concept

Audio

Everything heard: dialogue, effects, music, silence, and the argument over whether sound serves the image or works against it.

audio
reference
technical-code

Audio is everything a film lets you hear: dialogue, effects, ambience, music and the silence between them. It is the code audiences treat as accompaniment and analysts skip, because the vocabulary of film ("viewer", "spectator", "watching") assumes the image is the film and the soundtrack is what plays under it. The position taken here is the reverse. On the four films on this site, sound does the work the image is credited with. The murder in Psycho is substantially a sound effect; the levitation in The Craft is a rhythm; the whole premise of Alice is a cut you can hear with your eyes closed. The distinction between sound the characters share and sound only the audience hears has its own note, Non-diegetic sound.

Servant or partner

The library disagrees about rank. Giannetti, closing two chapters on the image, calls it "the most important source of meaning in the movies" and files sound among the "many other ways of communicating information". Barsam and Monahan say the opposite in so many words: "Today, sound is not subordinate to image", and "A film's sound is potentially as expressive as its images." Bordwell and Thompson explain why the argument persists: we have learned to ignore most of what we hear, so "we're strongly inclined to think of sound as simply an accompaniment to the real basis of cinema, the moving images". Their verdict is that sound is "perhaps the hardest one to study", not the least important.

Reisz and Millar, writing in 1953, had already moved past the ranking question to a practical one: what sound does to time. Their reading of the robbery in Odd Man Out shows a fast-cut sequence slowed by the steady beat of mill machinery on the track, so the audience feels the men's sense that the job is taking too long. "Sound can be used to act in opposition to the visuals, in quality or tempo", and in that scene "the tempo of the sound is used as a counterpoint to the visuals, not as a reinforcement". That is the difference between the camps. Giannetti's sound illustrates; Reisz's sound argues with the picture.

On the bench

Psycho — the shower scene is the case for Barsam and Monahan. The knife never enters flesh; the shrieking strings do the physiological work the image withholds, and they exist only because the composer ignored an instruction to leave the scene unscored (Herrmann scored the shower against orders). Screen the two versions back to back.

The Craft — light as a feather is the case for Reisz. There is no cue. Four girls' voices repeat a rhyme, each cycle a little faster and quieter, and the cutting locks to the beat, so suspense is manufactured out of pulse rather than information (The chant is a metronome, not a spell). Sound governs the tempo of the scene, exactly as the mill machinery governs Odd Man Out.

Alice — the prologue shows sound and editing as one instrument. Alice Faye's "You'll Never Know" is the sound of a 1940s promise; the smash cut to Mott the Hoople at full volume is 1974 arriving. Twenty-seven years are explained by the join between two songs (You'll Never Know, then Mott the Hoople). And Taxi Driver — the shoot-out ends on a musical citation of Herrmann's Psycho score, which turns an apparent recovery into a diagnosis (Herrmann finished the score and died that night).

Mean Streets (1973) is the partner position at its most literal: there is no score at all, only what the jukebox and car radio are playing, and the cutting follows the records. Johnny Boy's entrance cuts to slow motion on the downbeat of "Jumpin' Jack Flash" (Mean Streets — Tony's bar, The jukebox is the score).

What to look for

Play the scene sound-only. What survives? Then image-only. What survives?
Does the tempo of the track match the tempo of the cutting, or work against it?
What is conspicuously silent, and what would a cue have added or spoiled?
When does a sound arrive before its image, and what does the film gain by letting you hear a place before you see it?

In the books

This makes sound as flexible and wide-ranging as other techniques. Yet sound is perhaps the hardest one to study.

— Film Art, fa 264

we've been concerned with the most important source of meaning in the movies—the visual image. But of course movies exist in time and have many other ways of communicating information.

— Giannetti, um 94

A film's sound is potentially as expressive as its images.

— Barsam & Monahan, lam 370

In many instances, sound can be used to act in opposition to the visuals, in quality or tempo.

— Reisz & Millar, tfe 226

Deepest on this in the library

Measured across the 72 books indexed in Reel — how much denser each one is on this concept than the library average. A place to read next, not a claim about quality.

2.4× Barsam & Monahan — Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film 386 passages · cite as lam
2.2× Karel Reisz & Gavin Millar — The Technique of Film Editing 240 passages · cite as tfe
2× Bordwell & Thompson — Film Art 619 passages · cite as fa
2× Marilyn Fabe — Closely Watched Films: An Introduction to the Art of Narrative Film Technique 99 passages · cite as cwf
2× Justus Nieland — David Lynch 77 passages · cite as dl
2× David A. Cook — A History of Narrative Film 393 passages · cite as hnf

Go on, then

concept Camerawork Where the camera stands, how it moves, and what that position makes the audience.
concept Editing The join between shots: cinema's only invisible code, until it decides to be seen.
concept Lighting Light as language: key, fill and shadow, the moral vocabulary one textbook gives them and the grey scale another reduces them to.
scene Alice — the prologue Ninety seconds of counterfeit 1940s Hollywood, built at real 1940s expense, existing to be destroyed by one cut.
film Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) Scorsese's studio women's picture: a widow, a kid, a road east, and an argument with every film Alice grew up watching.
idea Herrmann finished the score and died that night Bernard Herrmann took some persuading to score a film with a title he disliked. He completed it on Christmas Eve 1975 and died the same night.