SoundCracked:

How to Destroy a Film Soundtrack

 

Notes by Richard Burt, March 7, 2013

"Since their beginning motion pictures have been accompanied by music.  The pure cinema must have had a ghostly effect like that of the shadow play—shadows and ghosts have always been associated. The magic function of music that has been hinted at above probably consisted in appeasing the evil spirits unconsciously. Music was introduced as a kind of antidote against the picture. The need was felt to spare the spectator the unpleasantness involved in seeing effigies of living, acting, and even speaking persons, who were at the same time silent.  The fact that they are living and nonliving at the same time is what constitutes their ghostly character, and music was introduced not to supply them with the life they lacked—this became its aim only in the era of total ideological planning—but to exorcise fear or help the spectator absorb the shock.
Motion picture music corresponds to the whistling or singing child in the dark.  The real reason for the fear is not even that these people whose silent effigies are moving in front of one seem to be ghosts. The captions do their best to come to the aid of these images. But confronted with gesticulating masks, people experience themselves as creatures of the very same kind, as being threatened by muteness. The sound pictures have changed all this original function of music less than might be imagined. For the talking picture too is mute. . . . A talking picture without music is not very different from a silent picture . . ."
--Hanns Eilser and Theodor Adorno, Composing for the Films, 75; 76; 77

"Music for silent films was very close to being a continuum; in any case it played almost without pause. It is curious that while it had a markedly sequential character . . . , this diverse music was a constant presence in the film from beginning to end. In contrast, music in sound films is generally discontinuous, music cues are dispersed throughout, and they are interwoven with other sound elements."

Michel Chion, Film, a Sound Art, 407

Sound Off

The disruption or destruction of musical instruments, records, record players, and other sound storage objects and devices has been central to the art and music composition and music performance since the early twentieth century. (See Caleb Kelly's lengthy book report on this topic, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction, MIT: Cambridge, 2009). Theodor Adorno's essays on sound recording and his book, co-authored by Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films, have been central both to the study of sound and media and to the study of film soundtracks (See Kelly, above, and Michel Chion, Film, a Sound Art (Translated by Claudia Gorbman, New York: Columbia University Press. 2009). Adorno's prescriptive work on sound technologies enables a critical pragmatism or functionalism dependent on uncritically assumed oppositions between the sound of function and the sound of malfunction, sound and silence, noise and msuci, and so on. (Chion regular uses the word "functions," although he is also attentive to failure.) The deaf spot, so to speak, of both sound art works and sound studies in film and media is the film soundtrack (something Chion says does not exist, by the way, pp. 226-230). While avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and Bill Morrison have either distressed or recycled celluloid film stock and nitrate film prints, they have left the soundtrack untouched. To my knowledge, no film maker has distressed or destroyed the film soundtrack, analogue or digital, monoaural or Dolby either while leaving the image intact or distressing the image. The continuity of the film soundtrack remains unimpaired. Yet this lack of impairment paradoxically produces a kind of deafness to sound. Only the image is evident, so self-evident that the continuity of sound goes unheard even as musical accompaniment to the image. The random superimposition of random on images fails to produce the equivalent of msucial dissonacne not only because sound offers no resistance, as Chion points, but because the sound effectively goes off. The only noise in cinema that explains the use of music even in silent film is confined to the noise of the film projector. Music supposedly covered up this noise. Chion mentions various kinds of "fundamental" sounds that recall this noise.(see "covering the Noise of the Projector," 454-55) But noise (that trains and other of forms of mechanical transportation make) remains exterior to the film sountrack, in his account just as it does in earlier accounts. And though Chion provocatively and productively speaks of deaf cinema rather than silent cinema, he does not speak of mute cinema. Sound is always there, apparently, even if actors in the film can't hear it, even if spectators can't hear it. In silent film, or "deaf cinema," Chion maintains, the soundtrack music is continuous. Silent film de(a)faults to music. (Chion calls sound fillm "hearing" film and entitles one subsection: "the 'hearing cinema' is hard of hearing," 289.) In avant-garde cinema and in narrative film, however, sound is still covering up a distressed or degraded image and the cut (as in a Hollywood montage). Why does the film image still need a protective layer of sound? This question is even more pertitent given that film projectors in movie theaters are now digital. More broadly, we may ask a number of questions: is listening to sound we don't hear paradoxically a kind of deafness? How does impairment differ from hearing malfunctions? Is deafness to sound, especially to music, required for film destruction to function as a film effect (as in Rodrigues and Tarantino's Grind House [2007])? Why does cutting up a film to make a film appear to require that the soundtrack remain a constant (even if it is a loop)?

Rather than assume that we can open our ears, as it were, to sound, I suggest that we can examine the deaf spots of cinema, the soundcracks of film that get sidetracked by critics who uncritically adopt oppositions between sound / film recording and sound / film projection (or reproduction), of function and malfunction. We might begin by returning to Richard Wagner's music, central to Adorno and Chion; in particular, we might return to Parsifal and Kundry's laughter, screams, and muteness in the third Act. Although less obviously important Wagner's concept of the Leitmotiv or his musical chromaticism and the lack of resolution in his composition, screams, moans, laughter have no clear semiotic register in Parsifal. If Wagner's operas were pre-cinematic, as Adorno maintains in In Search of Wagner, and if Wagner's creation of a darkened performance space and an orchestra pit constitutes the default for what Chion calls "pit" music as opposed to "screen" music, Wagner's use of vocalized "noises" in Parsifal complicates the relegation of the soundtrack's continuity to deafness.

Chion says that sound is never autonomous, unlike the image, yet he also says that sound is not merely additive: "In cinema the notion of the auditory field is completely a function of what appears on the screen. In other words, in film there can be no autonomous auditory field; its real and imaginary dimensions are created in collaboration with the image; and at the same time sound is always overflowing and transgressing it. It is in this double movement that sound operates," 249; "the classical model, which considers the relation between sound and image to be additive in nature, [is] incorrect," 256-57.

For Chion, sound differs from image in not being locatable, in not having a frame (instead of a frame, there is a "sound setting"), in not having a symbolic mediator (a microphone), and in not having a subjective point of view (unlike a camera). Sound has no container, no place, no subjective source. There is no point of view there way there is a point of view. Moreover, sound is rendered, not replicated (the way the image is the record of "exactly" what is front of the camera during filming). Image and sound have a "dyssmetrical" rather than a hierarchical relation (sound is not covertly manipulative, a accessory to the crime "seen" of the image).

For Chion, sound produces effects, not rhetoric; sound cannot be coded, but it does produce meaning, primarily by puntuating and scanning time; when the sound goes off entirely after the music and then the dialogue have stopped, we seem to be in real time. Sound controls time primarily through synch points.

Eisler and Adorno Composing for the Films

Motion picture music only denies to the listener what he refuses to listen to in any case. 58

The eye is always an organ of exertion, labor, and concentration; it grasps a defined object.  The ear of the layman, on the other hand, as contrasted to that of the musical expert, is indefinite and passive. One does not have to open it, as one does the eye, compared to which it is indolent and dull. 22-23

One of the most widespread prejudices in the motion-picture industry is the premise that the spectator should not be conscious of the music. The philosophy behind this belief is a vague notion that music should have a subordinate role in relation to the picture. 9

All motion picture-music has so far displayed a tendency to neutralization—there is almost always an element of the inconspicuousness, weakness, excessive adaptation, and familiarity in it.   Frequently enough, it does exactly what it is supposed to do according to the current prejudice, that is to say, it vanishes and remains unnoticed by the spectator who is not especially interested in it. 86-87

Cinema music is not carefully listened to. 132

By displaying a tendency to vanish as soon as it appears, motion-picture music renounces its claim that it is there, which is today its cardinal sin. 133

Expressive subtitles from silent films in sound films:

Man on Fire (the two torture and execution scenes) and The Artist (the film in the film and elsewhere)