Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner

Summary & Implications: What is the author’s project and why is it important now? What’s the narrative about the field that’s emerging from the reading? What narratives are silent? Whose voices are silent?

In this giant text, Michel Chion attempts to revise the way we think of film’s relation to sound, specifically to move towards a way of thinking about images and sounds in an inextricably entwined way such that any analysis which takes the two realms as separate (or even ignores one) would be seen as fundamentally deficient. In an attempt to make his argument as forcefully as possible, Chion splits his text into two parts, with the first tracing the technical and aesthetic history of sound’s relation to image in cinema before a longer section that sees him more thoroughly investigating some of the claims, theoretical nooks and crannies, and expansions of the ideas first presented in the history section.

The history section contains Chion’s most thoroughly organized thoughts on how ideas about sound’s integration with image developed via a complex interrelation between technological advancements, artistic experimentation, and cultural factors (the prevalence of disembodied sound via the radio, for example). Here he calls what is traditionally termed “silent” cinema “deaf cinema” instead (a play on the French term “mute cinema”) because it was never silent in the first place, it just couldn’t fully respond to the sounds that were being played alongside the images. He also claims, convincingly, that sound film is a palimpsestic art form where the silence of the first type of cinema remains underneath the integrated sound film, waiting for the soundtrack to die down to return. In this section he also writes about the way that the technology advancements of the 70s (problematically but still effectively collected under the branded Dolby designation), which featured not just the splitting of audio tracks into locationally distinct speaker locations (aka surround sound) but also a broader dynamic range of possible sounds, allowed for the (re)development of impressionistic creation of space via sound. The introduction of digital recording and playback is the last technological advancement that Chion writes of in this section, and he claims that it allows for true silence in a way that optically recorded and played sound couldn’t, as well as the further development of microediting sounds that makes sound effects a more powerful and varied tool for filmmakers.

The second part of Chion’s text takes a different tack, abandoning a linear progression of events and developments for a topic-by-topic trip through the various ways that sound and image relate to each other on film. One big theme that runs through this section is that the relationship between those two realms is not nearly as neat or easy to understand as it seems. He calls the audiovisual relationship a continuous “vertical” Kuleshov effect because at every moment the image is influencing how we perceive the sounds while the sounds influence how we perceive the images (231). Sounds come from different realms, ranging from simple on-screen representation to complicated interplays of off-screen sounds and music and dialogue that can greatly effect how an image is understood.

Chion also writes about how sound creates a sense of time and place within (alongside? throughout?) a film. Because sounds have a definite duration (even if that duration is endless) they are the elements of film that create time more profoundly than the shot, the image, which might be as short or as long as the director wants. A ticking clock creates a sense of time much more than the image of a clock does. Similarly, the filmmaker can use sound to create a sense of an expansive vista with wind sounds and the recorded (or recreated) sounds of bugs chirping in such a way that gives more life to the image of such a scene. Sound can expand beyond the screen, and so can be used to manipulate the way an audience feels about the images they are seeing on that screen.

Chion writes also of the critical role voice plays in film, noting that even films that decenter intelligible speech (the works of Tati, to call out Chion’s favorite exemplar) still rely upon the vocal to structure the film and specifically the sounds of the film. Even sounds of speech that cannot be distinguished from each other and given their full meaning are being used to specifically deny the vocal’s power. He also writes that the voice might be considered another kind of special effect as actors manipulate their voices for volume, intelligibility, and timbre, to say nothing of post-processing that further changes that vocal performance. Of course, voices can sing as well, and join in with the musical element of filmmaking, and we all know examples of dialogue that have been called melodic. Again, things are not easily categorizable.

Finally, Chion writes convincingly about the way that music structures film experiences, as most films do not feature a full-length score. The music then becomes an important signifier of crucial moments, either as a type of drumroll that sets up an important action, scene, or bit of dialogue, or instead plays underneath such an event to color that event differently (either increasing or decreasing the intensity of the event or instead providing some other way of thinking about it entirely). Music with words, Chion argues, is largely useful for turning the specifics of a scene into a more universally applicable situation. A love scene with a song featuring lyrics about “she and he” or “you and I” turns that love scene into a scene about all romantic pairings, including ones featuring the “I” of an audience member.

Chion concludes the book by writing about how sound is used to “equalize” film, to smooth off the edges of the film viewing experience to create something immediately understandable and graspable in the way that, he says, great art does. It returns us, he claims, to the state of the child experiencing things anew and marveling at the way they work rather than categorizing them into hierarchies in the way that our society would expect of us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mG-HRiBWrlM

Context: Who is this author debating with and why? What is the context of the text’s production and distribution? What historical, cultural, etc. factors affect the way it makes meaning? Does the author seem to be in conversation with other scholars and/or paradigms? Where is this piece of writing centered in the field? What is their intervention in the literature/field? What text is this text in conversation with?

The scholar most frequently cited in this text is Rick Altman, the other major theorist who wrote primarily about the use of sound in film. Even then, he is most frequently cited to say that another scholar has indeed already touched upon the idea at hand. Chion doesn’t overly reference other scholars, instead taking a pretty (although not entirely) wide base of films up for discussion as his method for ensuring a breadth of ideas. It is clear, from the title through the text itself, that Chion’s project is an intervention into the discussion of aesthetics, poetics, and the history of film arguing that those areas of film scholarship have ignored or downplayed the importance of sound to film. Even though the introduction of sound is indeed a large part of film history, Chion still thinks that scholars have not yet fully understood or dealt with the implications of its introduction on cinema or lasting effects.

Methodology: What is the methodological framework of this text? What methodological moves or questions does the author engage? What is their object of analysis?

As I wrote about above, the book is split into two parts. In the first half the ideas are presented chronologically, following the development of sound technologies, strategies, and effects as they were introduced to film. In this section the technology becomes the dominant element, and the theory and examples come out of it. In the second section, which is arranged thematically around big ideas or kinds of film sounds, Chion will often start with one big idea or term before outlining several different ways that cinema has operationalized those ideas or terms via copious examples. This might also happen several times in a chapter as Chion touches upon a few different but related ideas or bits of theory.

Rhetorical Moves: What are the major rhetorical moves of the author’s arguments?

The biggest rhetorical move that Chion engages in is to first call forth a (bad or incomplete) understanding of how something related to sound in film works before explaining why it is wrong and then explaining his way of conceiving it. This works pretty well for his project to assert the importance of sound in the analysis of film.

Engagement & Application: How do I engage this text? How does this apply to my work? Does it support or provide a counterargument or model for strong intro or lit review? In other words, why is this piece of writing useful to me and/or how is it limited (bad writing style, problematic, didn’t consider x, y, and z)? Does it intersect with other items on the list?

Probably the biggest complaint one might make in regards to Chion’s text (aside from its length!) is the somewhat limited scope of his filmic examples. He brags at one point about how he’s not afraid to look at the non-auteurist works that his fellow French theorist apparently ignore. But that largely amounts to an obsession with (the admittedly great) Blade Runner and everybody’s favorite, Hitchcock. The rest of his examples come from American and European Art House movies with brief stays in Japan ever few chapters. This aligns him pretty strongly with the stuffy movies that people think film theorists usually write about. Plenty of Tarkovsky and Bresson here, for example. He claims to be working on a book that would complement this one focused on world cinema, and I hope he does eventually publish it if only to broaden his scope beyond the staid grounds he’s mostly treading here.

Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped

Key Terms: What terms are key to the author’s argument, and are they operationalized explicitly or implicitly?

He’s got a whole glossary and invents a new term or two every chapter, so he’s got a heck of a lot of key terms. The ones that stick out for me are: sound, image, synchresis, time, space, music, voice, Dolby, silence, montage, onscreen, offscreen, the “fundamental noise of cinema,” realism

Significant Quotations: What key quotations from this work would I want to have quick access to?

The “whirring of the machine” is, of course, the first noise of the cinema. This noise that would persist, concretely or symbolically, into the sound film is what I call the fundamental noise, in other words the sound that refers ultimately to the projection mechanism itself. (8)

This is what the so-called sound cinema made possible, even when films were not taking advantage of its ability to make dialogue audible. The new cinema standardized film projection speeds once and for all (at twenty-four frames per second, imposed by the demands of sound reproduction), whereas previously both cameras and projectors could run at variable speeds, generally anywhere between twelve and twenty frames per second. Henceforth the cinema could literally count on constancy in the reproduction of actors movements and gestures. Moreover, it allowed the auteur director, the era’s king (think of Stroheim before his problems with the studios or of Murnau, Gance, Eisenstein, and Clair), to control the music – and the silence – down to the second and to know that all audiences would hear exactly what he desired. (35)

But even before Dolby, in the history of the sound film, sound slowly expanded farther into the low and high frequency ranges; It became denser and more refined. This often went unnoticed. No one said at a particular moment that the sound was different. But things on the screen were perceived to have more physical presence, and the film’s time became more urgent. […] On the screen everything looks right, but in the découpage, the construction of screen space, everything has changed. The image no longer establishes the scenic space – sound does that – now the image only presents points of view on it. (119)

There is no pure silent cinema on one side and sound (or talking) cinema on the other; they mutually implicate each other. (184)

The absence of a clear rhetoric for sound is also linked to the absence of any symbolic mediator of our hearing, something that would function as the “symbolic microphone” allowing us to participate in the effects and at the same time keep our distance from them, a double position readily occupied by the “symbolic camera.” (212)

Indeed, as I see it, the audiovisual relation is 90% a generalized Kuleshov effect, but it is a Kuleshov effect that is “vertical” (through the projection of one element onto another simultaneously) instead of “horizontal” (projection of the meaning or the effect of one element onto another that precedes or follows it), such that it is much more immediate and perennially produces an illusion of redundancy. (231)

Synchresis can thus override the perception of realism. Cinema has created codes of “truth” – in fact what feels true – that have nothing to do with what is true. Cinema prefers the symbol, the emblematic sound, over the sound of reality. The proof is the alarm or siren sound in city scenes. (241)

Can’t we say that the voice is the mother of all special effects – one that requires the least technology and expense? A good actor or comic imitator, and practically anyone who has had some training and practice, is capable of altering his or her voice and giving it all kinds of inflections, using only the natural bodily resources that nature has provided. Moreover, an individual’s voice changes through life much more than his or her face changes (this is particularly so for males, whose vocal timbre changes significantly at puberty). Though it is common to see facial features in childhood photos that survive in the grown adults, there is unlikely to be any relation between an individual’s voice as a child and his or her voice in middle age. (337)

A song would seem, a priori, to be the opposite of a talking film: the first is set to music while films are mostly spoken; a song is often composed of verse, with rhyme and rhythm, while movie dialogue is in prose. A song posits an I, you, he, and she that are indeterminate, often symbolic or generalized, while sound films present specific characters. A song takes place over a short, highly structured length of time with predictable symmetries and repetitions, while a film is expected to advance without repeating itself. Finally, a song can have extremely varied modes of existence – played with instruments only, hummed, whistled, shouted, la-la-la’d, recited – while dialogue most often comes in only one form. It is precisely because the song is so different that above and beyond its centrality to musicals, in many films it takes the role of a pivot or turntable, a point of contact. The song opens a horizon, a perspective, and escape route for characters mired in their individual story. The song is what often creates a link between individual characters’ destinies and the human collectivity to which they belong. When we hear a film referring to “you and me,” in a scene where two characters are getting together or breaking apart, we think of a “she” and a “he” that transcend the woman and man we see on the screen. We leave behind any individual psychologism that often circumscribes the sound film. (428)

These fundamental noises are like reminders of the sound of the movie projector, the mechanical place from which the film unwinds to begin and then returns at its end. The fundamental noise – always a complex sound mass – is the emergence of the background noise of the film’s apparatus; it represents the sound out of which everything emerges and into which everything melts back and is reabsorbed. (454)