And Sound

Synchresis Image and Sound by Mario Cordina (Anidroc)

This is a possible lecture on 'And Sound'

In the Beginning there was the word. In 1895, the aptly named Lumiere brothers gave light to the Movement image. Below is Maria's Dance scene taken from Fritz Lang's Metropolis 1927.

Cinema was born and all was fine till the Movement Image found a partner; Sound.

Early versus Modern Sound Theory

Many film directors, film theorists, and aestheticians believed that the image defined the essence of cinema and was the feature that distinguished it from literature and theater. They felt that the addition of synchronized sound (especially in the form of spoken speech) to film was a disaster that would destroy the cinema as a unique art form.

Bela Balazs: "The silent film is free of the isolating walls of language difference," ... "If we look at and understand each other's faces and gestures, we not only understand, we also learn to feel each other's emotions."

Rudolph Arnheim: "In the universal silence of the image, the fragments of a broken vase could 'talk' exactly the way a character talked to his neighbour."

Sergei Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovkin, René Clair, and Alberto Cavalcanti deplored films that employed sound in a slavish, unimaginative way, by matching every sound to its on-screen source. but admitted that the addition of music, sound effects, and even the spoken word could potentially enhance the power of the film image if most of the sounds were non-synchronous that is in counterpoint to the image, creating a clash, a felt disparity, between what was seen and what was heard.

René Clair: "Even in the dialogues of the talking picture," . . . "it seems that at the moment a sentence is spoken it is often more interesting to see the face of the listener than that of the speaker."

Do you agree with the above statements? Watch this sequence below featuring Maria's Dance scene in the 1927 film Metropolis over Tito and Tarantula's song 'After Dark' used in Robert Rodrigo's From Dusk Till Dawn 1996 and Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.1994.

André Bazin: Cinema is the ability to mechanically record images of the world. Sound therefore, was the natural extension of film's inherent realism.

Karel Reisz: Sound not only helps to make cinema more realistic but permits greater economy in storytelling and allows for more complexity.

Michel Chion in Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen:

Sound is in fact more important than the image in determining the effect of a film.
Sound influences our perception of images.
We notice different things in the same image when it is accompanied by different sounds
Sounds can make us notice otherwise insignificant elements of an image.

Do we see what we hear?

Let us first look at illusions of the ear.