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How
do we perceive the aural world? The problem is particularly
important in the case of sound cinema (which today is simply
the cinema), television, radio, etc. However, unless it is a
question of the sounds of spoken language, sound has been studied
far less than the visual, our civilization greatly privileging
the latter. Caught between the two, "sound" is often left aside.
—Christian
Metz, "Aural Objects"1
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The late
Christian Metz pointed out that one of the problems in studying
sound was that, even when represented through recordings, it
is too ephemeral, a "bad object choice" for analysis. Sound
is temporary, dependent on time (and the representation of time),
and its many qualities quickly disappear from the critical ear
as soon as they are encountered. Of course the voice is as difficult
an object choice for analysis as any, a fact that Michel Chion
notes at the beginning of his book, The Voice in Cinema,
when he states that, The voice is elusive. Once you've eliminated
everything that is not the voice Itself-the body that houses
it, the words it carries, the notes it sings, the traits by
which it defines a speaking person, and the timbres that color
it, what's left? What a strange object, what grist for poetic
outpourings... (1)
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Indeed,
the term "poetic" is well chosen. Chion's observations are far
removed from anything resembling a science or any other systematic
listing of examples of cinema and the voice; rather, Chion is
a creative intellectual whose propositions may exist as flawed
inventions, yet their existence is contingent on making imaginative,
yet highly cerebral leaps. To read Chion
is to engage in a very un-American experience where the well-informed
intellectual free-association of each essay provides thoughtful
offerings that float untethered to the weight of academic obligations
or to the strictures of discipline. The result is a highly readable,
yet erudite set of essays suitable for anyone interested in
an intellectual investigation of the voice in the 20th century
arts, particularly that most modern of arts, the cinema. For
some readers, the topic matter of recorded audio may seem both
remote and lacking relevance to any serious discussion concerning
music. But for those who view audio recordings as something
more than a "neutral" medium through which we access and evaluate
both music and performance, Chion's work exists as an achievement
that cannot be ignored. The Voice in Cinema, published
by Columbia University Press, is the second book for which Claudia
Gorbman has provided smart and important translations of Chion's
work from the French and like the first, Audio Vision: Sound
on Screen (Columbia University Press 1994), this volume
presents the musings of a very creative intellectual on the
topic of film soundtracks. It is fair to say that Chion's decision
to focus upon recordings—for this is what a "soundtrack"
consists of—places his work within the context of a small
yet growing scholarly interest in recorded music and sound.
Indeed, Gorbman's latest translation should be considered essential
reading for those interested in recordings, and can be situated
alongside the work of Rick Altman, Jim Lastra, John Corbett,
Kaja Silverman, Mary Ann Doane, Theodore Gracyk, and Michael
Chanan. More familiar to anglophone scholars, these writers
have argued throughout their careers for the necessity of understanding
how the recorded object (in many cases the film soundtrack)
has affected our perception of sound and, in some cases, the
way in which we have come to understand the production of music.
For this reader, it is safe to say that Ms. Gorbman's continuing
translation of Chion's work on recorded sound is of the same
intellectual importance as Brian Massumi's 1985 translation
of Jacques Attali's Noise: The Political Economy of Music
(University of Minnesota Press), a piece that has greatly influenced
critical theorists interested in music. As is the case with
Noise, any critical theory that wishes to take the issues
surrounding musical and audio recordings seriously will have
to engage with Chion's propositions regarding the film soundtrack.
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Take, for
example, Chion's critical observation that there is no one singular
"soundtrack." It is simple, inaugural and dislodging at the
same time. From this "first principle" Chion argues that, just
as the visual terrain of film is often composed of a number
of distinct shots and processes (that is, mattes,
backscreen
projections, post production manipulations of a primary
image, and so forth), the soundtrack does not constitute one
singular item or individual aesthetic entity. It is an important
point, since the proposition cuts through a number of assumptions
and underlines how common-day parlance envisions the soundtrack
as simply consisting of diegetic
and non-diegetic film music. The thinking implicit in this
type of discussion, Chion notes, is that "sounds from the proscenium,
at a remove from the visual field, more easily gain the spotlight,
for they are perceived in their singularity and isolation" (4).
Indeed, this has not only framed our day-to-day discussions
about the film soundtrack as a primarily musical entity, but
it explains why there is so much more written on music than
on film sound.
- Yet if early
sound films resulted in the production of the film musical, they
also produced "talkies." The fact is, as Chion observes,
Discussions
of sound films rarely makes mention of the voice, speaking instead
of "the soundtrack." A deceptive and sloppy notion, which postulates
that all the audio elements recorded together onto the optical
track of the film are presented to the spectator as a sort of
bloc or coalition, across from the other bloc, a no-less fictive
"image track" (3).
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By positioning
the soundtrack's as a "heterogeneous material"2,
Chion begins to unravel the many audio components that interact
with and influence the production and representation of the
voice as it relates to on- and off-screen visual material. Most
impressive is the fact that the use of the voice, the voiceover,
vocal timbres, the scream and the relationship of each of these
elements to cinematic bodies are not only discussed in The
Voice in Cinema, but these essays quietly turn discussions
of canonical film texts on their respective heads. Chion has
a talent for making the work of Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock,
Marguerite Duras, Jacques Tati, and Orson Welles utter an aural
complexity that is typically overlooked in more visually driven
analyses. Indeed, for any reader who wishes to engage with this
book, a solid familiarity with Psycho, Citizen Kane and
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse would be more than beneficial.
This is particularly true of the latter of the three films,
Fritz Lang's The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, as Chion rightly
understands the film as one of the more important works in the
history of sound cinema. The 1932 film tends to be overlooked
when compared to Lang's 1931 work, M, but Testament's
importance in sound cinema is due to a number of factors, the
most fundamental being that, as the title indicates, the audience
will hear Mabuse voice his plans and desires—Mabuse, it
seems, will provide audible testimony of his madness.
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Or does
he? On screen, Chion notes, what we witness and hear is a trompe-l'oreille,
trickery that visually casts Dr. Mabuse as a mute, yet we are
convinced that we hear him speak (although we are never given
any evidence to support this). To be sure, "the voice attributed
to Mabuse—which turns out to be the voice of another—is
heard only from
behind a curtain."
Like the Great
Oz, "The terrible Mabuse is divided up into a mute body and a
bodiless voice, only to rule all the more powerfully" (31). And
as in the case of Oz, Mabuse's body is rendered lacking when it
is revealed that is not he who speaks from behind curtains and
over phones. His voice outstrips the limits of his body and buttresses
his plans with a diabolical power. This relationship, a structured
scenario wherein "we don't see the person we hear" despite the
fact that this voice emanates with an authority from the screen
is, for Chion, cinema's acousmetre. The acousmetre is Chion's
most vital concept, a force that drives many of the essays included.
Drawn from the French word acousmate, this term signifies
"invisible" sounds. The cinema, Chion argues, continually presents
us with a game of present/absent signification: The sound film
can show a closed door or an opaque curtain and allow us to hear
the voice of someone supposedly behind it. Sound films can show
an empty space and give us the voice of someone supposedly "there,"
in the scene's "here and now," but outside the frame (18).
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It is this
absent vocalist but ever present voice that presents a number
of powers, many of which are authoritative in their accent and
force. Our desire is to assign a body to these voices (The
Ten Commandments, the Scream series, The Wizard
of Oz, and so forth). And the minute that we perform such
an act an unusual violence is unleashed as Gods are desecrated,
murderers discovered (or so we think), and magicians exposed.
There is a power in the voice: hushed tones not only convey
information but they create within us the desire to attentively
listen to them. Chion's work begins to detail what we want to
hear in film voices and, by association, the silences of the
cinema. I know of no other book that so effectively discusses
the figure of the mute, the use of the scream and the reccurrence
of the siren song in cinema throughout the world. In fact, throughout
this book, it becomes evident that we need to think more clearly
about our own desire to control the voice, to separate it from
the performer, and to position it in recordings in order to
repeatedly subject it to our judgements.
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Unfortunately,
the one film that best illustrates this desire and its possibilities
for violence, Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva (1981), is,
rather surprisingly, not discussed in these essays. Yet it is
in reading Voice in the Cinema that it becomes evident
where the sparks of connection lie. It is clear that Voice
in the Cinema is not "complete," but constitutes instead
the beginning of a discussion that—unlike any other volume
since Kaja Silverman's work, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female
Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema—makes it clear that
there is an intellectual stake to be made in analyzing how the
voice is used in cinema. The real power of Chion's work, though,
is to force us to conceive of why we want to hear recordings
of voices at all.
Tim
Anderson
Denison University
References
1.
Christian Metz, "Aural Objects," Yale French Studies
60, trans. George Gurrieri (1980): 24.
2.
My use of this term directly invokes the work of Rick Altman on
recorded sound, specifically his essay, "The Material Heterogeneity
of Recorded Sound," Sound Theory/Sound Practice, ed.
Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992).
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