the score is going to sound like before conducting
a real orchestra. O f course, most of the synthesizer and sampler
sounds will be replaced by real humans playing real instruments,
which will always be an improvement. As good as synth demos are,
the real thing always sounds a lot better. So, finally after these
periods of discussing, sketching, testing and orchestrating comes
the recording session.

SOLVING PROBLEMS AND ANSWERING QUESTIONS

In order to discuss the choices a composer makes, I’m going to
look at each of the Coens’ films in terms of problems and how they
might have been solved. Solving problems in film composing is
part intuition and part intellect. For everyone who does something
like this, it’s mostly their intuition which tells them what is
appropriate. I’m not in a position to theorize about what I do, nor
would I want to. It would be inappropriate because there are people
paid to do that, and it would distract from my real job, which is to
be intuitive about composing.
When I see a film, I’m usually thinking about what I would
like the music to do — what I would do to make it a richer
experience for me, make it somehow more dramatic or
emotional. But once I’ve decided what that should be, it becomes
an intellectual problem. This is what I think the music should do
in this scene, but how will I achieve that while faced with
constraints like the film’s budget and schedule, the actual piece of
film I’m looking at, and my own abilities as a composer and
conductor? So, intellect takes me through that maze to find a
solution to the question that was really an intuitive one at first.
The types of question that I answer in these situations are: what
kind of melody is required? or, should my composition even be
melodic? Should it just be sound construction integrated with the
films sound design and editing? If melody is needed, then what
would be its instrumentation?
To some extent instrumentation is dictated by budget, but as
composers like Howard Shore and I now work on a lot of
Hollywood films it is not difficult for us to get a symphony
CINESONIC: The W o rld of Sou nd in Film

orchestra if we want. However, that does not necessarily mean it is

appropriate. A symphony orchestra is a wonderful instrument, but
I find it much more interesting and fulfilling to have smaller
ensembles and choose quirky instrumentation: what Howard Shore
did with Crash [1996] is a perfect example of that.
Another composing question I search to answer is: to what
extent will my score either refer to the picture or live in a world of
its own? Some of my scores seem to be in a world separate from
the picture. I don’t think they really are separate from the picture,
but often they arent referring to the action on screen. This is
partly because I am personally not concerned with the incidents
going on. I watch the film plot, but its one of the last things that
interest me. If someone says tell me the story of a film, I vague-out
after the first sentence: its just not interesting. So the question for
me as a film composer is: are there places where the music really
needs to refer to the film? O f course I’ve worked on other
Hollywood films where music is constantly referring to the action,
the characters and the plot situations, but with Joel and Ethan I
have the pleasure of not doing that. Thg work I’ve done for their
films contains moments where music, having ignored most of
what is happening in the film, suddenly begins to pay attention to
the action on-screen. It has an interesting effect.
Yet another question I often grapple with is what should define
the scores musical themes - to what should I attach them? Each
character can have a theme. Certain situations can have themes.
Parts of the storyline can have themes. Typically in Joel and Ethans
work, I do attach themes to characters because their writing is very
character-oriented. Often their films will simply have one or two
characters, and you see almost the entire film through their eyes. So
most of my composing for their films will be based around a theme
that attaches to character.
The Coens central character is typically a relatively normal,
average person, without any extraordinary qualities, who finds
himself caught up in extraordinary circumstances which are
generally of a tragic and cruel nature. Pathos, then, is one of the
theatrical effects that the music is required to deliver. And, at the
same time, the Coens movies are almost always comedies on some
level, and by far the most interesting aspect of what I do is that it
 Music fo r the Films of Jo e l and Ethan Coen 19

has to be both of those things.

On the subject of comedy, the Coens’ films are often referred to
as ironical. I don’t think this is true for any intellectual or objective
reason. The reason Joel and Ethan and I get along is simply because
we view life that way. The first time I saw footage for Blood Simple
[1984], I went home and wrote some melodies and brought them
in the very next day. Joel and Ethan liked the music I composed,
and ever since then it’s been a seamless collaboration. We see life in
a similar way, which is to say that the paradoxes in life make it so
much fun, and the horrible things in life are what makes life really
funny. So, the irony in the work is not there for any intellectual
reason: it’s just the way we see life.
But when this type of ‘irony appears in music, it also has an
additional effect, in that the music is telling you something
different to what you are seeing on the screen. It tells you that
something is happening which does not meet the eye. Yet because
music is such an abstract art, it does not tell you what that more’
is. That’s a little unsettling - which is another typical adjective that
we ascribe to the music in Joel and Ethans movies.

BLOOD SIMPLE
Blood Simple was originally mixed in mono. It was a very low
budget film so we could not mix it in Dolby stereo, and Joel and
Ethan could not afford some songs they wanted to be coming out
of the jukebox. Recently, however, October Films agreed to
subsidize a remix of the film. Amazingly, we found in a vault
somewhere the original twenty-four track master of the music, so I
was able to do some sort of stereo mix. There will be a laser disc
and a DVD of the movie soon, probably accompanied by a limited
theatrical release in some cities in the States.
In Blood Simple, the themes are attached to neither the action
nor the drama - not even to the characters. They float freely, and
I think it is important that they do not attach to any of those
things, and that the music remains very repetitious, relentlessly
repetitious. Hopefully this gives a sense of a mechanism that is
unwinding but outside the reach of the characters. No matter
what they do, things don’t change, just as the music does not
CINESONIC: Th e W o r l d of Sou nd In Film

change. Both music and characters are in some sort of machine

that will unwind of its own accord.
Another effect of repetition is its inevitable implication of
tension: the repetition of a melody leads you to wait for its end.
You know that it will not go on forever, so there is something about
finally hearing it change that is quite striking. This approach is used
for a cue in Blood Simple which we called ‘The Night of the Fans’.
There are three characters caught within a love triangle: the
husband, played by Dan Hedaya, staying up late at the bar he
owns; his wife, played by Fran McDormand, who has left him and
is at this moment staying with another guy, played by John Getz.
The cue covers a nighttime scene and there are ceiling fans of sorts
in all three locations. The theme of the fans and the music gives the
idea that they are all thinking about each other, even though they
are in different spaces.
The original idea Joel and Ethan had for the score was that it
would all be electronic. There would be bits played on piano but
they wanted it to be generally cold: warmth is rarely part of Joel
and Ethans scheme for any of their movies. It is not something
they consciously think about; it usually only comes about when
we’re working on the music. Yet it is something I feel I contribute
to their films for better or worse, and I think one of the better
things my music does is draw an audience into situations that they
otherwise want to avoid. Like being buried alive (as in Blood
Simple). Also, I think that due to the Coens being such technical
masters of filmmaking that, again, ‘w armth’ can get you past that.
It can mitigate the cool perfection of the frame. Not unlike some
of Hitchcocks work and the scores provided by Bernard
Herrmann. The Coens’ fdms look so perfect it can give you the
impression that there is no emotion there.
Another cue from Blood Simple extends this idea of repetition
further. Relentlessness, once it has been established, can then be
subverted for new purposes. The same theme from the ceiling fans
sequence plays again much later in the film, when John Getz starts
his car to leave after having buried Dan Hedaya alive. The cue plays
briefly and is then interrupted as his car engine stalls. It has a
striking effect. Whether you like it or not is another question. You
could think that kind of self-consciousness is just snide or funny,
 Music fo r the Films o f Joe l and Ethan Coen 2 1

but I like it. Blood Simple is alter all a snide film and it has got some
moves that are extremely self-conscious. One such move is when
the camera tracks down the bar: it gets to this drunk slumped on
the bar —and then simply goes over his slumped body. Admittedly
Barry Sonnenfeld was their camerman, so those moves are almost
inevitable. But what happens in the cue where the music 'stalls’
with the car engine is that the music suddenly, and for the first
time, decides to pay attention to the film action. This moment
works as a joke and lightens things when you would least expect it.
It tends to diminish the drama of what’s just happened - a man
being buried alive - rather than heighten it, and that kind of
undercutting is something that we almost always do. And it often
infuriates the audience.

Questions
That idea of the relentless music —it seems so inevitable in the
whole film. Whose idea was that? Is that something that you came
up with from seeing the film or does it originate from a plan the
Coens had at the beginning?
If Joel and Ethan had any plans about the music, I didn’t hear
about them. This is the first film that they made and they were
encouraged to try to hire a composer who had some experience in
the field —which I certainly didn’t. So they had to interview dozens
of people until the producers were satisfied that they had exhausted
them and still wanted to hire me. But, no, they never expressed any
ideas like the use of relentlessness and so on. That was my idea; it
is also my taste. If I had played to the action with my cues, I think
Blood Simple might have been categorized as a B movie, because
that is the type of story it is, ie, a love triangle that goes bad. The
tagline for the movie when it was first released was ‘Breaking up is
hard to do’. It was undistributed for more than a year until finally
the Toronto Film Festival picked it up and it got a good response
there. Then the New York Film Festival picked it up, so people
stopped thinking of it as a bad thriller and started thinking of it as
a good art movie. I saw it at the New York Film Festival, where it
was taken very seriously. And then it started playing midnight
movie shows in New York and I saw it several months later after it
CINESONIC: Th e W o r l d o f Sound in Film

had been there for a long time. There the audience was just
laughing through the whole thing. Screaming and shouting out the
lines before that character would say them, which I think is the
more appropriate response to the film.
I know I am not answering your question but ...yes, the
relentlessness was my idea, although I would not say I
intellectualized it at the time I was doing it. It just felt right.
To what extent was improvisation a big part in that sequence -
like a hands on approach to something sonorized and
written down?
Well, that brings us to a painful point which is that, back when
we did the film, neither Joel nor Ethan nor I nor anybody we knew
understood anything about how to synchronize music with film
during the recording process. So, we would time the scene with a
stopwatch and say ‘Well, I guess we need three minutes and twelve
seconds of music here’. I would then sit down at a piano and play
three minutes and twelve seconds of music. In situations like the
stalling car engine where the music actually does halt, I had to set
a metronome or something to make it work out right. In other
cases, like the ceiling fans cue where the music just sort of fades
away, I could just play forever as it didn't matter so much.
But there is no real improvisation in Blood Simple because I
played all the instruments. It was not as though there was a band
playing together; it was just me and the tape. Other pieces in the
movie get involved in electronic processes. There are the pieces that
have tape loops or have ...voices played backwards. Actually my
favourite piece in the movie involves one of A1 Lomax’s recordings he
made in the thirties of prisoners at Parchman Penal Colony in the
States. That was played backwards under this huge synthesized drum
track and you can’t recognise anything the voices are saying because
they are played backwards. Its just unsettling. Scores like Blood
Simple are a bunch of experiments to see what works. I certainly did
not pretend that I had any idea of what was actually appropriate for
the film. I was just trying things to see how they worked, and I would
go with them if they did. Joel and Ethan certainly had no
compunction about taking taped music that was written for one
scene and putting it somewhere else. It was fine with me.
 Music f o r the Films of Jo e l and Ethan Coen 23

RAISING ARIZONA
Raising Arizona [1987] was the next movie I worked on for the
Coens and it is completely unlike Blood Simple. It is much more of
a comedy. The characters are ostensibly familiar characters - there’s
cops and robbers, convicts and bounty hunters —but one of the
things that is really charming about it, is that the characters express
themselves in this florid storybook type of language. When I read
it as a script I thought the script was so good there was really no
point in making a movie out of it. It takes place in Arizona which
is ‘The West’ as far as America is concerned, but it takes place in
contemporary times: Arizona is one big suburb now. Yet the
characters still express themselves as though they are living in a
Zane Grey western, and it’s quite beautifully written.
So, I think that was one of the keys to me - that these characters
are coming from extremely humble material but they have very
noble aspirations and they express them that way The score is like
that. It is built from very humble materials: a banjo player, a singer,
someone playing spoons, someone whistling, things like that, but
it also hopefully expresses some of the romance of the old west. The
vocals are done in yodelling style which is meant to suggest that
while all these proceedings are taking place, the ‘heart’ behind them
is the heart of a cowboy: riding horseback, whipping off his stetson
and letting go a yodel, even though the on-screen action shows
people running down suburban streets. It would be unfair not to
mention the impact of budget on sessions like that: Raising Arizona
had an extremely low budget, so working with banjo and spoons
was a good choice.
Some plot points. Nicholas Cage — an habitual offender - is
always holding up convenience stores. Through all his times in and
out of prison he keeps running into the same cop who’s played by
Holly Hunter. They fall in love and he vows to go straight, so when
he gets out of prison, they get married. All this happens before the
titles at the beginning of the movie, and then they find that they
cannot have children. As he says ‘Her insides were a rocky place
where my seed could find no purchase’. And because of his
criminal record they are not really able to adopt a child. They
discover that the Nathan Arizona family has had quintuplets, and
decide to kidnap one of them. But it puts them in a touchy
CINESONIC: The W o r l d of Sound in Film

situation as far as the law is concerned. The wife, Holly Hunter, is

an ex-policewoman so, of course, she feels sworn to uphold the law,
while her husband, Nicholas Cage, finds it difficult to keep away
from the convenience stores.
The scene where their marital stability starts to fall apart is when
Nicholas Cage robs a convenience store of some Huggies. A chase
ensues, and the theme involving the banjo, yodelling, spoons, etc,
carries across that long scene which we called ‘The Huggies Chase’.
I’ll just draw your attention to the fact that playing in the
convenience store is a muzak rendition of the very thing you hear
during the chase that follows for several minutes. It is quite an
involved scene. I was in Scottsdale while they were shooting it and
they had to have several dobermans lined up because their toe pads
would get worn down from running on asphalt. They had to bring
in stand-by dobermans, and all the other dogs in the
neighbourhood were barking the whole night long. The yodeller
was a guy we found from Tennessee - he was actually working on
Broadway at that time —and the banjo player is Ben Fried, Joel and
Ethans optometrist.

BARTON FINK
Barton Fink [1991] is my favourite of Joel and Ethans movies.
Barton Fink is a playwright, a sort of Clifford Odets-style
playwright played by John Turturro, and hes in every scene. The
movie is entirely from his point of view.
There is also almost no plot to Barton Fink. Again, you more
plot-oriented people can tell me if I am wrong, but while there
seems to be a plot, about half-way through the movie makes about
a ninety-degree turn. From there on I don’t think the story makes
any sense in terms of cause and effect. Joel originally thought there
actually should not be any music. There would just be sound
design and maybe I would contribute something to that. But after
I saw the film I composed a melody that I thought was very nice
for Barton, and it contributed something in terms of explaining his
personality. It almost gives a ‘back story to him, you might say The
melody is extremely childlike in nature and the octave jumps make
it sound like it might be played on a toy piano. It suggests Bartons
 Music fo r the Films of Jo e l and Ethan Coen 25

naivety which is an important part of the story and for me it also

suggests some of the darkness, confusion and cruelty of his
childhood, and that helps to explain some of the things that go on
in the film. This melody is also very unresolving. In fact it never
ends until the very end title, where we hear the last chord reach
resolution. The melody is three and a half bars long which means
that it repeats unexpectedly. Sometimes in the film it’s very
repetitious, but it remains unpredictably repetitious.
A key scene featuring this melody is when Barton is sweating in
his hotel room, suffering from writers block and other anxieties.
Actually the most important thing in that scene is the sound design.
Skip Lievsay did the sound design for Barton Fink as he has done for
all Joel and Ethans movies. Howard Shore spoke about Skip
regarding Silence of the Lambs [see pp6-7]. He has done work for
Jonathan Demme, Spike Lee, and so on. I think he is really the most
imaginative sound designer working out of New York, and I put him
in the class with Walter Murch and Alan Splitt and people of that
calibre. Barton Fink is an example of what I think is an optimum
interaction between the composer and the sound designer.
Skip and I have known each other a long time. He was a bass
player and he knew what I was doing in New York, and he
introduced me to Joel and Ethan. We actually spotted Barton Fink
together. In that case, we went through the film from beginning to
end. There’s a lot of non-naturalistic sound in the movie so I
needed him there to tell me what was going on. He would say
‘Well, in this scene there’s this low rumbling in the hotel that I got
from the guy who did the sound design for the movie The Abyss
[1989]. He had given Skip all these underwater sounds of metal
plates cracking under water pressure, and they’re actually used quite
a bit in the hotel where Barton Fink is staying. We also discussed
how we might parcel out the frequency space in each scene. Skip
would say ‘Well, there’s a mosquito here’. And I’d say ‘Okay, I’ve
got low brass’. And he’d say ‘I’ve got this rumbling that’s going to
come from the sink’. And I’d say ‘I’ll give you the low end and I’ll
do this’. Or we would collaborate and I’d say ‘I’m doing this
prepared piano part here and it’s metallic-sounding, but maybe
you’ve got some humming sounds I can put in there. I could
repitch them in a sampler and then play them along’.
CINESONIC: The W o r l d of Sound In Film

So we spotted the whole movie that way and while I was writing
I was in touch with Skip about the sounds he was developing,
because I wanted the option to be able to sample some of those and
use them musically. For me it was a perfect example of how that
should be done. We have done it since then, but not on every film.
I’ve done it a couple of times in Hollywood but it’s really too bad
that its not done more often. A more common experience is that
everyone works in their own world and they all meet up at the film
mix and come to fisticuffs. An even worse result is that everything
just gets mixed in very loudly and creates a mess. I would sooner
have the fisticuffs myself and at least have someone make a decision
about what the sound should be like.
In the key scene I mentioned when Barton is sweating in his
hotel room, the collaboration between Skip and myself is evident.
The violin sound obviously echoes the mosquito - an aural theme
that runs throughout the film. In that scene the mosquito is killed,
but prior to that the mosquito has been all through the film and so
those very high violins are often present. The combination of
prepared piano, chimes and other metallic instruments
complements the sounds of plumbing - another aural theme in the
movie in that he hears voices and activities through the plumbing
all the time. There are many times when the whole hotel creaks like
a ship, and those sounds are matched with a lot of low brass. We
hired something like six bass trombones for this score. It’s a very
strange ensemble: just violins, bass trombones and percussion. A
relatively novel facet of the score is the way it attends to John
Turturro’s unscripted vocalizations: another instance of ‘is it a little
too arch or not’. I like it and fortunately Joel and Ethan laughed so
we kept it. It is not unlike the stalling car cue in Blood Simple where
the music, by suddenly paying attention in some way to what’s
happening on screen in a self-conscious way, actually shifts contexts
at a time when you are most uncomfortable. He finds a woman
inexplicably dead in his bed and it will never be explained, so to
have humour come in - especially a humour that seems to have
been the filmmakers entertaining themselves - takes you out of
that discomfort.
Skips work is clearly audible when the camera goes into the
drain. You hear some wrestling noises from a previous scene, a man
 Music f o r the Films of Jo e l and Ethan Coen 27
being thrown onto a wrestling mat. It relates to sexual sounds that
may be coming from the bedroom. You hear a jet taking off. You
hear those underwater sounds from The Abyss. All sorts of stuff; it’s
wonderful. When we finally put the score to Barton Fink on a
record along with the score to Fargo, I put Skip’s work on the CD
along with the score.

Questions
This kind of similarity between the filmmaking process and the
events contained within the scene is indicative of the work of the
Coens, and yourself obviously. Is there a basis for this in other
work, inspiration between you and the Coens maybe?
No. I cannot think of anything. One of the things I like about
working with them is that I don’t really think of their fdms as
experimental’. They clearly come from a Hollywood tradition and
there is much about the way they are made which tells you that,
but I never go back and look at other films when I’m working on
theirs or make explicit references to other films that I know of. I
would like to think of the work the Coens and I do as being in our
own little world, our own playground, so there is no conscious
outside reference.
The film has a very hermetic feeling both visually and aurally,
especially with the doors and the sound of sucking reversed wind.
Is that idea very deliberate or did that build up because of the
sound effects?
It is very, very deliberate. The character of Barton Fink is a
serious playwright. He comes from New York and goes to Los
Angeles. His thing is writing plays about the nobility of the
common man, and he is very upfront about what he does. So he is
condescending when he comes to Los Angeles to work on films. He
goes to stay in this cheap hotel because he will be closer to the
common man but as soon as he meets his next door neighbour,
played by John Goodman, you quickly get the impression he’s
probably never met a common man in his life. This is just his
conceit as a writer. And so, he enters a certain hell. This is why I
say the childlike nature of the melody playing to his naivety helps
CINESONIC: The W o r l d of Sou nd in Film

to make you aware of this. He pretends to be a great intellect

fighting for social equality yet he really has no idea what he is
talking about.
The hermetic quality oT the hotel is very deliberate because it
really is hell for him and it will, in fact, become an inferno at the
end of the film. The environment of the hotel is discomforting all
through the film. There are very strange things happening.
Inexplicably, the wallpaper comes off, and when he puts it back on
the gum of the wallpaper is a disgusting, sticky substance. It gets all
over his hands. It is endless. There are mosquitos, but as is pointed
out by another character in the film, Los Angeles is in a desert:
there are not meant to be any mosquitos there. I believe the sounds
for the doors were Slap’s idea, not Joel and Ethans, but it arose at
a very early stage of the film, this idea of the doors being like an
airlock and that there is a vacuum sucking him into it.

MILLER'S CROSSING
Millers Crossing [1990] is my first orchestral score. The budget
for the film was $8m, which was huge for Joel and Ethan, though
it was nothing in Hollywood at the time. They wanted an
orchestra, partly because they wanted to have the experience of
working with one and partly because the film is so visually lush that
they felt it should be aurally lush too. I had never worked with an
orchestra before this, and anybody except Joel and Ethan would
have gone and hired somebody who knew something about
orchestras. But one of the things I love about them, and everyone
who works with them does, is that they are very loyal and they do
not have that much respect for the idea of you having experience in
other areas or what education might mean. Ethan majored in
philosophy at Princeton. I went to Harvard and Joel did film at
NYU, We are educated but I do not think we feel the work we are
doing is in any sense based on that education. I know mine isn’t.
So they gave me three months to complete the score - which is,
in Hollywood, an extremely luxurious length of time to work on a
score. You are usually forced to complete a score in about six weeks.
Sometimes you get surprisingly less. The Coens tend to make a
decision to pay people less money but give them more time. And it
 C o m p o s in g w ith a V e r y W ide Palette 29

Gabriel Byrne and |ohn Turturro in Miller's Crossing

is a trade-off that most people will accept. I think almost all actors
who work in their films are proud to be in them. I know I am and,
as a result of us all making those trade-offs, Joel and Ethan pay us
more respect, and garner more themselves in turn. Doing Millers
Crossing I learned all about orchestras. I think it is the only score
which, by the time I had finished it, was everything I wanted it to
be. I did not merely turn it in because there were recording sessions
the next day. It was fully finished and an additional day would not
have made me change a note in it.
The problems the film presents are striking. It’s an ironical score
because the music does not sound like what you would expect for
this film. It is based on a Dashiell Hammet story called The Glass
Key, from which an earlier film was made. In the story there are two
gangs, an Italian mob and an Irish gang, with Gabriel Byrne and
Albert Finney in the Irish gang. Finney is the big boss. (In fact, the
town seems to be populated solely by gangs and gangsters.)
I first saw this film without music - an important feature about
Joel and Ethan is that they never put temp’ music onto their
rough or fine cuts. At that initial viewing I saw that it was an
CINESONIC: The W o r l d of Sou nd in Film

extremely brutal film: the main character, played by Gabriel

Byrne, must get kicked in the head six or seven times. You often
do not know why Gabriel Byrne is going through this violence, or
why he is willing to do it. But Finney and he are very close and, in
my mind, that is the only thing that can explain his willingness to
go through the cruelty he goes through during the film. I really
wanted to express that love’ he has for Albert Finney in the score
somehow: if I could attach a theme to the love they have for each
other early on in the picture, then recall that theme later, you
would understand what was motivating him. Very early in the film
Byrne appears to betray Finney. At the end of the movie you find
out that that was just a ploy, a strategem, but Byrne never lets on.
In fact, his face and his features never offer any explanation to his
actions: he remains a cipher.
I imagined the theme to be derived from Irish melodies because
the story features an Irish gang. Joel and Ethan wanted a lush
orchestral score so I decided to go for an extremely traditional
arrangement. Hopefully that pays off at the end of the movie,
because I progressively used less traditional arrangements and even
some extreme Penderecki-style techniques. Those extreme
moments mean a lot more because you got accustomed to the
extremely traditional arrangement at the beginning of the film.
As it turned out, when we spotted the film, there was no place
to put the theme under Albert Finney and Gabriel Byrne together.
That is a very interesting example of how spotting can affect the
process of writing a film score, because I had this very definite idea
of what the theme should be and why it should be there and what
it should do. But it just was not possible because of the way the film
was shot and written, so the first time I was able to introduce a
theme is under the opening titles. This comes after we have seen
Byrne and Finney together talking in a pre-credit sequence, and
that was the best I could do. As Byrne leaves the room, the theme
comes “ an Irish folk melody played in very traditional manner by
a full symphonic orchestra, with the oboe playing the lead melody.
Hopefully the placement of the theme right there would still attach
to the characters in some way, and convey a warmth’ which is
totally lacking in the visual style of the film. When we spotted the
film I said to Joel and Ethan, ‘Some warm music might be nice
 C o m p o s in g with a V e r y W ide Palette

here. Something almost sentimental, because the movie is just so

cold’. As I said earlier, Joel and Ethan do not think about warmth
when they’re writing their films, so their immediate reaction was
‘Well, no, I don’t think so’. They simply had not thought about this
possibility, and said 'Well, maybe something neutral’. So I just
went back and wrote the main theme and played it for them and
they immediately got it. No further discussion. I love them for the
fact that they do not have strong predispositions as to what the
music is to be in their films. I don’t know what it would be like to
work with a director who does. Generally, if I sense on the phone
or in a meeting that a director does know exactly what he wants, I
will turn down the job - because where is the fun in that? The
irony is that probably a lot of the best directors have a very definite
idea of what they want - and that very fact will prevent me from
working with them.
As in all of the Coens’ movies, Miller’s Crossing has a set piece’.
It is my favourite part of their films, usually because it has nothing
to do with the plot. There is also usually no dialogue either. In a way,
these set pieces are Joel getting the opportunity to exercise himself.
In the Millers Crossing set piece’ Albert Finney is at home relaxing
- being an Irish mob boss, he’s in bed, smoking a cigar and listening
to a 78 playing Danny Boy. The music we hear from the old record
player is sometimes non-diegetic and sometimes diegedc: it begins
sounding like a score but then it becomes, momentarily, source
music when we go into Albert Finneys bedroom and we see it
coming from a record player there. Being momentarily diegetic
there, the music attaches to him in a very particular way because we
know that he chose to put it on. It becomes like the slippers that we
see him put on: he carries’ the music with him even as he leaves the
house. At that point, of course, the music is not strictly diegetic
anymore but it clings to him like his clothes, his slippers, the cigar
in his mouth. A huge gunfight ensues outside his house, but I think
what makes him feel totally at home as he blasts away on his
machine gun is that he has brought his favourite tune with him
along with his cigar and slippers. He seems comfy and relaxed in this
situation, and it tells you a lot about his character.
There’s an interesting story about how the song for this scene
was recorded. During the editing, the scene was needing a song and
CINESONIC: The W o rld of Sou nd in Film

it had to be an Irish song from the twenties. Joel and Ethan, for
lack of anything else, found a recording of Danny Boy and cut the
scene to that song however they did not anticipate using that very
song. I think we all felt that it was so familiar, it would be more
interesting for us to find a wonderful Irish song of the period that
people did not already know. Weeks went by and we listened to all
these Irish recordings from the period but we couldn’t find
anything better. So, we resigned ourselves to using that song. Its
correct name is Londonderry Air. We looked at the recording we
had been listening to and it was sung by one Frank Patterson who,
according to musical critics of our time, is considered the greatest
living Irish tenor. Typical of Joel and Ethan, they thought ‘Well,
lets see if we can get him to do it - you never know’.
It turned out he was living in New York at that moment, so he
came by the editing room and looked at the film. Now, you show
a sequence like that to someone who is completely unfamiliar with
the Coens' style and they might run out of the room screaming.
But he loved it; his reaction was ‘This song will have new meaning
for a whole new generation. But we didnt want to use the song
exactly how it was on the original recording. We needed certain
actions to sync to key moments in the song. For example, just prior
to the car hitting the tree and bursting into flames, there is a long
note held by Frank in the new recording that perfectly matches the
timing of the edit. When we pointed out to Frank these moments
of synchronization, he was amazingly game about the process and
wrote down notes about what words went with which visual
actions. We recorded it like a studio session from the twenties:
Frank was up front with a typically small orchestra of about 25
players, and a conductor from the period - Larry Wilcox - wrote
an authentic old-sounding arrangement to complement the
music. Larry watched Frank sing; Frank watched the video; and the
musicians watched the conductor. This ‘free conducting’ is very
hard, yet it was acheived in two takes.

THEHUDSUCKER PROXY
The Hudsucker Proxy is actually the film by Joel and Ethan that
I had the least connection to. I’ve never quite understood the film.
 C om p osin g with a V e r y Wide Palette 33

It is very funny and, again, a great script to read, but it seemed like
the sort of film Jerry Lewis might make. But for Joel and Ethan it
was a bigger budget than they were used to, and they enjoyed the
huge sets and, again, a big orchestra. I admit that I do not quite
understand what the movie was about and Joel and Ethan were not
able to help because they do not discuss things like that, nor do
they explain’ the movie to people. So, I did my best.
In the tragic climax of the film, Tim Robbins, who begins as a
mail boy at Hudsucker Industry and becomes the president, finds
himself on New Years Eve contemplating suicide. The theme that
plays here is a restatement of the theme from the very beginning
of the movie. I think by restating this theme that we heard earlier,
it seems to reinforce the idea that what is happening now’ was
destined from the start. In this tragic scene, the score for me is a
little ‘mickey mousie’: the music is directly and obviously
mimicking the on-screen action. The character goes through a
door, the music changes, and so on. Something happens, the
music changes. It is not a technique that I would use in a movie
unless there was a specific reason, which is usually for humorous
effect, and that is why it is here. When you have a tragic situation
ajtid the music makes these little shifts and comments on action, I
think it tends to lighten the situation and allows you to step back
slighdy. We can see humour in it, and the fact that Tim Robbins
cannot see the humour makes for a tension that I think is
interesting. Yet at the same time, I hope I am doing it lightly so
that we remain sympathetic to his character. If we do not - then I
have not succeeded.

Questions
Has it ever been the case that once your music is placed over a
scene, the Coens and their editor rework the cut to fit particular
rhythms, stresses or nuances in the music?
A good question. It does happen sometimes though it is
relatively rare - partly because Joel started out as an editor, so
usually by the time he has edited his film he is pretty confident
&bout how it should be. But there are times when I can point
something out, especially at the end or beginning of a scene, where
CINESONIC: The W o r l d of Sound in Film

the cut might be a little more flexible. I can say ‘If you add a second
here or cut this a little bit, I could do something musically that
wouldn’t be as awkward’. There is probably one such moment on
each film. It is not a common thing but it does happen and it is
much more apt to happen in situations like this where you have a
trusting relationship with the director. Although, on the film I just
did with Stephen Frears —which is the first time we’ve worked
together —I asked him if he could add nineteen seconds to a scene
and he said ‘Sure, no problem’. So, it varies. I think people
understand that I do not ask such things for no good reason.
Was the Hudsucker Proxy your first experience with a choral
arrangement?
No, I had done choral arrangements with other filmmakers by
that point. I also used to sing in a choir myself and actually
performed at the Adelaide Festival ten years ago in a group called The
Harmonic Choir. In that group we did overtone singing, so it did not
necessarily prepare me for doing four-part harmony, but I had done
choral material before. In The Hudsucker Proxy it is pretty obvious
when I use the choir: it only comes in when people go off the top of
that building. For one of those occasions, I wrote a separate part for
the soprano because I wanted her to get up to a high C so that by the
time the body in question is nearing the sidewalk, the sound would
almost be out of control. She did a great job.

FARGO
I think Fargo [1986] probably represents one of the more subtle
and interesting musical choices I have made in my film scoring
because it is an unlikely combination not only of comedy and
tragedy but also of dramatic writing based on a true story. None of
the other Coen films do this. I was never distracted by whether it
was true or not, but I was aware that the audience would need to
believe that it was true. It would help the story to believe that and
if you pushed the comedy too much people might stop believing it.
If the filmmakers become too arch and go for comedy in the
middle of killings and other violence, I think the believability of
the story then suffers. It was a fine line to walk in Fargo.
 C o m p o s in g with a V e r y W ide Palette

There were many roles for music in Fargo - so much so that I

had to write them down because they constituted such a challenge.
The m usic has to play the crime story. It has to be believable. It has
to seem like its representing an historical event And it has to
sim ulate a ‘t rue crime story which is a very melodramatic genre.
But in this particular ‘true crime story’, the two people who do the
killing are played by Peter Stromare and Steve Buscemi as buffoons.
They are ridiculous in almost every scene. So the music has to
accom m od ate their comedy but you still have to believe that they
are going to kill someone. The film takes place in Minnesota and
North Dakota and there is a lot of local colour in those regional
accents. As the characters are written in the script, the people have
a desperate cheerfulness that comes out in the worst of situations.
But there is loneliness and despair behind a lot of that cheerfulness.
They live in a dark, cold climate, so hopefully that undercurrent to
their cheerfulness can be played with the music.
My solution to this complex set of problems was to direct the
music to always take itself seriously. In other words, the music is
going to say ‘Yes, I am a crime drama and I am going to take myself
seriously. This allowed me to play the drama and make that
believable, but, by the music taking itself too seriously, I was also
able to push the comedy. Particularly as there is not much action in
the film: when it does occur, the music is often over the top with
bombast, and hopefully that helps with the comedy. I organized
and directed the orchestra very much in the tradition of Miklos
Rosza: low winds, brass, percussion and few strings. This is a much
lower budget film than the one before it, The Hudsucker Proxy, but
I also felt that a smaller orchestra was appropriate - the exact kind
of orchestra that was often used for low budget crime movies like
The Killers [1997].
Another element of the score is that there is a personal story
going on. Bill Macy plays the male protagonist who sets the crime
in motion, and the character played by Frances McDormand is the
female protagonist, who is the police chief on his trail. She also
happens to be pregnant. I wanted the music to play on intimate
scales for these characters, and especially for the pathos of Bill
Macy. I think he defines the archetypal pathetic character.
I do some musical research for most of the films, and for Fargo
CINESONIC : The W o r l d of Sou nd in Film

I was listening to Scandinavian music. This was before they were

even shooting the film, because all the characters have
Scandinavian names and their accent is somehow derived from a
Scandinavian accent —although why that is so remains a mystery
to me. I thought it would be interesting to inject some
Scandinavian feeling into it. There is a coldness’ in a lot of
Scandinavian music, not so much with the melodies, but with the
way instruments are played. Their folk music usually revolves
around a fiddle called the hardanger fiddle which has five or six
strings that are played, but underneath them are a group of
sympathetic strings that are not directly played but which vibrate
in sympathy with the strings that are being played. It creates a
glistening effect around the sound. It also tends to be played in a
manner not unlike what we think of in the States as Appalachian
‘hillbilly music. This approach to instrumentation seemed right for
the coldness of the theme I composed for Fargo. The hardanger
fiddle is also a solo instrument, played in the mid scale, so I used a
small idiosyncratic ensemble for the personal scenes comprised of
hardanger fiddle, harp and then just let it grow bigger from there.
For example, in the very opening scene, we see a commonplace
action: a guy driving a trailer with a car on it through the snow. But
the music begins with this extremely delicate intimate melody, gets
a little bigger, then grows to a ridiculously large scale.
Fargo gave rise to the question of what is comedy and how exactly
does one play it musically. For instance, how should the music play
to the two bad guys? I would say that the killers are essentially
buffoons, but they do ruthlessly kill people through the film. They
can be played for comedy, but the question is how to do it. For the
scene where the two killers relax in the hotel room watching The
Johnny Carson Show in the dark, I composed a synthesizer sketch
which we eventually did not use. The music made a statement that
the film knew it was a comedy. By not using this cue and instead
having the sound of The Johnny Carson Show theme play lightly, the
impression is that the film takes itself seriously: it does not know, it is
a comedy. It is then left to the audience to decide if it is a comedy or
not. Viewers reading this scene with a knowledge of film context
would probably get the joke of the overblown music, but the absence
of that cue allows the bad guys their dignity. I played both options to
 Music fo r the Films of Joe l and Ethan Coen 37

Joel and Ethan. They laughed at the first one but they liked the
second one. They wanted the movie to take itself more seriously.

Questions
How many times might you rewrite a cue, given that you had
written two versions of that one. Does rewriting like that
happen often?
The example from Fargo was not so much a question of
rewriting a cue as it was of deciding the theme for these characters.
I often just take a scene and test some thematic material against it:
if it works in one place Tm pretty sure it is going to work
somewhere else. And it raises key questions about what the theme
should be, so I used that scene from Fargo to help me decide on
things. Rewriting cues does not happen that often with Joel and
Ethan. We are generally in agreement as to what type of film we are
making, and at what level the humour exists, as in this last example
from Fargo. But Joel and Ethan also place their faith in me because
we have been through this so many times that, if we have a
disagreement, and I feel strongly that I am right, they will generally
give me the benefit of the doubt.
You mentioned earlier using synthesizers and samplers for
composing sketches and testing orchestration. Does it surprise you
when you get the orchestral recording back? Is there a problem
with the translation between something you might try out on a
synth and how you can get an orchestral player to perform that?
Not really —partly because I have in my mind what is going to
happen as we move from a sketch to the finished thing. I know
pretty much what those changes will be —of which there definitely
are many —though I cannot really think of too many surprises. It
has generally been a favourable surprise. A typical difference
between a synthesized recording and an orchestral one is in the
greater dynamic range of the orchestral recording which you do not
achieve with synthesizers generally. For the opening title theme of
Fargo, I wrote or suggested performance ornaments for the violin
part on the score, but I was well aware that by getting the right
fiddle player, he was going to do a lot better than anything I could
C1NES0NIC: The W o rld of Sou nd in Film

write. So recordings are almost always a series of wonderful

surprises. The reverse does happen sometimes. If you write for
special instruments like, say, the theremin, as Howard Shore did for
E d Woody you can have a wonderful idea of what it should sound
like in your mind but then discover that it is extremely hard to find
people who can play it.
I wrote a piece for a musical saw a couple of years ago just hoping
there was a great musical saw player out there somewhere and, in
fact, there is. He’s a classical violinist who lives in New York and
who doubles on musical saw. So I lucked out, but it will often be
true that if you write for strange instruments and you do not already
know exactly who will play them, it can be a challenge to get a
decent performance and recording. Especially folk instruments:
finding someone who reads but can also play folk material. But
when you do find someone, it is usually a pleasant surprise.

THE BIGLEBOWSKI
Joel and Ethan foresaw The Big Leboivski [1998] as a movie full
of songs. The script was filled with references to songs because the
main character, known as ‘The Dude’ and played by Jeff Bridges,
pretty much scores his own life with a Walkman. The songs are
playing all the time. We agreed right from the start that there was
not going to be anything that sounds like a score. There were
definitely things for me to do but they could not sound like a
composed score. A score would change the nature of the film and
change The Dudes relationship with the film. If suddenly music
starts coming from somewhere else it would be disconcerting once
we had already established that The Dude is scoring his own life
with his tapes.
So this meant, for instance, there was no opportunity for me to
have a theme for the film or a character and develop it, because the
things that I would write had to sound like songs. I wrote about six
or seven pieces which all sound like songs. When you see the movie
you would have no idea what my contribution was because there is
nothing that appears as score.
There is one cue that we call ‘The Jazz Piece’. It is one of the
closest things to being scored. Towards the end of the film, Jeff
 Music fo r the Fiims of l o e l and Ethan Coen 39

Bridges has reached a peak in this little detective story. He runs out
of his apartment and the cue starts. At first it seems that it is
playing his idea of what detective music should be. As the scene
develops it transforms into diegetic music and becomes a source
coming from someone elses car —someone else who also thinks he
is a detective and who we have never seen before. We think it is Jeff
Bridges’ detective music but it turns out to be the music of another
guy, John Polito. Throughout this scene the music is manipulated
sonically to go from one point to the other.
The Big Lebotuski climaxes with a confrontation between the
good guys and the bad guys. The good guys are the three slacker
bowlers: Jeff Bridges, John Goodman and Steve Buscemi; the bad
guys are the three nihilist bikers. There is a reference made at
another point in the film that these bikers at one time were a
German electro pop band in the late seventies, obviously modelled
on Kraftwerk. I guess the idea is that this is what happens to
seventies’ electro pop bands in Germany: they end up as nihilist
bikers in LA. Joel and Ethan had considered licensing a Kraftwerk
tune for this scene, but my background really is in electronic music
and I was just very taken with Kraftwerk at a certain point in the
late seventies too, so I thought it would be great fun to do a
German electro pop tune. So I composed a little song with the
vocoded vocals and everything typical of the period. But I wrote it
also to score the scene. As I say, it is the showdown in the movie,
but the music is coming quite clearly from a boom box that one of
the nihilists is carrying on his shoulder and which becomes a
weapon later in the scene. The music is not very audible, but it is
actually following the action. The song has a German lyric line
which is a statement the nihilists keep making throughout the
movie: ‘We believe in nussing’.
YASUNORI HONDA I

Rarely acknowledged in the West, the sound design in

Japanese animation is arguably at the forefront of shaping
and spatializing sonic occurrences with narrative mechanisms
and effects. The mood, style, tone and signification of most
audio-visual moments in Japanese animation have great
potential to realign and readdress the limiting
naturalist/realist/modernist dichotomies which govern most
Western live-action sound design. Yasunori Honda is one of
Japans most accomplished designers in this field. His work
covers many genres and styles, and is always exactingly
crafted by his finely tuned rhythmic and spatial sensibilities.

It is a great pleasure to be invited here to Cinesonic and to have

the opportunity to show my work. My expertise covers aspects of
sound post production in film and video and although I have a
certain confidence and pride in my work, I see much room for me
to develop - technologically and philosophically. My ultimate goal
is to reach an ideal in sound design through incorporating the work
and approaches of other sound designers, both Japanese and
international.
I have been designing sound for animation — animated
cartoons, mainly - for nearly 32 years. Much of what I did for the
first 30 years in this field was not very different from what one
would do with sound for live action. However in the past few years
there has been a drastic change taking place in sound design: the
transition from analogue to digital. This change is repainting the
 From A n a l o g u e to Digital

whole picture of sound design. Every facet of sound designing from

sound effects to dialogue to music to the mixdown —everything
from A to Z —is radically affected by this change,
Since I’m a sound engineer rather than a scholar, I will not be
able to speak academically, but I will discuss three movies I have
worked on in the past fifteen years: Macross: Do You Remember
Love? [1985], Ninja Scroll [1992] and Tencbi Muyo In Love [1996].
I will focus on two segments from each movie: the introduction,
which I, as a sound designer, think is a very important part of the
movie, and the climax, which is of course the most important part
of a movie.

MACROSS
The story of Macross is quite simple, and similar to many other
Japanese sci-fi animations. This one has a cute girl - Minmai -
who is a pop star performing her first concert, on board a gigantic
space battleship. War erupts, but the song she sings will eventually
have the power to end the war due to its emotional effect upon the
enemy.
The movie opens rather mysteriously by depicting the enemy. I
intended to introduce the enemy at the very beginning, which may
be disconcerting to an audience, yet nonetheless a fascinating way of
starting the story. This enemy is a species of male giants engaged in
a 5000-year war against a species of giant females. Each species
speaks a unique language, so the director Shoji Kawamori and I
composed two distinctive languages —one for the giant males and
one for the giant females. The movie opens with this alien dialogue.
Behind this strange-sounding language is the atmosphere of the
interior of the alien vessel, for which I used biological sounds such as
the beating of a heart because of the bio mechanical nature of the
alien species. You then see the huge battleship Macross floating in
space, then a series of shots illustrating the interior of the ship. As the
introduction to the film progresses, we shift from the military
locations of the ship to the civilian areas. It is a very big ship - big
enough to contain a whole city. The civilian population is quite large,
and we see many shots depicting their normal everyday life on the
battleship. In this setting, Minmai is giving her first concert.
C1NES0N1C: The W o rld of Sou nd in Film

Climax
In the climax of the movie, the enemy star fleet is ready to attack
Earth and mankind is in great danger. Despite this devastating
situation, Minmai is engaged in a iove affair with the pilot Hikaru,
the hero of the film. Minmai will be rejected by Hikaru, but
because her song will affect the enemy giants and bring an end to
the battle, she must sing the song even though she is deeply hurt
by his rejection.
The sound design for this climax involved many arguments in
post production. Even though there is a war going on in space,
Macross is basically a love story. To express this, we decided to make
the most of the love song Minmai sings, so we designed the entire
battle sequence in a way that its timing matches the structure of the
song. To accomplish this effectively we disregarded any
unneccessary sound, which resulted in using a minimalist
approach. Minmai’s song is broadcast so that it can stop the war,
yet she is not only directing the song at the giants, but also singing
the song to her lost lover, who is the main fighter pilot. "We
employed two different approaches in the sound design: one for
when the song is heard by the giants; another for when the song is
heard by the pilot. Recorded using analogue systems but mixed in
Dolby stereo, we used spatial effects and movement to enhance this
dual perspective of hearing the song. The surround channels are
active when the song is heard by the giants, while the song is placed
in the centre channel when it is heard by Minmais ex-lover. We
also employed the surround channels for sound effects like the
space fighters fly-bys, and of course when the enemy mothership
explodes. Initially, we charted and track-laid all the sound which
would be usually deemed necessary for such a climactic batde
sequence, but we gradually removed more and more elements,
until eventually we were left with the final lean soundtrack.
Because Macross was made fifteen years ago when the surround
system was still in its technological infancy, we had to conduct a lot
of trial and error to ascertain what sounded right and what didn’t.
Due to this extensive experimentation and the complexity of the
climax sequence, half the schedule of the mixdown of this one
hundred minute film went on this final battle - which on screen
lasts for only seven minutes.
 From A n a l o g u e to Digital 43

NINJA SCROLL
Ninja Scroll was produced as an OVA (an Original Video
Animation for sale directly to the video market). We didn’t use so
much of the surround system for this movie, however it has very
interesting aspects to its sound design. Its a creepy movie, best
viewed in the dark. The opening sequence features elements
typical of all Ninja movies. Just as every western cowboy movie has
tumbleweeds, cactus, horses, the desert and so on, every Japanese
samurai movie has the wooden bridge over a river, reeds rustling
in the wind, wind blowing across the river and so on. I tried to
design the sound to accompany these obligatory and expected
icons of the genre. I wanted the animation to make it seem as
realistic as possible.
The movies visual style is realistic, but the actions and events in
the story are extremely unrealistic. Ninjas belong to groups who are
highly trained in specialist combat techniques for espionage. They
are also trained in magic and trickery, so Ninja Scroll contains
many weird moments. I tried to maintain a high level of reality
while at the same time suggesting a certain surreal ambience behind
all sound and dialogue in any scene. In the opening sequence we

Ninja Scroll
C INESONIC : The W o r l d o f Sou n d in Film

see the ragged girl say ‘Everyone is dead’, yet it is not her speaking
but Ninja hiding in the forest manipulating her vocal chords. This
is an example of the strange power of the Ninja in this movie.

Climax
The climax of the sound design to Ninja Scroll features Kagero,
a lone kunoichi (female Ninja) fighting a large group of enemy
Ninjas. In doing so, she sacrifices her life to save the film’s hero
Ninja, Jubei. In this battle sequence, the sound is designed to
express the characteristic swift movements of Ninja. We employed
traditional Japanese instrumentation in the music score which I feel
enhances the Ninjas movement. In fact, because I thought that
music was so important in this scene, I asked the composer Kaoru
Wada to rewrite and rewrite his cues until finally the music truly
matched the scene. Once the music was complete in this regard, I
toned down the sounds of the Ninjas quick movements so that
music and sound effects blended well together.

TENCHIMUYO IN LOVE
Tenchi Muyo In Love was the first Japanese animated feature
whose post production was entirely done in the Todd-AO studio in
Hollywood. I went there to push myself further in terms of
interesting sound design, and to experiment with high-end audio
technologies. DVDs [Digital Video Discs] are now becoming
widely used in the domestic market, so in anticipation of this three
years ago, I decided to mix the movie in DDS [6-channel Dolby
Digital Surround]. The film was mixed by Scott Millen - who won
an Oscar for his work on Ron Howards Apollo 13 in 1996 —and
the music was composed and performed by Christopher Franke,
one of the founding members of Tangerine Dream.
The directionality of the DDS system is divided into six
channels: front right, front left, rear right, rear left, and two in the
front centre - one of which is the sub woofer for generating ultra
low frequencies. This low frequency generation and the very clear
separation in sound directionality is, in my opinion, the definite
advantage of digital sound technology. When we produced Tenchi
 From A n a l o g u e to Digital 45

Muyo In Love three years ago, there were only two movie theatres
in Japan equipped with the facilities to replay the 6-channel DDS
system. At the time we were looking to the future so we decided
to go for it, and now there are triple the amount of theatres which
handle DDS. Now I know that we were right then in pushing
ourselves to explore the DDS system to this extent. Traditionally,
Dolby stereo involves only left centre and right, which means that
the sound can only be manipulated sideways. But with the six
channels of the DDS system we tried something unusual by
having sounds come from top to bottom, as well as sounds start in
the rear and move over the audience to the dead centre of the front
screen. These spatial effects could only be done with DDS s six
channels, and the introduction to Tenchi Muyo In Love
demonstrates all of this.

Climax
In the climax of Tenchi Muyo In Love we really tried hard to
express movement throughout the theatre space, and I think we did
well in this area. Working with the Hollywood technicians at the
Todd-AO studio we learnt a lot about 6-channel surround. In the
film’s climax sequence, the up-down sound movement occurs most
dramatically when the girl Achika swings her laser sword down
onto the monster Kain. The back-front sound is heard when the
Kain attempts to suck everything into itself through its power to
create black holes. These sounds are designed so that the audience
can feel the movement flying over and around their heads. Once
the battle sequence is over, we have a quiet peaceful sound which is
monaural in comparison to these other spatial effects, so as to
enhance the dramatic effect of the peace which follows the climax.

CONCLUSION
Macross: Do You Remember Love?, Ninja Scroll and Tenchi Muyo
In Love are three movies which we were able to sound-design under
better working conditions, both creatively and technically.
Unfortunately, the working environment for sound designers is not
as ideal as it should be due to the various time and money
CIN ESO NIC: The World of S o u n d in Film

constraints. But recognizing this problem, we nonetheless wish to

push ourselves harder to realize the highest possible level of sound
design in the field of Japanese animation - an entertainment form
which recently has been well received around the world. I would
like to thank everyone then for enjoying our work.

Questions
You said that in the last few years there has been a big advance in
the shift from analogue to digital in sound post-production. How
do you think this will benefit, influence or make a difference to
your work as a sound designer?
I don't think everything is fantastic with digital technologies,
however - whether I like it or not - it has become an industry
standard. In terms of post production, digital processes and systems
make everything easier to manipulate, but I don’t think digital
processing is infallible or almighty. I personally prefer the very
delicate sound of analogue audio, and I will try to keep an analogue
feel as much as possible. But now that recording in analogue and
then transferring to digital for post manipulation is so easy, I think
analogue will find a way to be kept alive in this industry. In terms
of post production, digital gives us very spontaneous results. We
can manipulate the sound and hear the outcome immediately,
almost in real time. Therefore, we can work intuitively - which is
a very important contribution from the digital media.
Seeing that, for example, George Lucas recently remixed the
soundtracks to the Star Wars films and remastered the images>
would you ever consider remastering your work in the light of
DVD releases?
A good question. We are currently in the middle of remixing
one of the Tenchi Muyo movies. The advent of DVDs has now
given us the opportunity to rework our old mixes because now
everything is required to be in DDS. If the material is suitable for
re-releasing, we will be given the chance to remix in a more
sophisticated way things we completed before in simple fashion.
Due to the six channels of the DDS system, we have to record more
sounds, plus the lay-out of the sounds is more complicated. It
 From A n a lo g u e to Digital 47

usually takes three to four months to produce the sound design for
a movie in Dolby Stereo, but the remixing of a film into DDS takes
one whole year!
Because audiences tend to look primarily at the actors and the
scenery and so on, do you feel as appreciated as the visual
practioners?
Whether animation films are appreciated more than live action
movies, I’m not sure. However, a definite difference between live
action movies and animated movies is that animated movies are
more controlled —yet things tend to be exaggerated, such as facial
expressions, etc, because they are not alive but animated two-
dimensional drawings. To give them life and to help these animated
characters appear alive, sound effects and music are extremely
important - much more so than in live action movies. Actually, it
sometimes happens that we design the sound prior to the drawing
of the pictures so as to define the movie from a sound point-of-
view. It not only gives the movie a framework, but gives some
necessary inspiration to the animators. This in itself is an indication
of how important sound is to animated movies, and how different
an approach it is from the live action sound design.
One of the most interesting things about animation sound is that
you have to create sounds that dont exist outside o f the animated
world. Could you describe for us some of the tools, instruments or
processes you use in creating these ■u nnatural’ sounds —spaceship,
monsters, and so on.
The actual making of the sounds - recording the sound effects
or producing the foley tracks - is done by a different department.
I instruct the personnel to provide me certain sounds, but I cannot
describe their exact techniques in recording some of those sounds.
All I care about is the end results they produce according to my
instructions. As long as it sounds good, I’m happy. I use ProTools
on Mac to edit the sound and perform some simple manipulation.
I used to use a specially designed interface called the Synclavier,
designed by Ben Burt of Skywalker Sound in Hollywood. Actually,
it is a very unsophisticated machine which I do not use so much
now. O f course I also use synthesizers and a lot of non­
48 C1NES0NIC: The World of Sound in Film

professional’ means such as ftizz-wah pedals and so on. Eventually,

I transfer all these processed elements into ProTools to prepare for
the final mix.
You said before that Dolby Digital Surround allows you greater
flexibility with the directionality o f sound in the final mix. I
noticed one scene in Tenchi Muyo In Love has sound that
remains at a fixed volume while the visual edit shows that the
sound would be changing in levelfrom shot to shot. Do you fin d
that sharp changes in volume are distracting, or is there another
reason why you chose to keep the sound at the same level across
such shots?
The up to down sound design that accompanies the action of
the girl striking the monster with her laser sabre is probably what
you have in your mind. As you pointed out, the extreme changes
in volume or shift can be very distracting. No matter how far away
from the centre of the screen the source of the sound may appear,
some of the sound has to remain in the centre, or it will sound odd
and unnatural. That’s one of the things we figured out as we mixed
6-channel surround, and we could only learn it by actually listening
to the sound in the appropriate environment. This was one of
many good things we learned from our trip to Los Angeles.
Could you describe the ideal relationship that you would have as
a sound designer with a composer o f an original sound score?
Actually I am not a very musical person. Im a bad singer and I
received dreadful marks in music classes back in school. But in
filmmaking, I have a composer to take care of that. The
relationship I would like to strike with a composer is to not
pressure the composer with my ideas in the beginning, but to let
the composer bring in a whole range of ideas so he can have creative
latitude. As with Howard Shore, I also try to include the composer
in the process as early as possible, even though that is not how
things occur in the making of Japanese animation. The music tends
to be thought of at the last minute and it is really difficult to try to
get the composer involved earlier, but that would be my way of
trying to establish a good working relationship with a composer.
 PARTTWO:

rsS ry
c i l V c * t e
PHILIP BROPHY

AVOICEINHELL
The final image to Doris Wishmans 1963 movie Bad Girls Go
To Hell is a freeze-frame of the films central character Meg (Gigi
Darlene). She is about to be raped. Her mouth is open in a silent
scream - frozen by film technology, superimposed with the words
‘The End1. The soundtrack contains a blood-curdling scream —
well, maybe not so blood-curdling. Lets hold the freeze-frame for
a moment and discuss Megs voice.
Bad Girls Go To Hell is wholly post-dubbed —brutishly so, as is
the case with most early sixties American sexploitation movies. It
was and remains cheaper to shoot without synch-sound in
acoustically problematic locations (downtown streets and hotel
rooms) and later post-synch all the dialogue. The post-dubbing
process is invariably rushed, and employs amazingly emotionless
and unconvincing voice-actors. Most scenes contain off-screen
dialogue: easier to record, edit and mix due to not having to
synchronize the Automated Dialogue Replacement (ADR) with
C1NES0NIC: The World of Sound in Film

on-screen lip movement. These factors contribute to an awkward

alienation effect wherein the on-screen being achieves and projects
a disembodied state. Visually, he/she inhabits a mobile screen space
—within the frame, across edits —but acoustically remains fixed,
boxed in a sonic realm devoid of the subtle phasing which
accompanies location microphone movement.
The result of this technological process does not instantly
guarantee ‘bad acting’ as most would have it. Firstly, the ownership
of the ‘act’ of acting is bipolar —distributed between the efforts of
on-screen bodies and post-synced voices, each belonging to their
respective persons and therefore difficult to attribute under
conventional definitions of holistic acting. Secondly, finding fault
in such ‘disynchronization’ belies an unfortunate trust in the
unification of screen-based projections — moreso due to the
presumption that those who populate the screen void do so under
the laws of physics which govern our worldly reality. Thirdly, any
investment in screen characters on grounds of rounded, motivated
and justifiable psychological traits amounts to a desperate
avoidance of the emotional schizophrenia which the cinema —and
drama in general - works hard to dissolve, neutralize, sanitize. The
voice of Meg - detached, divorced, undynamic, ill-performed,
artificially joined to her other’s lips - can perhaps rightly be
accepted to be unconvincing, unacceptable, unbelievable.
But to ridicule this is severely problematic.
That scream - that corny, carney, carnivale cry - has been heard
before. Too many times. Next to the sound of a gun being fired, the
scream of woman is one of the most iconic sound effects in the
cinema. This is not to say simply that it is ‘employed’ extensively
across histories, genres, forms and media (which it has been), but
that its nature as a ‘sound effect’ - as a repositionable fragment
within the post production process - suggests that there are
operations undisclosed by such perfunctoriness which reflect on
wider commingled issues of sex, gender, violence and drama.
Rather than dismiss its cheapness - its tawdry obviousness, its lack
of substance - let us loop that scream from Bad Girls Go To Hell.
Let us structurally, syntactically and sexually live the hell that
sound effect signals. Let us voyage through the many synchronized,
stretched and silenced screams which sail between the cinema and
 I S c re a m in Silen ce: C in em a, Sex and the Sound of Women Dying

our social reality —screams whose tactile renderings are acoustically

blurred, and whose significance is dulled despite the violence which
prompts their release. I ask a sim pie question: what does it mean ,
when a woman screams?

THE AURAL CUM SHOT

In Bad Girls Go To Hell a circular story unfolds. Meg - an
oversexed bored housewife the type of which rampantly populates
sexploitation movies of the sixties - cleans the house in her negligee
while her husband goes to work. After taking out the garbage - in
her negligee - and arousing her lecherous landlord, she is raped.
While she is being ravaged by her landlord —she awakens from her
dream. She then gets up, cleans the house in her negligee, takes out
the garbage in her negligee — and is attacked by her lecherous
landlord. Scream —freeze frame —the end. The circularity of this
story is more important than its originality. To use a classical and
cliched paradigm, the story’s ‘journey - as is the case with
pornography in general - is more a bodily passage which mimics
sexual dynamics (sensation, arousal, orgasm) than it is a three-act
tale. Pornographic narratives - both those that show and those that
suggest — are best understood as linear looping progressions
impelled by a moistening of canals and an engorging of tunnels.
We move through their telling less via an understanding of
character and plot and more through a realization of our own
physical transformation. Under such a logic of interpretative
morphology, visuals and sounds combine solely to titillate and
satiate. And where required, sound can stand in for the unseeable
and image can be sublimated by sound. *
It is not hard, then, to perceive the cinematic scream as at{ ero-
sonic moment. It signifies an entry point for erotic consumption in
the name of rape. Tike the bird that tweets morning, the siren that
signals work, the bell that tolls death, the angel that sings rest, the
scream in the cinema operates as a phoneme for that which cannot
or does not want to be shown. Clearly, the screen would like to grant
us an image of graphic vaginal penetration under force. Heterosexual
pornography performs this service, but the desire for its effect is by
no means restricted to pornographic production and consumption -
 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

hence its refuge under complex symbolic guises in supposedly soft’

cinema. Many people afraid of (or even opposed to) pornographic
presence may nonetheless desire such imager}7. Denial of that
unacknowledged desire coupled with the social coding of dubious yet
acceptable imagery cause a crisis in consumption for the cinema:
how can it deliver that which guarantees its economic livelihood but
which would also constrict and potentially destroy its social status?
By the invisibility of sound — the realm wherein the unseeable
^becomes known and the unwatchable becomes imagined.
In the sixties cycle of sexploitation movies, the thwarted desire
for visible penetration contributed to awkward narratives where
women wanted sex whether they knew it or not and men fucked
anything in lingerie. It could be argued that softcore porn from this
period caused great anxiety by not showing that which was
thematically/iconically promised, which in turn created the
convention of depicting the heady force and impact of sexual
intercourse through the dramatically-acceptable act of rape. It is
near impossible to find a film from this era where a bra isn’t ripped
off a woman and a man in underwear and socks doesn’t lie on top
of the squirming female while he smothers her with stubble-
scarring kisses. Penetration is mysteriously avoided; orgasm is
t impossibly attained. The open mouth - far from being a snapping
castrating Freudian threat - is the flayed vaginal lips that
irrationally signal an orgasm which is unlikely to have occurred no
matter how desperate the imagination of the male viewer. Her
scream impossibly but logically becomes an aural cum shot.
Accordingly, the female scream has remained a frighteningly
ambiguous fixture in the dramatic scenarios of theatre, radio and
cinema - especially as its placement in a dramatic context
reverberates with the sublimatory pornographic coding of
U- sexploitation. From the salacious silence of open-mouthed heroines
tied to railway tracks, to the radiophonic incision of female fright
into the family loungeroom, to the gasping gurgling foley effects of
nurses and co-eds having their throats slashed, one detects a dark
colon of vocal anguish shooting through the historical reservoir of
‘thriller-kill-her’ entertainment. It is no wonder that a mangrove of
murky knotting between the dramatic and pornographic has given
rise to skewed perspectives, where dramatic issues are sexualized and
 I S cre am in Silence: C in em a, S ex and the Sound of Women Dying 55

erotic functions treated as dramaturgy: did she deserve it? Did she
want it? We told her not to visit the sawmill, walk home from work,
go down to the basement. Yes, she’s in her underwear because she
wanted to shower. No, he wanted to kill her because he hated
blondes only. The ambiguity of the scream is most frightening 1
because it becomes embroiled in the most inconclusive morals and
mores. The scream rings loud as if to give a warning, a message, a
statement —but all it does is thrill us, raising the hair on the back of
our necks and stimulating the pubic forest of our confused desires.
Yet the starkest aspect of the female scream’s ambiguousness is
how its very intent to communicate - through the tightening of the
vocal chords in an involuntary spasm —short circuits all linguistic
operation. The wordless cry is a return to the primal, sure enough,
but its desperation alone does not ensure clarity of purpose. Many
a scream heard from a distance halts one with its indistinction
between delight, terror, fancy, pain. ‘No’ might mean ‘no’, but a
scream can be interpreted through too wide an emotional gamut to
be fixed as a directive. Worse, the scream heard from a distance —
refracted and diffused by urban architecture - leaves one in a
quandary as to the unseen circumstance and context of the Jf
disembodied voice: are two girls teasing each other? Are lovers deep
in breeder passion? Is a group of friends making their way home
from a bar? Or is someone being attacked? Cinema gleefully and
remorselessly exploits the iconic effect of the scream, emptying it of
its social specificity and flooding it with our indecision and
immobility. How easy it is to make a plot turn through an off-
screen scream. How dreadful it has become a cliché which filters
our aural reception of what might be happening right next door.
How dumb it is to ignore its lineage.

THE CATATONIC CORPUS

Another cheap movie, one year earlier. Herk Harvey’s Carnival
O f Souls (1962). A woman - bruised, tattered, covered in mud —
emerges from a rivers edge where earlier her car had been retrieved
after she was driven over the bridge into murky waters. Dredging
fails to recover the car, but now she mysteriously returns in a daze,
unable to communicate clearly. She gives rise to strange visceral
56 CIN ESO NiC : The World of Sound in Film

combinations: moist and muddy, sweaty and sexual, ravaged and

rebirthed, traumatized and terrifying, erotic and ectoplasmic. This
is the body of the cinematic scream: a catatonic corpus whose
silence articulates all that is connoted by the tightly phased
collision of cinematic screams with social screams.
Carnival O f Souls is mostly post-dubbed and echoes many an
adult movie’ with its flat vocalization as Mary Henry (Candice
Hiligross) drifts through the scenes in a strangely detached manner.
But simpático with the films haunting story, Mary is in fact dead.
And as she ethereally floats in the mortal world of tangible
substances, so does she quiver on the film soundtrack separate from
her on-screen presence. Yet Mary does not realize she is dead. The
souls’ of the dead follow to reclaim her and return to the domain
of the departed, leading her to believe she is being chased by a
strange man visible only to her. Standard devices for haunted
narratives, but Carnival O f Souls enacts a chilling rupture between
sound and image in one outstanding scene. After Mary tries on a
dress in a department store change room, she returns to the sales
clerk who now can neither see nor hear her. Mary thinks she is
r being ignored but then becomes aware - as we do - of the
profound silence which embalms her presence. The soundtrack is
totally devoid of all atmosphere and ambience - what studio
engineers refer to as an acoustically ‘dead’ space, unenlivened by
spatial refractions and lacking in any sound design to redress what
seems to be a problem in filmmaking. If Mary only knew of this
sonic morbidity, she would realize her unalterable predicament.
Unfortunately prompted by the privilege of sight in the mortal
world, she believes that which appears before her eyes, when her
hearing alone grants absolute truth.
'X This unsettling audiovisual effect recalls similarly alienating
moments in our actual acoustic existence: the blocking of the ear
due to changes in atmospheric pressure in a plane cabin; the
lodging of water in the ear canal after a swim; watching people on
the street through sealed doubled-glazed glass windows without
hearing their speech, etc. These commonplace situations wrench
sound from sight, upsetting the balance struck in stable sono-
opticaPconditions. In place, we clearly audit our own internal
breathing but registeF ohly the slightest and radically diminished
 I S c re a m In Silence: C in em a, Sex and the Sound of Women Dying 57

occurrence of all external action we witness. Our awareness of

bodily sensations - heightened by the rise in level of sounds which
we normally filter out due to their low frequency and decibel level
- obliterates the position of self-erasure we voyeuristically inhabit
when viewing both reality and film as a window on the world’.
Our very breath - the most tangible trace of our mortality - haunts
us. Mirroring the frightening ambiguousness of the female scream,
breath on the soundtrack is both erotic and necrotic. It replaces the %
presence of the actor and his/her character with a bodily
occupation of audiovisual space. The screen and its acoustic field
Become a terrain no longer inhabited by silvery ghosts, but by a
corporeal funk of glottal spital and nasal whistle. When Mary
realizes that no-one can see/hear her, she becomes aware of her
bodily status as a shell traversing a world in which she is not
welcome, leaving her to roam mismatched, disynchronized,
acoustically alienated.

CINE-SILENCE AND RECORDED ERASURE

I posit the aural anguish of Meg - displaced, disfigured,
decollated - and the catatonic corpus of Mary - derailed, drained,
drenched —as bodily manifestations of the trauma cinema induces
through its application of the female scream as mere sonic cipher '
in avoidance of its social referent. For when woman cannot even
scream in the cinema, her silence is most morbid. However this
censure yields a tersely vibrational force which reveals firstly the
audiovisual substance of cinema through the act of recording and
positioning the human voice, and secondly the material totality of
sex and violence as compound apparitions in the medium of film.
The handful of films discussed here exemplify this in unsettling
ways and thereby can direct us to listen more carefully to what we
presume to be mere sound effects’.
Meg’s hell is doubled through repetition (she experiences the
whole film twice, potentially ad infinitum) while Mary’s catatonia
is doubled through reflection (people witness her inability to
speak, then she witnesses their inability to hear her). Each doubly
silenced, they symbolize both the breakdown of the social being
and the dismissal of deeper significance in fetishizing the female
CINESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

scream. Cinema will use woman as both siren and banshee,

granting her paranormal and meta-mystical vocals for purposes of
spooky seduction. And many a cine-social edict has woman as one
who will not shut up and needs to be silenced —by a witty retort,
a hypnotic stare, a morning grapefruit, a cup of hot coffee, a
leather glove, a hypodermic needle, an electric chainsaw. But when
frozen mouths like Bad Girls Go To Hell's Meg and animated
corpses like Carnival O f Souls' Mary appear (from which a modern
semiotic lineage persistently trails), they scream in the utmost of
silence, documenting the very act of erasure that posits them as
dead women.
This specific ‘silent scream’ is neither a gesture of melodramatic
freeze nor a psySToTogical blockage of expression,1 but a form of
Jcine-silence’ precisely centred at the nexus of the sexual and the
technological. Cine-silence generated by the absence, dislocation
and/or import of an actress voice is a carefully placed act of erasure
on the film soundtrack. In the operations of dialogue editing, ADR
and post-dubbing, other sounds are muted, faded-down, edited-
out. Foregrounded is the sensation of something missing: from the
wholly expected randomness of breath presence to the highly
desirous ero-sonic moment of the scream. The symbolic resonance
in the figures of Meg and Mary is not to be found in any archaic
literary tradition, but in the discursive and strategic methods of
recording, encoding, mixing and rendering their voices.
Remembering the audiovisual base of cinema and the
interchangeability of aural and visual modes of depiction, aural
means of production here enact the symbolic codes of the images
to which these silenced voices are tied. Their muting in the mix
reflects the way that the female scream in our social reality is
uncomfortably ignored; their removal from the soundtrack
signifies a dual operation of sexual censure and violent erasure.
The hyper-violent ending of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo (1976) is
most savage due to its removal of screams from the soundtrack. As
young men and women lie stomach down in a sandy courtyard and
have their tongues cut out and scalps pried back, the soundtrack
indifferently hisses with recorded silence and optically encoded
crackles. We see their mouths open wide in screams we do not hear.
The voyeuristic distance we enjoy from the spectacle is contracted
 I S c re a m in S ile n ce: C in em a , Sex and the Sound of Women Dying 59

and thrust inward to us as we are refused the pleasure j}f the scream
as both aural cum shot and iconic softener for the extreme actions ”1
visually depicted. Due to the cinemas incessant employment of the
scream as a sonic simulacrum for that which cannot be shown, the
atypical apparition of a silenced scream on the soundtrack presents
the cinematic apparatus as an inverted audiovisual machine, here
psychologically amplifying the scream by muting it in the mix. The ^
ñiachinic effects of the cinematic apparatus are painfully apparent
in Sato's finale: it is like the cinema itself has been technologically, ' VJ ^
short-circuited, blowing out the speakers and upsetting any ^
intended audiovisual normality. Silent footage and extreme <//; .
violence tend to go hand-in-handy^and have established a semiotic i
“^effect o f morbidity which cinema usually avoids. Stan Brakhages '
The Act O f Seeing With One’s Own Eyes (1972) unsettles the
stomach as a coroner operates on a range of bodies in total
cinematic silence. The withholding of the expected squelching
creates a vacuum of clinical silence in the morgue. As bushed
witnesses we are refused all form of bodily and psychological N' J
catharsis through psychoacoustic triggers: breath, voice, scream, ^ %• j
music, etc. Instead we must stare blankly as the scalp of a patient is > ' ^
rolled down the front of his face and clamped in his mouth while V
the skull is sawn open to remove his brain. The image is most
disorienting; its silence most disquieting.

POSSESSED VOCAL CORDS

AND THE VOICE OF ANOTHER
Our vocal chords are a conduit for communication of which we
presume much yet consider little, mainly due to memory loss of the
steep learning curve we ride in childhood to gain the power of
speech. Our larynx is the morphic machine of that muscular and
neurological struggle to attain speech. Tone, timbre and texture are
ingrained at early stages, then later filtered and modulated by the
mechanics of language and the desire for communication. Each
and every nuance of our genetic inference, communal interaction
and acoustic environment is impressed on our vox mechanica.
Vowels are tied to our mothers breath; pitch to our conversation
with friends; phrasing to our surrounding architecture; volume to
 CIN ESO N iC: The World of Sound in Film

our landscape. As such, our voice documents our aural history, and
describes past, place and personality through its instrumentality. It
is no surprise that we Fear the taking-over of our voice by another.
In William Friedkins The Exorcist (1972), the voice of female
pubescence is orchestrated as a hellish chorus of effects and
transmogrifications. Possessed by a devil, Regan (Linda Blair)3
speaks in foreign languages, reversed recordings and diabolical
dialogue. Drained of the personal, filled from beyond and fuelled
by possession, Regan’s whole body becomes a distorted
receiver/broadcaster for Satanic power. She is a ouija body: letters
press outward from her abdomen to emboss the word ‘help’ in
typographical welts; spinal gymnastics redefine the limits of
contortion as her head spins 180 degrees to face those whom she
addresses; vulgarities spew forth in linguistic and bilious form until
r she literally exhales a stream of vomit. As words become abject
matter - phlegm for insult, saliva for disdain, etc - the voice
becomes an aural anus. It no longer voluntarily speaks, but shits
uncontrollably. The Exorcist conjures a nauseating audiovisual
imagining of the loss of one’s own voice. Regan is silenced through
a severing of her psyche from her vocal chords, forcing her to
become a bloated vessel for every possible vocalization of the
Other: social, familial, sexual, physical, spiritual. Priests recite and
recant to retrieve her; words are their tools, a bible their manual.
Somewhere deep in the cavernous corporeal cacophony of those
who crowd her being lies Regan —lost in the noise of the Other and
prevented from screaming with her own voice.
^ While the hysteria in which Catholicism is historically grounded
gave rise to the symbolic plausibility of Regan s speaking in demonic
tongues, the notion of a non-possessed human speaking the voices
of other humans elicits greater scepticism. Fraudulent ‘mediums’
have since the turn of the century been a staple of ridicule, intrigue
and mystery in much comedy and thriller entertainment. Yet
exposés of much undoubted fakery have tainted our reception of
what remains a curious mystical figure: the medium through whose
vocal cords vibrates the voice of another.4 Popular media depicts
sufferers of multiple personality disorder as pathological liars or
delusional attention-seekers, but it is overlooked that the
methodology of personality multiplication is primarily a therapeutic
 J S cre am in Silence: C in em a, S ex and the Sound of Women Dying 61

measure which can enable the victimized to identify their personal

trauma from a distance. Specifically, they can ‘talk’ about their bad
experience as if an ‘other’. It is not surprising then that these actors’
of their selves populate tabloid talk shows, and thereby deliver
through their desperate fiction exactly what those shows desire
most: unfettered, unabashed, unconscious talk.
This adoption of characterization in order to comprehend a
stultifying experience may blur fact and fiction, but healing of the
self at times is a higher priority than literary truth. Famous child
incest survivor Trudi Chase was not thinking about wacky carneys
in turbans parting money from dizzy society dames when she wrote
her biography When Rabbit Howls in 1992. Interviewed on a
special Oprah that year, she promoted her book naturally enough
(as a tie-in with a telemovie, Voices Within: The Lives O f Trudi
Chase). Oprah even interviewed some of her ninety-two
personalities, addressing them by name, to which Trudi responded
in distinct vocal character. The incidents of child abuse and
domestic violence which Trudi and some of her available others’
detailed were so horrific that the cinema has yet to venture a
portrait of such a monstrous stepfather. Trudi Chase’s multifarious
personalities are based on an excessive number of abuses which
Trudi has remembered through guided therapy. The different
names relate to different locations, periods, seasons, smells, years,
colours. Some are subjective memories; others are remembrances of
witnessing abuse directed at her brothers. Each character’ is
determined by his/her ability to remember, and - crucially —speak
of the memory. The youngest personality belongs to ‘Rabbit’,
sexually abused at the age of two. The title When Rabbit Howls
relates to the sound with which Trudi Chase most identified: the
silent hoar which comes from rabbits when they are killed. Rabbits
do not scream because rabbits do not possess vocal cords.

PROXIES AND PUPPETS

Trudi Chase’s identification with a being who has no voice is a
telling compensation for her manifestation of multiple voices,
through which a strange equilibrium of vocalization is struck. After
all, her recourse to a fractal schizophrenia via her many voices is
 C1NES0NIC: The World of Sound in Film

aberrant only in relation to how much we equate our own singular

j""voice with a sense of stable self. Character is seeminglyTngrajned in
our voice, but the sound it projects may only be an aural/oral
illusion of what we presume to be our self’. Like the visible vapor
our body temperature enables our mouths to exhale on a cold
morning, our voice could be the very thing we most fear: a slight
effect. Maybe no-one owns their voice. Maybe our voice was never
ours to be possessed. Maybe it is owned elsewhere.
In Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll (1993), a woman walks
through a ravaged village. She appears to be in a zombie state, her
eyes dull and lacklustre, her face pale and pasty. She speaks in a
stilted monotone and moves with strained coordination.
Elsewhere, an evil Ninja mouths the words which synchronously
motorize the lips of this catatonic corpus, forcing her to expel his
foreboding words through her larynx. Once finished with her as his
rotting messenger, she falls down dead like a lifeless puppet
detached from the master’s control. She is/was a being whose voice
is owned elsewhere, whose words are controlled by remote. In other
scenes, head Ninja Urimaru uses similar communication to
whisper commands to his Ninja army from afar. In a method akin
to the childrens telephonic string tied between two tin cans, a
glistening trail of fleetingly visible thread streams through the forest
and is attached to others’ lips! Curiously, the para-mystical
vocalization of puppets, the possessed and other proxies figures
strongly in much Japanese fantasy animation, with characters who
can speak - and in a sense ‘are spoken’ —across dimensions, call
beyond states, and communicate through realities.5
In Toshihiro Hiranos animation The Princess of the Vampire
Miyu (1992), a swirling mass of possessed, dispossessed and
repossessed voices is epicentral to the 4-part series. Based on both
the phantasmagoria of bunraku puppet theatre and its oriental deus
ex machina (the use of men clothed in black set against a black
back-drop while they manipulate intricate, down-scaled, fully-
articulated mannequins), the eponymous Miyu is a young girl who
has been summoned to connect with her shinma\ a tall, skeletal,
dark figure, Larvae. He even resembles a bunraku puppeteer,
hovering over Miyu and performing identical synchronous actions
with her in a display of control. The relationship between the two
 1 S c re a m in S ile n ce: C in em a , S ex and the Sound of Women Dying 63

is partly that of the vampire and his undead victim, but moreso a
mirroring of the condition of shinma: loosely, the originating state
wherein deity and evil spirit were in ancient time conjoined and
inhabited a single plane of existence. Capable of traversing
corporeal and spiritual worlds (not unlike the existential/Gothic
meld of Meg in Carnival of Souls), Miyu navigates a dimensionally
warping expanse devoid of Western binary morals and strewn with
collapsed psychotic figures.
In the second instalment of the series (titled Banquet of
Marionettes) Miyu encounters Ran-Ca, a delicate doll-like
schoolgirl who has been uncontrollably killing her lovers as she
attempts to consummate a relationship. Through the act of her
love, she transforms them into life-size bunraku figures, partly
through a denial of her own status as a cursed human who must
exist as a puppet in human form. Miyu uncovers this after a young
man to whom Miyu is attracted (Yuzuki Kei) is seduced by Ran-
Ca. Following a complex psychic battle, Miyu witnesses the now-
dead Kei speak through the voice of Ran-Ca as the latter holds his
body like a puppeteer. Clothing falls from both their bodies to
reveal the bunraku form of chained and linked muscular armatures;
they then depart into another dimension as doomed lovers at
strange peace with their non-human form.
By this stage of the tale, the ownership of voice — not to
mention the territorialization of vocal cords as visceral strings for
the puppeteer - is presented as a shifting occurrence of oral real
estate. Miyu often operates as a medium for others, and her ‘self’
is intricately bound with the mute Larvae. Through the
alternating current of her vocal reflux, she demonstrates how voice
is dispersed and diffused across psychic and psychological
landscapes: no-one solely owns their own voice, but everyone can
have potential purchase of the voices of all others. The fantastic
scenarios of animations like The Princess o f the Vampire Miyu and
Ninja Scroll re-evaluate the strained measures by which the human
voice is treated as a localized, stabilized point of origin, and
ponder the problems produced by the functioning of proxies. As ~j
mentioned earlier, the linguistic multiplicity and emotional
ambiguity of the female scream defend its meaning in an aural
‘hall of mirrors’ where the imperative source of the scream is
64 CINESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

indistinguishable frmn its copies, doubles, echoes. We can now

extend that idea of a vocal .fieldJ- a locatable space of the vocal
event —into; a vocal matrix: /an expandable network of vocal lines
which creates' the space for'vocal multiplicity, within which vocal
ownership is a questionable investment.
^ While Japanese animation foregrounds this space through its
dispossession of the solo voice, we can audit similar transferences
and matrixes in common everyday occurrences. For example, a
young girl playing with friends might scream in mimicry of a
horror film she saw but did not fully understand. The young girl
may be suppressing an infantile trauma. The horror film may by
based on researched fact, but presented phantasmagorically for the
purpose of entertainment. The actress who performs the scream
may have suffered an attack or rape, from which she queasily draws
motivation for her performance 6
Thus we arrive at a salient aspect of the silent scream: within
these type of vocal matrixes, its notary function as an event of
silence can be rewritten and orally encoded by a proxy, so much so
that the scream we hear silences its point of emission and its
circumstantial origin. Those who scream loudest may be either
amplifier or signal processor that extends that 'dark colon of
anguish’ which connects the voice of woman. Their volume will be
an abrupt marker - an incision into space, the screen, a narrative —
while their timbrel identity may be the result of multiple scream
eifects designed to highlight a vocal performance. Furthermore, the
woman who screams may be instigating the act of screaming
p herself, or she may be performing under control of another. The
registered scream - full of artifice, ambiguity, anguish —fills the
uncomfortable holes created by silent screams, possessed vocals,
other voices and oral proxies. Its truth factor is unessential to its
meaning, because even if a scream lies, it echoes an awful truth:
that each scream by proxy is but a microcosmic moment in a series
of extended shock waves which rebound from the personal to the
social and back again, and that those shock waves are modulated
indiscriminately by truth and falsehood.

/
 I S c re a m in Silence: Cinem a, Sex and {he Sound of Women Dying 65

SYNCING LSPS AND SAMPLING VOICES

The heady confusion induced by the bi-phonic conundrum of
vocal proxies is strangely ignored despite the flagrant contradictions
inherent in its many manifestations. Nowhere is this more apparent
than in the phenomenon of ‘live lip-syncing’ - where people
wilfully Become zombies like those of Ninja Scroll and use song to
move them as animated objects mouthing the words of recordings
by people who exist elsewhere.7
Live lip-syncing is at once weird and familiar. Its weirdness lies
in the inappropriateness effected by its audiovisuality: a young girl
sounding (not sounding like’) Bruce Springsteen or Scott Walker;
an old man sounding Queen Latifah or Tanya Tucker. Moreso, the 7
psychoacoustic impression of watching a live body while hearing a
recording thrusts a ‘cinesonic effect into an acoustic reality: it is
like one inhabits a film soundtrack, or that its spatiality engulfs a
realm (the nightclub, the bar, the loungeroom) which we presume
to be acoustically defined and not electronically constructed. The
familiarity of lip-syncing lies in our intuitive awareness of the
phenomenological state created by listening to recorded music. In
an era wherein electro-magnetic aura defines the meta-field within
which acoustic data is interpreted, we are adept at recognizing,
identifying and accepting the surface sheen which defines recorded
music. This is so much so that we are more likely to be disoriented
by the sudden appearance of the tone of a real tuba co-habiting our ^
listening space.
Lip-syncing is intricately linked to the many ways in which we
have had pop music revealed to us as the manipulation of a singing
voice controlled elsewhere - by song writers, A&R personnel,
studio producers, music arrangers, tour managers, marital partners,
casual lovers. Not surprisingly, the stereotype of the petite, young,
feminine singer controlled by silent and invisible svengaliAxks. old
men is more accurate than not. The ‘bird in the gilded cage’
syndrome (as well as the ‘ballerina in the music box’, the ‘puppet
on a string and so on) has become central to a condition of pop
music, where women’s voices especially are trained to be a
feminized sound effect. This type of control particularly exploits
the erotics of the female singing voice as it has been celebrated in
many song forms, from operatic arias to melodramatic ‘torch songs’
6 6 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

to rhythm and blues ballads, wherein the soaring heights of the

female pitch range partially or wholly replicates the tri-tiered
narrational envelope common to erotica and pornography
(sensation/arousal/orgasm = introduction/build-up/peak). Male
voices can perform similarly, but a certain template of control
presents itself when men direct womens voices to stimulate
through simulating such states of arousal.
The engenderment of these erotics and their manipulation is
most apparent in the lip-syncing of womens songs by male drag
performers. Obviously, a conscious embrace of the melodramatic
excessiveness of overtly theatrical and/or impassioned singers
(from Edith Piaf to Judy Garland to Barbara Streisand to Annie
Lennox) fuels the desired transplantation of a sexual otherness —in
this case, femininity. The result is a gaudy, grotesque or even
monstrous surfeit of inappropriate signage as the female voice -
brimful of orgasmic intimation - ungainly spouts from the over­
glossed lips of a waxed queen. Bizarrely, we have returned to the
illogical causality of female orgasm achieval through hirsute manly
aggression: hearing Marilyn Monroe coo through the voice of a
120kg drag queen is similar to watching a balding oaf with a hairy
back slobber over a sexy young woman in bra and panties. The
drag aesthetic and its questionable modus operandi inherits the
morbid legacy of treating and transfiguring the female voice as a
sexual ized ‘sonicon. *
Digitally sampling womens voices extends the drag effect into a
hyperactive processing of those sexualized ‘sonicons’. The results
fuse the hyperthyroid with the hypermorbid: divas gulp for air as
they drown in their own vocal juices to the necrophiliac humping
of a drum machine; choirs constructed from female breaths sing
into the ether like lost angels mourning dead women. The poetics
imply vitality and beauty; the semiotics suggest death and horror.
Although the issues which arise from sampling women’s voices
,V requires a completely separate analysis, it is pertinent to note that
the act of sampling ensures ultimate symbolic control of the voice
of woman: like a malleable sex doll, you can do anything you want
with it, sustain it for as long as you like, and conduct in every way
possible. You can transform ‘her’ into an angel or a devil; a crone
""oFa baby; a princess or a monster. The algorithmic streaming of her
 I S c re a m in Silence: C in em a, Sex and the Sound of Women Dying 67

voice as digital data is on in one sense a wide river of poetic

potential, but in another sense, a thin trail of her seeping life force.

THE SIGNIFYING SCREAM

In as much as men have metaphorically and technologically
made use of womans voice as an oral catchment of beauty, tragedy,
femininity, innocence, frailty, etc, so have women bared naked the
collective scarring this usage has caused to the tissue of female
vocalization. For when a womans scream is audible, non-silent,
locatable, unpossessed, unmanipulated, self-controlled, its raw
texture colors it as noise.
Vocal performers like Cathy Berberian, Janis Joplin, Yoko Ono,
Diamanda Galas, Roberta Finley and Courtney Love8 eschew all
conventions of the tamed feminine voice for an unleashing of
animalistic howls and guttural growls. It is not so much that when
they sing they ‘bare their soul’ or perform any pseudo-mystical feat
through bypassing romantic gendered cliches. These singers inflict
themselves with the reverse of those conventions. In doing so, they V
revoke all licensing of their voices as simulated sound effect (as V 7
generic icon, sexual sonicon or silencer of emanating source) and in ^
"place physically express the terrible breadth of traumatized ^
experience which equally scars the self, the personal and the social. \
While female singers can explore this oppositional strategy of ' 'V
singing tKe Body sexual, cinema has rarely allowed ‘the noise of "t
female’ to corrupt the ruthlessly coded soundtrack. Technicians will
cite problems in frequency encoding; producers will fear audience
alienation; directors will be too busy swamping Enya over their
humanist scenarios to care for the physically intimidating presence
of a woman’s raw voice. Occasional moments of vocal strength and
cursive energy occur,9 but few films holistically import the female
vocal machine into the cinematic apparatus.
A potent exception is UIu Grossbards Georgia (1995). Sisters
Sadie (Mare Winningham) and Georgia (Jennifer Jason Leigh) may
have the same genetic mother, but every fibre of their psychological
make-up casts them as polar opposites. This is painfully apparent in
the timbre and personality of their voices. Sadie is a successful soft-
C&W singer: slick, humane, lovable, warm. Georgia is a drug-
CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

fucked post-punk bar singer: aggressive, strained, wired, psychotic.

Audiences melt at the crystal purity of Sadie’s lulling performances;
they freeze at Georgia screeching nihilistically into her microphone.
This binary split is reinforced throughout the film, each time with
the shuddering thwack of an axe into wood. The sisters never resolve
anything, and no matter how hard one of them tries to bond or re­
unite, the other is uncontrollably repelled. Now, this all sounds
acceptable when outlined in literary terms, but Georgia purposefully
presents the dulcet tones of Sadie as vapid, repressed and
meaningless, while the hoarse wails of Georgia are posited as a
gaping emotional wound baring her capacity to feel, hurt, yearn.
The accrual of every semiotic and musicological layering by which
we attribute degrees of emotionalism in a singing voice is thus
inverted: the gorgeous warbling of Sadie is revealed to be pure sonic
effect; the dark crowing of Georgia as total vocal noise.
Jennifer Jason Leigh’s vocal performance is crucial to the harsh
dynamics of Georgia s operatic textuality, especially in the ways she
uses her voice as an instrument of performance. She deliberately
sings flat, placing far too much pressure on her vocal cords; she
improvizes in a deluded and solipsistic fashion; she perceives her
talent unrealistically. (Leigh accomplishes this so well that many a
reviewer complained of her ‘trying to sing’, when clearly her
character is meant to be lacking in this area.) In short, Leigh’s
character Georgia abuses her voice in an unremitting display of
self-destruction. But there is purpose to this wailing wall of noisy
negativity After it becomes apparent to all concerned that these
sisters will never embrace each other’s emotional fissures, Sadie
blends into her bland domestic cocoon, while Georgia appears on
a rickety stage in yet another alcoholic dive. Unrecognizable at first
with her head near-shaven, Georgia clearly is sinking lower than
ever before. Her punky jitteriness is evident as she wraps up a song
to the abrupt end of some brutish rock music. Three hand claps
from the audience and an icy glance from Georgia as she spits out
some cynical thanks - and then a decisive cut to black. The edit
itself is violent: a genuine ‘fuck you’ in emotional synch with
Georgia that sucks us into the narrative black hole of her inner
turmoil. Yet this final moment of the film is a chilling glimpse of
the defiant will to survive that ultimately rings through her vocal
 I S c re a m in Silence: C in em a, Sex and Ihe Sound of Women Dying

cords despite the negative response its noise solicits. Georgias

ending constitutes a rare cinematic moment where the noise of a
woman’s deliberated scream signifies hope.

PHALLIC SOUNDS AND AURAL HARD-ONS

In Katherine Bigelow’s Blue Steel (1990), Megan Turner (Jamie
Lee Curtis) is a rookie cop whose nervous strength and lithe
stature sexually arouse the psychotically dispossessed Eugene Hunt
(Ron Silver) into stalking her. After failing to have him legally
detained (because she had unwittingly invited him back to her
apartment) Megan senses all public and personal space as a
potentially threatening environment. Claustrophobia and
agoraphobia collapse into a fear of space itself, as she finds familiar
locales transformed into alien terrain. This is effectively cued
throughout the movie by the subtle use of flanged wind sounds
(like one hears when breathing through a cardboard tube). Often,
Megan will be framed at the end of a corridor in silhouette, light
spilling in while we see watch her from a distance. The "7
combination of such overtly voyeuristic images with the
tunnelling sound of air contribute to a phallic sound effect’: an
abstraction of the peeping tom’s breath, diffused into a penile ^
stream of white noise which shoots toward Megan.
The title credits to Blue Steel establish this audiovisual
symbolism clearly. Extreme close-ups track across and through
interlocking chambers, connected barrels and linked passages of a
Smith & Wesson 38 Special. A scopic universe of metal if mapped,
while sampled/looped breaths - sexual, mortal, fatal - breathe
through this machinic architecture. The intricacies of gun design
are enlarged to form a social macrocosm, charting both the urban
entrapment of women and the psychological confines within which
they must survive. The flanging wind texture is amplified to convey
the exhausted breath from both excited voyeur and fearful victim
as they engage in a cat-and-mouse chase.
That texture connotes a contraction of space, evoking pipes,
tubes and tunnels which are designed to irrigate flow under
heightened pressure, as liquid or air will pass more quickly and
with greater force down a narrow canal than a wide thoroughfare.
CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

The notion of phallic’ characteristics here is not to do with mere

visual similarities in vertical form (a gross misunderstanding of
penile mechanics within the body construct), but more to do with
the control of energy and its transformation into the securement of
power. If the scream is an aural cum shot - externalized, airborne,
explosive - the hollow sound of tunnHred air islm aural hard-on -
internalized, fluid-driven, raging. Blue Steel focuses on the build-up
(that afore-mentioned moistening of canals and engorging of
tunnels ) more than the climax; on the urges and impulses which
heave and sigh within the male corpus more than the screams
unleashed from the victimized female. Megan is not another
Pauline tied to perilous railway tracks, nor is she facilely spooked
and shocked by unexpected attacks from her assailant. She is
gradually granted an overview —a schematic map —of his methods,
his machinations, his miasma, his mania. From that vantage point,
she can audibly discern his panting breath from her own nervous
gasps; she can locate him, fix him, frame him, freeze him. Far from
being silenced, she silences herself. Empowered through knowing
the sound of his voice, she refrains from giving him that which he
most desires: her scream.

WAVES OF SILENCE
Shortly after the tranquil travelogue imagery unfolds in the title
sequence to the premiere episode of David Lynchs Twin Peaks
(1990), a young woman shuffles in small steps across a river bridge;
she is barely covered by a tattered petticoat, her exposed flesh
smeared with mud and blood. The unexpected apparition of this
mysterious catatonic figure eerily echoes the halting image of Mary
in Carnival O f Souls almost thirty years earlier. But Lynchs recall of
this figure is more an evocation of the surrealist spirit (itself a
grotesque celebration of unrepressed misogyny) than a comment
upon the female corpse. The film that performs this latter function
in the most uncompromising of ways is Meir ^archi’s I Spit On
Your Grave (1978).
The plot of I Spit On Your Grave is simple. Jennifer Hills
(Camille Keaton) leaves New York and settles in an upstate
riverside cabin to write her novel (30 minutes). There she is
 1 S cre am in Silence: C in em a, S ex and the Sound of Women Dying

attacked by a group of four men who each take turn to viciously

rape her (30 minutes). She then seduces each of her four rapists
separately and impassively kills them (30 minutes). Jennifers story
neither depicts nor grants us the tropology through which classical
narration proceeds: it features no laws, no morals, no catharsis. She
ruthlessly redresses her ravaging with revenge, and in doing so
reduces this example of the ‘rape-revenge’ subgenre into an obscure
narrative object: its character motivations are spiked yet flattened;
its acts of violence are sharp yet blunt. The plots skeletal triptych
(rest/rape/revenge) becomes an engorged macro-structure of
erotica/pornography’s tri-tiered narrational envelope, but this time
dangerously yet appropriately synchronizing the psycho-sexual
drives of both aggressor and victim. Structurally speaking, a
primary consensual equation (the narrational envelope
[introduction/build-up/peak] miming the sexual envelope
[sensation/arousal/orgasm]) is overlaid with a secondary non-
consensual equation: a male act [threat/violation/rape] moulding a
female act [trauma/repair/murder]. A hybrid networking of sexual
and violent drives is then constructed in such a way that the two
are impositioned as being the one. Which, in actual cases of sexual
violence, they always are - despite the cinemas desperate measures
to separate them so as to not offend.
Originally and tellingly titled Day O f The Woman, I Spit On
Your Grave places woman on centre stage and amplifies in equal
proportion her aspiration (30 minutes), her anguish (30 minutes)
and her abysm (30 minutes). Counter to the congested urban
backdrop to most ‘rape/revenge’ movies, the ‘stage’ for Jennifer is
nature: beautiful, serene, peaceful, calming. And in place of the
usual wall of city noise is the silence which accompanies the clean
country air —something Jennifer notices immediately. Likewise, we
notice the emptiness of the soundtrack. As with Mary in Carnival
of Souls, Jennifer is somewhat detached from her surroundings, and
this psycho-spatial aspect of her habitation is reflected in the
quietness with which she simultaneously moves through nature
and graces the sound track. Noticeably, the expanse of ‘nature’ in /
Spit On Your Grave is non-reverberant. Everywhere space is
uncontained, rolling, continual; the outside is consequently
incapable of trapping sound, of corralling it or bouncing it around.
7 2 CINESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

Camille Keaton in I Spit on /our Grave

Whereas reverberant tunnels, corridors and halls can intimidate

due to the feeling of intrusion generated by the spooky sound of
ones footsteps, open landscapes can make one feel less self-
conscious of ones presence due to the absence of sounds which
rupture the acoustic space. This psychoacoustic phenomenon of
the open landscape typically creates a sense of ease and freedom to }
which Jennifer responds positively and innocently
Upon arrival at her riverside cabin, Jennifer embraces the
openness of her new space and immerses herself in its totality by
swimming naked in the river. As she subsumes herself into the
rivers mass, virtually fusing her body with the water, the river
welcomes her, folding her into its undulations and shifting
contours. There she exists free of gravity, hovering in the water’s
aqueous ethereality My lyrical waxing here is not to deepen what
visually is a softcore cliche, but to qualify Jennifer’s relation to her
surroundings as an act of aural sublimation. Both music and sound
attain the dimensional symbolic state of water: their presence may
be perceived as a silent airborne phenomenon, but their movement
is described through waves, flow, frequency, volume and so forth —
all terms of liquidity. Through identifying with the river and its
 i S c re a m in Silence: Cinem a, Sex and the Sound of Women Dying 73

life-flow, Jennifer profoundly takes on the characteristics of sound

itself. Not merely at one with nature’, she sounds herself through a
tactile relationship with all she touches. She strokes the water as if
conducting music; she breathes air as if drinking silence; she rocks
on a hammock as if recording a breeze.
No music accompanies the early scene of Jennifer swimming
nude in the river, and it is filmed in unobtrusive wide shot, thereby
reducing its quotient of conventional audiovisual voyeurism. On
the one hand, this early moment of eros may suggest an exploitative
tone, but there is also the likelihood that it simply shows a woman
enjoying a private sensual pleasure. Not only does she —as a textual
seme - not acknowledge our presence, but her audiovisual
capturing and encoding within the film also block access to her
inner thoughts. Just as she moves through her space (both pre and
post her traumatic raping), so are we left to observe and audit her
predicament from a strained distance - textually divorced through
the total erasure of music, the complete embrace of silence and the
strident employment of long wide shots, yet socially implicated by
experiencing the movie. Any other film would avert the gaping
holes, uncomfortable pauses and painfully long passages caused by
this refusal to nurture character identification. Any other film
would resorF~to the clichés of compassionate voice-over, fey
melodiousness, visual symbolism, reverent portraiture, beautiful
pictorialism, moving Spit On Your Grave is not the by­
product of such comfortable enlightenment: it is a deliberately
disquieting dive into the compacted molecular grain of the J
cinematic scream. It grants access - vicariously, yet forthrightly - to
the deafening din of the looped scream in Bad Girls Go HelL And
once there, we are refused any exit.

WAVES OF VIOLENCE
It is not surprising that Jennifer s world is initially wracked by a
series of sudden sounds: a knock at the door breaks her
contemplation of having discovered a gun in her bedroom drawer;
the dim-witted Matthew (Richard Pace) noisily rides through the
bush with pegs attached to the wheel spokes of his bike; Stanley
(Anthony Nichol) and Andy (Gunter Kleemann) interrupt Jennifer
C IN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

lolling in a hammock as they drive by in their speed boat. All

innocent enough in a court of law (recalling Megans predicament
in Bkte Steel, no-one is perpetrating any act upon Jennifer), but if
Jennifer has personalized her space - the totality of its topology
from atmosphere to aquasphere — then the mere presence of
unwanted others constitutes a symbolic act of aggression.
Essentially, Jennifer as woman is posited as space - engulfing,
encasing, subsuming - while Matthew, Stanley, Andy and their
‘leader’ Johnny (Eron Tabor) as man are posited as events —actional,
causal, arrestive. They are sounds to her silence; shadows to her
sun; bodies to her air; knives to her flesh. The continuity in
representing Jennifer primarily through aural and acoustic codes
points to a gendered determinism to which the film remains
faithful, for as the men break the silence and slash the water, they
will shortly violate her body and penetrate her sex with similar
disregard and force.
The symbolic split of gendered action in I Spit On Your Grave is
succinctly conveyed by the differing ways that the men and
Jennifer travel across the water. She sensually strokes the water with
wooden oars, creating a gentle pattern of waves balanced to the left
and right of her boat, using her body to physically produce a
travelling rhythm. The men sit low in the rear of their speed boat,
hand on the vibrating dildo-throttle, burning liquid fuel to
rapaciously spin metal blades which chop the water into a noisy
series of foaming counter waves. The noise that the men generate
(from their engine roars and vocal screams to their aberrant
simulation of pig squeals and bird noises) is a continual reminder
of their invasion of space itself: they literally disturb the
atmosphere through making sound, whereas Jennifer exists in the
country quiet without making a sound.
The quadruple rape of Jennifer physically and symbolically
functions as a series of shock waves to her body, following the
initial sudden sounds which disturb her space. And as she has
become one with her space, her whole sense of being within the
natural surroundings is then left vibrating, humming, ringing like
a metaphysical alarm bell which cannot be turned off. After the
first rape in the forest by Johnny, Jennifer manages to stagger
away. Naked, bruised, muddied, she walks wordlessly through the
 I S c re a m in Silence: Cinem a, Sex and the Sound of Women Dying 75

trees, her breath faintly discernible (a la Carnival o f Soul's Mary).

Earlier, her naked body blended with nature. Now, the brittle
ground is unforgiving to her bare feet, and the penile forest
through which she walks ignores the presence of her flesh as she
navigates her way back to safety. Again, silence deafens, devoid of
any moralist thunderbolts or humanist violins. Jennifer is not
there for ‘us’: she existentially inhabits this narrative and its harsh
landscape in symbolic accord with the unforgiving reality to
which her story alludes.
After some time, Jennifer reaches a forest clearing. As in a bizarre
Gothic fairy tale, the trees seem to have magically parted - only in
order to create a stage for the second rape, cued by a mournful
harmonic wail by Andy. Nature at this point seems cruel. Space
itself seems lethal. Yet Jennifer survives this horrible second ordeal.
In a set of disturbingly surreal images (absolutely pre-Lynchian in
their pallor) she crawls over grass toward her house, over wooden
boards up her porch, then inside over carpet toward her phone.
Amazingly, her body still moves. Just as the men reduced her body
beyond objectification into an abject state of de-objectification
(treating her as a lump with orifices rather than figuring her as a
pornographic catalogue of recognizable body parts) so she is reduced
to a pure pulse of quivering energy. As repulsive as this unsettling
sequence is, Jennifer is presented as someone not at the precipice of
death, but on the brink of life. For Jennifer is being existentially
reborn, and she is traumatically realigning herself to her external
space and the conditions of its nature. If before it welcomed her, she
must now find a means of existing without its support. Before, she
dissolved herself in the wavering, shimmering domains of the
outside, impervious to the controlling differences between nature
and culture, landscape and psyche, corporality and spirituality,
silence and sound. Now, she has experienced those stark differences
through the violence of gender. Now, she must learn not to sound
herself5, but to become noise.
Such is the nature of her revenge. It is not your usual, cathartic,
impassioned balancing of right and wrong (despite the
lackadaisical ritual of asking for forgiveness at the local church).
For Jennifer, ‘revenge’ is merely the mechanism she utilizes to
maintain her sanity and create a new equilibrium of existence. The
CINESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

men must cease to exist, and in silencing them, she must embrace
their noise, their rupture, their violation. After Jennifer has
dispatched them through a variety of psycho-sexual acts (hanging
by rope, castration by knife, butchering by axe and pulverizing by
outboard motor) she rides off not into the distance, but into us.
The camera travels with her in the boat, as she looks ahead past us
to what we cannot see behind us. Her hand is firmly on the
throttle, the engine noise droning at a fixed pitch on the
soundtrack as she rides the waves of violence with which she has
now become one. The image fades to black as the sound of the
engine bores deep into our skull, aurally depicting the noise which
must be ringing non-stop in her own head.

FADE OUT AT FULL VOLUME

The aural world is wrought by a terrifying equilibrium, where
every vibration produces a counter-vibration; where every sonic
occurrence creates an unregistered shock wave; where every silence
evacuates a sound to occur remotely elsewhere. This world is
polarized between the sounds you hear and the sounds you cannot
hear; between the voices you block out and the voices you dare not
imagine. Most screams we do not hear, nor never will. The
occasional one we experience is a sonic portal to that other realm
containing all we do not register. The scream in einenia acts as a
draft-stopper to this portal, sealing its lips to prevent the din from
that realm pouring in, blocking its reality with a gaudy sonic
hologram. The carney scream is neither registered nor released in
“Agnes Vardas Vagabonds (1985), a chilling tale of a young transient
Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) hitchhiking across the countryside. The
film opens with the discovery of her corpse. It ends with her death
as she stumbles into a ditch, malnourished and dazed, and freezes
to death overnight. The last image is of her face as she realizes that
she is about to die. Drained to the last drop of her life force, she
gasps and gulps because she does not have the energy to scream.
And even if she did, there would be no-one to hear her.
At the end of Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974),
Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) is left hysterically screaming like a
pig and thrashing his buzzing chainsaw in the air. Sally (Marilyn
 I S c re a m in Silence: C in em a, S ex and the Sound of Women Dying 77

Burns) —who he has chased, tormented and tortured for most of

the movie - has just escaped into the closing night. She has been
screaming for nearly twenty minutes of screen timCj and now her
voice finally cross-fades with that of Leatherface and his screaming
chainsaw. The film stock barely registers the ill-lit shape of
Leatherface as night falls again; the swimming grain connotes low
budget pornography from the era; the soundtrack is congealed into
a thick, hyper-compressed impasto of white noise hissing, tearing, "7
crackling through the speakers. This is the exhausted body of the
cinematic scream: performed to the point of exhaustion, encoded
at the edge of legibility, thrust toward the envelope of hyper­
ventilation.
The closure to Texas Chainsaw Massacre is at the threshold of
cinemas representational limits. Like the diminishing of lung j
power which silences Vagabonded Mona; like the impassive voyage
into darkness upon which I Spit On Your Graves Jennifer embarks;
like the black hole which swallows up Georgias Georgia after her
last song; like the dripping car wreck which entombs Carnival O f
Soul's Mary; like the darkly frozen frame which grips Bad Girls Go
To HeWs Meg as she screams yet again. All these films and more n
(though nowhere near as many as one would like) exploit the
cinematic scream not to ward one from a zone of inaccessibility and
inadmissibility, but to go beyond the audible world of ‘sonicons’
and their sexualized sound effects and into our ignored ‘socio-
acoustic’ reality - where woman screams in silence.
For Maria.

Notes
1 See Elisabeth Weis, The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchock's Soundtrack,
Rutherford, New Jersey, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982, and
Thomas Hemmeter, 'Hitchcock's Melodramatic Silence', Journal o f Film &
Video, Vol 45 Nos 1-2, Spring-Summer 1996.
2 From the silent footage of the Hindenburg exploding to burning children
fleeing Hanoi during the Vietnam war to guys being bashed in the LA riots,
the absence of syncronized sound tears us away from the depicted events and
traumatizes us by that very distance.
3 Listen also to Linda Blair's vocal performance in the telemovie Sarah T:
Portait O f A Teenage Alcoholic (1974).
4 The first topical film to seriously exploit this may be Noei Langley's The
 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

Search For Bridie Murphy (1956) where Bridie (Teresa Wright) regresses under
hypnosis past her early childhood into her prior lives. Told in a naturalistic and
riveting manner, the 'true' story on which the film is based was later revealed to
be fraudulent. This did noi iainl ihe veracity or plausibility of deranged and
multiplied mental states as exemplified by Daniel Petrie's notorious telemovie
Sybil (1976) with Sally Field portraying all seventeen of Sybil's personalities.
5 Some examples: Baoh, Blue Seed, Dctngio, Fight! Iczer-One, Genocyber,
Iczelion, Macross, Marvelous Melmo, Neon Genesis Evangelion, N ight On
The Galactic Railroad, Psycho Diver, Sailor Moon, Shoten Doji, Silent
Moebius, Unico, Ushio and Tora, Yoma.
6 The ultimate perversity in Brian De Palma's Blow Out (] 981) is that its
ending - where a director post-dubs the sound of a genuine scream onto the
image of an actress pretending to scream - is more social documentary than
postmodern play.
7 The height of this pre-karaoke trend occurs with TV's Putting On The Hits
(1985) hosted by Farah Fawcefl's brother Alan and featuring contestants who
mime to pop songs and are judged by a panel of experts.
8 Suggested listening: Luciano Berio's Visage (1966) featuring the voice of
Cathy Berberian; Yolo Ono's Fly { 1971) and Yoko Ono ana The Plastic Ono
Band (1970); Diamanda Galas' Mask of the Red Death trilogy (1988-89);
Karen Finley's The Truth Is Hard To Swallow (1988) and A Certain Level of
Self-Denial (1994); and Hole's live Through This (1994) with Courtney Love
on lead vocals.
9 A random sampling of variable intensities: Shelly Winters in Roger
Corman's Bloody M am a (1970); Andrea Feldman in Paul Morrissey's Heat
(1972); Nichelle Nichols in Jonathan Kaplan's Truck Turner [1974); Sissy
Spacek in Terrence Matick's Badlands (1974); Shelly Duval in Robert Altman's
Tnree Women (1977); Kathy Bates and Jennifer jason Leigh in Taylot
Hackford's Dolores Claiborne (1995); Jodie Foster in Robert Zemeckis'
Contact (1998).
10 I Spit On Your Grave has no scored music. For more on the function of
'amoralizing' through the_total absence of scored music, see my ‘ The Birds':
"HTie Triumpn oTNoise Over Music', Essays In Sound A, 1999, Contemporary
Sound Arts, Sydney.
ELISABETH WEIS

This paper asks: if voyeurism is such a fertile subject for film ,1

to what extent is there an aural equivalent? I propose a possible
psychoanalytic basis for considering an erotics of cinematic
eavesdropping and suggest that it may be a neglected aspect of the
compelling connection between audiences and films. I then turn to
the Him texts themselves and find that the device of diegetic
eavesdropping raises a broad and complex range of moral and
narrational as well as psychoanalytic issues.
Eavesdropping is a dramatic device of long standing. It goes
back at least to Greek drama and is a favorite trope of Elizabethan
dramatists. Think of the overheard conversation about a
handkerchief in Othello or Polonius behind the arras. In comedy,
especially farce, misunderstandings of overheard conversations may
be the single most prevalent catalyst for motivating plots. From
Plautus to Shakespeare to US televisions Frasier, in its farce mode,
aural misperceptions fuel comic complications. The eavesdropping
can be more than just a plot device, however; it can have larger
implications: incomplete overhearing or misinterpreting what is
heard can sometimes be a metaphor for how we misunderstand the
world and our relationship to it, just as the nearly blind Mr Magoo
is an animated representation of our inability to recognize and cope
CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

with the realities of our physical environment. In films, even more

than in plays, the eavesdropping is likely to have reflexive as well as
diegetic significance because of our greater identification with
screen characters.
Movie eavesdropping raises issues having to do with the nature
of the medium itself. For one thing, it can foreground, as does
voyeurism, the way in which cinema seems to invade privacy - the
way all of film drama feels overheard and spied on. Like voyeurism,
eavesdropping can reflexively question our prying relationship to
film, our love of listening in, our complicity with the eavesdropper.
When we find the eavesdropping to be central to the diegesis, as in
Coppolas The Conversation (1974), the device thematizes these
issues. Eavesdropping is inherently cinematic; as I will argue, the
situation requires both audio and visual information and therefore
perhaps can be most fully exploited on film.
Because cinematic eavesdropping has implications unique to
film, it \yould b^ useful to have terms for such behavior. I propose
the teriji écouteurjfor an eavesdropper. In France, the word écouteur
refers tcFa second ear-piece on a telephone, which allows a listener
to overhear a conversation.2Like a filmic écouteur, its user can listen
to but not participate in the conversation. Besides suggesting the
possibility of mechanical eavesdropping, the term écouteur evokes
its sister term, voyeur. In psychoanalytic literature, a voyeur is a
person who derives sexual pleasure from forbidden looking .3 In
cinema studies, the definition of voyeur’ has expanded
considerably from its specific, erotically charged psychiatric
definition. I suggest a parallel definition of écouteur not just to refer
to the listener who derives erotic pleasure but in a broad sense that
encompasses all eavesdropping behavior. We can coin a noun for an
écouteurs condition: écouteurism (being careful not to
mispronounce it as ecotourism: the practice of visiting rainforests
or whale watching). The notion of scopophilia, or the love of
looking, also demands a sonic parallel, which we’ll designate as
akoustophilia (being careful not to mix it up with an obsession for
listening to whale calls: Jacques Cousteauphilia?). We will save for
extreme cases of preferring overhearing to interacting with people
the term otakoustophiliay which means literally ‘the love of
overhearing’. Because almost every example I have found is
 Eavesd ro p p in g : An A u ral A n a lo g u e of V oye u rism ?

multivalent, I shall use eavesdropping as the more neutral term

that covers the entire range of listeners and écouteurism when I wish
to stress the erotic implications of such behavior.

A PSYCHOANALYTIC UNDERPINNING
The one group of scholars who most frequently approach issues
apropos of eavesdropping are the psychoanalytic theorists, who
have consistently emphasized the importance of sound, so I shall
briefly contextualize my ideas in relation to some psychoanalytic
theory. In film most psychoanalytic writing on sound in film
usually focuses on the significance of the voice.4 Cinematic
moments that might be considered eavesdropping are cited within
discussions of the appropriation or fetishization of the voice. But
even Kaja Silverman (1988) and Slavoj Zizek (Salecl and Zizek,
1996), who have contributed so much to our understanding of
situations that involve eavesdropping, do not address the question
of overhearing per se.
Much early psychoanalytic theory when applied to film sound
evolved from Mulveys suggestion that voyeurism is so central to
cinema because it is one of two forms of mastery by which the male
overcomes the castration threat posed by the sight of a woman
onscreen.5Mulvey calls voyeurism sadistic: the mainstream cinema
neutralizes and contains the woman’s threat ‘through the plot’; the
plot punishes the woman: kills her off, desexualizes her; the male
character investigates, demystifies and/or ‘saves’ her. Kaja
Silverman and others have suggested that voice can also be used
fetishistically, that ‘Hollywood requires the female voice to assume
similar responsibilities to those it confers upon the female body ...
as a fetish within dominant cinema, filling in for and covering over
what is unspeakable within male subjectivity’ (1988). It would
follow, then, that to appropriate that persons voice, say, by taping
the^person secretly, would be to exert mastery over that person.
Thus, it might well be worth investigating whether there is a
gender differential in eavesdropping situations, whether the
dominant situation is male eavesdroppers listening in on women,
or vice versa.6
However, my focus here will exclude such questions of sexual
82 CINES0N1C: The W o rld of Sou nd in Film
")
difference, in order to first suggest some more general dynamics of
eavesdropping. Whereas the point of departure for Mulvey,
Silverman, et al, is the critical developmental moment when the
child discovers sexual difference, I shall take as mine the situation
of the primal scene. Freud, having first postulated the importance
of childrens watching their parents make love, later decided that it
was more likely to have been a case of the children overhearing their
parents make love. He theorized that they projected their own
fantasies onto this violent-sounding business. In 1925, Freud wrote
that analysis shows us in a shadowy way how the fact of a child at
a very early age listening to his parents copulating may set up his
first sexual excitation, and how that event may, owing to its after­
effects, act as a starting-point for the child’s whole sexual
development’ (1961). According to Freud, when children
encounter the primal scene the event is traumatic; their
interpretation is inevitably a sadistic one, which will probably affect
their adult sexuality.7 Further, Freud asserted that even if children
did not encounter a primal scene, they would nevertheless develop
fantasies about it. More recent research has suggested that reactions
to the primal scene are more culturally determined.
Psychoanalysts working with patients often hypothesize that the
adult eavesdropper recapitulates the primal scene.8The listener can
identify with either of the people overheard, who represent the
aggressive and the submissive parent. Or the listener s identification
can be placed with the overhearing child. Further, the triangular
situation can fluctuate, with the hearer identifying at times with
the listening, excluded child and at other times with one or both
parents. There are any number of modifications and complications
possible in this equation, not least in terms of degree of
identification. I would simply suggest here that overhearing is a
f fundamental experience with profound implications for film. If we
consider the film-going experience to be one of watching and
overhearing characters who are separated from us, then the entire
film-going experience could be defined as eavesdropping as well as
voyeurism. In that case we have a general explanation for an erotics
of listening, that links the film-going experience to the primal
scene. The experience is one of hearing but not hearing, which may
be experienced as anything from maintaining a safe distance to
 Ea v e sd ro p p in g : An A u ral A n a lo g u e of V o ye u ris m ? 83

feeling over-stimulated sexually and/or aggressively. On the diegetic

level, if a screen character participates specifically in the act of
eavesdropping, he or she could also be said to be unconsciously
re-evoking the primal scene. And, finally, if one assumes that the
film-goer identifies with the diegetic eavesdropper, then we would
have an almost over-determined explanation for a primal effect of
eavesdropping on the film audience, because both diegetic and
non-diegetic eavesdroppers recreate the primal situation of both
identifying and being left out.
Although psychoanalysts vary in their interpretations, all agree
that overhearing is a primal phenomenon that invokes anxiety.
Freud thus prefigured the very cinematic axiom that a threat that is
heard but left unseen can allow the audience to imagine something " '
more terrifying than anything a filmmaker could embody in a
specific image. More specifically, it can help explain the frisson
created by menacing off-screen sound in thrillers, war movies, and
science fiction scenes where the enemy’s location is usually
identified by sound long before it appears. In this paper, however,
I am limiting myself to a more specific land of overhearing:
eavesdropping defined as listening secretly to what is said or done
in private.

NARRATSONAL FUNCTIONS OF EAVESDROPPING

Having suggested that ecouteurism may be a factor worth
exploring in terms of the film-goer’s general experience, I will now
turn to eavesdropping as a diegetic device. Because this paper
represents the start of a long-term investigation, I am interested in
discovering the full range of issues that may be raised by the trope.
As a start, I have chosen to discuss films that foreground the process
of overhearing other people and to analyze the narrational
functions of such a device. I am working on a taxonomy of
narrational uses that range from those who accidentally overhear a
conversation to otakoustophiles, those characters who prefer
listening to participating. It is important to recognize the wide
range of what falls into the catch-all category of overhearing in
movies. Some characters stumble onto conversations, and others
are innocents who learn edifying things through hearing; some are
 84 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

professionals who record sound, and others actively listen for

prurient or terrifying pleasures. Needless to say, the films that
problematize the moral and narrational distinctions among the
various forms of overhearing, écouteurism, and otakoustophilia are
the most interesting for this investigation.
Plot situations where we are likely to find eavesdropping include:
scenes involving the telephone, tape recorders or answering
machines; deliberate bugging of people or rooms; confessions,
particularly in Catholic confession booths; therapy sessions;
conversations overheard in adjacent rooms or spaces, particularly by
jealous or paranoid characters; non-realistic scenes in which we or
characters can overhear thoughts, as in Wings of Desire (1987) or
many Godard films; and all films about sound recordists.
f I find that nearly all narrational uses of eavesdropping call for
the examination of two all-encompassing considerations about the
relation between the listener and the overheard party. The first is
that eavesdropping raises issues concerning intrusion, the invasion
of privacy. The second is that it is the separation that is important;
this separation defines the eavesdroppers and their subjects in an
opposition of social inclusion vs exclusion. The person constructed
as the outsider may be the eavesdropper or the overheard party.
A second way of considering the subject is to ask what kind of
information is heard, which in turn affects the hearers relation to
it. Here is my proposed schema for all diegetic eavesdropping
behavior.9 In every case the eavesdropper acquires some form of
knowledge. In the psycho analytically based model, the listener
relates to what is heard in a situation that somehow mimics the
, primal scene. It is often not important what words are overheard;
^ w rather, that knowledge is often of something momentous, terrible
(anxiety producing), erotic, and secret: carnal knowledge. The
knowledge may bring pleasure or pain to the écouteur. But there is
another, more epistemologically based, model for overhearing that
one might call noetic, to suggest that it is experienced through the
intellect rather than the emotions. What is learned may be a
simple fact, such as what time a raid will take place, or a secret
password. In such cases, the acquired knowledge imparts power or
control over the overheard party. But there is a second kind of
noetic knowledge. That is, where the eavesdropper hears
 E a v e sd ro p p in g : An A u ral A n a lo g u e of V o ye u rism ?

information that yields a ^//-knowledge that the listener would

not otherwise have recognized. (We could call that recognition of
the self in what one hears an ‘acoustic mi rror’ if the phrase had not •J
already been appropriated in a different context by Silverman. I’ll
suggest Voice of reality’ instead.) Two complications to my
schema: First, some cases of noetic eavesdropping may involve
overhearing explicitly sexual material. But it is quite possible that
while the content of what is overheard is erotic, the eavesdropper’s
connection is not. Second, the schema is further complicated by
the possibility that the relationship shifts during the scene as it
does in the situation I shall discuss from the film Addicted to Love
(1997), which moves from the noetic model to the
psychoanalytically based model as the experience becomes less
intellectual and more emotional in its impact.

EXCLUDED OUTSIDERS: CHILDREN

In applying my model to specific films, I’d like to look first at
eavesdroppers who are separated from the mainstream of society. Let
us consider the category of films portraying children —a genre that
regularly depends on eavesdropping scenes^ One narrational function
of eavesdropping is to literalize a metaphorical or psychological gap
between the listener and the speakers. In most cases, childrens -
eavesdropping involves their exclusion from the adult world, rather
than from the companionship of their peers. Their exclusion from
adult life is by definition one of innocence because they lack certain
kinds of knowledge. Not surprisingly, films about children,
particularly those told from the child’s point of view, are rich with
examples that suggest the primal scene. The eavesdropping trope
thematizes the child’s incomplete comprehension of the adult world,
including the mystery of sexuality and the threat, real or imagined,
of parental rejection. In particular, films often present children
overhearing custody fights or lovemaking.
Both parental lovemaldng (of a sort) and arguing about custody
are central to the 1983 Australian film Careful, He Might Hear You
(directed by Carl Schultz), which is virtually constructed around a
series of eavesdropping scenes involving a six-year-old boy, Pierce,
whose mother has died and whose father has abandoned the family.
CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

In Australia during the Depression, two very different sisters are

fighting over the right to raise the orphaned son. The working-class
couple Pierce lives with are having difficulty making ends meet and
have received a request from his wealthy, unmarried aunt Vanessa
that he live partly with her - an offer that eventually escalates to her
wanting to take him to London.

Clip 1: Careful, He Might Hear You (opening scene)

This first clip presents some of the conventions of
eavesdropping scenes. First, it includes watching as well as listening
- as is true in the majority of cases. The visual emphasis is on the
listeners eyes, a pattern which usually obtains even when he or she
can’t see what is overheard. (Images of ears are not very expressive
—except maybe to David Lynch.) This equal dependence on the
audio and visual components is an important principle of
eavesdropping scenes. Although on the diegetic level the boy may
be experiencing the situation through instinct as a kind of
rejection, cinematic convention demands that on the non-diegetic
level his comprehension be conveyed to the audience via the image
of his open eyes.
Because the sound is more important for the purposes of
exposition to the audience, it is the view that is partially
obscured, not the voices. Indeed, the aunt’s voice is quite loud
and has some reverberation, to suggest an interiority as does the
extreme close-up of the child’s eyes. What is not typical is that the
film stays in the room with the listener, rather than cutting at
some point to the overheard party. The usual convention is to cut
to the overheard speakers even when the listener does not see
them - presumably for expository clarity or to enliven the mise-
en-scene. In this particular case, the aunt’s insistence on not
closing doors becomes a major motif of the film. To her mind,
not closing the child out conveys her empathic view of child­
rearing. But in fact the view of the world she is trying to impose
on Pierce is at least as false as Vanessas.
In the next clip, a door is closed, but the camera cuts into the
room with the overheard couple for quite a while. Indeed, this is
the point where Schultz abandons the boy’s perspective for long
 Ea v e sd ro p p in g : An A u ral A n a lo g u e of V oye u rism ?

Careful, He Might Hear You

periods as the screenplay gets more interested in the psychology of

the aunt. At the start of this scene, the wayward father, Logan, has
returned while the boy is staying with Vanessa. In some ways
Vanessa is the quintessential cliché of the love-starved spinster. She
is frigid —in the not very original words of Logan, a virgin queen.
Visually, however, Vanessa is presented not as a ‘dried up old maid’
but as an exquisite beauty. She is introduced into the film, through
the boys eyes, in an excess of glamorous, diffuse lighting (as is the
father, glimpsed briefly by the boy at a cemetery). Two of the
problems in the film are the extent to which the boy, however
much he does not want to live with Vanessa, envisions her as a
romantic figure and the extent to which she eroticizes him. Vanessa
explicitly uses him as a husband substitute. Early on we have
viewed her ritual behavior during thunderstorms: in the most
sensuously shot scene of the fdm we have watched her gather Pierce
into her arms, moaning ‘Hold me, Logan, hold me’. (Of course,
with a character named Pierce we might expect that the boy can be
seen as a male sex object.)
CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

Clip 2 : Careful, He Might Hear You (O^S" - O^S")

The first eavesdropping act in this scene begins and ends with
Pierce behind the stair rails, to emphasize his separation visually. But
the boys eavesdropping is more or less forgotten during the
melodramatic moments that explicate Vanessas pathology. We cut
only once away from the room back to Pierce. He is presumably
more upset during the second part of the scene, when Vanessa
embraces him. A distinction is made between the boys timidly
staying behind the staircase and a maid rather aggressively
eavesdropping and spying. I would presume that the addition of the
maid s spying, complete with a keyhole matte, is there to emphasize
how embarrassingly private are the matters being unleashed. But
because the sight of a maid listening at a keyhole has such resonance
with comic dramatic traditions, it also lightens the melodrama and
lessens any invasiveness the audience might feel.
Half an hour later in the film, in another back-to-back set of
eavesdropping scenes, virtually all the situations are reversed, as
Pierce retaliates. He has told his birthday party guests about
Vanessas needy behavior (clutching Pierce to her while calling out
his fathers name), and the children start to imitate her. From this
point on it is Vanessa who is presented as more of an outsider than
Pierce, by virtue of her sexual fears. We get a scene in which she
first overhears, then watches, her public humiliation. The
psychological impact on Vanessa is emphasized by the use of
reverberation in the childrens voices, and it is she who is on the far
side of a doorway. This scene has an interesting interchange of
adult and childrens roles. In taunting Vanessa about behavior in
which she has conflated the child with the man she loves, the
children have appropriated the adults language with their juvenile
voices. Thus her words echoing back obscenely in the high-pitches
of children are all the more tormenting.

Clip 3 : Careful, He Might Hear You (111 4 " - 1 *1 7 ")

In the second part of the scene, it is again Pierce overhearing
the adult world. And, as in the opening scene, he is listening from
bed with the lighting emphasizing his eyes. Although Pierce cannot
see his aunt, there is no reduction in the volume of her crying when
 E a v e sd ro p p in g ; An A u ral A n a lo g u e of V o ye u rism ?

we cut from her to him in bed. His growing ability to 'hear his
aunt stands in for his empathy for her. Also, it is now Vanessa who
says ‘go away, The rhyming of this scene with the opening of the
film emphasizes how Pierce has changed. The difference between
these scenes marks his growth. Pierce not only has learned about
adult sexuality but about its complications. Eventually Pierces
empathy with the aunt is so great that he ‘hears Vanessas screams
as she drowns far away. Ultimately, Pierce has acquired all the types
of knowledge in my schema: secret knowledge about sexual desire,
knowledge about death and denial, knowledge about the ways
adults tell lies to maintain their views of the world and, finally, self-
knowledge about his identity. The last shots of the film are of Pierce
running through the woods claiming the name of his mother’s
father. Pierce has rejected both of his aunts’ attempts to become his
surrogate mother, their lies, and their attempts to control what he
sees and hears. By the end of the film he has acquired enough self-
knowledge to determine his own identity.
A more recent Australian film also is centered on a child’s
feelings of exclusion: Rolf de Heer’s The Quiet Room (1996), which
foregrounds overhearing in two ways. First, and more traditionally,
we hear the parents’ marriage disintegrating as the seven-year-old
girl overhears their quarrels escalating in intensity, from beyond her
room, where she and the camera stay for most of the film. As in
Careful' He Might Hear You, the child devises a punishment for the
adults. She refuses to speak to her parents. Thus, the audience has
a second experience of overhearing; throughout most of the film we
are able to hear the girl’s thoughts — both to herself and to her
parents —as she carries out her end of the dialogue with them in
her mind.

THE VOICE OF REALITY

There is a class of people whom Hollywood may consider to be
even less socially acceptable than children: single, no longer nubile
women. We have seen that Careful, He Might Hear You puts
Vanessa in the humiliating position of having her neediness
revealed publicly. Its somewhat of a staple of womens melodrama
to show older or single women overhearing people who have cast
9 0 CINESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

them as outsiders. Eavesdropping is a useful narrational device in a

genre that often accentuates the discrepancies between what the
audience knows and what individual characters know.
King Vidors Stella Dallas (1937) contains an example that is
classical in what it accomplishes but transcendent in the subtlety of
the feelings it conveys. In Stella Dallas the mother is not only
separated from her husband (by her choice) but separated from the
social class that she wants her daughter to marry into. The
eavesdropping scene on the train in which Stella and her daughter
overhear the humiliating chatter of girls describing the public
spectacle she had made of herself earlier that day foreshadows the
final scene of her watching her daughter’s wedding from outside
the window, excluded from society. But it is also a paradigm of
overhearing the voice of reality. An earlier scene on a train, in
which Stella and her male friend laughed hysterically about his
itching powder pranks, had shown Stella to be absolutely oblivious
to the reactions of others, even when Vidor has the couple enter a
first class car in order to reveal their impact on an upper-class
audience. But the scene in which Stella hears herself talked about
finally confronts her with the reality of social distinctions, as is
indicated by the last part of the scene with the daughter asleep but
the mother, eyes open, planning to give up her daughter for good.
Linda Williams has captured the subtlety of perceptions here. Note
also the extent to which she uses the word see’ in the second half
of this citation:
What is significant ...is that Stella overhears the conversation
at the same time Laurel does - they are in upper and lower
berths of the train, each hoping that the other is asleep, each
pretending to be asleep to the other. So Stella does not just
experience her own humiliation; by seeing herself through her
daughters eyes, Stella also sees something more. For the first
time Stella sees the reality of her social situation from the
vantage point of her daughters understanding, but increasingly
upper-class, system of values... (1984, italics mine).
The visual terminology used by Williams suggested that
knowledge is visual, that understanding is seeing - which of course
 Eavesd ro p p in g : An A u ral A n a lo g u e of V o ye u ris m ? 9 1

is an ideological notion the cinema conspires in perpetuating. Its

the visualisation that helps us register the significance of what the
characters, and we, hear. The linguistic isnt enough. The films
cinematic conventions insist that the facial expressions of the two
women must convey their understanding of what is being
overheard. Thus, on the diegetic level, it is the girls’ words that
convey reality to Stella. But on the non-diegetic level, it takes the
images of the womens expressions to convey to us what they
understand. Having finally seen herself as others see her, Stella in
the very next scene offers her daughter up to her future stepmother.
It is interesting to note that in creating the scene in which Stella
humiliates herself in front of the rich and tasteful, Vidor and
Stanwyck emphasize the display visually as an excess of makeup,
gesture, and garish clothing. She has made herself up as an erotic
object, unlike the rich, whose tasteful style is one that represses
vulgar eroticism. However, in this eavesdropping scene on the
train, when the girls report the event, they use aural language,
turning so-called loud’ clothing into a literal description; they
speak of ‘bracelets up to here that clinked’ and 'bells on her shoes
that tinkled’.

SANCTIONED EAVESDROPPING
The 1997 comedy Addicted To Love also uses overheard sound
as a weapon that forces a character to acknowledge a painful reality
that he has been avoiding. The reality heard by the protagonist is
not a class reality, but the sexual truth about his ‘beloved’. But this
case is more complex, as the voice of reality experience also
becomes a sado-masochistic erotic experience. This film provides a
perfect match when a voyeur meets up with an écouteur. Both Sam
(Matthew Broderick) and Maggie (Meg Ryan) have been jilted by
lovers who are now a couple. The jilted lovers hole up in a nearby
apartment in order to try get their loved ones back —through the
unlikely methods of spying and harassment. Sam rigs up a form of
camera obscura to watch his girlfriend and, projecting her image
against his wall, he creates a benign scene in which, to the
background of a love song, he talks to her image. She appears to
hear him and to laugh at his cleverness. He is able to recreate his
CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

vision of an ideal love between them. However, Maggie, the more

aggressive and sadistic of the two, tries to persuade Sam to become
as angry and vindictive as she is. She adds sound to his pictures by
bugging the other couple’s apartment, inevitably, we overhear a
iovemaking scene, and inevitably the new lover is evoking from the
girlfriend cries of passion that Sam had never stimulated. (The new
boyfriend is French.) In this film, aural evidence is incontrovertible.
It is also a weapon. Maggie turns the orgasmic sounds up to a
deafening level and uses them to batter Sam with the truth - so that
he absorbs the lesson not just intellectually but emotionally; his
body assumes a defensive position as he writhes in pain.
Addicted To Love provides an intriguing transition between films
that look at the victims of eavesdropping and those that stress the
intrusive behavior of the perpetrators. Usually, an audience is
predisposed to dislike eavesdroppers. However much the public
dislikes Monica Lewinsky for having exposed the Presidents
priapism, it is more hostile towards Linda Tripp for having betrayed
her friend by taping a confidence. Yet some films, including
Addicted To Love, and M*A*S*H> which I will take up next, find
ways of sanctioning the behavior of eavesdroppers.
In Addicted To Love, Sam is both perpetrator and victim (as
Nixon managed to be when he destroyed himself with his own
tapes). Sam’s voyeurism via telescope is sanctioned by the film’s
presentation of his character as an astronomer who, in the heyday
of his relationship with his girlfriend, trained his telescope on her
at noon every day, with her knowledge, so that they could
communicate across a few miles’ distance. Once she has left him for
the French lover in Manhattan, his illicit telescope setup seems
almost natural. It takes the aggressive, leather-clad, cycle-riding
Maggie to take the seemingly perverted and immoral step of
physically entering, and bugging the lovers’ apartment. The
scenario attributes the blame to the aggressive woman and thus
removes the onus of guilt from Sam, who nonetheless participates
fully in the surveillance of the lovers.
The film also constructs an elaborate apparatus for raising and
then defusing the guilt of voyeurism-ecouteurism by sanctioning
those acts via the victim status of those doing the surveillance. By
mid-film, we see Sam and Maggie on a couch, watching and
 E a v esd ro p p in g ; An A u ra l A n a lo g u e of V oye u rism ?

listening to their exes by means of their audio and video

technology. They’re eating take-out food, laughing like a couple at
home watching a video. The film is not so subtly suggesting that
scopophilia and akoustophilia, especially as voyeurism and
ecouteurism, are the fundamental pleasures of the cinema. If such
behavior can be sanctioned by the plot as ‘overhearing rather than
actively sadistic intrusions, or as intrusions by victims upon the
lives of their oppressors, we can safely identify with those doing the
intruding. However, it becomes more problematic for both the
psychic and the studio censors when full-fledged ecouteurism is
indulged for the unsanctioned pleasures of eroticism and sadism.
Even Addicted To Love found some critics more disturbed than
amused by the couples’ sadistic torturing of their former loves.
By contrast, M*A*S*H (1970), which also tries to sanction
eavesdropping through the disabling mechanism of comedy, was
hugely successful at the time, although today it looks as cruel,
sophomoric, and misogynistic as it is funny. Altmann’s
quintessential anti-establishment film posits its outsider/victims,
Margaret and Frank, precisely as those two characters who most
adhere to establishment rules - in this case, those of the army and
organized religion. One of the best remembered scenes of the film
is that in which the surgeons and Radar slip a microphone under
the bunk while the outsider-couple make love. This excerpt reverses
the paradigms we have looked at, in which we move from listener
to target to listener.

Clip 4: (O V C T -O 'T S ")

It is not by accident that the scene introduces the notion of
listening to the radio. The priest’s mistaken impression that the
group is listening to a specific radio show is prompted by their
physical arrangement in such a way as to evoke nostalgic images of
family and friends huddled around the radio in its golden days.
And eventually, the eavesdroppers do transfer their private listening
session to the camps public address system, thereby creating a
public broadcast. Under the guise of producing a public
performance, the perpetrators can suggest that their motive is
entertainment rather than prurience or sadism. Later Hawkeye,
 1

94 CIHESONJC: The World of Sound in Film

Trapper, and company will humiliate nurse Margaret visually by

raising the tent in which she is showering. The notion of spectacle
there is reinforced by their lining up seats in preparation, by their
applauding, and by their explicit references to the show’. In the
bugging scene most of the sounds we can identify of frenzied love-
making are uttered by Margaret. The film’s sympathy is with the
adolescent sensibilities of the mostly male diegetic audience. The
sole eavesdropper who empathizes with the love-making is the
woman. For the boys of the 4077, taking seriously anything other
than surgery is anathema. It is hip to show no feeling. It is
Margaret’s seeming excess of desire, as well as her command over
the male lover, that is therefore a subject of ridicule. Thus we have
the antinomy of the cool characters listening vs the hot lips of
Major Houlihan and Major Frank Burns. The explicit sadism of
eavesdropping is sanctioned here by the in-group, by the pre­
feminist social mores of the late 1960s, and by the genre, comedy.
I do not teach M*A*S*H in my American Film Comedy class. I
cannot persuade my students that it was ever considered hilarious.
My students and I find the behavior of Hawkeye and Trapper to be
sadistic rather than funny. Nonetheless, this scene does have a
timeless aspect to it that provides the humor: it exposes the sheer
clumsiness and fumbling of love-making that are usually not
subject to observation in films about adults, especially in
Hollywood films in which movie stars all have the technique of
James Bond and Mata Hari. This type of humor, funny because of
our nearly universal insecurities about love-making, is possible only
through sound. To show the fumbling would make it improbable
and too specific in terms of sexual logistics. As presented, the scene
suggests two more narrational uses for eavesdropping: to let us hear
what cannot be shown and to provide the requisite distance Tor
laughter. I would suggest that the presence of the intermediary
'diegetic eavesdroppers mitigates our own guilt and sanctions the
pleasure of listening in on private sexual activity.

SURVEILLANCE
Because of the intrusive implications of eavesdropping, one of
its most frequent narrational uses is to define character.
 E a v e s d ro p p in g : An A u ral A n a lo g u e of V oye u rism ?

Eavesdropping can characterize an entire society, as in Wenders’

The End O f Violence (1997), Weir’s The Truman Show ,(1998), or
Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), where surveillance is a social
comment on the lack of privacy in the modern world, whether that
invasion be ascribed to the state or to the capitalist free market. But
I am referring here to its use as a short cut to define an individual:
to characterize someone as sneaky, make him an eavesdropper. The
Salieris of the world are often found lurking behind doors and
curtains in contrast to Hollywood western heroes who face the
enemy at high noon, in public (while the cowards shoot their
opponents in the back, under cover of night, without revealing
their presence). Thus, when the M*A*S*H surgeons publicly
acknowledge their bugging by broadcasting it, they are coded as
all-American boys. They have not concealed their behavior, and
their victims are not seen as deserving privacy.
Frequently, to st ress the intrusive nature of eavesdropping, films
portray it as revealing the victims’ innermost, emotional lives.
THus, even when the targets’ personal lives are incidental to the
purpose for the bugging, as in much police surveillance, writers
typically add a very private moment to the tape. For example, the
bugging in the comedy-thriller Conspiracy Theory (1997) is a minor
plot event, wherein one character is tracking another’s location
through an electronic bug placed in a box of pizza. But the first part
of the conversation being monitored between Mel Gibson and Julia
Roberts is a touching reference to his love for her. In many films,
the example is less delicate: when electronic bugging is involved,
the filmmakers can use its invasive potential as an excuse for a
gratuitous sex scene.
As for the characterization of the individuals who engage in
bugging, perhaps the fact that the individual eavesdropper must
operate surreptitiously is also behind the negative image. Even if
someone eavesdrops for socially redeeming reasons - such as
exposing crimes - the act will usually be encoded with additional
negative associations. For example, the eavesdropper may be linked
with images of fdth. Harry Caul, the surveillance expert played by
Gene Hackman in Coppola’s The Conversation, is seen installing a
bug while working around a toilet. Touch of Evil (1958) ends with
an extended scene of body bugging by the ‘hero’, portrayed by
CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

Charlton Heston. Morally compromised in his pursuit of evidence

to incriminate Orson Welles’ Inspector Quinlan, Heston tracks his
target alongside the oil-slicked, garbage-filled river into which
Quinlan ultimately falls as he dies.
Two key American films that focus on bugging, Blow Out
(1981) and The Conversation, question of course the whole notion
of whether one can trust the objective reliability of sound
recordings, and, by extension, anything we hear. In focusing solely
on how these films represent eavesdropping, we should consider
how both films emphasize its lethal potential. During the opening
scene that depicts the original recording of The Conversation, the
‘targets' are photographed through a so-called shot-gun mike and
lined up in cross-hairs. Harry’s fears that his tapes will be used to
murder a philandering couple are explained in part by his guilt
deriving from an earlier incident in which his tapes resulted in the
gruesome deaths of an innocent family. In De Palmas Blow Out,
Jack (John Travolta) is a sound man for third-rate horror films. He
has relegated himself to this job because of his guilt about a tragedy
he inadvertently caused when he worked for the police helping
them wire undercover cops to catch criminals. In the films main
action, Jack, while trying to do the right thing after discovering
that he has inadvertently taped a political murder, is unable to save
a woman after he has wired her. Michel Chion comments that
Blow Outs action begins with a search for a scream to dub onto an
actress in a low-budget horror film. The ‘screaming-point’, as
Chion calls it, is an audio-visual culmination of many lines of
action in a womans scream (1999, pp75-79). Its satisfying,
necessary. And we may recast it as a supreme moment of voyeurism
and ecouteurism in such movies. The sound man does get his
scream, ironically enough, at the end of the film as he (and we)
listen with fascinated horror as his girlfriend is murdered.

PROFESSIONAL SITUATIONS:
THERAPY SESSIONS ANP CONFESSIONALS
Two additional professional situations often imply
eavesdropping: psychotherapy and the Christian confessional. The
therapist and priest are figures whose role is to be entrusted with
 Eavesd ro p p in g : An A u ral A n a lo g u e of V o ye u ris m ?

peoples innermost secrets, but, like professionals who wield

microphones, they can abuse their privileged positions as listeners.
No wonder that so many therapy and confession scenes act as the
intermediary for the cinematic audio-viewer and have reflexive
implications. The 1971 film Klute is interesting in this respect
because the mediation is used less with the heroine’s therapy
sessions than with tape recordings. Jane Fonda’s character, Bree, a
call girl, is seen on many occasions talking to her therapist. Bree’s
monologues during therapy are set in opposition to her
monologues as a professional seducer. Most of the times when we
hear Bree in therapy, we do not see the therapist but rather stay
firmly fixed on Bree, talking almost at the camera. The film’s
recurring therapy sequences are photographed and acted in a style
that suggests the relatively unmanipulated manner of Direct
Cinema. This style creates a sense of verisimilitude that heightens
our sense of intrusion at the same time that it puts the film-goer in
the privileged position of the therapist. In the therapy scenes, there
is little mediation between the listener and Bree/Fonda, who seems
to be speaking the words just as they occur to her.
At the other extreme is our experience in listening to the tapes
that form the contrasting major motif of Bree talking. These are
tape recordings on which we hear Brees pre-sexual spiel, intended
to seduce and relax her various clients. The spiel is introduced
during the opening titles, as we look at a small tape recorder. There
is no distracting action on the screen and the voice provokes, in
most viewers, I should think, both extreme discomfort at
overhearing private language and prurient curiosity about how a
professional goes about seducing a client. In a sense, we are being
seduced as well. Through repetition in later scenes, the tapes start
to lose their shock value, but their effect varies because, as in The
Conversation, we hear what is essentially the same spiel in different
contexts, as we watch different images — in this case, various
listeners. Some discomfort at intruding does remain, even though
Bree speaks of this activity as performance, as acting, and has told
her therapist that she hasn’t been able to give up being a call girl
because of the sense of control it gives her. Whereas the therapy
monologues present an unmediated and tentative Bree thinking
her way through therapy, the tape scenes present a performing,
CINESONIC: The W orld of Sound in Film

confident woman, and we experience them (except during the

credit sequence) while watching a surrogate male listener who
stands in for the original male listener.
Eventually, the danger associated with the tapes escalates as does
the threat to Bree herself. A stalker, who has been phoning Bree but
not speaking, finally terrorizes her by playing one of these tapes to
her over the phone. When she finally confronts him in person he
plays a tape that is even more painfully intimate: it is his voice as he
speaks to a woman whom he is about to murder, followed by her
screams. The film suggests that overhearing a woman’s last
moments is even more obscene than the content of the earlier
tapes. Bree does not look at the tape player or the camera, but
rather weeps silently, with her head averted and eyes down. She is
now not a voice without an image, but an image without a voice.
She has lost control, and, for once, it is the man who is talking. We
realize that the situation is doubly obscene; the playing of the tape
challenges our roles as eavesdroppers because we are watching and
hearing what may be the last minutes of Bree as well.
I shall not venture into the vast territory suggested by the topic
of therapists themselves as écouteurs, but instead move to a second
film that uses therapy sessions in ways that challenge the audiences
involvement. In Woody Allens Another Woman (1988), therapy
sessions are overheard by a diegetic outsider. (Perhaps we should
not be surprised that Allen might be paranoid about having ones
therapy sessions overheard.) In this case, the vent of a therapist’s
office allows the tenant in the next apartment to hear with absolute
clarity. Unlike some directors who make us strain to listen during
eavesdropping sequences, Allen keeps the overheard voices
unrealistically audible and the images very spare; there is a
minimum of detail or movement in the frame, so that we can
concentrate on the voices. This is decidedly a metaphorical rather
than a realistic case of overhearing.
Roger Eberts review commented on his sense of invasion when
watching Another Woman: ‘Film is the most voyeuristic medium,
but rarely have I experienced this fact more sharply than while
watching Woody Allens Another Woman. This is a film almost
entirely composed of moments that should be private. At times
privacy is violated by characters in the film. At other times, we
 Eavesd ro p p in g : An Aura! A n a lo g u e of V o ye u rism ? 99

invade the privacy of the characters. And the central character is

our accomplice, standing beside us, speaking in our ear, telling us
of the painful process she is going through (1988).
Allens eavesdropper is yet another of the directors cold and
proper intellectuals who have achieved outward success at the price
of denying their emotional lives. This point is articulated a dozen
times by various characters, thus leading to a paradox: although the
film is aimed at intellectuals or quasi-intellectuals (it drops the
names of such cultural icons as Rilke and Klimt), it insults our
intelligence with redundancy on the screenplay level. It is the
enunciation of the film that is intelligent, in its complex shifts
between voice-over, fantasy, flashback, and dream sequences,
indebted to Bergmans Wild Strawberries (1957). The action is
initiated when Marion, a philosophy professor played by Gena
Rowlands, having rented a room to write a book, overhears the
therapy sessions of Hope (Mia Farrow) in the next room. Hope
articulates all the problems that Marion has been repressing —such
as the inadequacy of her marriage and the regret that she did not
marry the one man for whom she felt true passion. Marion gets
progressively more involved with her doppelganger - her acoustic
mirror - meets up with her, and eventually has lunch with her.
Another Woman can be said, like Stella Dallas, to use
eavesdropping to waken a character to her own reality - but it is a
psychic not a social reality. This is clearly a case of eavesdropping
that breaks through the listeners life-long resistance. The overheard
voice can be interpreted either as Hopes or as entirely a projection
of the professors imagination - her subconscious finally breaking
through to destroy her illusions. The film does play with the
audience s prurience. The first patient overheard by Marion is a man
who describes his initial sexual experience with another man, his
masturbation fantasies, and the like - all in the space of a minute.
When the next whiny voice overheard is that of Mia Farrow
(Marion’s Great Whiny Hope?), whose problems are more cosmic
than sexual, we are forced to ask whether we are disappointed. Later,
when even Hope is not talking, when she has sat for almost an entire
session in silence, we share Marions disappointment.
The eavesdropping device becomes richly reflexive - or perhaps
I should say echoic - in a scene where Marion finds herself as the
100 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

topic of Hope’s therapy sessions after the two women have met.
Suddenly it is Marions private life being described; she is
eavesdropping, as it were, on herself, inasmuch as the film-goer has
identified with Marion, we too feel violated. Yet the professor has
also been portrayed as insufferably smug. Thus, the film has
interesting ways of making us alternate between identifying with
the character and objectifying her.

Clip 5: Another Woman (l,07,,-ri0")

This scene’s inversion, with the eavesdropping turning in on
itself, is consistent with the rest of the film, that often reverses
conventions. The society portrayed in this film is comprised of
couples who consider it chic to discuss their sex lives in public. Its
characters perform’ more histrionically in real life than they do
when acting in plays. And scenes of overhearing patients in therapy
are not as painfully intrusive as some moments of public
embarrassment. Needless to say, thanks to the miracle of dime-
store Freud, Marion is cured’ by the experience, meaning that she
not only mends all her relationships and divorces her husband but
- more important to we academics? - she finds that she no longer
has a writing block!
Like therapists, hearers of confessions can be constructed as
benign, neutral, or overly-curious. In some Catholic confession
scenes the camera remains on the speaker; this choice usually
stresses either the mysteriousness of the vaguely discerned ear
beyond the screen or the cleansing relief attained by the act of
confessing. I have yet to locate films other than comedies that
overtly depict a priest as a prurient listener. There is one where
the listener’s curiosity is quite literally morbid: to me the most
invasive confession scene ever remains that in Bergmans The
Seventh Seal (1956), where the knights confessor is revealed to be
Death himself.
The extent to which a confession scene has a reflexive quality -
that it reminds us that we áre overhearing privileged secrets - is
almost directly correlated to the difficulty we have in discerning
what is said. The confession scene in The Godfather III (1990) takes
place in a courtyard with Michael Corleone (A1 Pacino) and the
 E a v esd ro p p in g : An A u ra l A n a lo g u e of V o ye u rism ? 101
cardinal facing each other, yet the images create an experience for
us that suggests the effect of a confession booth.

Clip 6: The Godfather HI - Confession to Cardinal

(1,43,,-1
This scene is coded to suggest intrusion. First, the camera
physically places us in the position of eavesdroppers by putting
images between us and the speakers. Second, some leaf-covered
statuary creates a visual separation between the characters, but only
from our perspective, not from theirs. Third, Michael’s voice drops
down as he confesses to having ordered his own brothers death.
Oddly, I find this scene less intrusive than another in which
Michael is alone speaking to the recently deceased body of his
friend Don Tomasino and vows to ‘sin no more’. Whereas the
actual confession scene with the cardinal puts more emphasis on
Michael’s need to confess for the release it brings, the scene of him
speaking to the corpse both creates a sense of intimacy and makes
us aware of the enormity of Michaels secret. I would suggest that
what we feel in scenes like the one with the corpse —a combination
of intimacy and identification with, yet a sense of intrusion -
characterizes the attraction-repulsion nature of ecouteurism as an
aspect of the film-goer’s experience.
I have yet to investigate whether eavesdropping scenes in
television have the same effects as in the movies. However, the
assumption that an audience has an insatiable appetite for
eavesdropping on confessions is such a given that an entire
television movie is predicated on it.10 In Original Sins (1995), a
radio talk-show host comes up with the idea that listeners may call
in to confess their secrets over the air, and the ratings soar. What
the audience and the station owners do not know for most of the
film, is that the host is himself... a priest. The film does not exploit
the ecouteurism motif per se. Like its diegetic station, this TV movie
uses overhearing confessions as a gimmick rather than a rich motif.
Thus, it is only interesting for our purposes in that it assumes that
such a program would attract a wide listening public.
102 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

OTAKOUSTOPHILES
Original Sins assumes a whole society of eavesdroppers. My last
three examples concern individuals who have a pathological
preference for overhearing rather than participating in life. My
....search for film protagonists with otakoustophilia so far has
uncovered only three - in films by Coppola, Kieslowski, and
Egoyan. I have mentioned only in passing the best known example,
the professional bugger in The Conversation, because that film has
received extensive attention in print. Most relevant to this
discussion is the work of Kaja Silverman (1988), who argues that
Harry Cauls ‘fear of being overheard is as intense as his compulsion
to eavesdrop on others’. She also evokes the image of the primal
scene, which she suggests is reenacted by Harry when he bugs the
adjacent room from a hotel bathroom. I will concentrate on the
two less-scrutinized exemplars of otakoustophilia.
Kieslowski s eavesdropper appears in Red, the culmination of his
‘Three Colors’ trilogy (1994). One of the two protagonists, a
retired judge, played by jean-Louis Trintignant, is a misanthropic
recluse in Geneva, whose main preoccupation is listening in on his
neighbors’ telephone conversations. In a sense, his private listening
is an extension of the ‘hearings’ he had held professionally —but
without his having to render judgments. The judge s social isolation
is interrupted by a model —a professional exhibitionist, as it were
- whose life intersects with his when she accidentally injures his
dog. She is present when he listens in on a neighbor, who is
ostensibly a happy family man, having a warm phone conversation
with his male lover. When the model runs next door to warn the
wife, she cannot bear to destroy the womans complacency and
leaves without saying anything, even though she sees their young
daughter listening impassively to her fathers conversation on an
extension phone. The judge and the model argue about whether
they should interfere with the lives of those they overhear.
The model eventually manages to forge an emotional connection
with the reclusive judge, and she tells the judge to stop
eavesdropping. That night he turns himself in to the police, thereby
facing a trial and public contempt. But he is also redeemed. Red,
which opens with an image of transatlantic telephone cables, is
about connections between people. Kieslowski, having created in
 Ea v e sd ro p p in g : An A u r a l A n a lo g u e of V o ye u rism ? 103

Blue, White and Red, a whole trilogy of characters who have cut
themselves off from society, finally allows for reconciliation in this,
his last film (Kehr, 1994). The judge is shown to he capable of
reintegration within the social sphere. Or he may have gone further:
there is a suggestion that, having earlier quit the bench and dropped
out of society in order to avoid any responsibility for human or even
canine life, the judge now goes to the other extreme and controls the
fates of those he overheard (and even characters from earlier films of
the trilogy) with the omnipotence to determine who survives a
transchannel ferry accident —that he may himself have caused.
Kieslowskis film operates both as an exploration of human
psychology and as a philosophical investigation. He investigates the
nature of eavesdropping per se, but ultimately places the
eavesdropping in broader contexts: the reciprocal relationship
between spying and being spied on, our ethical connections to
people we see and hear, our social responsibility for each other, and
ultimately our ability to control our own fate and those of others.
I am not sure whether my last otakoustophile has been
reassimilated into society or will be capable of normal relationships
when the film ends. The protagonist of Atom Egoyans 1993 film
Calendar is a photographer whose idea of dating is to hire a woman
who will engage in erotic talk with a man on the telephone in an
exotic language as our photographer overhears and is excluded.
These dates occur twelve times, one for each month of the calendar,
with twelve women speaking twelve different languages. We infer
that each woman has been instructed in advance that when he
pours the last of the wine, she is to ask to use the phone.

Clip 7: Calendar (0,27,,-0 ,29,,J

The otakoustophile here is a professional photographer in
Toronto who is trying to understand how his relationship with his
wife fell apart. Like his wife, he is a Canadian of Armenian descent.
He had gone to Armenia on commission to shoot pictures of twelve
churches for a calendar, which we see hanging by the telephone. He
had also made a videotape of the trip. The sounds of three discourses
- the video, the women talking on the phone, and his voice
speaking aloud the words he writes during the dates - all bleed into
1 0 4 CIN ESO NIC: The World of Sound in Film

each other. Sometimes the sonic discourses overlap; sometimes we

hear the sound of one while we watch the image of another.
Occasionally we hear his estranged wife leaving messages on the
answering machine because he will not pick up the phone. From the
video we learn that his wife, who still spoke Armenian, had
translated for the local guide who led them to the churches and
explained their cultural significance. Gradually the wife had fallen in
love with the guide, and the photographer had filmed them talking
in a language he did not understand. Thus he has arranged for his
dates to duplicate the pain of hearing his wife speak with a man she
came to love. He writes of the masochistic impulse: ‘all that’s bound
to isolate is bound to hurt’. It is not clear whether the experience is
simply a masochistic duplication of his feelings of exclusion or a
repetition compulsion designed to help him overcome his pain. He
seems to relate a bit more to the last ‘date’ as an individual; he listens
more attentively as she converses with him before using the phone.
In either case, a traditional psychoanalytic interpretation would be
that in forcing himself to overhear, the photographer has
masochistically created a reenactment of the exclusion of the child
who witnesses the primal scene.
You will notice that I have suggested a possible erotic
interpretation only in this last case of the three otakoustophiles I have
discussed. Although the judge in Red also listens in on some phone
sex, I see no basis for assuming that he or The Conversations Harry
Caul gets off sexually on listening. The question remains, does the
construction of such characters raise the ante in appealing to any
erotic impulses in the audience? Again, I do not think the answer is
simple. Is there any parallel to Hitchcock’s use of voyeurism where
the audience is encouraged to watch along with the voyeurs?
Hitchcock usually creates strong emotional identification with the
attractive characters who exhibit anti-social behavior, thereby forcing
us to recognize its seductiveness and suspend our judgment.
However, the eavesdroppers in Red, The Conversation and Calendar
are constructed as more pathological extremes. Their behavior is
constructed as anti-social. On the other hand, all three films tease us
by letting us overhear conversations along with the eavesdroppers.
The extent to which we strain to listen inevitably makes us conscious
of our curiosity. But that curiosity may be as much intellectual as
 E a v e sd ro p p in g : An A u ra l A n a lo g u e of V o ye u rism ? 105

prurient. Further, Red and The Conversation include diegetic

discussions of the moral implications of such behavior. And just
because the protagonist of Calendar has an erotic response, that does
not mean that the audience does. In presenting the psychoanalytic
theory that eavesdropping may rouse primal memories, I mentioned
two complicating factors: the shifting of identification and levels of
conscious awareness. Both factors probably obtain in the above three
films. It may be when otakoustophilia is so central to the narrative
that our very consciousness of the issue makes it more of an
intellectual device than an erotic one.
Ultimately, I do not feel comfortable determining the nature of
the listener’s response in particular instances, diegetic or actual. My
purpose here is not to provide a global theory, but in having aired
examples, to open up some of the issues that are raised by filmic
eavesdropping behavior. I can, however, offer concrete evidence of
the lure and frequency of eavesdropping behavior by providing
reality bites in the form of statistics on the actual listening habits of
Americans. The publisher of the scanner journal Monitoring Times
estimates that between ten and twenty million people in the United
States use scanning equipment to listen in on a range of wireless
devices (Kratz, 1997, p30). And in 1998 the United States Justice
Department released figures that government wiretaps had reached
a record two million private conversations. And that’s just the
federal, legal ones. Any private party who wants to tape a telephone
conversation can. Radio Shack reports booming sales of telephone
jacks that enable any user to tape a conversation without notifying
the other party —for as little as $19.99.
I am indebted to Claudia Gorbman, Pamela Grace, Jeff Smith, and Jane
Buckwalter, who made generous contributions of time and ideas to this paper.
Bibliography
Chion, Miche!, ] 999, 'The Screaming Point' in The Voice in Cinema,
Claudia Gorbman, ed and trans, Columbia University, N ew York.
Dolar, Mladen, 1996, 'The Object Voice' in Saiecl, Renata and Zizek, Slavoj,
eds, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, Duke University, Durham.
Eberf, Roger, 'Another Woman', Chicago Sun-Times (8 November 1988).
Esman, Aaron, 1973, 'The Primal Scene: A Review and a Reconsideration',
106 CIN ESO NIC: The World of Sound in Film

in Psychoanalytic Study o f the Child, vol 28, International University Press,

New York.
Freud, S, 1961, 'Some Psychical Consequences of ihe Anatomic Distinctions
Between the Sexes' in Standard Edition o f the Complete Psychoanalytic Works
of Sigmund Freud, vol 19, Hogarth, London.
Hinsie, Leland and Campbell, Robert, 1970, Psychiatric Dictionary, 4th ed,
Oxford University, New York.
Kehr, Dave, 1994, 'Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors', Film Comment XXX,
Nov-Dee.
Kratz, Michael, 1997, 'Guess Who's Listening', Time CXLSL,
Lawrence, Amy, 1991, Echo and Narcissus: Women's Voices in Classical
Hollywood Cinema, University of California, Berkeley.
Mulvey, Laura, 1975, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Screen, XVI:3
reprinted in Mulvey, Laura, Visual and Other Pleasures, 1989, Macmillan,
London.
Salecl, Renata and 7izek, Slavoj, 1996, eds, Gaze and Voice as love
Objects, Duke Universily, Durham.
Silverman, Kaja, 1988, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in
Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Indiana University Press, Bloomington,
Williams, Linda, 1984, '"Something Else Besides a Mother": Stella Dallas
and the Maternal Melodrama', Cinema Journal XXIV, 1, Pall, reprinted in
Landy, Marcia, ed, Imitations of Life, 1991, Wayne State University, Detroit,
Notes
1 Since the 1960s many theorists have argued that film is a spectacularly visual
regime that engages the scopic drive. They see voyeurism as a crucial source of
curiosity, pleasure, and fantasy in film spectatorship - an idea often thematized
in diegefic scenes involving characters who engage in voyeuristic behaviour.
2 There is, however, no physical separation, and the listener's presence is
manifest to at least one of the speakers.
3 The écouteur is not a common concept in psychoanalytic literature, but the
standard Psychiatric Dictionary (Hinsie and Campbell) defines an écouteur as
'one who obtains inordinate gratification from listening to sexual accounts'.
4 The three central film texts (Silverman, Salecl and 7izek, and Lawrence, qv)
all include the word 'voice' in their full tities. See Doiar ¡1996) for a
comparison of how voice was treated by Saussure, Derrida, and Lacan.
5 A key early text was her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema', qv.
6 One might then go on to ask whether there is a power differential
depending on the gender of the person doing the fistening.
7 Summary taken from Esman, qv.
8 My summary here is a composite derived from interviews with
 E a v e s d ro p p in g : An A u ral A n a lo g u e of V o ye u rism

practising analysts.
9 The ideas and terms in this schema were formulated with the help of Jeff Smith
10 1995, CBS, Maple Street Films, dir by Jan Egleson. Also known as Acte
o f Contrition.
1 1 Kratz, qv, citing Bob Grove, publisher of Monitoring Times.
SARAH KOZLOFF

Genre theory’s preoccupation with visual iconography and

thematic analysis has caused it to slight the verbal dimension of
American genre films. Aside from passing references, I’ve found few
sustained discussions of dialogue in such films. Yet my research
indicates that their dialogue follows distinctive, recognizable
patterns, and I am convinced that identifying these patterns can be
a crucial tool for understanding each genres dynamics and how
each genre creates a distinctive relationship with eavesdropping
viewers. This papers project is to present a condensed overview of
the patterns I’ve found in westerns, screwball comedies, gangster
films and melodramas.1
What accounts for these verbal genre conventions? Partially,
they are motivated by the subject matter and by screenwriters’
concern that dialogue be appropriate to characters’ social
backgrounds, and thus ‘realistic’ — accordingly, cinematic rural
cowboys speak differently than cinematic urban gangsters. Partially,
films are clearly copying pre-existing expectations created by other
forms of representation — stories, novels, autobiographies, plays,
even silent films - such models delimit the types of speech that
Hollywood employs. Most importandy, once the patterns were set
by successful, influential examples of each genre in the early sound
era the conventions assumed a life of their own, so that later
filmmakers and viewers unconsciously internalized the genre
conventions most appropriate to each story type. Brian De Palma’s
1983 remake of Scarface is very self-conscious about the influence
of previous films:
IMMIGRATION OFFICIAL: Where’d you learn to speak
the English, Tony?
 Genre T a lk 10 9

TONY MONTANA: In a school. And my father, he was from

United States. Just like you, you know. He was a Yankee. He
used to take me a lot to the movies, you know. I learn, I watch
the guys like Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney. They teach me
to talk. I like those guys.
O f course not every film follows the ‘rules’, just as not every
film slavishly duplicates its genre’s visual conventions. But by
taking a broad overview of many examples, general proclivities can
be identified.
My research indicates that these proclivities hold, even over the
passage of time. Although my own approach is more neo-formalist
than historical, I am well aware that dialogue in American film has
changed over the 70 years of the sound era. Obviously, American
English is itself quite fluid. Tom Schactman notes,
We have to recognize that English is altering at a
phenomenal rate of speed. Comparing successive editions of
dictionaries, we find about 10,000 words per decade are
added or dropped from the usual college dictionaries. ...That
is to say, what one generation accepts as its standard is, at
least in terms of vocabulary, perhaps 10 to 15 percent altered
from what its parents accepted as standard. Grammar also
changes rapidly (1995, p46).
Along with language change, industrial, technological and social
upheavals have affected the use of dialogue in film. O f particular
consequence has been the initial instigation and later overthrow of
the Production Code administered by the Hays Office, which was
a tool for censoring controversial material in general and non­
approved language in particular. That genre talk still displays
recognizable conventions despite the rides of linguistic and cultural
change, indicates how integral patterns of character speech are to
genre films.
I’d like to start by giving a whirlwind overview of the styles of
speech characteristically found in each of my four genres.
Although on some occasions the western hero is allowed to
have a southern accent, for the most part he speaks ‘western. In
an area of the vastness of the states and territories west of the
CINESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

Mississippi and a large and blurred time period, linguists would

find many distinct regional variations, but Hollywood has made
no such careful distinctions, coining an all-purpose western
dialect’ (APWD). Hollywood screenwriters may have consulted
handy reference texts for their dialects —Ramon Adams published
Cowboy Lingo in 1936, and Western Words: A Dictionary o f the
Range, Cow Camp and Trail first appeared in 1944. In APWD all
women are addressed as ‘ma’am’, all strangers are referred to as
‘pardner’, horses are ‘ponies’, homes are ‘ranches’, meals are
‘chow’, clothes are ‘duds’, a gun is a ‘piece’, employees are ‘hands’
or ‘boys’, Indians are ‘injuns’, ‘bucks’ or ‘squaws’, ‘hello’ is
replaced by ‘howdy’, think and/or believe folded into ‘reckon,
thank you covered by ‘much obliged’. Along with a specialized
and instantly recognizable vocabulary, western characters
commonly employ an informal pronunciation and syntax: ‘git’
instead of get’, ‘gonna instead of ‘going to’, ‘fella instead of
‘fellow’, evenin’’ instead o f ‘evening’.
The dialogue of westerns not only uses a specialized vocabulary
but also a distinctive style of performance. In 1947 Lewis Herman
published American Dialects: A Manual for Actors, Directors and
Writers. In it he counsels actors to drawl their vowel sounds as in
‘skOOwhul’ (school) and notes that:
These drawled vowels make for a speech that is paced quite
slowly, often hesitantly and thoughtfully. It is a calm,
unhurried speech that takes cognizance of the fact that time
is not as fleeting as some may think it to be; that cogitation
is a prime virtue; that ‘shooting off at the mouth’ is the sign
of a fool (p299).
Western heroes do speak slowly, and in popular perception, they
are quite chary of speech - taciturnity is seen as part and parcel of
the hero’s separateness, loneliness, superiority. This general
perception oversimplifies and ignores significant variation: Cooper
is tight-lipped in Man o f the West (1958) but he plays a masterful
verbal trickster in The Westerner (1940). Stewart withholds vital
information in The Man From Laramie (1955) but positively
babbles in Destry Rides Again (1939) and Two Rode Together (1961).
As Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine (1946), Fonda talks at
length only to his brothers grave; however, in Fort Apache (1948)
Fonda goes off on tangents about military tacticians. John Wayne,
who, as the number one box-office star from 1950-1965, may have
done more than anyone else to popularize the stereotype of the
close-mouthed western hero often fits the stereotype, but Wayne
himself is quite garrulous in True Grit (1969). Cawelti might have
included Clint Eastwood in his list, for Eastwoods marked silence
has a menacing air in Hang Em High (1968) and in Sergio Leone’s
spaghetti westerns. Yet in Unforgiven (1992) Eastwood waxes on in
ornate phrases about his dear, departed wife. Not surprisingly, these
actors’ dialogue styles do vary with different characterizations,
narratives, screenwriters and directors.
And yet the impression that the western hero must be a taciturn
man is so much a part of the cinematic record, and so embraced by
general cultural expectations, that it overwhelms any evidence to
the contrary. Historical cowboys, were not, in fact, particularly
quiet; on the contrary, tall tale-telling and verbal play were more
characteristic of western speech (Statter, 1994, p i94; Cassiday,
1957, p203). The rule that the cowboy must be silent is a twentieth
century invention, an invention that in some way satisfies the
expectations of movie-goers.
This expectation is the ingrained, widespread association of
talkativeness with femininity, silence with masculinity. In Literary
Fat Ladies, Patricia Parker has traced the ‘tradition that portrays
women as unflappable talkers’ in literary texts from the Bible to
James Joyces Ulysses (1987). Popular maxims also provide evidence
of the association of private talk with women:
Where woman is, silence is not. (France)
The tongue is the sword of a woman, and she never lets it
become rusty. (China)
The North Sea will sooner be found wanting in water than a
woman at a loss for a word. (Jutland)
Ten measures of speech descended on the world; women took
nine and men one. (Babylon)
112 CJN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

Two women and a goose are enough to make as much noise

as you would hear at a fair. (Venice)
Many women, many words; many geese, many turds.
(England)
As the most macho man in town, the western hero must be
perceived, by other characters, and by the viewer, as the least
talkative. This doesn’t mean that western films really avoid
dialogue, for they cant - like every narrative film they need to
explain why these people are in these situations, what is at stake,
when the deadline elapses, who is evil, and who is good. But
westerns deliberately create an imbalance; they shift as many of the
dialogue functions as possible away from the western hero to other
characters —the sidekick old timer, the professionals from the east,
the lady schoolmarm - and in a classic case of ingratitude, the films
go on to condemn or ridicule these secondary characters for their
talkativeness.
Jane Tompkins explains the association of fictional westerners
with terseness. Westerners believe in doing, not talking. ‘Language
is gratuitous as best; at worst it is deceptive.’ Most importantly, the
westerner must be silent to enhance his status as a masculine
archetype, to prove and enforce his superiority over women. ‘For a
man to speak of his inner feelings not only admits parity with the
person he is talking to, but it jeopardizes his status as potent being,
for talk dissipates presence, takes away the mystery of an ineffable
self which silence preserves ..•Silence is a sign of mastery, and goes
along with a gun in the hand ...In westerns, silence, sexual potency,
and integrity go together’ (1992). Ed Buscombe concurs that
‘Terseness is a tradition in the western, in which loquaciousness is
often associated with effeminacy’ (1992).
Tompkins supports her argument by reference to a scene in
Hawks’ Red River (1948). The scene is so blatant in its association
of loquaciousness with femininity that it is worth quoting in full.
Tess Millay has caught up with Matthew Garth in an Abilene hotel.
She is very distressed because she knows that Tom Dunson has
vowed to kill Matthew for assuming control of his cattle herd.
TESS: He’s, he’s ...he’s camped two or three miles outside of
 Genre Talk 113

town. He says he’ll be here just after sun-up. He says he’s

going to kill you. W hat’s the matter? Is something ...? Oh
...oh, I must look like I’m in mourning. I didn’t mean it that
way ...I ...or I wouldn’t ...No, no, Matthew, I know you’ve
only a few hours, but but listen for just a minute, that’s all,
and, and ...then I wont talk about it anymore, just a minute.
He, he hasn’t changed his mind, Matthew.
MATTHEW: I didn’t think he would.
TESS: We saw the railroad and I thought ...I thought it might
make a difference, but it didn’t. Nothing would. He’s ...he’s
like something you can’t move. Even I’ve gotten to believe it’s
got to happen, you meeting him. I was gonna ask you to run,
but ...no I’m not, I’m not, it it wouldn’t do any good. You’re
too much like him. Oh, stop me, Matthew, stop me ...
MATTHEW covers her mouth with his hand.
TESS: (whispering) God bless you, Matthew.
MATTHEW kisses TESS.
Under stress, Tess resorts to blabbering and stammering. She
speaks nearly 150 words, while Matthew speaks five. There is no
point in discussing Dunson’s plans; Matt is so wise he already
knows them, and he also knows that what Tess really needs (to calm
her down about this situation, and in general), is for him to take
charge of her, to silence her, and to bed her. Silence is associated
with virility.
In screwball comedies, ‘western’, ‘hick’ and ‘foreign accents are
all placed in opposition to a speech pattern I’ll call eastern upper
class, spiced by urban slang’. True New York or Boston accents are
not found; instead one notes the crisp articulation reminiscent of
the transatlantic style’ advocated by dialogue coaches of the thirties
for its proper’, that is upper class/British pronunciation. This
accent is leavened, however, with a certain amount of
contemporary slang:2 In His Girl Friday (1940) Walter Burns calls
Hildy ‘do 11-face’; in The Lady Eve (1941) Jean Harrington calls
Charles a sap’; in Bringing Up Baby (1938) David Huxley plans to
‘knock him for a loop’; Peter Warne in It Happened One Night
114 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

(1934) uses such phrases as ‘prize sucker, ‘spill the beans’, ‘shut
your trap’. The leading characters of screwball comedies are not
moldering old fossils, but rather vibrant participants in modern
city life. Ball o f Fire (1941), of course, takes slang as its subject in
its story of a scholar who hires a nightclub girl to teach him
contemporary language usage, and its wedding together of Bertram
Potts’ elitist speech with Sugarpuss O ’Sheas street smart argot
could be taken as a metaphor of the genre’s overall verbal strategy.
Dialogue is used in screwballs, as it is in westerns, as a tool of
character definition and evaluation, but the rules of the game have
changed. Verbal dexterity is as highly prized here as the quick draw
is in Westerns. In these films the principal characters think quickly
and speak quickly. Just as Westerns use dialogue to separate the
tough, laconic westerners from the nervous tenderfoots, screwballs
use language to separate the quick-witted stars from the duller clods
around them. Leo McCarey’s The Aivfiil Truth (1938) is frequently
cited as one of the quintessential screwballs; significantly, this film
overtly turns western values upside-down. The sincere Oklahoman,
Dan Lesson (Ralph Bellamy), is the fool, and his deficiencies are
apparent in such lines as: ‘Oklahoma’s pretty swell’ or ‘Back on my
ranch I got a little red rooster and a little brown hen and they fight
all the time too. But every once in a while they make up and they’re
right friendly’. By contrast, the urbanites - Jerry (Cary Grant) and
Lucy Warriner (Irene Dunne) —are clever and sophisticated, because
they know how to play with words.
One of the chief ways in which screwball characters play is by
putting on a masquerade, feigning another identity. Masquerading is
embraced as a form of freedom and fun; as Tina Olsen Lent remarks,
‘By playing fictional characters, the screwball characters freed
themselves of their original personalities, expectations and value
systems’ (1995, p323). In My Man Godfrey (1936), Godfrey feigns to
be a bum when he’s really one of the Parkes of Boston, and John
Sullivan in Sullivans Travels (1941) pretends to be a hobo to gain
experience for his social realist film. In The Awful Truth Lucy
Warriner breaks up the romance between Jerry and his rich fiancee
by impersonating Jerry’s fictitious sister, Lola, and displaying Lola as
a vulgar alcoholic. Part of the madcap aura of screwballs stems from
the masquerading and proves infectious and uncontrollable,
 Genre Ta lk 115

becoming more and more involved and spreading from one character
to another. Susan Applegate, in The Major and the Minor (1942),
first impersonates a 12-year-old in order to ride on the train on a
half-fare ticket; then she impersonates Kirbys girlfriend, Pamela, and
still later she pretends she is Susus mother. In Midnight (1939), Eve
Peabody feigns to be the Baroness Czerny, and then her cab-driver
suitor pretends to be the Baron Czerny, and then her friend gets on
the phone and assumes the guise of their fictional baby daughter,
Francie! O f the canonic screwballs only His Girl Friday (1940) offers
no disguise as such, but James Harvey insightfully notes that Walter
and Hildy, are both consummate stylists — and conscious self­
parodists. And their way of quarreling, as in this case, is to perform
to each other, their best and most challenging audience ...Hildy and
Walter are the kind of characters —Hawks’ land of characters - who
impersonate themselves’ (1987, pp437-8).
Masquerades may be aided by costume changes — Susu
Applegates knee socks and braids, Lola Warriner’s fringed dress -
but the chief way in which they are enacted is verbally. In each case
the strategy is to co-opt the verbal style of a certain social type and
exaggerate it. No 12-year-old ever spoke like Susu: ‘Oh, what a
lovely room! Goldfishes! Look at the ones with the flopsy wopsy
tails! That ones sticking his nose up. He wants his din din’. No
upper class snob ever spoke like Tracy Lord, with her little French
phrases, her references to her sister being ‘sooo talented’, ‘Julius is
such a lamb’, and ‘Dahrling papa. And in each case the language is
exaggerated to keep the audience aware of the characters
performance, and of his or her joy in the role-playing.
As for gangster films, the classic films of the early 1930s
acquainted audiences with a specialized vocabulary: ‘take him for a
ride’, ‘grifter’, ‘cannon, ‘m ug, ‘on the square’, ‘sucker, ‘bulls’, ‘cut
you in, ‘lay low’, ‘the heat’s on, ‘bum rap’, ‘mebbe’, ‘cross me’,
muscle in’, gat’, ‘rat’ on one’s friends. The trend has continued in
more contemporary films with: ‘hitter’, ‘contract’, ‘whacking’,
‘hood’, ‘homeboys, ‘bustin’ my balls’, wiseguys’, ‘made man’, and so
on. In The Art o f Conversation) sociolinguist Peter Burke notes that:
The slang of professional beggars and thieves is an extreme
case of this creation of a symbolic boundary between a single
1 16 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

group and the rest of society. It has been interpreted as an

‘antilanguage’ which 'brings into sharp relief the role of
language as a realization of the power structure of society’ and
at the same time reflects the organization and values of a
‘counterculture" (1993, p25).
Along with a specialized vocabulary, what sets gangster films
apart is a constant use of ‘lower class’ constructions. As Rocky
Sullivan in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), Jimmy Cagney says,
‘Whadyaknow, whadyasay’ as a greeting, not ‘How do you do?’ or
‘How nice to see you. All characters in gangster films say yeah’
instead of yes’, ‘hey instead of ‘hello’, shaddup’ instead of please
be quiet’, get me?’ or ‘see?’ instead of ‘do you understand?’. Their
phrases are less likely to be rhythmically balanced, compressed, or
witty. They speak informally, with a great deal of almost rambling
repetition; they are uneducated and inarticulate. In Hawks’
Scarface (1932), the script goes out of its way to demonstrate that
Tony doesn’t understand the meaning of ‘gaudy or ‘effeminate’, he
refers to a writ of habeus corpus as ‘hocus pocus’ —which ironically
captures the hoodwinking quality of legal shenanigans. Similarly,
the Lucky Luciano character in Marked Woman (1937) doesn’t
know the meaning of the word ‘intimate’. In On the Waterfront
(1954) Terry Malloy garbles the syntax when he tries a put-down
to tell the investigators that he doesn’t want to see them again:
‘Never’s gonna be too much soon for me’.
In most gangster films what the central figures lack in verbal
finesse they make up for in brute verbal power, as if their speech,
instead of a social lubricant and means of sharing information, is to
them another weapon against their enemies. This power partially
stems from the gangsters lack of verbal restraint — gangsters are
likely to rain down a torrent of words. But it also comes from their
use of obscenity. Obscenity indicates strong emotion; employing it
also indicates that the speaker is willing or eager to break codes of
parental admonishment, polite language or religious taboo.
Gangster films, especially after Scorseses Mean Streets (1973), make
obscenity a major tool, emphasizing the characters’ crudeness, their
hypermasculinity, and the power of their emotions. In Cursing in
America (1992) Timothy Jay offers statistics counting the number
 Genre Talk

of curse words in representative films. Not surprisingly, the winner

of the contest was De Palmas Scarface (1983). In Brian De Palmas
The Untouchables (1987), A1 Capones fury upon hearing that Eliot
Ness has succeeded in capturing a major shipment of booze leads
him into this tantrum:
CAPONE: I want that son of a bitch dead ...I want you to
get this fuck where he breathes. I want you find this fancy
boy Eliot Ness. I want him dead. I want his family dead. I
want his house burnt to the ground. I go in the middle of the
night I want to piss on his ashes.
It is unthinkable that a character in a western, screwball comedy
or melodrama would talk this way.
By contrast, the dialogue in melodramas is primarily marked by
upper class diction and phraseology. This is the genre in which the
‘transatlantic’ dialogue style holds sway. Most of the characters are
supposed to be well off, socially prominent, perhaps even European
aristocrats. British actors and British accents are legion: Clive
Brooks stars in Shanghai Express (1932), Herbert Marshall in
Blonde Venus (1932), Joan Fontaine in Rebecca (1940), Leslie
Howard in Intermezzo (1939), Greer Garson in Random Harvest
(1942), James Mason in The Seventh Veil (1945). And unlike the
upper-crust characters in screwballs, these characters rarely resort to
slang or informal speech. Rather than representing contemporary
urban vibrancy, their roles are deliberately set in past eras; formal
or antiquated speech patterns predominate. The fact that many
of these films are adaptations of nineteenth century novels and
plays intensifies their tendency to use ‘dated’, as opposed to
contemporary, phraseology.
Dialogue in film melodramas is ornate, literary, charged with
metaphor. In Stella Dallas (1937), Laurel is trying to describe
Helen’s upper class grace to her mother and she calls her a flower
in Maine’. In An Affair to Remember (1957) Terry (Deborah Kerr)
and Nickie (Cary Grant) realize that this may be their last chance
for love. ‘Winter must be cold for those with no warm memories’,
Terry tells him. 'We’ve already missed the spring.’ They decide to
reunite on the top of the Empire State Building, because the
1 1 8 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

skyscraper ‘is the nearest thing to Heaven we have in New York’.

Moroever, melodramatic speech is likely to be accompanied by
expressive gesture and underscored by evocative music, Music plays
a major role in melodramas, and many of the scores are written by
Hollywood’s most renowned studio composers, including Max
Steiner, Franz Waxman, Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann. In
this genre, scoring is particularly likely to be used under dialogue
scenes. Alfred Newmans score for Wuthering Heights, which covers
75 minutes of the films 103-minute running time, is memorable
for its integration with the dialogue (Berg, 1989).
Irving Rapper’s Now Voyager (1942), which is supported by Max
Steiners lush score, provides a clear example of the stylistic traits of
melodramatic speech. It includes explicit references to nineteenth
century literary models such as the quotation from Walt Whitman,
‘Now, Voyager, sail thou forth to seek and find’, and all the explicit
references to Camille. Dr Jacquith (played by Claude Rains), in
particular, often speaks metaphorically, alluding to patients
growing and blossoming, wandering in the woods, going through
tunnels, and becoming fledglings. When Jerry (Paul Henreid)
discusses the love he and Charlotte (Bette Davis) share, he turns
their connection into something living: ‘It wont die — what’s
between us. Do what we will - ignore it, neglect it, starve it —its
stronger than both of us together’. The film’s well-known ending
combines melodramatic gesture (the business with the cigarettes),
Steiners score and metaphor when Jerry asks, And will you be
happy, Charlotte? Will it be enough?’ And Charlotte answers, ‘Oh
Jerry, don’t lets ask for the moon. We have the stars’.
The differences in diction and social class that Ive just outlined
are fairly straightforward and perhaps obvious. But when one
studies film dialogue, the question is not only how do the
characters talk, but how is character speech used in the narrative?
Which speech acts assume particular prominence in each genre?
It turns out that the genres vary widely in which speech acts
they foreground. Melodramas utilize their dialogue for a particular
type of character revelation - the open discussion of emotions. As
Peter Brooks has noted regarding theatrical melodramas, ‘Nothing
is understood, all is overstated’ (1985, p4l).
The desire to express all seems a fundamental characteristic of
 Genre T alk

the melodramatic mode. Nothing is spared because nothing is left

unsaid; the characters stand on stage and utter the unspeakable,
give voice to their deepest feelings, dramatize through their
heightened and polarized words and gestures the whole lesson of
their relationship (Brooks, 1985, p4).
In screwball comedies, characters will go to any lengths not to
say ‘I love you, because screwballs set out generally to ironize and
sabotage the language of love. In contrast, in Cukors Camille
(1937), after witnessing the wedding of their friends, Armand and
Marguerite have the following exchange:
ARMAND: You mean you’d give up everything for me?
MARGUERITE: Everything in the world. Everything. Never
be jealous again. Never doubt that I love you more than the
world, more than myself.
ARMAND: Then marry me.
MARGUERITE: What?
ARMAND: I married you today. Every word the priest said
was meant for us. In my heart I made all the vows. To you -
MARGUERITE: - and I to you.
ARMAND: Then ...
MARGUERITE: No, no, that isn’t fitting. Let me love you,
let me live for you, but don’t let me ask any more from
heaven than that. God might get angry.
And it is not just love that is so boldly spoken. In Leave Her To
Heaven (1945), Ellen Srectly admits her feelings towards her unborn
child: ‘I hate the little beast. I wish it would die. In Shanghai Express
(1932), Madeline talks openly to Captain Harvey about her own
trustworthiness: ‘When I needed your faith, you withheld it. And
now, when I don’t need it and don’t deserve it, you give it to me’.
Melodramas use words to lay bare their characters’ hearts.
More than any other style of dialogue, my students resist
melodramatic speech. It literally makes them squirm in their seats.
This might be due to the fact that certain subjects strike them as
120 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

sentimental and far-fetched and thus may trigger a rejecting

cynicism. I believe it is because the emotional honesty, the
‘nakedness’, that the characters display is just too threatening. (The
fact that the obscenity and verbal violence of the dialogue in
gangster films are more likely to upset older viewers —once when I
screened Reservoir Dogs (1992) to an alumnae group, several
viewers walked out - just goes to substantiate the thesis that each
viewers history and expectations affect how they ‘hear a film’s
dialogue.) Melodramatic speech however is still an important part
of contemporary film - certainly one hears it in Titanic (1997) and
The English Patient (1996).
Westerns use words for different ends - for exposition about the
conflict at hand, but also to create an atmosphere of tension and
threat. The Magnificent Seven (I960) exemplifies the threats and
commands integral to westerns. Calvera and his men have ridden
into the town, and the seven gunfighters take turns revealing
themselves and the trap they have laid.
CALVERA: I should have guessed when my men didn’t come
back. I should’ve guessed. How many of you did they hire?
CHRIS: Enough.
CALVERA: New wall.
CHRIS: There are lots of new walls. Ail around.
CALVERA: They wont keep me out.
CHRIS: They were built to keep you in.
CALVERA: You hear that?! We’re trapped! All forty of us, by
these three, or is it four? They couldn’t afford to hire more
than that.
HARRY: We come cheaper by the bunch.
CALVERA: Five! Even five wouldn’t give us too much
trouble.
CHRIS: There wont be any trouble ...if you ride on.
CALVERA: Ride on?! I’m going to the hills for the winter,
where am I going to get the food for my men?
 Genre Talk 121

Steve McQueen and Yul Brunner in The Magnificent Seven

CHICO: Buy it or grow it!

RILEY: Or maybe even work for it.
CALVERA: Seven. Somehow I don’t think you’ve solved my
problem.
CHRIS: Solving your problem isn’t our line.
VIN: We deal in lead, friend.
CALVERA: So do I. Were in the same business, huh?
VTN: Only as competitors.
CALVERA: Why not as partners? Suppose I offer you equal
share?
CHRIS: O f what?
CALVERA: Everything. To the last grain.
CHICO: And the people in the village? What about them?
CALVERA: I leave it to you. Can men of our profession
worry about things like that? It may even be sacrilegious. If
122 CIN ESO NIC: The World of Sound in Film

God didn’t want them sheared, he would not have made them
sheep. What do you think?
CHRIS: Ride on.
Here is the tanginess of western dialogue. This bite comes
from the use of metaphor —‘dealing in lead', ‘shearing sheep’; its
in the pairing of phrases ‘keep you out/keep you in’,
‘competitors/partners’; it’s in the rhythm of the short phrases, and
the alternation of speakers. Perhaps most of all, the power of this
dialogue comes from repeated, abrupt commands, ending,
climactically with Chris, low, authoritatively, ‘Ride on.
Just as ‘commanding’ is a common trope in westerns, ‘teasing’ is
a very common speech act in screwball comedy. Noel Coward
described his own dialogue as ‘perfectly ordinary phrases, which are
funny because of their context and because of the way in which
they are delivered’. Screwball dialogue relies heavily upon actors’
skill in archly conveying double messages. In this example from
The Awful Truth (1937), Jerry is both teasing Lucy and pretending
good fellowship towards Dan:
JERRY: Ah. So you’re going to live in Oklahoma, eh Lucy?
How I envy you. Ever since I was a small boy that name has
been filled with magic for me. Ok-Ia-homa.
DAN: Were gonna live right in Oklahoma City.
JERRY: Not Oklahoma City itself? Lucy, you lucky girl. No
more running around to night spots, no more prowling
around in New York shops. I shall think of you every time a
new show opens and say to myself, ‘She’s well out of it’.
DAN: New York’s all right for a visit but I —
JERRY: (Chiming in unison with Dan, who continues):
Wouldn’t want to live here.
LUCY: I know I’ll enjoy Oklahoma City.
JERRY: Well, of course. And if it should get dull, you can
always run over to Tulsa for the weekend.
 The scripting of the scene is clever - the build up (or down) from
Oklahoma the state, to Oklahoma City, to Tulsa (!) is a good
example of end position emphasis’. But what makes the scene is the
acting: Irene Dunne’s pained expression, and the way she
uncomfortably shifts her gaze, and Grant’s mischievous glee, and the
way he delivers the lines, from his stringing out ‘Ok-la-homa to his
mocking ‘She’s well out of it’, to the way he hits the word ‘Tulsa.
The double'layeredness of screwball comedies is characteristic
of the working of film dialogue. In Forging a Language: A Study of
Plays of Eugene O'Neill, jean Chothia writes:
Stage dialogue is different from real speech. It operates by
duplicity: it is not spontaneous but must appear to be so. It is
permanent but must appear to be as ephemeral as the speech it
imitates. The actor must seem to speak what in reality he recites. In
sharing the convention, the audience in the theatre has a share in
the duplicity. We simultaneously accept the illusion of spontaneity
and know that it is a pretense ...For it is not the hearing of the
words by the interlocutor that completes the exchange, as it is in
everyday speech, but the witnessing and interpreting of both the
utterance and the response by the audience. Much of the particular
effect of drama derives from the gap between two ways of hearing,
that of the interlocutor on stage and that of the audience, and from
the audiences consciousness of the gap. The audience sets each
utterance beside each previous utterance made within the limited
time span of the play and, in doing so, catches implications beyond
those immediately relevant to speaker and interlocutor ...If the
dramatist is to create an action of significance ...his dialogue,
however natural it may appear, must be most unnaturally resonant
with meaning and implication (1979, pp7-8).
Film dialogue shares with dramatic dialogue these deformations
from everyday conversation, this unnatural resonance, this double­
layeredness - in short, this dramatic irony. In all films, we viewers
act as eavesdroppers on conversations that ostensibly are not
directed at us, but actually exist solely for our benefit. The viewers
always know more than any single character and we put every word
said in the context of our previous knowledge. Film dialogue differs
from that of the stage because of the presence of the camera which
simultaneously enriches and complicates the actors’ performance.
CINESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

However, when you look closely at different genres’ handling of

talk, you realize that each genre offers a different relationship to the
eavesdropping viewer.
Take gangster films. The viewer has a conflicted relationship to
the gangster universe. We are both attracted and repelled by the
gangster’s energy and acquisitiveness, both in awe of and disgusted
by his violence. The dynamics of the dialogue only further this
conflict. Some of the dialogue relies so heavily on crime jargon or
foreign accents or even foreign languages that it may be more or
less incomprehensible to the eavesdropping movie-goer. These
audibility frustrations are exacerbated by the genres penchant for
polylogues - in gangster films there are countless scenes of
overlapping conversations between gang members horsing around,
playing cards, having drinks. The polylogues are designed to show
group solidarity and to create an informal and realistic
atmosphere. But because so much of this dialogue is quick and
overlapping, again the viewer will not catch every word. Mark
Winokur points out the particularly noticeable difficulties with
contemporary black films:
Some black inflections are so difficult for white audiences to
understand that ...minutes can go by in Boyz TV The Hood
and New Jack City that are difficult for white audiences to
follow ...Linguistic opacity redefines the gangster film as the
‘gangsta film (1995, p26).
But struggling to understand’ is not confined to one gangster
ethnic group nor one time period; segments of Dead End (1936)
and Angels with Dirty Faces (1937) featuring a gang of white slum
kids are very hard to follow, so are exchanges of the white urban
hoods in Pickup on South Street (1953), the Cubans in the 1983
Scarface, and the Italian-Americans in Goodfellas (1990). Some
degree of linguistic opacity may define the gangster film in to to.
I don't believe that the audibility problems reveal technical flaws
in gangster films; this frustration is part of their aesthetic. Whatever
our own ethnic background, no viewers are supposed to catch every
word of every stripe of gangster film; we are not expected to
understand every inside reference. Our failure to hear or
 Genre Talk 125

comprehend continually throws in our face that we are outside this

gang; the characters are pals and equals, and we are not included.
Unlike the case with screwball comedies, where the dialogue winks
at us and includes the viewer in the fun, in gangster films, the
characters are hip and cool and oh so tough; we are merely weak-
kneed tourists. Narrative clarity (and all that such clarity implies
about a stable, ordered world and society) is so not important to
these texts. Whereas almost all other film dialogue is designed for
the comfort of the viewer, these films pretend not to give a damn
about our comfort, and we admire them the more for their disdain.
Melodramas forge a different relationship with the
eavesdropping viewer. This is because these films - which seem so
verbally over-explicit - actually hinge around the not said, the
words that cannot be spoken.
In most melodrama the driving tension of the plot stems from
one character keeping some secret, a secret that the viewer knows.3
We know that Marguerite is lying when she breaks up with
Armand, that she is sacrificing her love and her health for his future
and social respectability, so the remainder of the film is agonizing
until he finds out the truth. We know that Stella Dallas is
playacting when she chases Laurel away, that she is giving up her
reason for living for her daughter s well-being. In Shanghai Express,
we know that Madeline is agreeing to become the mistress of the
Chinese warlord only to save Donald Harvey from being blinded.
In Magnificent Obsession (1954), we know that Robbie Robinson,
Cary’s new love, is actually Bob Merrick, the playboy responsible
for her husbands death. We know that Tina is actually ‘A unt
Charlottes’ illegitimate daughter in The Old Maid (1939), just as
Griggsie is Jody Norriss illegitimate son in To Each His Own
(1946), just as Rafe is Wade Hunnicutt’s illegitimate son in Home
From the Hill (1959). We know that Judith Treherne is blind and
on the verge of death when she cheerfully sends her unaware
husband off to his scientific meeting. And we know that the reason
that Terry seems to have thrown over Nickie in Affair to Remember
is that shes been crippled in a car accident.
But the characters don’t have the benefit of our perspective - as
Jeanine Basinger puts it, ‘A little sensible talk is never allowed to
sort things out (1993, p5). Sometimes they find out at the story’s
12 6 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

end; sometimes they never know. In the absence of such crucial

information, the characters blunder around in the dark, doing and
saying the most terrible things. In no other genre is the viewers
superior knowledge of the narrative so influential in our
understanding of the double-layering behind individual speeches.
When Tina in The Old Maid fawns over her mother s rival Delia,
who is lax and spoiling, and criticizes her stern Aunt Charlotte’, we
cringe at the pain Tina is unwittingly causing. When Nickie vents
his bitter broken heart on Terry, who sits quietly accepting the
abuse with a quilt hiding her crippled legs, we can hardly stand it.
When Stefan Brand (in Letter from an Unknown Woman, 1948)
lapses into his shallow seduction patter with Lise after she has
sacrificed her whole life for him, we want to scream. Melodramatic
dialogue is suffused with the tension and pathos of dramatic irony.
Peter Brooks argues that melodramas present a ‘drama of
recognition in which the central figures identity and virtue is
gradually recognized by the diegetic characters. The eavesdropping
viewer however is always already in the know, and the films tension
comes from our waiting for the other characters to see the light.

SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS

Covering four genres is enough, but others beckon; I hear them
as faint rhythms and melodies. Film noirs use short sentences,
urban slang, toppers and rely upon questions. War films always
feature the collision of national languages, and they constantly use
dialogue to discuss the meaning and rectitude of the military
conflict, but the genre is bifurcated by the Vietnam era, which
brought in a seismic change in the use of obscenity in Vietnam War
films. Sports films regularly build up to climax in a coach’s
motivational locker-room speech; this speech act is nearly as
important as the final championship game. Contemporary horror
films, as Philip Brophy has shown, rely upon a unique kind of
punning, a gross kind of tongue in cheek (1992, pp247-266). I
look forward to the day when analysis of verbal conventions is an
expected part of genre study, as de rigeur as discussions of lighting
or costume.
Finally, the more I worked on my four genres, the more I
 Genre Talk 127
realized that each in its own way presents a troubled relationship to
language. Gangsters spend half their time worrying about silencing
potential informers. Western heroes don’t talk very much, but they
paradoxically make a fetish out of their respect for language, taking
every slur personally and believing that a man’s word is his bond.
Screwball comedies valorize verbal ingenuity, but then they mock
their heroines as silly blatherers. Melodramas seem to be
completely explicit, but then they create convoluted
misunderstandings and secrets. Each genre, in different ways,
rehearses the love-hate relationship that Americans have with talk,
or that film studies has had with the soundtrack. Listening to
dialogue, talcing it seriously, studying it, is thus to enter the words
vs images fray on the side of the persecuted, and to argue that how
film characters speak and exactly what they say is of vital
importance to the movie-going experience.

References
Adams, Ramon, 1936, Cowboy Lingo, Houghton Mifflin, Boston.
Basinger, Jeanine, 1993, A Woman's View: H ow Hollywood Spoke to
Women 1930-1960, Knopf, New York.
Berg, A Scoff, 1989, Goldwyn: A Biography, Knopf, New York.
Brooks, Peter, 19 8 5 ,The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James,
Melodrama and the M ode of Excess, Columbia University Press, New York.
Brophy, Philip, 1992, 'Read My Lips: Notes on the Writing and Speaking of
Film Dialogue', Continuum 5:2.
Burke, Peter, 1993, The Art o f Conversation, Cornell University Press, Ithaca,
New York.
Buscombe, Edward, 1992, Stagecoach, BFI Film Classics, London.
Cassiday, Frederic, 1957, 'Language on the American Frontier' in The
Frontier in Perspective, eds Wyman, Walker and Kroeber, University of
Wisconsin Press, Clifton, Madison.
Chothia, Jean, 1979, Forging a Language: A Study o f Plays of Eugene
O 'N e ill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Harvey, James, 1987, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to
Sturges, Knopf, New York.
Herman, Lewis, 1947, American Dialects: A M anual o f Actors, Directors and
Writers, Theatre Art Books, New York.
Jay, Timothy, 1992,Cursing in America, John Benjamins, Philadelphia.
1 28 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound In Film

Olsin Lent, Tina, 1995, 'Romantic Love and Friendship: The Redefinition of
Gender Relations in Screwball Comedy' in Classical Hollywood Comedy, ed,
Branovska Karnick and Jenkins, Roufledge, New York.
Parker, Patricia, 1987, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property,
Methuen, New York.
Shachtman, Tom, 1995, The Inarticulate Society: Eloquence and Culture in
America , The Free Press, New York.
Stalta, Richard W , 1994, The Cowboy Encyclopedia, ABC-Clio, Santa
Barbara.
Tompkins, Jane, 1992, West of Everything: The Secret Life of Westerns,
Oxford University Press, New York.
Western Words: A Dictionary o f the Range, C ow Camp and Trail, 2nd ed,
1968, Universily of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma.
Winokur, Mark, 1995, 'Marginal Marginalia: The African-American Voice in
the Nouvelle Gangster Film', Velvet Light Trap No 35, Spring.

Notes
1 For more information, see Sarah Kozloff, Overhearing Film Dialogue
[Universily of California Press, forthcoming, 2000),
2 I am indebted to James Gordon, The Comic Structures o f Preston Siurges
(PhD Dissertation, Northwestern University, 1980) for his recognition of The
importance of slang in Sturges films.
3 See Edward Braniaan, Narrative Comprehension and Film, 1992,
Routledge, New York, on disparities and hierarchies of knowledge in film.
ADRIAN MARTIN

Even when one makes the commentary of a film, this

commentary is seen, felt, at first as a rhythm. Then it is
a colour (it can be cold or warm); then it has a meaning.
But the meaning arrives last.
Robert Bresson, 1967 (Thompson, 1988, p3l4)

SIREN'S SONG: THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI (1948)

Let s start in chaos, in a wild babble of voices: four minutes of
Orson Welles The Lady from Shanghai (1948), a shipboard scene
seventeen and a half minutes in, built upon a five-way conversation
and a song by Rita Hayworth.
Welles’ films provide us with some of the most fertile examples
of image-sound fusion in all cinema. On the visual plane, they
employ a baroque patterning of images - in the rapid editing, in
the quite astonishing number of different camera set-ups (many
used only once in the montage), in the incessant use of frame
entries and exits, and in the expressionist-style compositions. But
Welles’ management of sound is no less baroque - as is evident
from the use of multiple, rapid-fire voices; the overlapping between
voices (including here, singing voices); and the spatial ping-pong of
voices back and forth across extreme points of the set.
But we can go much more deeply into this. One of the aspects
of the image-sound fusion that most characterizes Welles is his
quite disconcerting use in concert of rapid editing and off-screen
voices —off-screen voices which are, in this case, mainly dubbed.
1 30 CIN ESO NIC: The World of Sound in Film

Welles always gets the viewer a little uneasy or dizzy, off-guard, a

little unable to place or locate these various voices in the space of
the scene, at least for a split second. And often the voices are
demanding to be heard (ie, the characters are demanding
attention), which only exacerbates the split-second tension of this
mise en scène.
Welles does amazing things with the fragmenting of off-screen
dialogue by shifts in the picture editing: at a high point of this
scene, in the middle of Arthur’s cranky monologue about his
mother and the great Bacharach, Welles keeps Arthur as just an off­
screen voice for four consecutive shots. During this passage, and
indeed throughout the entire scene, Welles exercises his freedom to
cut the shot in the middle of sentences, long and complex words,
and even on especially slurred or drawn-out syllables within words;
he also uses what today seems the very modern, Scorsese-style
device of cutting hard to the act of someone talking, without
providing the usual aural breathing space or lead-in of a few frames
without speech.
Beyond the crafty, logistical intricacy of all this cutting and
moving, framing and looking, note the expressive rewards of this
style. Welles is able to abstract the minute territorial or spatial
zones of the scene with such skill that, by the time we reach the
end, with Michael climbing back on deck to listen to Elsa, we
might imagine or assume they are the only two people left in the
scene - even though, logically, George is still over in the off-space
playing his piano and the crippled Arthur doubtless remains
rooted where he sits.
Sometimes there is so much cinematic business in a Welles
 Th r e ad s of Voice 131

So this, from a more directorial point of view, is what the scene

amounts to, or at least begins from: Michael is literally, spatially
fixed in the middle of the set (he doesn’t get the wild shot changes
that everyone else gets), and he’s fixed between two temptations -
the monetary temptation that Arthur represents, sitting stiffly at
one end, and the sexual temptation that Elsa represents, supine at
the other end. I want to stress how Welles gives dramatic and
cinematic form to this basic premise through his staging and
manipulation of sound - and particularly voice.
Welles, as a rule, likes to work all the registers of voice: from
whispering through plain speaking to singing and shouting, with
various vocal but non-verbal modes in-between, like granting,
wheezing and breathing. This scene in Lady from Shanghai stages
the battle over Michael’s soul or his will, and it is primarily a battle
of sounds: Arthur s speaking voice versus Elsas song (indeed, Elsa
speaks only a handful of breathy or low, mumbled words in the
course of the entire scene). From Arthur’s point of view, this is an
anxious battle for power: he is always trying to dominate the scene,
the space, through the projection of his voice - raising his volume
in a taunting way (‘Did you know about that, lover?’), issuing
commands (‘Shut up, George’, ‘Sing it for us again, lover), and by
using an aggressive, dismissive way of speaking to his servant,
Bessie (‘Isn’t that right, Bessie? ...Yes, of course it is’). Even at the
scripting stage, Welles had a good mind for the ways in which
dialogue can cue a drama of voices in action and contestation.
How does Elsa subvert Arthurs power games in this battle of
wits and wills? Firstly through gestures: her act of wanting her
cigarette lit instigates a chain of actions that takes the focus of the
decoupage away from Arthur s monologue, and relegates him more
and more to the off-screen. But mainly through her song - a little
ditty called Please Don’t Kiss Me, The story behind this songs
inclusion in the film is important. This scene once existed in a
completely different form - but presumably with the same basic
dramatic function that I have proposed. It existed without Rita
Hayworth singing a song, which was something the producer
Harry Cohn insisted upon; to that end, the whole scene was
reconceived and reshot. Welles is on record as saying that he ‘didn’t
mind the theme song’ (as he called it), but he came to hate the way
132 CINESONIC: The W orld of Sound in Film

that, later, it was plastered all over the film in ‘incidental’ variations
(Welles & Bogdanovich, 1993, p i94).
You can tell from the scene itself that Welles had a rather ironic
attitude towards this song and towards the fact that he had to
include and work around it. In the first place, it is a pretty simple,
formulaic, corny pop ballad of its era, with lyrics that go round and
round with slight variations (don’t kiss me ...don’t hold me ...don’t
love me). Welles plays upon these constituent qualities of the song.
Since his film has had to become, for a minute, a musical, he gently
mocks the conventions of the musical genre in the slightly nutty
way that he has the character of George above deck providing the
piano accompaniment, and another stray boatman below bringing
in the guitar part. Even more pointedly, he bookends the song
mockingly in two ways: first, he has George sing a line flat, and its
even the wrong line for that verse; and then he makes a sound
transition from this scene to the next that butts the end of Please
Don’t Kiss Me with a Frank Tashlin style pastiche of a radio
commercial for ‘Glosso Lusto’ shampoo. This radio ad is itself a
kind of mockery of the femme fatales code of lustful glamour and
allure (pleases your hair - pleases the man you love’).
But, for all this gentle mockery and irony, Elsas singing of Please
Don’t Kiss Me really works, and it’s hard to imagine the scene ever
being half as effective without it. Welles may or may not have taken
on grudgingly the task of including the song, but he did finally
manage to make it absolutely integral to the dynamic and meaning
of his scene. Those lyrics, for instance, simple and cornball as they
are, allow a certain tension, a certain to-and-fro that goes perfectly
with Welles baroque shifts and movements: don’t ldss me —but if
you kiss me - don’t let me go. It is, quite effectively in this sense, a
sirens song, a song of tease and seduction, pulling someone
forward and pushing them away.
And then there’s Hayworth’s singing delivery Welles positions
the star —on her back - to emphasize the dreamy, breathy qualities
of her vocal delivery, so that the song begins like an interior sort of
reverie or whisper, the lyrics sung and abandoned at whim,
mindlessly or distractedly, as the piano plays. But then the song
gets serious, and she gets serious singing it, as the soft-focus, close-
up photogenie devoted to Hayworth becomes more intense; the
 T h re ad s of Voice 133

song picks up more musical backing and fills the soundtrack,

banishing all voices and noises, and the bodies that make them, to
a zone of off-screen silence. The hi!! achievement and rendition of
her song marks her defeat of Arthur’s bleating, and her triumph
over Michael's will - and she doesn’t even have to look at Michael
to know that this is so.

UNCONSCIOUS BABBLE: FORCE OF EVIL

Abraham Polonsky’s masterpiece Force of Evil (1948) is prized
among cinephiles partly for its unusual, highly stylized dialogue.
The words have a flamboyantly poetic quality, while still remaining
within the tradition of terse, hardboiled, urban, streetwise talk. The
director had a highly sophisticated, fairly avant garde
understanding of his own artistic method. In the early 1960s, he
commented: £I assumed ...that the three elements, visual image,
actor, word are equals ...[it was] just an experiment in which each
of my resources was freed of the dominance of the other two ...All
I tried to do was use the succession of visual images, the
appearances of human personality in the actors, and the rhythm of
words in unison or counterpoint. I varied the speed, intensity,
congruence and conflict for design, emotion and goal, sometimes
separating the three elements, sometimes using two or three
together’ (Sarris, 1972, p392).
Here is another case where the analysis of sound cannot be
meaningfully separated from an analysis of the visuals. At first
glance, there may not seem to be a whole lot happening in the
visuals of a typical scene of the film, which occurs 26 minutes in —
a conversation between Joe (John Garfield) and Doris (Beatrice
Pearson) in the back of a cab. This exchange is covered in three
shots, all of them two-shots (between what I am calling Shots 1 and
2, there is a brief insert, without dialogue, filmed from outside the
car). The small-scale directorial dexterity in this scene is
remarkable: each of the three angles has been chosen to focus on
very particular aspects of the actors’ performances, especially the
manner in which they deliver their lines. In each shot, each
framing, we can intuit that the actors have been instructed to work
within very particular parameters of bodily and vocal gesture.
134 CINESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

Observe how the actors, sitting quite still in a confined space, use
essentially their eyes, and the positioning and turning of their
heads, as well as (as the scene progresses) their hands; and listen for
the rhythm, modulation and music of the words.

Shot 1
DORIS: I went to a business college for ten weeks because
my mother wanted to give me advantages.
JOE: You have many advantages, Doris.
DORIS: So did you. I’ve known Leo since I was thirteen, I’ve
heard about you since then.
JOE: What did you hear?
DORIS: Oh, stories of a prodigal brother who never came
home. How much Leo did for you, how little you did for
yourself. The wild boy in the streets, the wild man who said
he was a wild cat in the jungle —that’s what I heard. Oh, your
brother kept me on even when business was bad, and I guess
that’s why I pretended to believe what he pretended to believe
- that running a lottery was not so bad - now my names in a
book and my fingerprints are in a file and no matter how
long I live people’ll remember and know it. And I’ll
remember it and know it. Oh, I’ll know it.
JOE: Forget it. You were just a telephone call that came into
the police station and it was a wrong number. How does it
feel to be a wrong number, Miss Lowrie?
DORIS: Not very nice, Mr Morse, not very nice.
JOE: Blame me, blame me, everybody does —they do!

Shot 2
DORIS: You’re a strange man and a very evil one.
JOE: And you’re a sweet child and you want me to be wicked
to you.
 T h r e a d s of Voice 135

DORIS: Now what are you talking about?

JOE: Because you’re wicked, really wicked.
DORIS: What are you talking so crazy for, Mr Morse?
JOE: Because you’re scrambling for me to do something
wicked to you, make a pass at you, bowl you over, sweep you
up, take the childishness out of you, then give you money
and sin - that’s real wickedness.

Shot 3
DORIS: Wliat are you trying to make me think, Mr Morse,
what are you trying to make me think about myself, and you?
JOE: You know what wickedness is? If I put my hand in my
pocket and gave you a ruby, a million dollar ruby for nothing,
because you’re beautiful and a child with advantages, because
I wanted to give it to you without taking anything for myself
- would that be wicked?
DORIS: Have you got one?
JOE: No!
DORIS: You know, when I was a little girl, magicians used to
fool me, Mr Morse, with their high hats and their black capes
and their ruby rings, cause I listened to what they said - they
talked so fast - instead of watching what they did. But I’m a
big girl now, with a police record thanks to you, and I know
it’s not wicked to give and want nothing back.
JOE: It’s perversion, can’t you see what it is, it’s not natural. To
go to great expense for something you want, that’s natural. To
reach out, to take it, that’s human, that’s natural. But to get
your pleasure from not taking, from cheating yourself
deliberately like my brother did today, from not getting, from
not taking —don’t you see what a black thing that is for a man
to do, how it is to hate yourself, your brother, make him feel
that he’s guilty, that I’m guilty, just to live and be guilty ...
In the total narrative context of Force of Evil, this scene tackles
136 CINESONJC: The Wortd of Sound in Film

one of the hardest challenges of the fiction film: it is trying to show,

in a necessarily unreal, artificial, telescoped way, the birth of a
relationship, from first nerves and fumbles and parries, through to
the beginning of warmth and intimacy. Polonsky clinches this in
two short scenes, just three and a half minutes of real time —but in
movie time, drama time, emotional time, we feel that we know
these characters, and that they know one another, more deeply at
the end of the sequence than at the start. The sequence starts
simply, on the everyday theme of where do you come from, what
do you do’ and ends with a bleak philosophical dissertation on
altruism and desire.
The work with acting, vocal delivery and the conceptualisation
and writing of dialogue in this sequence is quite extraordinary. Look
at the first shot, which is angled a little from the side to concentrate
us primarily upon Doris’ actions and reactions. In a way, one can
think of all Pearsons intricate work with gesture - whether she looks
at Joe and how she does so, whether its a shy look or an accusing
look, whether it’s a half turn or a full turn of her head, whether she
looks away or ahead or down - as a way of scoring the dialogue, of
variously underplaying or emphasizing its words and phrases.
Similarly with her voice volume; Polonsky has both actors speak in
a very calm, low way, so that from there they can only drop to a
whisper (like when Doris mutters with her head down, ‘Oh, 111
know if), or speak up in a way that seems violent (as when Joe says
near the end, ‘Its perversion, can’t you see what it is’). In fact, for
much of this film, the register of this poetic speech has a similar
aural consistency and tone to Hollywood voice-over speech, which
gives it a strange effect of intimacy and inferiority.
This effect was certainly intentional. When Polonsky was asked
whether he had aimed to write blank verse instead of naturalistic or
generic film dialogue in Force of Evil, he commented: ‘Blank verse?
No. But the babble of the unconscious, yes, as much as I could,
granted the premise that I was committed to a representational
film’ (Sarris, 1972, pp392-3). What does this mean for Polonsky,
the ‘babble of the unconscious5? In terms of the dialogue that he
wrote, it refers to a stream of words - and sometimes their
streaming is more important than their strict sense. This flow of
language in the scene is marked by constant repetition of key words
and images (‘the wild boy in the streets, the wild man who said he
was a wild cat in the jungle’), and by all kinds of returns and
rhyhming structures - she says: ‘You’re a strange man. And a very
evil one’, then he says: ‘A nd you’re a sweet child. And you want me
to be wicked to you.
Polonsky’s method of constructing a sentence is unique - highly
florid, literary sentences on one hand, full of interruptions and
extra clauses — but sentences designed absolutely for real-time
flight, for motion and activation through an act of speech (for
instance, Doris’ long statement about magicians). These sentences
sometimes deliberately do not reach their syntactical end; they lose
their way in a jungle or confusion of turns, pronoun switches and
repetitions. The end of the sequence is particularly powerful and
poignant in this regard. The bodily positions switch from start to
end: at the start he watches her, turned away; at the end, she is
gazing at him, as he becomes more inward. His final, unfinished
sentence trails out after 60 words, and by the end of its
convolutions a mood of introspective sadness entirely dominates
the scene.
One of the things that Force of Evil can teach us about the
writing and delivery of filmic speech is that a string of words —a
sentence, a phrase - can carry a special kind of tension or suspense,
just as much as a camera movement or a dissonant burst of strings
in a music score. It can have a dynamic, a modulation, a way of
teasing out or playing on possibilities. Above all, it can have a way
of placing you or displacing you, guiding you or deliberately losing
and confusing you - but all of this within split seconds. Polonsky,
for his part, had certainly learnt something about this special vocal
art from Welles, with whom he worked in radio. This is Welles’
spoken introduction to his 1940 radio version of Huckleberry Finn:
Good evening, this is Orson Welles. Our story, as promised,
is Huckleberry Finn, and our guest is Jackie Cooper. But since
that promise was made, another star has joined the cast:
Walter Catlett, whose face you’ll remember from at least a
hundred movies; whose voice, of most recent memory, was
unforgettable in Pinocchio - in which Mr Catlett created for
Mr Disney the character of Jay Worthington, Honest John,
1 3 8 CINESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

Foulfellow the fox; and who - I’m still talking about Walter
Catlett —will enact for us tonight the taxing role of the Duke.

ABSTRACT AND CONCRETE: CARLITO'S WAY

One thing that is plainly obvious - but deeply fascinating —in
films that use voice-over narration is the material difference
between two kinds of voices, or two different ways of rendering
voices as sounds. To put it in the simplest way, this is the difference
between an intimate voice — a single, sole voice-over, seemingly
right up close to the mike, a pure voice without any air or space
around it - and the voice which exists within the space of a
fictional event, recorded in the broader sound-context of a set or a
natural location, a voice which is part of a public space that
partakes of a potentially more chaotic babble or flux of a whole
world of sound.
Brian De Palmas Carlitos Way (1993) strikes me as one of the
recent highpoints in the history of films that use voice-over
narration. It begins with the solitary sound of a gunshot: the hero
(A1 Pacino as Carlito) is fatally wounded in this abrupt and startling
opening gesture. Patrick Doyles musical score begins here, and there
are only a few, isolated noises to accompany the slow-motion, black
and white images of Carlito being carried away to the hospital,
during the films credits. His voice-over narration, which cues the
events of most of the rest of the film in flashback, is something like
the inner thought-track that accompanies him in his passage to
death. As in many voice-over movies, old and new, there is a high
level of unreality and artifice in this strange voice-over device: it
hovers, suspended, over the film in a weird narrative space.
Carlitos voice-over is one of the most intensely close narrations
in cinema, almost whispered, full of vocal grain - with all the
poignancy this generates (Terrence Malick experiments in a similar
way with voice-over in The Thin Red Line, 1998). The soundtrack
treatment of this narration, as well as Pacino’s superb delivery,
enhances this sensation. This voice is like the emanation of the last
breath from Carlitos rapidly fading body. The first voice-over
words spoken in the film are: ‘Somebody’s pulling me close to the
 T h r e a d s of Voice 139

Al Pacino and Penelope Ann Miller in Carlito's Way

ground. I can sense, but I can’t see5. The voice works with the
situation and the mise en scène: the images, with their close-up
proximity to Pacinos face and their free-floating point-of-view
movements, take us into a zone of shadow between life and death
where such an unreal, inner voice can dwell and make its utterance.
Here is something unusual: De Palma goes straight from
Pacino’s voice as narrator to his voice as character, with no sort of
bridging sound distraction to smooth through the transition. This
is how the film insists on the interplay, the difference between two
renditions of the same voice. The wonderful courtroom scene
which follows the prologue, with Pacino, Sean Penn as Carlitos
lawyer and Paul Mazursky as the presiding judge, emphasizes
speech and vocalizing as an act, as a public and social performance.
At least half a dozen times, the dialogue marks or stresses the act of
Carlito speaking —‘[I] stood up in front of that judge and told him
what was who’, ‘Now I ain’t sayin”, ‘You’ve heard this rap before’,
Penn asks that his client be ‘indulged his right to speak’ —While the
judge refers caustically to his position as listener: ‘I’m all ears’, ‘why
am I listening to this?’ And of course there are backstory references
to illegal wire taps, sound recordings where the act of speech is
140 CINESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

again a dramatic, life and death matter.

Even more emphatically, this scene stresses Carlitos dazzling,
dynamic and comical power as a speaker, his voice veritably
booming at top volume through the courtroom. Notice how
everyone else is placed well below him in their modes of voice
projection: the judge mutters to himself; Sean Penn has a shy, soft,
somewhat muffled tone; and the prosecution lawyer says in a
controlled, steely way at the end of the scene, ‘I’ll be seein’ you,
Brigante’. Carlito speaks in a flowery, rhetorical, bombastic style of
oratory. The judge is compelled to remind him: ‘You’re not
accepting an award’. Carlito takes up spontaneously a Martin
Luther King mode of speech, in the way he enounces words like ‘to-
do' and ‘my time’; in his cry out in the street, ‘Thank god almighty
I am free at last!'; and in his marvellous word-sequence: ‘[I am]
rehabilitated, reinvigorated, reassimilated, and finally gonna be
relocated’. As that last turn of phrase shows, the beauty of the
dialogue that David Koepp has scripted for this character lies in the
way it slides between Carlito s attempt at high rhetoric and then his
falling into straight street talk, as when he interjects: ‘Never
convicted on no dope’. As an actor, Pacino performs this kind of
verbal slide superbly. (For a pre-Method version of a similar
performance mode, check out Joan Bennett’s performance as the
hooker masquerading as an artist in Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street, 1945).

VANISHING POINT: ANTOINE ET COLETTE

The Nouvelle Vague in France inaugurated a quite different and
contrary model of the use of voice-overs in cinema. One of the
principal artistic liberations wrought by this movement was its
freedom in relation to voice-over speech. Blocks of spoken text —
thoughts, quotations, recitations, various kinds of data or
information —could suddenly appear on the soundtrack without
being cued by the usual narrative devices like a flashback, or an
obvious movement into an interior monlogue. These blocks of text
could be spoken by any character within the film at any time,
regardless or whether they had been designated a privileged
narrator or observer of events.
In terms of concrete sound properties, it is fruitful to think of
 T h re ad s of V oice 141

the Nouvelle Vague model of sound design as a form of aural

collage. In this collage model, the relations between the three main
bands or tracks of sound —voice, music and noises —are always
being pulled apart and put back together in various combinations.
So, an analysis of sound mixing, the perpetually shifting and
layering of these various levels, becomes crucial to an
understanding of the Nouvelle Vague legacy in film soundtracks.
Although Francois Truffaut is often regarded as a far more
conventional filmmaker than Godard or Rivette, his work on
sound was more intricate than many historical accounts have
acknowledged. Truffauts work with sound as a whole is in perfect
congruence with his work on narrative and on mise en scène. All
three levels are marked by an obsession with economy, speed, a
mania for telescoping and bridging which amounts to an aesthetic
of transition or the vanishing point’, to take further a comment
on Truffaut by Serge Daney: All space is fdmed from the point of
view of the door, the passageway, the window, the line of flight’
(1991, p23).
In Antoine and Colette (1962), a short which comes second in
the directors autobiographical Antoine Doinel’ series, voices are
only one facet in a whole tightly interlacing tissue of sounds. A
recent testimony from Truffaut’s picture and sound editor of the
period, Claudine Bouché, reveals that the director hated layering
sounds —‘Francois wanted only a single, good sound, which would
play a central role in the scene. Never two sounds mixed’ - and that
his abhorrence of stock’ noise tracks (such as car engines) led him
to wish for musically stylised replacements for such sounds
(Bouché, et al, 1999, pp48-9). In Antoine et Colette, we hear voices
in various forms - dialogue, voice-over narration, voices on TV,
and (very importantly for Truffauts sound collage) in the sung
lyrics of songs, whether heard on radios or played on gramophones.
There is an objective, third-person type of narration, which enters
without warning over ten minutes into this 30-minute film. Even
more crucial is the fact that all the dialogue in the film is post-
synchronised.
In the opening few minutes of Antoine and Colette, sounds
always take us into scenes, define the narrative space, and then
provide hinging or bridging points into the next scene, fragment or
1 42 CINESONJC: The World of Sound in Film

detail. There is a swift, dense procession of sonic events. We see a

street, and hear street noise. Then, on a cut to the outside of a
particular apartment, we hear what sounds like a pneumatic drill;
but that’s a kind of aural gag or decoy to take us into Antoine’s
bedroom, and the ringing of his alarm. The alarm turns on the
radio; so we get a clever little fragment of song. Antoine, during his
grungey morning smoke, goes from the radio to his record player.
(Already, in this rapid succession of gestures and events, were
getting all kind of information about this character, his interests,
and about the world and the time he’s living in). As Antoine
dramatically opens his bedroom window, the nominally diegetic
sound from the record player instantly swells or thickens in the mix
to become full'blown soundtrack music - there’s no longer
ambient street noise. This music then carries us over a number of
rapid visual ellipses, as Antoine makes his way to work.
The dramatic sound of Antoine clocking in abruptly ends the
music and brings on very specific, highly informative sounds that
characterise his workplace - Truffaut had a penchant for workplace
sounds, vocational or professional noises. This bunch of sounds
ushers in an amazing collage of songs, one after another and for a
few seconds piling on top of each other - and they function as
sound quotes or, as we might say today, sound grabs. This musical
collage is ended by the bookending sound of Antoine clocking out.
Finally, after all this sonic exposition, we get a passage of dialogue
- but post-synchronised dialogue, stylised so as to trigger a
flashback, which happens to be an outtake from Truffauts earlier
film in the Antoine Doinel series, The 400 Blows (1959).

PSYCHODRAMATICS: THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS

One of the most important things that sets both Citizen Kane
(1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons apart from all subsequent
film work by Welles is their particular work on sound. In these first
two films - perhaps because of the luxurious and highly
controllable conditions under which they were made — Welles
experiments a lot with direct sound, rather than with the extensive
post-synchronisation of his later work (such as The Lady from
Shanghai) . Clearly, Welles’ first two films continue the experiments
 Th re ad s of Voice 143

he developed in radio - and particularly with acoustic depth, the

actors proximity to the live microphone, and how they produce
their voice effects within this radiophonic space. Beyond the
dazzling surface effects created by this kind of live sound-work,
deeper effects of characterisation and speech-action can be explored
in The Magnificent Ambersons.
Listen closely to the scene which takes place in the Ambersons
mansion, at the end of the night of the ‘last great ball’. It is a scene
completely and strikingly without music (in other scenes of the
film, Bernard Herrmann’s music cues seem timed to fit exact words
and pauses in sentences). The scene demonstrates the full expressive
power of voice and speech in cinema. Indeed, I can think of few
films with such a large range of voice pitches and voice volumes, in
a constant modulation. And listen for how each voice is literally
brought forward to the centre of the scene and then manoeuvred
again to the acoustic periphery, as each actor is shifted in and out
of the action.
This scene makes for an interesting comparison with Force o f
EviL Here again, perhaps, we see a rendition of the ‘babble of the
unconscious’. In Polonsky, it’s a kind of magical, lyrical, collective
or shared unconscious created by a sterephonic flow of speech
between two characters. In Welles, the unconscious speaks or
babbles a bit differently. It’s a situational unconscious, an
interactive clash of different characters and their drives, impulses,
utterances. The Magnificent Ambersons goes further than the staging
of a drama of speech (as in The Lady from Shanghai), into a full­
blown psycho-dramatics of speech. The fdm reveals Welles’ artistic
understanding, in his time, of psychoanalytical processes. After all,
the scene begins, right in the middle of something, with a kind of
everyday psychological interrogation: ‘I know that isn’t all that’s
worrying you. So much of this scene is comprised of worries,
symptoms, slips, telling utterances, and eventually hysterical
outbursts - particularly from Fanny (Agnes Moorehead), who gives
away far, far more than she means to.
This is not an abstract interpretation laid upon the scene. It’s in
the voices, the work of the voices. Everyone has at least two, maybe
three voices or voice modes in this scene. There’s a hushed, one-to-
one, intimate voice - like how Isabel (the mother) talks to her son
1 44 CINESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

George at the start of the scene, where the darkness focuses us

intensely on the quality of their sound; or like George later, when
he suddenly lowers his tone and says to Fanny: ‘Oh look here, don’t
do that. Mother mustn’t do that’. Notice how, for Isabel, as soon as
her husband dramatically appears, throwing light from his
doorway, her voice changes tone to a louder, more public and polite
register: ‘Hello, dear. Have you had trouble sleeping?’ Although the
scene is mostly in direct sound, Welles has interpolated several
looped or dubbed lines: and they are usually at these points where
a voice changes its mode, up or down. And as well as the hushed,
private voice and the stiffer, more mannered public voice, there is
also the shouted voice, the ejaculation of abuse or exasperation -
and here words sometime break down altogether, like when Fanny
spreads out the words oh - good - gracious, or when she is
increasingly reduced to just an exasperated exclamation o f ‘Oh!’
The words in this scene are always animated by drives, impulses
- conscious, pre-conscious and unconscious. It is fascinating to
compare these words as coldly transcribed on a page to how they
are actually spoken by the actors in this wonderful Wellesian
ensemble. Even the simplest phrase or everyday utterance becomes
implicitly an entreaty, an interrogation, or a barbed assault. As in
the Polonsky film, the repetition of words has a crucial effect. But
repetition - in the form of mimicry - has a particularly cruel and
cutting edge in the psychodramatic dynamic here. This dialogue is
like an echo chamber in a theatre of cruelty - especially when
George and Fanny engage in a war of mimicking each others
words, accents, pitches, even each others laughter. And notice the
power of that vocal break when Fanny answers Georges mocking
Tor whom, Georgie’ with the suddenly low reply: ‘For M r Morgan
and his daughter.
Moorehead’s virtuosic performance in this scene (and in the film
as a whole) demands particular praise and attention. The sound of
Fanny’s voice is tensely twisted up by the emotions driving her. It
flies up hysterically in pitch, like when she ends a statement with
‘having to make a to-do about it5. It gets caught on words and
stutters: ‘He ... he, he never wants’. It breaks down the word-units
of sentences, as if in a desperate effort to force down their
underlying emotion: ‘Cant —people be - glad\ lTve —just — been —
 T h r e ad s of V oice 145

suggesting. And it stops dead in the middle of phrases, like when

she’s repeating Georges words, ‘w ouldn’t look —\ What Fanny plays
out or enacts in her voice is her wildly shifting and unstable relation
to the family members around her: there are moments when she is
talking to George as if she considers him a child (‘You just march
straight on into your room’), and others where she is pleading with
him, begging for complicity as an adult (‘because hes a widower’).
But none of these transferences or relations ever hold for her, or
work for her, for more than a few seconds —which is the sign her
character is on the way to a massive nervous breakdown.
We are deep in the forest of melodrama here — repressed
sexuality, family hell, sibling rivalry, murderous complexes, you
name it. But Welles also knew how to use voice-work for comic
effects, too. So, in the very last moments of this scene, one can
almost hear a homage to Ernst Lubitsch, a master of the comic and
ironic uses of sound. The three characters left in the scene produce,
in a rapid volley, three non-verbal sounds: Fanny at the end of her
tether exclaims ‘Oh!5, Jack grumbles wearily ‘Ohhh...’, and George
laughs triumphantly. They have each already made these sounds
earlier in the scene —so now they are like synoptic sounds, specific,
sharp sound effects that sum up those characters for us. And when
they produce their identifying sounds in such a lightning
succession, the scene becomes, for a split second, a kind of cartoon.

CALLING ROSA MOLINE: BEYOND THE FOREST

A last detail. In Beyond the Forest (King Vidor, 1949), Bette
Davis plays a modern Madame Bovary character, named Rosa
Moline full of dreams and desires. At one point she leaves her
dumpy, small hometown, for the sake of a handsome lover in the
big city. And there’s a scene - just a detail, a moment in a scene -
where Bette/Rosa sits there in a cafe, daydreaming. Since she’s in
the city of her dreams - Chicago —the score plays an exaggeratedly
romantic rendition of the tune Chicago, Chicago. In voice-over
Rosa thinks to herself: ‘He’s got to see me. I’m sick of life pushing
me around. I’m not just a small town girl, I’m Rosa Moline’. Then
we hear some other, unfamiliar voice which murmurs dreamily, as
if to echo her: ‘Rosa Moline’. Then Rosa, stoked, thinks to herself
146 CINESONIC: The W o rld of Sou nd in Film

again: ‘I’m Rosa Moline’. Then that other strange voice returns, but
now tinnily and harshly, as a real, off-screen sound. It drawls:
‘Calling Rosa Moline’. The music quickly builds and abruptly halts
as Rosa shakes herself out of her trance. And then she says to the
first person she can find in this cafe: ‘Someone’s calling my name.
What do they want?’
O f course, it’s just a call to come to a telephone. But how
wonderful it is that, in that moment of Rosa being so lost and
misplaced, she can no longer tell the difference between her own
inner voice and a strangers voice-off — no longer distinguish
between interior and exterior worlds, fantasy and reality, between
objective perception and subjective hallucination. And its even
more wonderful that for a moment, Vidors film, lending its music
and its mixing and its mise en scène to the cause, can join in with
this delirium of voice —and can take us into that delirium, as well.

References
Bouché, Claudine, et al, 1999, 'Montage, notre beau souci', Cahiers du
Cinéma, numéro hors-série.
Britton, Andrew, 1992, 'Betrayed by Rita Hayworth: Misogyny in The Lady
From Shanghai', in The Movie Book of Film Noir, ed Ian Cameron, Studio
Vista, London.
Daney, Serge, 1991, 'Journal de l'an passé', Trafic 1, Winter.
Sarris, Andrew, 1972, Interviews wiih Film Directors, Avon, New York.
Thompson, Kristin, 1988, Breaking ihe Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film
Analysis, Princeton University Press, New Jersey.
Welles, Orson and Bogdanovich, 1993, Peter, This is Orson Welles,
HarperCollins, London.
Note: A longer version of this text, with additional analyses, will appear
in Adrian Martins book The Artificial Night: Essays in Film Theory,
Culture and Analysis (forthcoming).
PART THREE:
DAVID SANJEK

MR CRUMB GOES ABROAD

To the gifted American cartoon artist and curmudgeon Robert
Crumb, the modern world is a ‘confusing and frightening place’
and no more so than in the domain of popular music (Groth,
p i02). Few material things pacify Crumb’s dyspepsia except
music, and particularly that recorded at the virtual dawn of the
history of the commercial music business. Crumb has drawn from
the blues, country and jazz repertoire of the 1920s and early
thirties as a member of the the musical group Cheap Suit
Serenaders; designed several sets of trading cards that feature
important performers from the period; and collected a sizable
150 CINESONIC : The W o r l d of Sound in Film

body of 78s recorded during this era. At the same time, he

bemoans a contemporary environment suffused with schlock,
devoid of interest in or awareness of the musical and cultural
traditions he venerates. In a spirited and dyspeptic story - ‘Where
Has It Gone, All The Beautiful Music O f Our Grandparents?’ -
Crumb blasts the contemporary mediation of individual
expression by the culture industry with a vitriol that would make
Theodor Adorno smile, and presents a notion of history that bears
more than a passing resemblance to some of the pronouncements
issued in Jacques Attalis celebrated volume Noise (Crumb, 1992).
For Crumb, the improvisatory quality of vernacular expression is
permeated by a dismissal of convention or class distinction. He
conceives music-making to have once been a spontaneous
expression of peoples daily life unencumbered by worries over
video rights or merchandising clout, things like that1 (Groth,
1988, p i02). By contrast, the effortless absorption on the part of
his contemporaries of culture created by others, not by themselves,
as a surrogate expression of their individual circumstances fills him
with rage and remorse. The only solace for his anger is by evoking
a familiar form of nostalgia that valorizes the aura of certain
recordings of vernacular performances of the past.1
During Terry Zwigoff s compelling and often downright creepy
1994 documentary on Crumb and his dysfunctional duo of
antisocial siblings, the artists affection for that acoustic heritage
comes across with a fascinating poignancy. Near the conclusion of
the film, he lovingly, yet with a pronounced streak of monomania,
packs his treasured 78s for shipping to the family’s new home in
France. In this passage, the artist plays a valedictory piano solo for
the loss of his homeland as a series of drawings entitled ‘A Short
History of America’ is animated. The drawings embody a
devolutionary notion of the transformation of the national
landscape, its erosion from a pastoral Eden to the pervasive present
day anonymity of strip malls and fast food franchises. When the
movers arrive to transport the family’s belongings, Crumb kvetches
out loud that this ‘bunch of football jocks’ will more than likely fail
to share his appetite for the antiquarian and do damage to his
collection of 78s. Despite his earlier assertion that ‘When I listen to
old music, that’s one of the few times I have a kind of love of
 Reelin' in The Years: Cinematic Documentation of Amercian Vernacular Music 151

humanity’, Crumb’s affection for his fellow man clearly does not
extend to those who might abuse his acoustic archive.
One is tempted to dismiss the artists more or less impotent rage
against the onslaught of time, and the working class, as the
contemporary equivalent of what was once known in the jazz
community as a moldy fig’: an individual who validates the music
of the past over the present as a matter of principle. However,
Crumb’s debatable castigation of the present day possesses any
number of analogies. All about us, instances of what Dean
MacConnell calls ‘collectomania’ abound and result in a kind of
staged authenticity’ whereby we imply that ‘tradition does not
control us, but we control it’ (1992, p27, pp298-99). In the case of
American vernacular music, the development of CD technology
and the desire of entertainment conglomerates to package and
promote their back catalog as a commodity bearing the highest
level of cultural capital has led to a virtual frenzy of exhumation.
Take, for example, the Anthology of American Music, originally
assembled by that perverse polymath Harry Smith - filmmaker,
painter, con-artist and seer - in 1952 and repackaged by
Smithsonian Folkways in early 1998. The collection incorporates
84 performances originally transcribed between 1926 and 1933 at
a time when regional distinctions had yet to be ground down by
mass media into a cornmeal consistency and were infused with
accents and expressions rich and strange to the average ear. What
began as one mans erudite and innovative juxtaposition of sounds
that struck his fancy now possesses a panoply of ancillary data:
textural exegesis, discographic aides, and an enhanced CD bearing
multimedia hypertext. Geoffrey O ’Brien observes that such box
sets are our moment’s equivalent of the medieval illuminated
manuscript. It is not enough to have learned how to capture sound;
there must be an appropriate monument to enclose it and keep it
from escaping, to stabilize what would otherwise remain a drifting
accumulation of sound effects’ (1998, p46). The Anthology of
American Music was in its day, and for several decades to follow, an
initiatory document of the diversity of American musical styles and
a foundational apparatus for the contemporary folk revival. Now, it
comes across as the acoustic equivalent of a coffee table book: an
artifact, I imagine, more admired than played.2
152 CIN ESONIC: The W orld of Sound in Film

Instances of ‘collectomania’ can also occur when life is breathed

back into a body of traditional material, as, for example, the 1996
tribute compilation of Jimmie Rodgers songs orchestrated by Bob
Dylan. While the manner with which the works are performed
bears the stamp of the present day, the aim behind the enterprise,
for Dylan at least, was retrograde in the extreme. A cultural
Jeremiah, he wished to jolt the public out of what he conceives of
as their affective torpor and reconnect them with an abandoned
body of primordial virtues. In his notes, the singer writes:
[Rodgers’] message is all between the lines and he delivers it like
nectar that can drill through steel. He gets somehow into the
mystery of life and death without saying too much, has some
kind of uncanny ability to translate it - he’s like the smell of
flowers ... We point you back there so you can feel it for yourself
and see how far off the path weve come (1997).
The evangelical tone of Dylan’s comments leads me to believe
he has not entirely put behind him his flirtation with
fundamentalism during the 1980s, but he is far from alone in
asserting that contemporary society has abrogated some preexistent
covenant with convention. As we approach the millennium,
numerous voices from a variety of ideological camps deliver dire,
albeit often unexamined warnings that the social contract has
irreparably frayed and our cultural record grown tawdry and trivial.
The award-winning and best-selling American historical novelist
Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain, referred to Dylans
comments in a Newsweek interview and added:
I’m not sure we were ever on the path, that we re not always
floundering off somewhere in the underbrush. But we have
this desire to look back and think that we were closer to it
than we are now. How did we get where we are? A way to
answer that question is to see where we’ve been (Jones, 1998,
pp62-65).
Last, I would point to the virtual cascade of examples of
recorded blues now available, from the most routine to the most
 Reelin' in The Years: Cinematic Documentation of Amercian Vernacular Music

recondite. Where once aficionados had to wander rundown

neighbourhoods in search of 78s for sale, now one can encounter
those fleeting performances with the static of time digitally erased
from some of our earliest instances of analog technology. The
involvement called for by the acquisition of this cultural knowledge
is no longer physical - the legwork and perseverance required —but
now wholly economic - a trip to ones local record outlet.
Furthermore, those remaining blues performers who practice time-
bound musical practices no longer have to be tracked down in rural
juke joints or inner city bars. Amongst others, the Oxford-
Mississippi-based Fat Possum label has rounded up a number of
these aging musicians and brought them to the general public
about the world. A noteworthy platform in that extensive itinerary
is the ‘House O f Blues’ restaurant/club chain founded by Isaac
Tigret, who recently purchased and put on display the birthplace of
guitarist Muddy Waters (Farley, 1998, pp60-62). Only time will
tell whether such new-found convenience will breed neither
familiarity nor contempt so much as complaisance.
Clearly, our access to certain forms of recorded and performed
sound has been radically transformed through the interaction of
mass marketing, the availability of archival material, dubious
assumptions about cultural devolution and a demonstrable interest
on the part of a significant body of the general public in the
acoustic documentation of the past. My interest in these
phenomena and their relationship to our meeting today is two­
fold. First, I wish to question and critique the actions of those
individuals who produce and promote these products as engaging
in what David Whisnant calls systematic cultural intervention: the
process whereby ‘someone (or some institution) consciously and
programmatically takes action within a culture with the intent of
affecting it in some specific way that the intervenor thinks
desirable’ (1983, p i3). This requires that we move beyond a knee-
jerk accusation of cultural appropriation and determine on an
individual basis how the meaning and use of these artifacts has
been normalized and legitimized by their importation into a
foreign environment.
My second, and more important, concern is the lack of effort or
risk involved in many of these relatively sanitized exhumations of
CIN ES0N1C: The World of Sound in Film

the past. The British writer Iain Sinclair observes, ‘Furious

displacements of energy are capable of damaging the membrane of
what we call “the past”. The past is an optional landscape. We ate
gifted with unearned memories, memories over which we have no
moral purchase’. (1997, p2l4) Few of us possess or would choose
to exercise the kind of powers of discrimination and skill at
juxtaposition that led Harry Smith to construct the Anthology of
American Music. Moreover, even fewer of us retain an attraction to
the inherent strangeness or flat-out weirdness of much of the
material Smith, and others, have excavated. Little about the
material recorded before the emergence of the mass media and
corporate synergy reaches the ear without effort. Geoffrey O ’Brien
reminds us, ‘The soothing and hypnotic aural environment to
which latter-day pop music has accustomed us makes this music
exotic: it feels like a music in which the world cannot be escaped
...this music is about being awake. It is always at peak; it refuses to
become subconversational pulse or trickling background rivulet3
(1998, p45). One must not so much de- as re-familiarize oneself
with the sounds of a prior age and time, which the transformation
of taste and the development of new recording and performing
conventions have made foreign and unfamiliar.
The cinematic documentation of vernacular musical traditions
exhibits a comparable set of dilemmas. Like the repackaging of
recordings, these films all too often fail to nudge us out of knee-jerk
assumptions about the past or engage in time-worn images that
merely replay customary views of musical experience. The foreign
becomes the familiar; the unexpected the customary. If many films
on vernacular music are constructed in the form of journeys or
travelogues, then their destinations seem pre-determined, their
itineraries formulaic. Dean MacCannell argues that an innovative
perspective on the quest for our cultural ‘roots’ is engaged upon by
those who leave home not knowing where they will end up, never
knowing whether their eventual end will connect meaningfully
with their origins, knowing only that their future will be made of
dialogue with their fellow travelers and those they meet along the
way (1992, p4). That expedition is not undertaken without a
variety of baggage, crucial amongst which in films about music are
the listening competencies both filmmakers and audiences have
 Reelin' in The Years: Cinematic Documentation of Amercian Vernacular Music

accumulated over their lifetimes. Anahid Kassabian reminds us of

‘the possibility that a film-goer has a prior relationship with music
of the genre she/he is hearing ...Insofar as, within this genre,
specific types of music have specific meanings, she/he may derive
pleasure from an instance of film music because it has an
accumulation of meanings from previous film experiences' (1993,
pp61-62). Those competencies direct and reinforce what we choose
to see and hear. However, to my mind, most modern audiences
more than likely find the visual documentation of American
vernacular music as foreign and unfamiliar as their acoustic
acquaintance with it.
What I wish to examine in the remainder of my comments is
how the potentially shop-worn quality of our knowledge about
American vernacular music and, in most cases, limited competency
with its recorded history collide with the narrative trajectories of
individual filmmakers. I will focus on three issues in this context:
how place is defined and depicted; how commerce is theorized; and
whether any of these films permit an arguably utopian possibility
for the unification of consumption with personal experience and
individual agency. As in the case of the use of underscoring in a
narrative film, I want to inquire whether, to use Michel Chion’s
vocabulary, there exists a demonstrable level of ‘synchresis’ in these
works or discover that, like too many documentary reissue
recordings, we are only reelin’ in the years to exhume the deceased
(1994, P58).

LOST SNTHE KUDZU AT DOCKERY FARMS

The identification of particular forms of music with specific
places collides with the fact that many if not most of the
noteworthy physical landmarks in American music no longer exist
or, even if they do, lack either their former appearance or
institutional significance. For example, in the case of New York
City, the few remnants of Tin Pan Alley long ago met with the
onslaught of urban renovation; virtually all of 42nd Street and the
surrounding environs of Times Square likewise have fallen to the
wrecking ball of civic reconstruction. Harlem’s 125 th Street and the
Lower East Side succumb to alternating cycles of decay and
156 CIN ESO N iC: Th e W o rld of Sou nd in Film

gentrification. A body of offices once identified with a distinct

body of popular song, the Brill Building, is at present but one of
countless office towers. In other cities and parts of the country, a
similar pattern of erasure and reconstruction continues apace, prey
to the velocity of industrial capitalism and the short-term attention
spans of the general public. ‘The impulse to speed is at the heart of
post-war pop’, Jon Savage reminds us; ‘the impulse to up the ante,
to go faster than anyone else, is inherent in the twinning of
technology and the adolescent psyche that occurs in Western
consumerism’ (1997, p6). The very basis of pop music, he adds, is
that ‘it provides a refuge from chronology >permitting us to live in
the moment and suspend the ravages of decay if only through sheer
sleight of hand (p8).
At the same time, however unfixed or geographically unhinged
much popular music appears to be, a number of scholars have paid
a considerable amount of attention to local environments or
‘scenes’. The latter term has a vernacular meaning for music
business professionals, connotating the hot new venue or genre ripe
for exploitation, while scholars use the term, as Sarah Cohen states,
‘to define a particular methodological orientation, and a particular
relationship between the spatial, the social, and the conceptual'
(1995, p61). Cohen, and others, dissect how music acts as a
binding agent in that relationship, specifically the degree to which
it creates ‘webs of significance woven through sound in the
classification of spaces, places, and peoples (p64). Those identities
and communities of interest can exist across fixed boundaries of
place, race, age, class, gender, ethnicity, or kinship, but nonetheless,
they achieve a commonality through consumption and creation of
a particular form of music. For example, by virtue of the
proliferation of the marketing category ‘w orld music’ or, as Tim
Taylor calls it global pop\ citizens of individual nation states are
affectively able to affiliate with other nation states in a unique form
of imagined community brought about by the common acquisition
of and appreciation for a particular form of music (1997). Despite
all the resulting commingling of disparate cultures and identities,
the digitalization of music may in the end arguably erode if not
altogether efface geographical borders and unique markers of place
as a result of the desire of transnational capital to appeal to diverse
 Reelin' in The Years: Cinematic Documentation of Amercian Vernacular Music

consumers as one uniform market of interchangeable individuals.

Therefore, Cohen asserts, ‘Expressions of affinity and alliance
through music are not just about resemblance, inclusion and
interconnection; they also mark distinctions between us and them,
here and there, then and now’ (1995, p64). ‘Localities’ and scenes’
inescapably constitute contested, forever unstable terrain.
The scholarly investigation of ‘localities’ has fruitfully taken on
an ethnographic dimension in order to investigate how specific
individuals in defined spaces engage with music in order to
construct affective alliances. Mark Fenster persuasively argues that
‘The public spaces of music as conceived by the music industry do
not necessarily correspond to the lived geography of musical
practice5 (1995, p86). Therefore, we must enter the homes, public
places, and performance sites where those alliances are constructed.
One of the most influential studies in this field remains Ruth
Finnegans The Hidden Musicians. Music-Making In An English
Town> an examination of ‘The social contexts and processes of
artistic activity and human relationships5 through the lens of
Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England. Finnegan’s detailed
investigation of the lives of non-professional musicians living in a
specific place enables her to critique a number of propositions
about music and ‘localities5, principal amongst them the influential
mass culture’ view epitomized by Adorno and Horkheimer that the
culture industry lulls a passive public into stupefaction and denies
them the opportunity, or even the desire, to create their own
culture. By ‘looking at practice rather than formalized texts or
mental structures, at processes rather than products, at informal
grass-roots activities rather than formal structure’, Finnegan
reinforces that individuals create themselves as they create or
consume music (1989, p8). In his equally insightful examination of
the professional folk scene in England, Niall McKinnon reinforces
the need for ‘the interpretation of musical performance as social
action, a shift of focus away from understanding music as sound
towards thinking of it as behavior5 (pi).
Much of the cinematic documentation of that manner of
cultural behavior to which I want to focus attention deliberately
endeavors to slow down or sidestep altogether the velocity of media
consumption and engage in dialogue with a body of individuals
158 CIN ESONIC: The W orld of Sound in Film

and the environment they inhabit. The acoustic foreignness of

which I spoke earlier here has its audiovisual analogy. Places,
activities, sounds, and faces are brought to audiences divorced by
time, geography, class, and race from their points of origin.
Obviously, the urge to engage in objectification under such
circumstances is strong, but by and large, the ethnographic
motivation of these films predominates. For the most part, they
eschew excessive editorial manipulation of either image or sound.
As a consequence, tableaux, travelogue, and portraiture abound, as
if the excessive hand of extradiegetic sound or authorial
commentary would contaminate the endeavor. At best, we are
brought into a novel environment or one made familiar by
ideological or journalistic shorthand. At worst, we feel driven by
the tourists impulse that allows us to deny the part we play in
profit and exploitation yet congratulate ourselves for the false belief
that we are permitted access to a human resource that can be
possessed, albeit temporarily, without being somehow diminished.
On more than one occasion, Dean MacCannell reminds us, ‘the
image we have constructed of ‘tradition enables modernized
peoples to think of themselves as Victims’ of their own
heterogeneity, while patting themselves on the back for their
technological creativity5 (1992, p293).
In the process, too many music documentaries are records o f5
rather than records about’ their chosen subject, whereas we ideally
wish to encounter works that amalgamate a record tf/and a discourse
about (Taylor, 1996, p83). This is particularly the case when the
subject at hand is one of those ‘spaces of memory’ —what Pierre
Nora calls lieux de memoire — that exist in the form of physical
locations which our various and elaborate prostheses of recollection
allow us once again to revivify (1989, p28). In the case of American
vernacular music, those spaces typically are points of origin,
locations in which either individuals began, in some cases ended,
their careers or a body of musical practice took hold. One such
space is the plantation, Dockery Farms, in the Mississippi Delta.
Here, Charlie Patton, one of the primordial figures of the blues,
lived his adult life and created his corpus of material. The French
filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier and his collaborator the late
American filmmaker Robert Parrish incorporated this site in their
 Reelin' in The Years: Cinematic Documentation of Amercian Vernacular Music 159

1983 feature Mississippi Blues. It includes a passage in which the

present head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bill
Ferris, explains to Tavernier the historical significance of the site
and the people who lived there. What interests me in this sequence
is two-fold. First, despite the presence of outbuildings and
equipment, one does not have any confirmation that the plantation
still operates, that the process of human and ecological exploitation
continues into the present. It is nothing so much as a stage set for
antiquarian and academic recollection. The comment on Ferris’
part about the amelioration of racial tensions does little but call
even further attention to the continuity o f racism in the South and
throughout the nation. Second, and more important, the tracking
shot across the kudzu-covered pond fails to bring to consciousness
whatever about this place played a part in the creation of delta
blues, the aura that makes it a point of pilgrimage for authorities
and aficionados. Surely, both Tavernier and Parrish appear to wish
that the sequence and shot did so, but the plantation remains
opaque and undemonstrative. We are ourselves lost in the kudzu,
consumed by scenery at the expense of directed inquiry.
By contrast, the many works of Les Blank strikingly interfuse
the processes of creating a body of music and a discourse about that
activity. For more than thirty years he has created works about the
rural culture of the American South, most notably the area in and
about New Orleans and the African American inhabitants ofTexas,
as well as the Hawaiian islands and Appalachian mountains.
Endemic to all Blanks work is a simultaneous presence of joy and
loss. Few documentarians of American vernacular culture give one
such a vivid sense of the manner in which individuals augment
their lives through either the performance or consumption of
music. These are works that overflow with exuberance, that disdain
silence as much as their characters disdain the subordination of
their lives. As Pat Aufderhide observes, in Blank’s films we share a
glimpse of a world in which work and play still belong to the same
universe, and where play means more than distraction and escape’
(1979, pl4). This filmmaker spurns gloominess as vigilantly as his
subjects avoid a flat note. At the same time, Blank’s career operates
on the basis of a pronounced set of implicit assumptions regarding
the devolutionary qualities of contemporary culture and society.
160 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

While neither he nor his subjects overtly engage in any diatribes or

polemics about the evils of postmodernism, the films are suffused
with a respect for and validation of the continuity of time and
place, the passing along of knowledge from generation to
generation, and the virtues of inhabiting a world off the beaten
track. What prevents the possibility of the kind of claustrophobia
that often results from the veneration of established traditions is the
fact that Blank’s subjects are very much alive and active in their
worlds, not obsessed with or defined by the past.
In addition, a noteworthy quality of Blanks depiction of place
is the skilled manner with which his work illustrates Chion’s notion
of ‘synchresis. This occurs in those sequences where, through adept
editing practices, the filmmaker brings about analogies between the
rhythms in the music being examined, whether that material is
presented intra- or extradiegetically, and the rhythms of daily life.
Two passages drawn from Always For Pleasure (1978, set in New
Orleans) and Hot Pepper (1973, set in the black bayou of Southern
Louisiana) illustrate a world unified through the backbeat of
vernacular music, a body of behavior dancing to a common groove.
The opening to Always For Pleasure scores a montage of boat traffic
on the Mississippi, snatches of street festivals and random urban
highjinks to the 1958 Frankie Ford hit Sea Cruise, while Hot Pepper
concludes with a club performance by Clifton Chenier that
extradiegetically accompanies a sequence of images that appear as if
to dance to the rhythms of the performers accordion: young girls
skip along railroad tracks, a kite glides and weaves across the sky,
and a flock of pelicans appear to be possessed by a common
urgency. Such moments come close to confirming Richard Dyer’s
characterization of the film musical as a taste of utopia —what that
elusive environment would feel like rather than how it would be
organized’ (1981, p i 77).
If the kudzu of Dockery Farms obscures and envelops our
potential for either inhabiting the space of the delta or
comprehending how and why it helped bring about the blues,
Blanks interfusion of place and performance provides illustrations of
innovative ways to move beyond travelogue into thesis, all without
the intrusion of extradiegetic commentary. At the same time, it must
be admitted that, like all behaviorally-based treatments of
 Reelin' in The Years: Cinematic Documentation of Amercian Vernacular Music

environments, Blank’s films are selective. They may acknowledge

loss, the erosion of tradition, but they less often overtly encompass
the pain of accommodating oneself to a racist and capitalist society.
That is not to say that Blank is either an innocent or an idealist.
Instead, his subjects possess an admirable indomitability as evidenced
most strikingly by the 1970 portrait of the late Texas songster Mance
Lipscomb, A Well Spent Life, The musicians equanimity and wisdom
in the face of a lifetime of hard work and minimal rewards bear
testimony to both the transformative qualities of vernacular culture
and the endurance of the human spirit. He proves, as one of the
characters in Hot Pepper states, ‘Whatever you is, be that’.

PAYING THE COST TO PRAISE THE LORD

For the majority of audiences, gospel must be the most alien of
all forms o f vernacular American music. The genres presence on
the public airwaves is minimal to non-existent, and the fdms about
it are few in number. Other than music festivals, the only possible
means of acquaintance would be to attend an African American
church or to encounter an opportunity when a performer trained
in the sacred domain interrupts a secular performance to reinvoke
their ecclesiastical roots. Otherwise, even the sound of a gospel
quartet or choir evokes for most listeners the acoustic signature of
emotional religiosity, the expressive dimension o f sacred principles.
The formal traditions behind those practices remain alien or
unknown, let alone the tension between the sacred and the secular
spheres for those who participate in the gospel community. That
inalienable tension makes the genre a fascinating illustration of
how documentaries of American vernacular music treat the
economic superstructure within which musical culture exists.
Money and worldly goals or power purportedly lack a place in the
genre, but their presence is unmistakable, most particularly when
they are mentioned indirectly or not at all.
By and large, the depiction of the music industry in most
documentaries about any form of popular music oscillates between
the adulatory and the antagonistic. The former can be illustrated by
Robert Mugge’s fdm Pride And foy (1992) on the Chicago-based
blues label, Alligator Records. Label owner Bruce Iglauer,
162 CINESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

dominates the narrative; its history remains his and his alone to tell.
Artists are not participating voices until midway through the
feature, and none of them contradicts the story Iglauer tells. The
latter point of view comes across in many of the more widely
viewed multi-part histories, such as that recently produced by the
combined forces of Bostons WGBH and the BBC. Here, the forces
of multi-national gigantism are pitted against the individualistic
entrepreneurial energies of small label owners and alienated artists.
The British commentator Sarah Thornton astutely refers to this
knee-jerk dismissal of professional bodies of power as the ‘chimera
of a negative mainstream’ (1996, p93). Positing such a metaphor
permits consumers and producers of music to construct a yardstick
by which they can dismiss that which they defile.
While commercial recordings of gospel music date back to the
turn of the century and even include a significant number of
sermons by prominent evangelists, the industrial dimension of the
enterprise remains a matter of inference. Mammon and the Lord
inhabit not only separate domains but separate spheres of existence.
A fascinating illustration of the implications of this virtual erasure
of the material foundation of gospel music, particularly as concerns
the gender dynamics of the form, can be seen in George T
Nierenbergs Say Amen Somebody (1982). It chronicles the career of
the most prominent composer in the genre, Thomas A Dorsey, and
two of his principal female associates, Sallie Martin and Mother
Willie Mae Ford Smith. Dorsey began his career in the secular
world as a piano accompanist to the singer Ma Rainey and later as
the writer of some of the most successful risqué ‘hokum’ blues,
most notably Tampa Red’s Tight Like That (1929). He made the
conversion, both musically and personally, to the sacred sphere in
the early 1930s and wrote his most famous and successful
composition, Precious Lord, following the simultaneous death of his
wife and child. Over a lifetime that spanned nine decades, Dorsey
wrote thousands of songs, integrated a blues-infused form of gospel
music into the mainstream black church and established an annual
gospel choir convention during which he promoted his own
material (Harris, 1992).
Nierenbergs film depicts that annual convention as a wholly
sacred event. During an elaborate montage, the room is consecrated.
 Reelin' in The Years: Clnemalic Documentation of Amercian Vernacular Music 163

White covers are laid over the furniture, and the mood is one of
pious reverence. No mention is made of the commercial origin of
much of the music that will be performed nor of the fact that the
event itself will serve, in part, as a marketing venue. This conforms
with the failure of Nierenberg’s film to root the spiritual atmosphere
of the gospel community in the sphere of material circumstances.
However, one scene does illustrate the manner in which gospel
music was both a calling and a commercial enterprise. It depicts a
strained exchange between Dorsey and his former associate Sallie
Martin. Dorsey introduces their encounter by stating, 1 was doing
all right for myself. Then the voice of God said you need to change
a little’. That transformation came in the person of Sallie Martin,
who not only acted as his musical amanuensis, singing his
compositions to potential customers, but also treated his spiritual
enterprise as a business proposition. As Ms Martin curtly and
somewhat disdainfully asserts, ‘Professor Dorsey had something but
he didn’t know what to do with it ...He had the money and I had
the singin” . In ten years, she adds, she laid a firm foundation to his
business. The two harmonize as a recording of one of Dorseys song
is played, never looking one another in the eye as they sit side by
side. As the song ends, Dorsey states, 'Beautiful, my child’ to his
former partner; she bluntly responds, £Yes, that’s all, too’.
When I first saw this sequence, it struck me as little more than
a comic altercation between two senior citizens, the ragged end of
a debate begun years before. At the time, I was unaware of Sallie
Martins role in Dorseys business enterprises nor of the career she
established on her own when she left Dorseys employ in 1939,
founded Martin and Morris Music Inc a year later and went on to
become one of the most successful black women in the music
industry over the course of the next four decades, finally selling her
publishing interests to her partner, Kenneth Morris, in 1978
(Boyer, 1995; Reagan, 1992). Erasing her achievement and
reducing her more or less to a bickering termagant evaporates the
discussion of the business of gospel music and smoothes over the
risks Dorsey had to take, and those he avoided taking, in order to
prosper in the music industry. It also undermines the role of gender
in the film as it fails to indicate that Dorsey and Martin were on an
equal business footing.
16 4 CINESONfC: The W orld of Sound in Film

The other women featured in Say Amen Somebody are singers,

shown time and again to be ensnared in gendered definitions of
their craft and their calling. In particular, Mother Willie Mae
Smith’s even-tempered but emphatic debate with her grandson
about womens proper role in the church and the home not only
underscores the constraints within which individual agency exists
in a male-dominated environment but also reinforces that
Christian fundamentalism need not require all its adherents to
succumb to a narrow-minded point of view that predetermines
subordination. Calling attention to Sallie Martins career would
illustrate that not all women in the gospel community were
subordinate. Finally, clarifying the business practices of the
preceding generation would balance a discussion in the film by
younger artists of how preferable the past was for conducting one s
affairs. Such a temporally misguided perspective obscures the
reality of well entrenched commercial practices as well as the
obstacles put before Dorsey and others by the black church in order
to isolate and undermine the wordly influences his music brought
into the sacred sphere.

WILLIE MAE POWELL SMILES

The films I have addressed so far and the points of views their
creators adopt remain in some ways inescapably narrow and
unimaginative despite individual instances of insight. They
collectively demonstrate what one might call a reflectionistic
paradigm whereby music, and the cultural practices music
represents, amounts to no more than the sum total of those social,
economic, and ideological propositions that underpin its very
existence. Little attention is paid to the formal dimensions of music
texts for fear that the average viewer will allow their absence of
technical expertise to erode their interest in the subject at hand. O f
even greater concern is the fact that the power of human agency is
shown almost without exception to reside in the producers, not
audiences. This latter body of individuals is implied to be no more
than passive consumers of materials created by others whose role in
their lives is to ameliorate the weight of daily responsibilities.
Unconsciously, these films end up by inadvertently confirming the
 Reelin' in The Years: Cinematic Documentation of Amereian Vernacular Music 165

long-standing mass culture debate initiated by Adorno and others

that consumer culture can only confirm, never critique or even less
often contest; the constraints within which we are forced to live.
On the other hand, these films are not without their moments
of release and rapture that illustrate the potential for hope and the
fulfillment of desire. While vernacular musical culture cannot be
said to possess any explicit revolutionary potential, let alone
incorporate a sense that music even need concern itself with
anything broader than the momentary amelioration o f life’s
misfortunes, there does nonetheless exist a dimension to vernacular
music that illustrates a sense of what another way of life might
sound like. As Caryl Flinn argues in Strains of Utopia, ‘Music
extends an impression of perfection and integrity in an otherwise
imperfect, unintegrated world’ (1994, p9). Perhaps to ask the
question whether music can be explicitly transformative amounts
to a blind alley. We might be wiser and more productive, as Flinn
believes, to imagine how music might bring about a greater degree
of affect on the part of its listeners. Individual compositions can be
argued, Flinn believes, to ‘raise the possibility of change, returning
to representation, discourse and perhaps even social action the
fantasies and hopes that were prompted by these circumstances in
the first place’, (p i54) Much of the scholarship about music has
concerned itself with such a process of transformation through the
act of consumption, but too often the focus of that analysis has
been on the artifact, not the audience; how the individual
commodity can be modified to bring about a desired result through
some manner of modification or rearticulation. Less often does one
find a comparable degree o f attention paid to the transformation of
affect that Flinn discusses.
The last excerpt I want to examine concerns itself with just this
subject: the infusion through musical means o f a sense that life
might be broader and more inclusive than habit and circumstances
lead us to assume. It comes from Chris Burns’ BBC film The Search
For Robert Johnson (1992) wherein John Hammond, the son of the
famous record executive and a proficient participant in the blues
revival of the 1960s, takes to the roads of the Southern delta to
investigate the elusive history of the most highly regarded
performer in the blues genre. Part of the fascination about Robert
166 C1NES0N1C: The World of Sound in Film

Johnson results from the almost complete absence of information

about his life as well as the beguiling mythology attached to the
development, seemingly overnight, of his technical expertise - eg,
the purported transaction between the guitarist and the devil at a
nameless rural crossroads whereby Johnson sold his soul in
exchange for fame and fortune. Rather than rehashing these time­
worn assumptions, Burns’ documentary endeavors to give shape
and definition to a vaporous life by fixing the key places in
Johnsons short existence: where he played, whom he knew and
loved, how he died and where his body lies. More important, the
musicians compositions are shown to be not timeless expressions of
abstract themes but circumstantially driven responses to particular
events and specific individuals.
In a striking passage, we meet the woman to whom Johnson
addressed one o f his most famous compositions, Love In Vain —Mrs
Willie Mae Powell. Blues scholar Gayle Wardlow argues in the film
that Johnson created many of his songs with a specific audience in
mind: a particular woman he wished to seduce. Mrs Powell was one
of many who answered his call, although theirs was a warm, albeit
brief relationship of some six months. On another occasion, the
last performance of his life, Johnson’s roving eye led an anxious
husband to poison the bluesman. Some fifty years had passed since
Mrs Powell had last seen Johnson or heard him sing. Unfamiliar
with any of his recordings, she is played Love in Vain. One can only
imagine the range of emotions and memories that pervade her
consciousness as the song unfolds. She listens placidly until her
name is spoken. A smile crosses her face that might be said to erode
the passage of time. When asked if she loved the performer, she
answers, ‘I sure was. I was much in love with him’.
For me, this passage is one of the most telling in all
documentaries about American vernacular music. Its emotional
substance is self-evident but even more significantly it illustrates a
great deal about the process of consumption. Willie Mae Powell’s
smile unlocks the complex process of how an individual life is
transformed by the consumption of music. We see here something
other than a transaction defined wholly by market terms. A
commodity is shown to acquire a value that exceeds anything
measured by sales charts or mass sales. Obviously, I am loath to
 ---------1

Reelin' in The Years: Cinematic Documentation of Amercian Vernacular Music 167

generalize too much on the basis of her experience. Not only was
Mrs Powell’s relationship to Johnson unrepeatable but also out of
the ordinary. Establishing any general principle on the basis of her
case remains out of the question. At the same time, while any
inference of utopian fullness and integrity remains more a matter
of interpretation on my part than Mrs Powells experience, what
impresses me about the passage is that it gives a name, face, place
and time to a process more often than not addressed in the abstract.
Much that is consequential about the role of music in our lives
amounts to a significant degree to the unlocking of memories, the
coupling of a pattern of notes, words and rhythms with the fugitive
occasions and emotions of human existence. Most analysis of that
process, particularly that to be found in documentaries, addresses
it only in the mass, not in the individual case. We are informed
more about generations moved, not individual lives transformed.
For example, I can recall but one example, George Nierenbergs
That Rhythm Those Blues (1988), of a discussion about the
influence of popular music upon racial integration that
incorporates individual testimony from average people. As a result,
an abstract phrase like the affective economy of our lives or the
alliances established by means of that transaction pale before the
concrete evidence of Mrs Powells smile.
In conclusion, if music does possess the capacity to bring about
individual transformation, we witness that process given voice and
physical expression in The Search For Robert Johnson. For once,
vernacular American music is not merely exhumed but shown to
generate a more inclusive and expressive sense of the wholeness of
our lives. Such moments are few and far between. More often than
not, the documentation of American vernacular music seems
possessed by a relentless linearity, committed to narratives with a
predetermined end and little desire to engage in guesswork,
revisionism, or the pursuit of potentially rewarding blind alleys.
How often does a documentary film, as occurs in Peter Meyers
1997 work on Robert Johnson Cant You Hear The Wind Blow,
state an assertion and then completely deflate it. In this case, the
subject is Johnsons purported pact with the devil at a rural
crossroads. Meyer presents the myth in its entirety and then has
several of his respondents, contemporaries of the bluesman,
168 CINESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

deflate the story altogether. One wishes filmmakers were not so

driven by what film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum dubs “the
narrative conquistador of popular movies”: everything must be
used up by the end of the tale, with no messy remains’ (Martin,
1994, p89). The uniformity that results in a well-made but
unadventurous narrative would benefit from what the African
American filmmaker Arthur Jafa calls polyventiality: the pursuit
of multiple tones, multiple rhythms, multiple perspectives,
multiple meanings, multiplicity’ (Dent, 1992, p253). Jafa inquires
what the life of Litde Richard might be like if it were told by the
late Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. How indeed. If these
final comments might seem to reinforce Robert Crumbs dyspeptic
response to the contemporary world, such should not be the case.
Instead, we ought to be encouraged by the work of these
filmmakers at their best, for these occasions encourage our sharing
the cartoonist s empathy for the mass of humanity.

Notes
1in the course of these comments, I have intentionally chosen to use the term
'vernacular' rather than the more conventional critical shorthand of 'roots'
music. That expression is laced for me with allusions to a kind of organicism
that assumes cultural activity bears a behavioral resemblance to a compost
pile and, furthermore, has become a marketing tool as against a definable
generic category. 'Vernacular' expression, by contrast, is fundamentally
connected to musical or, more broadly, cultural expression related to a
particular place, body of practitioners and audiences, and set of performance
traditions.
2 The enclosure of sound need not always be a stabilizing process. On
occasion, box sets of other forms of reissue possess liberating potential for
they can transform our notion of historical development and generic
transformation. The 1997 reissue by SONY of the recordings by Emmett Miller
provide us with acoustic ammunition to reinscribe the intermingling of African
American and other traditions. Miller, a white blackface performer, is best
known for his 1928 rendition of Lovesick Biues, to which Hank Williams paid
tribute and whose yodeling is a tribute to - some might say a copy of -
Miller's performance.

References
 Reelin’ in The Years: Cinematic Documentation of Amercian Vernacular Music

Elliott & Clark, Washington DC.

Chion, Michel, 1994, Audio-Vision. Sound On Screen, edited and translated
by Claudia Gorbman, Columbia University Press, New York.
Cohen, Sarah, 1995, 'Localizing Sound' in Popular Music: Style and Identify,
eds W Straw, S Johnson, R Sullivan and P Friealander, Centre For Research
On Canadian Cultural Studies, Montreal.
Crumb, Robert, 1992, Robert Crumb Draws The Blues, London, Knockabout
Comics, [orig pub Weirc/o No 14, 1984],
Dyer, Richard, 1981, 'Entertainment and Utopia', in Genre: The Musical, ed
R Altman, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.
Dylan, Bob, 1997, The Songs o f Jimmie Rodgers - A Tribute,
Egyptian/Columbia CK 67676.
Farley, Christopher John, 1998, 'Serving Up The Blues', Time, 1 July.
Fenster, Mark, 1995, 'Two Stories: W hat Exactly Is The Local?', in Popular
Music: Style and Identity, eds W Straw, S Johnson, R Sullivan and P
Friedlander, Centre For Research On Canadian Cultural Studies, Montreal.
Finnegan, Ruth, 1989, The Hidden Musicians. Music-Making In An English
Town, Cambridge University Press, New York.
Flinn, Caryl, 1994, Strains O f Utopia: Nostalgia, Gender and Hollywood
Film Music, Princeton University Press, Princeton.
Groth, Gary, 1988, 'The Straight Dope From R Crumb', The Comics Journal,
No 121, April.
Harris, Michael W , 1992, The Rise O f Gospel Blues: The Music O f Thomas
Andrew Dorsey In The Urban Church, Oxford University Press, New York.
Jafa, Arthur, 1992, '19 69 ' in Black Popular Culture, ed Gina Dent, Bay
Press, Seattle.
Jones, Malcolm Jnr, 1998, 'The Pinnacle of Success', Newsweek, April 6.
Kassabian, Anahid, 1993, 'A Woman Scored: Feminist Theory And The
Popular Music Soundtrack', Studies In Symbolic Interaction 15.
MacCanneil, Dean, 1992, Empty Meeting Grounds. The Tourist Papers,
Routledge, New York.
MacKinnon, Niall, 1993, The British Folk Scene. Musical Performance and
Social Identity, Open University Press, Bristol, Pa.
Martin, Adrian, 1994, Phantasms, McPhee Gribble, Ringwood, Australia.
Nora, Pierre, 1989, 'Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire',
Representations 26.
O'Brien, Geoffrey, 1998, 'Recapturing The American Sound', N ew York
Review o f Books, 9 April.
Reagan, Bernice, 1992, Johnson, ed, W e'll Understand It Better By And By:
Pioneering African American Gospel Composers, Smithsonian Institution Press,
Washington, DC.
CINESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

Savage, jon, 1997, Time Travel. Trom The Sex Pistols To Nirvana: Popular
Music, M edia and Sexuality 19/7-96, Vintage, London.
Sinclair, lain, 1997, Lights Out For The Territory. 9 Excursions In The Secret
History O f London, Granta Press, London.
Taylor, Lucien, 1996, 'Iconophobia', Transition No 69, Spring.
Taylor, Tim, 1997, Global Pop. W orld Music, W orld Markets, Routledge,
New York.
Thornton, Sarah, 1996, Club Cultures: Music, M edia and Subcultural
Capital, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Ct.
Whisnant, David, 1983, All That 1$ Native And Fine. The Politics O f Culture
In An American Region, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill,
N Carolina.
CARYL FLINN

In a talk given in 1995, well after Fassbinders death, Peer ~|

Raben, his collaborator and composer, argued that film music
jshould function,as a series of ‘shocks . The aim of Musik-ShocFfoF
him was ‘to support something that isn’t yet in~tH<f innigeTTiof hi
the mind either, that isn’t yet true (1984, p i 27). Raben’s ideas and
terminology here lend themselves easily to European modernism’s
interest in blazing open new forms of perception: Russian
formalism’s defamiliarization, Brechts verfremdungseffekt or
Pound’s imperative to ‘make it new’. -1
Such connections to modernist aesthetics are not incidental for
people of the New German Cinema such as Raben and Fassbinder.
Although the movements investment in the war and postwar
periods, of mourningwork’ and of ‘working through the past’ has
been endlessly documented, the movement was equally marked by
the interiuar period during which European modernism flourished.
As Alexander Kluge has said, ‘I wouldn’t be making films if it
 172 CIN ESONIC: The W orld of Sound In Film

weren’t for the cinema of the 1920s, the silent era. Since I have
been making films it has been in reference to this classical tradition
(1981/2, p206). Modernism’s influence is upheld in Kluge’s raids
of earlier texts and techniques; the quasi-typage of Fassbinder’s
characters; the extreme anti-illusionism of Schroeter, Ottinger and
Syberberg. There are the New German Cinemas remakes (Mother
Kuster Goes to Heaven [1975], Nosferatu [1979], Fassbinders
brilliant adaptation of Doblins 1929 Berlin Alexanderplatz [1980]),
its re-workings of period icons {Anita: Dances of Vice [1987], Lola
[1981]); the deference to authenticating forbears (eg, Eisner for
Herzog; Vertor and Eisenstein for Kluge).
While these references reveal the extensive reflexivity that
characterized much of the New German CInema - and indeed
other postwar European modernist film - I will be exploring here
^ the way that Raben’s notion of Musik-Shock - which describes
equally the highly composite, manipulated soundtracks of Kluge s
films (with virtually no original music) - is indebted to earlier
notions of shock. At the same time, it reworks them, filtering
modernist conceits through a series of distorting mirrors and
amplifiers tied to the shocks of war.
The concept of ‘shock’ Virtually saturates European modernist
^ discourse until the end of the interwar period. Moral shock of taste
played a significant part (Tzara, Duchamp), but shock’s brute
physicality, its material, often somatic effects provided an especially
t V 0' " key trope of modernists, from Eisenstein, who wanted to wire his
viewers to their seats (in order to reach the fifth level nirvana of
^ oi v i - intellectual montage), to Marinettis enthusiasm for death drives in
sexualized cars. Peer Raben seems to uphold this tradition by
advocating a provocative use of music that jolts the film-goer:
‘When you watch a film’, he said, ‘there’s a riot [going on] in your
brain that’s not just psychological but physical’.
Modernist shock was often aligned with technology itself, be it
through Hoffman and Freud’s uncanny, mechanical dolls,
futurism’s delight in war’s destructive machines or Benjamins
guarded hope that film would habituate consumers to the shocks’
of modernity. The intense materiality of shock, whether from
leftists like Eisenstein and Benjamin or protofascists like Marinetti
was crucial for its ability to impart new worlds, and participated in
 The Legacy of Modernism: Peer Raben, Film Music and Political After Shock

what Tom Levin has called a larger rhetoric of violence and nihilism
of political modernism. To consider only cinematic examples, there
is the vocabulary of attractions, conflict, collision, physical
sensation, the sensory stimuli of both fairground and city, the jolts
o F industrialization, modernization. (Non cinematic examples
include the ‘blasts’ of vorticism, Jliiiger’s Man o f Steel, et al.)
It would be a commonplace to note that, even by omission,
shock was most routinely linked to vision, availing potentially
radicalized ways of seeing for cultural workers as diverse as
Kracauer, Heartfield or Breton. Even Ernst Bloch, the
unconventional marxist whose analysis of music’s utopian function
is well known, maintained that Visual montage [would be] an
appropriate vehicle for representing utopianism since its
juxtaposition of fragments allows for a blossoming of allegory -
providing multiple jumping off points in the present from which
to imagine a better future’ (in Lavin, 1992).
Matthew Teitelbaum’s preface to a recent book on montage and
modernity describes montage similarly, arguing that forms such as
‘the multiply collapsing views of cubist art ...suggest a something
not yet seen [or even see-able]’ (1992, p8). How far is this remark
from Rabens assertion that musical practice can reveal that which
is not yet true’?
Thus it would be an error to dissociate modernist shocks and
their supporting techniques such as montage from new ways of
hearing’ (Hanns Eisler himself advocated choral montage’ [1978,
p59]). Further evidence exists in Eisler s enthusiasm for having
composed ‘blast furnace music’ for a Soviet film (1978, p59);
Stravinsky’s remark that music functions best when running like a
sewing machine (in Eisler, 1978, p49), and the rhythmic fusion of
cinema, trains, and music in Honegger/Mitry’s somewhat later
Pacific 231 (1949). Even Schoenberg once wrote that he hoped his
music stimulates the brain or spinal cord ...in its full severity’
(1975, p!38). There were reasons why film music seemed
jjarticularly suited to the task of the technology of shock and
dehabitualized perception. As Eisler put it,

...by virtue of its character of immediacy - and music still

possesses this character to a greater extent than any other art
■
‘v ■ 174 CIN ESONIC: The W orld of Sound In Film

- it should stress the mediated and alienated elements in the

photographed action and the recorded words, thus preventing
confusion between reality and reproduction, a confusion that
is all the more dangerous because the reproduction appears to
be more similar to reality than it ever was (1947, pl23).

To change reality, defamiliarise it, to present the not yet

hearable’, this is a notion often yoked to social and political change.
Although Hanns Eisler, to whom we will return momentarily,
offers the most fully articulated example of this, others of the time
were very much involved in changing musical form and function.
til In musicologyCjmiodernism’ i$ generally used to describe atonal
experimentation of the 1910s. But since musics rejection of
expressionism and romanticism and its interactions with modernity
continued well beyond this period, I am using it to describe activity
in Weimar Germany and Europe o f the 1920s. Neoclassicism offers
the clearest repudiation of romanticisms emphasis on emotionalism
and subjectivity, and other musical developments had intimate
connections with film culture: Honegger with Mitrys Pacific 231\
Hindemith’s 1921 score for Battling the Mountain and Eisler most
famously, with Kuhle Wampe (1932). Sergei Eisenstein’s famous
interaction with contemporary music culture is apparent in his
extraordinary collaboration with Prokofiev, in his levelling musics
value with that of other film elements, and in the allegories of his
own writing. Believing in the productive distance between ‘intervals’
he argued that, ‘There can be cases where the distance of separation
is so wide that it leads to a break - to a collapse of the homogeneous
concept of art’ (1988, p i 86). Equally interested in Russian musical
symbolism, Eisenstein wanted to blend cinematic ‘dominants’ and
‘overtones’ in ways inspired by Scriabins colorised’ chromaticism,
to produce what the director called unity through synthesis’.
Paul Hindemith, for his part, wrote that contemporary music
should be of ‘moral foundation’ (in Neumeyer, 1986, p i 4), a
remark in keeping with the neue sachlichkeit, the New Objectivity
movement that was tied to him and other composers as it was to
painters, cineastes and other German cultural producers of the
1920s. Though not a stylistically, or even ideologically, uniform
movement, neue sachlichkeit generally affirmed urban culture and
The Legacy of Modernism: Peer Raben, Film Music and Political After Shock

its technologies (think of Benjamin and Kracauer on film); indeed,

society itself was perceived as a city machine’ (Neumeyer, p 13). As
Eisler put it in 1928, ‘When you are composing and you open the
window, remember that the noise of the street is not mere noise,
but is made by humanity ...Choose texts and subjects that concern
as many people as possible’ (1978, p30). The movement militated
against the emotional subjectivity of expressionism, against its
obsession with psychic states outwardly expressed only to point
back to the ‘special’ individualism ‘inside’ the artist.
Along with neue sachlichkeit was gebrauchsmnsik, which aimed
to democratise music, to wrest it from the hands of elite specialists,
and compose it with real audiences in mind, and to widen that
audience through new technologies like the cinema, phonograph,
and radio. In order to close the breach between 'high’ art forms like
opera and concert music and light’ popular music, new forms and
modes of transmission emerged, like short operas, film scores and
radio music. Normally translated as ‘music for use’, gebrauchsmusik,
Eisler polemicised, transformed ideas of aesthetic ‘beauty’ and ‘lack
of beauty’ into questions o f ‘useful and useless’ to which, he added,
one must ask useful for whom?’ (1978, p i 09).
Finally, it is probably Eisler who still provides the most direct
articulation of shock5 in film music:

.. .only by using the element of surprise can the motion

picture give everyday life, which it claims to reproduce by
virtue of its technique, an appearance of strangeness, and
disclose the essential meaning beneath its realistic surface
" (1947, p36).

His most widely known argument for film music was to place it
in opposition to the image, a ‘conflict’ that provided ‘commentary’
“rather than redundancy. His score for Abdul Hamid (1935), for
instance, plays the patriotic Hymn To The Sultan at the same time
Hamid beats his soldiers. Years later, Alexander Kluge would
deploy the same technique, taking Haydn’s Emperors Hymn on
which Deutschland\ Deutschland Uber Alles was based in the same
ironic, anti-nationalist vein (his frequent deconstructions of the
piece began as early as 1977 in Germany in Autumn). Raben would
176 CIN ESONIC: The W orld of Sound tn Film

do the same thing in Berlin Alexanderplatz (which after fourteen

hours closes on the Internationale fading into Deutschland) and in
lesser known work (such a his score for the television film Bismarck
[1990] - a score choked with old warhorses associated with
German nationalism).
There are certainly other ways that Eisler’s ideas on and use of
music seem to match Raben’s own. Eisler argues for music to be
used in an anti-naturalist fashion, stressing ‘movement as a contrast
to rest’ and that it interrupt film (1947, p26 and p28cf). In the
opening of Fassbinders Chinese Roulette (1976), Raben’s use of
Mahlers 8th Symphony accomplishes both of these things.
Here we have the moving passion of the male vocalist, the lush
orchestral accompaniment posing a sharp contrast to the staged
stillness of the separated female characters, and then the music
itself is interrupted by another ‘movement’ — and noise - that
announces the fathers return home,
v Eisler, like Raben and Kluge after him, prefer this sense of
fragmentation and interruption to the false cover, suture, and
complicitous identifications offered by classical' film and film
composing techniques. Although Eisler spent considerable energy
' rallying against Hollywood film, he had a certain amount of
optimism about the cinema, a qualified optimism not unlike that
of Kracauer and Benjamin. In the late 1940s, for instance, Eisler
wrote that films sensationalism’ and its non-bourgeois progenitors
(‘dimestore novel,’ fairgrounds, etc) enabled it ‘to gain access to
collective energies that are inaccessible to sophisticated literature
and painting’ (a relatively unexplored area of Eisler). ‘Traditional
music’, he goes on to say, cannot ‘reach’ this perspective; whereas
‘modern music’, by contrast, ‘is suitable to it’. For instance, the
i- ‘traditional music' he felt that Max Steiner composed for King
Kong (1933) failed to achieve what the ‘shocks of modern music’
could have (1947, p36).
Peer Raben and Alexander Kluge’s soundtrack practices seem
^ more or less anticipated by Eisler, who claimed that ‘well-arranged
,i noise strips might in many cases be preferable to music’ (1947,
^ pi 01). Examples of this may be found in abundance in Raben’s and
others’ scores - amplified typewriters (mocking jackhammers and
machine guns) throughout The Marriage o f Maria Braun (1979);
The Legacy of Modernism: Peer Raben, Film Music and Political After Shock 177

Jürgen Kniepers air raids and radio transmissions taking over key
scenes in Sanders-Brahms’s Germany Pale Mother (1980) - but
these later examples highlight the destructiveness of technology
whereas Eisler revels in its innovative potential to, as he says, ‘do
away with program music’ (1947, pl03). ^
And so despite reference points to modernists such as Eisler,
well known to German film composers, there remains a very strong
sense in which these references provided practices to be reworked
rather than retrieved. Whereas Eisler wrote that ‘motion-picture
music should not become the tool of pseudo-individualization
(1947, pl28), Raben, by contrast, loaded his score for Fassbinders
Lola with, as he says, ‘bad popular songs’ of the 1950s precisely to
accentuate the pseudo individuality’ of the films characters, the j
corrupt beneficiaries of postwar Germany’s ‘economic miracle5.
More telling than this example, however, is Raben’s account of
the New German Cinemas beginnings. He wrote that after the war,
German film composers had no models, no traditions’ (1984,
p!25). Though a pragmatic observation, since funding for film
production in Germany didn’t permit access to the symphony
orchestras that Hollywood composers had had, it also stands as an ^
Oedipal, aesthetic and ideological rejection of German forbears like
Eisler. For in spite of Eisler’s innovative practice and his leftist
engagement, Raben considers his theory and his music ultimately
too detached, too rationalised, too formulaic. Just as Fassbinder
famously criticised Brecht for his purported disregard of emotion,
Raben finds Eisler’s notion of contradiction ‘too active, rational and
unfeeling’ (1984, p i 26). Raben’s own work bears this out, because
for all its shocks, it is compellingly moving, beautiful music.
At this point, I want to explore examples of a seemingly
modernist aspect of Raben’s ‘Musik-Shocks’: their violence.
Whether selecting preexisting music for one of Fassbinder s films or
composing new material, the connection of the music to the
diegetic period is disjunctive, undercutting as well as establishing
setting. Here is how he describes his scores for Fassbinders j
war trilogy:

With each one, my music referred to the appropriate period.

In Lili Marleen [1981], it relied heavily on Wagner and
178 CENESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

Bruckner, judged favourably by the Nazis. In Lola, it was

music of the early ’50s, influenced by Glenn Miller or
Mantovani and therefore with a large orchestra in these styles.
For Veronika Voss [1982], you find an American influence of
country music, barely sketched out, to be sure, but there to
suggest the origin of the drug given to Veronika by her doctor
(in Karban, 1992, p i 92).

Second, Rabens scores and sound designs can be devastatingly

silent. Early Fassbinder films like Beware O f The Holy Whore (1971)
and melodramas like Fear Eats The Soul (1974) and Merchant O f
r Four Seasons (1971), are positively restive in their near absence of
music. When after an hour into the film, we finally hear music in
"Merchant O f Four Seasons it appears as a partial fragment of Rocco
Granatas Buono Notte. While Norbert Jürgen Schneider argues that
this indicates the emotional barrenness of Hans, the protagonist, I
see it as a more fundamental questioning of melodramas
association of music with emotionalism.
L One hundred and eighty degrees from this, and not
\

insignificantly, in Fassbinders later films, are Rabens extremely

complex, dense, and layered work for Chinese Roulette and,
^l^peciafly, Berlin Älexanderplatz. In the fourth chapter (A Handful
of People in the Depths of Silence’) Franz Biberkopf nearly drinks
himself to death in a room without language; in the famous
epilogue, he undergoes an equally hallucinatory dream, a rebirth of
sorts in which all previous characters - with their accumulated,
entangled motifs — recur, along with a wide variety of music
Fassbinder considered ‘religious' (apparently, Raben had to convince
him that Kraftwerks Radio Activity was not religious music). Like
the alcoholic fourth chapter, the epilogue features a dizzying variety
of musical styles and motives, sounds, noises, ^bits of ghostly
dialogue, all of which add to a sense of drowning/drowning out.
A third modernist aspect of Rabens principle/practice of Musik-
Shock comes from its ability to interrupt and be interrupted, a
violent cutting short’, as with Chinese Roulette. Raben’s own
compositions often appear without resolution, as randomly played
melody fragments, even in the melodramas. Kluge, for his part,
argued that the nineteenth century’s ‘dramaturgy o f inescapable
 The Legacy of Modernism: Peer Raben, Fiim Music and Political After Shock 179

tragedy’ requires interruption. As Don Jose is about to stab

Carmen, for instance, he states, in a very Brechtian manner, that
music should not heighten the imminent tragedy; instead, a
prompter should intervene and say ‘This situation calls for an
immediate discussion (Kaes, 1989, pi 17). Violence takes other
forms too. In Fassbinders Martha (1973), inspired by Cornell
Woolrich’s short story, ‘For The Rest O f Her Life’, the heroine, just
like Emma Bovary before her, adores Donizettis Lucia di
Lammermoor but is forbidden to play it by her sadistic husband.
The record, like Marthas pet cat, ends up destroyed. "7
And so, the ‘productive’ physical violence celebrated by
modernists Before and between the wars is turned inward:
recordings are smashed, badly performed, pieces altered or
damaged. This occurs in Raben’s own compositions - with their
unconventional modification of standard form, foregrounding
pitch relations to sound effects, playing out of tune instruments.
^ Mischievous violence is waged against Europe’s canonic repertoire,
from the dizzying variations of Vivaldi’s Violin Concerto in A Minor
that comprises the Lola Concerto to the entirely ‘borrowed’ score
of nationalist warhorses in Bismarck.
An excellent example that shows the destruction of musical
authority, aura, as well as the myths of nationalism, occurs at the
beginning of The Marriage O f Maria Braun. It is a busy
soundtrack, whose clutter and debris are matched by the barely-
legible credits. Maria and Herrmann marry during a bomb raid; we
hear screams, sirens, bombs, complete chaos. But we also hear the
third movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. At best, the high
German culture Beethoven’s symphony represents is made ‘useless’;
at worst, complick with the machinery of war. (Interestingly,
Brecht, who never liked Beethoven, said that ‘His music always
reminds one of paintings of battles [in Eisler, 1978, p 173]; and
Fassbinder expressly wanted the quality of the recording to be
deliberately poor here).
This link of music and violence is shared by Kluge, in his deep
distrust for bombastic forms of feeling and in particular his distrust
" of nineteenth century music and its institutions. In his own
‘Beethoven moment’ in The Patriot (1979), said patriot’ (a teacher
of German history) gets drunk with some female colleagues on New
 180 CIN ESO NiC : The World of Sound in Film

Year’s Eve at a kitchen table where Schillers sacred words undergo

questioning by the drunken revellers. In The Power O f Emotion
(1983), Kluges film in which his ideas on institutionalized music
f and feelings reach their sharpest articulation, he refers to the opera
/ house as the ‘power plant of emotions’. Kluge prefers instead the
I small stories and the feelings that get left behind', his is an emphasis
| on ruins and remnants quite different to Eislers, who urged
j composers ‘to check the decay of music ...to find a new technique,
\ a new style and thus a new circle of listeners’ (1978, p i 12).
Eisler once influentially wrote that music was ‘par excellence the
medium in which irrationality can be practised rationally5 (1947,
‘ p'22). Sounding much like Kracauer on the mass ornament, he
' wrote (just after World War II) ‘Today, indolence is not so much
x(v , overcome as it is managed and enhanced scientifically. Such a
< / ; ^ rationally planned irrationality is the very essence of the
; r , amusement industry in all its branches. Music perfectly fits the
pattern (1947, p23). At the same time that this critique is offered
in Composing For The Films, the reader is struck by the text’s
repeated confidence in the ‘objective’ use of film music. In other
words, while Eislers critique of musics rationalisation, its
commodification and overall function under capitalism was rather
steadfast, one nonetheless detects a certain faith —marked by the
modernist heritage from which Eisler emerged —in precisely that
same ‘rationalism’.
I don’t want to use Eisler too metonymically here, for his
writings reflect the attitudes of many other modernists in Germany
- of both left and right stripes - with their enthusiasm (at times
mixed) in science, technology, and even rationalism. His own
endorsement of gebrauchsmusik, for example, was highly qualified,
even ambivalent, although, like its leaders, he consistently argued
against the capitalist division which ‘has led to a peculiar division
between specialist and amateur in art ...That indicates the difficulty
of talking scientifically about music. If we want to discuss art in
such a way that we not only describe it, but also obtain practical
and useful results then it is essential to introduce scientific
methods, not only into the production of art, but also into the
conception of art’ (1978, p36).
Significantly for someone eager to check the decay of musical
 The Legacy of Modernism: Peer Raben, Film Music and Political After Shock

trends, Eisler selects disease to make his point. Once perceived as

‘matters of chance’, misfortune or demonic possessions, science’
now tells us that their basis in microbes’ often renders them
curable. And since many diseases are a consequence of social
conditions, these too, he argues, are changeable, curable’. ‘If we
modern composers’, he goes on to say, were able to apply some of
this objectivity, common sense and knowledge to our own field, we
would be more successful’ (1978, 106).
This is not to say that Eislers faith in science and, especially,
technology were boundless — many times he blasted the ‘failure’ of
technological means to widen ‘real’ music listenership, to advance
a proletarian music, complained that they had made actual
composing skills irrelevant. But his desire to deploy science as a way
to preserve categories of the ‘expert’ and the artist’ is clear:
throughout his work runs the bitter complaint of amateurs’ and
‘music lovers’ taking over. The classical marxism to which he
steadfastly adhered might partially explain his insistence on the
categorical struggle on the side of truth against falsehood’ (1978,
pi 13), a truth whose stability was under siege long before
postmodernist creatures came along.
Fassbinder and Raben’s positions may seem to offer the perfect
postmodern rejection of the more technologically minded
modernism’s indenture to reason, science, measurement, the
formulaic. The two preferred instead what Raben calls the
unexpected’, which they both cast in terms of the utopian, a
~Tiope for change that seemed utterly unattainable, BuF necessary
air”The- same: they stressed the unexpectedness of audience
response, its ‘playfulness’ over calculated, ‘guaranteed’ effects.
Kluge, for his part, was interested in this same sort of ludic
quality: recall his interest in the stubborn, obstinate ‘feelings’
which history (or opera) leaves behind in residual forms of debris,
‘stranded objects’ such as small histories, myths, popular songs,
drawings, fairy tales.
In this way, Musik-Shock, which seems so smoothly maintained
from interwar to postwar culture, is differentiated. Raben and
Fassbinders shock was no longer an effect that could be calculated’
or predicted’, objectively manufactured, democratically aimed; it
was something sporadic, subjective, chaotic, unexpected, if still
182 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

sometimes violent. Another significant difference: for Eisier, early

film music attempted ‘to help spectators absorb the shock’ (1947,
p75). of seeing lifelike images lacking sound. (A tired remark for
film music scholars, but one appropriate to the New German
Cinema, with its emphasis on ‘ghosts’, and the persistence of the
^ past in the present). Walter Benjamin had claimed even more
pointedly that film offered a training ground o f shocks, and that
‘shock shoulcTbe cushioned by a heightened presence of mind’.
Modernity’s shock was not something so much to jolt or move or
change the body as to be adopted by it, integrated within it, like so
many homeopathic pills.
Modernism's asserted ‘absorption of shock forges an imaginary
bond between body and external stimuli (be this the cinema or a
vaguer notion o f ‘die modern experience’), to habituate the former
to the latter, to train it, regulate it at the same time as the body is
believed to be inoculated ‘against’ such very externality. Absorbing
the shock meant absorbing the lesson. (Shock has always been
grounded in physicality, from its first usages in agricultural
measurement and military encounters to contemporary
associations.) To be sure, the New German Cinema retained this
insistence on knowledges physicality, Kluge most particularly, as
with The Patriot's ‘talking knee’, the remnant of a German soldier
killed at Stalingrad who narrates the story. Yet postwar directors
like him treated the question of absorption and shock’s forced
integration into the body with considerably greater suspicion, at
arm’s (or leg’s) length, if you will.
For shock also retains the threat of the repulsion of what can’t be
absorbed but can only be resituated, recontextualized, repeated. In
"contrast to the internalized shock treatments espoused by Benjamin,
Eisier, and others, Fassbinder and Raben stress the shocks which the
post war body can’t absorb, first, and obviously, at the level of what
the body cannot ‘take’ (the deaths of Hans in The Merchant O f Four
Seasons (1971); arid Foxs in Fox And His Friends (1975) and
^ Fassbinder s coundess depictions of drug or alcohol addiction - the
body that has absorbed too much). Musically this is conveyed in the
witty and sadistic torture of Robert Mendelssohn, Willies Jewish
lover, in Lili Marleen, whose eponymous song plays, scratchily,
nonstop in his small cell, as if to overdose him a la Veronika Voss.
 The Legacy of Modernism: Peer Raben, Film Music and Political After Shock 183

lili Marleen

While shock unquestionably affects, transforms, deforms the

body (Franz Biberkopf more than Mendelssohn here), there is no
myth of internalization at work: the body cannot refuse shock any
“more than it can take it. And although postwar shocks can still offer
enlightenment in unexpected places (the recovered ‘life’ of the brain
damaged dealer at the end of The Power O f Emotion), it is important
to recall the extent to which shock and trauma create victims.
A second example from Lili Marleen illustrates this point, as
well as my earlier remark about postwar shock depending on the
alterity of the body from the people and contexts against which it
is juxtaposed. The films final performance o f the song is a forced
performance, made under pressure from the nazis to arrest rumours
that Willi the chanteuse had been killed in a concentration camp.
Less a living creature than a mummy in her tight metallic dress,
Fassbinder crosscuts between her performance and German
soldiers on the field who, hearing the song, believe it comes from
their own troops. They rush forward into gunfire, and Lili
completes the song.
Just as shock ‘deadens’ bodies, no guarantee exists anymore that
it will generate productive or desirable results. And by stressing the
184 CINESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

alterity of the body, shock affects it but cannot be expected to

Hbuffer it or inoculate it from externality. Such refusal is a part of the
"negativity associated with Fassbinder, a negativity which has been
insistently aligned with utopianism. Importantly, Fassbinder
“ himself set the ball in motion, remarking (not unlike Brecht) that
the unhappiest film endings are the most utopian because they
°~draw attention to ways in which things need to be changed. Peer
Raben has also made explicit links between music and the utopian
for a long time.
It is on the basis of alterity vulnerability and emptiness, and not
absorption, protection, or assimilation that these recent film-sRocks
work. This idea stands in marked contrast to the additive
assumptions of modernist textuality, eg, dialectical montage adding
up to more than the sum of its parts, yielding ideological,
epistemological and political gain. Consider, for example, the
L- constant fades to white in Fassbinders adaptations like Effi Briest
(1974). Or as Alexander Kluge put it, in talking about The Patriot,
‘the after image is what matters. Before it, something has been
emptied out, and after it there is an image that does not belong. I
call that the subversive work of the cinema’ (in Kaes, 1989, p i 22).
And from Jean-Marie Straub: 1 think the deception comes about
when one gives people the impression that something always
happens when the film is running, something they call “action”. Its
not true; when a film that doesn’t rest on deception is running,
nothing is happening, absolutely nothing. Whatever happens, only
happens in the spectator’ (in Byg, 1995, p i 26). Blanks, afterimages,
leftovers and negation ...markers of a postwar German cinema.
Fassbinders remake of Jutzi’s leftist film Mutter Krausens fahrt ins
Gluck (Mother Küster Goes To Heaven) offers a good example of this.
The absent Father Küster, the suicided husband/father never seen in
the film, is constructed solely through the responses of various role-
players - suffering wife Mother Küster, desperate to cling on to
whats left of her family and to clear her husband s name; daughter
Corinne, who uses the scandal to advance her stage career; an
embarrassment to daughter-in-law Helena for whom her expected
baby ‘is everything’; fodder for a sensationalizing press; martyr for
the communists; excuse for terrorism by the anarchists. Only Ernst
Küster, the son, hitches his response to nothing; he has no responses
The Legacy of Modernism: Peer Raben, Film Music and Political After Shock 185

and seems utterly devoid of commitment, ambition, identity. He

barely even moves. (Significantly, he is portrayed by the directors
lover, Armin Meier and likely a displaced stand in for Fassbinder.)
In Jutzis earlier film, the son performs a more active function.
Guilt-ridden and remorseful for having taken money from his
mother, he is shown out of doors, lurking in dark alleyways, half
hidden behind columns, carrying out bungled robberies —an active
cast-out from the home rather than a domestic centrepiece of
negation like Ernst. In his discussion of his remake, Fassbinder said
he refused to ‘tell the audience what to do’, unlike Jutzi’s earlier film,
or other engaged films of Germany’s political modernism (eg, Kuhle
Wampe), The ideological ‘shock’ of Fassbinder’s film comes from
sheer negativity, from a repudiation of all organized responses
coming from others. Hope resides in actions not taken (like Ernsts),
just as Peer Raben said about ‘hearing what is not yet true’.
After the war Adorno reflected:

The idea of montage and that of technological construction

are intimately bound up with each other. Together they are
becoming increasingly incompatible with the notion of
radically elaborated art with which they used to be identical.
The principle of montage was supposed to shock people into
realizing just how dubious any organic unity was. Now that
the shock has lost its punch ...the interest in montage has
therefore been neutralized; more and more, it becomes a
historical and cultural concern. (1986, p223)

Over twenty years ago Fredric Jameson similarly argued that the
strategies of political modernists no longer hold sway. For him, the
culture industry had become so pervasive as to:

make for an unpropitious climate for any of the older, simpler

forms of oppositional art [be they proposed by Lukács,
Brecht, Benjamin or Bloch]. The system has a power to co­
opt and defuse even the most potentially dangerous forms of
political art by transforming them into cultural commodities
(witness, if further proof be needed, the gristly example of the
burgeoning Brecht-Industry itself!) (1977, p208).
C I N E S 0 N 1 C : The World of Sound in Film

It would take a calamitous amount of historical insensitivity to

believe that a movements aesthetics could directly bypass the war
to retrieve a prelapsarian cinematic glory, to procure a
phantasmatic national unity or socio-political utopia through
unreconstructed notions of ‘shock’, musical or otherwise. If, as
Patrice Petro has noted in an article on boredom, after/shock’
functions as the shadow side of modernity’s ‘restless search for
novelty’, a consequence of overstimulation, banal ization, and
commodification in modernist and postmodernist cultures (1993-
94, pp72-92), I would propose..that with the New German
Cinema, the temporal register of the term ‘postmodern requires
special consideration. For more than any other postwar ‘modernist’
European cinema, German film production was marked by a
(massively delayed) after shock’, that famous generational
difference it took to come to terms with and address its traumatic
past. And if, as Peter Burger maintains, ‘Nothing loses its
effectiveness more quickly than shock’, shock does seem a far more
ephemeral phenomenon than trauma.
In short, it is impossible to consider registers such as those of
modernism and postmodernism without reference to the
Holocaust, under whose signature all of contemporary culture lives,
and no more so than in Germany. We have already mentioned some
of Adorno’s comments. More recently, in a provocative article on
performance in the O J Simpson trial, Shoshana Felman argues that
when trials tap into a social vein to the extent that that one did, they
carry an echo, a history, a memory and duality (‘legal recall’) even if
the trauma it repeats had never been fully admissible. Felman
connects the Simpson trial with Tolstoy’s story The Kreutzer Sonata,
which also featured the trial of a man accused of killing his wife.
Interestingly, music inspires Tolstoys protagonist to the murderous
act, reacting in jealousy after his wife performs the Beethoven piece
with a male friend (1997).
Felman describes legal trials as a form o f ‘performative
historiography’ (p766), a ‘structural ...remedy to trauma (p766,
n26). Her focus on inadmissable trauma is crucial: ‘[A] trauma’,
she writes, cannot simply be remembered when, in the first place,
it cannot be grasped, when, as these trials show, it cannot even be
seen. Rather than memory, it compels a traumatic reenactment’.
The Legacy of Modernism: Peer Raben, Film Music and Political After Shock

Her descriptions are obviously germane to the New German

Cinema, whose politicised directors never tired of putting into
performance - and on trial - Germany’s past. As Benjamin put it
in his famous ‘Thesis on the Philosophy of History:

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize

[the past] the way it really was ...It means to seize hold of a
memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger .. .The tradition
of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in
which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain
to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.
Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a
‘real state of emergency’ (1969, pp255-7).

While Raben and Fassbinder retreat from Benjamins modernist

discourse of crisis, modernisms own ruins, decay, music and
afterimages function as ‘after shocks’ - through their negativity,
inward violence, isolated bodies, chaotic responses. Modernist aims
and objects may have receded, but their ghosts and displaced
proxies, like those of history more generally, endure. Given the j
intensity with which Fassbinder, Raben, Kluge and others
addressed fascism and the war, it is clear that those particular
historical brutalising shocks have likewise shaped the post’ modern
deployment of Musik-Shock in the New German Cinema, and
explains why these filmmakers and composers articulate what may
seem an old fashioned urgency for change.

References
Adorno, Theodor, 1986, Aesthetic Theory, trans C Lenhardt, Routledge and
Kegan Paul, London.
Benjamin, Walter, 1969, 'Thesis on the Philosophy of History' in illuminations,
Schocken Books, New York.
Burger, Peter, 1994, Theory o f the Avant-Garde, trans M Shaw, University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Byg, Barton, 1995, Landscapes o f Resistance, University of California Press.
Eisenstein, Sergei, 1988, Selected Works Vol I, 1922-34, ed and trans R
Taylor, BFI Publishing, London.
Eisler, Hanns (with Theodor Adorno), 1947, Composing for the Films, Dennis
188 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

Dobson Lid, London.

Eisler, Hanns, 1978, Hanns Eisler, A Rebel in Music: Selected Writings,
Internationa! Publishers, New York.
Felman, Shoshana, 1997, 'Forms of Judicial Blindness, or the Evidence of
What Cannot Be Seen: Traumatic Narratives and Legal Repetitions in the
O J Simpson Case and in Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata ', Critical Inquiry,
xxiii, 4, Summer,
Jameson, Fredric, 1977, 'Reflections in Conclusion' in Aesthetics and Politics,
by Ernst Bloch, ef al, New Left Books, London,
Jansen, Peter and Wolfram Schulte, 1976, eds, Herzog/Kluge/Straub, vol 9,
Riehe Film, Hanser, München.
Kaes, Anton, 1989, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Karban, Thomas, 1992, 'En Allemagne', in Action 62, Janvier.
Kluge, Alexander, 1981-92, 'On Film and the Public Sphere', N e w German
Critique, xxiv, 5.
Lavin, Maud, 1992, 'Photomontage, Mass Culture and Modernity' in
Montage and Modern Life 1919-42, ed, M Teitelbaum, MIT Press, Boston.
Neumeyer, David, 1986, The Music o f Paul Hindemith, Yale University Press,
New Haven.
Petro, Patrice, 1993-94, "'After/Shock'", Discourse, xvi, 2.
Raben, Peer, 1984, 'Musique et film, la cantate de Bach dans l'érable', trans
C Flinn, in CinémAction.
Schneider, Norbert Jürgen, 1990, Handbuch Filmmusik 1: Musikdramaturgie
im Neuen Deutschen Film, 2nd ed, Oelschlaager, Munich.
Schoenberg, Arnold, 1975, 'Modern Music: New Music 1923' in Style and
Idea: Selected Writings o f Arnold Schoenberg, ed, Leonard Stein, Faber and
Faber, London.
Teitelbaum, Matthew, 1992, 'Preface' in M ontage and M odem Life 1919-
42, ed, M Teitelbaum, MIT Press, Boston.
ROYAL S BROWN

Ce nest pas du sang, c’est de la peinture rouge,

— Glissements progressifs du plaisir
In the 1974 Glissements progressifs du plaisir (Progressive Slidings
of Pleasure), the fifth film (or sixth, if one counts the anagram’
version of the 1971 L’Éden et après [Eden and After], N a pris les
dés) directed by French novelist-filmmaker-theoretician Alain
Robbe-Grillet, there is a key sequence (the fifteenth in the
published screenplay) that begins about 25 minutes into the film.
The scene seems to be one of many instances in his work as both a
novelist and a filmmaker in which Robbe-Grillet examines the
theme of voyeurism: A magistrate (Michael Lonsdale) investigating
the apparent murder of a young woman named Nora (Olga
Georges-Picot, who also plays a lawyer in the film) by her friend
Alice (Anicée Alvina) stands outside a door to a room that may
either be a prison cell or a cell in a convent — or both. After a
moment, he opens up the judas and peers through it, which leads
to the expected point-of-view shot of the İnside of the sparsely
furnished cell, in which we see Alice standing naked beneath a
high, barred window (with one bar broken).
190 CJNESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

At the same time, however, on the intricate sound/music track

composed and designed by frequent Robbe-Grillct collaborator
Michel Fano, we hear an intriguing variety of sounds and noises:
1 a womans sensual moanings
2 breaking glass
3 the sound of a fire burning
4 the cracking of a whip
5 a dog barking.
During this sound-music cue, the sound of the womans voice
moves from sensual pleasure to outcries of pain and, finally, to
screaming. In this way, Robbe-Grillet creates a parallel theme that
might be called écouteurism, where the invisible music arouses our
expectations (and, apparently, those of the magistrate) at least as
much as the very visible closed door. But here, in a land of audio­
visual counterpoint created out of narrative, psychological, and
aesthetic anticipation, Robbe-Grillet and Fano frustrate
expectations. As the magistrate enters Alices cell, we see nothing to
resolve our aural expectations. Instead, the camera shows a cheap
phonograph on the bed. The magistrate lifts the tone arm from a
small disc spinning on the turntable, and the sound music stops.
‘What are you doing with this gadget?’ the magistrate asks. ‘Cant
you see?’ the nude Alice answers, ‘I’m listening to music’. In one
way, this moment in one of the novelist-director’s best films might
be said to define the artists entire goal with respect to the use of
sound and music in his cinema, namely the transformation of the
entire sound-music canvas into an ongoing work of musique,
concrete or otherwise. One might also suggest that Robbe-Grillet
is, in this sequence, attacking those critics who attack him for the
virulently sexist content of his novels and films, particularly the
later films. ‘This isn’t sexism’, Robbe-Grillet might say, ‘its my
own, personal, male fantasies translated into the travail and
matériaux of the artist’.
Much has been made, both by Robbe-Grillet and by his various
interpreters, of the wáys in which the author-filmmaker has
throughout his oeuvre shifted reader/viewer/listener attention in
his texts away from a conventionalized, quasi-mimetic presentation
of the subject matter to presentations that stress what Robbe-
Grillet has often referred to as travail and matériaux —the work of
 Sound Music in the Film s of Alain R o b b e - G r ille t 191

the creative artist and the materials used by him/her in that work.
The various ‘objects’ —verbal, visual, aural - in Robbe-Grillet’s
work, rather than functioning as once-occurring events in a quasi-
historical, linear narrative with a predetermined meaning’, tend to
reappear in identical, varied, or contradictory forms throughout a
given work, thereby functioning as independent themes or motifs
whose meanings grow out of their relationship to each other and to
the structure of the work as a whole. In Robbe-Grillet, meaning is
generated out of contiguity, not continuity.
In the sequence mentioned above, Robbe-Grillet solidifies this
approach to the structuring of the cinematic text by having his
fictitious magistrate write ‘Theme of broken glass’ in his notebook.
It is this characteristic of Robbe-Grillet’s novelistic and cinematic
fiction that led his frequent collaborator, musician Michel Fano, to
find a common ground between musical aesthetics and Robbe-
Grilletian aesthetics. Noting that ‘music expresses nothing, nothing
except itself’, Fano goes on to ‘link this affirmation to one
frequently proposed by Robbe-Grillet himself concerning his own
work, namely that it does not say something; rather, it simply says’
(Fano, 1976, pl74).
It is no great mystery that sound is one of the primary tools used
by commercial cinema - and, for all its experimentation, Robbe-
Grillet’s cinema definitely falls under that category - in furthering
what Robbe-Grillet has called the ‘ideology of realism’. As to the
end of the silent era, what we see on the screen and what we
presume to be in the nearby offscreen space are inevitably
accompanied by the expected sounds —doors opening and closing,
footsteps, dishes rattling, gunshots, even music coming from a
presumed source (hence its frequent designation as ‘source music’).
What comes as somewhat more of a surprise to the average
film-goer is that almost all sound in commercial cinema is carefully
synchronized from sources rarely having anything to do with the
shooting o f the film and then laid in - these days by a Foley person
—after the movie has been shot, with volume levels, timbres, and
other aural qualities manipulated down to the last overtone and
micro-decibel to fit smoothly into the nonintrusive sound canvas
demanded from the outset of ‘talking’ cinema as the norm. So
habitual is this practice that, when Jean-Luc Godard decided to use
192 CINES0N1C: The World of Sound in Film

nothing but sound captured ‘live’ during the shooting of Vivre sa

vie {My Life to Live) in 1962, including Michel Legrand’s raucous
swing number played on a jukebox, one French critic wrote an
entire article about it, referring to the film’s use of sound as an
audacious experiment’.1
Lying at a much deeper level yet is the common practice of
providing not a realistic sound but rather one that corresponds to
a world of hyper-real aural stereotypes that were created by and for
the cinema and that actually condition our expectations in real life
of what something should sound like. When people who have
actually heard gunfire for the first time describe it as sounding like
fireworks, or in terms such as pop, pop, pop’ it is because the only
gunshots they had heard until that point had been the gross
approximation resulting from the inevitable audio distortion
created when one attempts to record a sudden loud noise such as a
140-decibel gunshot. It is the sound that led litde boys when I was
young to make gunshot noises from the back of their throats,
inevitably accompanied by a fine spray from the mouth. In the
movies, the almost impenetrable safety glass of car windows is not
only easily broken, it produces the highly improbable noise of plate
glass falling on concrete. Fist blows to the jaw sound like two
billiard balls banged together. One of my favorite examples comes
from the pretitle sequence of an underrated James Bond film, On
Her Majestys Secret Service (1969): as John Barry’s music tells us
how excited and suspense-ridden we’re supposed to be, the noise of
cars crazily maneuvering on a sand beach is suggested by the classic
sound effect of rubber tires skidding on asphalt. (The cinema has a
perfect visual equivalent of this same phenomenon in the two-
circle mask used in point-of-view shots almost every time a
character looks through a pair of binoculars. As everybody who has
ever looked through a pair of binoculars knows, you see things
through a single, large circle. What the cinema inevitably gives us
is not binoculars but rather what Roland Barthes would call
‘binocularicity.)2
What were dealing with on this third level, then, is not realism
but rather the replacement of reality by the hyper-reality o f the
perfect image. One suspects, in fact, that postmodern philosopher
Jean Baudrillard could easily have included this particular use of
 Sound Music in the Films of Alain R o b b e - G r ille t

sound in the cinema in his scathing critique of hyperpatriarchal

culture in an article entitled ‘The Year 2000 Has Already
Happened’ (the French title, ‘L’an 2000 ne passera pas’, would
better be translated as ‘The Year 2000 Will Not Go By’).4
Outrageously equating quadraphonic sound, a short-lived attempt
made by recording companies in the seventies to push sound
quality one step further into the hyper-real, with pornography,
Baudrillard notes that ‘technological perfection entails a principle
of radical uncertainty about the reality of the music’, and that ‘the
disappearance of music is the same as that of history: it will not
disappear for want of music, it will disappear in the perfection of
its materiality, in its very own special effect. There is no longer
judgment, nor aesthetic pleasure, it is the ecstasy of musicality’ (in
Kroker, 1987). Further on, Baudrillard states that ‘The original
essence (of music, of the social ...), the original concept (of the
unconscious, of history ...) has disappeared because we will never
be able to detach these from their model of perfection, which is at
the same time their model of simulation, of their forced
assumption in a transgressed truth, which is also their point of
inertia and their point of no-return (Kroker and Kroker, p40).
One might expect that Robbe-Grillet, in his ongoing battle
against the ideology of realism and against commercially
predigested effects, would in his cinema have rejected both the
realism of synch sound and the hyper-realism created out of the
arsenal of sounds at the sound technician’s disposal. But such has
not proven to be the case. In dialoguing with Michel Fano at the
1975 Cerisy colloquium cited earlier, the director, referring to a
particular sound used to suggest a man walking on dried leaves in
his 1968 L’H omme qui ment (The Man Who Lies), had no problem
with the realism, or lack of same, of the standard gimmick used by
his sound person, namely the rustling of old, dried-out magnetic
recording tape (the use of a particular piece o f recording hardware
to create the sound that hardware is supposed to record could
engender another whole discussion!). Robbe-Grillets problems
instead had to do with a) aesthetics and b) directorial control.
Noting that ‘those dead-leaf noises were not very beautiful’, the
director goes on to state that he violently resists the idea
technicians have that dead-leaf noise can be made only with 6.35
194 C1NES0NIC: The World of Sound in Film

recording tape. What I hear, adds Robbe-Grillet, ‘is magnetic tape

(Fano, 1976, pl91). It is apparent from these remarks that,
while not opposed in principle to the presence of hyper-real sound
effects, the director would prefer that these be a part o f his carefully
structured aesthetic universe rather than a manifestation of the
predetermined, homogenized ‘sound5 of well-made cinema, or, as
the French call it, le cinéma de papa.
What comes as a much greater surprise, however, is Robbe-
Grillet’s insistence on synching sound, even un- or hyper-real
sound, to onscreen movement. Indeed, in the interchanges
between the director and Michel Fano during the Cerisy
colloquium, it is quite obvious that this apparent contradiction in
the Robbe-Grillet aesthetic was a source of no small irritation for
Fano. When, for instance, Fano stressed that the work of the sound
person was a profession that had nothing to do with his own work
as a composer of ‘sound scores’, Robbe-Grillet answered that Fano
could nonetheless have been present during the sound sessions.
‘No’, answered Fano, ‘because I have no influence. I would even go
so far as to say, particularly for this film [.L’H omme qui ment], that
its something that bothers me a lot, because the sound effects seem
to me to represent a foreign soundscape ...’ (p 191). Further
defending himself later in the colloquium, Robbe-Grillet stresses
that, even though a sound person will fade down the volume of
footsteps if an onscreen character is walking away from the
audience, he demands that the footstep sound remain at the same
volume level throughout the shot - in synch with the movement,
but at the same volume level. The director also describes a very
particular sound design he had in mind for the 1961 L'Année
dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad), for which he wrote
the screenplay but which was directed by Alain Resnais:

A part of the initial plan for the sound design involved the
footsteps of the man always being on gravel, as if he had
never left the grounds, and that, on the other hand, the
womans footsteps would always be on the floor. This always’,
of course, was to have been subverted by all sorts of
infringements and infractions. In the beginning, Albertazzi
had to belong to the world of gravel and Delphine Seyrig, on
 Sound Music in the Films of Alain R o b b e - G r ille t

Delphine Seyrig in Last Year at Marienbad

the other hand, to the world of the floor. That would have
given a particular resonance to the moment when she breaks
the heel of her shoe while walking on the gravel paths of the
grounds. Resnais, who was always more concerned with
realism than I was, refused. He would say, 'No, people won’t
understand . .. ’ (Fano, 1976, p i 97).

At another point in the colloquium, however, when confronted

by another participant on his insistence on a kind of basic
synchronization, Robbe-Grillet gave what may be his most
revealing answer: ‘I don’t necessarily insist on it. We’ve made several
attempts at non-synchronization. In general, I didn’t find them
very interesting, to the degree that, three-quarters of the time, it
simply looked like an accidental lapse’ (Fano, 1976, p i 96). What
one comes to realize is that, for all of the ways in which he attacks
the rigid codes of the ideology of realism, Robbe-Grillet also
maintains with a vengeance the profile of a cinematic (and literary,
for that matter) auteur whose distinct personality manifests itself so
thoroughly at every level, whether thematic, narrative, or stylistic,
of the artistic process that he is loathe to have the reader of any of
his texts perceive any element as falling outside of his total control.
For a film project with the rather creepy title o f Piege cl fourrure
(Fur Trap), which dates from 1977, Michel Fano made the
19 6 C1NES0N1C: The World of Sound in Film

suggestion that the nine or ten reels of the film could be projected
in an aleatory order that would change with each screening. Robbe-
Grillet resisted the idea, however, stating that \ . .je tiens à contrôler
le hasard’ (I insist on controlling chance) (Fano, 1982, p46).
In this way, as I have suggested in an earlier paper,3 Robbe-
Grillet somewhat co-opts the freedom Roland Barthes would give
the reader of a literary work - and in my opinion this can apply
equally to the cinema - via the methodologies established in his
1970 S/Z, in which Barthes offers to make reading an active
process, creating the texte scriptible (the writerly text), rather than
the passive experience afforded by the texte lisible (the readerly
text). Robbe-Grillet accomplishes this co-option most strongly in
his literary works by attacking the linearity o f the two closed-ended
codes that contribute the most greatly to the tyranny of the readerly
text, the proairetie, or narrative, code, and the hermeneutic code,
which demands solutions and resolutions to the narratives
unfolding enigmas. Rather than resolution, Robbe-Grillet provides
constant re-solution. But, even though the reader is no doubt made
aware that alternate re-solutions are possible, the re-solutions
offered are Robbe-Grillet s, who writes himself into the text as its
own writerly reader.
In the cinema Robbe-Grillet as screenwriter not only subjects
the proairetic and hermeneutic codes to the same types of varied
repetitions, contradictions, and permutational/combinational
serialization we find in his novels, he subjects both the visual and
the sound montage, which most commercial films normally blend
completely into the cinematic text to support the linearity of the
proairetic and hermeneutic codes, to constant anti- and non­
continuity manipulations, more often than not with the
collaboration of his frequent co-artists, Bob Wade, who was
responsible for the editing and ‘continuity for the directors all-
important first five films, and Michel Fano, who put together a
partition sonore (sound score) for the last four of the five. (Although
not involved in the music or sound for Robbe-Grillet s first film as
a director, the 1963 L’Immortelle, Fano co-produced the film with
long-time Robbe-Grillet associate Samy Flalfon.)
The interactions between visual and sound montage in Robbe-
Grillet s films allow, in fact, the director to use them, along with
 Reelin' in The Years: Cinematic Documentation of Amercian Vernacular Music

certain other elements, as the basis for what 1 have referred to above
as a kind of permutational/combinational serialization of certain of
the film’s basic cells, somewhat in the manner suggested by Pierre
Boulez in an article entitled ‘A léa,4 in which the musician suggests
that the job of the creative imagination of the composer is to
establish series that are then allowed to play themselves out against
each other until their microscopic and macroscopic combinations
have been exhausted.
An excellent example of this can be found in the motif of
broken glass as it appears in L’H omme qui ment, in which the main
character, Boris Varissa (Jean-Louis Trintignant), arriving in an
anonymous town in Slovakia, attempts to establish an identity for
himself by co-opting the identity of Jean Robin (Ivan Mistrik),
who may or may not be one of the towns World War II heroes .. .or
traitors. Now, first of all, the motif of broken glass is a constant in
Robbe-Grillet’s work, particularly in his cinema. Therefore, as an
intertextual motif, broken glass immediately suggests an
interpretation within the framework of the symbolic, rather than
proairetic or narrative code. The symbolic code to which the motif
of the broken glass relates in Robbe-Grillet takes on a bipolar
significance in the director’s works. Within the framework of the
obsessive desire to possess and control women that is a constant in
Robbe-Grillet, the broken glass is a sado-erotic object capable of
maiming, mutilating, inflicting pain, even killing. But in the
opposite sense, particularly in the way the motif is treated in
Robbe-Grillets visual and sound montage, the broken glass takes
on a kind of metafictional resonance: the attempts by the male to
define himself vis-à-vis the woman by possessing her or controlling
her in one way or the other are constantly undone.
One way that the male protagonists of Robbe-Grillet’s have of
trying to possess/control the woman is by ensnaring her in a one­
way, linear narrative. Just as that narrative begins to acquire a shape
of its own, however, it is undone, both intra- and extra-narratively.
What was a bottle becomes a pile of broken shards; what was a
smoothly flowing soundtrack is interrupted by the violent sound of
glass breaking. The male has (sometimes literally) to pick up the
pieces and begin again. (I would suggest that another way in which
Robbe-Grillet co-opts the reading of his own text is by the
C İN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

foregrounding of the symbolic code. Whereas a director such as

Alfred Hitchcock will foreground the narrative and hermeneutic
codes while leaving the ‘reader5 of his films to search for the
enfolded symbolic codes, a point stressed in Raymond Bellour’s
pioneering analysis of North by Northwest (1975, pp235-350).
Robbe-Grillet presents the manifestations of the symbolic code in
his work right up front for all to see, while leaving to the reader the
job of decoding his fractionalized narratives and conflicting
hermeneutics.)
I would suggest, then, that the first, very simple series applied
to the motif of the broken glass in L’H omme qui ment would be
based on the two categories of symbolic code and narrative code.
Within the context of the visual and sound montage, other simple
series can be established:
Visual
1 Glass seen
2 Glass not seen (offscreen)
3 Glass not seen (mimed)
Sound
1 Glass heard breaking
2 Glass not heard breaking
3 Sound synced
4 Sound not synced
5 Diegetic sound
6 Nondiegetic sound
In L'Homme qui ment, the breaking-glass motif first appears
some fourteen minutes into the film as the third of a quick series
of shots. In the first shot, we see a close-up of Laura (Zuzana
Kocurikova), one of the several women İn the film vis-â-vis whom
Boris tries to establish his identity. She is blindfolded, indicating
either her refusal to see Boris as he wants to be seen or,
contrariwise, her inability to fight back against his voyeuristic gaze.
This shot is accompanied by some kind of squeaking sound from
Fanos arsenal that would have to be considered as nondiegetic. In
the second shot, we see and hear a German soldier firing a machine
gun into the opening in the wall of a building; the third shot shows
a bottle falling and breaking, accompanied by diegetic sound that,
however, tails off into a nondiegetic chime-like sound that
 Sound Music in the Film s of A lain R o b b e - G r ille t 199

continues into the next shot. The combination here would be:
Symbolic; Visual 1; Sound 1, 3, and 5, with the diegetic sound
transformed at the end into nondiegetic sound. It should also be
noted here that the sound of the machine gun and the sound of the
breaking glass can be considered as manifestations of the audio
paradigm of violent, interruptive sounds.
The second appearance of the breaking-glass motif occurs
nearly a half-hour into the film: we see Boris enter the room he has
rented in the local inn, sit down, mime pouring himself a drink,
and then throw the invisible glass to the floor, breaking it. One
reads this scene, unlike the previous shot sequence, as narratively
generated, since it logically fits into a chain of events that includes
Boris renting the room from a surly barman (Dusan Blaskovie),
although it immediately follows a sequence, with Boris rescuing
Jean Robin, that is supposed to have taken place more than twenty
years earlier. Here, then, the combination reads as: Narrative;
Visual 3; Sound 1, probably 3, and ambiguously 5 or 6.
Interestingly, following the breaking of the glass, the film breaks
with the apparently pure narrativity of the sequence with an
intertextual shot of Boris crouching at the foot of the brass bed,
which quotes a shot from Robbe-Grillet s previous film, the 1966
comedy, if such a term can be applied to a Robbe-Grillet work,
Trans-Europ-Express, which also features Trintignant. During this
shot, Robbe-Grillet and Fano repeat another sound motif heard
throughout the film, an even tattoo played on a woodblock (and
no doubt electronically manipulated) suggesting a woodpecker.
This sound also relates to the machine-gun fire via a different
paradigm, that of the brief burst of evenly repeated, percussive
sound established as with the opening music on the snare drum.
The next manifestation of the breaking-glass motif takes place as
Boris is preparing to leave the inn. Initially, we hear part of Fano s
nondiegetic music in the form of a resonant, solo piano (no doubt
with the damper pedal depressed) playing a slow, atonal motif. We
then hear, off camera, the sound of breaking glass, which is followed
by a shot of the broken glass at the feet of Lisa, the barmaid
(Dominique Prado). The apparent combination here is: Narrative;
Visual 2 (Visual 1 after the fact); Sound 1 and 5 (Sound 3 is not
relevant here). Two additional interpretive details are worth noting,
2 0 0 C I N E S O N J C : T h e W o r l d o f S o u n d In F i l m

however. First of all, the progress from sound recognized as music

(because it is played by a musical instrument, the piano) to a violent,
interruptive. apparently nonmusical sound that cuts it short, is a
sound-music paradigm established with the title sequence, in which
a machine-gun burst cuts short Fano s uitra-modern opening music.
In this sense the music, in its attempts to establish an identity that
is continually shattered throughout the film, becomes a kind of
metonymy for the character of Boris. And in this particular
instance, of course, the viewer/listener has the option of considering
the progression from the atonal piano music to the breaking glass as
either a movement from nondiegetic music to diegetic sound, or as
a slightly broader piece of nondiegetic musique concrète in which the
breaking glass becomes an ‘instrument, although the shot of the
broken glass at Lisa’s feet somewhat undercuts this reading (film-
going habits by and large preclude other possible readings, such as a
group of string players hiding behind the bar and doing their
musical thing). Secondly, the shot of the glass at Lisa’s feet re­
establishes the implications of the broken-glass motif within the
sado-erotic symbolic code, a motif strongly developed, as we will
see, in Glissements progressif du plaisir. Indeed, of the various women
characters in the film, it is via the two who are present in this scene
- Maria, the servant at the castle (Sylvie Bréal), and the barmaid Lisa
- that Boris attains his greatest degree of control, via Maria because
she is, sexually speaking, the easiest,’ and via Lisa because she is
naïve and childlike.
But it is in an apparent nightmare sequence that starts some 49
minutes into the film that Robbe-Grillet, Fano, and Wade develop
the broken-glass motif in a truly virtuosic manner. Having
established his (male) identity vis-à-vis Maria, first by beating her
up in the woods and then by seducing her in a steamy bedroom
scene, Boris inevitably finds himself, this time via his dream, back
at square zero, back in the woods, where he is pursued by German
soldiers. The broken-glass motif turns up here in five, very short
insert shots:
1 Maria, blindfolded (the women in the film are often shown
playing blind-mans bluff), knocks a bottle off of a table
(Visual 1; Sound 1, 3, 5)
2 Laura, running from a room, knocks a bottle off a table
 Sound Music in the Film s of Atain R o b b e -G r ille t

(Visual 1; Sound 1, 3, 5)
3 We see a shot of a woman’s hand holding and then dropping
a bottle; this time, instead of hearing and seeing the broken
glass, we hear a single, quasi-pizzicato sound followed by the
woodpecker sound motif (Visual 1; Sound 2, 6)
4 We see a shot of a womans arm and hand knocking a bottle
off a table (Visual 1; Sound 1, 3, 5)
5 We see a shot of a woman’s hand shaped as if it is holding a
bottle (Visual 3, Sound 2)
The codes dominating this scene are simultaneously Narrative
and Symbolic: Narrative, because Robbe-Grillet shows several shots
of Boris sleeping in (apparently) the same bed where he has seduced
Maria; Symbolic, because the various shots are presented in such a
noncontinuous, fractionalized, and repetitive manner that they
seem to function much more as symbolic paradigms than as
proairetic syntagms. This sequence could even be read as a parody
of the well-made film, which tends to allow non-linear, non­
continuous series such as the above only if logically justified,
frequently within an oneiric context: ‘Ah, it was only a dream!’. At
any rate, across the four examples just examined, Robbe-Grillet and
his crew have pretty much exhausted the combinatory possibilities
of the three series I have suggested - Narrative/Symbolic; Visual;
Sound —with one exception: nowhere does the director allow the
introduction of non-synch sound, in which the noise of breaking
glass would slightly precede or follow - or both - the shot, or the
implication of the shot - of the breaking glass. Robbe-Grillet even
resorts to the ‘unrealistic device o f repeating exactly the same
breaking-glass sound every time the motif appears, and in the one
shot seen in the last example, a nondiegetic, quasi-musical
presentation of the woodpecker aural motif replaces the diegetic
glass-breaking sound. But in all cases, these come across as
conscious, modernistic manipulations of the various texts into
which Robbe-Grillet has inserted his own writerly reader ...or
perhaps composerly reader.
It strikes me, however, that Robbe-Grillet’s resistance to non­
synch sound also establishes the possibility of a particularly rich
dialectic that carries the writer/directors work into the domain of the
postmodern. Robbe-Grillets frequent establishing of sound, sound-
202 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

music, and music in a structure of inter- and intratextuai paradigms

seems to strongly fall in with one of Fredric Jameson’s perceptions of
the way postmodern culture deals with space and time:

We have often been told .. .that we now inhabit the

synchronic rather than the diachronic, and I think it is at
least empirically arguable that our daily life, our psychic
experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by
categories of space rather than by categories of time, as in the
preceding period of high modernism (Jameson, 1991, p i 6).

At the same time, however, Robbe-Grillet, in refusing to be

tempted by non-synch sound, maintains a category of time that is
not even modern but simply realistic, even if only within the
homogenized standards of well-made cinemas hyper-real sound.
Robbe-Grillet, the man who would be the great anti-realist, is
instead a postmodern dialectician - the cinema even allows him, as
we will see, to be a contrapuntal dialectician —who, rather than
parading a series of modernist upheavals before our eyes and ears,
anchors his language in a realism that he immediately proceeds to
deconstruct. This is not an Arnold Schoenberg cringing in pain at
consonant harmonies the way most people cringe at dissonance but
rather an Alban Berg (Jameson suggests Stravinsky) making his
atonal passages all the more effective by pitting them against at least
the possibility of tonality.
I return to Glissements progressifs du plaisir. In this film, three
men - a detective (Trintignant again, this time with a phony
moustache), a priest (Jean Martin), and a magistrate (Lonsdale) —
attempt to bring a woman who may or may not be a prostitute and
who may or may not have murdered her roommate (Olga Georges-
Picot) with a broken bottle, under their control by attempting to
resolve a sado-erotic crime more apt to have been committed by a
man than by a woman. Alice, who according to Robbe-Grillet
represents the spirit of freedom, in fact insouciantly co-opts the
roles of just about every character in the film, male or female. The
music’ played on Alices phonograph suggests a number of
elements that relate to the symbolic codes elaborated in Robbe-
Grillet s work. We aurally move, for instance, from a womans erotic
 Sound Music in the Films of Alain R o b b e - G r ille t

pleasure to the sado-erotic attempts to control the woman via the

whip and the flame. The music’ played by Alice, who is seen nude
throughout much of the film, also includes the inevitable broken
glass motif. We further hear, as the magistrate opens the door, an
intertextual reference (a dog barking) to Robbe-Grillet s first film as
a director, L’Immortelle, in which a mafioso-type character (Guido
Celano) with a pair of dogs also seems to keep the films ‘immortal’
woman (Françoise Brion) on a leash. (The dogs at points also seem
to tie in to the films sado-erotic symbolism, and, within the
doubled structure of his strongly Orphic narrative, they stand as
the Cerberus-like guardians to the gates of Hell.)
The viewer/listeners reaction to this musique concrete
metamorphosizes according to what is seen:
1 While the door remains shut, the audience (and no doubt
the magistrate) suspects diegetic sound, in spite of the
improbability of a whipping and/or a burning taking place
within Alice s small cell
2 Once the magistrate opens the door and we see no possible
source for these sounds, the audience can still interpret what
it hears as diegetic sounds, now apparently coming from an
undetermined place offscreen; or, if it is hip to Robbe-
Grillet/Fano manipulations, it can begin to suspect some
kind of nondiegetic sound music
3 The shot of the phonograph and the coincidence o f the
ceasing of the sounds with the magistrate’s lifting of the
tonearm reveal the sounds to be source music, offering an
ironic commentary on the realistic tropes of commercial
cinema (source, or nondiegetic, music is almost always laid
in on the music track after the film has been shot, just as the
nondiegetic music is, and that source is often shown to
justify the presence of the music) while at the same time
allowing Robbe-Grillet and Fano to transparently reveal the
nature of at least one facet of their sound design.
But the attentive listener will notice other levels of ongoing
sound and sound music as well. Early on, for instance, Robbe-
Grillet introduces, parallel to the music’ on the phonograph, the
diegetic, synch sounds of the magistrate opening the peephole and
then opening the door. As Alice turns around and knocks the bottle
C 1 N E S 0 N I C : The World of Sound in Film

off the wrought-iron stand, we likewise get synch, diegetic sound,

as we do as Alice picks up the glass shards. But here,
simultaneously, Robbe-Grillet and Fano also introduce nondiegetic
sounds, which include what may be the noise of a cup rattling in a
saucer and, later, a glass bottle rattling on a cement floor. While all
of the sounds itnply glass, the film simultaneously offers two layers
of sound, one defined more or less in space, the other (diegetic) in
time, in a kind of counterpoint or, to use Eisensteins term, vertical
montage. The same type of sound layering occurs as the magistrate
sits on the bed (with appropriate creakings) and begins to write,
creating a quasi-diegetic, hyper-real movie sound that might be
described as pen-and-papericity, since it is doubtful that we ever
hear writing sounds such as this at such a volume level. As the
magistrate writes, however, Fano and Robbe-Grillet continue to
introduce nondiegetic sounds, some of them involving glass, plus a
squeaking sound that may be a cork turning in the neck of a bottle.
And then, in one drolly comical moment, the film brings the two
simultaneously layered domains together. Picking up a large, jagged
part of the broken bottle and holding it by the neck, Alice remarks,
‘Look. This could be a crime weapon to which the magistrate
answers ‘You’re beginning to bug me with all your shit’, Alice
answers, ‘Well, then just drop it (sound of broken glass,
described in the screenplay as ‘more muted than the preceding one,
like an echo’ [Robbe-Grillet, 1974, p62]) ‘. . . so to speak,’ Alice’s so
to speak' would seem to be a coy, punning commentary on the
sound of the broken glass, even though the film offers no shot of a
bottle ‘dropping’ to label this as a diegetic sound.
But there is yet one more dimension to the ongoing sound
music. After two insert shots, including a closeup motif-shot of a
blue shoe that takes on the quality of a fetishized object in the film,
Alice, now wearing an oversized, mans white shirt, cuts her foot on
a piece of broken glass, and then asks the magistrate to lick it so
that she won’t die. As she sits next to the magistrate on the bed and
asks him to suck the blood, we hear someone whistling the main
theme from the Good Friday Spell in Wagners opera Parsifal. Then,
on a cut to the shoe-fetish, the music track offers a brief, nontonal
motif played by a mallet on a metallic instrument. As the
magistrate begins to perform the very suggestive and, for him,
 Sound Music in the Films of Alain R o b b e -G r ille t 205

humiliating, act of sucking Alice s toe (one is reminded of a scene

between a woman and a statue in Luis Bunuels 1930 LAge dor),
we hear actual, nondiegetic music, a series of slow, dissonant, near­
cluster chords played on a piano, ending on what sounds like an
electronically modified piano chord that actually ‘Mickey-Mouses’
a shot of the blue shoe falling on the floor. As Alice stands next to
the magistrate and tells him that he might be the one to die, the
piano begins again, this time in sustained, single notes forming an
atonal theme.
Interestingly, none of this nondiegetic music, either the found
music by Wagner or the score composed by Fano, is suggested in
the screenplay, which simply indicates that the licking scene is to
take place ‘in a dreamy fashion, as if the movements have been
either stretched out or slowed down (perhaps shot at twenty-eight
or thirty frames a second)’ (Robbe-Grillet, 1974, p64). It goes
without saying, of course, that Robbe-Grillet’s particular brand of
filmmaking could not support, except ironically (and this very
rarely), the type of musical score normally heard in commercial
cinema, in which music fortifies the linearity of the narrative
structure by eliciting the correct’ emotional reaction at the ‘correct’
points as the story progresses. As early as his screenplay for Last
Year at Marienbad, Robbe-Grillet describes as follows the kind of
score that he would have wanted to accompany certain scenes from
the beginning of the film onward: it would be ‘...serial music
consisting of notes separated by silences, an apparent discontinuity
of notes and unrelated chords. But at the same time the music is
violent, disturbing and for the spectator who is not interested in
contemporary music it must be both irritating and somehow
continually unresolved’ (Robbe-Grillet, 1962, p96). Earlier on
Robbe-Grillet has described the music as consisting 'of scattered
notes or brief series ...; it is uncertain, broken up, and somehow
anxious’ (1962, p32). The ongoing musical canvas of lugubrious,
quasi-silent-film, Phantom-of the-Opera organ music provided by
Francis Seyrig, brother of the actress Delphine Seyrig who stars in
the fdm, for Marienbad is, of course, a major betrayal of Robbe-
Grillets intentions, since it provides us with a way to read,
emotionally at least, the film.
Interestingly, then, what Robbe-Grillet seeks from his composer
206 CINESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

- and what he certainly got from Michel Fano - is a type of music

whose language is much more purely modern’ than that of the
director in his films. Whereas the music provided by Fano is
generally nontonal, or even nonsystematically atonal, and
arhythmic - indeed, much of it would seem to fit the requirement
of an apparent discontinuity of notes and unrelated chords’ from
the Marienbad screenplay - Robbe-Grillet, while constantly
introducing discontinuity into the heretofore unshakable linearity
characteristic of the narrative and hermeneutic codes, nonetheless
maintains a certain contact with ‘tonality’ via the presence, implied
and otherwise, of a potentially linear narrative. (To those who
would ask whether I am here implying a parallel between tonality
in music and linearity in narrative, the answer is an emphatic yes’.)
Since Robbe-Grillet chose to market his films via the paths of
commercial cinema, it could not very well have been otherwise.
Even when deliberately structuring a film according to the
principles of serialism, as he does in his 1971 VEden et apres,5
Robbe-Grillet enfolds into all of his manipulations of the films
visual and aural elements, as well as of the very cells of the
narrative, an implied narrative that is so constant in his work that
it might actually be referred to as a land of Mr-narrative: A man, a
kind of a Flying Dutchman —here ‘Duchemin - type doomed to
fly dangerously close to the women with whom he is obsessed
without ever being able to touch them, tries to ensnare, to rape a
woman by capturing her in a work of art (more narrative than
visual in Marienbad > more visual than narrative in VEden et apres).
In VEden, Duchemin is often aided and abetted in this by a group
of male secondary characters. The woman, Violette —a flower, a
color, a ‘little rape’ (viol, which means ‘rape’ in French, plus the
diminutive —ette ending) - quite simply resists, ultimately emerging
victorious from all the traps laid by the male characters through an
encounter with her own double. And so, not only is there, within
Robbe-Grillet s films, a kind of postmodern dialectic between the
modern and the realistic, between the open-ended and the linear,
there is a secondary dialectic created between the postmodern
quality of the Robbe-Grillet text as a whole and the very modern
quality of Michel Fano’s nondiegetic music, with the sound music
mediating between the two.
 Sound Music in the Films of A la in R o b b e - G r ille t

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the opening sequence to

VHomme qui ment. The narrative suggested by the visuals, in
which we see a man pursued in a forest by stereotypical nazi
soldiers, is a classic cinematic situation - only the fact that Boris is
dressed in a 1960s suit might give the audience pause to wonder
what is going on. The violent and ominous music, on the other
hand, has an ultramodern sound to it, and it is described by
Michel Fano as follows:

The whole thing is structured around three different vertical

blocks, something like three columns within which the
instrumental material that will be used later is exposed: a
brief passage in pizzicato strings; a brief passage played very
slowly on the piano that will later return in the scenes at the
inn and in the attic; finally, an outburst featuring a kind of
superposition of fairly violent and fragmented rhythmic
elements. These three groupings o f musical matériaux will be
adhered to throughout the entire film. I would also like to
point out that the percussion sequence introduces a very rapid
motif in the snare drum, which is very important because it is
there that the system of contiguity between the sounds begins;
it is also the woodpecker pecking at a tree trunk each time
Trintignant begins to speak when he says, T m going to tell
you my story ...etc.’ (Fano, 1976, ppl87-88).

Indeed, the transition from music to sound takes place quite

dramatically in the opening sequence when, following the snare-
drum tattoo described above, a machine-gun volley both mimics
the snare drum and cuts it short. In this sense, the musical score
resides in part on the same paradigmatic level as Boris’s various
stories (his histoires, his lies), since both are subject to being cut
short by the sound-music motif of the rapidly and evenly paced
burst of violent or quasi-violent sound, sound music, or music.
Later in the film, the woodpecker-snare drum-machine-gun motif
undergoes yet one more transformation: at two moments in the
film, we hear (but never see’) the evenly paced but slow sounds of
an ax chopping a tree. We also hear the sound of a cut tree falling,
again with no visual complement. (One might see a paradigmatic
208 CIN ESO NiC : The World of Sound in Film

tie-in between this rhythmically augmented motif [ie, the note

values, and therefore the durations, are increased] and the slow,
piano motif described above.) It also reverses the usual polarity of
the woodpecker motif, since this sound suggesting an attack on the
very phallic trees of the High Tatra forest in Slovakia that was, in
fact, the visual inspiration for VHomme qui merit, is associated with
the death of the father and/or of the rival ‘brother. Like most of
the sound-music motifs, this one is bipolar in its relationship to the
film's symbolic text. In this sense, of course, the Robbe-Grillet text
does in fact go beyond simply ‘saying: the interaction of the films
symbolic text with its sound-music text does in fact produce a layer
of meaning, even if that meaning is ultimately presented as a self-
contained oxymoron.
The title sequence also offers an excellent example of the way in
which the sound-music component of the film is juxtaposed
against the visual component: in the title sequence, Robbe-Grillet
never shows - not once - the nazi soldiers and Boris in the same
frame. By leaving out potential shots of Boris and the nazis in the
same frame, shots that would be essential for transforming the
contiguous nature of montage into illusory continuity, Robbe-
Grillet shows the ‘lie’ of continuity editing. In the sound montage,
on the other hand, he perpetuates the ‘lie of continuity by carrying
the sound - or perhaps the sound music —over from shots of the
soldiers to shots of Boris. What Robbe-Grillet ultimately gives us
in LHomme qui ment as well as throughout his cinematic oeuvre in
the interactions between narrative, visual montage, sound
montage, music, and sound music, is that glorious, postmodern
oxymoron, the true lie.

Notes
1 Collet, Jean, 'An Audacious Experiment: The Sound Track of Vivre sa v ie , in
Focus on Godard, ed Brown, Royal S, New jersey, 1972, pp] 60-62. The
original article, entitled 'La Bande sonore du film Vivre sa vie' appeared in the
French journal La Revue du Son in. December 1962.
2 See in particular Barthes' various discussions as presented in Mythologies,
irans. Annette Lavers, New York, 1972. The original French version was
published by Les Editions du Seuil in 1957.
3 'The Mirror of Meta-fiction: Robbe-Grillet as the Writerly Reader of Trans-
 Sound Music in the Films of Alain R o b b e - G r ille t

Europ-Express'. Written and presented by Royal S Brown in the conference

'Au Temple des Reves: L'Ecrivain a l'Ecran' sponsored by Living Time Films,
Ltd, and the Maison Française, Oxford University, at Oxford, England, 25
September 1 9 9 6 .
4 !n Notes o f an Apprenticeship , trans Herbert Weinstock, N ew York, 1968,
p35-5 ]. The article was originally published in the Nouvelle Revue Française
in November 1957. The original title of the book is Relevés d'apprenti.
5 See my 'Serialism in Robbe-Grillet's L'Eden et après: The Narrative and Its
Doubles', Literature/Film Quarterly XVIII, Air 1990, p p 2 10-20. See also the
section on Twelve Themes: Serialism in L'Eden et après in Stoltzfus, Ben, Alain
Robbe-Grillet: The Body o f the Text, London and Toronto, 1985, pp44-56.

References
Beliour, Raymond, 1975, 'Le Blocage symbolique' in Communications 23:
Psychanalyse et cinéma.
Fano, Michel, 1976, 'L'ordre musical chez Robbe-Grillet: Le discours sonore
dans ses films' in Robbe-Grillet: Analyse, Théorie. 1. Roman/Cinéma, 1975
Colloque de Cerisy, Paris: 10 /18 .
Fano, Michel, 1982, 'L'Éden et après: Genhsé d'un film' in Alain Robbe-
Grillet: Oeuvres cinématographiques (booklet included in the Edition
Vidéographique Critique], Paris.
Jameson, Fredric, 1991, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism, North Carolina.
Kroker, Arthur and Kroker, Marilouise, 1987, eds, Body Invaders: Panic Sex
in America, New York.
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 1962, last Year at Marienbad: Text by Alain Robbe-
Grillet for the film by Alain Resnais, trans Richard Howard, New York.
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 1974, Glissements progressifs du plasisir, Paris.
PART FOUR:
WILL STRAW

In 1991, in the magazine Cahiers du cinema, Luc Moullet looked

back at the sorts of credit sequences which had proliferated within
the cinema of the 1960s. During that decade, Moullet writes:

Credits wrote themselves onto roadways, onto cars, onto the

main character as he or she went from home to work, from
one place of action to another: this, a commonplace in films
of the 1960s, would quickly become an unbearable trait
which withered away in later decades (1991, p81).

As I want to argue, the place of writing and graphic forms

within the credit sequences o f films is, much of the time, intimately
bound up with the place of music. In the cinema of the late 1950s
and early-to-mid 1960s, one sees a proliferation of possible
relationships between extradiegetic elements (such as graphics,
lettering and music) and diegetic worlds, between those modes of
expression we might consider ornamental and the fictional/textual
constructs which they serve to ‘decorate’.
In this period, we find credit sequences which use fashion-style
still photographs, as in Howard Hawks’ film Mans Favourite Sport
(1964); credit sequences which play simply with colour fields or
chromatic bars, as in It Started With A Kiss (1959); others which use
transparent tissue paper imagery, as in the credits to Send Me No
Flowers (1964), spiralling forms and op-art extravagances as in
2 14 CINES0N1C: The World of Sound in Film

Charade (1963) or Danger: Diabolik (1968); title cards which

slowly burn up, in Where The Spies Are (1965); a claymation play
with letters and forms in Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine
(1965); the silk-screen quasi-abstraction of the credits to Murderer’s
Row (1966) —and so on. This is to say nothing of the more famous
animated credit sequences to the Pink Panther films, or the
graphic-geometrical exercises of credits in the James Bond series.
Within this proliferation of graphic forms for presenting credits,
the role of theme songs in relationship to the opening and closing of
films - and to narrative action itself - will lose its self-evident quality,
opening up a range of new possibilities. Each of these possibilities is
linked, implicitly or not, to aesthetic and even moral presumptions.
If, as Moullet says, the graphic writing of credits onto a films world
and actions withers by the end of the 1960s, this is not simply
because a fad has played itself out. It is also because the tendency to
imagine films as a playful polyphony of expressive forms will come
to seem frivolous in a cinema more and more shaped by a sense of its
own artistic self-importance or political urgency. The destinies of
lettering, animated drawings and self-contained theme songs are
intimately bound up with each other, bound together by their
participation in a history of filmic ornamentation.
A popular film is many things, but one o f the most
underexamined things which it is is a designed object. I don’t mean
by this, simply, that a film is a constructed artefact, produced in the
interplay of shapes, sounds and colours, through those procedures
which have come over time to be known as art direction or sound
design. I mean, as well, that the cinema is part of a broader history
of design and has been shaped, implicitly or otherwise, by the sorts
of moral-aesthetic thinking about design which have been brought
to bear on other objects. In particular, the cinema is subject to
judgements about the relationship between moral or aesthetic
seriousness, on the one hand, and stylistic restraint or extravagance,
on the other.
We judge films according to whether they are more or less
excessive or constrained in their deployment of spectacle, more or
less unified in combining various forms of expression. In doing so,
we are not merely judging their artistic or expressive integrity —that
is, the extent to which things hold together in an appropriate
 Ornam ent, En tran ce and The Theme Song 215

manner. We are, as well, like critics of graphic design and of

architecture, expressing presumptions about the use and moral
status of ornament, of decoration, of pleasures which might seem
frivolous or extraneous. Films are like other sorts of narrative texts,
in a whole variety of ways which have long been the focus of
analysis, but they are, as well, like other consumer goods. The
manner in which they bear their marks of corporate or authorial
origin, the extent to which information within them is presented in
blatant or disguised form, the extent to which their pleasures seem
detachable from each other - through all of these dimensions, the
design status of films takes shape and offers itself up for judgements
in which one can almost always glimpse a moralizing component.
The status of films as design objects is perhaps most usefully
grasped by looking at what Gerard Genette, speaking of
literature, has called paratextual features: those elements, such
as prefaces, indexes and acknowledgements, which fall outside
the conventional boundaries of the text. The paratextual
accompaniments to a film include the credit sequences, theme
songs and corporate logos which are considered part of the body of
the film. Because they always threaten to appear parasitical,
extraneous or disruptive of the organic integrity of the film text,
paratextual features such as credit sequences are often the most
revealing symptoms of historical shifts or differences in aesthetic
premises. In this respect, the crucial intertextual spaces within
which films circulate are not simply those of other fictional or
dramatic forms; they include, as well, the spaces of architecture and
graphic design. Deeply ingrained presumptions as to what
constitute artistic ambition or political righteousness in film often
overlap with those having long histories in the worlds of design and
architectural theory.
In the history of films as designed objects, one of the richest
periods for analysis is the late 1950s and 1960s. The most striking
development, during this rime, was the rise and fall of the animated
credit sequence, a self-contained segment of film in which
animated drawings, photographs and graphic shapes were, most of
the time, accompanied by self-contained pieces of music. Most of
you, I assume, will know what kinds of films I mean: the
Hollywood sex comedies, so often with Doris Day and Rock
216 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

Hudson, the spy spoofs made in Europe and the US, the farcical
European coproductions which were so prominent in the 1960s,
The kinds of films are hardly forgotten, but they remain under- or
unexamined in most histories of cinema of the 1960s. Those
histories are typically written as the history of national new waves
or with an emphasis on those films most obviously marked by
countercultural sentiment and avant-gardist impulses. For the most
part, the films I am talking about are seen as residual phenomena,
morbid symptoms of the waning of a studio system. Interest in
them has been sustained primarily in the unofficial fan subcultures
which surround the spy film or European soft-core porn; more
recently, it has been nourished by the rash of reissues of soundtrack
music from Italian sex films or Anglo-American thrillers.
I will turn, a little later on, to some of the other ways in which
these films interest me, but I want to dwell for a few minutes on
what is perhaps the most formally interesting aspect of them. These
films respond, in innovative ways, to the question of how we enter
a film. Film studies has taken up this question in relationship to the
initiation of character and story, but we might consider, for a
minute, the ways in which films dispose of the sorts of extratextual
information they are required or compelled to offer. Historically,
we enter a film through some combination of music, on the one
hand, and graphic shapes or lettering on the other - through the
music with which almost all films open, and through the studio
logos and credits which, throughout most of film history, have
come near the beginning of films. Elements such as studio logos
will almost always be somewhat extraneous to the body of the film
itself, though there are any number of films which attempt to
diminish this extraneous character. More and more, by the 1960s,
theme music specific to a film will replace studio fanfares over the
studio logo, for example, or animated elements which are part of a
film’s specific presentation of information about itself will come to
interact with studio logos.
From the very beginning, the succession of written and graphic
elements which make up credit sequences has created a place,
within the film, in which musical sequences may be offered with
more integrity than elsewhere. The graphic and musical elements
of credit sequences will come to support each other in a variety of
 Ornam ent, Entrance and The Theme Song

ways. The duration of credits will determine and legitimate the

duration of musical pieces, just as the movement of a theme song
towards closure somehow naturalizes the progression of titles. The
words ‘directed by are, after all, a kind of closure, and they are
typically punctuated by moments of resolution in the theme song
which might accompany them.
Beginning in the late 1940s, in Hollywood filmmaking, there is
a destabilization of what might be called the ceremonial function of
credit sequences, of their hitherto highly standardized role in
announcing and opening a film. Throughout the 1950s, the forms
of credit sequences will proliferate, for a variety of reasons which
may be quickly summarized. Firstly, a rise in the number and
complexity of coproduction agreements diminished the pertinence
of the uniform titles associated with each major studio. Secondly,
as Saul Bass and others have pointed out, agreements with craft
unions increased the number of credits which films were required
to display, leading filmmakers to seek novel or entertaining ways of
presenting these. And finally, as dramatic films more and more
employed title songs over the credits, particularly following the
success o f High Noon in 1952, extended credit sequences were
embraced as one of those places in a film in which theme songs
might be presented.
The effect of these developments was to denaturalize the classic
form o f credit sequences. The proliferating forms observable in
films of the 1950s come to align themselves in regularized ways
with broader aesthetic strategies and taste formations. These
alignments are embedded within the stratification of Hollywood
cinema İn the 1950s, which saw the aesthetic economies of
constraint and vulgarity expand to broad extremes. Screen ratios
and colour schemes are part of this stratification, of course, but
these, themselves, will allow for a diversification in the ways in
which graphic information is presented. As credit styles proliferate,
in the 1950s, they grapple with two problematic qualities of the
credit sequence as a form. The first o f these is the status of the
credit sequence as marker of corporate affiliation. In those films of
the 1950s marked by an avowed moral seriousness, such as those of
Stanley Kramer, there is a reduction in the size and fanfarish quality
of corporate identification, as if this had now become the quiet
CINESONIC: The W orld of Sound in Film

signature of the painter rather than the proud proclamation of

industrial origin. In expensive musicals, on the other hand, the
classical studio opening is frequently reinvested with new levels of
monumental significance, rendered more extravagant, with musical
overtures preceding a corporate logo and both followed by the
symbolic opening of on-screen curtains. These two examples
represent extreme responses to what might be called a crisis of
ceremonialization: a crisis in the extent to which the opening of a
film is seen to involve a heralding of the forthcoming spectacle. In
those films which offer the distributing studio’s logo briefly and
quietly, and the production company’s name with understated
dignity, we see films downplaying their continuity with previous
Hollywood product. In the exaggeration of these fanfarish
openings, we see an exaggerated effort to link contemporary
Hollywood, not only to its own past, but to the broader history of
showbusiness and its monumental institutions.
The second, and more important issue with which credit design
grapples is the extent to which their graphic and musical elements
are offered as ornamental and decorative. There is increasing variety
in the extent to which graphics and music are autonomous textual
elements, some blatantly offering these up as pleasures which other
films will repress or seek to render minimally ceremonial or
functional. At a most basic level, these uncertainties reveal a range
of attitudes towards graphic writing: while writing may
increasingly appear small or hidden in corners in certain films, it
may be animated, colourful and central in others. What is striking
is the persistence with which the expressivity of graphic forms and
writing is mirrored in the status accorded to theme music. Films
whose written credits are unobtrusive and minimalist are likely to
use music which is likewise restrained and of diminished
expressivity
Here, we might begin to explore analogies between the credit
sequence and the architectural entrance. The credit sequence and
the doors to a building are both elements which risk appearing to
be falsely seductive, or as betraying the formal integrity of the work
which they accompany. Histories of the credit sequence and the
architectural entrance have been shaped by the extent to which
entry into their respective forms is intended to be the crossing of a
 Ornam ent, Entrance and The Theme Song

ceremonial threshold, by the embracing of ceremony at certain

historical points and its repression at others. Both the credit
sequence and the architectural entrance are subject to the sorts of
debates which have been at the core of twentieth century aesthetics,
debates in which aesthetic options have been invested with a
strongly moral dimension. At the heart of these debates is the status
of ornament.
As Brent Brolin has pointed out, the ideas of architectural
modernism were founded on an equation between moral sincerity
or honesty and the banishment of ornament. The
ornamentalization of the facade to a building, inasmuch as it
betrayed that building’s overall form and function, was to be
rejected. We may recall here Adolf Loos’ famous dictum, that the
evolution o f culture was synonymous with the disappearance of
ornament. In modernist architecture, any sense of the entrance as
offering autonomous decorative pleasures was considered
antithetical to both formal and moral-political integrity. Both the
ceremonial quality of neo-Gothic entrances and the chaotic jumble
of the vernacular suburban homes front door stood, for the
modernist, as proof that the building itself had failed to
communicate its function through its overall form. The former was
an oppressive staging of power; the latter was a seductive masking
of vulgarity. In their most pure examples, modernist buildings were
to be buldings whose backs were indistinguishable from their
fronts, in which the entrance was not a deceptive facade but, rather,
an element indistinguishable from the rest of the building. In
particular, the materials of which entrances were built, and their
underlying principles of design, were to be indistinguishable from
those of the structure as a whole.
Credit sequences are not front doors, of course, but as the
entrances into particular aesthetic constructions they announce
and specify such constructions in ways which, by the 1950s, were
no longer self-evident. The wide variety of credit sequence forms in
the 1950s, like architectural renderings of the entrance, manifest
anxieties over the extent to which such forms should be
autonomous, their pleasures or modes o f expression distinct from
those of the structure to which they are attached. Simple decisions,
such as whether to present the credits before or after the narrative
220 CINESONIC: The W orld of Sound in Film

has begun, condense a range of broader aesthetic and moral

choices. They led certain filmmakers to devise forms of writing
which hide themselves within a diegetic world; they led others,
such as Saul Bass, to seek geometrical graphic forms which
mirrored the structure of the film as a whole; they led composers
like Mancini to devise, for a film like Charade, musical themes
which blend with the diegetic sounds of train travel.
Most blatantly, this decline in the self-evidence of a credit
sequence’s relationship to the film as a whole will lead to the
disappearance of credits in some films, and their exaggeration, as
autonomous, mini-movies in themselves, on the other. Between the
credit-less opening of The Magnificent Ambersons (I960) and the
detachable cartoon sequences which open the Pink Panther films
lies a long negotiation of the relationship of credits to the formal
integrity of a work. Credit sequences become problematic in part
because they enact the imposition of extraneous elements, such as
writing, musical compositions and graphic design. At the same
time, they presuppose a direct, pragmatic communication with the
audience frequently at odds with notions of the self-contained
diegetic fiction.
In the oral presentation of this paper, I showed four credit
sequences from films of the 1950s and 1960s. The last three of
these were animated credit sequences (taken from a compilation of
32 such sequences, which I had prepared but did not have time
to show), but the first is actually a counter-example. It is from
12 Angry Men (1957), and it includes neither animation nor a
theme song. The other three include both theme songs and
animation; these are the credit sequences to Teacher's Pet, likewise
from 1957; Jack Arnolds Bachelor in Paradise, from 1961, and the
1965 film Do Not Disturb .
In his book Violent America, Lawrence Alloway talks about the
long-standing aesthetic prejudice which equates social reform with
stylistic constraint and impoverishment.

The 19th-century equation of realism with reform is ...an

obstacle in appreciating movies. It is naive to believe that the
more stark a film is in style and the more underprivileged the
characters, the more realistic it is (1971, p 9).
 Ornament, Entrance and The Theme Song 221

Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men

Nevertheless, the presumption of a strong and necessary link

between a reformist politics and stylistic constraint would shape
the aesthetic strategies of 1950s cinema in consistent ways. The
denial of an obviously ornamental function to credit sequences is
one easily available way of manifesting stylistic understatement and
starkness and therefore highlighting reformist intentions. In a film
like 12 Angry Men , we find a tendency which will continue
throughout the 1960s and 1970s, fading somewhat in the 1980s
and 1990s: the move to slip credits into quiet, stalled moments of
the narrative, accompanied by music which is unobtrusive and
purely instrumental. The typefaces employed in these credits are
lower-case, and there is no sequence of credit cards; similarly, the
woodwinds used in the music itself are low-key and sustained,
rather than rhythmic.
I will turn to the animated credit sequences of sex comedies in
a minute, but let me stay, briefly, with the tradition of the urban
drama. In the black and white urban film o f the 1950s, we may,
quite schematically, speak of three broad tendencies in presenting
credits, each marked by a distinctive relationship between writing,
music, and narrative worlds. One o f these, exemplified by 12 Angry
222 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound In Film

Men, is that of the naturalistic drama. Here, the credits come a few
minutes into the film itself, after we have seen people moving about
a busy court building. Here, there is the aesthetic tendency towards
a depth, but this is not the seductive depth of the lurid thriller.
Rather, it is the depth of social worlds imagined as coherent. This
delaying of credits privileges the quiet entry into this naturalistic
world, rather than the dramatic explosion of a narrative worlds
stability and the initiation of tension.
A second tradition is that of the post-war semi-documentary.
This typically combines old-fashioned studio title cards, great
symphonic fanfares of a martial-like quality, visions of the city
scape as monumental and a narrating voice-over whose texture
connotes the official. This tradition will persist as late as the mid-
1950s, as in a 1954 film like Doivn These Dark Streets, That it will
appear corny and outmoded by then has much to do with the ways
in which this opening is highly ceremonialized, binding the official
markers of a studio production to the authoritative voice-over
narrating of the procedural film.
A third tradition is that of the lurid thriller, of which Fritz
Langs While the City Sleeps (1956) and two Mike Hammer films,
Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and I, The Jury (1953), offer good examples.
Discussing paperback cover art of the 1950s, Geoffrey O ’Brien
defined the ‘lurid’ as ‘the freezing of sensation in graphic form’
(1991). We might define a lurid aesthetic more generally as one
based on the production of intermittent sensation: in lurid texts,
characters freeze in poses of fear or seductive beckoning,
saxophones wail, lights emerge from darkness. The credit sequences
typical of lurid films of the 1950s often involve words which
approach the foreground of the screen accompanied by swells of
music. What is distinctive about the lurid in film is its impulse
towards producing a sense of depth which has nothing to do with
the social depth of Bazinian realism or 1950s Hollywood
naturalism. Lurid depth is the depth of angularity: of characters
leaning towards the camera, of doors opening onto well-lit rooms,
or of bent saxophone notes.
The credit sequences of the sleaziest of 1950s noir films are
often organized around creating this sense of depth, as that spatial
dimension out of which people or things emerge or into which
 Ornament, En tran ce and The Theme Son g 223

they, and the viewer, are enticed. What marks the lurid as vulgar is
not simply a thematics of sex and murder but the blatant
seductivity with which space and depth are constructed, and the
role of music in doing so. Arguably, this space and depth mirror
those of the facades of urban strip architecture, likewise based on a
blatantly communicative and seductive function, the pragmatic
capturing and directing of attention and interest.
As in 12 Angry Men , the credits of the lurid Kiss Me Deadly are
postponed, but in the latter film this delaying is part of an extended
exercise in sustaining an enigmatic uncertainty. In both cases, the
placing of credits and o f music under or over them has much to do
with ideas as to how one should properly enter a film: through the
quiet movement into a world possessing a pre-given integrity; or as
the dramatic encounter with a series of contrived, startling
sensations. In one, the music is flat and marked by a lack of effect;
in the second, it serves as punctuation.
As a naturalist aesthetic flowers in the 1950s, it is accompanied
by movements away from ornamental lettering, and towards the
use of brief, tentative passages of music under the credits.
Naturalism’s insistence on the self-contained integrity of the
fictional world is marked by the banishment or reduction of
elements which might appear extraneous or decorative, which
might transform the film’s entrance into a seductive facade. In
12 Angry Men, writing threatens to interrupt the slow elaboration
o f a social depth. In a lurid crime thriller, such as Kiss Me Deadly,
lettering coheres with music and a highly stylized presentation of
place and character to produce moments of movement between
foreground and background. Both senses of depth are at odds with
the aesthetic of schematic flatness we find in the animated credit
sequences which introduce Teachers Pet, Bachelor in Paradise, and
Do Not Disturb.
These animated credit sequences are often dense intertextual
clusters of influences and traditions, and I have found it impossible
to exhaustively catalogue the influences upon them. Their flatness
has its most obvious roots in the animation style of the UPA studio,
whose minimalism has been taken to signal a modernist turn in the
animated film. One can sketch the history of these credit sequences
as the history of specifically American vulgar modernism, as Jan
224 CINES0N1C: The World of Sound in Film

Hoberman has defined it, and draw a line that runs from studio
animation through the live action, but nevertheless highly graphic
films of Frank Tashlin, or, more generally, through Paramount
studio comedy of the postwar period. While this might provide one
genealogy for the credit styles of Bachelor in Paradise and dozens of
other films, it has little to tell us about Do Not Disturb and
innumerable films which come later, in the mid 1960s.
In different ways, the animated and graphic credit sequences of
the late 1950s and early 1960s draw on a range of influences which
run throughout graphic design in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Bachelor in Paradise uses the rubber stamp effect, popular in high
art design, in its backgrounds, and throughout a longer
compilation of such sequences one sees the influence of
gouachisme, Paul Klee, and, as the decade wears on, Warholian silk
screen, op art, the art nouveau revival, Tiffany glassware, and so on.
Taken individually, these influences suggest the insinuation of
high'art impulses from painting into studio animation, through
the intermediary of commercial and graphic design. When, as in
Bachelor in Paradise, however, they are combined and joined with
the music and lettering, they become instead what Felix Torres,
speaking of suburban architecture, has called a heterogeneous
polyphony: a busy, cluttered mixture of expressive forms. These
sequences participate in the elaboration of a broad, international
graphic vocabulary in the 1960s, whose elements are combined in
innumerable ways in film or record album design, magazine
illustration and elsewhere. The sequence for Do Not Disturb is
explicitly painterly and illustrative, in a style which connotes
Europeanness in a somewhat unspecified but effective way.
A theme song like Henry Mancini s Bachelor in Paradise likewise
offers an interesting condensation of forms. It is, like so many theme
songs of this period, easy listening5, with the intermittent use of
choruses and lush strings, but it is, as well, syncopated and
rhythmic. (It is these qualities of this sort of music which have made
it a desired resource in some contemporary club music. The recent
album, Sacre Bleuy by French house music DJ, Dimitri from Paris,
uses the lushness of Mancini-type music to build soundscapes, just
as the syncopated rhythmic elements offer the foundation over
which dance rhythms are layered). In this film, the lushness of the
 Ornam ent, Entrance and The Theme Son g 225

music marks it as sophisticated and elegant, but its more rhythmic

elements perform other functions. In the first place, they generate
the tensions which make this sequence an effectively attention-
holding opening of the film, producing the sense of excitement and
motion which carry the viewer through the credits and into the live-
action narrative. At the same time, they represent the achievement
of something like a musical equivalent to animation. Philip Brophy
speaks in this respect of an animatic apparatus:

An animatic apparatus would be a similarly generative

machine of effects to that of the cinematic apparatus, but one
that is interested in frames, images, cuts and parts more as
events and occurrences than elements or components; attuned
more to the speed and tempo of fragmentation than the
formal sequencing or structural organization of fragments;
concerned with film and photography more as a transition
than a process; and focused on animation more as a method
of caricature than an apparition of lifelikedness (1991).

Let me turn, now, to a consideration o f the ways in which the

animated credit sequences and theme songs of various genres of the
1960s work to position them upon fields of taste and ambition.
One of the axes along which this positioning occurs is geographical.
These films partake, increasingly, of an emergent cosmopolitan
internationalism. This cosmopolitanism is thematized through the
invocation of ideas of sophisticated adult sexuality, but it is evident
in a whole range of other aspects of these films as well. Increasingly,
the sorts of films in which animated credit sequences are found are
made outside the US, or are coproductions involving one or more
European countries. One finds a circulation of performers from one
country to another: charactor actors, like Terry Thomas or Akim
Tamiroff, will move across films produced in a variety of countries;
American stars will appear in films set in Britain or continental
Europe, production arrangements will involve Italian or French
firms. The animated credit sequence, in the Pink Panther films or
any number of romantic comedies, will itself become an
international assemblage of styles.
In my view, the theme song and credit sequence work across this
226 CINESONIC: The W orld of Sound in Film

body of films to produce a certain unity amidst this diversity of

production circumstances, grounding each film in a distinctively
transnational set of design vocabularies even as their own points of
origin are increasingly dispersed. The credit sequences to the Pink
Panther films, or to a spy film like Danger: Diabolik, exemplify this
recentering, in my view. All these films are complex jumbles of
international coproduction, but the animated form of their credit
sequences and transnational musical vocabulary of their theme
music function to mark them as legitimate, official examples of a
broadly shared, newly cosmopolitan cinematic culture.
The other axis upon which these films come to be positioned,
through their ornamentation, might be termed generational. By
1961, Bob Hope is clearly a residual performer, and, by the mid-
1960s, the first Matt Helm films risk appearing as old-style studio
productions even as they appear to exploit the spy-film boom. The
animated credit sequences of these films, which evoke
contemporary graphic design, fashion photography, or high-art
practice, will serve to mark these films as somehow up-to-date,
anchoring them within contemporary sensibilities which their
narratives and tone will bely.
As David Galbraith has suggested, much middle-class, adult
culture of the 1960s is marked by the attempt to map a sense of
moral and aesthetic modernization onto the signifiers of North
American middle class prosperity. The function of credit sequence
theme songs in supporting this negotiation is interesting. These
songs rarely recount the plot of the film in any direct sense. They
generalize, as most songs do, abstracting specific romantic themes
into broader observations about love and marriage. In conjunction
with the animated credit sequences of these films, however,
something more specific is going on. In Bachelor in Paradise, Mans
Favourite Sport (1964), For Those Who Think Young (1964) and so
many of these films, theme songs and animated sequences manifest
an anthropological bent: they are about the age-old war between
men and women, about the strange mating habits of suburbia. The
schematic character of the animated credit sequences links the
specific plots of their films to broader discourses of sexual play and
pursuit, discourses increasingly saturated with European reference.
The over-riding tendency in these sequences is to
 Ornam ent, Entrance and The Theme Song 227

anthropologize the plotlines which follow: to link specific stories

o f sexual intrigue to broader mythologies which cast the
relationship between men and women as one of unending sexual
pursuit. References to Adam and Eve or the birds and the bees run
through these credit sequences or the songs which accompany
them. The typical form of the sex comedy credit sequence is
marked, as in Teacher's Pet or Bachelor in Paradise by graphic
oppositions between male and female figures and by various sorts
of passage between them. The flatness of these sequences has
much to do with the screen ratios and color schemes of the films
which follow, but it is part of an overall geometrization of
romantic/sexual narratives: as the collision between sexual worlds
or sexual tribes. The credit sequence of a more recent film, He
Said/She Said (1991), plays explicitly with the styles of this period,
just as the film itself manifests similar tendencies towards narrative
schematicization. In the popular culture of the early 1960s, this
geometrization signals a removal o f sexual play from naturalistic
contexts of community or family and its redefinition as the
interplay of independent characters or groups (such as the
bachelor tribe of the big city office).
My interest is less in how these sequences contribute to a films
thematic unity than in how they mark such films with the signifiers
of cosmopolitan sophistication. As suggested, the graphic and
musical forms employed in credit sequences throughout the 1960s
frequently embody design principles more up-to-date than the
generic traditions or styles of the films themselves. These sequences
become, quite literally, deceptive facades which mask their
interiors. At the same time, the acceptance of distinctive graphic
styles and musical motifs throughout the West during the 1960s
will create a significant space of stylistic overlap between the films
of Hollywood and those made in Europe during this period. This
sense of a shared, internationalized culture of adult themes and
transnational graphic and musical forms will become one of the
prominent features of popular culture in the 1960s.
Thanks to Keir Keightley, Johanne Sloan and David Galbraith for
ongoing conversations and advice concerning the issues raised here; and
to Sarah Kozloff, whose own paper on credit sequences has been a source
of inspiration.
228 CINESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

References
Alloway, L, 1971, Violent America, The Movies / 946-1964, The Museum of
Modern Arr, New York.
Brien, G, 1981, Hardboiled America: The Lurid Years o f Paperbacks, Van
Nosfrand Reinhold Company, New York.
Brolin, B C, 1985, Flight o f Fancy: The Banishment and Return o f Ornament,
Academy Editions, London.
Brophy, P, 1991, 'The Animation of Sound' in The Illusion o f life: Essays on
Animation, ed, Alan Cholodenko, Power Publications, Sydney.
Genette, G, 1983, Palimpsestes: la littérature au second degre, Edifions du
seuil, Paris.
Moullet, L, 1991, Les annees 6 0 ou le chant du cygne, Cahiers du cinema,
4 4 3 /4 4 4 .
Torres, F, 1986, Déjà vu. Post et nèo-modernisme: le retour du passé, Editions
Ramsay, Paris.
ALAN WILLIAMS

Many, perhaps most film historians make short work of the five
or so years o f the transition from so-called ‘silent’ cinema, not to
some vague entity called sound cinema’ (for that had been around
in a variety of formats for over a quarter of a century), but to what
I’m afraid well have to call commercially viable fiction and
nonfiction film forms incorporating synchronized, recorded sound.
Please note that I do not mention technology in my definition, for
sync sound recording and playback had been around almost since
the very beginnings of the medium. The major difficulty wasn’t
developing the technology - it was in using technology to create a
viable commercial product, and then marketing it. Hence my
insistence on film form, for cinema industrialists ultimately - if
belatedly and perhaps even accidentally —realized that the failure to
230 C IN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

market sound cinema by Pathé Frères, by Gaumont et Cie, by the

Edison Film Manufacturing Co, by Lee De Forest, and by others,
indicated the need for a somewhat different product to market, as
well as different sales strategies.
That the whole area of product development and marketing is
intimately, though not exclusively, tied up with the issue of film
form (and, at the beginning of the transition, with film forms) is the
all-but-inescapable conclusion that one must reach upon examining
the repeated story of the failure of technically adequate (though
seldom much more than that) sync sound processes to win public
approval. From the Photo-Cinéma-Théâtre (1900) to De Forests
technically sophisticated demonstrations in the early 1920s, the
story was always one of initial brouhaha followed by dashed hopes.
Sound cinema, to use modern terminology, had no legs. Even the
Warner Brothers Vitaphone presentations of 1926-27 did not
deviate strikingly from this pattern until The Jazz Singer (1927).
Then, obviously, the new medium found its legs; but why?

'PRIMITIVE' SOUND CINEMA

Let us briefly examine two pre-jazz Singer sound films, from the
beginning and the end of what I will call the primitive’ phase of
the new medium - and I mean this to be exactly parallel, as will
soon be apparent, to the accepted (if, from some points of view,
inaccurate) label primitive cinema.
First let us consider Alice Guys 1906 Questions Indiscrètes. This
brief film was made with the Gaumont Chronophone process,
which synchronized disc sound recordings with 35mm image
recording, via a common mechanical link from an electric motor.
Playback was by the same mechanical system of synchronization,
with sound amplification provided by a compressed air system.
Amplification was always the big problem before electric recording
and playback, but the Gaumont system functioned well enough to
remain part of the bill at the (then 2800 seat) Gaumont Palace for
about a year, when the company ceased production of sound films.
(Good reviews, good initial public response, no legs.) Now, if the
Gaumont company failed to commercialize the synchronized
sound film, it was not for want of trying. The project was in the
The Raw and the Coded: Sound Conventions and the Transition of the Talkies 23

hands of the organizations immensely talented and energetic head

of production, Alice Guy, who devoted most of her last year in that
position to the process. She had all the resources of the world’s
second largest vertically integrated film company at her disposal.
An extant publicity film (not widely available, but preserved in the
Gaumont corporation archives) shows her shooting a ‘phonoscene’
with impressive studio facilities and technical support team.
Questions indiscrètes is relatively typical of the dominant genre of
the Gaumont phonoscènes: the musical hall number featuring a
well-known singer. The performer, Mayol, delivers a comic musical
dialogue between a man and a woman who live next door in their
apartment house. He begins, Ah, tell me, Rosine my beautiful
neighbor, what was that sighing and moaning I heard from your
place last night?’ And she (Mayol, affecting a few telling ‘swish’
gestures) replies, ‘Oh, that was my cat who caught a mouse’. The
dialogue continues in this coy manner, and eventually the narrator
declares that he burns for her, but Rosine wants no declarations of
love —twenty francs, she says, is a much better way to make her
conquest. Its a funny little song, if you like that sort of thing, but
what is interesting for film history is how Mayol delivers it, and
how Guy and company shoot it.
Mayol sings his comic dialogue as if to an audience in a large
music hall, apparently making eye contact with (imaginary?)
spectators both on the right and the left of the camera. Sometimes
he looks directly at the camera, but it is not his primary ‘viewer’.
He performs in front of a curtain that gives the impression that he
is on the front o f the stage of a theater (though actually he is in the
middle of a large sound stage, with the curtain suspended in the
middle). All of this suggests a somewhat more refined version of
Georges Méliès spectatorial address, though the differences are
important. Méliès and his players perform only for the
camera/spectator, but Mayol seems to perform for others as well.
Guy’s mode of address is rather close to that of Hollywood musical
numbers such as That's Entertainment in The Bandwagon with their
persistent invocation of a possible spectator just to the left or the
right of the camera. Questions Indiscrètes remains relentlessly
presentational, rather than representational; it is, in other words,
primitive cinema’ of the sync sound variety - however much
232 CJNESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

Mayol downplays the fact that he performs, in reality, only for us,
the film spectators.
Now let us move ahead twenty years, to one of the last
primitive’ sound films. To give its full title, as audiences first saw
it: Warner Brothers Pictures Inc and the Vitaphone Corporation have
the honor to announce [new title card] Hon. Will H Hays, President
o f the Ration Picture Producers & Distributors o f America, Inc., who
will address you. This was the first film on the first Vitaphone
program in August of 1926, and Hays’ speech was indeed a fitting
way of marking the introduction of the new’ technology, though
not necessarily in the way that the Warner Brothers intended. It
stands, rather, as a kind of summa of sound cinemas primitive’
phase - or, to borrow Tom Gunnings formulation, we could call it
one point of cumulation of the cinema of sound attractions. It is
not a film that many people take seriously today; modern audiences
tend to giggle.
But why do we laugh, today, at poor Will? He was a very
successful politician - with an interesting and effective
subspeciality in dirty tricks (not at all the empty-headed stuffed
shirt some cinema histories make of him) - and a respected orator.
O f course, his oratorical style belongs to a long dead school, and
so most modern viewers find his slow rhythm and his use of his
hands, in particular, rather risible. But a large part of the problem
is not at all his fault, but the result of the film’s relentlessly
presentational (as opposed to representational) mode of address. It
shares this trait with Questions Indiscrètes and with all works with
apparently ‘live’ synchronized sound recording (though many
were in fact prerecorded) until The fazz Singer. And shorn of any
formal or generic context that might make such presentational
address acceptable to modem spectators, the intertitle the Hon.
Will H. Hays makes poor Will Hays look foolish for reasons not at
all of his own making,

EFFECTING AMERGER
It is necessary to specify apparently live’ sound films in speaking
of the 1920s, for Warners, following in the footsteps of Lee De
Forest, had split its sound film production into two distinct parts.
The Raw and the Coded: Sound Conventions and the Transition of the Talkies

A! lofson in The Ja zz Singer

There were the primitive works addressed directly to the audience,

which formally represented little or no advance since the 1900s.
Then there were the post-synchronized fiction features, which
employed more recent sound accompaniment practices and (in
sound and image) representational strategies. Historians of cinema
typically pay much more attention to the ‘primitive’ works, because
they stand more clearly in the technological line o f development of
the sound cinema. But both are important, and even more
important than either considered separately is the fact that slowly,
over time, they manage to merge and cross-fertilize.
Warner Brothers at least did not fail spectacularly with the
Vitaphone, as had Lee De Forest, but they didn’t have a big hit on
their hands either. Purely technical improvements - electronic
recording, amplification, and sound reproduction - arguably
explain the real, if tepid success of the Vitaphone’s first year. But
no-one rushed in to compete except for William Fox, who had
bought sound patents largely to gain a competitive advantage for
his company’s newsreels (an area in which there was cutthroat
competition in the 1920s). Fox’s programs, like Warners’, carefully
segregated sound short subjects (the newsreels could and did have
234 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

‘live5 sound recording) from the feature films, which were shot
silent and synchronized under the direction of Hugo Riesenfeld
(who had provided the same service for Lee De Forests abortive
attempts to commercialize sound cinema).
The big change, of course, came about a year after the ghostly
image of Will Hays first gave his welcoming remarks to New York
cinema spectators —with The Jazz Singer. Few major films have
been cited so often, so inaccurately, and so unsympathetically.
Some of these errors have been corrected: almost everyone with a
modicum of learning knows that The Jazz Singer was not the first
talking picture. Nor is it, however, a so-called ‘silent5 film with its
only dialogue to be found, left there by an improvisational
accident, in the musical numbers. (At least one spoken line was
obviously pre-scripted: interrupting Jack Robins song, his father
yells ‘Stop!’ and singlehandedly, or so it seems, moves the film back
into muteness. The effect is absolutely electric, for a viewer who has
any sympathy at all with the film.)
The Jazz Singer is the founding moment of modern sound
cinema for a number of interrelated reasons. It is, first of all, the
first text in a new, though doomed, film form: the part talkie'.
Modern historians mostly find the part-tallde a historical curiosity,
assuming that the Warner Brothers continued (with other studios)
to produce them because of their extreme overall conservatism
and, most specifically, their tight purses. This may or may not be
so, but the fact remains that it was the part-talkie, and not any
TOO percent talking picture’ that finally sold mass audiences on
sound cinema. The questions of why and how it did this remain
highly frustrating.
I have made one attempt to provide some answers in an article
in Rick Altmans anthology Sound Theory/Sound Practice, but here
is one observation that isn't in that article, and that I now believe
to be of crucial importance: if The Jazz Singer is the founding text,
not only of the part-talkie form, but also the backstage musical
genre, and even - as I will argue —of all modern sound cinema, it
is to some extent because of its abandonment of the ‘primitive’
mode of spectator address. Perhaps, more accurately, one may
speak of the merging (and submerging) of the presentational mode
into the representational mode of the silent5narrative feature. The
The Raw and the Coded: Sound Conventions and the Transition of the Talkies 235

Jazz Singer has, in two words, something that no one had yet
audio-spectated in fiction films: a diegetic audience.
That is, after all, one big thing that makes us - or at least, me —
uncomfortable in early works like Questions Indiscrètes and Will
Hays. The performers address us directly, but we know that they
‘know’ that we aren’t there at the moment they address us. This
troubling situation is resolved by the inclusion of just one spectator
- mom, in the Blue Skies number in The Jazz Singer, for example,
or even an absent, possible spectator in one number in Fox’s Janet
Gaynor vehicle and monster hit of 1929, Sunnyside Up. Now, the
presentational mode of address rarely goes completely away in
musicals —if it did, they would lose much of their often fragile
charm - but The Jazz Singer showed how it could be tamed,
brought into contact with the representational fictional world of
‘classic’ narrative cinema without completely disrupting it.

THE PART-TALKIE: ITS VIRTUES AND ITS HERITAGE

Warners continued to make part-talkies after The Jazz Singer, as
did most other studios. In large measure, of course, this was in
order to have a product that could be shown (in minimally altered
versions) in the many cinemas still not wired for sound. But the
fact remains that the studios could program these works in their
flagship (sound) theaters because audiences seem to have liked this
hybrid form. Warners smash hit o f 1928 was not its first all-talkie,
The Lights o f New York — though that film did well - but The
Singing Fool, another A1 Jolson part talkie that confirmed, for those
who still doubted, that The Jazz Singer was not a fluke. (In todays
more crudely honest marketing environment, The Singing Fool
would have been called Jazz Singer II. One can imagine the story
conference: ‘O K so in the first film we killed off his dad, so why
don’t we kill off his son in the sequel!’)
The Singing Fool is even less known than The Jazz Singer, which
goes a long way toward explaining the curious gaps in the standard
versions of the story of the transition to the talkies. It should be
seen and studied, first of all, as an example of a post-Jazz Singer
part'talkie. After all, the form was surprisingly long-lasting (four
years, including its crucial European phase) and produced some
236 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

major works (Clair’s Sous les toits de Paris [1931] being the most
celebrated). It also helps to shed light on the very curious career of
A1 jolson, whose two part-talkies were both smash hits, but whose
career began to decline the moment he appeared in ail-talkies.
Beyond that, the film can also illustrate, though it cannot help to
prove (alas, nothing can) the argument that I will make here: that
all modern cinema descends from the part-talkie, and not from the
early ‘real’ sound films like Lights of New York or (in France, to take
only one example of a national cinema that followed in
Hollywood’s footsteps) Le Collier de la reine (1929).
The Singing Fool reverses the proportions of The Jazz Singer. It
is a part-talkie that has more sync sequences than post-sync
sequences: only five dialogue scenes use intertitles; the rest are all
spoken. Large sections of the ‘silent’ sequences do not depend
much on dialogue, as witness the film’s opening scene, set in a night
club and featuring an impressive moving (and subjective!) camera.
Warners was, obviously and for the first time, aspiring to enter the
FW Murnau/best mobile camera prestige sweepstakes. This they
could finally do, as a newly prosperous studio. But in 1928, it was
still not possible for them to move the cabinet-bound sync sound
camera; shooting silent and post-synchronizing was the obvious
solution.
The Singing Fool is, stylistically, a remarkably more ambitious
film than The Jazz Singer (and it is miles ahead of Lights o f New
York). Whereas The Jazz Singer uses relentless shot-reverse shot
configurations for its dialogue sequences, The Singing Fool is much
more varied, in sync and post-sync sequences alike. The works
stylistic range, as one might imagine, extends into different areas in
the two types of filmmaking: camera movement, for example, in
the silent’ parts, and expressive composition in depth in the
‘talking’ scenes. This range of possibilities is clearly one of the
advantages of sticking for the moment, in 1928, with the
part-talkie format. Also, the part-talkie form allows crucial
experiments in the area of transition between sync and non-sync
sequences - for these must not be too obviously distinct, and shifts
from one to the other must be accomplished smoothly. All this not
simply to satisfy the bizarre requirements of the part-talkie form,
but to create the modern narrative sound cinema. For the modern
The Raw and the Coded: Sound Conventions and the Transition of the Talkies 237

fiction film doesn’t simply descend from the part-talkie (as I will
argue); virtually all films from 1931 or so onward are part-talkies.
To this day, few commercial narrative sound films (experimental
exceptions like Vivre sa vie [1962] tend to prove the rule) are
exempt from the part-talkies alternation of sync and non-sync
sequences. We have become so familiar with this format, and it has
been disguised so well, that we do not recognize the kinship
between, for example, modern action pictures’ and The Singing
Fool or even The Jazz Singer. If one accepts this argument, film
historians have been incredibly misguided in concentrating their
attention on the relatively few ‘100 percent talkies’ from 1928 and
1929. They should instead be looking at part-talkies and, as I will
further argue, at the truly neglected film form of the transition, the
form without a name: the films shot entirely 'silent’ and
post-synchronized with music and effects tracks for presentation in
theaters wired for sound.
But before moving on to consider a few of these, let us briefly
consider one of these TOO percent talkies’, Warner Brothers’
Disraeli (1929, directed by Alfred E Green). Though the very brief
credits do not inform us of this, this film is in essence, a
Vitaphoning’ of one of George Arliss’ great Broadway successes, a
play which had already been adapted as a ‘silent’ work in 1921. The
opening few sequences of the talking version will suffice as an
example of this sort of work. Each scene is introduced by a tide
card; transitions are obviously difficult; and the titles serve the same
function as the scene identifications in theater programs. Within
each scene, fictional time is relentlessly continuous. Each cut is a
match cut, and the effect is very much that of three-camera video.
This is hardly surprising, since each scene was shot with two or
three cameras running simultaneously, and all cuts were between
different views of the same master scene.
The Singing Fool, one year older than Disraeli and with all of its
dialogue intertitles, is much more advanced in almost every way,
and much more in the direct line of the evolution of the modern
sound film. When something occurs in the domain of the 100
percent talkie, it probably was previously done in a part-talkie. This
is almost certainly so for the innovations in Mamoulian’s Applause
(1929), particularly its celebrated tracking shots. Certainly, the
238 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

tracking in Applause is impressive from a purely technical point of

view, but it is worth noting that this aspect of the film owes much
to the opening of The Singing Fool. What made Mamoulian want
to track, and what made his producers give him the resources to
work out the effect? The most likely candidate, I would argue, was
Warners’ and Jolsons monster hit from the year before.

THE FORM WITHOUT A NAME

The last section of my paper is intended to suggest some of the
questions raised by the study of the synchronized music and effects
tracks issued with silent’ films from 1927 - of which the
best-known example in cinema studies is Murnau & Foxs 1927
work Sunrise. (That film was not a big hit, incidentally, for reasons
having nothing to do with its characters’ muteness, or its
soundtrack. Borzage’s Seventh Heaven (1927), which has the same
star, Janet Gaynor, and an equally elaborate soundtrack, is the film
to study if one believes in commercial success as an index of
audience approval.) I will concentrate here on M GM largely
because the Turner organization has been diligently restoring many
of the transitional films from that studio.
MGM is interesting in a number of ways. Because the studio
delayed full entry into sync sound production as long as it could,
they seem to have made the largest number of post-synchronized
silents of any of the integrated majors. They also were the most
systematic in reissuing some of their early hits, such as Vidors The
Big Parade (1925), with synchronized tracks. But M GM was also,
as far as I can determine, the studio with a tin ear for music -
outside of the genre of the musical at any rate (and, for that matter,
often within it). So they often fumbled, both during the transition
and afterwards, and this makes the studio’s works perversely
interesting - one can learn a lot from what today seem to be
mistakes. In particular, one can see how utterly wo/z-obvious were
the conventions of musical accompaniment that were to evolve for
the sound film, at least in the first few years of the new medium.
Let us consider the opening few moments of WS Van Dyke’s
White Shadows in the South Seas (1928). This is a sort of Flaherty-
wannabe with a thesis that white men have corrupted the South
The Raw and the Coded: Sound Conventions and the Transition of the Talkies 239

Pacific by casting their ‘white shadows’ on it. If we listen to the

soundtrack and note its relations with the image track, what is
perhaps most striking - for ears accustomed to classical sound film
musical conventions - is the comparatively large musical units
employed. The post-1933 leitmotif score employs musical units of
small dimensions, anywhere from three to six notes (Kong’s theme
in the 1933 production of King Kong for example) to two to four
measures (the Tara theme in Gone With The Wind , 1939). White
Shadows music is not only in larger units, but it is notably
repetitive, making even bigger musical entities out of them.
Obviously, one reason for this is that, at this time in film history, an
absence of music was not an option. (Or were there certain possible
exceptions? We should note the remarkable battle sequence of the
M GM 1929 reissue of The Big Parade — over fifteen minutes with
only sound effects, mostly machine gun and mortar shell noises.)
A major drawback of these large units, however, is that going
from one to another is time-consuming and clumsy (you have to
wait, as it were, for a musical unit to come to a satisfactory stopping
point). Furthermore, their duration makes them difficult to
employ for associations with specific characters. Through the study
of post-synchronized ‘silents’, we can see (or, rather, hear) the
musical units begin to get shorter and more flexible - or at least this
is my impression from the small sample that I have studied —and
preparing the emergence of leitmotif construction in about 1933.
Another, and in some ways more noteworthy aspect of the
accompaniment to White Shadows is how the various materials are
associated with fictional elements, given that they are not
character- or even situation-specific. The music in this opening
sequence has a descriptive, even an ideological function: it
distinguishes whites’ from natives’. In doing this, it even specifies
one character (the alcoholic doctor) who seems to be white’ but is
actually, in the films conceptual scheme, on the side of the noble
savages. This simple distinction is one of the two major functions
of the soundtrack music; the other is the anchoring of geographical
associations - the native’ music is what we would expect from the
South Seas. (The two functions are obviously related.) The music
has no time to descend to the level of character, even for a
putatively tragic figure like the doctor. One can put this even more
240 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

strongly: in Michel Chions terms, this music - like that in a great

many MGM transitional sound films - is anempathetic rather than
empathetic: its function is more intellectual than emotive.
White Shadows shows one use of music, but its method of
symbolically parsing the characters according to geography and
belief systems is (as far as I can determine) relatively rare. It
represents one of the many experiments in musical and narrative
forms that are to be found in the neglected works of the transition
years. If Van Dykes film is relatively unusual, my next example
represents another dead end that was tinkered with much more
widely: the use of popular vocal music with sung lyrics to
accompany moments of high emotion in domestic dramas (or
‘family melodramas’, though I think the industry term woman’s
picture’ is a more accurate label for most of these). Some striking
examples are to be found in the Fox synchronized silents’, such as
Street Angel (1928), but I will stick with M GM because these works
are less well-known.
For modern audio-viewers, the effect of having to read dialogue
intertitles while hearing different words sung by an unseen,
unknown vocalist is truly maddening. What is so interesting about
such works is that no one seems to have had this reaction in 1928.
Presumably this was because it had been a fairly common practice
in some theaters for the ‘live’ accompaniment o f ‘silent’ films before
the arrival of commercially viable sync sound. One of the most
elaborate and interesting cases now available for study is the
synchronized sound version of the Joan Crawford vehicle Our
Dancing Daughters (1928). It is no exaggeration to say that, with its
original synchronized accompaniment, this film is a radically
different experience from the silent5 versions that still circulate
with organ accompaniment (added several decades later). The score
is peppered with popular songs, in renditions that range from brief
quotation to extended theme-and-variation treatment. Three of
them are also sung by nondiegetic vocalists, a mode which
alternates with ‘soundtrack5orchestral music laced with occasional
sound effects (eg, a telephone bell). Heard today, the soundtrack
isn’t altogether satisfactory, particularly in terms of the balance of
the musical materials. One of the songs, Lonely Little Bluebird, is
sung only once; another, I Love You Now as I Loved You Then, is
The Raw and the Coded: Sound Conventions and the Transition of the Talkies 241

sung twice (plus once, in the background, by unseen diegetic

singers), while the third, Broken Hearted, ends up being sung on
five separate occasions. To modern ears, at least those of this author,
no song can stand such over-exposure; at a certain point one wants
to scream, ‘Enough, already!’.
I Love You Now, on the other hand, gets a treatment more like
that accorded to songs in the ‘classical’ sound film. Its chorus is
heard, orchestrally, behind the credits; almost immediately
afterwards, it is subjected to light-hearted orchestral variations in the
first scenes with Diana (Joan Crawford) and her mother, and then
Diana with her suitors. Later, it is sung in the background at the first
party sequence (when Diana first dances with Ben Baines); then,
midway through the film, it emerges fullblown —verse and chorus
- sung by an offscreen tenor, behind the rather torrid (for the day)
love scene between Diana and Ben by the seaside. But at that point
I Love You Now, too, comes into conflict with modern conventions.
In retrospect, Our Dancing Daughters, like so many of the post­
synchronized silents’ of the transition era, seems to have been made
to please the admirers and practitioners of the dramatic theories of
Bertolt Brecht. The melody of I Love You Now is, if not downright
anempathetic in Chion’s terms, certainly not nearly as empathetic as
we would expect in such a scene. (There are also, of course, the usual
difficulties listening to sung lyrics while reading intertitles).
What we need to remember in order to understand how this
scene would have worked for audiences in 1929, is that the
emotional content of the song —in terms of its use in this scene -
resides largely in the lyrics and not in the melody or in the
particular musical treatment it is given in this scene. Purely musical
elements seem to have been arranged largely for the advantage and
the convenience of the singer; he gets to end the chorus on an
impressively high note with a slight retard. At this point in the
fiction, however, the lovemaking had been broken off, and a feeling
of sadness or anxiety would be more appropriate, narratively. There
is worse, however: if one listens carefully to the lyric, one finds that
it anticipates plot developments by several steps. The chorus begins
‘I loved you then as I love you now’, then speaks of the singer’s
separation from his beloved, then reverses the initial words to ‘I
love you now as I loved you then’. So the lyrics are emotional (in a
242 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

way that the music per se is not), but they speak not of the present,
but of emotions yet to come in the story.

LEARNING/CREATING THE
CONVENTIONS OF THE SOUND FILM
The overall lesson of the post-synchronized silents’, I would
argue, is that the American sound cinema has to learn, not exactly
how to be empathetic, but how to be more empathetic (to
encourage more ‘identification’ with characters and with narrative
developments) and with what materials (melody, not words in the
music; short forms rather than long ones). Empathy does not seem
to come easily, which makes for an interesting commentary on
so-called silent’ feature filmmaking as well as on the classical sound
narrative that grows out of it and consolidates itself in the
remarkably brief period from 1927 to 1931.
Historians sometimes speak of filmmakers ‘learning’
conventions; here it is probably more appropriate to speak of
creating and/or adapting them (from silent’ practices). Here are a
few basic principles that I would argue can be seen emerging in
these years:
1 There will be a diegetic audience (real or imaginary) for all
musical and other performances. A question for further
research: to what extent is this true of animated and mixed
animation-pluS'live action works such as Max and Dave
Fleischers Time On My Hands (1931, with Ethel Merman
and a Betty Boop prototype)?
2 Music should follow the flow of the action relatively closely
and for this short, musical units are better than long ones.
The normal landmark cited here is Max Steiner’s score for
King Kong, but can one trace this further back?
3 In general, empathetic music is more commercially viable
than nonempathetic music. On the basis of what I’ve seen
and heard, M GM is the studio most resistant to this lesson,
whereas Warners and Fox learnt it first.
4 Music should be non-continuous but a notable presence in the
sound fiction film. There must be stretches with no music,
and stretches with music. The early ‘100 percent’ talkies had
 'I

The Raw and the Coded: Sound Conventions and the Transition of the Talkies 243

far too little music; the synchronized silents’ had too much.
The 'right’ balance seems to grow out of the part-talkie.
5 Diegetic and non-diegetic sound must be distinguished;
generally by adding a bit of reverb to diegetic elements. All
things being equal, they will not, however, be at different
volume levels. This is the mistake’ heard so often in the early
part-talkies and synchronized ‘silents’: distinguishing
diegetic effects by having them heard at lower volume levels
than the ‘soundtrack’ music.
6 Although in theory most things that can be done with image
recording can be done with sound recording (eg, fades in and
out, edits, etc), in practice some of them will distract or
confuse the spectator. This is particularly true of some
experiments in sound superimposition in early Fox works
such as Sunrise and, most notoriously, in Abel Gances La
Fin du monde (1931). The latter, in particular, is a film that
should be seen by anyone who thinks that there was
anything aesthetically or technologically inevitable about the
way that the modern sound cinema evolved, so remarkably
quickly, into the form/s that have lasted until the present day
with so few basic changes.
RICK ALTMAN
w i>: 1 1 II

•as'f-c!
Most writing on film music has concentrated on the late silent
and classical sound cinema practice of underscoring a film
segment’s narrative or emotive content with light classical music in
the European tradition. Historiographically, this approach to film
accompaniment falls short on three separate counts:
1 It neglects the auditory practices of early cinema, thereby
failing to recognize cinemas investment in a competing
popular song tradition.
2 It unjustifiably limits our notion of the principles operative
in musical accompaniment to those characterized by
European-inspired light classical music.
3 It oversimplifies the complex dialectic between disparate
musical traditions that undergirds the history of film music.
These three shortcomings will structure the discussion that
follows.

ILLUSTRATED SONGS AND

NICKELODEON ACCOMPANIMENT
Traditional accounts of silent film sound have assumed that
early film exhibition borrowed its sound practices directly from the
nineteenth-century theater, and thus featured musical
accompaniment much like that of the later silent film period.1
Treating nickelodeons as the first theaters specifically dedicated to
 N icke lod e on s and Po p u lar Son g 245

films, critics typically assimilate nickelodeons and nickelodeon

music to the purpose-built film theaters of the teens and twenties.
However, a closer look at nickelodeon programs suggests radically
different conclusions. As facade photographs readily attest, the
highlight of many nickelodeon programs was the illustrated song,
a live entertainment featuring a popular song illustrated by colorful
lantern slides. Accompanied by the piano, the singer would
typically warble two verses and two choruses, at which point the
audience would be invited to join in the chorus. First invented in
the mid-1890s, illustrated song slides grew rapidly in popularity as
sheet music publishers recognized their publicity value, exhibitors
exploited their hand-colored brilliance, and audiences appreciated
the chance to sing along. With the rise of nickelodeons, illustrated
song slides became a standard part of the average program. Since
the projectors of the period served double duty for moving pictures
and lantern slides, song slides offered a convenient and inexpensive
manner to occupy audiences while the film was being changed. In
fact, given the enormous popularity of song slides, it would perhaps
be more accurate to say that films provided a convenient respite for
the singer between song slide performances.
Song slides held their popularity until around 1913, when a
second film projector was installed in most projection booths,
allowing films to alternate with films rather than with slides. The
typical illustrated song slide set included a title slide made from the
sheet-music cover, twelve to sixteen live-model slides
corresponding to two verses and two choruses, and a chorus lyrics
slide that remained on screen while the audience belted out the
chorus, often many times over. At first distributed gratis by music
publishers as a form of publicity, slide sets were eventually sold or
rented for modest sums. Ads for song slides appeared regularly in
trade journals like Views and Films, Moving Picture World and View
Photographer. Produced by small, undercapitalized companies such
as Chicago Transparency Company, A L Simpson, DeWitt C
Wheeler, or Scott and Van Altena, song slides featured many actors
and actresses who would become familiar silent film figures
(Francis X Bushman, Alice Joyce, Mabel Normand, Anita Stewart,
Norma Talmadge, Florence Turner, Lillian Walker).
Sung on the vaudeville stage by big-name song illustrators like
246 CINESONIC: The W orld of Sound In Film

Ada Jones and Meyer Cohen, or teams like Maxwell & Simpson,
song slides would later give their first chances to the likes of George
Jessel and Al Jolson. In nickelodeons, however, the singer would
often be the owner’s wife, daughter, or niece. There are many
reasons why illustrated song slides have been neglected. Even when
they weren’t broken by the intense heat of projection, the extremely
fragile 3 V4" x 4" glass slides were often simply thrown away like
yesterday s publicity. Considered as a different medium, song slides
have been ignored by major film archives and mainline film
scholarship, and are almost never shown as part of a film program.
Conversely, the few heroic collectors who have preserved song
slides so that future generations may experience them - people like
John W Ripley and Margaret and Nancy Bergh - are not film
scholars and thus tend to show song slides within a lantern-slide
context rather than in conjunction with films.
Our ignorance of illustrated song slides and their relationship
to film exhibition has seriously compromised our ability to make
sense of the nickelodeon period. The active presence of illustrated
song slides in nickelodeon programs suggests many different
avenues of research. What effect did the illustrated song preference
for ballads and other narrative forms have on film’s mid-aughts
turn toward narrative? Is contemporary songwriter Charles K
Harris right to claim that song slide scenarios provided the basic
model for ‘the moving picture play scenario’? Before Hollywood
‘invented’ background projection, long before television devised
the blue screen process, song slides had blazed the trail with a black
background technique making it possible to combine studio-shot
interiors with location exteriors. How did the compositing
techniques developed by the song slide industry influence
Hollywood’s constitutive foreground/background separation? The
early teens have been seen as a watershed, with the spread of large
purpose-built theaters, the installation of a second projector, and
the rise of feature films, but what of the active repression of a
cinema of attractions through industry criticism of song-slide-
spawned audience participation? These and other basic questions
are raised by the intermediality of nickelodeon programs.
When we consider the impact of illustrated songs from the
standpoint of sound practice, however, a totally different set of
 N icke lod e on s and Po p u lar Song 247

issues arises. Close inspection of the lantern-slide images that song

slide manufacturers accepted as appropriate matches for song lyrics
suggests that nickelodeon accompaniment standards may have
been very different from later criteria. As Film Index insists in 1911,
‘it is to be questioned whether a picture of a bird on its nest truly
illustrates a line to the effect that the hero will return when the
birdies nest again, but usually the slide gets a hand, the women
murmur “Ain’t it sweet” and the slide-maker makes some more of
the same sort because he is in business to fill a demand, not to
furnish an art education with each set of slides’. Unlike later
practice, which plays up the emotive value of musical texture, song
slides and early accompaniment often depend solely on verbal
matches. Even a deaf man could make song slides, since only the
lyrics count. In fact a deaf man did make song slides: Edward Van
Altena’s partner John D Scott had been deaf since the age of four.
A closer look at extant information on prewar sound practices
bears out the suspicion that early film accompaniment may have
been directly influenced by illustrated songs, film’s audiovisual
partner in the nickelodeon business. Repeatedly, we find that
during this period producers recommend popular songs to
accompany their films. For example, the Edison company suggests
the following familiar tunes to accompany the 1910 production, A
Western Romance: I f a Girl Like You Loved a Boy Like Me, School
Days, Im Going Away, On the Rocky Road to Dublin , Pony Boy,
Temptation Rag, Im a Bold Bad Man , Wahoo, So Long, Mary, and
Everybody Works but Father (1 9 1 0 ,p ll).A s late as 1912 a forward-
looking showman like Roxy (S L Rothapfel), even in an upscale
theater like Chicago’s Lyric, would lace his program with such old
favorites as Auld Lang Syne, A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,
He’s A folly Good Fellow, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, Oh You Beautiful
, .2
Doll Annie Laurie, Rosary, and Good-bye As Clyde Martin
confirms in Film Index (1910, p27), ‘half of the [film] musicians in
the country ...will pick up a publisher’s catalogue and get names of
songs that correspond with the scenes portrayed’ [my italics]. To
connect the music to the image, nickelodeon accompaniment
depended heavily not only on popular songs, but specifically on
their titles and lyrics. One particularly adept house pianist, affirms
Martin, ‘kept the house in laughter with his selections in
248 C1NES0NIC: The W orld of Sound in Film

accompaniment to pictures of a flirtation. He made the Lothario

say: ‘There’s something about you dear that appeals to me; my
wife’s gone to the country —won’t you come over to my house?
You’re just my style. I like you. How’d you like to spoon with me?’
The fellow’s wife broke in upon the flirtation, then left him in a
rage. The piano sympathized: Gee, I Wish I Had My Old Girl Back
Again. Nearly a century later, we still recognize in this account the
titles of no less than eight popular songs, evoked seriatim to
reinforce the narrative presented by the image. Far from simply
recycling nineteenth-century melodrama music and prefiguring the
accompaniment style typically applied to silent features,
nickelodeons depended heavily on popular song.

THE STRUCTURE OF POPULAR SONGS

AND 'CLASSICAL' MUSIC
For decades, scholars have neglected illustrated songs and the
nickelodeons popular song aesthetic. In order to revive that
tradition, and to understand its continuing role throughout the
history of cinema, we first need to understand the differences that
separate popular songs from other familiar film music styles. While
a few pages are insufficient to represent decades of music
scholarship adequately, it will nevertheless prove helpful to have at
our disposal a clear delineation - even at the risk of
oversimplification - of the characteristics that differentiate popular
song from the music used for late silent films and through-
composed sound fdms. For simplicity’s sake, I will adopt Royal S
Browns use of the term ‘classical’, in quotation marks, to designate
the various types of music included in the latter category.3 Film
music critics typically stress the Wagnerian tendency of classical’
film music to employ repeated leitmotifs and themes in connection
with specific characters or situations/ While not denying the
importance of this technique, I will here concentrate instead on
more basic aspects of ‘classical’ music. For the purposes of a
comparison with popular song, it is essential to recognize the
fundamental muteness, indeterminacy , inconspicuousness, and
expansibility of classical’ music, along with the effects that these
characteristics have on listeners.
 N icke lod e on s and Po p u lar Song

Muteness
Though classical’ music may have titles or even lyrics, it begins
to relinquish its classical’ qualities when audiences attend too
closely to those words. Whereas popular songs often match images
by virtue of their verbal content, classical’ music achieves
audiovisual matching by a more nebulous parallelism between the
emotive connotations of particular musical textures and the
content of specific image sequences.

Indeterminacy
Whereas the title and lyrics of popular song usually
overdetermine meaning, the signification of classical’ music is far
more dependent on the images and situations to which it is linked.

Inconspicuousness
By this term I do not mean simply that classical’ music is
unheard’, as Claudia Gorbman says of narrative film music.
Gorbmans -point relates to the way ‘classical’ music is deployed in
the cinema, whereas I am referring to a fundamental difference in
saliency between wordless music and popular songs. Because
language is processed differently from purely instrumental music
(even when only a reminiscence of that language remains, as with
an instrumental version o f a popular song), classical’ music is by its
very nature inconspicuous, even before it is inconspicuously
applied to Hollywood films.

Expansibility
In terms of its difference from popular song, classical’ music’s
expansibility looms large. Though several practices contribute to
this feature, the variability and occasional unpredictability of
classical’ phrase length underlie all the others. Dominant among
classical’ music’s multiple expansion methods are development by
variation, minor or modal treatment, change of instrumentation,
modulation, and transfer to a different register or volume range.
‘Classical’ music also uses several devices to delay closure, such as
 250 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound In Film

deceptive cadences, in which a V-Vl harmonic structure extends

the piece rather than closing it off through the expected V-I
authentic’ cadence. In addition, multilayered composition
practices stressing harmony over melody militate against
simultaneous resolution of all musical tensions, thus facilitating
extension of musical phrases. These techniques make it relatively
easy for classical’ music to proceed continuously for any required
period, without any clear stopping point.

Quiet listening and mental involvement

Though classical’ music depends on the same drive toward
tonic resolution as does popular song, its lack of repetitive and
predictable closure diffuses rather than unifies audience reaction.
1 Because it operates on multiple levels, classical’ music rarely offers
1 a separable hummable melody, and almost never provides singable
■ lyrics. It thus encourages quiet and attentive listening rather than
active participation. As such, classical’ music involves audiences
mentally rather than bodily, inviting them to internalize rather
K than externalize their reactions. The convention of silent listening
to concert music, established a full century prior to classical’
mI music’s debut in film exhibition,5 provides strong cultural
reinforcement for this tendency.
Anyone familiar with the history of music will of course be able
to cite exceptions to these general principles, but many apparent
exceptions are actually exceptions that prove the rule’, ie, moments
where classical’ music edges so close to popular song that it is in
fact treated by audiences as if it were song.
Romantic piano concertos provide a useful example. It is
certainly true that the dominance of melody in, say, Tchaikovsky’s
First or Rachmaninoff’s Second is sufficient to start audiences
humming (or perhaps even singing Tonight We Love or Full Moon
And Empty Arms, the lyrics provided by Hollywood). But it is this
very indebtedness to the popular song norm of melodic dominance
that has led many critics to disdain those compositions and their
popular nature. Even highbrow concert music at times borrows
features from popular song. Conversely, when a studio arranger like
M GM ’s Roger Edens needed bridging music, he would often create
 N icke lod e on s and Po p u lar Song 251

it by applying the principles of classical’ music to melody material

derived from one of the film’s songs. In other words, neither the
above principles of classical’ music nor the following popular song
strategies should be seen as insulated from each other. Not only is
a certain amount of interpenetration between the two models
possible, but the dialectic connecting the two is of paramount
importance; it will be treated in the last part of this article. Whereas
classical’ music is usually mute, indeterminate, inconspicuous,
expansible, and mentally involving, popular song depends on
language, predictability, singability, rememberability, and active
physical involvement.

Linguistic dependence
The musical aspects of popular songs may suggest emotive or
narrative connotations just as classical’ music does, but musical
modes of meaning-making are typically overwhelmed in popular
song by direct linguistic communication. Titles and lyrics so
dominate public evaluation of a popular songs emotive or narrative
content that it is rare for a song to signify separately from its
linguistic content.

Predictability
Built out of standard four- or eight-bar units, popular songs reach
rhythmic closure at regular intervals. Popular songs reinforce
rhythmic regularity through linguistic structures, such as the
placement of rhyming lyrics at the end of phrases. Based on a
standardized pattern of melodic repetition (usually an aaba
arrangement), popular songs establish and satisfy audience
expectations of a regular return to familiar melodic material. Because
they systematically employ harmonic progressions built around a
standard V-I harmonic pattern, popular songs establish and satisfy
audience expectations of predictable harmonic closure. Not only do
popular songs privilege repetition and regularity, but they align
linguistic and musical systems to take advantage of multiple
simultaneous closure cues at the end of every line and verse/chorus.
252 CINESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

Singability
Popular songs are hummable because they imply reducibility to
their melody, which is carefully devised to fit into a standard
accessible frequency range. They are singable because they are
written with easily pronounced lyrics arranged in convenient and
readily understandable breath groups reproducing common speech
patterns. Careful matching of music and lyrics further reinforces
popular songs singable nature.

Rememberability
Composed of short, standardized, and repeated components,
popular songs are easy to remember, both musically and
linguistically. Through repetition of verse and refrain, the song is
easily taught to even the most unmusical audiences. This return to
familiar material develops anticipation of further repetition that
popular songs amply satisfy.

Active physical involvement

Predictable, singable, rememberable, and apparently reducible
to melody and lyrics, popular songs typically inspire toe-tapping,
whistling, humming, and singing along. Whereas classical’ music
traditionally fosters quiet audiences, popular song encourages
active participation.
O f course, complex instrumental arrangements of popular
songs sometimes instead treat their initial material in a classical’
manner, just as classical’ music at times calls on popular song
attributes. By and large, however, the tendencies presented here are
strong and clearly differentiated.
When they are used in association with images, classical’ music
and popular song reveal yet another important difference. Because
it has an obvious coherence, with each line clearly connected to the
overall structure and a universally expected musical cadence and
linguistic conclusion, popular song never allows listeners of the
songs individual parts to escape from the whole. As such, the
popular song always remains a coherent block that appears to be
authored separately from whatever images it accompanies. Quite to
 N icke lod e on s and P o p u la r Song 253

the contrary, the meandering capacity of classical’ music makes it

able to lead listeners away from any overall structure and into a
realm where the music seems to be generated not by some global
vision, but by the image at hand. 'Classical’ music thus easily
convinces us that it is authored not by a composer, but by the image.
In this sense, the popular song aurally recalls the discursive nature of
an early cinema of attractions, while classical’ music fits especially
well into the impersonal narration of classical Hollywood cinema.

POPULAR SONG AND THE HISTORY OF FILM MUSIC

Film music scholarship has concentrated almost exclusively on
classical’ music. Yet the influence of the nickelodeons song-
oriented accompaniment practices is visible throughout the history
of film music. From the mid-twenties silent film theme song craze
to the compilation soundtracks o f the last two decades, popular
song has continued to share cinema sound space with classical’
music. Several genres depend wholly or primarily on the song
mode. These include early chronophone/cameraphone/cinephone
sync sound camera and disc recordings of vaudeville numbers by
singers like Vesta Victoria; thirties’ animation series, like Warners’
Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, that used popular songs
available through the studio’s recently acquired Tin Pan Alley music
publishing companies; soundies and other pre-TV attempts to
provide an audiovisual version of popular songs; and music videos
spawned by M TV and its imitators.
More complex and in the long run more interesting are the
many feature film attempts to take advantage of popular song’s
ability to perform certain operations better than classical’ music.
Two of these in particular stand out. While classical’ music is
particularly able to provide routine commentary and to evoke
generalized emotional reactions, popular song is often capable of
serving a more specific narrational purpose. Thus John Ford
regularly used folk songs to establish a specific mood in his
westerns, historical films often employ period songs to signify a
specific historical moment, and film noir systematically interrupts
loveless male-dominated narratives with night club songs offering
an oasis of romance or female power. From High Noon to Millers
254 CINESONIC: The World of Sound In Film

Crossing, non-diegetic popular song lyrics provide a unique

opportunity to editorialize and to focus audience attention. Theme
songs used over initial credits constitute a particularly common
example of this strategy. A second capacity not fully shared by
‘classical’ music is popular song’s separate marketability. By virtue
of its ability to be reasonably well reproduced by a piano and
amateur singers, popular song for decades carried on an intense
symbiotic relationship with the sheet music industry. Short,
inexpensive, and easily distributed, popular songs also made ideal
auditory commodities when recorded on cylinders, discs, or tape.
Since American cinema production derives by and large from a for-
profit industry, films regularly renew attempts to take advantage of
the commercial opportunities associated with popular song. Even
before sound, orchestra leaders understood the benefits of this
strategy, privileging certain music cues and building them into
potentially lucrative theme songs.
By the fifties, the film and record industries were so closely
intertwined that original movie theme songs were often separately
marketed and released as singles in advance of the films opening.
With the triumph of albums and the development of compact
discs, the single theme gave way to the compilation soundtrack
built entirely out of popular songs. The changing role of the theme
song in film music dramatizes the cost of excluding popular song
from our musical analyses. Far from being exclusively constituted
of classical’ music, most film scores use some popular song
material. Popular songs are sometimes introduced diegetically —
sung in a nightclub, broadcast over an on-screen radio, or played in
a marching band scene - and sometimes employed non-diegetically
— to establish period atmosphere, to cue viewers to noteworthy
images, or simply to provide rhythm and structure to an otherwise
disparate jumble of images.
One of the film music problems that most needs attention
involves the interaction between classical’ music and popular song
in films that include both. Is a melody from the song thematized
and turned into a leitmotif? Is some part of the song expanded,
developed, and used according to classical’ principles? In short, is
the popular song made to change colors and participate in the work
of the classical' soundtrack? Or are lyrics and a title imposed on
 N icke lo d e o n s and P o p u la r So n g 255

classical’ material? Is a classical’ theme so often repeated in

conjunction with a particular structure and cadence that İt emulates
a popular song? In short, is the film’s classical’ accompaniment
forced into accomplishing popular song goals? When we consider
these questions historically, we recognize the important role played
by the sound component of early exhibition practices. Nickelodeons
established many expectations and techniques that would ultimately
either be overtly adopted by Hollywood, or repressed and carried
covertly within dominant filmmaking practice. In order to
understand Hollywood sound in its breadth and depth, we must
begin to address the dialectic that relates/separates ‘classical’ music
and popular song. We must also recognize the extent to which this
relationship serves as a vehicle for essential oppositions between
spectacle and narrative, discours and histoire, static dual-focus forms
and dynamic single-focus approaches, bodily reaction and mental
processing, film as participatory mode and as spectator form, and
European inspiration versus American pragmatism. None of these
important dichotomies can be properly understood independently
of the ongoing and complex relationship between classical’ music
and popular song.

References
Edison, 1910, Kinetogram, 15 March.
Film Index, 1911, 'Unique Effects in Song Slides', 6 May.
Harris, Charles, 1917, 'Song Slide the Little Father of Phofodrama', Moving
Picture World, 10 March.
Martin, Clyde, 1910, 'Playing the Pictures', Film Index, 19 November.

Notes
1 For a critique of this position, and for several other points of particular
relevance to the subject of this article, see Rick Altman, 'The Silence of (he
Silents', Musical Quarterly 80, no. 2 (1997), pp648-718.
2 Reported by Clarence E Sinn in 'Music for the Picture', M oving Picture
World, 9 July 1912, p49.
3 Royal S Brown, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music (University
of California Press, Berkeley, 1994), pp38-39. It goes without saying that this
use of the term 'classical' both oversimplifies and falsifies a complex situation.
256 CINESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

In particular, the 'classical' categories of the art song and orchestral program
music clearly present important exceptions to many of the claims made here. I
trust that readers will understand the heuristic usefulness of oversimplifying these
aspects of music history.
4 See, for example, Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film
Music (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1987) 26ff.
5 For music audiences' turn toward silence in the early nineteenth century,
see James H Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural hlistory (University of
California Press, Berkely, 1995.
 Index 257

INDEX
A doors, 27-8
Abdul Hamid, 175 footsteps, 193-5
accents, o f genre film characters, gunshots, 192, 198-9, 200,
109-10, 113-14, 116, 117, 124-5 207-8, 239
The Act O f Seeking With One’s Own mosquitoes, 26, 28
Eyes, 59 wind, 27, 69-70
Addicted To Love, 91-3 woodpeckers, 199, 201, 207-8
An Affair to Remember, 117-18, 125 see also screams
akoustophilia, 80, 93 The Aw ful Truth, 114, 122-3
albums, 10, 27, 254
alienation, 52, 56-7 B
Allan, Woody, Another Women, ‘babble of the unconscious’,
98-100 133-8, 143
Alligator Records, 161 Bachelor in Paradise, 220, 223-4,
Altman, Robert, M*A*S*H, 93-4, 95 226, 227
Always For Pleasure, 160 Bad Girls Go To Hell, 51-2, 57-8
American genre films, 108-28 Ball o f Fire, 114
American vernacular music, 149-70 banjo, 23, 24
analogue sound, 19, 42, 46 barking dogs, 203
anempathetic music, 240-2 Barry, John, 192
Angels with Dirty Faces, 116, 124 Barthes, Roland, 192, 196
animation, 40-8, 62-4 Barton Fink, 24-8
credit sequences, 214, 215-16, Bass, Saul, 220
220, 223-4, 225-7 battle sequences, 42, 44, 45
thirties’ series, 253 Baudrillard, Jean, 192-3
L Année dernière à Marienbad, The Benedetti Tapes, 11
194-5, 205-6 Bergman, Ingmar,
Another Woman, 98-100 The Seventh Seal, 100
Anthology o f American Music, 151 Berlin Alexanderplatz, 176, 178
Antoin et Colette, 140-2 best selling albums, 10
anxiety, 83 Beware O f the Holy Whore, 178
Applause, 237-8 Beyond the Forest, 145-6
Arnold, Jack, Bachelor in Paradise, The Big Lebowski, 38-9
220, 223-4, 226, 227 The Big Parade, 238, 239
audibility flaws, in gangster films, Bigelow, Katherine, Blue Steel, 69-70
124-5 binoculars, 192
aural themes Bismarck, 176
broken glass, 191, 192, 197-201, Blank, Les, 159-61
203, 204 Blonde Venus, 117
dogs barking, 203 Blood Simple, 19-22
258 C1NES0NIC: The World of Sound in Film
Blow Out, 96
Blue Steel, 69-70
blues music, 152-3, 158-9, 165-8
Borzage, Frank,
Seventh Heaven, 238
Boyz ‘N The Hood, 124
Brakhage, Stan, The Act o f Seeing
With One’s Own Eyes, 59
brass instruments, 26
Bringing Up Baby, 113
budgets, 3, 19, 23
bugging (surveillance), 92-6
Burns, Chris, The Search fo r
Robert Johnson, 165-7
Burroughs, William, 11
Burton, Tim, 8, 13, 14
Burwell, Carter, 15-39
c melodrama scores, 118
Cagney, Jimmy, 116
Calendar, 103-5
Camille, 119, 125
Can’t You Hear The Wind Blow,
167-8
car window glass, 192
Careful He Might Hear You, 85-9
Carlito’s Way, 138-40
Carnival o f Souls, 55-8
Catholic confessionals, 96-7, 100-1
characters, 108-28
defined by eavesdropping, 94-6
music and, 18, 24-5, 200
Charade, 214, 220
Chase, Trudi, 61-2
chase scenes, 24
children eavesdroppers, 85-9
chimes (instruments), 26
Chinese Roulette, 176, 178
choral arrangements, 34
Christian confessionals, 96-7, 100-1
Citizen Kane, 142-3
‘classical’ music, 248-55
Coen, Joel and Ethan, 15-39
Coleman, Denardo, 12
Coleman, Ornette, 7, 10-12
comedies, 18-19, 36-7, 94
screwball, 113-15, 119, 122-3
composer-director relation
Carter Burwell —Joel and Ethan
Coen, 16, 27, 33-4
Michael Fano - Alain Robbe-
Grillet, 194
Howard Shore, 7-8, 12-13: and
Tim Burton, 8, 13; and David
Cronenberg, 2, 5, 7
composer-sound designer relation,
6-7, 25-7, 44, 48
composers and composing, 1-39,
171-88, 242-3
Japanese animation, 44
Mancini, Henry, 220, 224-5
see also Fano, Michel
concert music, 7, 8-9
confessionals, 96-7, 100-1
Conspiracy Theory, 95
conventions of sound film, 242-3
The Conversation, 80, 95, 96, 97,
102, 104-5
Cooper, Gary, 110
Copland, 9
Coppola, Francis Ford, films of, 80,
95, 96, 97, 100-1, 102, 104-5
corpses, 55-8, 59
corporate identification, 217-18
costume changes, in screwball
comedies, 115
Crash, 1-2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 18
credit sequences, 69, 213-28, 241
Cronenberg, David, 2, 4-5
films, 1-5, 7, 9-12, 18
Crumb, Robert, 149-51
cues, see aural themes; musical themes
Cukor, George, Camille, 119, 125
cultural behaviour, 153-64
cursing (swearing), 116-17, 120

D Dorsey, Thomas A, 162-4
Danger. Diabolik, 214, 226
Danny Boy-, 31-2
DDS, 44-5, 46-7
De Forest, Lee, 230, 232, 233, 234
de Heer, Rolf, The Quiet Room, 89
De Palma, Brian, films of,. 96,
108-9, 117, 124, 138-40
Dead End, 124
Dead Ringers, 3, 5
‘dead’ space, 56
Demme, Jonathan,
Silence o f the Lamb, 6
design, film as aspect of, 213-28
Destry Rides Again, 110
Deutschland Bleiche Mutter
{Germany Pale Mother), 177
dialogue, 131, 133-8, 139-40
genre films, 108-28
off-screen, 130
part-talkies, 236
post-sync, 51-2, 56, 141, 142
see also narration; vocal delivery
diegetic audience, 235
diegetic elements, 198, 199,
203-4, 243
eavesdropping, 80, 83-5, 91
discussions about, 105
musical themes and, 39, 220
songs, 31, 253, 254
see also nondiegetic elements
digital sound design, 40-1, 44-8
digital surround, 44-5, 46-7
digitally sampling voices, 66-7
directors, see composer-director
relations
Disraeli, 237
Do Not Disturb, 220, 223-4
Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini
Machine, 214
dogs barking, 203
Dolby Digital Surround, 44-5, 46-7
doors, 27-8
Index 259
double messages, 122-3
Down These Dark Streets, 222
drag performers, 66
dubbing sessions, 6
see also post-syncing
Dylan, Bob, 152
E
Eastwood, Clint, 111
eavesdropping, 79-107
by viewers, 83, 123-6
¿couteurism, 80-1, 83-5, 91-3,
101, 190
Ed Wood, 8, 13-14
L 'Eden et apres, 206
editing, 4, 129-30
E ffi Briest, 184
Egoyan, Atom, Calendar, 103-5
Eisenstein, Sergei, 174
Eisler, Hanns, 173-4, 175-7,
180-1, 182
emotions, expressions of, 95,
118-20, 166-7
The English Patient, 120
Existenz, 2, 3
The Exorcist, 60
p
Fano, Michel, 191, 194, 195, 196
L ’Année dernière à Marienbad
{Last Year at Marienbad), 206
L ’Eden et après, 206
Glissements progressifs du plaisir,
189-191, 202-5
L ’Homme qui ment,
194, 200, 207
Piège a fourrure, 195-6
Fargo, 27, 34-8
Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, films of,
172, 176, 177-8, 179, 181,
182-5, 187
Fear Eats The Soul, 178
260 CINESONIC: The World of Sound in Film

females and femininity, see women Georgia, 67-9

fiddles (instruments), 36, 37-8 Germany in Autumn, 175
film, reference o f music to, 18, Germany Pale Mother, 177
19-20, 33, 143, 253 glass, broken, 191, 192, 197-201,
film composition, see composers and 203, 204
composing Glissements progressifs du plaisir,
film history, 213-56 189-91, 202-5
film noir, 126, 222-3, 253 Godard, Jean-Luc, Vivre sa vie,
La Fin du monde, 243 191-2, 237
Finnegan, Ruth, 157 The Godfather III, 100-1
fist blows, 192 Gone With The Wind,
Fleischer, Max and Dave, Tara theme, 239
Time On My Hands, 242 Goodfellas, 124
The Fly, 3 gospel music, 161-4
folk music, 36, 38 graphics, 213-28
see also popular music Green, Alfred E, 237
Fonda, Henry, 111 Grossbard, Ulu, Georgia, 67-9
footsteps, 193-5 guitars, 3
For Those Who Think Young, 226 gunshots, 192, 198-9, 200, 207-8,
Force o f Evil, 133-8 239
Ford, John, 253 Guy, Alice, Questions Indiscrètes,
Fort Apache, 111 230-2
Fox, William, 233-4, 235, 240,
242, 243 H
Fox And His Friends, 182 Halfon, Samy, 196
Franke, Christopher, 44 Hammer, Mike films of, 222-3
Frears, Stephen, 34 Hang Em High, 111
Fried, Ben, 24 hardanger fiddles, 36, 37-8
Friedkin, William, The Exorcist, 60 harps, 3, 36
Fur Trap, 195-6 Harvey, Herk, Carnival o f Souls, 55-8
Hawks, Howard, films of, 112-13,
G 116,213, 226
The Game, 9 Hays, Will H., speech by, 232
Gance, Abel, La Fin du monde, 243 He Said/She Said, 227
gangster films, 108-9, 115-17, Heaven, 6
124-5 Herrmann, Bernard, 143
Gaumont Chronophone process, High Noon, 217
230-1 Hindemith, Paul, 174-5
gebrauchsmusik, 175, 180 Hirano, Toshihiro, The Princess o f
genre films, 108-28 the Vampire Miyu, 62-3
Japanese samurai, 43 His G irl Friday, 113, 115
geographical places, identification of historical films, 253
music forms with, 155-61 Home From the Hill, 125
L ’Homme qui ment, 193, 194,
197-201, 207-8
Hon. W ill H Hays, 232
Honda, Yasunori, 40-8
Hooper, Tobe, Texas Chainsaw
Massacre, 76-7
horror films, 126
Hot Pepper, 160
The Hudsucker Proxy, 32-4
humiliation, 88, 90-1
s L’Année dernière à Marienbad
1, The Jury, 222
I Spit On Your Grave, 70-6
Iglauer, Bruce, 161-2
illustrated songs, 244-8
image-sound relationship, 3-4,
173-4, 129-46, 242-3
L ’Immortelle, 196, 203
impersonation, 114-15
Intermezzo, 117
Irish melodies, 30-2
It Happened One Night, 113-14
It Started With A Kiss, 213
J The Lights o f New York, 235
James Bond series, 192, 214
Japanese animation, 40-8, 62-4
jazz, 11-12, 13-14
The Jazz Singer, 234-5, 236
Johnson, Robert, 165-8
Jolson, Al, 236
K location recording, 9
Kawajiri, Yoshiaki, Ninja Scroll,
43-4, 62
Keaton, Diane, Heaven, 6
Kieslowski, Red, 102-3, 104-5
King Kong, 176, 239, 242
Kiss Me Deadly, 222, 223
Kluge, Alexander, 171-2, 175,
178-9, 179-80, 184
Klute, 97-8
Knieper, Jürgen, 177
Koepp, David, 140
L
La Fin du monde, 243
The Lady Eve, 113
The Lady Jrom Shanghai, 129-33
landscape, 71-2, 75
Lang, Fritz, films of, 140, 222
language, 108-28
see also dialogue; vocal delivery
(Last Year at Marienbad), 194-5,
205, 206
Leave Her To Heaven, 119
L ’Eden et après, 206
legal trials, 186-7
Leigh, Jennifer Jason, 67-9
leitmotif, see aural themes;
musical themes
LetterJrom an Unknown Woman, 126
lieux de memoire, 158-61
L ’Homme qui ment, 193, 194,
197-201, 207-8
Lievsay, Skip, 6, 25-7
Lilt Marleen, 177-8, 182-3
L ’Immortelle, 196, 203
Lipscomb, Mance, 161
live lip-syncing, 65-6
live sound, 3, 192
localities, identification of music
forms with, 155-61
logos, 217-18
Lola, 172, 177, 178, 179
London Philharmonic, 3, 12
love, expressions of, 95,
118-20, 166
low-budget films, 3, 19, 23
lurid thrillers, 222-3
Lynch, David, Twin Peaks, 70
lyrics, see songs
262 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film
M montage, 173, 196-7
M Butterfly, 3
McCarey, Leo, The Awful Truth,
114, 122-3
Macross: Do You Remember Love?,
41-2
The Magnificent Ambersons,
142-5, 220
Magnificent Obsession, 125
The Magnificent Seven, 120-2
The M ajor and the Minor, 115
Maiick, Terrence, The Thin Red
Line, 138
Mamoulian, Rouben, Applause,
237-8
The Man from Laramie, 110
Man o f the West, 110
The Man Who Lies (L 'Homme cjui
ment), 193, 194, 197-201, 207-8
Mancini, Henry, 220, 224-5
Man s Favourite Sport, 213, 226
Marked Women, 116
The Marriage o f M aria Braun,
176, 179
Martha, 179
masculinity, taciturnity and, 111-13
M *A *S*H , 93-4, 95
masquerading, 114-15
Mean Streets, 116
melodramas, 117-20, 125-6
Merchant o f Four Seasons, 178, 182
metaphor, use in genre films,
117-18, 122
Meyer, Peter, Can't You Hear The
Wind Blow, 167-8
M GM, 238-42
Midnight, 115
Midnight Sunrise, 10-11
Millen, Scott, 44
Miller, Cynthia, 13-14
Miller's Crossing, 28-32
Mississippi Blues, 159
modernism, 171-88, 219, 223-4
mosquitoes, 26, 28
Mother Kiister Goes To Heaven, 172,
184-5
Mugge, Robert, Pride and Joy, 161-2
multiple personality disorders, 60-2
Murderer’s Row, 214
Murnau & Fox, Sunrise, 238, 243
music, 149-209, 224-5, 242-3
in credit sequences, 216-17, 218,
223, 241
in melodramas, 118
Robbe-Grillet films, 202-7
scenes without, 73, 143, 178,
239, 242-3
synchronized tracks issued with
‘silent’ films, 238-42
see also composers and composing;
songs
music documentaries, 154-5, 158-68
musical themes, 216, 239
The Big Lebowski, 38-9
Blood Simple, 19-21
characters and, 18, 24-5, 30-2,
37, 38-9, 200
Charade, 220
Fargo, 36-8
The Hudsucker Proxy, 33
M iller’s Crossing, 30-2
reference to film, 18, 19-20, 33,
36-7, 143, 253
theme songs, 214, 217, 224,
225-6, 254
musicals, 218, 235
Musik-Shock, 171, 172, 177-9,
181-2
Mutter Krausensfah rt ins Gluck,
172, 184-5
muzak, 24
My Darling Clementine, 111
My Life to Live (Vivre sa vie),
192,237
My Man Godfrey, 114
N ornament, 213-28
Naked Lunch, 3, 4, 5, 10-12
narration
eavesdropping and, 83-5, 94-6
voice-over, 138-41, 145-6
popular songs used for, 253
see also dialogue
naturalistic dramas, 222, 223
neue sachlichkeit (New Objectivity
movement), 174-5
New German Cinema, 171-88
New York City, 124
Newman, Alfred, 118
nickelodeons, 244-8
Nierenberg, George T, films of,
162-4, 167
Ninja Scroll, 43-4, 62
noetic knowledge, 84-5
noir films, 126, 222-3, 253
nondiegetic elements, 198, 199,
203-4, 243
eavesdropping, 83
music, 31, 199, 203, 205, 206
songs, 240, 254
see also diegetic elements
non-sync sound, 201-2
see also post-syncing
Nouvelle Vague, 140-1
Now Voyager, 118
o possessed vocal cords, 59-64
obscene language, 116-17, 120
off-screen voices, 129-30
The Old Maid, 125, 126
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, 192
On the Waterfront, 116
ondes martenot, 13-14
orchestral scores
Burwell, Carter, 16, 17-18,
28-32, 34-8
Raben, Peer, 176, 179
Shore, Howard, 3, 10
Original Sins, 101
otakoustophilia, 80-1, 84, 102-5
Our Dancing Daughters, 240-2
overhearing, see eavesdropping
P
Pakula, Alan J, Klute, 97-8
paratextual features of films, 213-28
Parker, Charlie, 11-12
Parrish, Robert, 158-9
part-talkies, 233-8
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Salo, 58-9
The Patriot, 179-80, 182, 184
Patterson, Frank, 32
Patton, Charlie, 158-9
percussion, 14, 26, 199
personality disorders, multiple, 60-2
Phillips, Barre, 12
piano, 26
Pickup on South Street, 124
Piege a fourrure, 195-6
Pink Panther films, 220, 225, 226
places, identification of music forms
with, 155-61
Polonsky, Abraham, Force o f Evil,
133-8
polylogues, 124
popular music, 149-70
popular songs, 31-2, 160, 240-2,
244-56
post-synching, 51-2, 56, 141, 142
part-talkies, 233-8
postmodernism, 189-209
The Power o f Emotion, 180, 183
Powell, Mrs Willie Mae, 166-7
power struggles, 131-3
Pride and Joy, 161-2
priests, 96-7, 100-1
‘primitive’ sound cinema, 230-4
The Princess o f the Vampire Miyu,
62-3
pronunciation, by genre film
264 CIN ESONIC: The World of Sound in Film
characters, 109-10, 113-14, 116,
117, 124-5
ProTools, 47, 48
psychoanalytical theory, 81-3
psychotherapy sessions, 96-100
9quadraphonic sound, 193
Questions Indiscrètes, 230-2
The Quiet Room, 89
R composing
Raben, Peer, 171, 175-9, 181-4,
185, 187
Raising Arizona, 23-4
Random Harvest, 117
rape, 51, 53, 54, 70-6, 206
Rapper, Irving, Now Voyager, 118
realism, 220
of sound, 191-5
Red, 102-3, 104-5
Rebecca, 117
Red River, 112-13
relentlessness (mood), 20-2
repetition
circular stories, 53, 57
musical themes, 19-21
words, 97, 122, 136-7, 144, 145-6
Reservoir Dogs, 120
revenge, 70-6
rhythm (‘synchresis’), 160
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 189-209
s western heroes5 taciturnity, 110-13
Salo, 58-9
samplers and synthesizers, 16-17,
37-8
sampling voices, 66-7
samurai films, 43
Sanders-Brahms, Helena, Germany
Pale Mother, 177
Say Amen Somebody, 162-4
Scanners, 2, 3
Scarface (1932), 116
Scarface (1983), 108-9, 117, 124
Scarlet Street, 140
‘scenes’ (local environments),
identification of music forms
with, 155-61
Schultz, Carl, Careful, He Might
Hear You, 85-9
scopophilia, 80, 93
Scorsese, Martin, Mean Streets, 116
scoring, see composers and
screams, 51-5, 57-9, 63-4, 67-9,
76-7, 96, 190
screwball comedies, 113-15, 119,
122-3
The Search fo r RobertJohnson, 165-7
secrets, 125-6
semi-documentaries, 222
Send Me No Flowers, 213
Seventh Heaven, 238
The Seventh Seal, 100
The Seventh Veil, 117
sex, 51-5, 69-76, 206, 226-7
eavesdropping on, 94, 95, 97-8,
99, 103-5
sexism, 190
sexploitation movies, 51-4
Shanghai Express, 117, 119, 125
‘shock’, 171-88
Shore, Howard, 1-14, 18
signifying scream, 67-9
silence, 51, 56-9, 70-3, 75
Silence o f the Lambs, 6
silent films-talkie transition, 229-43
silent scream, 64
The Singing Foot, 235-7
singing voices, 23, 24, 65-8, 132-3
slang, 113-14, 115-16, 124, 126
song slides, 245-7
songs, 244-56
Always For Pleasure, 160

The Big Lebowski, 38-9
The Lady from. Shanghai, 131-3
Macross, 4 l, 42
0 « r Dancing Daughters, 240-2
as part of plot, 41, 42
popular, 31-2, 160, 240-2, 244-56
Questions Indiscrètes, 231
theme songs, 214, 217, 224,
225-6, 254
sound cinema development, 229-43
sound designer-composer relation,
6-7, 25-7, 44, 48
sound effects, see aural themes
sound-image relation, 3-4, 173-4,
129-46, 242-3
‘spaces o f memory’, 158-61
speech, see dialogue; narration;
vocal delivery
spoons (as instruments), 23, 24
sports films, 126
stage dialogue, 123
stalkers and stalking, 69-70, 98
Steiner, Max, 118, 176, 242
Stella Dallas, 90-1, 117, 125
Stewart, James, 110
Street Angel, 240
studio logos, 217-18
studio music, 3
Sullivan’s Travels, 114
Sunnyside Up, 235
Sunrise, 238, 243
surround, 42, 44-5, 46-7
surveillance (bugging), 92-6
swearing (cursing), 116-17, 120
symphonic scores, see orchestral
scores
‘synchresis’, 160
syncing lips, 65-6
syncing sound, 194, 201-2, 229-43
see also post-syncing
Synclavier, 47
syntax (characters’ grammar), 114,
116-18, 137
in d e x 265
synthesizers, 16-17, 37-8
‘systematic cultural intervention’,
153
T
taciturnity, of western heroes,
110-13
Takemitsu, Toru, 2, 7
Tashlin, Frank, 224
Tavernier, Bertrand, 158-9
Teacher’s Pet, 220, 223-4, 227
teasing, 122-3
technological developments,
229-43
television eavesdropping scenes, 101
Tenchi Muyo In Love, 44-5, 48
tension, 20-1, 120-1, 137-8
terseness (of language), 112-13
Texas Chainsaiv Massacre, 76-7
That Rhythm Those Blues, 167
theme songs, 214, 217, 224,
225-6, 254
themes, see aural themes;
musical themes
therapy sessions, 96-100
Theremin, Lydia, 13-14
The Thin Red Line, 138
thrillers, 222-3
Time On My Hands, 242
Titanic, 10, 120
title credit sequences, 69,
213-28, 241
To Each His Own, 125
Touch o f Evil, 95-6
Trans-Europ-Express, 199
trials (legal), 186-7
trombones, 26
True Grit, 111
Truffaut, Francois,
Antoin et Colette, 140-2
12 Angry Men, 220, 221-2, 223
Turin Peaks, 70
Two Rode Together, 110
266 CIN ESONIC: The W orld of Sound in Film

u battle sequences, 42, 44, 45

unconscious babble, 133-8, 143 Warner Brothers, 232-3, 234-8,
Unforgiven, 111 242, 253
The Untouchables, 117 water, 72-3, 74
urban drama, 221-2 Wayne, John, 111
UPA studio, 223 A Well Spent Life, 161
Welles, Orson, 137-8
V films of, 95-6, 129-33, 142-5, 220
Vagabonde, 76 A Western Romance, 247
vampires, 62-3 The Westerner, 110
Van Dyke, WS, White Shadows in westerns, 109-13, 120-2, 253
the South Seas, 238-40 Where The Spies Are, 214
Varda, Agnes, 76 While the City Sleeps, 222
vernacular music, 149-70 White Shadows in the South Seas,
Veronika Voss, 178 238-40
Videodrome, 2, 3, 5 Wilcox, Larry, 32
Vidor, King, films of, 90-1, 117, wind sounds, 171, 69-70
125, 145-6, 238, 239 Wishman, Doris, Bad Girls Go To
violence, 58-9, 179-80 Hell, 51-2, 57-8
rape, 51, 53, 54, 70-6, 206 women, 51-78, 163-4
violins, 26 eavesdropping and, 81, 88, 89-91,
Vitaphone, 232, 233, 237 92, 94
Vivre sa vie, 192, 237 talkativeness of, 111-13
vocabulary, in genre films, 110, woodpecker sound motif, 199, 201,
113-14, 115-17, 124, 126 207-8
vocal delivery, 131, 132-3, 136, wordplay, by genre film characters,
138, 140, 143-5 114, 122-3, 126
genre film characters, 109-10, Wuthering Heights, 118
113-14, 116, 117, 122, 124-5
voice-over narration, 138-41, 145-6 Y
voices, 129-46 yodelling, 23, 24
screams, 51-5, 57-9, 63-4, 67-9,
76-7, 96, 190 Z
singing, 23, 24, 65-8, 132-3 Zarchi, Meir,
taken over by another, 59-64 I Spit On Your Grave, 70-6
see also dialogue; narration; vocal zombies, 55-8, 62
delivery
voyeurism, 79-107, 189-90, 202-5

w
Wada, Kaoru, 44
Wade, Bob, 196, 200
war films, 126