Evolution on Film Sound - Dissertation Example

The synchronized sound came to motion pictures in the mid-1920 when engineers in Germany and the United States demonstrated a few systems. In these systems, the sound from a disc was mechanically matched with the film. This method was soon replaced by one in which the sound was recorded on the film. The sound-on-film system is still in use. The most thoroughly and self-consciously “diegetic” understanding of sound representation, however, emerged in the late 1930s, unsurprisingly in contact with the cinema.

The collaboration between Prokofiev and Eisenstein on the latter's Alexander Nevsky (1938) prompted the composer to re-imagine musical recording along with the model of Eisenstein's visual techniques. Prokofiev argued for a recording strategy that combined different sonic “angles” and “scales” to create a whole that was as fully penetrated by the microphone in its conception as Eisenstein's visible world was by the camera. For the most part, Prokofiev's “narration” of the music consisted of “unnaturally” foregrounding particular instruments by placing microphones very close to them or recording different sections of the orchestra in different studios, producing effects the composer likened to standing the orchestra on its head During recording, Prokofiev stood in the mixing booth rather than on the podium, overseeing the performance through the mediation of the recording apparatus rather than the mediation of the concert hall.

Indeed, for the composer, the piece was as inconceivable without recording as Eisenstein's films were without the camera. Neither considered representation a process of bringing an external device to bear upon an otherwise complete performance, but instead imagined staging, performance, inscription, and editing as inseparably united aspects of the same integrated vision. So radical a rethinking was this (although so unobtrusive sounding) that even the ostensibly more radical sound theories of the Soviet filmmakers give it little attention.

Nor did it have much of an effect in more purely theoretical realms. The reduction of a complex system of representational practices to a single act of mechanical recording or inscription is characteristic of nearly all representational technologies and derives from an understanding of representation as an act of mechanical perception. 

The mechanical nature of the devices, and the uncannily precise effects of nonhuman technological recording, so thoroughly crystallized the novelty and epistemological uncertainties embodied by the new media that it is hardly surprising that the camera's “click” and the microphone's passive “listening” came to stand for the totality of the process. Even if the preternaturally present images and sounds of the new media suggested a world where machines could perceive and preserve a world that produces its own record, the varied practices of image and sound representation within particular institutional settings and under specific representational demands proved again and again that even the single image or recording implies a broad range of different possible stories of production.

The most convincing “Arizona” landscape might be shot in Brooklyn and require framing out Coney Island attractions, and the most “faithful” recording of a Caruso might require him at times to sing like an amateur. As Marey proved in one way and Edison in another, technological representation is never a case of simply seeing or hearing, but of looking and listening. We look and listen for things, for specific purposes, while the machine's “more perfect” eyes and ears simply absorb indiscriminately.

Whether recording muscle contractions for a study of human physiology, or an aria for the most demanding audience, it is not possible to separate the performance from the processes of inscription, nor neither from the conditions of exhibition. Even the most “objective” recording cannot leave its object untouched, for the very goal of objectivity touches the core of that which we wish to record, and the techniques we use to record it. While the “coming of sound” may seem a particularly clear-cut instance of adapting a well-defined technology to a similarly stable aesthetic form, such is decidedly not the case.

Not only were both technology and representational form in flux, but each helped to define or constitute the other in the process of their mutual interaction. Moreover, the period before the putative coming of sound offers us a glimpse into how two new technologies with sometimes overlapping and sometimes quite distinct histories—namely, cinematography and phonography—could combine to form an integrated sensory experience that was neither audio nor visual, but distinctly audiovisual. However, the proper ratio between the senses—between hearing and seeing—was open to vigorous debate and competing models.

Was the cinema an essentially aural medium, born of the spirit of publicly performed music, to which spectacles of various sorts might be appended, or was it a narrative visual form, to which sound could only be an “accompaniment”? Chapter 2 Literature Review During the early cinema period, especially, we can indirectly witness a confrontation between competing sensory regimes, each one adhering to its own dictates and coexisting at times unpeacefully. The dominant ideal of listening as attentive, sensitive, and receptively passive—as complete and self-contained—confronted the film industry's emerging visual language, and each sense was forced to work with and against the other in a project of audiovisual collaboration.

As the institution of cinema moved more and more firmly toward narrative, sound took its place as an integral, but also over determined, part of the sensory order characteristic of the classical cinema. Sound In 1926 In retrospect, the sonic needs of Hollywood in 1926 seem almost obvious. Who, for example, could ever have doubted the primacy of intelligible, narratively important speech for the classical paradigm? The cinema of narrative integration, long since established, apparently mandated the practices of sound we have come to accept as the norm, as it simultaneously ruled out other approaches.

David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, for instance, assert that “sound as sound … was inserted into the already-constituted system of the Classical Hollywood style,” that “the centrality of speech became a guide for innovation in sound recording,” and that the use of character-centered leitmotivs indicates how even musical accompaniment had become a fully integrated component of a narrative unity.