University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

At least half the picture: sound and narration in the postwar / pre-Dolby American film

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At least half the picture: sound and narration in the postwar / pre-Dolby American film

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Content AT LEAST HALF THE PICTURE: SOUND AND NARRATION IN
THE POSTWAR / PRE-DOLBY AMERICAN FILM

by

Paul N. Reinsch

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMA-TELEVISION (CRITICAL STUDIES))

August 2008

Copyright 2008 Paul N. Reinsch
ii

Dedication

For
Nelson and Ruth Reinsch
Raymond and Ida Weatherford
iii

Acknowledgements
First, thanks to my advisor David E. James for his support, oversight, and
willingness to ask tough questions that forced me to think harder and more precisely
about this material. At a more basic level, this project would not exist, and certainly
would not have been completed, without his generous involvement. Thanks as well
to Rick Jewell and Leo Braudy for their input and insight on all stages of this
dissertation. Their criticisms have sharpened my opinions and deepened my
knowledge. Each scholar studies history in a way I seek to emulate.
Drew Casper and Marsha Kinder shared their considerable insight and
contributed to the foundations of this dissertation. Dr. Casper’s enthusiasm for, and
knowledge of, postwar Hollywood decidedly shaped this dissertation, and Dr.
Kinder’s ability to combine interests in sound theory and narrative theory served as a
model for portions of this project.
My family supports me in ways that defy description and have little to do
with this dissertation. This thank you is wholly inadequate. My parents Lamar and
Janet Reinsch continue to nurture me. Karl and Marisa Reinsch are my favorite
siblings and I hope will one day read this work.
Some of my friends worried that their children would enter college before I
was out of college. I just made it. For their benevolent pressure thanks to friends
and their families: Jill and Erik Johnson, Matt and Megan Milholland, and William
Watkins. Jeff and Linda Childers do a great job of reminding me why I wanted this
degree. And I am thankful everyday to know Sally Jones.
iv

For support, encouragement, and occasional intellectual stimulation at USC,
my thanks to Robert Buerkle, James Leo Cahill, Daniel Herbert, Chris Hanson,
Carlos Kase, Nam Lee, David Lerner, Sourav Roychowdhury, Scott Ruston, Janani
Subramanian, and Chris Valness. Thanks as well to Bill Whittington, Linda
Overholt, and Sherall Preyer in the Critical Studies department. Dana Polan was also
very supportive and helpful at the early stages of this project.
And finally, my thanks to John Vernon Jones for being a terrific friend and
pressuring me to start taking films seriously.
v

Table of Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Abstract

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: The Postwar / Pre-Dolby Period

Chapter 3: Narration and Sound

Chapter 4: Sync and Async Sound

Chapter 5: Sound and Diegesis

Chapter 6: Sound / Image Hierarchy

Chapter 7: Conclusion

Bibliography

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374
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Abstract

This dissertation: (a) argues that the time between the end of World War Two and
the introduction of Dolby technology constitutes a distinct historical period in the
American sound film and labels this the “postwar / pre-Dolby era”; (b) offers case
studies of Hollywood films, avant-garde films, documentary films, and an animated
film from the identified time period; and (c) on the basis of these case studies,
complicates the synchronous / a synchronous dichotomy, the diegetic / nondiegetic
binary, and the classical hierarchy of image over sound. In sum, the dissertation
argues that the study of film history needs to more fully acknowledge the centrality
of sound and the study of film sound needs to become more historical.
The dissertation discusses changes in the production, aesthetics and
exhibition of American films in the postwar / pre-Dolby era. Films in this period
present sound as something more than a support for the image and narrative. The
foregrounding of sound in film narration is a return to the uncontrolled sound of the
pre-classical era and explains the uses and presentation of sound in the Dolby era.
This leads to a reconfiguration of the classical period’s limitations on sound as the
exception, rather than the norm, of cinema. The discussion puts forth a theorization
of film narration as the combination of sound and image because film is an audio-
visual medium.
Topics also include: magnetic sound, stereo sound, surround sound,
voiceover narration, the use of rock music as performance and underscore, the direct
vii

aural address of the audience, and the combination of voice and body in films that
admit the two do not naturally or inevitably belong together.

1

Chapter 1: Introduction

In his influential and oft-quoted study Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, Michel
Chion notes the lack of a thorough, complex historical account of sound in cinema:
after the coming of sound, you’ll find, if you leaf through
essays on the subject, it is as if nothing ever occurred since.
Historians continue to apply the same models and voice the same
regrets that people expressed fifty years ago. But it seems to me
that beyond the cinema’s discontinuous history, marked by
recognizable break points, which are like easily memorized dates
of major battles, there lies a continuous history, made up of more
progressive changes that are more difficult to detect. This is the
history that interests me.
1

Chion calls for work on the history of sound in / and / of film that will deepen the
litany of dates marking technological innovations and unique films. Implicitly Chion
also calls for a consideration of sound more developed than a binary of “classical”
and “modernist” or “postmodern” sound manifestations. Yet Chion’s comments
after the quoted statement fault directors such as Federico Fellini and Stanley
Kubrick for failing to take full advantage of the opportunities of Dolby technology in
their 1980s films: “Fellini . . . makes use of Dolby in Interview in order to fashion a
soundtrack exactly like the ones he made before. In Kubrick’s latest films there is no
particularly imaginative use of Dolby either.”
2
He therefore unwittingly
demonstrates exactly the sort of overly broad approach to sound in film that he
attacks. Though he quickly notes that sound “definition” improves over time
3
, and
explores a broad range of films in his discussion, Chion’s own example is to skip
from the “coming of sound” to the “superfield” permitted by Dolby stereo, a shift in
2

practice so significant that he compares it to an “eight-octave grand piano” which
replaces the old “upright spanning only five octaves.”
4

Chion’s comments are symptomatic of the treatment of film sound. Studies
of sound and / in American cinema focus on the early sound period (1926-1931),
classical Hollywood (the system of “invisible” cinematic style and the domination of
the eight major studios from 1929 to 1948), and the “postmodern” era, with this last
period beginning with the introduction of Dolby sound technology in the mid 70s
and its widespread adoption in the late 1970s as a central component of
contemporary spectacle cinema.
5
For Stephen Handzo the introduction of Dolby
stereo sound on film is not the second sound revolution but rather, “The third major
revolution after the ‘talkies’ (1927-30) and magnetic stereo (1952-55).”
6
While
Handzo’s essay outlines a number of significant changes in all three sound
revolutions and makes a case that each must be considered in detail, the middle of
these three “revolutions,” and the films made on either side of it, are relatively
neglected.
The following discussion intervenes in the study of film sound by focusing
on American cinema between Hollywood’s classical era and the first wave of the
American avant-garde (roughly the 1930s and into the 1940s) and the mid 1970s
when film and popular culture became increasingly read as “postmodern” and film
studies begins to explore connections between the film and music industries. This
project focuses on what some scholars label the “postwar” or “postclassical” period
of American cinema: 1946 – 1975. For the consideration of sound’s role in film, the
3

“postwar / pre-Dolby” period is the most neglected and perhaps the most interesting.
Sound elements in postwar cinema were of increasing significance in the
presentation of narrative information and sound’s position as half of film narration
was more and more evident in both commercial and avant-garde cinemas. As films
became more reflexive about their status as films, the presentation of sound has
transitioned from covert to overt and the binary between “classical” and “modernist”
uses of sound became increasingly difficult to discern. This transition should be
explored in detail rather than regarded as a clean break.
Second, at the level of theory, this project seeks to form connections between
the discourses of sound theory and theories of film narration and contends that sound
and image only co-operate (or fail to co-operate) in cinema through the act of film
narration. The study of the postwar / pre-Dolby period reveals that classical film
sound has been mistaken for a norm of cinema. An historical and cultural moment
of history and its accompanying aesthetics have been mistaken for theory. In
American cinema sound tends to serve the image but only necessarily in the classical
period.
This study argues that scholars need to reconsider descriptions of film
audiences as “spectators”
7
and cinema as a “visual art.”
8
Though cinema is casually
referred to as a “visual” art, film is, in fact, no more a visual than audio art; cinema is
audio-visual, or visual-audio. James Lastra claims that “cinema, the most pervasive
mechanism for disseminating technologically mediated sensory experience is, and
was from its very inception, not a visual phenomenon but a resolutely audiovisual
4

one.”
9
Lastra recognizes that the study of modernity cannot address only visual
elements because “Vision and hearing are the senses that, as a consequence of
nineteenth-century innovations, have been most fully penetrated by technology and
that have, reciprocally, shaped sensory technologies to the greatest degree.”
10

Nowhere are these facts demonstrated more clearly than in cinema. Film is herein
discussed as using sound(s) and image(s), and while this study focuses on sound it
continually recognizes that both sound and image are managed by film narration.
This work discusses film narration as an organizing system which does not
necessarily entail the arrangement of material into a narrative. David Bordwell, in
Narration in the Fiction Film, writes: “We can, in short, study narrative as a process,
the activity of selecting, arranging, and rendering story material in order to achieve
specific time-bound effects on a perceiver. I shall call this process narration.”
11

This study uses Bordwell’s theorization as a starting point to discuss film narration
as an organizing force which arranges sounds, arranges images and most
importantly, negotiates the union of sound and image with the goal of conveying a
narrative, or story. Sound is here theorized as half of film narration and separate
from the image: neither equal nor unequal but wholly other. This approach seeks to
correct sound theory which elevates sound by focusing only on it and ignoring the
image. Chion’s theory of “added value,” which he defines as “the expressive and /
or informative value with which a sound enriches a given image, so as to create the
definite impression . . . that this meaning emanates ‘naturally’ from the image
itself,”
12
demonstrates the absence of a theory of narration in his study of sound.
5

“Added value” reminds scholars of the need to examine sound and image together,
but even as he focuses on sound Chion argues that “the screen remains the principal
support of filmic perception.”
13
Sounds assist the image and the image: “projects
onto them [the sounds] a meaning they do not have at all in themselves.”
14
It is not
just that the image is innocent and that sound narrows the range of interpretation.
Instead sound too is determined by the image with which it is matched. Each is
flexible in meaning, but perhaps this is even more true of sounds: “The same sound
can convincingly serve as the sound effect for crushed watermelon in a comedy or
for a head blown to smithereens in a war film. The same noise will be joyful in one
context, intolerable in another.”
15
Yet the reverse can be also claimed. Crushing a
watermelon or a death in a war film has “meaning” in relation to other images and
particularly in terms of its aural partner. Synchrony and verisimilitude (of
convention, not “truth”) determine how the audience responds to a sound / image
combination and this theorization is insightful and helpful in examining audio-visual
texts. But Chion does not fully explain how these meetings occur; he stops short of
explaining how the “value[s]” of sound and image come to together and “add” to one
another.
At the same time, in part due to the continued reliance on literary-based
theories of narration and narrative, theories of film narration proceed as though films
are truly silent. For example, while Bordwell’s discussion of film narration shapes
this study, his work is founded on principles outlined by Russian Formalists (such
Meir Sternberg) who study narration and narrative in literature and figures
6

influenced by them (such as Gerard Genette). Bordwell focuses on the visual
conveyance of information. Sound theory and narration theory must be coordinated
and placed in dialogue in order to discuss sound and image together, the ways in
which they interact in specific film texts, and to examine the full implications of how
sound and image form the dual-address system of film. The focus on sound and
image relations – rather than narrative – demands that this discussion address a
variety of film texts – documentary, commercial (industrial), avant-garde (non-
industrial) – in order to explore how film sound acts as half of film narration.
16

A Case for Post-Classical Sound
Though this study does not propose a singular moment of change, or paradigm shift
in sound aesthetics or technology for either commercial or avant-garde film, the
suggestion that film sound can and should be used as a marker of change has a clear
and universally accepted precedent: the shift to “talking” film in the late 1920s.
There are few historical surveys of cinema that do not discuss sound experiments,
The Jazz Singer (1927), and the awkward and contentious transition to recorded
sound for filmmakers, exhibitors, and audiences. But scholars do not investigate
sound to consider the classical era’s origins or its decline. Douglas Gomery begins
his essay “Hollywood Corporate Business Practice and Periodizing Contemporary
Film History” by asking: “Proper periodizing of Hollywood history after the coming
of sound remains an unsettled matter. We must grapple with this key issue: what is
the best way to divide the history of the American film?”
17
He mentions the rise of
7

television, the Paramount Decision in 1948, and notes that, “numerous other events,
from 1953’s coming of widescreen images to the 1950s ending of blacklisting, have
been taken as the signal that a new period of Hollywood history had commenced.”
18

Though Gomery marks the coming of sound as a change, this is apparently the lone
moment of sound’s place in film history. He also says nothing about the changes in
sound exhibition which accompanied widescreen images in 1953 and beyond. Yet
exposure to films now described simply as “widescreen” was a new experience for
audiences, as was the use of “Rock Around the Clock” in the opening credits for
Blackboard Jungle (1956). Other individual films such as Fantasia (1940), The
Jolson Story (1946), The Tingler (1959), Cosmic Ray (1961), Scorpio Rising (1963),
and (nostalgia) (1971) indicate change.
The focus on these and other individual films is not meant to reaffirm their
status as exceptions but rather to situate them as individual manifestations of the
general trend away from classical sound norms to contemporary film sound. If the
classical system, and the norms of narration of the films, position sound as “less-
than” the image, in the postwar / pre-Dolby period sound reveals itself as half of
film. Many films in this period foreground sound in part because the structures of
classical storytelling are looser and moving towards fragmentation. Editing, for
example, deviates from continuity editing and the “rules” such as the 180 degree rule
are violated with more and more impunity. Rather than skip ahead to 1960 (or 1975,
or beyond) and note that the system is “broken,” it is more beneficial to consider the
pressures which build and stretch the ability of the classical aesthetic norms to
8

accommodate change. Without arguing for a teleology of cinema, or even a rigidly
evolutionary model of American cinema, changes in Hollywood and avant-garde
cinema can be linked to changes in available technology and practices in both
production and exhibition. One could also link postwar cinema to the larger
emphasis in American society to listening to recorded music (rather than live) and
the move to listen to music with more sophisticated equipment in cars and at home.
19

With this in mind, below is a chart which indicates some of the ways in
which a middle position between the “classical” and the Dolby or “postmodern”
periods of film history can be examined. Sound in cinema is often reduced to the
presentation of music and this aspect of film sound has received the most critical
attention, a fact reflected in this chart’s emphasis on music. But changes in
technology such as stereo and Dolby are just as important, if not more, for the
presentation of the voice and sound effects as they are for music.
1927-39 1940-75 75 to present
Music: “Inaudible” noticeable obvious (for sale)
Music: leitmotifs “monotheme” compilation / pop
Music: original score original / with lyrics existing music
Creator: composer Music supervisor Sound designer
Technician: sound recorder Foley artist ADR
Technology: mono stereo Dolby / surround
Voiceover: newsreels Many Hollywood Few Hollywood
Avant-garde: mostly silent innovative sound

This chart, and the search for “midpoints” is not undertaken in order to
preserve or harden the binaries offered for “classical” and “postmodern” cinema.
For example, while music might be (nearly) “inaudible,” dialogue has never been;
speech is presented to be heard, understood, and convey narrative information.
9

Similarly, “inaudible” music is often linked to the presentation of narrative and
audible music is linked to spectacle. While classical cinema does sometimes
foreground music in moments of spectacle (montage sequences, for example) this is
not a necessary connection, and it is only the classical system, or at least the standard
conception of it, which insists that “audible” and “narrative” cannot be one and the
same.
The first line of the chart describes how film scholars label the use of music
in these three periods. The experience of music in the classical film is labeled
“inaudible” by scholars, such as Claudia Gorbman, to indicate that music is not
meant to be heard on its own terms or focused on as music, but rather supports the
image and narrative. When contemporary film reviewers attack a film for being too
much like a music video, they respond to music which is obviously presented as a
product for sale (possibly even in the theater lobby). Yet in the 1940s films noir
often include scenes in nightclubs where an entire song is performed and the
ostensible narrative of the film seems to pause.
20
In the postwar / pre-Dolby era
Hollywood becomes increasingly interested in selling music, promoting singers, and
tapping into the rise of home sound (eventually stereo) systems. In this period
singles and soundtrack albums appear which are identified as having connections to
the film.
The second line broadly indicates the type of music used in film in these
three periods. Hollywood scoring was not monolithic or perfectly stable and its
changes mark the breaking apart of the classical norms. Classical films in the 1930s
10

likely present an original (if borrowing heavily from uncopyrighted music) orchestral
score which consists of leitmotifs assigned often to individual characters. In the
1940s popular music begins to appear more frequently: jazz, pop songs and, by the
1950s, rock. Additionally, music with lyrics appears as underscore and not just as
performance numbers, and orchestral scores, begin to seem anachronistic for some
genres. The heavy repetition of the leitmotif in classical scoring leads to the
“monotheme” scores which repeat a strong, clear melody for much of the film’s
running time in films like Laura (1944) and High Noon (1951) – this practice has the
effect of a 90 minute commercial for the song. These themes were sold as singles on
the backs of the films. By the mid-1950s rock songs – with lyrics which may
themselves tell a narrative – begin to infiltrate Hollywood films, and other films like
Rear Window (1954) combine existing material with something like a monotheme.
Other 1950s films like Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956) showcase theme
songs in their opening credits. Films today often feature existing, and perhaps
already popular, music by established performers which forms a clear intertext, both
with the song itself and prior uses of the song (often in other films). These
compilation scores mix artists, styles, and time periods and result in soundtrack
albums that are much like mixtapes.
21
The compilation score can be traced to the
postwar period with rock films and avant-garde films like Scorpio Rising and moves
squarely into Hollywood with Easy Rider from 1969.
The fourth line addresses the music supervisor who in post 1930s films
partially replaces the studio composer. This individual is in charge of selecting
11

existing music for use in a film and securing the legal permission to use it (and / or a
specific performance). A position officially created in the 1970s by Walter Murch
and unique to contemporary filmmaking is the sound designer, who crafts sounds for
the film and may coordinate work with the music supervisor. Murch’s work on
Apocalypse Now (1979) (after previously receiving a “sound montage” credit for
films like The Conversation [1974]), and his work and writings on the subject of
sound, all serve to promote the acknowledgement and study of aural elements.
22
A
growing body of scholarship likens the work of sound designers to musical
composers because the sounds are a significant portion of the film’s address and are
not recorded but crafted. Some theorists compare this work to musique concrete.
The sound designer is also an indication of increased acknowledgement of the
creative act of sound production in film.
The classical period relied primarily on sound engineers and technicians who
worked under trying conditions (and received little respect from others in the
filmmaking community) to deliver clear and communicative soundtracks (dialogue
primarily). Contemporary filmmaking is characterized more by the work of ADR
(auto dialogue replacement) where actors’ words on set are recorded as a guide and
later replaced by an entirely new dialogue track. The practice of ADR begins in the
1960s and has connections to Foley art which begins in the 1940s since both
processes create sound for the film after the photography. “Foley” is named for
Universal Studios employee Jack Foley who in the late 1940s made what the studio
called “synchronized effects.” He was not alone in this endeavor, but his name
12

became synonymous with the creation of sound effects which are synced to the
image.
The fifth line contributes to the consideration of technology. The
technologies of recording, creating, and presenting sound continue to change and
often improve. The major change in the postwar period involves the use of magnetic
sound on film and the presentation of stereo sound. Though mono films continued to
dominate until the 1970s, the innovation of stereo and magnetic sound was
noticeable for both filmmakers and audiences and marks a middle point between
mono film and the Dolby revolution of modern Hollywood (and later surround sound
and digital sound). The introduction of Dolby sound technology and the introduction
of the sound designer as a film production position each occurs in the mid-1970s and
together spur academic interest in film sound.
23

The chart next includes voiceover narration. After its use in a few innovative
fiction films such as The Power and the Glory (1933) and newsreels in the classical
period, voiceover narration becomes much more common and elaborate in its
presentation of information and subjectivity (and sometimes subjectivities) in the
postwar / pre-Dolby period. It continues to appear in nonfiction films but the Direct
Cinema eschewal of voiceover as a device which tells the audience what to think and
feel is perhaps a response to the flowering of voiceover narration in the 1940s and
1950s.
The chart concludes with a line addressing avant-garde film practice.
Though the rubric of classicism is not useful when discussing avant-garde cinema,
13

there is an equally significant shift in avant-garde cinema which is nearly coeval with
the beginning of post-classicism in Hollywood. In the 1940s more filmmakers
embraced the practice of cinema outside the film industry and created works which
expanded cinema vocabulary in part by embracing the sonic potentials of the
medium. Scott MacDonald states that “After World War II, technological and
esthetic developments catalyzed a major flowering of avant-garde cinema in the
United States” and further explains: “The increasing availability of less-expensive
16mm motion picture cameras and projectors made the production and exhibition of
alternative forms of film economically feasible, and it facilitated the development of
a broader range of production systems.”
24
In his invaluable collection Lovers of
Cinema: The First American Avant-garde 1919-1945, Jan-Christopher Horak offers
a more thorough explanation for the shift and argues that “film historians should
consider adopting a different terminology to differentiate between the ‘first avant-
garde’ of the 1920s and 1930s, and the ‘second avant-garde’ of the mid-1940s
through the 1960s.”
25
While technological changes played a significant role and the
expanded participation in non-commercial cinema were each important, of greater
interest to Horak is a change in philosophy between the two movements: “Both
defined themselves in opposition to commercial, classical narrative cinema,
privileging the personal over the pecuniary.”
26
Yet, he continues, their differences
are fundamental and recognizable in that unlike the earlier practitioners, “the 1950s
avant-gardists proclaimed themselves to be independent filmmakers, actively
engaged in the production of ‘art.’”
27
For Horak this second group sought to capture
14

“personal expression” and to distance themselves from “any collaboration with
commercial or public interests, any utilitarian usage of the medium, be it
commercial, instructional, or ideological.”
28
Though scholars of the avant-garde
debate the relationship between avant-garde cinema and commercial film, with P.
Adams Sitney among others arguing for a near total separation, and David E. James
and David Curtis exploring how these cinemas interpenetrate one another and are
each energized by the collision,
29
Horak contends that the divisions between avant-
garde and commercial film practice were deeper after the Second World War and the
adversarial relationship which exists today is a postwar phenomenon.
The second wave of the avant-garde demands that the audience monitor the
relation between sound and image and conjecture about how this relationship will
continue. While the opening scene of a (classical) Hollywood film is likely to
confirm the expected supportive relationship between sound and image, the first
image or sound of an avant-garde film can not be regarded with such assumptions.
Narration tends in Hollywood films – particularly before World War II – to make
sound serve image through the presentation of sync dialogue and unobtrusive
underscore. In the postwar avant-garde sound and image are as likely to be in a
contentious relationship. David E. James argues, “Apart from the school of visual
music principally associated with Oskar Fischinger, the avant-garde’s use of sound
has typically emphasized disjuncture and counterpoint.”
30

The second wave’s use of sound therefore represents less a reaction or a
release of sound’s withheld energy, and more a discovery of the potentialities of
15

sound. Stan Brakhage’s famous resistance to sound is a sign of respect for its power
and his work could be labeled reactionary in its avoidance of sound – yet it rejects
not avant-garde sound but the unimaginative and vision-stifling sound he located in
narrative, and especially Hollywood, films. Brakhage does not seem to have rejected
or spoken against, for example, Steve Reich’s original sound collages for a number
of Robert Nelson’s films including Oh Dem Watermelons (1965) and Plastic Haircut
(1963) and Gunvor Nelson’s My Name is Oona (1969). Interestingly, some avant-
garde films made as silent films in 1930s (and even 1940s) had soundtracks added
for screenings in the postwar period. Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)
features a score by Teiji Ito (a unique composer in his own right) which was added in
1952 and is almost never mentioned, much less examined, in the many
considerations of Deren.
31
Similarly, Harry Smith’s Early Abstractions (1946-1957)
were made silent but screened with various soundtracks, including Beatles songs
(rather than the Americana which comprises his justly famous Anthology of
American Folk Music albums). These handcrafted films are therefore set to music
which, in the case of the Beatles, was the most “produced” and popular – even
industrial – of its time. Smith’s films are not properly described, therefore, as silent
but rather as featuring a variable soundtrack. Screenings have been accompanied by
a live performance of music and sound when possible in order to best present his
work. Smith’s appreciation for music even spilled over into his paintings, which
could be viewed while listening to particular pieces of music.
32
He finally finished
16

Mahagonny in 1980 which offers 4 projected images and the entirety of Kurt Weill
and Bertolt Brecht's opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.

Film as Audio-Visual Art
This section argues for a shift in focus for studies of the variable relationship
between sound and image in cinema and notes the aural nature of cinema. Chion
argues that “A film without sound remains a film; a film with no image, or at least
without a visual frame for projection, is not a film”
33
and thus positions film squarely
as more visual than aural art. He mentions Walter Ruttmann’s 1930 film Weekend
as an “imageless film” and “limit case”: “Played through the speakers, Weekend is
nothing other than a radio program, or perhaps a work of concrete music. It becomes
a film only with reference to a frame, even if an empty one.”
34
Some scholars, like
Fred Camper, posit that true “silent” cinema was created only when the “sound” was
invented, and he compellingly argues that the practice of avant-garde filmmaker Stan
Brakhage embraces the possibility of true silence. In the so-called “silent” era, films
were typically accompanied by sounds which were performed in the space of the
theater. But when sound was added to the transmission apparatus of the cinema –
sound on the film strip – it created the space for a third category in addition to the
simple binary of silent and sound films. He states:
Thus there are really three major categories: those films that are
intended to be accompanied by a sound track not on the film strip
itself, whether live music, spoken commentary, sound-on-tape, a
record player, or intended audience sounds; films with a
predetermined sound track placed on the film strip; and films that are
intended to be projected in silence.
35

17

In the last category the most obvious example is the films of Stan Brakhage. Here
we see that “a new technology has created a renewed sense of opposite possibilities:
so that the invention of the ‘true’ sound film allowed, some years later, for the
emergence of our final category, the ‘true’ silent film.”
36
The invention of sound
made silence “a true choice for film.”
He additionally notes that “silence” itself is not monolithic: “A silence
‘filled’ with film images is different from any other type of silence, and in the realm
of silent film there exist many varieties of silence.”
37
This complicates Chion’s
comments, clearly demanding that “silent” film be described as something other than
silent. It also suggests that our definition of cinema needs to be interrogated with
regard to sound and image. Chion argues that, “Ontologically speaking, and
historically too, film sound is considered as a ‘plus,’ an add-on”
38
and supports these
positions throughout his writing. In partial response to Chion, in two different essays
Rick Altman has addressed what he calls the “ontological fallacy”: This fallacy is
that “the image without sound still constitutes cinema, while sound without an image
is no longer cinema. Clearly assuming that cinema is a firm, unchanging category,
immune to history, these critics present their arguments as logical and permanent.”
39

Writing in 1992, Altman notes several instances of texts – the overtures before
Vitaphone sound-on-disk features, the overtures and post-credits themes of films and
“the use of a totally black screen in recent music videos”
40
– which feature sounds
without images (typically presented in a theatrical setting but at least involving a
frame) and argues that these have been accepted as instances of film. These texts
18

demonstrate that the definition of cinema is not static but always changing. His
comments also suggest that the relationship between sound and image should be
considered in any discussion of cinema and in individual texts, and that all of this
should be undertaken with a close look at history. Like Lastra, Altman demands that
film scholars take account of sound in historical investigations and theoretical
discussions.
William Johnson’s two 1980s essays for Film Quarterly are important works
that have received too little attention. He begins his 1985 essay by declaring that
“sound in the film is a full and equal partner of the image.”
41
He argues that image
and sound need to be considered as distinct entities: “The crucial condition of sound
and image in film is that they are both distinct and comparable.”
42
He suggests that
when sound and image coincide it should be called “confirmation” and when they
differ it should be labeled “opposition.” In his later essay Johnson continues his
argument, saying near the beginning, “Sound always plays a part, even when reduced
to a minimum, just as the image always plays a part, even during a fade or black-out
(or all the all-black and all-white frames of an abstract film such as Kubelka’s Arnulf
Rainer [1960]). The basis of film is a continuous interaction between sound and
image.”
43
The mention of Kubelka is welcome, indicating Johnson’s desire to
discuss sound in film, not simply sound in narrative films. This sets his work apart
from most writers on sound. For Johnson, cinema represents a unique joining of
sound and image:
This interaction is quite different from the relation between sound
and image in other performing arts because, in film, the two
19

channels are separate. Even with a scene recorded directly in
cinéma vérité style the image and sound are mediated separately,
and in most films any ‘natural’ link in tone and intensity between
profilmic sound and image is thoroughly broken. In this respect
the archetype of the sound film is the animated cartoon, in which
the often tightly knit sound and image have no profilmic
communality whatsoever.
44

Johnson argues that because image and sound are different mediums, and are
experienced with different bodily organs, cinema is unique in combining two
channels of information. Positioning the cartoon – where sound and image are
created separately and are completely free to interact in a limitless number of
combinations – as the “archetype of the sound film” is wonderfully suggestive. In
this second essay Johnson articulates a more detailed analysis of how sound and
image interact, finally concluding that “the ground state of sound-image relations
consists of accidental relations. These are multiple and random, overlapping and
often conflicting with one another, and too profuse to come under the film-makers’
full control; thus they can also conflict with the overt meaning of any scene in which
they occur.”
45

In light of these arguments, perhaps cinema should be redefined as consisting
of sound and image and the “coming of sound” represented by the Vitaphone shorts
(and others) and, of course, with The Jazz Singer represents the sound portion of
films becoming as fixed – rather than being relatively more variable – as the image
portion. Cinema could be regarded as existing on a continuum of sound and image
and an individual film’s address (or narration, in many cases) should be read as
20

(tending to) emphasize either sound or image. The following diagram suggests a
beginning to such an argument.
SOUND -------------------+-------------------+--------------------+--------------------IMAGE
Jarman’s Blue Rock films Bruce Conner Gone w/ the Wind Brakhage
Audible Picture Show Hollis Frampton Empire

Here films which consist only of sounds, and have a single image or no “image” at
all, are on the far left and films which consist solely of images and which do not
incorporate sounds, occupy the right side of the continuum. Derek Jarman’s film
Blue consists of an unchanging screen of blue while the soundtrack chronicles his
struggle with disease and his musings on a range of subjects. The Audible Picture
Show is an ongoing project organized by Matt Hulse which compiles short audio
pieces from artists, bundles them into screening packages, and exhibits the works in
theatrical settings.
46
At the opposite end are the films of Stan Brakhage, Warhol’s
Empire (1964) and other films which lack a soundtrack. These are the limit cases
and other films exist somewhere between these extremes. Most Hollywood films
put more emphasis in terms of narrative content and emotional force in the image
rather than the soundtrack, so here Gone with the Wind (1939) stands in as a
“typical” Hollywood film. Its counterpart on the left side of this continuum are rock
films which present rock, or any other form of popular music, as the primary
attraction of the film. Concert films, while providing the image of performers, offer
music that the audience wants to hear and in an environment – at least theatrically –
which likely offers an aural experience superior to a purchased recording. A concert
film also offers audiences something like a front row seat to a concert and Gone
21

with the Wind, for example, features a famous score by Max Steiner, so each
contains information and appealing aspects from both sound and image. Squarely in
the middle of this continuum we could locate many of the avant-garde films of
Bruce Conner and Hollis Frampton because they value sound and image equally,
often by emphasizing their radical otherness from one another. These films refuse
to place either sound or image in a subordinate position and instead force the
audience to consider them as equals which dynamically interact to create
experiences which are as purely “cinematic” as one could hope. Conner and
Frampton stand in for other avant-garde filmmakers but this middle position is also
indicative in many ways of the period that this discussion intends to explore in
detail.
Each of the films mentioned above shares another trait: they are stable texts.
Yet since this study contends that film consists of sound(s) and image(s) it is
important to note that each half of a given film – its soundtrack and imagetrack – is
subject to variation. This helps address films of the postwar / pre-Dolby era whose
status as performance is foregrounded due to the solicitation of audience response.
The experience of films like Woodstock (1970) and The Tingler can never be the
same twice if audience members either sing along or scream when cued by the film.
Cinema, as Rick Altman argues, should be examined less as a collection of texts and
more as a series of “events.” He forcefully argues that regarding films as “coherent”
ignores clear differences in release prints and:
1) three decades of live, unstandardized accompaniment of ‘silent’
films, 2) simultaneous release of silent and sound versions during
22

the later twenties and early thirties, and 3) parallel distribution of
magnetic and optical track versions during the fifties and sixties, as
well as mono, stereo, and surround versions in the seventies and
eighties.
47

His list focuses on changes in the sound of a given film, and changes that largely go
unrecognized by scholars. Altman’s theorization encourages the study of the
performance of a given text, and while he does not make the connection, his
discussion encompasses films which are explicit in their status as performances. In
some films either image, sound, or both, is certain to be unique at each screening.
For films using multiple projectors such as Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1966) and films
which incorporate the use of gels placed in front of the image by the projectionist
like Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth (1963), the image track is variable with
each presentation, or performance, of the film. At the opposite end of this continuum
would be films where the image is stable; films where there is a single accepted
version. A continuum of this category could look like this:
Variable image ----------------------------------------- Fixed Image
Christmas on Earth Gone w/ the Wind
Chelsea Girls Cosmic Ray

Yet it is also true that films exist in various forms: film, video, laserdisc, DVD, Blu-
Ray, High-Def, widescreen, fullscreen, director’s cut, unrated edition, edited for
television, edited for air travel, and the like. Before the proliferation of Hollywood’s
software, in the 1920s and 1930s local censors would extract material from films
which means that seeing the “same” film in two different regions could potentially
result in quite different experiences.
23

These various versions of a given text can also have different soundtracks. A
version of a film edited for broadcast television or for use on airplanes may have
dialogue altered to remove objectionable words. Additionally, some films like
Christmas on Earth have an unfixed, or variable, soundtrack since the screening is
meant to be accompanied by a radio playing in the exhibition space and the audio
content would necessarily vary considerably from screening to screening. We
should also include early films which do not have a fixed soundtrack recorded on
film (or disc) so the sound would vary according to the actions of musicians and
sound effects technicians. So we could produce something like a continuum of
sound in films as well:
Variable sound ----------------------------------------- Fixed Sound
“Silent” films Top Gun
Christmas on Earth Cosmic Ray

It is also worth noting that while not true of Top Gun (1986), the use of popular
music in cinema has resulted in films which feature one song in the theatrical release
but substitute a different song for the television and home video release because of
rights issues.

Why Sound and Narration Need to Be Examined Together
While Johnson offers unique considerations of sound in cinema and a model which,
unlike Chion’s, refuses to discuss sound as a servant of the image or cinema as
essentially visual, his work also shares a failing with most writers on film sound.
Though Johnson compellingly argues for considering film as the union, or better yet,
24

collision, of sound and image, he does not offer an explanation for how this collision
is created or managed. Similarly, director Robert Bresson’s articulation of the
balance of sound and image stops short of explaining how sound(s) and image(s)
come together: “The exchanges that are produced between images and images, sound
and sounds, images and sounds, give the people and objects in your films their
cinematographic life and, by a subtle phenomenon, unify your composition.”
48

Bresson argues for the choices of the filmmaker to create these relationships but says
nothing of the tool which the filmmaker must use: narration. While Buhler
demonstrates that dialectics operate in the image track (and logically in the
soundtrack as well), and Johnson demonstrates that sound and image are
fundamentally different, what both of these theorizations lack is an articulation of
film narration. These theorizations are readily applicable to nonnarrative texts but
have been neglected.
Johnson is correct that not only the links between sound and image are
“multiple and random” but so are the links between images and between sounds. But
in the narrative films which Johnson considers (and Buhler only addresses narrative
films) what renders the collection of images, the collection of sounds, and the
combination of sounds and image into something which communicates is the process
of film narration. Narration controls the audience’s experience of these sounds and
images and does so in such a persuasive manner that it seems sound and image
“belong” together, concealing their separateness. For example, consider moments of
slow motion, or when the image is noticeably sped up, to create emphasis. In these
25

moments the sound track very seldom changes speed in a similar fashion; sounds
continue in “normal” speed, most obviously in the case of any music which
accompanies the image.
49
The soundtrack is only similarly “distorted” for jokes and
such an alteration is clearly not the norm. Narration organizes images and has since
the film first edit. Continuity editing, for example, is a complex system which
developed over time to control images and place them in a cooperative and
communicative relationship with each other. Sound mixing is a clear example of
how narration controls sounds as the volume of individual sounds shifts in order for
speech to be heard over noise. The pleasure of musical films, and music
documentaries, is in large part due to the high degree of cooperation between sound
and image. Musicals are harmonious objects in that sound and image are so clearly
united in a common goal, much more so than a film which features dialogue, sound
effects, and background music. The musical is utopian not simply in depicting an
ideal world as scholars like Altman argue, but in presenting sound and image
together as so alike as to unite naturally.
The central division which film negotiates is not between plot and story as
some theorists (such as Bordwell) would have it – though this is worthy of continued
attention – but rather between sound and image. The polysemous nature of cinema is
not a soothing union, it is better recognized as a mess, or knot, of information, often
but not always organized by narration and again by the audience. The most vital
work of film is in its negotiation of the relationship between sound(s) and image(s).
In narrative cinema sounds and images cooperate (to varying degrees) only through
26

the coercive act of film narration. Sound theorists – and film scholars who work in
willful ignorance of film sound – need to take Altman’s statement of the “ontological
fallacy” seriously. In cinema, neither sound nor images are (typically) experienced
apart from the other. A theory of cinematic narration must account for this dual
address and will preferably avoid the language of sound being subordinate to the
image. Such a theory should acknowledge that narration activates and shapes the
audience’s search for and construction of narrative. At the same time, films which
lack narratives need to be considered both in their tendency to present sound and
image in a cooperative relationship and more importantly in their tendency to sound
and image in a combative relationship. Films such as Wavelength (1967), and
animated films which are not representational in the same way as much of cinema,
must have their juxtapositions of sound and image explored in detail.

Summary of the Following Chapters
The primary goal of this discussion is not to unearth unknown or forgotten films but
rather to note the centrality of aural elements in cinema as evidenced by a number of
films whose aural properties are seldom examined.
Chapter Two, “History,” surveys discussions of “post-classical” American
film, and considers changes in aesthetics, technology, and exhibition practices which
separate the postwar period from the 1930s. While the coming of (pre-recorded)
sound to film is a break in film history for many scholars, and is used by some to
mark the beginning of the Classical period, sound is largely absent in discussions of
27

film history which address cinema after the late 1920s. This section argues that
changes in aural aesthetics and sound technology should be incorporated in all
considerations of American film history and that these changes are at least as
significant as changes in modes of production and visual aesthetics at the level of
production and exhibition. The chapter concludes with a consideration of Fantasia to
demonstrate how the film alters classical sound norms.
Chapter Three, “Theory,” offers a survey of film sound theory and theories of
film narration. While these two bodies of theory have developed for years in relative
ignorance of one another, traces of overlap between these two discourses can be
found and this section argues that they must engage more directly with one another
in order to begin to fully account for the manner in which film presents sound(s) and
image(s). The chapter includes discussions of The Conversation and Wavelength in
order to express the benefits of joining sound theory and narrative theory.
To organize the discussion of sound and individual films, three trouble spots,
or fallacies perhaps, of film sound studies will be considered in individual chapters.
50

Chapter Four is “Sync Sound” and it addresses films of the postwar / pre-Dolby era
which complicate discussions of synchronous – and asynchronous sound – in film.
The relationship has never been simple, but it is under more pressure in the postwar
period and films here reveal that the appearance of “sync” is classical. In the
classical system, cuts are concealed in editing and so too is the combining of body
and voice which are not naturally together. The chapter discusses two biopics of
Jolson from Columbia: The Jolson Story and Jolson Sings Again (1949). These
28

films openly present actor Larry Parks playing Jolson, but each time “Jolson” sings
the actual voice of Al Jolson is used. A young man’s body and face are matched
with the pleasantly-weathered and justly-famous voice of Jolson to create the ideal
Jolson, a possibility which exists because of film narration’s ability to link sound and
image through sync points. Jolson Sings Again includes the making of The Jolson
Story and acknowledges that the earlier film revived the singing and performing
career of Jolson, thus indicating that film audiences can bring Jolson into their own
homes by purchasing albums.
If these films suggest that sync is given a more flexible status, documentary
production of the mid 1950s worked to re-establish the links between sound and
image. New cameras and audio recording technologies allowed filmmakers to
record actions with a (supposed) modicum of interference and therefore capture life
as it happened. Here narration achieves something of a zero-degree style, where
sound and image are recorded together and remain together in the finished film. Yet
some of the most famous films of this moment – Dont Look Back (1967) and Gimme
Shelter (1970), for example – at various points present sound and image which were
pointedly not recorded together. The chapter closes with a consideration of films
which are likely to be labeled asynchronous, and points out that the sound / image
relationships on offer in films like Frampton’s (nostalgia) and Thom Andersen’s The
Rock n Roll Film (1967) are as carefully controlled as those in sync films. American
film – particularly in the postwar period – makes any simple division of “sync sound
bad / non-sync sound good” useless, both aesthetically and politically. By the time
29

Michael Snow releases Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by
Wilma Schoen in 1974, the notion of “asynchronous” sound is an obsolete starting
point for the discussion of film sound.
The next chapter is “Diegesis” and it examines how films of this period
complicate the clear separation of audio elements into the categories of diegetic and
nondiegetic. In the postwar / pre-Dolby period films acknowledge that sound is part
of the film’s narration and a core element in defining the film’s diegesis. Though
“modernist” films are typically said to display that a film’s diegesis is the creation of
narration, as early as the mid 1940s some films present their diegesis as a
construction. Early sound films featured sound almost exclusively coded as diegetic
due to technological constraints, and multi-camera filming techniques were instituted
to accommodate the need for a continuous audio track. Yet this is too simple a
statement to convey the explorations of “diegetic” sound which occurred in the
period of early sound films. What is clear is that for classical films there tends to be
a division between diegetic and nondiegetic sound, particularly music. Films which
systematically trouble this binary appear with increasing frequency in the 1940s,
signaling the loosening of classical narration’s norms.
In films of this period sound is often not simply diegetic sound effects,
dialogue and nondiegetic underscore with the two categories of diegetic and
nondiegetic rigidly separated. A number of films foreground – sometimes
ostentatiously – a coherent diegesis. Here (nearly) the only sounds which the film
permits are those which could, and do, logically emit from the conditions visually
30

present. In Rear Window, Faces (1968) and The Last Picture Show (1971) sound
participates subtly as the narration seems only to organize the image track and record
sounds which were already occurring. Paradoxically, in these films the retreat is a
display and typically meant to be noticed since nondiegetic sound – particularly
music – is the norm for American narrative cinema. Concurrently, in some films of
this period the diegesis is “unstable,” or not whole. The boundary separating the
inside from the outside is complicated, for example, by the foregrounding of a
central character’s unstable subjectivity. The boundary dividing the natural and the
unnatural, or supernatural, is also blurred when characters encounter odd or
unexplained events. The “rules” of the world are unclear: are supernatural events
possible? What is possible in the diegesis created by the film? Tzvetan Todorov’s
work on the “fantastic” helps explain the aesthetics of such texts. Cat People (1942),
The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), and The Haunting (1963), for example, present
the viewer with contradictory information about narrative events and the narration
places sound and image at odds with one another. The sound and image tracks
refuse to allow the viewer to determine whether events depicted on screen are the
result of either natural or supernatural causes. The third section of this chapter turns
to films which feature an “expanded” diegesis. The direct address of the spectator is
a commonplace concern of film studies, and an accepted norm of the musical. In this
period however some films – both commercial and avant-garde – engage the
spectator aurally. Some of these films disturb the division between film diegesis and
the space of exhibition. Films such as The Tingler and Woodstock seek to produce a
31

physical response from audiences. Concurrently, participatory films such as Bleu
Shut (1971) ask the audience to engage – aurally – with the film text.
Chapter Six is “Sound / Image Hierarchy” and permits some summing up
because there is some overlapping between the argument that postwar / pre-Dolby
films position sound as equal to, or greater than the image, and the previous
discussions of sync and diegesis. This chapter emphasizes historical changes more
directly than the others.
The classical period is predicated on the suppression of sound to make it
largely supplementary to the image and visual narration, but some films since the
1930s present aural elements as more important than, or even independent of, visual
elements. Rick Altman defines moments where the sound(s) seems to control the
image(s) as moments of “audio dissolve.” Using this theorization as a starting point,
this chapter argues that in a number of films, the hierarchy of sound and image is
systematically, or regularly, problematized, emphasizing not simply the sensory
power of sound but its narrational weight vis-à-vis the image.
This section argues that in the postwar period a number of films disrupt the
hierarchy of image over sound – a core component of classical narration – by three
primary means: (1) foregrounding the act of presenting sound in the exhibition
space; (2) foregrounding the role of sound in films as providing interest and
information; and (3) the use of voice-over as a central element of a film’s address.
The chapter is divided into sections on each topic. The first section considers the
exhibition of films where the presentation of sounds – issuing from speakers which
32

are not hidden – brings audiences to the screening space. The three primary texts
under consideration are 1927’s The Jazz Singer which presents the talking and
singing of Jolson, 1956’s Blackboard Jungle which offers “Rock Around the Clock”
and 1974’s Earthquake which uses “Sensurround” to provide a physical experience.
Each film draws audiences to visit a theater because of the speakers and sound to be
found there. The second section examines films which present sound as the equal of
the image or allow it to present more, or more important, narrative information than
the image. Music particularly functions in this capacity in early rock films such as
Rock Around the Clock (1956); the experimental cinema of Bruce Conner,
specifically his films Cosmic Ray and Breakaway (1966); and the rise of the
“compilation score” in Hollywood cinema’s The Graduate (1967), Easy Rider and
American Graffiti (1972). Finally, the chapter moves to films which feature
voiceover narration, the one site where scholars tend to consider both sound theory
and narrative theory and then examines the work of three feature film directors –
Orson Welles, Joseph Mankiewicz and Stanley Kubrick. In their films voiceover
narration does not duplicate information found in the image, and audiences must
attend to it if they wish to fully experience the work.

33

Chapter 1 Endnotes

1
Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, Ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York:
Columbia UP, 1994) 142.

2
Chion, Audio-Vision 152.

3
Chion, Audio-Vision 147.

4
Chion, Audio-Vision 153.

5
“Contemporary spectacle cinema” includes aural spectacle in the sense that cinema and home
theater systems use sound technology as an overt selling point. This dissertation will argue that
film trades in spectacle long before this present era both in terms of sound and image.

6
Stephen Handzo, “A Narrative Glossary of Film Sound Technology,” Film Sound: Theory and
Practice, Ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia UP, 1985) 422.

7
This study uses the term “audience member” in place of “spectator” or “viewer” to describe
someone who experiences a film since this person never only watches, even if attending the
performance of a silent Brakhage or Nathaniel Dorsky film. Miriam Hansen offers an explanation of
the rise of the term “spectator” in Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991). Bordwell’s and others’ formulations leave no room for the
study of the Apublic dimension of cinematic reception” (7). Using Jürgen Habermas’ theory of the
public sphere (and Negt and Kluge’s application of it), Hansen discusses the cinema as a public
sphere of its own and as a part of social and cultural history. Hansen locates the origin of the term
“spectator” at around 1910. At this moment film was bringing the viewer into its space, and
eliminating the division between theater and screen space preserved in early cinema. This is due
primarily to the introduction of the feature film, which eliminated other forms of entertainment from
the program and demanded more audience attention. Here Hansen agrees with formulations by David
Bordwell and Noel Burch. But for Hansen, the spectator is a product of the goals of the industry to
standardize the viewer=s experience; the spectator is a product of the transition to the classical cinema
and a necessary function of ideological and institutional goals. The implications of the spectator are
most significant for her in terms of production strategies: “the concept of the spectator made it
possible to precalculate and standardize individually and locally varying acts of reception, to ensure
consumption across class, ethnic, and cultural boundaries” (84). The spectator formulated as a
singular viewer appears at the moment diversity in the theatrical program is being replaced with the
single feature film. Hansen ties the move from “audience” to “spectator” in with the discourse of the
period describing cinema as a “universal language” suitable for all viewers. This universal language
positioned all viewers as one. The move to the spectator is also a part of the industry=s general
wooing of the middle class on the heels of the nickelodeon boom. Interestingly, the industry
simultaneously touted its status as a popular art by celebrating its “origins” in nickelodeons even as it
proclaimed films as high art and theater owners systematically upgraded their theaters with the goal of
attracting a higher class of audience.

8
Andy Hamilton has written to encourage scholarship on the “aural arts,” and he defines an “aural
art” as: “one that is primarily addressed to the ear, and which uses sound as its primary material.”
Hamilton then makes a striking reference to film: “In contrast to the visual arts, which include
painting, drawing, sculpture, video-art, and perhaps film, reference is rarely made to ‘the aural arts’ or
‘the arts of sound’” (46). The author does not explain this hesitation to position film as a visual art,
34

but Hamilton’s “perhaps” is defensible. Andy Hamilton, “Music and the Aural Arts,” British Journal
of Aesthetics 47.1 (2007): 46.

9
James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity
(New York: Columbia UP, 2000) 4.

10
Lastra 4.

11
David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1985): xi.

12
Chion 221.

13
Chion 21.

14
Chion 22.

15
Chion 23.

16
Fred Camper correctly states that “Any investigation of the varieties of sound film must turn much
of its attention to avant-garde cinema.” Yet few sound theorists or scholars interested in avant-garde
cinema concern themselves with sound in this important strain of American cinematic practice. Fred
Camper, “Sound and Silence in Narrative and Nonnarrative Cinema,” Film Sound: Theory and
Practice, Ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia UP, 1985) 372.

17
Douglas Gomery, “Hollywood Corporate Business Practice and Periodizing Contemporary Film
History,” Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, Ed. Steven Neale and Murray Smith (New York:
Routledge, 1998) 47.

18
Gomery 47.

19
See Tim J. Anderson, Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording
(Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2006).

20
For a Baktinian analysis of how these films present time see Vivian Sobchack, “Lounge Time:
Postwar Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir,” Reconfiguring American Film Genres: Theory and
History, Ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1998) 129-170.

21
Writing in the late 1980s, Alexander Doty notes that, “In the silent and early sound periods of
American film history, it was usually movies that sold music, rather than the reverse (as was also the
case with vaudeville and the musical theater).” Alexander Doty, “Music Sells Movies: (Re)New(ed)
Conservatism in Film Marketing,” Wide Angle 10.2 (1988): 70.

22
The quite useful webpage filmsound.org includes a page which compiles Murch’s essays, interview
with Murch, books which discuss his work, articles about him and links to audio and video files of his
lectures and commentaries. http://filmsound.org/murch/murch.htm

23
Other examples of the neglect of sound in the 1940s to the mid 1970s include Charles Schreger’s
discussion of Dolby, Robert Altman’s use of radio microphones and live sync sound in “Altman,
Dolby, and the Second Sound Revolution.” Early in his essay Schreger proclaims: “In 1978,
America seems sound-obsessed” (348) but offers no explanation as to how this has come to pass
beyond the then-new examples mentioned above. Charles Schreger, “Altman, Dolby and the Second
35

Sound Revolution,” Film Sound: Theory and Practice, Ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New
York: Columbia UP, 1985) 348-355.
In his Sound Design and Science Fiction (Austin TX: U of Texas P, 2007), Bill Whittington
discusses sound in the genre and persuasively links technological changes (Dolby most obviously),
youth culture, and the influence of international cinema, particularly the French nouvelle vague, in
explaining the interest in sound in American film which develops in the late 1960s and flowers in the
mid-1970s.

Whittington begins with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) before moving to the originator
of the term “sound design” Walter Murch and his work on George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971). One
could ask why Forbidden Planet (1956) is not included as it presents a distinctive soundtrack which
famously includes extensive use of theremin. Whittington therefore seems sympathetic to Schreger’s
proclamation that the Dolby era represents the “second sound revolution” in cinema. This work
implicitly fosters the opinion that before innovators like Murch and technologies like Dolby, film
sound is perhaps not worth listening to. Whittington’s focus on “sound design” and a single genre
creates an admirable model for sound film analysis but also participates in the neglect of sound
between the Classical film and the introduction of Dolby. For Whittington, Sergi, Schreger, and other
scholars of sound, the Movie Brats (Lucas, Coppola and others) bring innovations to Hollywood’s
stagnant practice of sound.

24
Scott MacDonald, Avant-garde Film: Motion Studies (New York: Cambridge UP, 1993) 4.

25
Jan-Christopher Horak, “Introduction: History in the Gaps,” Lovers of Cinema: The First American
Avant-garde 1919-1945 (Madison, WI: Wisconsin UP, 1995) 7.

26
Jan-Christopher Horak, “The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919-1945,” Lovers of Cinema:
The First American Avant-garde 1919-1945 (Madison, WI: Wisconsin UP, 1995) 14.

27
Horak, “First American Film” 15.

28
Horak, “First American Film” 15.

29
In Visionary Film (New York: Oxford UP, 2002) xii (in “Preface to the First edition”) where
Sitney states, “The Precise Relationship of the avant-garde cinema to American commercial film is
one of radical otherness. They operate in different realms with next to no significant influence on one
another.”
David E. James summarizes the various positions in The Most Typical Avant-Garde
(Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2005): 444, note 27. For James there are two options. Some
filmmakers establish a film aesthetic which is outside of Hollywood. Here we can place Brakhage,
Whitney and others. These artists position their work as opposed to mass culture. They seek to
establish a social sphere which is individualistic. The more practical approach is exhibited by
Vorkopich, Bruce Conner, and others. These artists negotiate with Hollywood and seek to create a
career for themselves. Here too is an emphasis on imagery.

30
David E. James, “Avant-Garde Film and Music Video: A View from Zurich,” Power Misses:
Essays Across (Un)Popular Culture (New York: Verso, 1996) 236.

31
Ito’s droning score is built around clear sync points, for example there are rhythmic beats as Deren
“hops” (via jump cuts) around the staircase, etc. The score also features a considerable amount of
silence which set up the blasts of sound for moments of violence.

32
Ed Sanders, in his comments for the booklet accompanying Harry Smith’s Anthology of American
Folk Music, Volume Four, writes, “At this time, his paintings were meant to be observed while
listening to music. Apparently each tiny part of a painting would relate specifically to certain notes or
36

measures of a piece of music. Harry would demonstrate this to friends, pointing to the corresponding
spot on the painting as the song progressed” (10). Ed Sanders, Liner Notes, Harry Smith’s
Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume Four, Revenant, 2000.

33
Chion 143.

34
Chion 143.

35
Fred Camper compellingly argues that the practice of avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage
embraces the possibility of true silence that the Hollywood sound film created. Camper explains that
Brakhage’s “frequent statement that he makes silent films because sound tends to dominate image is
important in this regard: the absence of sound give the images, and all their subtleties, a new priority
in the viewer’s consciousness, and allows them to speak with their own unique, musiclike rhythms.”
In this light, the lack of sound in the majority of Brakhage’s films operates as an acknowledgement of
the power of sound in cinema to dominate the image and further suggests that many directors – of
both avant-garde and commercial films – do not fully consider the aesthetic possibilities and power of
sound. Brakhage’s stance also hints at the extent of control that the classical style exerted in
Hollywood to control sound elements. It is likely not coincidental that Brakhage begins his career as
a largely (truly) silent filmmaker in a moment when sound means more to American cinema than any
time since the late 1920s. His first completed work is Interim in 1952 and by the early 1950s theme
songs, increasingly lavish musicals like An American in Paris (1951) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952),
and the presence of jazz on the soundtrack in Young Man with a Horn (1950) and other films, make
music and sound an attraction. Brakhage responds to these postwar (and pre-classical) sound
aesthetics and practices and astutely notes that these represent more a “norm” for film sound than the
classical period’s control. Camper 369. In his Notes on the Cinematographer, filmmaker Robert
Bresson makes a statement similar to this as well: “THE SOUNDTRACK INVENTED SILENCE”
(48). Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, Trans. Jonathan Griffin (Los Angeles: Green
Integer, 1997).

36
Camper 370.

37
Camper 372.

38
Chion 143.

39
Altman, “Four and a Half Film Fallacies” 37

40
Altman, “Four and a Half Film Fallacies” 38.

41
William Johnson, “The Liberation of Echo: A New Hearing for Film Sound,” Film Quarterly 38.4
(1985): 2.

42
Johnson, “Liberation of Echo” 6.

43
William Johnson, “Sound and Image: A Further Hearing,” Film Quarterly 43.1 (1989): 24-25.

44
Johnson, “Sound and Image” 25.

45
Johnson, “Sound and Image” 28.

46
http://www.audiblepictureshow.org.uk/

37

47
Rick Altman, “General Introduction: Cinema as Event,” Sound Theory / Sound Practice, Ed. Rick
Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992) 5.

48
Bresson 54-55.

49
A partial exception is the climatic shootout in Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45 (1981). As Thana guns down
every man she can at the Halloween party the screams of the partygoers are distorted and slowed
along with the slow-motion image. The music however is not the party music slowed down (“Ms. 45
Dance Theme”) but a different piece entirely, whose discordant sounds accentuate the horror of the
violence but demonstrate that sound and image are not bound together.

50
Claudia Gorbman in “Teaching the Soundtrack” notes the tendency of discussing sound in these
pairings and disagrees with this approach: “(sound falls into categories: ‘parallel’ or ‘counterpoint,’
and synchronous or asynchronous relation to the images on the screen, and its narrative source is
either ‘realistic’ or ‘unrealistic.’ Period)” (446-47). “Teaching the Soundtrack,” Quarterly Review of
Film Studies 1.4 (1976): 446-52.

38

Chapter 2: The Postwar / Pre-Dolby Period

This chapter argues for the study of sound in the postwar / pre-Dolby period of
American film. One of the goals of this dissertation is to encourage film historians
to more directly address sound and for sound theorists to more directly address
history. The first section considers the history and historiography of the
“introduction” of sound and argues that these discourses cooperate to label sound an
“addition” to the film image and so that cinema becomes firmly entrenched as a
visual medium. Next the chapter considers classical sound – defined as both the
sound of the classical studio era and a set of aesthetic norms that force sound to serve
the image. Some writers on film sound, however, focus on Hollywood films of the
1940s and 1950s which they label classical because their use of sound, particularly
voiceover, deviates from classical norms. This writing contributes to the foundation
for the category of post-classical sound. The next section discusses post-classical
sound – in terms of both industry and aesthetics – as sound which does not serve and
may not assist the image. The chapter closes with a discussion of Disney’s Fantasia
(1940) as a film which reveals the beginning of the postwar / pre-Dolby sound
period.

Sound as Footnote: The Historical Neglect of Sound in Film Studies
This section considers the tendency of scholars to focus only on visual aesthetics of
narrative and avant-garde cinema. It argues that the “addition” of sound to cinema is
39

in fact a change in the presentation of sound (from live to recorded) and institutes
Hollywood’s classical period. Existing studies of film history (including David
Bordwell on Hollywood and Wees and Sitney on the avant-garde) regard sound as an
addition to cinema (and the image).
The neglect of sound is encouraged by historical events and the way in which
film history is written. The neglect is not necessary however. Not only is the
introduction of sound used as a marker for historical considerations of cinema, but
the study of cinema both as an artisanal practice and something like an artform are
spurred by sound film.
1
Dana Polan examines how the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) worked “to create a curriculum – first at the University
of Southern California (USC) and then at Stanford University – of professional
training in filmmaking in order to meet the new needs of motion picture production
in the sound era.”
2
Though Hollywood’s effort came after courses on cinema at
Columbia and the New School, it is striking to read a letter from July 24, 1928,
which outlines plans for a course at USC to address “The addition of sound and
voice and its effect on the art form,” and “The Modern Photoplay. The Talking
Picture.”
3
The word “addition” is not an accidental choice of words. Film
production pedagogy labels sound an addition to the “art form.” Though regarded as
an “addition,” sound, though largely because of its newness, was a significant part of
training for these students.
As film sound became more common, the neglect of sound was fostered by
the academy. After this initial moment of interest, those who sought to teach sound
40

as something other than a production practice encountered numerous difficulties,
including the lack of a solid tradition on which to build. Writing in the 1970s
Claudia Gorbman notes an additional handicap: “Since the film distribution system
makes the entire ‘text’ available to students only for a brief time, the temptation
exists to fragment, abstract, and preserve this text by showing stills and replaying
soundtrack tapes after the film has gone.”
4
She notes that such a method does not
allow for a consideration of off-screen sound, for example, but her pedagogical
options are limited: “The ideal teaching situation will involve at least two screenings
of the film in question, with discussion and projection of textual segments scheduled
between the showings-in-entirety.”
5
This “ideal” would remain so until home video
technology allowed the close and leisurely study of sound for classes and scholars.
Gorbman and other scholars worked against the expanding tradition of
neglect and a history of film which downplays the role of sound. Rick Altman’s
“Four and a Half Film Fallacies” outlines forcefully the major reasons – which he
deems “fallacies” in need of correction – for the neglect of sound in the study of
cinema.
6
“The Historical Fallacy” is that cinema existed before sound and sound
therefore is “an add-on, an afterthought, and thus of secondary importance.”
7

Altman argues that research into early sound practices roundly disputes thinking of
sound as an addition. He also states that proponents of this view such as Clair,
Eisenstein, and Pudovkin, set up a false binary: “On one side an ethereal cinema of
silence, punctuated only by carefully chosen music; on the other side, the talkies,
with their incessant, anti-poetic dialogue.”
8
Altman also outlines the “ontological”
41

fallacy offered in the late twenties and early thirties by scholars such as Arnheim and
Balazs. William Johnson endorses Altman’s articulation of “ontological fallacy,”
stating that it, “survives in two widespread assumptions: that sound in general plays
only a marginal role in film and that synchronized speech in particular is frequently
redundant.”
9
Johnson argues that unless one is a lip-reader, seeing people speak in a
film does not deliver the same information twice. Altman and Johnson highlight the
fact that historical discussions of cinema and film sound include theorizations
(whether stated explicitly or not) about how sound elements function.
Pushing sound to the side allows scholars to address the truly “cinematic.”
Near the beginning of On the History of Film Style, David Bordwell makes this
emphatic statement: “The way movies look has a history; this history calls out for
analysis and explanation; and the study of this domain – the study of film style –
presents inescapable challenges to anyone who wants to understand cinema.”
10
One
can agree with the force of this argument and yet be troubled by the flat equation of
“the way movies look” with “film style.”
11
The text is an invaluable summary of the
visual bias of film history and a unintentional continuation of this same bias. He
concludes the preface by stating: “Finally, the bad news is that the tradition I discuss
has largely neglected the contribution of sound to film style. The good news is that
astute researchers are today exploring this problem.”
12
An endnote points the
interested reader to the work of Altman, Chion, Kathryn Kalinak, and Royal S.
Brown. What is most distressing about Bordwell’s scuttling of sound to a footnote
42

(or endnote, as the case may be) is his awareness of the neglect of sound in the study
of aesthetics and his own choice not to correct that neglect.
The book does expertly outline film history and existing approaches to film
history. Bordwell labels the first major account of cinema history the “Basic Story.”
In this account narrative cinema abandons its role as a recording device and takes up
the goal of artistic expression as artists become aware of its potential.
13
The Basic
Story is aided by what Bordwell calls the Standard Version of stylistic history
14

which considers cinema’s “unfolding potential.”
15
Sound is a problem for nearly all
the commentators Bordwell mentions who help develop the Basic Story and
Standard Version. At the heart of Basic Story’s narrative is the response to sound
film: “the flowering of the silent film was abruptly cut off by the arrival of the
‘talking’ pictures. Henceforth filmmakers would have to find a style appropriate to
the sound cinema, and only a few imaginative creators responded.”
16
There were
exceptions, however, including Fritz Lang, whose M (1931) demonstrated a
sophisticated joining of sound and image and, as Bordwell notes, “For many
observers, Walt Disney’s cartoons showed that talking pictures could properly
integrate the pictorial dynamism of the silent cinema into an audiovisual unity.”
17

“On the whole, however, the Basic Story asserts that talkies triggered a reversion to
film’s ‘theatrical’ mode and a loss of visual values.”
18
Since Bordwell’s focus is on
the visual half of “film style,” he does not dwell on the implications of this first wave
of film history and studies of film aesthetics, or the Basic Story’s and Standard
Version’s avoidance of sound.
43

Whether sound is read as a “break” in film history or not, scholars mostly
agree that it is secondary to the image. Donald Crafton examines the period of
Hollywood’s conversion to sound and describes the “part-talkies” of the late 1920s.
These films “used synchronized musical accompaniment throughout most of their
length, punctuated by occasional dialogue sequences.”
19
Crafton notes that a number
of films, including “talkies” such as The Jazz Singer (1927) and Show Boat (1928)
were also distributed in silent versions and were “somewhat successful.” While this
seems strange today, he admits, “if one conceives of sound as an embellishment to a
silent film, then the part-dialogue format makes sense. It would preserve the silent
film as an ideal, while exploiting the crowd-pleasing novelty of talking.”
20
From a
production standpoint, sound is an “addition” to film in that sound requires the work
of new artists and technicians and is initially distributed in the form of a disc, yet this
comment speaks to more than production and exhibition. The general lack of
attention to sound filters through film history and settles in theoretical works, as
Claudia Gorbman notes:
Arnheim’s plaint that films went noisy in the late ‘twenties, thereby
becoming a sort of bastard art, represents only a small part
of the mass of critical opinion responsible for the prevailing
attitude. Kracauer, Spottiswoode, Lindgren, – indeed, almost
everyone except Burch and Mitry – have contributed to our general
disinterest in film sound through the officiousness with which they
have treated the soundtrack.
21

The study of film theory and film history unite to position sound as secondary to the
image, and as Gorbman notes, apparently including herself: “since virtually anyone
will admit that a film’s visuals outweigh its soundtrack in importance, it has been the
44

visuals’ right to receive almost all the attention.”
22
J. Dudley Andrew writes that the
first wave of film theorists “struggled to give to cinema the stature of art. Cinema,
they claimed, was the equal of the other arts because it changed the chaos and
meaninglessness of the world into a self-sustaining structure and rhythm”
23
and the
inclusion of sound – especially dialogue – threatened this art. As sound carried the
day, it is perhaps not surprising that according to Andrew, the adoption of sound
“seems to mark the decline of the great age of formative film theory.”
24

The scholars Bordwell lists in his endnote seek to redress the neglect of
sound in studies of narrative cinema and this work expands each year. Yet there is
no comparable body of work focused on sound in nonnarrative cinema. Avant-garde
filmmakers took longer to transition to sound film than did commercial filmmakers
in part because of the required increases in production expenses and complications
for the filmmaking process. The slowness in production change was however ably
supported by theorists who like Arnheim argued for sound as an unnecessary “add
on” to cinema and writing on the avant-garde and its aesthetics fostered the silent art
of cinema that Hollywood abandoned. In avant-garde circles, Germaine Dulac’s
writing is perhaps the earliest and most forceful statement of this position and begins
the focus on the eye:
And so, as we see, every technical cinematographic discovery has a
very clear meaning: it improves the visual impression. Cinema tries
to make us see this, to make us see that. Constantly, in its technical
evolution, it appeals to our eye in order to impress our
understanding and our sensitivity. It seems then, from its scientific
basis, that cinema must address itself uniquely to sight as music
addresses itself uniquely to hearing.
25

45

Dulac combines a “scientific” definition of cinema with a statement of medium
specificity and also declares that cinema is the visual equivalent of music and should
therefore not include an aural address. Echoing the concerns of Arnheim, Eisenstein
and others, Dulac expresses the fear that cinema is “falling into the literary” and
bequeaths to the avant-garde cinema a valorization of sight and a loathing of sound.
For Dulac sound means dialogue, and dialogue means plot, and plot means
commercial cinema, and for other writers on the avant-garde this is the very evil they
wish to destroy. Stan Brakhage’s later and justly famous artistic call to arms begins,
“Imagine an eye…” not “Imagine an ear” or “Imagine sound and image joined in
harmony.”
26
Brakhage labels sight as the one area where all is comprehensible;
hearing is for him practically an addition both to cinema and to humans.
27
Though
very few filmmakers have followed his literal aesthetic path, his hierarchy of senses
for both the avant-garde film and the avant-garde audience has exerted a
considerable influence and buttressed the avant-garde embrace of the image.
28

David E. James labels Brakhage a poet and James Peterson locates him as working in
the poetic strain of the avant-garde,
29
but apparently these poems are not meant to be
read aloud.
30

P. Adams Sitney’s Visionary Film is the single most influential study of the
American avant-garde, and includes few comments on sound. Sitney’s approach to
visionary film establishes a model which neglects sound. He builds on models from
literary studies, specifically the work of Harold Bloom, and he uses the rubric of
romanticism, specifically Romantic poets and Abstract Expressionist painters to help
46

contextualize the work of American avant-garde. The study of literature offers a
model of a single channel medium and makes it more difficult for scholars to discuss
cinema as a dual address medium. Equally emblematic is William C. Wees’s Light
Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film which opens:
“From the beginning, avant-garde filmmakers have insisted on the visual nature of
the film medium.”
31
He then offers a list of significant artists who create this
tradition: Leger, Man Ray, Artaud, Richter, Vertov, Dulac. Wees wants to unite two
discourses: “On the one hand, then, there is the avant-garde’s traditional emphasis on
vision, on film as ‘an art of the eye.’ On the other hand, there is the study of visual
perception, the science of the eye.”
32
Of course doing so will not address sound and
he admits this, like Bordwell, at the end of his preface:
Finally, although many of the films discussed here have soundtracks,
the aural experience they provide is not examined in detail. Certainly
this is an injustice, not only to the films in question but also to the
avant-garde film movement in general, which has produced many
examples of complex and evocative uses of sound and sound-image
relationships.
33

Wees admits that considering sound would require “a different critical approach, one
applicable to a different channel of transmission, a different mode of perception, and
(on the whole) a different selection of films for close inspection.”
34
The emphasis on
the visual portion of film is unfortunately accompanied by the tradition of ignoring
sound, so perhaps a “different critical approach” is precisely what the avant-garde
cinema needs. Such an undertaking is beyond the scope of this project, but the
comments on Wavelength (1967) below and other films in the following chapters are
presented with the hope of encouraging scholars to listen to avant-garde films.
35

47

Classical Sound
This section considers classical sound in two senses: (1) the sound of Classical
Hollywood films, and (2) the aesthetic norms of classical sound which place it in a
position of supporting the image.
36
These two senses overlap and support one
another but for some scholars are not necessary conditions for the other.
The applicability of classicism to film, particularly Hollywood, is not
universally accepted
37
and for those who wish to use this rubric for Hollywood, the
periodization remains debatable. The industrial base of Hollywood was indisputably
altered when the federal government’s 1938 anti-trust case against Hollywood’s
oligopoly was settled in 1948 and the studios were forced to abandon exhibition.
38

For Douglas Gomery: “the classic studio era represented a stable twenty-year epoch
[1931-1950] in the history of the Hollywood studio system. Eight major
corporations . . . dominated all phases of industry operation.”
39
By 1956 when
Loew’s finally abided by the decision, the studios were out of the exhibition business
(until the 1980s at least).
40
The companies dominated not simply the business of the
movies but collaborated (unknowingly) to create a stable but flexible set of aesthetic
norms. Though it is difficult to locate their impact in singular, precise moments,
industrial changes offer more clear-cut dividing lines than changes in aesthetics to
define the classical period. Though scholars debate aesthetic changes, and Classical
Hollywood Cinema discusses how film style and production are inseparable in
Hollywood – specifically the development and dominance of the continuity script –
48

some scholars note adjustments in aesthetics which accompany the new business
practices of the postwar moment.
41

However, these authors were not the first to label Hollywood’s studio era
“classical”; Classical Hollywood Cinema, for example, begins by acknowledging the
influence of André Bazin. In “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” Bazin
states that, “By 1938 or 1939 the talking film, particularly in France and in the
United States, had reached a level of classical perfection.”
42
For Bazin this is a result
of the “stabilization of technical progress” and “the maturing of different kinds of
drama developed in part over the past ten years and in part inherited from the silent
film.”
43
Like Bordwell, Bazin links technology and aesthetics, and while noting
continuity (“in part inherited from silent film”) he describes cinema’s “classical
perfection” as achieved with sound. Though his is not a rigorous history of either the
technical processes of cinema or its kinds of drama, Bazin’s words exert an influence
and express a now common sentiment. When scholars speak of 1939 as the peak of
Hollywood’s output – with films like Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz –
they unconsciously echo Bazin’s opinion that by the end of the 1930s Hollywood
had peaked. Bazin’s discussions of Orson Welles’s use of long take / deep focus in
Citizen Kane (1941) assist his argument that style changes in the 1940s and moves
away from (not necessarily beyond) the “perfection” of the late 1930s.
44
Bordwell
aside, scholars tend to agree that the “classical” film is a sound film and this history
of American cinema contrasts with historians and theorists who actively resisted the
introduction of standardized sound.
45
Though part of classical cinema and perhaps
49

the final piece, sound is apparently unimportant. The common description of
classical narration is that it values exposition and conveyance over emotion and
mood, so when music and dialogue occur simultaneously, for example, dialogue
dominates. In addition to its subservience in terms of mix (its volume relative to the
dialogue) the music itself must avoid attracting attention to its own musical
properties. Dialogue will maintain a clear synchronization to the actors and assist
the process of combining multiple images into a coherent scene (and film). Sound
effects too will be synced with the image and not draw attention to themselves
beyond their narrative functions.
Bordwell, Thompson and Staiger’s Classical Hollywood Cinema locates
sound as a secondary part of the classical system. The book largely sets the
parameters of the debate and remains the most quoted position on American
“classical” film. Their dates extend from 1917 (before the “coming” of sound in
1927) all the way up to 1960 (though Bordwell admits that the cutoff date of 1960 is
“somewhat arbitrary”).
46
The book popularized the act of labeling the studio era as
either “classical” or containing a “classical” period where “unity is a basic attribute
of film form” and a narrational system dominates that “strives to conceal its artifice
through techniques of continuity and ‘invisible’ storytelling.”
47
The text makes clear
that in the classical system the uses of sound are strictly controlled. Bordwell argues
that: “Sound cinema was not a radical alternative to silent filmmaking; sound as
sound, as a material and as a set of technical procedures, was inserted into the
already-constituted system of the classical Hollywood style.”
48
In other words,
50

aesthetic and narrative effects offered by sound were not regarded or presented as
new but rather used to carry on the established system of film narration by means of
substitution. Music, for example, becomes “the cinema’s most overt continuity
factor,” because it “fills in cracks and smoothes down rough textures.”
49
Continuity
editing already joins shots and orients the audience in cinematic space but now music
helps images cooperate. Bordwell links classical scoring to late nineteenth century
music, especially Wagner’s use of leitmotifs and states that, “Like the opera score,
the classical film score enters into a system of narration, endowed with some degree
of self-consciousness, a range of knowledge, and a degree of communicativeness.”
50

Musical themes help identify and explain character but do so as an aid; the music
works to reinforce meanings in the image-based narrative. Bordwell links music to
other aspects of narration: “Like the camera, music can be anywhere, and it can intuit
the dramatic essence of the action. It remains, however, motivated by the story.
When dialogue is present, the music must drop out or confine itself to a subdued
coloristic background.”
51

Claudia Gorbman’s Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music builds on her
earlier essay “Narrative Film Music,” and is the first thorough and still the most
influential book length study of classical scoring. She argues that classical era films
are meant to be seen more than heard. Gorbman uses Bazin’s statement on classical
cinema to formulate her focus on “the period of the late thirties into the forties”
52
and
her ideas of narration and narrative show the influence of Continental film theory as
she describes a largely passive spectator subject to the workings of the film and the
51

classical system’s ideological imperatives. Yet even those who disagree with
Gorbman regarding the passive status of film audiences often rely on her list of the
functions of the classical score. She states that the classical score is invisible,
“inaudible,” it signifies emotion, it cues the narrative, it provides continuity (formal
and rhythmic) and it provides unity (formal and narrative).
53
For Gorbman the first
two are the most central and fundamental. The score is invisible in that it actively
conceals the means of its own production. For the score to assist the film’s
presentation of dominant ideology the status of the film as the product of technology
must be hidden and therefore the score, like other aspects of film, must seem to
simply occur and the labor involved in its creation remain concealed.
Gorbman examines the ordinary classical underscore and argues that in non-
musical classical films, the music in content and function is comparable to Muzak:
“Film music, participating as it does in a narrative, is more varied in its content and
roles; but primary among its goals, nevertheless, is to render the individual an
untroublesome viewing subject: less critical, less ‘awake.’”
54
Classical scoring
soothes the viewer, conceals the technological nature of the film and assists the
transmission of the narrative. Later, as she summarizes the work of Eisler and
Adorno, the most famous critics of the classical score, she writes: “Film music . . . is
essentially Muzak, background music; rather than directing attention to its formal
logic, it is fragmented, and therefore degraded, commodified.”
55
While Gorbman is
more generous than these Frankfurt school scholars in her opinion of this music, she
agrees that classical scoring serves the image by closing down its potential
52

meanings: “In emphasizing moods or feelings, in specifying or delineating objects
for the spectator’s attention, music enforces an interpretation of the diegesis.
Borrowing slightly out of context from Roland Barthes, let us say that music behaves
as ‘anchorage,’ anchoring the image more firmly in meaning.”
56
At the conclusion
of her 1987 study, Gorbman skips ahead to (then) contemporary Hollywood to
comment on changes in scoring, noting that by the mid-1980s: “the pop-musical
number in current dramatic films . . . set in a context of naturalistic acting, is most
often performed on the soundtrack by musicians with no pretense of a relation to the
diegesis.”
57
Gorbman’s leap from the classical scoring of the 1930s to the 1980s
“new hybrid” (which she states is perhaps not “different in kind”
58
from the
Hollywood musical) ignores the period between and suggests that scoring practices
change quickly. By the 1980s many films include popular music with lyrics.
Though featured along with the image this music lacks the sympathetic and
subservient connections which are fundamental to the classical orchestral
underscore. She argues that, “A hybrid is emerging, unlike diegetic music which is
normally not listened to, and also not as focused as musical numbers issuing from the
magic world of the musical.”
59
Many Hollywood films since the 1950s are
structured around music – popular music – and mimic the form of the musical but
lack presentations of characters dancing or singing.
Between the late 1930s and 1980s Hollywood’s orchestral underscore
became “anachronistic,” to use Joe McElhaney’s term. His The Death of Classical
Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli contributes a new understanding of classicism in
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terms of aesthetics by arguing that these norms do not “die” in cinema but instead
become “anachronistic”:
It is this idea of the death of classical cinema, its circumstances and
implications, which are the primary concern of this book. The type
of death I am situating here is not, by any means, a fact. Rather, it
is a descriptive and historical attempt to give a name to a way of
filming that, within several critical discourses of the period (and, to
a certain extent today as well), is regarded as being anachronistic.
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This theorization helps view classicism as a process and as a still viable option in
cinema rather than a set of rules for production and storytelling that was once
followed but is now lost. Regardless of the precise year when classical norms
become anachronistic, they linger and remain an option which needs only to be
sufficiently justified by the individual film. McElhaney’s conception of the
anachronism of classical norms should be deepened to include sound conventions.
Sound may still unobtrusively serve the image in films made after 1940 but, for
example, the orchestral underscore which buttresses the image is an element of films
like Ordinary People (1980) that can be read as willfully evoking classical norms.
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Yet music is not the whole of the soundtrack and classical cinema, even if it
offers a heavily managed soundtrack, relies more on sound than is usually
acknowledged. In fact, much of a given American film’s narrative comes through
without actually “viewing” the film; film dialogue carries most of narrative content
and this fact makes film perhaps more like television than some scholars would like
to admit.
62
Take (the admittedly postclassical) Rear Window (1954), for example.
For a film “about” looking, it requires sound to tell its story, delineate character,
present spaces, and establish (and manipulate) mood. As Chion states, “certain films
54

that we remember as action films, like many American productions, are in fact
dialogue films nine times out of ten,”
63
and while he does not single out Rear
Window, he notes that this includes “most of Hitchcock’s sound films, despite his
reputed contempt for words.”
64
Chion regards the voice as the dominant sound of
film and argues that most films are guilty of “vococentrism”: “there are not all the
sounds including the human voice. There are voices, and then everything else. In
other words, in every audio mix, the presence of a human voice instantly sets up a
hierarchy of perception.”
65
The ear of the audience member is drawn to the voice(s)
in the film and seeks to “extract meaning from it.” Chion’s explanation for this
cinematic norm is logical: human listening is vococentric so films also partake of this
trait. Yet this formulation of sound implicitly speaks to the assumed “norm” of
cinema: classical Hollywood cinema which features human talking.
More consciously than Chion, Sarah Kozloff persuasively argues for sound in
cinema as integral to the meaning of classical film. Like Gorbman, Kozloff
discusses Barthes’s canonical essay “The Rhetoric of the Image” in order to note the
interdependence of image and (verbal) language. Barthes examines a print
advertisement for pasta which creates a sense of “Italianicity” through a set of visual
cues but Kozloff notes that Barthes says little about the ad’s use of text: “While the
caption anchors the image, the image . . . simultaneously anchors the meanings
possible in the verbal text alone.”
66
She continues: “Neither medium holds a
monopoly on conveying personal, cultural, or ideological slants, and neither deserves
censure for making communication possible.” Building on this point Kozloff refutes
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theorizations of sound which relegate it to a necessarily secondary status in film.
Though she does not argue that sound is more important than the image in film, her
discussion demonstrates that sound – even dialogue – never simply duplicates the
content of the image and can easily in an individual film become more important
than the image. In Overhearing Film Dialogue, Kozloff expands on her insistence on
the importance of language and argues that dialogue allows films to communicate a
variety of information and in even the most conventional and / or classical of films it
does more than simply present and reveal character, establish time and place, and
help make the narrative comprehensible. Kozloff’s discussion of dialogue explains
cinema as not simply offering acts of voyeurism but also demanding that audiences
listen: “What we’ve often overlooked is that viewers are also listeners, in fact, they
are eavesdroppers, listening in on conversations purportedly addressed to others, but
conversations that – in reality – are designed to communicate certain information to
the audience.”
67
She argues that Hollywood audiences know this and never believe
they have access to “private” discussions, much less reality:
Film dialogue has been purposely designed for the viewers to overhear, so
that we can draw the best hypotheses, but films disguise the extent to which
the words are truly meant for the off-screen listener. Part of the film-going
suspension of disbelief is to collaborate in this fiction.
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Kozloff’s and Chion’s comments encourage a greater recognition of dialogue – as
sound – in classical cinema. Though certainly cooperating with the image, dialogue
carries a considerable portion of a film’s information even in contemporary narrative
cinema.

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Classical sound?
Stating that sound in the postwar / pre-Dolby period is neglected by sound scholars is
not strictly true. An examination of some of the major texts on film sound reveals
that some of the American films used for illustration and treated to sustained analysis
were made in the 1940s and 1950s. These examples provide evidence of the existing
– though heretofore unrecognized – foundation for a theorization of postclassical
sound. Mary Ann Doane and Michel Chion are but two examples of sound scholars
who rely heavily on “classical” Hollywood films such as Sunset Blvd. (1950) and
Citizen Kane. What these and other scholars find worth examining is the films’
deviations from classical norms; few argue that Welles’ flamboyant sound work
(extensive voiceover, exaggerated echo effects, ostentatious sound bridges and edits)
or the voiceover of the dead protagonist which begins and structures Sunset Blvd. are
“invisible,” “inaudible” or part of a seamless conveyance of narrative detail. In these
films sound is particularly available for consideration and examination because its
actions are not so heavily controlled by (classical) film narration. In the classical
films of the 1930s sound is largely controlled by film narration and its assistance of
the image does not generate much sustained discussion beyond studies of the scoring
practices of studio composers. Films of the 1940s however, generate discussion and
are used to support a variety of theories and theoretical positions. Karen Hollinger
considers female voiceover and, following the model of Mary Anne Doane in The
Desire to Desire, focuses on films released in 1948: The Snake Pit, Letter to Three
Wives, and Secret Beyond the Door.
69
Sarah Kozloff focuses on 1940s and 1950s
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films in her study of voiceover films Invisible Storytellers and her selective
filmography demonstrates the obvious rise of voiceover in the 1940s.
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Brian Henderson discusses the theories of Gerard Genette while discussing
“analepsis” – when a text moves backwards to an earlier moment – he echoes Bazin:
“The greatest period of analepsis in classical cinema was undoubtedly 1941-1957,
that maturity of the sound film marked by Citizen Kane and How Green Was My
Valley (1941).”
71
In noting this bulge of non-linear narratives Henderson highlights
one way the classical system began to change in the 1940s. By more openly
shuffling time and space and using voiceover to foreground character subjectivity
and the act of telling, films of the period display narration in a manner which is not
classical. Additionally, Jerrold Levinson’s “Film Music and Narrative Agency”
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discusses Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Preminger’s Laura (1944),
1950s films such as Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and On the Waterfront (1954),
and 1970s films such as Taxi Driver (1976) and A Clockwork Orange (1971). Royal
S. Brown discusses Double Indemnity (1944) as the film which “best typifies not
only a new sound ushered in on the movie music track but also a new type of
relationship between the film and its score.”
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Claudia Gorbman, Kathryn Kalinak and Caryl Flinn have each written
influential books on classical Hollywood. Kalinak’s case studies in Settling the
Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film, for example, are Captain Blood
(1935), The Informer (1935), Laura, Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons
(1942) and Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). She discusses Captain Blood and The
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Informer for their uniqueness more than their typicality as she notes that Korngold’s
score embraces spectacle to support the period action film and Max Steiner’s score
for the latter includes the most discussed example of “mickey-mousing” in classical
Hollywood.
74
Flinn states that her focus in Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and
Hollywood Film Music is on 1935 to 1950 because in this period “the Hollywood
studio system was operating at its most efficient,”
75
yet her longest discussions focus
on Edgar G. Ulmer’s B-film masterpiece Detour (1945) and Penny Serenade (1941).
While the latter is a fairly conventional Hollywood film, many scholars would argue
that Detour’s unique aesthetics, bizarre narration, and no budget production made
away from the major Hollywood studios, all make the film something other than
classical Hollywood. In her survey of “narrative film music” Unheard Melodies,
Gorbman spends more time on Hangover Square (1945) than any other film, but the
film is so deviant in its presentation of music that when she and other scholars
including Bordwell and Edward Branigan discuss it, their continual insistence on the
film’s classicism fruitlessly combats the much more logical position: the film and its
aural properties are not classical.
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Post-Classical Sound
The studies above discuss post-classical sound: pre-Dolby sound which does not
serve the image. That American society, Hollywood business practices, and film
texts were changing significantly in the 1940s seems inarguable. Film sound shows
as many adjustments as other aspects of film, but the period between the 1940s and
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the rise of Dolby sound is largely ignored. Positing the category of “post-classical”
sound may aid the study of this period. Like classical cinema, an articulation of a
post-classical period (or postwar / pre-Dolby sound period) includes industry and
aesthetics. The scholars listed above either regard sound in films like Citizen Kane
as classical, or feel that while the industrial base of Hollywood changes in the 1940s
the sets of aesthetic practices the studio system created and fostered continue to
dominate. This dissertation argues that as the economic base of production,
distribution, and exhibition of American film changed in the 1940s so too did their
aesthetics.
Scholars such as Bazin believe Hollywood achieves perfection in 1939-40 so
it is logical that it begins to decline in the 1940s. This is true according to the art
history model which Bordwell labels a “birth-maturity-decline pattern.”
77
The
outbreak of World War II slowed the breakdown of the studio era, in part by
interrupting the federal government’s prosecution of the oligopoly. Hollywood set
attendance records immediately after the war in 1946 in part because its products
attracted citizens flush with victory and willing to go out to the movies. This too
helped conceal Hollywood’s economic instability. Tino Balio labels the period of
1948 to the present in Hollywood as the age of “Retrenchment, Reappraisal, and
Reorganization.” He argues that because of divorcement and the new competition at
the level of exhibition, independent producers and the “Little Three” (Universal,
Columbia and United Artists) were able to compete with the “Big Five” (MGM – or,
more accurately, Loew’s, Paramount, Warner Bros,, Fox and RKO) as never
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before.
78
Many of the “independents” who rushed to adapt to the changes were
established and powerful Hollywood insiders. Producer-directors like Otto
Preminger and Billy Wilder, and actors like Burt Lancaster, Cornel Wilde, James
Stewart and Jimmy Cagney, all wanted more creative control of, and economic
benefit from, their labor and eagerly sought to follow the example of pioneers like
David O. Selznick and the powerful individuals who created United Artists in
1919.
79
They used the studios as banks, equipment shops, and distributors.
80
They
also stretched aesthetic norms, used established genres in new ways, and created new
genres to cater to new audience expectations.
81
Additionally, in the 1960s art
cinemas appeared which offered international films that more frankly depicted
sexuality and “adult” issues than Hollywood’s products.
The studios and independents sought to compete with television by reviving
old technologies like 3-D and widescreen processes (including Cinerama).
Alongside and often directly attached to these innovations for the presentation of
images are innovations in the presentation of sound. It is worth remembering
however that “all sound technology during the thirties and forties is also image
technology” because sounds were “expressed in optical terms” and so “nearly every
advance in image technology – film, lens, printer lamp – resulted in a corresponding
leap in sound quality.”
82
Cinerama, for example, was at least as innovative in terms
of sound as in image, though this aspect of the technology is seldom discussed.
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Sound technology made films louder, clearer, and (more) enveloping. Studios and
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exhibitors tested, employed, and marketed stereo sound, magnetic sound, and other
innovations.
John Belton regards 1950s Magnetic Sound as a moment of stifled change:
“It was not a complete overthrow of traditional cinema; it only went so far and then
stopped. It was a frozen revolution.”
84
This last phrase is a fair summary of the
period because of the era’s adjustments to classical aesthetics. Belton’s study
demonstrates that from 1952 to 1954 stereo magnetic sound, via large screen
processes and 3D, was offered to audiences as a superior and supposedly more
realistic alternative to the optical sound. But it was not until 1975 that stereo was
widely accepted and it became common as optical – not magnetic – sound. “Better”
sound did not win out and Belton explains the reasons for this evolutionary “failure.”
For a time both optical and magnetic sound were available to audiences though
production techniques transitioned to magnetic technology. A “two-tiered exhibition
system” developed: one for “the (theoretically) radical realism of large-screen (and
large format) motion pictures with stereo sound” that was put to use in films that
offered spectacle as much as “reality”
85
and the other for “the old-fashioned format
of monaural, optical sound” which presented “a redefined realism, anchoring the
spectacular, new wide-screen image in the familiar conventions of a pre-wide-screen
sound, which had achieved a certain identification with realistic representation over
the past twenty-five years.”
86
He mentions Ben-Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960) and
Oklahoma (1955) as films that combined stereo with large screen spectacle. But
other widescreen films, and soon all, relied on mono sound to ground the visual
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spectacle in more familiar audio conditions. While major theaters, which offered
first run films and took in the majority of a film’s box office take, could afford the
significant technological changes for magnetic sound and then promote their sound
systems, many smaller theaters switched to new projection lenses and screens for the
widescreen process but, according to Belton, balked at spending money on sound
improvements. Belton argues that audiences responded to the new sound in a
complex manner: “stereo magnetic sound was praised both for it realism and its
artifice.”
87
Audience familiarity with mono sound encouraged regarding stereo
sound as artificial and deviant rather than realistic:
The myth inspiring its evolution may have been the quest for ‘greater
realism,’ but that demand was already being satisfied, it would seem,
by existing sound technologies – in particular, by monaural optical
sound. Instead, it satisfied other demands – the need for spectacle and
the desire for / fascination with technological display.

He concludes that these changes in sound and image “proved to be too much of a
revolution in the mid-1950s. Widescreen cinema and stereophonic sound, as
idealistic phenomena . . . proved to offer an excess of spectacle that could survive
only in the most artificially theatrical of venues.”
In this period films reveal sound as a performance rather than passively
captured (perhaps by accident) along with the image. Altman reads the introduction
of magnetic sound as part of cinema’s continued separation of sound and image,
which he traces all the way back to the beginnings of sound film. In the filmmaking
process, as he notes with magnetic sound technology: “any number of sound sources
could easily be separately recorded, mixed, and remixed independently of the
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image.”
88
He argues that the emphasis on separation ironically caused independent
and documentary filmmakers to seek a renewed union of sound and image where
image and sound are recorded together and bound in a controlled relationship.
89
Paul
Monaco argues that in the sixties, “Soundtracks were increasingly being pushed from
an aesthetic of naturalism toward a more artificially crafted and manipulated motion-
picture sound design.”
90
The rise of ADR (automatic dialogue replacement) initially
used for soundtracks of films shot on location and Foley art supports this position at
the level of production since each in this period helps create – not capture – a
soundtrack for the film. Magnetic sound and Foley are necessary companions: “In
the optical sound era, effects editors would actually frame cut footsteps matched
visually to M.O.S. scenes. Magnetic sound mandated Foley, as did the widespread
use of lavalier and radio mikes that do not pick up footsteps or other natural sounds
that overhead mikes record.”
91
The smaller wireless radio mikes were popularized
by documentary filmmakers, especially Richard Leacock and Robert Drew who
favored their unobtrusiveness.
92
When this recording system is used in fiction
filmmaking, the union of sound and image in the production phase typically
necessitates the creation of sound in the postproduction phase.
This period also marks the emerging of blockbuster cinema. Paul Monaco
has argued for the 1960s as the beginning of the cinema of “sensation”: “Perceptibly,
visual and audio sensation began to coexist with – and even displace – the narrative
and dramatic demands of dialogue and scripting as the primary elements upon which
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the viewer’s attention was focused on the feature film.”
93
Hence the binary of covert
and overt uses of sound is increasingly hard to sustain.
One of the sensations films of the period offer is the presentation of popular
music. In the postwar / pre-Dolby era films include more popular music than ever
before. The use of existing music in (or with) film began with the creation of cinema
itself, but after the war Hollywood increasingly turned from original scores by
contracted composers and orchestras to freelance artists and existing music. In
increasing numbers of films, the music is not tailored to a specific film’s narrative
and imagery, but has a life of its own before the film and is pressed into service and
therefore participates in the film’s narration in a manner which may not support the
narrative.
Estella Tincknell argues in “The Soundtrack Movie, Nostalgia and
Consumption” that “the classical film musical’s use of diegetic musical performance
to express dramatic developments or emotional intensity has been effectively
replaced by a ‘postmodern’ model of the film score in which a pre-recorded
soundtrack is foregrounded.”
94
She continues: “in place of (and sometimes as well
as) the diegetically produced and visibly performed numbers of the traditional
musical, the cinema audience now increasingly encounters a film soundtrack
composed of discrete and previously released pop songs.”
95
By 1958 all of the major
Hollywood studios had cut loose their studio musicians and Monaco explains some
of the implications of this action:
The end of ‘in-house’ orchestras and of studio contracts with
individual composers increased the presence of free-lance work in
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Hollywood and the importance of directors in making myriad artistic
decisions about their films – what kind of music was put to a film,
how it was to be used, and where it was placed would never be the
same.
96

Though Monaco claims the director benefits most from these changes, equally as
important is that this leads to the positions of music supervisor and music editor who
make the first set of answers to the “kind,” “how,” and “where” questions.
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Fantasia: The Animated Concert Film
Fantasia is a central film in the weakening of classical sound norms and an example
of Hollywood taking up avant-garde practices along with the possibilities of
animation. In the postwar / pre-Dolby period, avant-garde and animated works
privilege aural elements and occasionally permit the image to dominate proceedings
or carry the majority of narrative information. Such a film is Disney’s Fantasia
which presents sound openly, creates the concert film (sub)genre, promotes classical
music, and uniquely mixes elements of narrative and nonnarrative film, Hollywood
and the avant-garde, and most significantly, offers a compendium of image and
sound relations, including sync, diegesis and sound / image hierarchy. The film
makes no apology for its attempt to popularize classical music and even uses the
company’s most popular icon – Mickey Mouse himself – to sell high(er) culture, and
culture in which the Disney company had no financial stake. The film exists because
of Walt Disney’s interest in music and was expanded from a single animated
orchestral piece to the finished film’s eight, and Disney hoped to update the film and
re-release it with new pieces periodically.
98
Fantasia participates in all three of the
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(overlapping) categories which organize the discussion of hierarchy in Chapter 6:
exhibition practices which offer and market as an (or the) attraction, the emphasis on
sound by a film’s aesthetics (and narration) in specific moments or perhaps
throughout the film, and voiceover narration which greatly influences the audience’s
experience of the film.
In terms of aesthetics, Fantasia offers sound as the attraction and the reason
for the film’s existence. Unlike other films considered in this dissertation Fantasia is
an animated film, but like many others it is a musical. As in the production of a
musical, the pieces of music in Fantasia are chosen and images created to accompany
them, and in this case the images represent several different styles. This makes the
film not unlike a program of avant-garde shorts which visualize music; each segment
offers images in a synchronous relationship with the music. More than such a
program however, Fantasia turns cinemas into (audio) performance spaces. Fantasia
is a sort of cartoon musical, but the film itself and its marketing place the
performance of famous pieces of classical music by the Leopold Stokowski-
conducted Philadelphia orchestra at the center, making it perhaps the first concert
film. The only recurring characters are Stokowski, host Deems Taylor and the
orchestra. Within the company the film was initially known as “concert feature”
before settling on the final title, and the film fits its initial (and descriptive) title
perfectly because it is not simply an animated feature-length film. Fantasia brings
Stokowski and the Philadelphia orchestra to cinemas around the United States and
throws in spectacular animation for added value (and broader appeal). The orchestra
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sets up for a concert in the film’s opening (after the curtains part) and returns after
each number.
99
Like some later filmed concerts such as Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii
(1972), Fantasia has been arranged for the camera, and there is no diegetic audience
(other than the filmmakers).
Deems Taylor directly addresses the camera and (film) theater audience once
the orchestra is settled and explains what is to come like a good host: “What you're
going to see are the designs and pictures and stories that music inspired in the minds
and imaginations of a group of artists. In other words, these are not going to be the
interpretations of trained musicians, which I think is all to the good.” Taylor’s
“reputation for making music meaningful to American audiences (notably on New
York Philharmonic radio broadcasts) made him a logical candidate for inclusion in
this project.”
100
His introduction emphasizes that different occupational interests
inform the film’s dual address: the music comes from trained musicians and the
images (though not of the orchestra) come from imaginative artists. His introduction
justifies the images as an addition to the music and thus reverses the typical
theorization of sound as addition to the image. He describes each musical selection
before the performance, serving as both host and program, and describes a few
pieces as telling stories, suggesting that the animated images are an embellishment
“inspired” by great music. He also carefully groups the selections into categories:
“Now there are three kinds of music on this Fantasia program. First, there’s the kind
that tells a definite story. Then there’s the kind that while it has no specific plot, it
does paint a series of more or less definite pictures. And then there’s a third kind,
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music that exists simply for its own sake.” Taylor’s description in this passage
further suggests that the animated sequences are superfluous as some of the film’s
music tells a story without images, other pieces “paint a series of . . . pictures” and
the third type which simply “exists.”
The film’s sound is not only dominant but is also acknowledged to be
separate from the images. In addition, the film plays with offering a diegesis in a
manner unusual for animated film. Fantasia’s structure highlights the division of
sound (produced by the human orchestra and conductor) and image (animation and
photographed humans). While sound and image are recognizably independent in
most animated works, Fantasia defines cinema as the joining of sound (music) and
image (animation – literally a series of still images) which are produced separately
and by different parties: musicians and illustrators. The film presents the ostensible
source of the music (the orchestra) and this establishes something like a diegesis.
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The film presents the music as a “live” concert performance and as it bridges images
of the orchestra to animation the film confirms that sound controls the image.
However after the third number “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” the two visual spaces
intersect as the star of the segment Mickey Mouse saunters up to Stokowski and
shakes his hand.
In terms of exhibition Fantasia offers audiences a unique experience,
particularly in its special engagements with Fantasound. Rightly convinced that
standard film sound (in production and exhibition) could not come close to providing
audiences with the aural experience of a live concert, Disney created a unique sound
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system. Stephen Handzo explains that RCA designed the system “to emphasize the
directional character of a symphony orchestra, e.g., brass clearly separated from
strings. Three oversize (.200”) optical tracks (left, right, center, plus a ‘control’
track) on one separate strip of 35mm film were run in interlock.”
102
The system
even included immersive, or surround, sound for some screenings: “For the Los
Angeles premiere, Disney added a primitive ‘surround’ channel of 96 small speakers
to pick up sound from one or more of the main channels, e.g., the choir singing ‘Ave
Maria’ was heard throughout the theater.”
103
One estimate puts the cost of such this
speaker system at $85,000
104
so only 6 (or 12)
105
cities showed the film with the
Disney’s intended Fantasound. Handzo writes that other than lucky filmgoers at
these locations, “Fantasia was not seen [sic] as Disney intended until it was reissued
(in magnetic sound) in 1956”
106
, but the 1950s audiences did not experience
Disney’s intended surround sound. Audiences for the initial Fantasound roadshow
release, with its reserved seating and two screenings per day, attended in part to get
the best possible experience of the film’s sound and this “event” package provides
the audience with an aural and visual experience a decade before later films like the
CinemaScope The Robe (1953) and Cinerama Adventure (1952).
Finally, Fantasia also briefly, but significantly, features voiceover from
Taylor. After the film’s intermission (in another nod to its concert format), Taylor
makes the following curious statement:
Before we get into the second half of the program, I’d like to
introduce somebody to you. Somebody who is very important to
Fantasia. He's very shy and very retiring. I just happened to run
across him one day at the Disney Studios. But when I did, I
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suddenly realized that here was not only an indispensable member
of the organization, but a screen personality, whose possibilities
nobody around the place had ever noticed. And so I'm very happy
to have this opportunity to introduce to you the sound track.

The comments about the soundtrack’s shyness and being “indispensable” are,
however, interesting statements on classical sound. Just as Taylor introduces
Fantasia’s audience to the soundtrack, the film itself introduces post-classical sound
which is overtly indispensable and no longer necessarily “shy.” It should be noted
that to audiences even dimly aware of Disney’s other output Taylor’s statement that
“nobody around the place had ever noticed” the “possibilities” of the soundtrack is
blatantly false. The company had a payroll full of individuals devoted to sound and
who made films like “Steamboat Willie,” the film that made Mickey Mouse famous
because of the use of music in 1928. The studio was more aware of the possibilities
of sound than any studio making films in 1940.
As Taylor finishes speaking the scene changes to an animated light blue
screen with a faint set of near-ripples (not unlike a representation of the effects of an
object falling into water). On the left edge of the screen a vertical line appears and
moves – with seeming hesitancy – to the center of the screen as Taylor coaxes, “All
right, come on. That’s all right. Don’t be timid.” When the line finally takes up the
center of the frame Taylor exclaims, as though to a dog, “Atta soundtrack!” to
express his pleasure, and then finishes his explanation: “Now watching him [the
soundtrack] I discovered that every beautiful sound also creates an equally beautiful
picture. Now look. Will the soundtrack kindly produce a sound?” Following this,
the line begins to move in a squiggly manner which (for some audience members)
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approximates the look an optical soundtrack. As Taylor requests different
instruments – to hear and “see” them – the “soundtrack” moves and the film offers
the sound of a harp, a trumpet, etc. Taylor’s explanation of this scene moves beyond
his statement that the film features images “inspired” by the music and which
“interpret” it. Taylor now claims – apparently as a rule of cinema (or reality?) – that
“every beautiful sound also creates an equally beautiful picture.” A clearer statement
could not be imagined about the relationship and hierarchy between sound and image
offered by Fantasia. This sequence also underlines that the voice has more power
than other sounds and supports Chion’s contention that cinema (at least live action)
tends toward vococentrism. Taylor orders the “soundtrack” and it never objects or
fails to respond to his “offscreen” voice. Significantly, what is visualized by the
“soundtrack” is musical sounds; Taylor’s voice is never represented by the
“soundtrack,” presumably because he does not order it to do so.
Not surprisingly, Disney’s fascinating experiment in animation, high (and
low) art, unique exhibition, and most importantly sound, was a financial failure,
likely in part due to the film’s attempt to unite several apparent binaries: the classical
and postclassical periods, Hollywood and avant-garde, photography and animation.
The film’s high production cost did not help its financial state either. In terms of
music the film is additionally transitional because it participates in the presentation
of “classical” music that the classical Hollywood film typically offers but rather than
featuring original nondiegetic pieces which borrow heavily from public domain
classical music, the film presents the real thing and puts it right up front as a concert.
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Disney wants film audiences to listen to classical music and this juxtaposition of the
high and low was apparently more than audiences were willing to explore, perhaps
because Disney’s film mode (animation) is the lowest of an already low cultural
form (cinema) and creates too great a juxtaposition, though the use of Taylor and
Stokowski attempts to bridge the divide. This failure did not cause the company to
abandon the visualization of music and they turned to the Make Mine Music and
Melody Time series which use familiar pieces. David Bordwell notes in his
discussion of the Basic Story of film history that Disney’s early shorts offered a
persuasive rebuttal to those who bemoaned the coming of sound as the end of real
cinema: “Walt Disney’s cartoons showed that talking pictures could properly
integrate the pictorial dynamism of the silent cinema into an audiovisual unity.”
107

One can add that Disney’s films continued to demonstrate this fact and though
following Oskar Fischinger (who had a frustrating experience contributing to
Fantasia
108
) and other experimental filmmakers in presenting a union of music and
image, Disney was ahead of most American filmmakers in recognizing the power of
giving both halves of film an equal amount of attention.

Conclusion
Film history is not just a collection of dates, a series of changes, or a fully stable
system immune from adjustments. The postwar / pre-Dolby era needs to be explored
not simply on it own – as this dissertation undertakes – but also in relation to other
periods. In light of significant changes in postwar narrative films’ sound aesthetics
73

and technology, and building on comments from Altman and Belton above, it can be
argued that the experimentation with both sound and image in the postwar period
represents a rise to the surface of tendencies which were suppressed by the studio
mode of production and the narration of the classical film. Altman has suggested
that “the coming of sound represents the return of the silent cinema’s repressed.”
109

As a group the changes in sound beginning in the 1940s suggest a similarly
significant shift.
The 1950s widescreen and 3-D films offering audio and visual spectacle are
similar to what Tom Gunning calls the “cinema of attractions.”
110
He argues that
narrative cinema pushed aside this cinema in the 1910s. More pointedly, James
Lastra states that between 1925 and 1934 there was a much more contentious period
for the “adoption” of sound in cinema than normally recognized. His research
reveals uses of sound where it was more prominent than the image in marketing and
more important than the image for the audience’s experience of the film. He also
notes, as Gunning argues regarding the cinema of attractions, that these tendencies
never died:
While, in general, sound (especially music) did tend to become more
and more subservient to the narrative, none of these traditions of
sound disappeared entirely; they persisted on the margins of the
classical style or in alternative modes such as the avant-garde.
111

In some film modes and texts released between 1925 and 1934 sound was more
“presentational than representational” and therefore a party to the cinema of
attractions.
112
Lastra’s work supports the theorization of sound as itself having
something like a classical period which suppresses experimentation:
74

Even while appearing to fulfill a particular function (such as
providing intelligible, narratively important dialogue), sound may
simultaneously be performing other, nonnarrative or even
nonrepresentational ones. The standards of sound reproduction
eventually codified by Hollywood practice, although appearing to
be yet another familiar set of techniques that aids the effortless
assimilation of story information, and therefore simply another
component of the classical narrative system, conceal a history of
traditions of representation and exhibition that may be at odds with
classical norms, and at times in direct conflict with them.
113

To support these comments Lastra outlines the ways sound was used to “solicit”
patrons to nickelodeons
114
, examines the popularity of the illustrated song which
typically created audience sing-alongs and song films
115
, the use of sound effects
which did not simply sync up and support the image
116
, and other practices whose
popularity not coincidentally dwindled in the late 1920s. Lastra’s work has
implications for the understanding of classical cinema and helps explain why a
period of renewed, more pronounced, or more widespread experimentation with
sound – which occurred after the classical period – begins in the 1940s.
Though most scholars recognize only the binary of “classical” and
“modernist” in aesthetics, and “classical” and “postmodern” in terms of production
practice, theorizing the postwar / pre-Dolby era of sound is necessary for
understanding film history. The “classical” use of sound to support the image is not
a, much less the, norm for cinema but one with a relatively brief period of dominance
in Hollywood: 1928-1939. The period is surrounded by aesthetic tendencies,
exhibition practices, and technologies that reveal cinema as the combination of
sound and image.
75

The classical system of aesthetics, particularly the system of classical
narration, pushed aside alternative uses of sound and forced sound to serve the
image. The postwar period is then the return of the repressed – stylistically at least.
Where synchronous sound is the norm for the classical period, in the postwar period
sound takes up relationships with the image that are not synchronous, even in major
Hollywood films. Where the classical period presents a clearly defined diegesis and
accounts for the images and sounds and explains their relationship to the diegesis, in
the postwar period films can induce dancing in the aisles or present diegesis whose
boundaries are difficult to define. Where the classical system insists that sound is to
serve the image, in the postwar period sound once again becomes the attraction for
audiences and provides spectacle worth paying for. The following chapters take up
these discussions but first it is necessary to explain how cinema manages sound /
image relations with narration.

76

Chapter 2 Endnotes

1
David Bordwell argues in for another way in which sound influences film history. He notes that the
dominance of sound and “death” of silent cinema caused film lovers to begin to actively preserve and
care for film texts. David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,
1997) 24.

2
Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film (Berkeley, CA: U of
California P, 2007) 10.

3
Quoted in Polan 189.

4
Claudia Gorbman, “Teaching the Soundtrack,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 1.4 (1976): 447.

5
Gorbman, “Teaching the Soundtrack” 447.

6
The four and a half are: the historical fallacy, the ontological fallacy, the reproductive fallacy, the
nominalist fallacy, and finally “indexicality: half a fallacy working on the other half” (42). Rick
Altman, “Introduction: Four and Half Film Fallacies,” Sound Theory / Sound Practice (New York:
Routledge, 1992).

7
Altman, “Film Fallacies” 35.

8
Altman, “Film Fallacies” 36.

9
William Johnson, “The Liberation of Echo: A New Hearing for Film Sound,” Film Quarterly 38.4
(1985): 3.

10
Bordwell, On the History of Film Style 4.

11
While he apologizes for not discussing sound in On the History of Film Style in his own frequently
reprinted textbook Film Art co-written with Kristin Thompson, Bordwell waits until Chapter 9 to
address sound as an element of film style after considering mise-en-scene, cinematography, and
editing.

12
Bordwell, Film Style 11.

13
Bordwell, Film Style 13.

14
Bordwell, Film Style 9.

15
Bordwell, Film Style 27.

16
Bordwell, Film Style 18.

17
Bordwell, Film Style 18.

18
Bordwell, Film Style 18.

19
Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound 1926-1931 (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997) 172.
77

20
Crafton 172. Bordwell discusses Seldes as calling for a synthesis of “silent” and “sound”
aesthetics and tendencies once he knew the battle to preserve silent film was lost. Prior to this he
campaigned for something like a dual trajectory of cinema, where artists would continue to develop
silent films alongside the new sound cinema. Bordwell, Film Style 37.
One can imagine a dual trajectory of sound uses developing at this time and a few films such
as The Life and Death of 9413 – A Hollywood Extra which uses George Gershwin's “Rhapsody in
Blue” hint at this possibility, but overall avant-garde sound production in the United States was
minimal before World War II.

21
Gorbman, “Teaching the Soundtrack” 446.

22
Gorbman, “Teaching the Soundtrack” 447.

23
J. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (New York: Oxford UP, 1976) 12.

24
Andrew 13.

25
Germaine Dulac, “From ‘Visual and Anti-visual Films,’” The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of
Theory and Criticism, Ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York UP, 1978) 32.

26
Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, Ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Film Culture, 1963) 23.

27
Annette Michelson brilliantly compares Eisenstein with Brakhage and among their similarities she
notes an aversion to sound: “both film makers are, interestingly enough, extremely wary of sound and
its uses in the making of film. Eisenstein’s reticence, shared by many of his more innovative
colleagues, is a matter of historical record” (32). The second phrase here suggests that “innovative”
filmmakers did (and should have) resisted sound. Yet Eisenstein eventually had a brilliantly creative
career in sound films, unlike Brakhage. Michelson explains: “Brakhage’s categorical rejection of
sound has its undoubted origin in his vehement commitment to the primacy, or ‘nobility’ of sight and
to his expansion, literalization, and revivification of the Visionary claims, the sense of the Imagination
as indeed primarily and concretely generative of images” (33). She summarizes the artists’ reaction to
sound: “Each film maker, then, derives a sense of the problematic nature of sound from the intensity
and integrity with which his forms reflect a sense, and his structures stand for philosophical
commitment. That intensity and integrity are the source of a power which transcends the exactitude
of arguments or invulnerability of positions.” Michelson, “Camera Lucida / Camera Obscura,”
Artforum 11.5 (1973): 30-37.

28
Brakhage is not alone is purposefully making silent film in the sound film era. Other filmmakers
such as Nathaniel Dorsky explore the visual properties of cinema. It is also important to note that
Brakhage made a few sound films, including Desistfilm (1954) and Blue Moses (1962).

29
See Chapter 2 of David E. James, Allegories of Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1989) and
James Peterson, Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order (Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 1994): 52-57.

30
And yet, as much or more than other avant-garde filmmakers the works of Brakhage cry out for
oral discussion. I owe this observation to David E. James in one of his lectures in a course on avant-
garde cinema.

31
William C. Wees, Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film.
(Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1992) 1.

32
Wees 1.
78

33
Wees x.

34
Wees x.

35
The work of Melissa Ragona is fairly unique in its focus on sound. See “Hidden Noise: Strategies
of Sound Montage in the Films of Hollis Frampton,” October 109.1 (2004): 96-118.

36
The term and conception of the “classical” was actually applied to cinema’s silent period before the
introduction of sound. Bordwell discusses this in Film Style 39.

37
See for example Rick Altman’s “Dickens, Griffith and Film Theory Today,” South Atlantic
Quarterly 88.2 (1989): 321-359.

38
In Hollywood Cinema (2
nd
ed.) Richard Maltby explains his use of the phase in this way: “I use
‘Classical Hollywood’ to refer to a specific period of Hollywood’s history form the early 1920s to the
late 1950s, and as a description of the style, the mode of production, and the industrial organization
under which movies were made in that period” (18). Hollywood Cinema (Malden, MA: Blackwell,
2003). Yet when it comes time to discuss the “industry” of Hollywood Maltby divides it into the
periods “to 1948” (with “to” never fully defined), “1948 to 1980” and “Since 1980” with the consent
decree of 1948 which forced the studios to cut off their exhibition wings marking the major break for
the studio era.
Some scholars focus on Classical Hollywood and thereby suggest that in the 1940s aspects of
this cinema change irrevocably. For Robert Sklar the 1930s and 1940s are “Hollywood’s classic era”
or the “Golden Age.” Robert Sklar, City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, Garfield (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
UP, 1992) xii. For Richard B. Jewell “American theatrical filmmaking passed through its most
dominant, authoritative and significant years between 1929 and 1945” (1). Richard B. Jewell, The
Golden Age of Cinema (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007).
For these film historians, Hollywood achieves stability with the standardization of the sound
film and the industry flourishes until the end of World War II, when audiences peaked in 1946. For
Andrew Sarris in You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet (New York: Oxford UP, 1998) the history of the
“American Talking Film” (the book’s subtitle) is 1927-1949 and while he offers no explicit statement
of his reasoning for focusing on this period, the rationale behind his starting point is plain from the
title and first part of the subtitle. But the reasons for stopping with 1949 are far less clear and never
explicitly stated. While clearly stating that “movie history” should never be simply correlated with
“sociological history,” (8) and arguing that “the ‘movie thirties’ can be said to extend technologically
and stylistically from The Jazz Singer (1927) to Citizen Kane (1941)” (9), Sarris allows the assumed
break of the consent decree in 1948 – a real change in film practice and one could argue, society –
become one with “movie history.”
Film history textbooks acknowledge the significant changes occurring in the postwar period
but use a variety of dates. For Mast and Kawin 1930 to 1945 are “The American Studio Years” and
1946 to 1965 is labeled “Hollywood in Transition” in their A Short History of the Movies (New York:
Pearson/Longman, 2006). Jack C. Ellis in A History of Film (Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1995)
groups 1940 to 1952 as “Wartime and Postwar Hollywood,” and 1952 to 1962 as “Hollywood in
Transition.” David A. Cook’s A History of Narrative Film (New York: Norton, 2004) discusses
American cinema in the 1940s, and then the periods 1952-1965 and finally 1965 to the present. Robin
Wood, Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan . . . and Beyond (New York: Columbia UP, 2003).
Wood calls the classical period “roughly 1930-1960, from the coming of sound to the dominance of
television and the beginning of the takeover by corporations” (309).

39
Douglas Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System: A History (London: BFI, 2005) 79. He argues
that the origins of the Classical period begin in 1915, because, as he explains: “The major Hollywood
79

companies may be identified with film-making, but as early as 1915, led by Adolph Zukor, they
sought to control the distribution of their films around the world” (5).

40
See Jennifer Holt, “In Deregulation We Trust: The Synergy of Politics and Industry in Reagan-Era
Hollywood,” Film Quarterly 55.2 (2001): 22-29.

41
Robert Ray’s A Certain Tendency of American Cinema, 1930-1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP,
1985) labels 1930 to 1945 “Classical Hollywood,” 1946 to 1966 “The Postwar Period,” and 1967 to
1980 is “The Contemporary Period.” Ray offers a convincing and influential reading of Frank
Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) as playing out the split between Classical Hollywood and
Postwar Hollywood with Potterville’s transformation read as the movement from an untroubled
surface to a noir environment: “In Capra’s film, the natural evolution of the movie’s early street
scenes into the Pottersville vision retroactively revealed the barely controlled noir elements existing
just beneath the surface of Classic Hollywood’s stock imagery” (203). Film Noir brings all the
anxiety suppressed by Classical Hollywood to the surface and Capra’s film plays out this struggle.
While the film ends with a Classical utopian conclusion, the noir vision of the town lingers.
For Ray and many other scholars (in the US and France) noir represents a disruption of
classical Hollywood style and is a manifestation of turmoil in American society and the film industry
itself. French writers recognized the sinister tone and obvious style of noir and gave the movement its
name. The absence of American films from French theaters during the war and the subsequent deluge
allowed audiences to recognize (or imagine?) a break in American cinema that few writers in
American recognized. Noir represents one of the major issues of the postwar / postclassical
discussion and locating dates for noir is one of the great pastimes of film studies. While a product of
Hollywood during the war, it was recognized in the postwar period, or, for some scholars, created by
French theorists after the war. The temporal lack complicates the discussion of noir. Many scholars
feel more safe focusing on the consent decree and refusing to weigh in on whether or not “noir” is a
genre.

42
André Bazin, “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” What is Cinema? Vol. 1. Trans. and ed.
Hugh Gray (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1967) 30.

43
Bazin 30.

44
The discussion continues today and the work of Gilles Deleuze currently receives a considerable
amount of attention in film studies. In his books Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis, MN:
U of Minnesota P, 1986) and Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P,
1986) he locates the major break in film history as the end of World War II. Joe McElhaney’s The
Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli (Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 2006) bears the influence of both Delezue and Bordwell as he examines three early 60s films
by the famous directors in his title. While claiming a great affinity for Delezue’s argument, his
position edges toward Bordwell in both his periodizing and argument as he argues that beginning in
the early to mid-1960s classical cinema was no longer to easily absorb “the lessons of modernist
developments in film form” (4). McElhaney discusses the breakup of the studio system in the
aftermath of the consent degree, dropping attendance, and the continued threat of television and
articulates Hollywood’s responses to the modernist art cinema of the late 1950s and 1960s, especially
from Italy and France. His discussion however leaves the question hanging: what exactly changed in
the 1960s? The implication remains that rather than a gradual change, in this moment classical
cinema was suddenly out of step with its own culture.

45
A middle position would be to discuss “silent” and “sound” cinema as two different art forms.
Bazin comes close to endorsing such a critical move.

80

46
David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style
and Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia UP, 1985) 9-10.

47
Bordwell, Classical Hollywood Cinema 3.

48
Bordwell, Classical Hollywood Cinema 301.

49
Bordwell, Classical Hollywood Cinema 33.

50
Bordwell, Classical Hollywood Cinema 34. Bordwell and other film scholars’ use of Wagner’s
work and ideas to describe Hollywood scoring has attracted criticism from other film scholars and
musicologists. For example, see Buhler, James and David Neumeyer. Review of Strains of Utopia:
Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music and Settling the Score: Music and the Classical
Hollywood Film, Journal of the Musicological Society 47.2 (1994): 364-385.

51
Bordwell, Classical Hollywood Cinema 34.

52
Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1987)
73.

53
Gorbman, Unheard Melodies 73.

54
Gorbman, Unheard Melodies 5.

55
Gorbman, Unheard Melodies 109.

56
Gorbman, Unheard Melodies 33.

57
Gorbman, Unheard Melodies 162.

58
Gorbman, Unheard Melodies 162.

59
Gorbman, Unheard Melodies 162.

60
McElhaney 5.

61
This match is not perfect as sound is used in many films in a manner nearly identical to the
classical system to present dialogue, effects, and music which assist the presentation of narrative
information. More generally, Bordwell is the most vocal opponent of conceptions of “postclassicism”
in cinema. See his The Way Hollywood Tells It (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2006).

62
John Ellis argues that television relies more on sound while film relies more on the image. See his
Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (New York: Routledge, 1992) 38-61.

63
Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, Ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York:
Columbia UP, 1994) 171.

64
Chion, Audio-Vision 171.

65
Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, Ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia UP,
1999) 5.

81

66
Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film (Berkeley,
CA: U of California P, 1988) 15.

67
Sarah Kozloff, Overhearing Film Dialogue (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2000) 14. For a
psychoanalytic consideration of cinematic eavesdropping, particularly of films which feature this
activity in the narrative, see: Elisabeth Weis, “Eavesdropping: An Aural Analogue of Voyeurism?”
Cinesonic: the World of Sound in Film, Ed. Philip Brophy (Sydney, Austral.: Southwood Press, 1999)
79-107.

68
Kozloff, Overhearing Film Dialogue 15-16.

69
Karen Hollinger, “Listening to the Female Voice in the Woman’s Film,” Film Criticism 16.3
(1992): 34-52.

70
The filmography begins with a list of all films in the 1930s but then lists each year individually.
For example, Kozloff lists 4 in the 1930s, 5 in 1939, 10 in 1940, 15 in 1946 and 14 films in 1950.

71
Brian Henderson, “Tense, Mood, and Voice in Film (Notes after Genette),” Film Quarterly 36.4
(1983): 6.

72
Jerrold Levinson, “Film Music and Narrative Agency,” Post Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies.
Ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1996) 248-282.

73
Royal S. Brown, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music (Berkeley, CA: U of California
P, 1994) 120. Brown’s explanation is complex: “But if the music and visuals interact on almost an
equal footing to communicate Double Indemnity’s subtextual Oedipal undertones, the musical score
and its interaction with the narrative / visual structure offer the most obvious clue to the other side of
the film’s mythology, which is highly Orphic in its implications” (122). Later he offers a discussion
of the film’s ambiguous presentation of music in terms of diegesis in the film’s climax: “As Neff
enters the room we hear the strains of a popular song. Although the volume level makes the music
seem either nondiegetic or as if it were coming from a source in the living room, Phyllis comments
that it is coming from a radio up the street” (132). Brown also considers the song which plays:
“Tangerine.”

74
For discussion of the film and its reputation see Chion, Audio-Vision 49-54. For a comment on
Eisenstein’s somewhat surprising approval of “mickey mousing” see Kristin Thompson, “Early Sound
Counterpoint,” Yale French Studies 60.1 (1980): 115-140.

75
Caryl Flinn, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton UP, 1992) 18.

76
The film concerns composer George Harvey Bone (Laird Cregar), a killer whose actions are
triggered by exposure to “discordant sounds.” Along with foregrounding the presentation of music
(as plot point and expression of subjectivity), the film begins with an extended shot that becomes an
optical point of view shot and features other sequences of overt visual narration. The film concludes
with Bone playing his final piece blurs into nondiegetic and into the closing credits. See, Gorbman’s
Unheard Melodies 151-161; Bordwell Classical Hollywood Cinema 35, 72; and Branigan Narrative
Comprehension and Film (New York: Routledge, 1992) 125-141.

77
Bordwell, Film Style 20.

78
Tino Balio, ed., The American Film Industry, Rev. ed. (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1985).
82

79
Charles Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks formed the company to
develop their own projects and distribute those of other independently-minded filmmakers.

80
See Denise Mann, Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover (Minneapolis, MN: U
of Minnesota P, 2008).

81
The 1940s represent a time of change for Hollywood. Though the war slowed industrial and
aesthetic changes, once it ended Hollywood moved steadily away from Classical norms, with noir as a
harbinger of the range of options for filmmakers in stretching classical norms. For example: Mary
Ann Doane explains the focus of her study The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1987) by noting “there is an intensity and an aberrant quality in the
‘40s films which is linked to the ideological upheaval signaled by a redefinition of sexual roles and
the reorganization of the family during the war years.” Additionally she sees “a kind of generic
intertextuality which seems to characterize the period. The woman’s film is frequently combined with
other genres – the film noir and the gothic or horror film, even the musical” (4). Though Doane is not
concerned with the debates about periodizing the Classical period, her work reads the 1940s as a time
of intense transition in American and the American film. Doane is drawn to the 1940s woman’s film
because it is moving away from its classical manifestation, as evidenced by its increasing combination
with a variety of genres and ideological turmoil.
Doane is not alone in noting genre changes in the 1940s. In Film Genre: Hollywood and
Beyond (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh UP, 2005) Barry Langford argues that genre is a revealing way
to explore Hollywood history, particularly its move away from the classical period. Langford
acknowledges his debt to Linda Williams’s influential essay “Melodrama Revised,” while arguing
that the Classical Hollywood genres “can also be seen as modalities of the film melodrama” (53).
Melodrama is positioned as the stylistic norm of classical Hollywood in place of theories of
Hollywood’s Classical realism. Langford labels horror and science fiction “transitional” genres as
each represents Hollywood’s move from classicism to post-classicism, in part through their deviation
from the stylistic norm of Hollywood, whether regarded as realism or melodrama. These genres look
forward to the postclassical period additionally because they are discussed in relation to issues of
great cultural interest in the era: for horror issues of the body and for science fiction the rising interest
in technology’s role in culture. Langford labels film noir and the action blockbuster as postclassical
genres which deviate significantly from classical norms and dominate contemporary Hollywood’s
output.

82
Rick Altman, “The Evolution of Sound Technology,” Film Sound: Theory and Practice, Ed.
Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia UP, 1985) 48.

83
John Belton’s Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1992), however, examines
the sound technologies and techniques which accompanied changes in image presentation.

84
John Belton, “1950s Magnetic Sound: The Frozen Revolution,” Sound Theory / Sound Practice,
Ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992) 167.

85
Belton, “1950s Magnetic Sound” 155.

86
Belton, “1950s Magnetic Sound” 156.

87
Belton, “1950s Magnetic Sound” 166. The following two quotations are from this source as well.

88
Altman, “Evolution of Sound Technology” 48.

89
These are discussed in Chapter 4 as films with a “restricted” aural diegesis.
83

90
Paul Monaco, The Sixties: 1960-1969 (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2003) 106.

91
Stephen Handzo, “A Narrative Glossary of Film Sound Technology,” Film Sound: Theory and
Practice, Ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia UP, 1985) 407.

92
Handzo 398.

93
Monaco 2.

94
Estella Tincknell, “The Soundtrack Movie, Nostalgia and Consumption,” Film’s Musical
Moments, Ed. Ian Conrich and Estella Tincknell (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh UP, 2006) 132.

95
Tincknell 133.

96
Monaco 109.

97
Ronald H. Sadoff, “The Role of the Music Editor and the ‘Temp Track’ as Blueprint for the Score,
Source Music, and Scource Music of Films,” Popular Music 25 (2006): 165-183.

98
The film’s failure precluded this plan for adding new pieces. Fantasia 2000 is even more populist
than the original by using celebrities such as Steve Martin and Bette Midler to introduce the pieces of
music and animation. These figures have no connection to the promotion of classical music, which is
in contrast to the use of Deems Taylor in the original film. See Daniel Goldmark’s Tunes for ‘Toons:
Music and the Hollywood Cartoon (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2005) 130.

99
They even provide comic relief as a percussionist fumbles with the chimes as Taylor introduces
“Rites of Spring.”

100
Leonard Maltin, The Disney Films, 3
rd
ed. (New York: Hyperion, 1995) 39.

101
Daniel Goldmark and Scott Curtis each regard the diegetic / nondiegetic binary as not useful for
considerations of animation. See Goldmark p. 4 and Curtis, “The Sound of Early Warner Bros.
Cartoons,” Sound Theory / Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992) 200-201.

102
Handzo 418-19.

103
Handzo 419.

104
Scott MacQueen (credited as Director, Library Restoration, Disney Studios) provides this number
in “The Making of Walt Disney's Fantasia.”

105
Handzo says it was only 6 (419), while Maltin puts the number at 12 (44).

106
Handzo 419.

107
Bordwell, Film Style 18.

108
Not surprising, there two different versions regarding the extent of Fischinger’s input. He
contributed to the designs of the first segment but his work was deemed too abstract and was altered
significantly. See also William Moritz, who credits Fischinger with the origins of the project because
he discussed illustrating Bach’s Toccate and Fugue in D Minor with Stokowski. See, “Fischinger at
Disney (Or Oskar in the Mousetrap),” Millimeter 5.2 (1977): 25-28, 65-67.
84

109
Altman, “Evolution of Sound Technology” 51.

110
Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectators and the Avant-Garde,”
Wide Angle 8.3-4 (1986): 63-70.

111
James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation,
Modernity (New York: Columbia UP, 2000) 118-19.

112
Lastra, Sound Technology 98.

113
Lastra, Sound Technology 97.

114
Lastra, Sound Technology 99.

115
Lastra, Sound Technology 99-104.

116
Lastra, Sound Technology 104-106.

85

Chapter 3: Narration and Sound

Existing theories of sound theory and narrative theory occasionally interact but rarely
fully engage with one another. This chapter uncovers connections that are
unacknowledged (or undiscovered) in order to build up the argument that cinema is
the combination of sound and image and this relationship is managed by narration.
This study argues for a loose definition of narration as the organization of sound(s)
and image(s) in cinema but a more strict definition of narrative as a series of events
connected by causality. Film narration does not necessarily result in a narrative but
rather in organization. Voiceover narration, for example, does not always result in
the presentation of a story but does serve to limit the range of meanings of the image
which it accompanies. Because sound and image do not inherently belong together,
cinema’s joining of the two requires explanation, and existing theories of narration –
particularly a combination of cognitive theory and the concept of spectacle – allow a
full consideration of the dual address of film. Cinema combines sound and image
and each can (and does) function as spectacle in a variety of films.
Sound theorists respond to its neglect by ignoring the image. They (1)
neglect narration as they address how sound and image interact, (2) discuss sound in
isolation from the image and focus on ideological critiques, and (3) address film
narrative in terms of music but not narration. The chapter considers The
Conversation (1974), the film perhaps most widely taught and discussed for its
presentation of sound in order to illustrate the necessity of bringing theories of
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narration into discussions of sound. A full understanding of the film, and even its
narrative, can not be obtained without considering the film’s aural narration.
Coppola’s film uses the tropes of a mystery thriller to equate surveillance with
making a film and presents cinema as the combination of sound and image.
At the same time, narrative theorists treat films as silent by locating all
narrative information – or spectacle – in the image. The second half of the chapter
discusses (1) the reliance on literary narrative theory in film narrative theory, (2)
cognitive theories of narrative which mention sound but stop short of considering its
place in narration (and narrative), and (3) theorizations of spectacle. This last section
addresses the binary of narrative and spectacle that drives some film discourse and
argues that these terms are not, in fact, mutually exclusive. Narrative is one way
cinema excuses the presentation of spectacle. Narration can offer visual and aural
spectacle. Spectacle should not be limited to visual spectacle. The aural properties
of a film – whether narrative or nonnarrative – are just as able to function as
“spectacle” as visual elements. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Michael
Snow’s Wavelength (1967), a film normally discussed only for its visual properties,
to demonstrate the necessity of considering the film’s sound.

The Neglect of Narration in Film Sound Theory
This section surveys studies of film sound and argues that the neglect of narration
limits the effectiveness of this discourse since films present sound and image in
controlled relationships. This neglect is in part a response to the general neglect of
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sound in film studies. It is also, in part, a result of following the example of others
for whom “narration” is a dirty word. The Maysles Brothers, for example, volunteer
that they abhor “narration” and do not use it. What they really mean however is their
films lack onscreen titles and explanatory voiceover, and feature unscripted events,
though their films are highly organized and some offer narratives. Additionally, the
presentation of sound and image in their Gimme Shelter (1970) is as controlled and
managed as that offered by Gone with the Wind (1939). Documentaries, Hollywood
features, educational films, newsreels and the like – with different generic tendencies
– display the organizing influence of film narration yet this fact is seldom considered
by film sound theorists.
First the chapter considers studies which discuss sound and image together.
Some theorists argue for discussing sound in its components (music, dialogue,
effects) while others more convincingly conceive of sound as making up a unity
comparable to the image track. Next cultural approaches to sound which use
ideological and psychoanalytic theory are considered. Finally, treatments of sound
and narrative are examined. Though considering how sound, especially music, helps
convey narrative, the studies stop short of recognizing sound as narration.

Sound and Image
Some studies of film sound acknowledge its connection to the image and explain the
interaction of sound with film images. Amy Lawrence notes that sound and image
are bound in the titular tale: “The story of Narcissus is frequently used to describe
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the image’s seductive power. However, in Ovid’s original myth the story of Echo
and Narcissus interweaves issues of sight and sound, vision and speech.”
1
She
summarizes the story which has proved central to a number of film theorists,
particularly those who study the image:
The story of Echo and Narcissus is a cautionary tale warning
against what is conceived of as the unnatural and dangerous
separation of sound and image, woman and man, hearing and
seeing – oppositions that are in many ways fundamental to the
ways we think about film. Both Echo and Narcissus are ravished
by perception, subjected to obstacles of expression or
comprehension, and ultimately die from the missed connections.
2

Lawrence provides a persuasive discussion of the female voice in films from the
1910s to the early 1960s, but her analysis even – after this introduction – does not
take in all of the work of Echo.
3

Lawrence’s focus on the voice is indicative of the tendency in considerations
of sound to fragment sound into its supposed respective parts: dialogue, music,
sound effects (and occasionally silence). Buhler convincingly demonstrates that the
components – dialogue, music and sound effects, “do indeed constitute an integral,
parallel track to the images; that indeed the two tracks, image and sound, are most
fruitfully interpreted as in a dialectical tension, each track structured in turn by its
own internal dialectic.”
4
He contests Chion’s famous contention that “there is no
soundtrack”
5
and concludes: “By refusing to grant either image- or soundtrack a
more secure ontological status vis-à-vis film (or, more properly, narrative) would
permit articulating the relation between the two tracks as thoroughly dialectical
rather than a supplemental binarism.”
6
He persuasively argues that the soundtrack
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should be discussed as a series of dynamic relationships, which, following Altman,
McGraw Jones and Sonia Tatro he calls “mise-en-bande.”
7
He outlines Chion’s
“perceptual triage” and Noël Burch’s theorization of a unified soundtrack and finds
both discussions – with the former against an ontology of the soundtrack and the
other for – wanting.
8
While Burch is one of the first theorists to argue for a dialectic
relationship between sound and image in cinema, he lumps the elements of the
soundtrack together: “on the one hand, Burch’s unity erodes the distinctiveness of
the individual components, blunting whatever critical edge each component might
have in its own terms; but on the other hand, it surrenders the possibility of forging
an internal dialectic of sound.”
9
Buhler suggests acknowledging the structural
complexity of the soundtrack: “If music is a structuring of sound in time . . . then
conceptually the mise-en-bande, with its complex interplay of music, dialogue,
ambient sound, effects, silence and so forth, can be understood . . . as a kind of
musical ‘composition.’”
10
Buhler remarks, “aural analysis . . . along with a specially
musical sensibility, can be brought to bear on the soundtrack as a whole, its relation
to the image, and its contribution not just to the narrative, but to the act of narration
itself,” but still does not explain how sound and image come together.
11
His
emphasis on conflict between sound and image and specifically between elements of
the soundtrack invites the question: how are these collisions arranged and presented?
Buhler’s focus on music is common in sound studies yet, surprisingly, this
does not prevent some scholars from arguing that music is the most neglected aspect
of film sound. As he and David Neumeyer write elsewhere:
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in the nearly three hundred pages of Bela Balazs’ Theory of the
Film, sound is given thirty, of which ten are devoted specifically to
dialogue. The situation is somewhat better in Siegfried Kracauer’s
Theory of Film: sound is given fifty pages (out of three hundred),
and music twenty of those. But Christian Metz’s comments on
music are few indeed, and mostly unsubstantial, and Bordwell,
Staiger, and Thompson [in Classical Hollywood Cinema] give
barely more than ten pages (from nearly four hundred) to sound.
12

This is one example of the energy spent debating which aspect of film sound is the
most neglected, a debate that occasionally impedes analysis.

Cultural Theories of Sound
The first wave of sound theory appeared around 1980, most obviously in the form of
the Rick Altman edited issue of Yale French Studies. Much of the work which
followed shows the influence of Lacan-based psychoanalysis and suture theory, the
dominant modes of film analysis in the 1970s in English-speaking film circles. Such
work integrates sound into larger questions about how cinema addresses and
manages the audience. Mary Ann Doane’s work from this period is particularly
influential. In “Ideology and the Practice of Sound Editing and Mixing” she argues
that the “heterogeneity” of cinema is denied in part by turning sound into support for
the image: “The effacement of work which characterizes bourgeois ideology is
highly successful with respect to the sound track. The invisibility of the practices of
sound editing and mixing is ensured by the seemingly ‘natural’ laws of
construction.”
13
Her essay “The Voice in Cinema: The Articulation of Body and
Space” makes similar claims but focuses specifically on the voice and its
synchronization to the image. She argues that the silent cinema was unified in its
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expression and that the addition of sound threatened to expose the apparatus and
cinema’s heterogeneous nature. The industry’s reaction to this threat was to match
sound and image through synchronization. For Doane, a psychoanalytic approach is
necessary to explain cinema sound: “the use of the voice in cinema appeals to the
spectator’s desire to hear, or what Lacan refers to as the invocatory drive.”
14
While
Doane does not historicize her account in either essay, her comments are most
readily applicable to Hollywood in its classical era / mode.
15
And although Doane
endorses the historical fallacy, her discussion acknowledges that sound and image
are separate.
The work of Kaja Silverman exerts as much influence as Doane’s and the
work share some of the same concerns. In “Dis-Embodying the Female Voice” she
describes synchronization in similar terms to Doane’s:
Synchronization plays a major role in the production not only of a
homo-centric but an ideologically consistent cinema; by insisting
that the body be read through the voice, and the voice through the
body, it drastically curtails the capacity of each for introducing into
the narrative something heterogenous or disruptive (it minimizes,
that is, the number and kinds of connotations which can be
activated).
16

Silverman makes an explicit connection to suture theory in explaining how sound is
used to conceal its own making: “Like the shot / reverse shot and other elements
within the system of suture, synchronization helps to stitch together the fabric of the
fiction over the apparatus.”
17
Silverman, Doane, and other scholars from this period
who approach film sound in terms of ideology often rely on a simple classical /
modernist rubric, with the former a reprehensible mode of cinema tied to capitalist
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ideology (read: Hollywood) and the latter capable of offering liberation, perhaps
simply by separating the voice from the body. Concerned with explaining culture
and only secondarily cinema, the comprehensive analysis offered by Doane and
Silverman spurred scholars to take film sound seriously but has not resulted in texts
whose aural properties have caused measurable social change.
Jeff Smith rebuts this wave of sound theory but also shares some of the same
limitations. While focusing on music, Smith rejects the theoretical underpinning and
attacks the common description of classical scoring: “Far from being ‘inaudible,’
film music has frequently been both noticeable and memorable, often because of the
various demands placed upon it to function in ancillary markets.”
18
Smith notes that
the notion of a “good score is one you do not hear” has its roots in the classical era
and is not a product of post-structuralist film theory. Some filmmakers at the time
worried that the score would “distract the audience from the narrative and the visual
action.”
19
Smith does not pursue this point or note that the classical system manages
sound generally (not just music). He also does not mention that ancillary markets are
more important before the classical period (in the form of sheet music) and after the
classical period (in the form of recorded music).
For Smith this body of theory clings to a rigid binary: “Too often suture
models of film music presume a drastic opposition: either the listener consciously
attends to all the complexities and details of musical structure, or the listener
completely ignores all aspects of music as a component in the film.”
20
He continues:
“In between these extremes, however, lie two other interpretive strategies of
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untutored musical listeners: the free association which takes music to be
representational, and the understanding of music in terms of emotional
expressivity.”
21
Smith refers to cognitive music theorists and endorses Noël
Carroll’s comments on “modifying music” which singles out its unique role in film:
“Music . . . helps to clarify the particular mood, character, or emotive significance of
a scene or visual action. The visuals, narrative, dialogue, and sound effects . . .
imbue the music track with a referentiality that it inherently lacks.”
22
In the complex
system of film, music works as a means “of enabling spectators to gauge the
emotional qualities of a scene.”
23
Smith argues for music which serves the image
and his description of music as “modifier” (following Carroll) is not far from
Gorbman and Kozloff’s evocation of Barthes’ idea of “anchorage.” Additionally
Smith’s major film example is Billy Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon from 1957,
which could be used as a case study to discuss the gap between “full awareness” and
“complete ignorance” of the film’s music since it presents the song “Fascination”
throughout its narrative, performances of it are part of the film’s story, and the song
was available for purchase.
24

Sound and Narrative
Lastly, some theorists discuss the role that sound, particularly music, plays in
presenting film narrative. This work has little connection to nonnarrative film but
gestures toward narration, and the lack of writing on nonnarrative film sound
necessitates using this material as a foundation to discuss film sound. Royal S.
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Brown goes beyond this position and almost argues that film and music together
produce narrative: “The film-music phenomenon – and it is nothing less than a
phenomenon – does not, then, relate simply to the dramatic needs of narrative
cinema. It relates just as much, if not more, to a need to ‘narrativize’ . . . the
cinema.”
25
He clarifies his when he adds: “By reinforcing significant movements in
a cinematic succession of images, whether held together by an apparent narrative or
not, music has, via its tendency to narrativize, helped lead ‘readers’ of the cinema’s
iconic language(s) . . . towards story.”
26
He goes on to say: “visuals and music,
rather than working within the domain of separate but equal stature, and rather than
mutually inspiring each other’s artistic structure, have been brought together by an
element that has interposed itself between the two,”
27
but this “element” is narrative
rather than narration. Brown thus relies on a loose definition of narrative to collapse
all combinations of music and image, or all manifestations of cinema, into
“narrative.”
Similarly, while Gorbman states that “The musical score’s rhythmic, textural,
and harmonic qualities, expressive via cultural musical codes, emphasize latent or
manifest narrative content through a synergetic relationship with the other channels
of filmic discourse,”
28
she does not articulate a theory of film narration. Kathryn
Kalinak theorizes a more active spectator – “Film music is a stimulus we hear but, by
and large, fail to listen to”
29
– and discusses narrative functions of Hollywood music.
Kalinak builds on Bordwell’s description of classical cinema to highlight the under-
discussed importance of music. She states: “Narrative is not constructed by visual
95

means alone. By this I mean that music works as part of the process that transmits
narrative information to the spectator, that it functions as a narrative agent.”
30
She
continues later: “Mood, emotion, characterization, point of view, even the action
itself are constructed in film in a complex visual and aural interaction in which music
is an important component.”
31
“The process that transmits narrative information”
sounds like narration though Kalinak does not state this. She traces the narrative
functions of music to the silent era and largely agrees with Gorbman’s summary of
silent scoring: it adds depth to the flat image, provides rhythm, covers the noise of
the projector, etc.
32
Kalinak argues that film music has never been simply a support
for the image, even in the silent period: “Critics and accompanists assumed the
image’s inability to sustain the continuity without the presence of music, and, as a
result, music and image developed a reciprocal relationship in terms of narrative.”
33

Jerold Levinson makes a number of important points about music in film
even as he betrays a reliance on literary theory, a flaw he shares with many who
discuss film narration (a point to be considered below). Levinson offers perhaps the
most well thought-out linking of both sound and film narration. He argues that while
the film narrator signifies emotion and cues the narrative, the implied author of the
film is better regarded as the source of nondiegetic music. Accounting for both the
cinematic narrator and the implied author of a film permits a close analysis of how
music relates to narrative: “Instead of appealing directly to an intuition of a
connection of the music to a film’s internal narrator, we can appeal instead to the
notion of making fictional, or generating fictional truth, in a film.”
34
Levinson
96

continues: “Being fictional thus has an ineliminable normative dimension; it is what
is to be imagined in a given context, rather than merely what may be imagined,” and
therefore, “We need to make a distinction between what is fictional in a film’s story
and what is fictional in the world of a film.”
35
The narrator is on the same level of
fictionality as the story itself, and is therefore in the “world” of the film while the
implied author stands outside.
One of Levinson’s key examples is Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt
(1943) to argue that the music does more than help tell the story. He focuses on
three moments when Franz Lehar’s “Merry Widow Waltz” occurs, the third of which
accompanies a visual representation of dancing figures. For Levinson, this
combination is commentary: “what is made fictional by these musical cues is not that
Uncle Charlie is the murderer, but that the narrator is advertising to that fact, almost
sardonically, both before and after it is narratively established.”
36
Though his
argument is not historical, Levinson’s examples indicate that overt actions by the
implied author in Hollywood films (or at least uses of music which suggest the
presence of an implied author) have increased in frequency and significance since
the 1930s. It is also important that Levinson – in an endnote – identifies Wavelength
and L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961) as examples of
films in which the “bounds of fictionality or narrative coherence are stretched to their
limits.”
37
Like the other scholars described briefly above his work has limited value
in explaining how sound works in nonnarrative films.

97

Narration in The Conversation
This section briefly analyzes The Conversation to argue that sound should not be
considered in isolation from the image. The film depicts the creation of a soundtrack
in its narrative yet more importantly reveals that narration brings together sound and
image and the meaning of each is shaped by the relationship. Rather than reducing
the film to a case study of the importance of sound in cinema, The Conversation is a
case study of postclassical film narration that also happens to treat sound in its
narrative. The film’s narration does not force sound and image into a soothing
union; in the film sound and image at times work at odds with one another.
Films made before the mid-1970s use sound to guide audience member’s
eyes around the frame and reveal substantial narrative information yet The
Conversation foregrounds this so thoroughly that it is perhaps the canonical
American “sound” film. Coppola’s The Conversation, a mono film released on the
cusp of the introduction of Dolby sound technology (with the rock opera Tommy in
1975), displays how narration presents subjectivity, character consciousness,
knowledge, and emotional states. The film’s narration uses sound to create space
and controls the range of the audience’s knowledge (little more than the protagonist)
to provide an unsettling experience. The narration avoids objective information and
suggests that the world is only accessible through subjectivity. Additionally, the
protagonist’s mind moves from paranoid to unstable in the course of the film and
block’s the audience’s mastery of narrative events.
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Scholars use the film to teach sound but it is perhaps more pertinent in
teaching narration. The participation of Walter Murch in sound editing and “sound
montage” for the film has also not been neglected by scholars. Additionally, the film
presents the construction of a soundtrack in scenes of Harry mixing tapes made from
three separate microphones to make a single recording. In this way, the film presents
the soundtrack, any soundtrack, as an act of creation and not a passive recording.
Claudia Gorbman notes that a film’s soundtrack varies in emphasis in the course of a
film:
As the camera lens sharpens selected elements in visual space, the
mixed soundtrack can give a similar impression of picking out sounds
In auditory space. For example, certain lines of dialogue are rendered
clearly perceptible in the hubbub of seven or eight voices talking
simultaneously.
38

She notes that: “This idea operates at the very center of The Conversation,”
39

referring to the film’s central conceit – the line of recorded dialogue which seems to
indicate that Ann and Mark are in danger. The Conversation lays bare not simply
how films present sound but how narrative films present all information.
The film (which echoes Michelangelo Antonioni’s art house hit Blow Up
[1966]) is a mystery / thriller and character study of Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), a
pre-eminent surveillance man. Though willing to photograph his subjects, Harry’s
expertise is in audio surveillance and the film follows him for several days through a
single job. The Director (Robert Duvall) hires Harry to spy on his wife Ann (Cindy
Williams) and her lover Mark (Frederic Forrest). After careful study and mixing
their recorded conversation Harry determines that they are in danger. As in many
99

mystery films, the narration uses deliberate camera placement and movement to
signal the act of “following” Harry. In nearly the only moments of apparent
objectivity, the film begins and ends with mechanized camera movement designed to
register as depersonalized surveillance. The film’s opening shot is a motor-
controlled zoom which slowly locates a mime in a public park as the soundtrack
slowly reveals the conversation between Ann and Mark and moments of distortion.
The film’s final shot is a motor-controlled back and forth pan that mimics the action
and physical location of a security camera. As Harry sits playing his saxophone in
the apartment which he has destroyed in his frantic search for a bug, the camera
crouches in the top corner of the room and surveys the wreckage. The shots are
visual equivalents to the auditory surveillance that Harry employs and that have
seemingly driven him insane.
The narration also uses music to help modify the image. David Shire’s
haunting solo piano score increases the sense of Harry’s isolation. The main theme
appears regularly but also speeds up and slows down depending on Harry’s actions
and it drops out abruptly at several points, violating the classical notions that sound
(and music) not draw attention to itself. For example, when Harry visits the
apartment of his girlfriend Amy (Teri Garr) he pauses on the steps outside her door
to spy on her. As he stops, the music abruptly drops out and leaves only the cold
sound of the hallway. Here and throughout the film the score does not operate in
accordance with editing or scene changes and continually offers the audience
opportunities to notice the film’s sound beyond its narrative content.
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The Conversation’s narration relies on offscreen sound to foreground its
withholding of narrative information. In Audio-Vision Chion distinguishes between
active offscreen sound, which raises questions, making the audience want to see the
source of the sound(s), and passive sound “which creates an atmosphere that
envelops and stabilizes the image, without in any way inspiring us to look elsewhere
or to anticipate seeing its source.”
40
Additionally Chion outlines his theory of
“extension,” which is space suggested by sound and the “degree of openness and
breadth of the concrete space suggested by sounds.”
41
“Null extension” is subjective
sound and occurs when the sound is heard by a single character and “vast extension”
is objective sound that extends beyond the frame. Chion also introduces the concept
of “point of audition” which has two senses: “A spatial sense: from where do I hear,
from what point in the space represented on the screen or on the soundtrack?” and
second, “A subjective sense: which character, at a given moment of the story, is
(apparently) hearing what I hear?”
42
Point of audition is often signaled simply
through cutting from the source (or its direction) and the (apparent) hearer. Chion’s
ideas indicate that the sound portion of narration creates the perception of space and
subjectivity.
When Harry goes to the hotel to stop, or at least witness, what he thinks is the
Director’s attempt to kill Ann, the film uses a combination of active and passive
offscreen sound. Harry takes the room next to the couple’s and passive offscreen
space becomes active when the couple arrives and Harry listens. In this pivotal
scene the film’s narration activates offscreen space through Harry’s subjectivity and
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selective camera placement. Through null extension and a subjective point of
audition the film’s narration presents the activities in the next room as a product of
an increasingly unstable character’s consciousness. As Harry lies on the floor of the
hotel bathroom to hear with the help of a microphone, the sound track moves
between the present conversation (Ann and the Director talk) and the earlier,
recorded conversation between Ann and Mark that structures the film. The narration
shifts between objective and subjective sound, linking the two conversations and
suggesting the coming narrative events. The two conversations are linked causally
because the earlier conversation initiates the Director’s visit to the hotel since Harry
plays it for him and it mentions the hotel and Harry’s remembrance of an earlier
event in which people were killed because of his work. As Ann and the Director’s
conversation becomes more heated, Harry pulls out his earphones and goes to the
balcony. Here he (and the audience) see a bloody hand hit the opaque glass partition
between the porches and the soundtrack explodes into a series of pulses and
screeches. Harry goes back inside and turns on the television at its highest volume
and crawls into bed. The visual narration remains focused on Harry, so, when an
indeterminate amount of time later Harry visits the room next door, there is no sign
of violence or indication as to what has transpired. It is only when he flushes the
toilet and blood spills out onto the floor (accompanied by more trauma on the
soundtrack) that it seems certain that a murder has taken place (and Harry did not
imagine the struggle on the balcony).
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By the concluding scenes of the film Harry’s subjectivity has become one
with the film’s narration or the narration has given itself over to Harry’s perception.
When he locks eyes with – the still very much alive – Ann and Mark at the
Director’s building the narration cuts to a presentation of their murder of the
Director. The cut between these images and Harrry’s face however indicates that the
images are a product of Harry’s subjectivity. Then the narration returns to the image
of Mark leaning in close to Ann to say “He’d kill us if he got the chance” which has
functioned as an aural and visual motif in the film. But now the line reading is
different as Mark says “He’d kill us if he got the chance” (as in, we need to kill your
husband first). This adjustment of sound – but not image – reveals character,
emphasizes and interrogates Harry’s subjectivity, and reveals the “real” meaning of
the narrative and titular conversation. The images of the murder however remain
apparently Harry’s alone and the film does not offer a more objective presentation of
the Director’s death.

Neglect of Sound in Studies of Narration
This section surveys approaches to film narration and argues that sound is half of
narration. Some theorists mention sound but studies continue to discuss narration in
only visual terms. First a section outlines the reliance on literary narrative theory
because this results in film theory that addresses only the image. The discussion then
turns to cognitive approaches to film narration, specifically those of David Bordwell
and Richard Maltby. These have clear advantages over other theories mentioning
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sound but failing to fully account for it This section closes with a consideration of
spectacle, a concept typically set in opposition to narrative. Yet Maltby argues the
two can (and do) coexist and this suggests the division between narrative and
nonnarrative cinema may be less important than is often suggested. Here the
discussion turns to avant-garde cinema and argues that “spectacle” should include
aural spectacle.

Literary-based Discussions of Narration
Much film narrative theory relies on literary narrative theory which offers a model of
narration that considers only a single channel of information.
43
This also results in
debates about point of view and the cinematic narrator, concepts which at times
obscure actual functions of film narration. For far too many scholars, film narration
is visual. As Altman argues regarding the “ontological fallacy,” cinema narration
continues to be interpreted as visual narration to which sound was added and remains
secondary. When (or if) sound enters into considerations of narration or narrative, in
essays or course syllabi, it does so as an addition.
Katherine Thomson-Jones persuasively argues that in studies of narrative,
particularly film narrative, “The defining features of literary narrative are . . . taken
to be the defining features of narrative per se”
44
and offers two explanations for the
dominance of literary studies in film narrative studies. First, “a large amount of
work has already been done in literary theory on narrative and narrative
communication.”
45
Her position is supported by the fact that at many universities,
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the study of film (media, television) occurs in a literature department and instructors
teach both literature and audio-visual media. Related to her first point is the fact
that,
the comparison between film and literature is regularly made in other
areas of film rhetorical study – for example, in considering whether
films have identifiable authors, how we relate to their characters, and
whether the film image track counts as a language.
46

These comparisons readily equate visual functions in film with literary devices and
make it awkward to discuss sound.
Some theorists look to Gerard Genette, though most of his work does not
address film (or sound).
47
Brian Henderson suggests ways to apply Genette’s work
to film. The fit is inexact however, in part because films do not offer strictly-defined
aspects of focalization (Genette’s correction of “point of view”) in the same manner
as literature. Near the end of the essay Henderson denigrates film narration because
Hollywood films do not use voiceover in a way that directly corresponds to
subjective narration in literature: “The voice-over in film is usually picked up and
dropped by the film at will, according to no principle but expediency.”
48
Henderson
does not regard the expediency of film narration as an asset: “The voice-over
narrator in classical film is a puppet of the narration.”
49
His last point is correct, but
the image track is just as much a “puppet” of narration. Film narration – particularly
classical narration – is powerful, flexible, and expedient, in part because its
properties can be created or adjusted at any stage of the filmmaking process – script,
filming, editing, sound mix. Rather than label this expediency a failing, it is better to
105

regard film narration as necessary to bring order to a range of sounds and a range of
images, and to makes sounds and images communicate.
The focus on point of view in studies of narration also neglects sound. For
example, George M. Wilson’s Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of
View is emblematic because the author regards points of view and narration as
almost purely visual. Discussions of point of view are valuable but not all films
feature characters, and character subjectivity is never simply that which is conveyed
visually. Some scholars regard Lady in the Lake (1947) as a failed experiment in
first person film but a greater failing of Robert Montgomery’s direction is that the
film does little with the protagonist’s aural subjectivity.
50

Like the search for “point of view” in film – a term with a visual bias
accentuated in its application to cinema – the debate over the cinematic narrator
results in a focus on what is seen and “who” shows it. One defense for the cinematic
narrator is that the presentation of irony requires a narrating agency. If irony is a
slippage (deliberate or not) between types of information in a text then film narration
by its very nature invites, if not fosters, irony because it ropes together very different
discourses: sound and image. The narrator must not be theorized as something like a
“camera” which shows events and can plug in music occasionally. More important
than the logic (or illogic) of the cinematic narrator is that the narrator must be
conceived as a presenter of images and sounds. Additionally, if one is to theorize a
cinematic narrator this position must be described as choosing, for example, to
present sound and image as cooperating, in sync dialogue. In film the human voice
106

does not require an image of moving lips, the image of moving lips does not require
sound which matches the image, and the sound of the human voice does not need to
be matched with the image of a person speaking. Film narration is expedient in its
presentation of all images and sounds, not simply voiceover. The union of sound
and image is not natural but the result of coercion that lies at the heart of cinema,
narrative and otherwise. Film narration must include the conflict between sound and
image.

Cognitive Theories of Narration
A clear advantage of cognitive approaches to film narration is that they theorize
active audience members who make meaning from a text. Bordwell states that sound
is an integral component of narration, but does not emphasize sound. He describes a
flexible system of narration that is omniscient and can use voiceover, onscreen titles,
editing, music, and camera movement, in order to efficiently tell the story.
51

Bordwell describes audience members’ experience of narration as one of
problem solving because they continually form hypothesis about the film and test
these quickly and efficiently. Though at times verging on a machine-like
interpretation, the theory highlights the active processes audience members
undertake. Using the Russian Formalist distinction of fabula (story: the raw
material) and syuzhet (plot: the artistic construction) Bordwell seeks to elucidate the
mental experience of film viewing. For Bordwell, therefore, “In the fiction film,
narration is the process whereby the film’s syuzhet and style interact in the course of
107

cueing and channeling the spectator’s construction of the fabula.”
52
He places
existing theories of narration into two categories: diegetic and mimetic. “Diegetic
theories conceive of narration as consisting either literally or analogically of verbal
activity: a telling. This telling may be oral or written” while, “Mimetic theories
conceive of narration as the presentation of a spectacle: a showing.”
53

Another way to bifurcate studies of film narration would be “silent” and
“mostly silent” and Bordwell’s work fits in the second of these. He asserts that “all
material of cinema function narrationally – not only the camera but speech, gesture,
written language, music, color, optical processes, lighting, costume, even offscreen
space and offscreen sound.”
54
Bordwell urges that narration be regarded as “the
interplay of potentially equivalent narrational factors”
55
, but his text has little to say
about music, speech, and offscreen sound; it seems suffice to include “music” and
“sound” in the list of cinema “material.” Additionally, the statement that visual
narration is, or can be, equivalent to aural narrative information fails to account for
any of the significant differences between these two channels, flattening out the
differences between sound and image.
Bordwell considers narrative cinema and argues for Hollywood as a
narrative-based film aesthetic. Richard Maltby offers a challenge to the narrative-
centered conception of classical cinema offered by Bordwell and others but has a
similar conception of narration. While he agrees on the basic points on narrative and
narration, he argues that classical Hollywood cinema includes spectacle. Even
classical Hollywood cinema is open to audiences focusing on any of its various
108

points of interest rather than, or in addition to, the narrative which ostensibly holds
everything together:
in Hollywood, narrative functions as part of the provision of pleasure
in cinema entertainment, not as the point of it. Storytelling helps
ensure that the movie can be consumed as a coherent event, but it
holds no privileged place among the pleasures a movie offers.
56

For Maltby the story is just “the part of the movie that holds its component parts
together, sequencing them, and provides an explanation or justification for that
sequencing.”
57
One can argue that, even in the classical Hollywood film, narration
fails to contain all the spectacle, and excess (the stars, the production design, the
costumes, the music, voices, and the like) always pokes through. The Hollywood
film “neither exists primarily as coherent narrative, nor is necessarily dominated by
narrative. Narrative operates alongside other spatial and temporal articulations, as
part of the complex means whereby Hollywood fulfills its industrial obligation to
entertain for profit.”
58
Maltby’s discussion of (Hollywood) film narrative explains
that audiences attend to various aspects of films, including aural elements. This
dissertation argues that there are more aural aspects of interest in the postwar period,
including voiceover, popular music, and a wider variety of sound effects, and that
these are less strictly managed by narration.

Spectacle and Narration
Maltby’s argument is not only a response to Bordwell’s discussion of narrative; he
also responds to the discussion of spectacle which usually relies on a binary of
narrative and spectacle. Nonnarrative cinema, and passages that are not motivated
109

by narrative elements in commercial cinema (such as performance numbers in
nonmusical films) are sometimes discussed as spectacle. Tom Gunning argues for a
pre-narrative moment of film history, where an “exhibitionist cinema” featuring
looks at the camera and foregrounding the activities of the camera / projector
dominated the cinema.
59
Gunning’s address of this “silent” cinema and his overt
linkage of it to avant-garde production in both the United States and France has
exerted a perhaps under-examined influence on considerations of narrative. His
essay gives impetus to regarding avant-garde production as inherently non-narrative
and committed to visually spectacular elements. It therefore neglects sound and
creates an unsustainable set of binaries with commercial and narrative cinema on one
side and avant-garde and spectacle on the other. In his later essay “Narrative
Discourse and the Narrator System,” Gunning proposes a theory of narration
consisting of three levels (“the pro-filmic, the enframed image, and the process of
editing”) and in a footnote (naturally) he adds: “This schema does not deal with the
important issue of sound in film, which is not relevant to the films I examine herein,
and would have to be approached as a fourth level, itself in need of subdividing.”
60

While the Griffith films Gunning addresses do not come with scores printed on the
film, it is unlikely these films were experienced by viewers then (or now) without
aural accompaniment. It is to Gunning’s credit that he acknowledges sound can not
simply be lumped into the three categories of narration he proposes. Yet sound is
not simply a fourth “level” but one that cuts across the three visual levels Gunning
describes.
110

Some scholars – using a broad definition of narrative as a process rather than
an object close to how this dissertation defines narration – argue that narrative runs
throughout the history of cinema. Maltby quotes Dudley Andrew to explain this
position: “In his book, Concepts in Film Theory, Andrew argues that because
narrative is ‘above all . . . a logic for delimiting meaning,’ narrative is inevitable in
cinema.”
61
Following Andrew, Matlby notes that because we are surrounded by an
“excess of information,” “our ability to construct, comprehend, and interpret stories
is crucial to the way we organize” our experiences. Cinema offers too much
information and so “coherence is produced ‘by way of calculated or ideological
limitation of this excess.’ . . . . Each choice, as Andrew suggests, fixes meaning.”
62

Hollis Frampton’s fascinating essay “Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative”
makes a similar argument but strangely ignores sound considering Frampton’s
attention to it in his films. As the essay progresses, the author does not lay out a
clear argument or seemingly even speak for himself. He labels the proposition that
all films offer narratives the work of Stan Brakhage: “for any finite series of shots
[‘film’] whatsoever there exists in real time a rational narrative, such that every term
in the series, together with its position, duration, partition and reference, shall be
perfectly and entirely accounted for.”
63
Frampton defines a narrative as “a stable
pattern of energy through which an infinite number of personages may pass,
ourselves included.”
64
Like Andrew, Frampton presents a broad definition of
narrative. As Edward Branigan notes: “Some writers, perhaps impressed by the
pervasiveness of narrative thinking in everyday life and despairing of the attempt to
111

find a bright line between narrative and nonnarrative, conclude that virtually
everything is narrative.”
65
If “narrative” is reduced in meaning to any material
which is organized, or available to be organized by an audience, then Brakhage (or
Frampton) is correct that any film – including Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer (1960)
– can be regarded as a narrative film.
66
One interpretation of Frampton’s essay is
that it argues audiences impose a narrative on any series of images, in part due to the
(actual) linear nature of film. This overlaps with cognitive theorists’ emphasis on
audience activity. Such a definition of narrative is not incompatible with the view of
narration as the conveyance of audio and visual material.

Sound in Wavelength
This section considers sound in Michael Snow’s Wavelength to argue that a full
understanding of the film is impossible when only its visual elements are examined.
In fact, what some label the canonical film “about” space is as much a sound film,
perhaps even as much a musical film as Singin’ in the Rain (1952). Wavelength
presents not just continuous sound but presents sound continuously (throughout the
film) and the vast majority of this sound is not dialogue but music.
Though compared to other avant-garde texts Wavelength has never been
neglected by scholars or audiences, and interest in the film has been reinvigorated by
the turn toward space in media studies. Manny Farber begins his collection of essays
Negative Space by arguing:
Space is the most dramatic stylistic entity – from Giotto to Noland,
from Intolerance to Weekend. How an artist deploys his space,
112

seldom discussed in film criticism . . . is anathema to newspaper
editors, who believe readers die like flies at the sight of esthetic
terminology.
67

Though the era of newspaper editors caring about film at all (beyond charts of
weekend boxoffice grosses) has come and gone, Farber’s dream of attention to space
has come true. For a number of film (and media) scholars working today “spatiality”
is paramount, and “space” is discussed as a purely visual construction.
68

Snow’s Wavelength is often interpreted as a study of space (for Farber it is “a
straightforward document of a room in which a dozen businesses have lived and
gone bankrupt”
69
) and – from the way it is discussed – silent.
70
It is the most famous
of what P. Adams Sitney named the “structural film” and more generally famous to a
degree that it pops up in discussions of many other films and film related topics.
71
In
the film, a discontinuous zoom shot slowly closes down the space of a New York
city loft. In the course of the film, the day passes, characters enter the apartment and
the frame, and a man (played by Hollis Frampton) collapses on the floor, and
apparently dies. Eventually the camera stops on a closeup of a photograph of waves
hanging on the opposite wall. For narrative theorists the film functions as a “pure”
representation of cinema and how it presents space. The film also functions as
something of a limit case in considerations of narrative. For Levinson, it is an
example of a film “in which the bounds of fictionality or narrative coherence are
stretched to their limits.”
72
Bordwell describes it as a film where, “A plot (the events
of a routine day and a mysterious murder) is wholly subordinated to the internal
progression of cinematographic parameters (lens length, light, color).”
73
Not
113

surprisingly, sound elements do not appear in Bordwell’s list of “cinematographic
parameters.” Sitney has almost nothing to say about the film’s presentation of sound
in Visionary Cinema where he describes it as “the story of the diminishing area of
pure potentiality,” and continues, “The insight that space, and cinema by implication,
is potential is an axiom of the structural film.”
74
Following Annette Michelson,
Sitney regards the film as the presentation of mental processes which are necessarily
given visual equivalences.
75

Snow’s description is typically complex and highlights his use of sound. It
concludes:
The room (and the zoom) are interrupted by 4 human events
including a death. The sound on these occasions is sync sound,
music and speech, occurring simultaneously with an electronic
sound, a sine wave, which goes from its lowest (50 cycles per
second) note to its highest (12000 c.p.s.) in 40 minutes. It is a total
glissando while the film is a crescendo and a dispersed spectrum
which attempts to utilize the gifts of both prophecy and memory
which only film and music have to offer.
76

The passage explains his goal of making connections between film, and music and
sound with this work. Snow explicitly links cinema and music in the final sentence
and suggests his focus on sound (music) in cinema at a fundamental level.
Wavelength’s sine wave does not register with some viewers as “music,” but
rather as noise (and an increasingly irritating one). For Snow, who is also a
composer, the sine wave is a musical narrative, with a beginning, middle and end.
Unlike the zoom this sound is continuous and creates a juxtaposition of sound and
image hidden by their supposed similarity: space closes down visually through the
zoom’s restriction of the frame, and the sound increases in pitch. Snow’s investment
114

in interpretations of his film is also evident from his letter to the authors of The
Sixties in which he states:
I absolutely never intended the film as a critique of “Hollywood-style
narrative.” There are thousands of “narratives” in the film, some of
them verbally indescribable. I simply included a “peopling” of the
space with implications of further continuity as one of the types of
“narrative” in the film.
77

Here Snow responds to comments which compare his film to a “Hollywood
thriller.”
78
But his explanation does not fully cover the film’s gestures toward
suspense in the form of the man who enters the frame and apparently dies. The film
features numerous micro-narratives and the fragments of a filmic (Hollywood)
narrative (the murder).
The film’s collection of fragments – of image, space, and sound – activate the
audience’s interpretations and the forward movement of the camera and sine wave
promise a conclusion (of sorts).
79
The sine wave builds anticipation as the camera
moves forward and its continuous presence is another reason (along with
misremembering the film and the inability to easily review it) that the zoom is
typically (mis)interpreted as continuous. In Wavelength sound not only shapes the
perception of cinematic space but also the presentation of that space and the
perception of camera movement.
In her study of Snow, Regina Cornwell observes, “Wavelength hinges on the
zoom as does all discussion of it.”
80
William Wees approvingly quotes this
statement and adds “one must not forget the rich visual texture of the film as a
115

whole” and lists other visual aspects of the film: “exposure shifts, flicker effects and
the like.”
81
Yet Cornwell addresses more than the image:
the zoom becomes the given. It extends the graphic and purely spatial
aspect into time; objects as multiples in space through time are
translated by analogy into a continuity along a line in time and
through space on the zoom. This is complemented by sound in the
sine wave, the ear’s equivalent to the zoom.
82

Her interpretation echoes Snow’s statement of his intentions. She also notes that the
zoom and the filmic “Conventions of sound and colour are, in Shklovsky’s terms,
‘laid bare’ or ‘revealed.’”
83
She evokes Russian Formalism to note the film’s display
of its own construction. The film presents streets sounds (which prompts Michael
Zryd to compare the film to a “document of Canal Street”
84
), about half of the
Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever,” dialogue, sound effects, and of course the sine
wave. Cornwell makes some important observations which complicate Snow’s
description of the film as simply featuring “sync” sound:
When the woman lowers the window all sounds stop except for the
radio, and as she leaves her footsteps are not heard; yet when her
companion turns off the radio and departs her steps and the sounds
from outside are once again audible. Later sound is heard only as
the woman reaches and pivots around to look at the off-screen
body. The wild track preceding the man’s entrance sounds tinny
and his falls seem slightly out of sync.
85

Cornwell’s careful description indicates that the sound of Wavelength is not simply
captured, and cannot be interpreted as captured, but is created. Offscreen space is
the domain of the soundtrack as much as it is the creation of the frame and simple
elements such as microphone placement, volume (not to mention reverb) have a
decisive influence over the experience of a given space.
86
Like all films,
116

Wavelength can not be adequately examined without considering how its narration
presents sounds.

Conclusion
This chapter has argued that sound theory and narrative theory can, and should, be
placed in conversation to account for the fact that cinema consists of sound and
image and the organized relationship of sounds, images, and between sounds and
images. Film sound is experienced with images so discussions need to explain this
interaction. In the absence of a consideration of narration sound, theorists such as
Chion discuss sound as a support for the image. In the absence of a consideration of
the importance of sound, theorists such as Bordwell mention sound but discuss only
how films convey visual information.
Between the extremes of classical sound serving the image and sound as
digital spectacle lie the films of the postwar / pre-Dolby period, where sound
elements draw audiences to theaters, encourage them to respond aurally, dance,
listen to music, listen to a voice, compare sound to image, consider the source of the
sound, and more. The following chapters seek to convey the variety of uses that
American film makes of sound elements between the 1940s and the mid-1970s. The
three most basic activities of narration are determining the sync between sound and
image, presenting a diegesis in terms of sound and image, and establishing a
hierarchy between sound and image. The following chapters take up these subjects
in films of the postwar / pre-Dolby period.
117

Chapter 3 Endnotes

1
Amy Lawrence, Echo and Narcissus: Woman’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley,
CA: U of California P, 1991) 1.

2
Lawrence 2.

3
Lawrence focuses in part on the various Hollywood versions of Rain (1921) and examines Sadie
Thompson (1928), Rain (1932), and Miss Sadie Thompson (1953) along with a few other films. Her
book closes with To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) which she reads as a “classical” film as well.

4
James Buhler, “Analytical and Interpretive Approaches to Film Music (II): Analysing Interactions
of Music and Film,” Film Music: Critical Approaches, Ed. K. J. Donnelly (New York: Continuum,
2001) 39-40.

5
See Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, Ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York:
Columbia UP, 1994) 40. Buhler acknowledges his debt to, and seeks to build on the work of Altman,
Jones and Tatroe who examine the construction of early soundtracks in “Inventing the Cinema
Soundtrack.” Their test case reveals a complex process that creates and manages conflicts within the
soundtrack, and this work is undertaken in almost willful ignorance of the image.

6
Buhler 56.

7
Rick Altman, McGraw Jones, and Sonia Tatro, “Inventing the Soundtrack: Hollywood Multiplane
Sound System,” Music and Cinema, Ed. James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer (Middleton,
CT.: Wesleyan UP, 2000) 339-359.

8
Chion argues that sounds are perceived as related to the image through a “perceptual triage” that
includes the space of the film and the space of the screening. See Michel Chion, The Voice in
Cinema, Ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia UP, 1999): 3.
Burch argues earlier for a “unified soundtrack” where the image and sound interact in a
manner not unlike the way in which the elements of the soundtrack interact. The classical system
keeps the different types of sounds distinct in order to clearly transmit narrative information. Burch
argues for a blurring of these distinctions. See his “On the Structural Use of Sound,” Chapter 6 in The
Theory of Film Practice, Trans. Helen R. Lane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1981).

9
Buhler 54.

10
Buhler 58.

11
Buhler 58.

12
James Buhler and David Neumeyer, Review of Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and
Hollywood Film Music and Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film, Journal of
the Musicological Society 47.2 (1994): 368.

13
Mary Ann Doane, “Ideology and the Practice of Sound Editing and Mixing,” Film Sound: Theory
and Practice, Ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia UP, 1985) 54. While
demonstrating the theory of the period, Doane’s work also relies on then-existing knowledge of scale-
matching between sound and image and the presentation of sound with silent films.

118

14
Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” Film Sound:
Theory and Practice, Ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia UP, 1985) 169.

15
She does mention that different modes of film feature different tendencies, singling out
documentary, narrative cinema, and avant-garde (166). She also briefly discusses documentary
voiceover narration (168).

16
Kaja Silverman, “Dis-Embodying the Female Voice,” Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film
Criticism, Ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams (Frederick, MD:
University Publications of America, 1984) 132-33.

17
Silverman 133.

18
Jeff Smith, “Unheard Melodies? A Critique of Psychoanalytic Theories of Film Music,” Post
Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, Ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison, WI: U of
Wisconsin P, 1996) 230. Smith notes Gorbman’s use of Barthes to argue that the music helps assure
“a safely channeled signified” (234) and the concealment of the music’s production to “smooth over
gaps and roughness, cover spatial and temporal discontinuities, and mask the recognition of the frame
through its own sonic and harmonic continuity” (234). In Flinn’s work he highlights her reliance on
Julia Kristeva to argue that, “the link between music and the maternal is expressed in the child’s
primordial fantasy of wholeness, an illusion that is ruptured upon the subject’s move from the
Imaginary to the Symbolic and the child’s entry into language” (234-35). The inherent abstraction of
music continually threatens “classical Hollywood cinema’s production of meaning” but “this threat
was diffused by placing this music entirely in the context of a visual narrative” (235).

19
Smith 231.

20
Smith 239.

21
Smith 239.

22
Smith 240. See also Noël Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film
Theory (New York: Columbia UP, 1988) 216-25.

23
Smith 240.

24
Wilder’s film tells the story of older American playboy Frank Flannagan (Gary Cooper) slowly
falling in love with young Ariane Chavasse (Audrey Hepburn) the cello-playing daughter of a
detective hired to entrap him. A recurring joke in the film is a band’s performance of “Fascination”
which at least once initially seems to be nondiegetic but the group is revealed to be in the next room.

25
Royal S. Brown, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music (Berkeley, CA: U of California
P, 1994) 16.

26
Brown 17.

27
Brown 23.

28
Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1987)
32.

119

29
Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison, WI: U of
Wisconsin P, 1992) 3.

30
Kalinak 30.

31
Kalinak 31.

32
Gorbman’s Unheard Melodies 73 and following. In Kalinak’s Settling the Score 79 and also 220-
221 for an endnote which compares her position to Gorbman’s.

33
Kalinak 54.

34
Jerrold Levinson, “Film Music and Narrative Agency,” Post Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies.
Ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1996) 259.

35
Levinson 263.

36
Levinson 265.

37
Levinson 248.

38
Claudia Gorbman, “Teaching the Soundtrack,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 1.4 (1976): 451.

39
Gorbman, “Teaching the Soundtrack” 451.

40
Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, Ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York:
Columbia UP, 1994) 85.

41
Chion, Audio-Vision 87.

42
Chion, Audio-Vision 90.

43
Approaches to film which attempt to take up the model of Roland Barthes’s S/Z also tend to
neglect sound, in part because Barthes addresses a piece of literature. His other works – such as “The
Third Meaning,” which focuses on film stills – also do not emphasize the role of sound.

44
Katherine Thomson-Jones, “The Literary Origins of the Cinematic Narrator,” British Journal of
Aesthetics 47.1 (2007): 76.

45
Thomson-Jones 77.

46
Thomson-Jones 77.

47
“Genette’s topics are traditional ones of literary theory and criticism: order, duration, frequency,
mood, and voice in classical fiction and the subversion of these in modern texts” (4). Genette, like
McElhaney and others, is comparing the “classical” to the “modern.” Brian Henderson, “Tense,
Mood, and Voice in Film (Notes after Genette),” Film Quarterly 36.4 (1983): 4-17.

48
Henderson 15.

49
Henderson 16.

120

50
This is all the more unfortunate considering MGM’s marketing for the film: “M*G*M presents a
Revolutionary motion picture; the most amazing since Talkies began! YOU and ROBERT
MONTGOMERY solve a murder mystery together!”

51
Bordwell’s recent studies (On the History of Film Style is largely with concerned staging in depth
and Figures Traced in Light [Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2005] is concerned with long take
cinema) suggest a movement away from rather than toward a study of sound. Indeed, in an endnote
Bordwell states that the claim that sound is neglected is “overstated,” because the “scholars of film
music easily outnumber the scholars of composition, color, or camerawork” (274, note 47). David
Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997).

52
Bordwell 53.

53
Bordwell 3. He places Münsterberg, Bazin, and Eisenstein (among others) in the first category and
Barthes, Metz, and Heath (among others) in the second.

54
Bordwell 20.

55
Bordwell 20.

56
Richard Maltby and Ian Craven, Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Blackwell,
1995) 453.

57
Maltby and Craven 453. Miriam Hansen agrees with regard to the star system. See Babel and
Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991) 246-47.

58
Maltby and Craven 465.

59
Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” Early
Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, Eds. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: BFI, 1990) 57.

60
Tom Gunning, “Narrative Discourse and the Narrator System,” Film Theory and Criticism, 6
th
ed.,
Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford UP, 2004) 475.

61
Maltby and Craven 330. What some label a “database narrative,” can fall into a “grab-bag”
mentality: close your eyes and pull out an item, and another, and another. Line them up in a row and
call it a narrative. Rather than stretching “narrative” to include such “database” work, another term
(even a new term) will be more productive.

62
Maltby and Craven 330.

63
Hollis Frampton, “A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative,” Circles of Confusion: Film,
Photography, Video Texts 1968-1980 (Rochester, N.Y: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983) 285.

64
Frampton 285.

65
Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (New York: Routledge, 1992) 12.

66
The more interesting approach is to read this as a biopic or documentary.

67
Manny Farber, Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies, Expanded ed. (New York: Da Capo,
1998) 3. The collection includes his insightful (and early) responses to Wavelength: “The cool kick
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of Michael Snow’s Wavelength was in seeing so many new actors – light and space, walls, soaring
windows, and an amazing number of color-shadow variations that live and die in the window panes –
made into major esthetic components of movie experience” (256). While mentioning the film’s
sound, Farber calls it a “one-shot movie, a forty-five-minute zoom” (257), a “continuous zoom” (250)
and says it “may become the Birth of a Nation in Underground films” (250).

68
Examining architecture in films without including sound only considers how these spaces look, not
how they are presented in the film. Theorists of spatial narrative such as Michel de Certeau’s The
Practice of Everyday Life (where he uses the model of the speech act) and Guy Debord’s “Theory of
the Dérive” have a place in film studies, but imagining that one experiences space – whether in film or
in life – as absolutely silent is not productive.

69
Farber 250.

70
It is no accident that Stephen Heath begins his famous essay “Narrative Space” with an epigram
from Snow: “It is precisely that ‘events take place.’” Unfortunately Heath’s essay largely ignores
sound and (however insignificantly) contributes to the discourse on Wavelength which neglects its
complex juxtaposition of sound(s) and image(s).

71
Richard T. Jameson, “Kubrick’s Shining,” Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick. Ed. Mario Falsetto.
(New York: Hall, 1996) 243-252. Originally Film Comment July-August 1980. “It seems poetically
apt that, at the same time Stanley Kubrick was describing arabesques round space stations and star
corridors and the history of human consciousness in Space Odyssey, Michael Snow was making
Wavelength . . . 45-minute film ‘about’ a loft, it consists of a single continuous zoom across 80 feet
of horizontal space, beginning with a full view of the room and ending on a closeup of a photograph
on the opposite wall” (245).

72
Levinson 248.

73
David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1985) 287.

74
P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000, 3rd ed. (New York:
Oxford UP, 2002) 352.

75
Michelson’s “Toward Snow, Part 1” is one of the major works on Snow and her comments on the
film shape most others. Artforum 9.19 (1971): 30-37.

76
Quoted in Sitney, p. 353.

77
Walter Metz, “‘What Went Wrong?’: The American Avant-Garde cinema of the 1960s,” The
Sixties: 1960-1969, Paul Monaco (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2003) 254. The
acknowledgements to the text indicate that Snow wrote to Monaco and the general editor of the series,
Charles Harpole. See p. xi.

78
Robert Stam writes: “the avant-garde films of the New American Cinema offer metatextual
critiques of classical Hollywood cinema. Michael Snow’s Wavelength, for example, both alludes to
and refused the conventional ‘suspense’ of Hollywood thrillers, as if it were stretching a single
Hitchcock dolly-shot into a 45-minute simulated zoom shot covering the space of a Manhattan loft.”
Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, eds, New Vocabularies in Film
Semiotics (New York: Routledge, 1992) 208.

122

79
James Peterson, “At any point during the film, viewers can calculate their progress and hypothesize
about the ultimate extent of the zoom; and, once a hypothesis has been selected, viewers can
anticipate the film’s approaching closure.” James Peterson, Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order:
Understanding the American Avant-Garde Cinema (Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 1994) 122.

80
Regina Cornwell, Snow Seen: The Films and Photographs of Michael Snow (Toronto, ON: Peter
Martin Associates, 1980) 73.

81
William C. Wees, Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film
(Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1992) 155.

82
Cornwell 73.

83
Cornwell 76.

84
Michael Zryd, “Avant-Garde Films: Teaching Wavelength,” Cinema Journal 47.1 (2007): 111

85
Cornwell 77.

86
As James Lastra notes: “A recording with a high degree of reflected sound, or some other indicator
of spatial signature, is linked to sound considered as an event, while closely-miked sound, with a
relatively ‘contextless’ spatial signature, is linked to sound considered as an intelligible structure – as
a signifying element with a larger structure.” This “structure” is the act of narration. He continues:
“‘Real’ space is simply not an issue for most images on the screen – their scale and angle are
functions of narrative emphasis, not of more or less precise perception.” James Lastra, “Reading,
Writing, and Representing Sound,” Sound Theory / Sound Practice, Ed. Rick Altman (New York:
Routledge, 1992) 78.

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Chapter 4: Sync and Async Sound

This chapter focuses on the sync / async binary which structures theorizations of film
sound, also and summarizes a few major theoretical texts. While Classical cinema
largely presents sound that operates in a subservient and sympathetic manner with
the image, the idea of “synchronous” sound is ill-defined from its inception as a
theoretical concept and practice.
Though performers worked to present sound in accompaniment with “silent
films,” sync sound becomes a concern for film in the late 1920s. On October 6
th
,
1927, The Jazz Singer premiered at Warner Bros. Strand theater in New York City.
In the film popular singer Al Jolson proclaims: “You ain’t heard nothin yet!” In
August of the following year Soviet directors S. M. Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovkin, and
G. V. Alexandrov released “A Statement” which begins: “The dream of a sound film
has come true.”
1
The promise – or threat – of Jolson’s statement (that there was
more film sound to come) had been confirmed far away from New York. For the
Soviet authors the “dream” of film sound is more like a nightmare; for them Jolson’s
words are more threat than promise: “it appears that this advance in films is being
employed in an incorrect direction.” These two texts, one a film and the other a very
brief essay, form the often unacknowledged foundation of many discussions of film
sound.
The Jazz Singer is popularly described as the beginning of sound cinema.
2

As one film history book text has it, the film’s “immediate success marked the end of
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an era.”
3
In Bordwell’s terms, the Standard Version of the film’s history is that
audiences, when exposed to the controlled union of sound and image rather than
images and music of various sorts in rough accompaniment, responded with such
enthusiasm that Hollywood was forced to follow Warner Bros. and convert to sound
films.
4
Here ends the “silent” era and begins the “sound” era not simply for
American cinema but for the world. Here also ends cinema’s evolutionary march
toward art and it is reduced to a recording device. Because of the need to wed sound
and image, cameras were attached to the ground, actors were attached to props, and
the sound track reinforced the information available in the film’s image.
5
For some
critics like Rudolf Arnheim the film destroys the artistry of silent filmmaking and
sets American cinema on a path from which it can never recover: the creation of
illusions of reality and a cinema where sound is redundant.
6
The art of cinema is
visibly present on the screen and sound must help the images tell a story without
introducing distraction (though occasional songs are permissible).
Similarly, the “Statement” – often mistakenly regarded as the work of
Eisenstein alone – is commonly read as the first and most significant attempt to steer
cinema back on a more “fruitful” course. Though the statement demonstrably failed
to do so, it continues to exert an undue influence over cinema theorists, particularly
those focused on sound. For many, sound – whether music, sound effects, or speech
– must create a “productive friction” with the image. Since films offer “sync” sound
the answer is to deviate markedly from this system. United in their opposition to the
normal use of sound in the late 1920s, the Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Alexandrov’s focus
125

on the issue of “nonsync” continues to structure many discussions yet the
“Statement” does not define “nonsyn sound” or even “sync” sound.
This chapter begins with these two texts to address the issue of
synchronization in detail. Few theorists define “sync sound” and simply assume it is
a negative quality to be combated. The chapter therefore poses several questions: Is
“sync” an issue of the relative temporality of sound and image? Is “sync” an issue of
the spatial contiguity of sound and image? Is “sync” an issue of the comparative
tone or mood suggested by sound and image? If “sync” sound means a consistent
temporal relationship between sound and image – whether or not the sounds
logically can be explained as emanating from the images depicted on screen – then
Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) (1971) – which combines images of slowly burning
photographs with voiceover narration that describes the photograph yet to come –
can be included in a list of “sync” films. So too can Unsere Afrikareise (Our Trip to
Africa, 1966) and some of the films of Owen Land (originally known as George
Landow) such as A Film of Their 1973 Spring Tour Commissioned by Christian
World Liberation Front of Berkeley, California (1974) and Institutional Quality
(1969). If “sync” however, means that sound and image are recorded and presented
together then most films can not be included and might therefore fall into the realm
of “nonsync” or “async” cinema. Many Italian films, Bollywood films, and even
films like Flash Gordon (1980) which extensively use automated dialogue
replacement (ADR) must be regarded as offering only the appearance of sync sound
rather than the genuine artifact. If “sync” sound simply means that sound and image
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seem to have been recorded together then the category allows for dubbed films and
films whose dubbing is not meant to be noticed such as Greystoke: The Legend of
Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984).
7

It seems that narrative cinema and especially Classical Hollywood Cinema is
“sync-centric.” Whether defined as a temporal relationship, or one of emotional
continuity, a cooperative and sympathetic relationship between sound and image is
classical cinema’s norm. More than the singing offered by The Jazz Singer, it is
Jolson’s talking which scholars herald as a revolutionary break in film history. The
authors of “The Statement” particularly press synchronization of music, though most
scholars neglect this fact. The idea of “sync” is a concern for sound well before The
Jazz Singer and is still a concern in the pleasures of audio-visual media. Today
many of the most viewed clips on YouTube feature teens (and pre-teens) lipsycning
to pop songs. The period of “sync” film between these homemade lip-sync videos
and The Jazz Singer deserves to be investigated more fully.
One way out of the ongoing, and largely unproductive, debate about defining
– or refusing to define – “sync” sound or its favored (and supposed) opposite,
“asynchronous sound,” is to argue that sound and image do not naturally belong
together in cinema. The async relationship scholars valorize is an acknowledgment
that sound and image only unite towards a common goal when forced to do so by
film narration. The failure to link film narrative theory and film sound theory is
evident in the discourse surrounding the issue of “synchronous” and
“nonsynchronous” sound. Similarly, though nonnarrative cinema affords the most
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obvious opportunity for async sound, the combination of sound and image in avant-
garde cinema does not often enter into the discussion because scholars focus more on
modernist semi-narrative European films such as Marguerite Duras’ India Song
(1975) or the live sync films of those by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub.
8

Films of the postwar / pre-Dolby era reveal that the union of sound and image in
narrative cinema, regardless of the recording circumstances of each stream of
information, is an act of narration.
This discussion begins with The Jazz Singer and “A Statement,” or, rather,
Eisenstein and Jolson: the fathers of sync sound in cinema. Following these sections
the chapter considers the “fake sync” feature films The Jolson Story (1946) and
Jolson Sings Again (1949), two popular films that match the voice of Al Jolson with
the body of actor Larry Parks. Next the discussion turns to Dont Look Back (1967)
and Woodstock (1970), two documentary films which rely on the presentation of
sound and image recorded together but also allow sound and image to play off and
contradict one another. Lastly the chapter considers async avant-garde films such as
(nostalgia), The Rock n Roll Film (1967), and Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot (Thanx
to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974) which fully embrace the inherent
conflict of sound and image in cinema.

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A “Statement” and a Proclamation
This section analyzes “The Statement” by S. M. Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovkin, and G.
V. Alexandrov to explore its complex influence on later (and current) studies of film
sound.
Since its initial publication (and translation into numerous languages) the
“Statement” has been republished and made to do a significant amount of work for
theorists.
9
But interpreting the text is a difficult task. The essay is often read away
from its historical context and theoretical foundation. Even more than many
theoretical texts, the time and place of the writing bears a concrete influence on its
argument. The essay is also the product of hearsay: “in the accounts of the invention
it appears that this advance in films is being employed in an incorrect direction.”
10

Unable (or perhaps having no desire to) travel to the United States to see The Jazz
Singer and other early sound films, the authors instead rely on “accounts” (but which
ones?) of the films. The statement is also the product of fear that the carefully
theorized and visually executed Soviet style of cinema the authors helped to create is
outmoded, or worse, rendered irrelevant by sound. The authors are aware of the
possibilities of sound, however, and their frustration is evident: “Sound recording is
a two-edged invention, and it is most probable that its use will proceed along the line
of least resistance, i.e., along the line of satisfying simple curiosity.”
11
The authors
lay out a prescient description of the use of sound. The initial period will consist
largely of “TALKING FILMS” created simply to make money and that settle for
providing a “certain ‘illusion’ of talking people, of audible objects, etc.” new for
129

audiences.
12
The second period poses a greater danger because it will “assert an
epoch of its automatic utilization for ‘highly cultured dramas’ and other
photographed performances of a theatrical sort.”
13
The authors institute the criticism
that most films of plays are nothing more than “photographed performances” and
denigrate the presentation of dialogue. The writers warn of sound and image
cooperating in a synchronous relationship that will “destroy the culture of montage”
because:
every ADHESION of sound to the visual montage piece increases its
inertia as a montage piece, and increases the independence of its
meaning – and this will undoubtedly be to the detriment of montage,
operating in the first place not only the montage pieces but on their
juxtaposition.
14

Sound threatens montage by decreasing the ability of individual images to collide
and create new meaning.
The authors do not oppose telling stories in film, but do oppose reducing
cinema to an apparatus for filming stage plays that emphasize narrative conveyance
and avoid montage and counterpoint effects. In this the complaint is accurate, but
less so about how film style developed than in setting the parameters of the
discussion. Critics in the 1920s and up to the present frequently describe early sound
films as devoid of purely “cinematic” qualities. Yet at the time of the writing even
Soviet cinema was moving away from the montage-heavy style toward one more
dedicated to clearly presenting narratives.
15
The context of the “Statement” is
therefore significant because the authors fight not just for a model of film sound but
aesthetics generally and how sound will be used.
130

The most quoted section of the “Statement” is where the authors proclaim the
need for “non-synchronization”:
THE FIRST EXPERIMENTAL WORK WITH SOUND MUST
BE DIRECTED ALONG THE LINE OF ITS NON-
SYNCHRONIZATION WITH THE VISUAL IMAGES. And
only such an attack will give the necessary palpability which will
later lead to the creation of an ORCHESTRAL COUNTERPOINT
of visual and aural images.
16

The authors express a two-part goal. First, filmmakers must “experiment” with
placing sound(s) and image(s) in a relationship which is not “synchronized.” The
second goal is more directed to the future and the culmination of the period of
experimentation: a system of “orchestral counterpoint” between sound and image.
The authors feel the system of image montage functions well and has measurable
effects, but sound / image montage is a work in progress. The outcome of this study
is not in doubt however; the authors are emphatic that Soviet filmmakers can (and
will) conquer sound just as they have tamed and controlled the relationship between
images. This passage argues that “nonsynchronization” between sound and image is
a step on the way to “counterpoint.” Unlike later writers the authors do not use these
two (translated) terms interchangeably; a period of non-synchronization will lead to
era of orchestral counterpoint.
The authors argue that sound and image are independent and must be
organized by a filmmaker with specific goals. Sound should be manipulated for
montage effects like the image: “Sound, treated as a new montage element (as a
factor divorced from the visual image), will inevitably introduce a new means of
enormous power to the expression and solution of the most complicated tasks.”
17

131

The parenthetical comment suggestively indicates the need for sound(s) to collide
with sound(s) in addition to working to create “counterpoint” to the image.
The “Statement” is not the authors’ only comment on sound but tends to be
considered in isolation and as a summary of the writers’ views. One equally worth
discussing is Pudovkin’s 1929 essay “Asynchronism as a Principle of Sound Film”
in which he writes: “It would be entirely false to consider sound merely as a
mechanical device enabling us to enhance the naturalness of the image” and later
adds: “The role which sound is to play in film is much more significant than a
slavish imitation of naturalism on these lines; the first function of sound is to
augment the potential expressiveness of the film’s content.”
18
Pudovkin indicates
that sound is an integral part of film’s communicative act and full partner in
expressing content. He explains also more concretely than in the “Statement” the
use of sound as a montage element:
Now in sound film we can, within the same strip of celluloid, not only
edit different points in space, but can cut into association with the
image selected sounds that reveal and heighten the character of each –
wherever in silent film we had a conflict of but two opposing
elements, now we can have four.
19

He also notes that sound and image are distinct channels of information and
comments more directly that music: “must in sound film never be the
accompaniment. It must retain its own line.”
20
Music – sound – must be allowed to
remain apart from the image and not be forced to serve it. Pudovkin delights in the
potential to make two sounds and two images collide in a single instant and his
insistence on sound elements as a unity anticipates arguments for the ontology of the
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soundtrack. The recent publication of his essays will hopefully increase discussion
of his ideas beyond the “Statement,” or at least demonstrate that his ideas – like
Eisenstein’s – were not static or simply the product of a fear of change.
As a polemic the “Statement” has considerable force and an undeniable and
continuing influence. But its most unfortunate legacy is that the authors do not
clearly define “asynchronous sound,” “nonsychronous sound,” or “orchestral
counterpoint.” Perhaps more importantly, the authors do not define “synchronous”
sound, the necessary opposite of these terms. The essay is therefore not a firm
foundation from which to mount on an attack on (Classical) cinema as perpetuating
dominant ideology through its use of (sync) sound. Chris Marker demonstrates the
power of sound to impose a reading of an image (or series of images) in Letter from
Siberia (1957), and so too does Woody Allen in his asynchronous sound masterpiece
What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966) where he edits and dubs a 1960s Japanese spy film.
21

Marker’s documentary uses sound for explicitly political goals while Allen’s fiction
film flaunts conventions of narration and narrative in its deliberate incoherence in
order to entertain. Assigning an absolutely positive value to “asynchronous” sound,
or sound “counterpoint,” without first defining “synchronous” sound is a failing of
too many writers. How synchronous sound actually functions needs to be considered
in its varieties and in individual texts. A starting point for such a discussion should
be the film most responsible for creating filmmakers’ and audience’s expectations:
The Jazz Singer.

133

Sync Sound: The Jazz Singer
This section examines The Jazz Singer’s presentation of sound and its influence on
the musical genre. While labeled a “sync” film, The Jazz Singer demonstrates the
flexibility of film narration to combine sound and image. Sound and its union with
the image are the attractions of The Jazz Singer (along with the presence and voice
of star Al Jolson).
Though one of the most discussed films in the history of cinema, The Jazz
Singer has not been subject to much sustained analysis of its sound practices.
22

Claudia Gorbman situates the film in its historical moment, noting that audiences had
already experienced synchronized dialogue in Vitaphone and Movietone shorts,
“which introduced the voice for its documentary value: recitations, songs, non-
narrative performances, interviews.”
23
The Jazz Singer’s presentation of
synchronized speech (“You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”) is therefore not a break in film
style (though it could be perceived as such by audiences unexposed to the shorts).
Gorbman does not, however, deny the significance of this moment. Al Jolson’s
singing and dialogue in The Jazz Singer wed the image and soundtrack in time and
space, and image and sound appear – through multiple sync points – to be recorded
simultaneously. The Jazz Singer introduced the existing documentary value (and
spectacle) of the voice as synchronized sound into fiction film. For Gorbman the
shorts allowed, and depended on, a direct address of the audience with looks at the
camera and aural address. These were brief audio – visual recordings of
performances.
24
The Jazz Singer uses music like the earlier Don Juan (1926), but “it
134

occasionally breaks into synch sound.”
25
“Breaks” is the correct word because the
moments of transition are not concealed despite attempts to minimize the disruption.
Gorbman continues: “the recorded voice already had its conventions in the cinema:
one could argue that it signaled a supplement of reality. Now, here was the voice in
a fiction film.”
26
Jolson’s voice adds a “surplus of both realism and spectacle-
value.”
27

Richard De Cordova argues that in the musical the performer uses a more
direct mode of address than in other genres. This occurs through features like the
lyrics of songs (“you”), the use of the proscenium space and the “glance into the
camera” which directly solicits audience response.
28
Performances tend to appear in
clearly demarcated segments of films (such as performance numbers). The Jazz
Singer inaugurates the presentation of songs in the fictional context of a story and
creates a foundational component of the film musical. Additionally, De Cordova
states that within the individual film “broader structural and thematic oppositions are
articulated through performance,” so its significance is not simply one of spectacle
versus narrative. He continues: “performance enters quite explicitly into the
thematics of the musical as it is taken up in a system of differences that gives it a
stable meaning.”
29

De Cordova notes his debt to Jane Feuer and her influential essay “The Self-
Reflexive Musical and the Myth of Entertainment,” in which she argues that the
genre negotiates oppositions in culture, and while foregrounding its status as a film,
also recuperates its reflexivity. Her primary examples are backstage musicals and
135

the “art musicals” of the late 1940s and 1950s by Comden and Green: The Barkleys
of Broadway (1949), Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and The Band Wagon (1953). She
argues: “Historically, the art musical has evolved toward increasingly greater degrees
of self-reflectivity.”
30
Feuer’s discussion explains the classical conventions of the
musical and allows for changes over time including greater reflexivity. The musical
depends, in part, on the “myth of the audience” in that the genre seeks to provide the
audience with a “sense of participation in the performance.”
31
More specifically, the
backstage musical – whose plot is the making of a show – provides the audience with
both the feeling of a live theatrical performance (direct address, the appearance of
spontaneity) and the experience of a film (the camera is often unfettered and
provides more information than is available from a theater seat). Performance
numbers typically begin with the approximate position of the audience (centered
staging and a visible proscenium arch) and then transition to a more fluid experience
which takes advantage of the opportunities offered by the cinema (including close-
ups and reactions shots – possibly even of the “audience” itself). Often in these
moments – such as “Make ‘Em Laugh” from Singin’ in the Rain – the film
seamlessly switches from addressing an audience within the film (Gene Kelly as
Cosmo) to the audience of the film. The film presents an audience responding to the
performance within the film’s diegesis in part to provide a point of identification for
the cinematic audience. Feuer summarizes this position: “Self-reflective musicals
mediate a contradiction between live performance in the theater and the frozen form
136

of cinema by implying that the MGM musical is theater, possessing the same
immediate and active relationship to its audience.”
32

The canonization of The Jazz Singer began early and was partially fostered
by the industry. Warner Bros. received a Special Academy Award “for producing
The Jazz Singer, the pioneer outstanding talking picture, which has revolutionized
the industry” on May 16, 1929. Though critically lauded, in other ways the standard
version of the history of The Jazz Singer is flawed. Donald Crafton demonstrates
that the film was not the massive financial success that it is often labeled, and more
importantly, did not single-handedly change how audiences experience film.
33
The
Jazz Singer is new and not new because it builds on the existing practice of
presenting sound and music in film and offers a famous performer. Jolson’s star
appeal should not be discounted and the film’s marketing provides some indication
as to what audiences expected:
The one thing viewers were not given during The Jazz Singer trailer
was the opportunity to hear Al Jolson sing or speak. There are
some teasing glimpses of him applying his cork makeup, but no
talking. For that one would have to pay. Synch dialogue is
provided “free” in the form of Miljan's [the host of the trailer]
address, but the real magnet, Al Jolson's voice, is withheld.
34

The film presents Jolson singing and talking in sync and even the film’s trailer
presents sync speech. But it also presents “fake sync” – where sound and image are
matched in time and space but not from the same source. As Crafton notes, the
film’s sounds and images are not always from the apparent sources: “Doubling had
been used practically from the beginning of the talkies. Al Jolson’s piano playing in
The Jazz Singer was performed by Bert Fiske off-camera. Cantor Josef Rosenblatt
137

was dubbed for Warner Oland [who play’s Jolson’s father] and Jolson.”
35
And he
concludes: “Though apparently common, these practices were not publicized.”
Scenes of Jolson singing and talking at the piano are cinematic constructions; some
of the film’s most famous moments and bald presentations of “sync” sound are
partially false: the piano playing is real – and contemporaneous with the image – but
does not issue from the visible piano or “playing.” Note too that, on more than one
occasion in this first sync musical, a character’s voice is not the actor’s own. This
fact was certainly “not publicized.” The most famous of sound films and the
beginning of sync sound (dialogue) in American feature films is also the beginning
of classical narration’s control of sound. Cinema turns sounds and images from a
variety of sources into a coherent whole, and classical film narration creates
moments – whether a single instance or for the duration of a film – when sound and
image collaborate.

Sync Sound after Jolson and Eisenstein
This section surveys theorists’ attempts to untangle and build on the dual legacies of
The Jazz Singer and the “Statement” in defining sound-image relations. Sound and
image operating in a “synchronous” relationship is alternately embraced and derided,
while theorists offer conflicting definitions in different contexts and describe very
different films. Scholars consider speech, music and the general relationship
between sound and image with regard to “sync.” The section concludes with a
138

discussion of the debates over the norms of classical sound, particularly the
presentation of the voice.
The Classical era of American filmmaking has the synchronous union of
sound and image at its center. In the Classical system cuts are concealed in editing
and so too is combination of body and voice which do not potentially belong
together. The perceived and necessary unity of voice and body is central to the
classical era of American film where aesthetics are at the service of the story.
Classical narration presents sound as coming from the image and cooperates with it
to tell a story. The Classical cinema tends to use sound in a manner which the
authors of the “Statement” sought to prevent.
The causes and reasons for sync sound have troubled theorists and resulted in
a variety of explanations. Sarah Kozloff suggests three reasons for sync speech: “the
nature of human perception” which brings together sound and image; additionally,
“linguistics teaches us that the words used in conversation are often ambiguous.
They are not fully comprehensible in isolation; they must be contextualized for
listeners to understand them” and finally, “the speech / speaker match also reflects a
strong cultural preference.”
36
Her own favored explanation is pleasure: “I find
watching characters while they talk endlessly enriching because it allows viewers to
study and compare so many simultaneous signifiers: the actors’ words, their voices,
their intonations; their facial expressions.”
37
Kozloff emphatically deflects any
argument that sync dialogue is redundant or that it should be overthrown.
139

Mary Ann Doane and other scholars build on the work of Hanns Eisler and
Theodor Adorno, whose book Composing for the Films argues for a new relationship
between film music and the image.
38
The work shapes not simply other discussions
of film music, but also considerations of speech. Debates regarding music and
“sync” largely follow – or at least profess to follow – the example of their book.
39

The work is the most sustained attack on classical scoring practices as a system
which strives to be synchronous with the image. While Hollywood composer Max
Steiner once noted that music should fit “a picture like a glove,”
40
for these theorists
music in a film should be something perhaps closer to a glove used to slap the
slumbering audience across the face.
41
But the attempt to change the system from
within proved impossible: “Eisler worked briefly as a composer in Hollywood, and
his work, though interesting, often sounds just like the classical scores he was trying
to avoid.”
42
More than a critique of Eisler’s compositional practice, Kathryn
Kalinak’s comment points to the importance of understanding the text as the product
of someone working for Hollywood and seeking to change its practices. The “films”
which they want to adjust music for are Hollywood films: those which tell stories
with photographed actors. In these films the music is “patched together by means of
leitmotifs”
43
and commonly avoids being noticed because of the “vague notion that
music should have a subordinate role in relation to the pictures.”
44

The authors call for music which relies on tone more than harmony and
maintains its own integrity in the face of the (discontinuous) image and a production
system which often chops apart music in order to make it fit the image and narrative.
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As Philip Rosen notes, the book is “a work of description and prescription”
45
in that
the authors outline the limitations of classical Hollywood scoring and offer a remedy.
The fix is planned music: “The insertion of music should be planned along with the
writing of the script, and the question whether the spectator should be aware of the
music is a matter to be decided in each case.”
46
The authors quite simply ask that
composers be more involved in the creation of the film rather than writing music for
a completed film. The request is for an alteration, in this sense, of the Hollywood
studio method of making films, which by the time the work was published in 1947
was already undergoing significant changes. Films were already making the
audience “aware of the music” and using music (particularly jazz) that, while not
“planned” along with the film, was written to be experienced as individual pieces.
Eisler is correct that in classical Hollywood films, “music is not carefully listened
to”
47
but this is less true of films made after 1940. Many scholars do not consider
the historical context of the work – either when it was written or the period of
American cinema it describes – and therefore misuse it as a theorization for all of
cinema, and an argument that music must conflict with the image. In fact the authors
argue that music interacts with the image and can not blindly contradict or ignore the
image but instead create productive tensions. The authors ask for more thoughtful
uses of music in film narration (though they do not use this term), not for a
separation of music (sound) and image.
Finally, scholars such as K. J. Donnelly and Michel Chion discuss “sync”
relationships in a more global sense than speech or music. Donnelly discusses
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contemporary media and notes that some films feature music and are cut to that
music. He also notes that many films have music composed to fit the image and
narrative. These texts include a preponderance of “sync points”:
“Synch points” are explicit instances of a dynamic convergence
between film and music, and often denote significant moments. At
their most obvious, they manifest “stingers,” the brief blasts of
sound that emphasize action in thriller and horror films, but their
proliferation suggests that screen music should no longer be
conceived as simply the “accompaniment” to the unerring primacy
of the image.
48

Donnelly explicitly argues for the need to accommodate historical changes in film
(and TV) aesthetics in the presentation of sound and image; the “proliferation”
indicates to Donnelly that music no longer simply assists the image.
Donnelly’s concept of “sync points” acknowledges the influence of Chion
49

for whom a “sync point” is “a salient moment of an audiovisual sequence during
which a sound event and a visual event meet in synchrony.”
50
Chion applies the
concept to nonnarrative texts:
Certain experimental videos and films demonstrate that synchresis
can even work out of thin air – that is, with images and sounds that
strictly speaking have nothing to do with each other, forming
monstrous yet inevitable and irresistible agglomerations in our
perception.”
51

Chion could be discussing Hollis Frampton’s Zorn’s Lemma (1970) when he writes,
“The syllable fa is heard over a shot of a dog, the sound of a blow with the sight of a
triangle. Synchresis is Pavlovian.”
52
His comments come close to a statement on
film narration but he settles for psychology and narrative: “But it is not totally
automatic. It is also a function of meaning, and is organized according to gestaltist
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laws and contextual determinations”
53
Chion explains sound-image relations in
cinema but does not address film history. Classical Hollywood, and its composers
(like Steiner), relies on sync points and a sympathetic relationship between sound
and image.
The Classical era should not be glossed over so quickly however. In fact,
after the release of The Jazz Singer and other “talkies,” there was a brief period of
negotiation regarding the norms of film sound, specifically sync sound and the voice.
Crafton argues that the voice was initially regarded by filmmakers and many
audience members as flexible and thus able to join a variety of screen bodies: “In the
sound motion picture, the actor's voice is separate from his or her physical body and
therefore interchangeable with the voices of other actors.”
54
Initially filmmakers
embraced this new possibility and combined voices and bodies in a practice known
as voice-doubling: “Perhaps better than any other issue, voice-doubling demonstrates
the rapidly changing conception of the voice from autonomous to integrated status.
The practice also raised the stakes in the game of who controlled the screen voice.”
55

He investigates fan letters and discovers not surprisingly that some fans were
unhappy to learn their favorite stars’ voices were not issuing from cinema speakers
and expressed the desire to hear the actual voices. Crafton notes: “These responses
assume that the star voice was a valuable draw in its own right, that fans would want
to hear their favorite performers speaking and singing in their ‘natural’ voices, not
some unknown, invisible impersonator.”
56
But there was disagreement from fans
who readily accepted not only voice doubling but embraced the practice as a logical
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extension of film practice and comparable to other common “lies” of cinema such as
“the practice of special effects or makeup.”
57
To illustrate this point Crafton briefly
considers Lon Chaney, an actor famous for being anything but “himself” but whose
decision not to speak in film was welcomed by fans.
58
Crafton regards sound as an
addition to the existing system: “Chaney’s case points out how readily the screen
voice was accepted as a surplus, an add-on, not unlike an extra layer of makeup or a
new character role.”
59
In this moment of film history audiences do not (yet) regard
sound as necessary and naturally arising from the image yet the opportunity for
revealing the separateness of sound and image represented by voice doubling would
be short lived.
Crafton suggests that studios would have been more than happy to continue
straightforwardly constructing performances at the level of voice: “In the early days
of sound, the voice had been a variable, the fitness and quality of which were readily
disputed. After a while fans redefined their expectation: the speaking voice was to
be an integral part of the actor.”
60
He summarizes this period as one where sound is
a site of considerable struggle, of which the practice of doubling was only a part:
Producers, studios, and distributors became stronger by using sound
to wrest control from local managers, thereby increasing their
regulation of the viewing experience. The switch to talkies also
granted the studios more authority over actors by allowing them to
institute voice tests, impose restrictive contract clauses concerning
speech, and threaten careers by bringing in Broadway
“replacements.” Doubling gave Hollywood the power to develop
face and voice as separately exploitable entities. Fan response,
however, had the potential of diminishing this power. By making
or breaking stars, discriminating among film genres, and – the
worst possible scenario – rejecting sound altogether, fandom (like
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unmanageable stars or independent theaters) was an economic
necessity, but also a potential threat.
61

Taking Crafton’s analysis into account, classical sound – in terms of its presentation
of the voice – does not truly become the norm until a couple of years after The Jazz
Singer. Yet importantly voice-doubling did not stop at this point – it simply became
more hidden as in The Jazz Singer. The public expressed a preference that
filmmakers would attempt to respect, or at least pretend to respect.
Comparisons can be made between The Jazz Singer and 1952’s Singin’ in the
Rain, a film about voice-doubling which itself includes voice-doubling. In the film,
Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) dubs the voice of Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen). But
the film itself features “fake sync” most famously in the film’s climax which in a
display of the diegetic “fake sync” to the stunned diegetic audience features Hagen’s
voice rather than Reynolds. The film’s final song offers fake sync while pretending
at the level of plot to destroy it. Elsewhere, Rita Hayworth was dubbed in all of her
singing parts, and not even by a single voice actor. Her career partially depends on
fake sync and is therefore a uniquely cinematic career as a performer.
62
Hayworth’s
films and Singin’ in the Rain conceal the fake sync yet other films of the postwar /
pre-Dolby period break the classical conventions.

Fake Sync: See Larry Parks / Hear Al Jolson
This section discusses The Jolson Story and Jolson Sings Again, two popular
Hollywood films from the postwar/pre-Dolby era which openly unite the voice of Al
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Jolson and the body (and face, and lips) of actor Larry Parks and argues that the
foregrounding of fake sync demonstrates the conclusion of the classical era of sound.
In 1953, several years after the Jolson films were released, the (all too brief)
era of 3-D films was coming to a close. Several films were released that year using
the technology including the magnificently “bad” Robot Monster. A short 3-D film
called Stardust in Your Eyes was filmed by the same team (director Phil Tucker and
cinematographer Jack Greenhalgh) to be screened before Robot Monster. In it
nightclub performer Slick Slavin stands in front of a white background with a black
grid (to increase the sense of depth) and does a number of sync sound impressions of
celebrities, including Cary Grant and James Cagney. Slavin also does “Larry Parks
in The Jolson Story” and moves his lips without making a sound. He then chuckles
and says he wondered if “we” would “get it.” While recent audiences might not “get
it” (or even see Stardust in Your Eyes), audiences for Robot Monster in 1953 likely
did because Larry Parks’ performances in The Jolson Story and its sequel Jolson
Sings Again were seen by millions of viewers in the 1940s.
Classical cinema’s manner of presenting (the appearance of) sync sound still
dominates film today. Yet by 1946 Hollywood was ready to openly present the
“fake sync” it used narration to conceal in 1927, and audiences were ready to
embrace it. The third highest grossing films of both 1946 and 1949 are structured
around a voice and body which clearly do not belong together. The films are able to
manipulate the process of voice doubling in part because it has been perfected at the
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level of style and technology; they also signal that audiences will (once again) accept
this unique potential of cinema.
63

Perhaps the most significant case of mainstream “fake sync,” and one largely
neglected by scholars, is that of The Jolson Story and Jolson Sings Again.
64
The
Jolson Story was Columbia’s top grossing film in the company’s history to date in
1946 and earned less than only two films that year: the mammoth and far more
expensive The Best Years of Our Lives (Goldwyn) and Duel in the Sun (Selznick).
The film presents the unmistakable voice of Al Jolson and new recordings of his
songs
65
but shows actor Larry Parks on screen. The Jolson Story romanticizes a life
spent performing but gradually reveals the toll this takes on the performer. Jolson
gives up singing to devote himself to his wife and even moves out to the country to
avoid the ever-present temptation to sing. The desire to perform proves irresistible
however and Jolson is coaxed into singing at a nightclub. As Julie Benson (Evelyn
Keyes) sorrowfully exits the club and the film, The Jolson Story resists closure and
suggests that singing and being a good husband are mutually exclusive.
66

The Jolson Story places voice-doubling, or fake sync, at the center and even
makes it an attraction in a clear deviation from Classical Hollywood and musical
norms. In Chion’s terms, the film features “playback” where an actor lip syncs along
with pre-recorded words or singing.
67
Interestingly, Chion uses The Jazz Singer to
illustrate his arguments and notes the same mixing of voice and image that Crafton
highlights: both Jolson and Warner Oland lip-sync to Josef Rosenblatt’s voice.
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Playback also appears when the little boy sings as he mimes along with Jolson’s
voice. Chion contends:
It would take another fifty-five years to execute the camera movement
up to a big closeup of the pseudo-singer’s very throat to get the
definite admission that he’s not the one singing, and more important,
to raise to the level of a principle the fact that the cinematic body and
voice are strangers to each other.
68

For Chion such a moment does not appear until Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s decidedly
non-Hollywood (and non-classical) film Parsifal (1982).
69

Yet only 19 years after The Jazz Singer, The Jolson Story places Parks at the
center of the frame and displays his non-singing with regular closeup shots. Indeed,
the film is arguably more “about” Jolson than if Jolson “played” himself. The film
offers two performances and two main attractions: Jolson and Parks.
70
Jolson sings
his standards anew and offers an aural “performance” the equal of Parks’ physical
pantomime. Short of seeing Jolson live (an option not available for many
Americans), there was no better way to hear Jolson than in a movie theater in the mid
to late 1940s. Though often on the radio, home receivers could deliver neither the
volume nor quality of sound that film exhibition (even optical mono sound) offered.
While Parks was nominated for an Academy Award, the film’s only Oscars are for
“Best Sound, Recording” by John P. Livadary and “Best Music, Scoring of a Motion
Picture” by Morris Stoloff. Though Larry Parks delivers some of the finest
lipsyncing of the postwar period,
71
the combination of Parks’ body with Jolson’s
voice makes the film more about the sound – or, in Roland Barthes’ terms, the grain
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– of Jolson’s voice, and cinema’s attempt to create images worthy of Jolson’s voice,
than his life.
72
Reviewers say as much. Bosley Crowther wrote:
In this specious illustration of Al Jolson’s glamorized life the songs
that were sung by Mr. Jolson are, incongruously, the whole show.
There is little more cinematic quality or dynamic imagery in the
picturization of the story than there might be in a set of stills.
73

The review in Variety adds: “The real star of the production is that Jolson voice and
that Jolson medley. It was good showmanship to cast this film with lesser people,
particularly Larry Parks as the mammy kid.” Columbia agreed at the level of
compensation, because while contract player Parks wanted the part and got it, Jolson
received a staggering 50% of the film’s profit. For the sequel, which Jolson shopped
first to Warner Bros – just as he had The Jolson Story – he received only 25%.
Meanwhile Parks sued to get out of his contract at Columbia but lost.
Since film first presented songs audiences have gone to movies in part to hear
singers perform, and since The Jazz Singer feature films have presented famous
voices.
74
As noted above, musicals typically combine the diegetic (seemingly the
singer / dancer) and the nondiegetic (where is the music coming from?) but The
Jolson Story baldy presents a voice and body that do not belong together. In fact, the
voice (sound) dominates and controls the image and the body of Parks because he
syncs his actions to the recording and physically imitates Jolson. This limits the
film’s visual vocabulary to cuts between Jolson and the appreciative audience. In
other words: there is not a great deal of visual interest beyond Jolson / Parks.
75
This
style suggests that Jolson’s voice transcends its (filmic) body; it seemingly can not
be contained in the body of Al Jolson (off screen) or Larry Parks (on screen).
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As a sync film The Jolson Story is as precise as The Jazz Singer and the
primary difference between the two is the ratio of fake sync to real sync with the
earlier film presenting a higher percentage of “real” sync sound. The Jolson Story is
a real “sync” film for all of the dialogue scenes but in moments of performance – at
least portions of 26 songs – the sync is brazenly “faked.” The film’s spectacle is its
ability to bring together different forms of address seamlessly (sound and image).
Film narration exists to do this, and while the film embraces the conventions of the
Hollywood musical in its presentation of performance on stage and stage-like
settings, a direct address to the audience, and the regular appearance of a diegetic
audience, the combination of vocal performance from Jolson and lipsync
performance from Larry Parks complicates discussions of sync sound, performance
and diegesis.
76

If one regards the diegetic audience as a (necessary) point of identification
for the cinema audience, The Jolson Story presents an interesting test case. One can
not fully identify with the audience presented in The Jolson Story in part because
they are blissfully unaware that the man on stage is not actually singing. In a period
when the musical was in the midst of its Golden Age, which for some begins with
Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), The Jolson Story underlines the
separation of diegetic and nondiegetic elements and presents sync as a function of
technology. The film participates in what Rick Altman calls the “show musical” that
documents the lives of performers and thus have reason to sing / dance.
77
In The
Jolson Story an orchestra appears in the frame for “Jolson’s” performances so the
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only clearly nondiegetic element is the voice of Jolson. The film presents singing
(performance) as a construction, the result of technology, and specifically addressed
to the film – not live – audience and therefore contradicts Feuer’s arguments that the
musical – even when reflexive – conceals performance as effortless, spontaneous,
and unmediated by technology.
78

The sequel, Jolson Sings Again, presents the creation of fake sync. The film
continues to tell the story of Jolson and even includes the making of The Jolson
Story with Parks playing Parks and Jolson. The film takes the reflexive musical to a
baroque height not often approached. Like The Jolson Story, Jolson Sings Again
finished third for the year 1949 behind two larger productions: Samson and Delilah
and Battleground, and earned $5 million.
79
The film begins just as The Jolson Story
concluded and partially justifies the earlier film’s abrupt ending and denial of
closure. As text scrolls that explains the audience is about to see “the rest of the
story of Jolson – the man who loved to sing …who loved only that,” the voice of
Jolson rises on the soundtrack and (re)asserts its centrality.
The ensuing film is profoundly episodic, with major events summarized
through static phone conversations between major characters (Jolson, his second
wife, and his parents). Numerous montage sequences – punctuated by newspaper
headlines – dominate the film’s narrative exposition. The film becomes something
utterly unique when it discusses the making of The Jolson Story in a manner as
fanciful as the treatment of other aspects of Jolson’s life and becomes an unequaled
apologia for voice-doubling. Hollywood producer Ralph Bryant (Myron
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McCormick) hears Jolson perform and remarks that his voice is “better now than it
ever was – warmer.” Because of Jolson’s age and increasingly fragile health Bryant
conceives of a film that matches Jolson’s voice with a younger actor’s healthier
body. Jolson is nonplussed: “This would be my stuff coming out of his mouth on the
screen just like I sang it.”
80
The parties agree that this is ideal: Jolson’s “better” and
“warmer” voice coming out of a younger (and more attractive) body. Before long
“Al Jolson” meets Larry Parks – playing himself – and both men look directly at the
camera to underline the film’s ingenuity and use of technology. The film then
presents the making of The Jolson Story complete with a sequence tracking the film
being taken from the camera, edited, put in canisters, and shipped to Santa Monica
for the big premiere. The sequence directly acknowledges the film’s value as a
commercial for The Jolson Story, Hollywood and, of course, Jolson. The screening
is an extended sequence which cuts between Jolson nervously waiting in the theater
lobby and The Jolson Story. Jolson Sings Again presents over 10 minutes of The
Jolson Story and only the proscenium curtain on the top and sides of the screen
indicates that the audience is in fact still “watching” Jolson Sings Again.
Columbia’s films capitalize on a brief period of postwar nostalgia for the
prewar age by presenting the aging voice of “the world’s greatest entertainer” in a
young man’s body. They also respond to the trend of music shifting from big bands
to vocalists, who toured, appeared on radio, and made television appearances.
81

These personalities were available across media and Jolson keeps up with this new
generation in every way except playing himself.
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Jolson Sings Again has considerably more screen time devoted to the creation
of The Jolson Story’s soundtrack than its images. In Jolson Sings Again’s most
fascinating scene Jolson records songs for The Jolson Story. “Jolson” stands in a
recording booth singing while an orchestra plays along in the larger room. The
sound of the film shifts to indicate both the isolated, boxed-in sound of Jolson’s
voice and the full orchestra as the camera moves between the spaces and overtly
chooses what the audience sees and hears. The camera also shows a team of men
who record “Jolson” / Jolson and the orchestra and how their labor results in a disc
of the performance. Once the song is over “Jolson” (Larry Parks), Larry Parks (as
himself), and others marvel at the recorded performance (and the technology which
is able to capture it). To the audience it sounds just like every other song in the film
– an older Jolson working his way through conventional arrangements of his famous
songs yet now the source – within the film’s diegesis – is a record.
Jolson’s performance of songs for The Jolson Story in Jolson Sings Again
doubles for his return to the recording studio to make albums for Decca Records.
Between 1932 and 1944 Jolson released no new recordings. After one recording
session prior to The Jolson Story in 1945 (he recorded the songs for the film in the
months before filming began), Jolson had three in 1946, and nine in 1947.
82
These
resulted in Decca releases which include 18 of the 26 songs featured in The Jolson
Story, 9 of which were issued before the Columbia film. By the time Jolson Sings
Again opened, 12 of the 16 songs featured in the film had been recorded and
released. These releases sold well and Jolson continued to record music steadily up
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to 1950. The recording scene in Jolson Sings Again therefore offers a clear reminder
of the fact that Jolson’s voice can be experienced outside the cinema. It is hardly
necessary for the film to present the newspaper headline “Sales of Jolson records
zooms!” in the montage of public reaction to The Jolson Story. In narrating the
making of the film’s soundtrack – Parks pretends to sing as Jolson records with an
orchestra – the film yet again concedes that its primary attraction is Jolson’s voice, or
even more pertinently, the soundtrack itself which is as separate from the film as
Jolson’s voice is from Parks’ body and can be taken home by purchasing Jolson’s
recordings.
While promoting The Jolson Story and the power of cinema to bring together
sound and image (at the same time highlighting their independence), Jolson Sings
Again concludes not with the screening of The Jolson Story but with Jolson on stage
singing to an admiring audience. Unlike the similar conclusion to The Jolson Story,
this one offers more closure – Jolson has a stable love life and is performing – and a
subtle reminder that audience members can bring the voice of Jolson into their own
homes by purchasing an album, especially if they are unable to attend a concert.
83

The film functions as a promotional tool for Columbia’s earlier The Jolson Story,
and also Jolson’s other ventures on radio and record albums which benefit Decca
records.
84

The Jolson Story turns voice-doubling (fake sync) into an attraction and the
follow up Jolson Sings Again uses voice-doubling as a plot point which is
acknowledged to exceed the film. If the soundtrack is at least partially contained by
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the narration’s use of (fake) sync in The Jolson Story, sound spills out of Jolson
Sings Again and into other speakers and media. In the latter film’s attempts to
present Jolson as an eager participant in creating films based around this sync “lie,”
his voice is simultaneously acknowledged to be more important than any image.
Sound is the more significant portion of Jolson Sings Again’s narration, and its
narrative – conveyed through a series of phone calls and montage sequences – is a
prop for the songs. After the classical period sync in the fiction film is less a
requirement and in some cases – such as these Jolson biopics – sound is often tied to
the image by sync points rather than a unity of body and voice.

The Return of “Real” Sync: Sixties Rock Documentaries
This section considers documentary films of the 1960s which take advantage of new
technology to unite sound and image in a more rigorous – and advertised – manner
than even Classical Hollywood’s narrative films. Because Hollywood by this time
relied increasingly on a mixture of sounds from various phases of a film’s production
(including Foley sound), documentary practice is able to offer real sync sound as
spectacle.
The Jolson biopics and other films like Singin’ in the Rain which foreground
the production of sound did not destroy the practice of “sync sound” or undermine
the expectation that sound and image will cooperate, and sound (particularly
dialogue) and image will seem to be recorded together. Changes in technology
resulted in a renewed contract with sync sound in the realm of nonfiction film in the
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late 1950s and 1960s. A concern with sound was certainly not new to nonfiction
filmmaking. While in studies of fiction film sound is typically under-examined or
ignored, in nonfiction film, the role of sound has been of greater importance to
practitioners and scholars. Even when regarded as a supplement to the (inherent)
truth of the image, sound was taken seriously.
Erik Barnouw indicates that the influx of sound ended the era of the “painter-
as-documentarist” and elevated aural information: “With the arrival of the spoken
word, images were suddenly downgraded. Games of movement and texture were,
for the moment, almost forgotten. Furious aesthetic battles over the uses of sound
took their place.”
85
The ability for nonfiction films to “express,” in Michael Renov’s
sense, was largely pushed aside by sound and has perhaps never been fully
acknowledged.
86
In the late 1950s the ability to easily record sync sound and image
with new cameras, reel to reel tape and, smaller, more powerful microphones pushed
filmmakers to take advantage of this new opportunities. Barnouw indicates that the
editing of ethnographic film changed drastically: “The silent-film editing tradition,
under which footage was fragmented and then reassembled, creating ‘film time,’
began to lose its feasibility and value. With speech, ‘real time’ reasserted itself.”
87

Sync sound binds sound and image in time – the time of recording and the (future)
time of exhibition. Following the introduction of sound, and then in the 1950s, the
demand for unity of time and space in documentary became a convention and
expectation, if not a rule. Brian Winston notes that André Bazin’s theorizations
regarding cinema’s tendency to embalm time fueled the “passionate attachment to
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actuality”
88
which pushed aside reconstructions and provided the theoretical
foundations for using sync sound in a way that “would supposedly allow for actuality
to be filmed for the first time without intervention or reconstruction.”
89
The
American practitioners of Direct Cinema reveled in this union of sound and image,
and according to Winston, “The new equipment did not just bolster and protect
documentary’s truth claim; it enhanced and magnified it.”
90
The camera and
microphone provide audiences access to situations previously unavailable, or, in
some films, superior aural and visual presentations of known experiences.
Some documentary films presented the recording of a performance (from an
actor or musician, for example). The connections between rock music and
documentary have been examined by a number of scholars, most of whom follow the
lead of Stephen Mamber who posits the rock documentary as one of the primary
causes for the spread of Direct Cinema.
91
As Winston notes, “Direct cinema made
the rock performer / tour movie into the most popular and commercially viable
documentary form.”
92
Films such as Dont Look Back and Woodstock, found an
audience beyond fans of the rock musicians the films depict.
93
In these and other
“rock docs” of the 1960s, sound and image are captured at the same time and
delivered to the audience as recorded. These documentaries deliver on the promise
of depicting the unity of body and voice along with the promise that audiences can
clearly see and hear sync musical performances in a theater.
The expectation of these films is that they offer only sync sound, as though
the presentation of non-sync sound threatens the truth of the presentation. The
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practitioners fostered such expectations with their “jargon of authenticity,”
94
yet a
consideration of 1960s rock docs reveals that the films at times offer sound and
image in relationships which do not fit the prescribed norms of sync sound –
particularly not “real” sync. It is actually more productive to regard these films as
embracing the newly available option of sync sound. The narration of even Direct
Cinema documentaries is flexible and adaptable and works, like classical narration,
to present information in an expedient rather than consistent manner.
In Dont Look Back and Woodstock sync is the ground from which the film’s
narration – as it brings together sound(s) and image(s) – can deviate as necessary.
Strikingly both of these films begin with a display of non sync sound and signal their
intention of separating sound and image. The promise that the film’s sound is “true”
to the images undergirds but does not dominate these films’ combinations of sound
and image. Though sound and image tracks are edited and organized, the claim is
that these films record events rather than create them. This logic results in the
avoidance of overt manifestations of narration such as onscreen titles, voiceover, and
talking heads addressing the camera or an offscreen interviewer. The attempt to
conceal the act of narration is these documentaries’ most ideologically suspect
practice; here in a manner more convincing than even the aesthetics of Classical
Hollywood is an attempt to make the combination of image(s) and sound(s) appear
natural and normal. The narration’s act of creating sync sound is a zero degree form
of film narration and hopes to submerge the organizing actions of editing.
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The D. A. Pennebaker-directed Bob Dylan film Dont Look Back offers a
clear example of these points and additionally shows the Direct Cinema tendency to
focus on the lives of performers. Jane Fonda, Marlon Brando, J.F.K, and the Beatles
were all subject to the new treatment and in being “themselves” offer riveting
performances for the cameras and microphones even as the films claim to offer the
“real” people behind the public personas.
95
Dont Look Back, like these films,
consists of a film crew following the film’s subject through a short period of time,
preferably a period leading up to and lingering beyond a moment of considerable
importance or even “crisis.”
96
In the film Dylan tours England at the height of his
trans-Atlantic fame. Dylan resists the film’s attempt to reveal him but in this
resistance – to some viewers – he is in fact revealed as a man of many masks.
97
The
film’s status as a sync sound documentary connects directly to its truth value because
it, at least, embalms Dylan in time. His actions and words are recorded despite
confining physical spaces, no lighting (other than available light), and a hectic
schedule the filmmakers struggle to follow.
Dont Look Back begins not with Dylan singing, or even in sync but with a
display of film narration. The film begins with its most famous, frequently
excerpted, and oft-parodied scene: Dylan stands in the alley next to the Savoy Hotel
in London holding small signs which feature portions (typically a word or two) of
the lyrics to “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” As Dave Saunders writes: “Clearly
staged and in no way interpretable as anything other than contrived, this prelude
introduces Dylan as collusive in the filmmaking process and confident enough to
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look directly out of the frame.”
98
Dylan holds and drops each sign close to the
correct moment but his lips do not move. When the song finishes and he runs out of
cards, Dylan walks away and the frame goes black. The screen is next filled with a
closeup of Dylan and the sound shifts noticeably: it is now live and in sync with the
image. As the camera zooms out to a wide shot of Dylan’s entire body the opening
credits appear. Dylan is backstage and about to begin his concert. Next appears the
first of Pennebaker’s signature shots: the camera trails just behind Dylan walking,
and captures his movements, time, place, and the experience of a space. The
juxtaposition of these two moments reveals the film’s lack of a strict sound policy.
The opening is striking for a number of reasons: the presentation of a complete song
before the title appears, the scene’s similarity to music video aesthetics and mode,
and the overt performance by Dylan (he even addresses the camera) in what purports
to be a nonfiction film. The opening’s presentation of sound is, however, the clearest
deviation from the (assumed) documentary aesthetic. Though sound and image were
seemingly recorded together since Dylan acts in time with the song, the music is pre-
recorded and its source is not visible. This immediately creates a contrast with the
next scene where the sound is indisputably recorded at the same time as the image
and issues from the material in the image. The opening violates the desire for Direct
Cinema films to conceal the functioning of film narration and thematically suggests
that Dylan is not going to be “revealed.”
In the DVD commentary for the film Pennebaker says that rather than
“directing” Dont Look Back he is “responsible for it.” Dylan, Pennebaker says,
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thought of the scene and was inspired by the French Scopitone machines which
presented images along with recorded songs.
99
The machines are basically 16mm
jukeboxes and the equivalent to the Vitaphone and Movietone shorts which allowed
audiences in the 1920s to see and hear Jolson. Unlike these earlier shorts which use
sync sound, the Scopitone shorts combine existing sound – songs – with singers
performing fake sync. In his desire to “film” a song, Dylan retreats from the new
potential offered by Direct Cinema; Dylan (re)performs his own song without
singing it and turns his audio performance into a filmic performance. “Subterranean
Homesick Blues” is a performance designed for, and dependent on, the presence of
the camera, and directly opposes the film’s presumed overall sound-image aesthetic.
The new technology available to filmmakers allowed them to capture audio–visual
performances which are not meant solely for recording devices. Dylan’s other
performances in the film are not addressed directly to the camera and would occur
whether it was present or not and the film presents a diegetic audience for the
performances.
After filming it (more than once) Pennebaker claims that he had “no idea”
what to do with it. While editing the film the sequence was put at the beginning and
never moved.
100
As an introduction to the film it is attention-grabbing, and
consciously or not, the opening proclaims that the film and its director are not
beholden to any strict theory about how sound and image should be recorded or
presented. The sequence presents no ambient sound such as car horns, the sound of
the cards hitting the ground, or the camera itself. Direct Cinema texts typically offer
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sound and image tracks which bear traces of authenticity (if not “truth”) in their
distance from the perfect aesthetics offered by fiction film. The wobbly handheld
camera finds its audio corollary in a soundtrack that is at times muddled or unclear.
In this opening however the camera is static (likely on a tripod rather than handheld)
and the sound is unblemished (because it consists of a professionally recorded rock
song). The true aural fingerprint of Direct Cinema films is the sound of the camera
itself; the whir of the camera is a confirmation of the act of recording and an aural
assurance that no sound intrudes from outside the film’s diegesis.
The film’s beginning is simply the first indication that Dont Look Back is not
strictly a sync sound film. For example, later the film matches the sounds of the
Newcastle City Hall concert as Dylan sings “Don’t Think Twice Its Alright” with
images of Dylan traveling by train. The sequence begins with Dylan onstage but as
the image track diverges from the soundtrack it becomes free not simply in time but
also in space. And just as the beginning of the film displays narration, so too does
Dylan’s final performance in the Albert Hall with an ostentatious zoom out as Dylan
sings “Love Minus Zero / No Limit.” In Saunders’ interpretation, “Pennebaker
zooms out to frame Dylan, tiny and humbled in the bottom left of the screen, the
spotlight beaming down upon him from the opposite corner like a sunbeam through a
cloud.”
101
Saunders links Dylan’s look here “towards his future”
102
with the singer’s
look at the camera in the film’s opening and which he describes as Dylan “looking
forward, at us watching him in the future, and setting his terms from the outset.”
103

An additional link between these two moments is in Pennebaker’s presentation of
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sound. As the camera zooms out the echo on the soundtrack increases. To the
attentive viewer this a clear deviation from sync sound because the microphone is
not attached to the camera and only the lens is moving anyway. While this link
between scale change in sound and image is normal in fiction film, in Dont Look
Back it is nearly ostentatious. Pennebaker reveals in the commentary that they only
had a mono recording of the song and added another copy to the soundtrack that goes
slightly faster to create this – false – echo. Pennebaker offers no apology (within the
film or in the audio commentary) for the use of sound and images which he did not
shoot or for altering the relationship betweens sound and image in the material.
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Apologies for manipulating the recorded material would be impossible in the
case of Woodstock. While some expository material is permissible in the subgenre
of the concert film (the band backstage relaxing and then storming the stage, the
audience filing into the stadium and possibly being interviewed) the films focus on
recording the concert. The (un)stated goal is to provide filmgoers with the ideal
concert experience, especially with better views and cleaner sound. Planning the
concert and the filming of the concert ensures that the concert will be legible as a
film. The concert as a live performance for paying costumers in many cases
becomes secondary to the filming and their experience is treated as less significant
than the film audiences’ experience. In privileging the recording technology, the
concert film directly addresses the cinema audience and offers the opportunity for
musicians to directly address the camera. In this, the concert film potentially
illustrates the wholly different philosophies of American Direct Cinema and Cinéma
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Vérité.
105
In Barnouw’s terms, the former is the work of an “observer” and the latter
is the work of a “catalyst.”
106
As a mode of production Cinéma Vérité presents the
effect a camera has on a situation, most typically by foregrounding the act of filming
itself. As Henry Breitrose puts it, if the Direct Cinema filmmaker wanted to be a
“fly on the wall,” then the Cinéma Vérité filmmaker wanted to be a “fly in the
soup.”
107
For all their differences, and the manner in which they made films and
theorized their actions, filmmakers in both movements respond to the opportunities
of technological change. Woodstock is not pure Cinéma Vérité, certainly, but it
makes plain that cameras are recording the concert and encourages the audience to
equate the film with the concert.
With Woodstock, even more than in the case of many other concert films, the
division between “concert” and “film” is largely illusionary
108
(and included too
must be the soundtrack album which was released before the film, and various other
commodities available to buttress the Woodstock experience).
109
The massive
concert / film makes use of 35mm and 16mm cameras to provide the cinema
audience with an experience not simply of the musical performances but the totality
of the event. The film attempts to collapse the distinction between performer and
audience in a more overt way than the (classical) musical. The film regularly cuts
between performers and audience members dancing in (drug induced?) joy, using
editing to forge connections between the two groups. Sometimes the widescreen
frame splits to simultaneously present rock performer and rock fan as visually and
ideological united under the banner of “rock.”
110
The film furthermore unites the
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cinema audience with the individuals in the film’s diegesis. Woodstock makes its
audience members of the “Woodstock Nation” regardless of their participation in the
weekend in New York.
111
By seeing the film the viewer “attends” the concert and
becomes a citizen of the Woodstock Nation with all of its privileges. This is
indicated by one video box caption for the film: “But even when it’s over, it’s not
over. Woodstock is part of history. Those who were there will never forget it. And
this film will make the experience come to life again for new generations.”
The film’s use of sync sound plays no small part in its value to future
generations. Hendrix’s performance, for example, is available in other forms, in part
for study by those who want to know how (in theory) Hendrix made those amazing
sounds.
112
The promise of sync is the appeal; sync sound in Woodstock and other
sync rock docs is the primary location of the film’s spectacle. As Hendrix takes
apart the “Star Spangled Banner” and then puts it back together again, the screen is
filled with his hands and the neck of his Stratocaster. There is nothing else on screen
because nothing else matters.
113

Woodstock does not only present sound and image together however. In
addition to cutting between performer and audience – with no change in sound
properties – like Dont Look Back, the film begins preparations for the concert and
recorded songs. The first is Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s “Long Time Gone” whose
first line functions as a statement of the importance of the event: “It's been a long
time comin’.” The soundtrack next features Canned Heat’s joyful “Goin’ Up the
Country” as the screen shows a number of concertgoers arriving and setting up camp
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and then Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s “Wooden Ships” (which turns the story of
Ulysses and the Lotus Eaters into a drug parable) plays as preparations continue into
the night and some dance around campfires. After a few seconds of black screen the
sun rises and the film’s structure is quickly established: songs and / or performances
followed by interviews with concertgoers. The back and forth structure assists the
project of equating audience with performers. The film runs for over 20 minutes
before Richie Havens takes the stage and delivers an unmistakably “sync”
performance of “Handsome Johnny”

and thereafter the movement between sync
sound performance and non-sync continues.
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Several montage sequences – notably one documenting drug use at the event
– use nondiegetic music to further link the shots. Though the music may be (and
often is) from the concert, in these sequences it is used in a manner indistinguishable
from classical film. For example, as John Sebastain sings “Younger Generation” the
narration provides a montage of children partially justified by the song’s lyrics.
Santana’s later performance of “Soul Sacrifice” is a highlight of both concert and
film. Much of the song is presented through split-screen shots of Santana’s band on
the left side of frame and audience members on the right. At the end of the song the
narration provides a quick recap of the audience members who enjoyed the song and
this allows them to seemingly take a bow along with Santana. Performer and
audience are linked through their status as filmed subjects and by the film’s
narration. Like Dont Look Back, Woodstock offers a range of sync options: sound
and image recorded together, temporal slippage between recorded sound and image,
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and recorded music used with different (nonsync) images. The film demonstrates the
act of narration involved in documentary films, and demonstrates that sync is a
convention rather than an absolute in sound / image relationships.
The influence of these “sync” documentaries can also be seen in fiction films
which include moments of performance. A clear example is 1978’s The Buddy
Holly Story, a biopic of the titular singer featuring Gary Busey. Rather than have
Busey and others lip-sync and mime the playing of instruments, the actors play and
sing Holly’s songs. The film audibly shifts to stereo for the performances and the
sound is real sync sound.
115
The obtrusiveness of the transitions allow the further
separation of moments of spectacle – in audio form – from the film’s story and
accentuates the appeal and spectacle of sync sound. Busey and the other actors
perform and, and while on a much smaller scale than The Jazz Singer, here the
presentation of sync sound is a clear attraction.
116

Sink Sound: Avant-Garde Approaches to Sync
Commercial cinema is not the only domain of sound / image relations. This section
discusses nonnarrative films which offer sound and image as opposed and
contradictory.
Fred Camper addresses the sync / async binary in nonnarrative cinema and
provocatively asserts: “For as many varieties as may exist of synchronous sound in
film, there are at least as many varieties of asynchronous sound.”
117
He then notes
that “The great maker of asynchronous sound films is Peter Kubelka” and offers a
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revealing analysis of Unsere Afrikareise (Our Trip to Africa).
118
Camper initially
says that the film is “perhaps the densest and most ecstatic compendium of the
possibilities of asynchronous sound in the cinema. Kubelka’s technique is to marry
precisely – rhythmically and thematically – an image with a sound that derives from
elsewhere.” In these two sentences Camper begins to shift the label of Kubelka’s
films from async to sync; for Camper the film is not so much asynchronous as the
supposed opposite, synchronous. Camper continues and explains that Kubelka’s,
“asynchronous” sound is in fact synchronous, in that sound and image
are clearly matched. At times they seem to unite rhythmically as
closely as lip and sound do in lip-sync. The difference, of course, is
that one is very aware that the sound married to an image in no way
comes from the natural object, but that Kubelka has made a new
entity, which has some of the qualities of an object in the natural
world and yet also is a comment on that world.
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Though Camper does not call attention to the fact, Kubelka’s film uses sounds and
images which he recorded. The director uses audio and visual material Kubelka
recorded of some Austrians on a hunting trip to Africa in 1961. Kubelka scrambles
the relationship between sound and image and creates layers of collision, but, as
Camper notes, makes a film which is a series of sync points as defined by Chion,
Donnelly, and Kubelka himself.
120
Camper’s movement of the film from one side of
the binary to the other is telling: sync and asynchronous sound have never been
defined with enough precision to account for work like Kubelka’s.
An equally complex film is The Rock n Roll Film (aka short dash long dash)
which combines concert footage of rock performances with images of the production
and sale of recorded rock music. While the film runs only a few minutes, it contains
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over a hundred shots arranged from shortest to longest (with the last running just
over a minute). The final shot is a pair of ecstatically gyrating feet on stage which
are finally revealed by the camera’s upward tilt to be Mick Jagger’s. The address of
images in The Rock n Roll Film was composed by Thom Anderson while the
soundtrack was constructed by Malcolm Brodwick. This dual directing is a clear
indication of the film’s unsurpassed demonstration of the conflict between sound and
image which drives cinema. The soundtrack was prepared with sounds mostly from
Anderson’s record collection, and like the image track, consists of quick bits of
information which increase in length as the film progresses. The sounds not only do
not “belong” to the images with regard to diegesis, but were prepared independently
of the image track. Anderson instructed Brodwick how much time the sound track
should run and how long to make a few of the sound portions, including the last
audio clip. The result is a film which avoids the sync points upon which most films,
even Unsere Afrikareise, rely. The film’s mostly chance structure refuses the easy
link of cuts on both sound and image and stimulates the audience both aurally and
visually. The two tracks of information press the audience to follow each and
constantly weigh the exchange. By separating the two modes of film address at the
level of production, the film forcefully demonstrates, like the sync documentaries
discussed above, that sync sound is only a convention. Its juxtaposition of the
control and lack of control of cinema over sound and image relations makes The
Rock n Roll Film perhaps the finest and most texturally rich rock film ever made.
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The film demonstrates the circulation of music in culture: live performance,
recordings, and an aural element of cinema and presents rock as live performance,
recorded performance, and a mass-produced commodity. Just as the sound track
moves from early rock n roll, to pop, to soul, and the 1960s rock, the image track
offers a range of how rock can be offered in visual terms. Musicians sing and play
instruments while audiences dance to live and recorded music. By 1966 rock has
been offered in film for 10 years, and this film functions as a document of its history
and its potential to be visualized, acknowledging and expanding on the use of rock
music in films like Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963) and Bruce Conner’s
Cosmic Ray (1961) and Breakaway (1966). The image track consists of footage shot
by Anderson himself, primarily on the Sunset Strip and this gives the film a
documentary quality in displaying mid-1960s Los Angeles similar to Riot on the
Sunset Strip (1967).
121
The sound track, on the other hand, consists of music
recorded and sold by companies (and largely not the small record labels which
spread rock in the 1950s). The energy from the sounds, images, and these fleeting
chance moments of correspondence present rock as a commodity (the images of a
record factory are as cold and clinical as an assembly line in a car factory) but one
which also exceeds Anderson and Brodwick’s representation. The energy and
ecstasy of Jagger’s shuffling feet can not be contained by either the Rolling Stone’s
music – on sale at a store near you – or the act of turning his performance into a
film.
122
Anderson’s footage, when linked to his own records, demonstrates the
friction between rock as an experience (admittedly perhaps best experienced live and
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with the sync sound of reality) and rock as commodity. Rock as a musical form is
live and also recorded; rock is a fleeting instant and doomed to be captured and
contained.
The Rock n Roll Film is a nonnarrative, non-industrial film about industrial
music and a dynamic demonstration that sound and image in film are separate forms
of address even when operating in a synchronous manner. Donnelly forcefully
argues for regarding sound and image as unique: “Film music works through its own
logic and (more importantly) through its logic of interaction with other stylistic
aspects of film.”
123
He continues:
Film and music have different floor plans of logic and aesthetics.
Sometimes they converge. Sometimes they work off each other in a
seamless manner. At other times, destructive feedback occurs,
allowing for the possibility that the aesthetic object (the film
composite) may break down in its workings.

This argument applies particularly well to avant-garde films. In the binary
established by the “Statement” The Rock n Roll Film is an asynchronous film.
Sound and image were not recorded at the same time or place. They do not maintain
a stable narrative-temporal relationship (each track’s components vary in length
independent of the other track’s elements). And the film refuses sync points. The
film was seldom screened and little discussed, but now can be regarded as a
significant intervention in avant-garde production, documentary and the “rock
film.”
124

Unlike The Rock n Roll Film, (nostalgia) and filmmaker Hollis Frampton
have been subject to considerable analysis.
125
Theorists use a variety of critical
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positions to dissect the film and 2006 saw the release of Rachel Moore’s monograph.
Moore displays the current fascination with modernity and theories of mass culture,
particularly those of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Theodor Adorno.
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The film has been “reprinted” in texts – including Moore’s book – as a screenplay of
the voiceover and a single image or two which stands in for the photographs.
(nostalgia) presents a series of black and white photographs which slowly turn to ash
on a hot plate. On the soundtrack a voice – presumably the photographer’s –
describes the photographs’ contents and how they were taken. Each block of
voiceover and a new image are roughly contemporary, but the fit is never exact and
the voiceover trails off but the photograph continues to wither in silence.
Since (nostalgia) is so emphatically a film (a series of still images projected
to provide motion) and is about still images (photographs) it encourages this sort of
“reprinting.” That Frampton did not allow his films to circulate as anything other
than films is important as well.
127
Moore’s text teasingly suggests the film
experience by including the film’s 6
th
image on the bottom right hand corner of each
page so readers can flip the pages and “see” the photograph burn. What all of these
reprints, including Moore’s own, lack is a discussion of the film’s sound. She does
however locate a letter from Frampton where labels the film “A bottomless pit of
maudlin sentiment, fossilized cleverness and asynchrony,”
128
but she offers no
response to this comment. As someone keenly aware of Eisenstein’s practice and
theory, Frampton’s choice of the term “asynchronous” is not idle but is perhaps not
helpful.
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The label appears in descriptions of the film because the images and
voiceover descriptions are mismatched. Sarah Kozloff states
when editors decide to cut the narration and image out of step with
each other, disparities can be created, forcing the viewer to scramble
to match up the verbal and visual information. (The avant-garde
filmmaker Hollis Frampton takes temporal mismatching to extremes
in (nostalgia).)
129

The relationship between sound and image in the film is consistent however because
the image on screen (after the first image lacks sound) is presented with the
voiceover description of what “belongs” with the next. The film presents 13 images
and 13 voiceover descriptions, so following Frampton’s example of mapping
narratives in “Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative,” if the image track of his film
is labeled with the alphabet (A-L) and the sound track is labeled with numbers (1-13)
the film might be described in this way:
A/2, B/3, C/4, D/5, E/6, F/7, G/8, H/9, I/10, J/11, K/12, L/13, /14
Most films (if one were to map them in this crude way) would be described with A/1,
B/2, C/3, etc. because the sounds of a given image are experienced with the image.
Since the sound (1) which “should” accompany the first image (A) is never heard
and the image (M) which “should” accompany the final sound (14) is never seen
they are not listed. As Kozloff notes, the film’s structure requires the audience to
track the aural description of one image while looking at a different image whose
aural description has passed.
The film’s imprecise sync is matched by slippage in the voiceover.
(nostalgia) separates the voice from the image at the level of production. Frampton’s
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film provides the grain of the voice of a non-author, and this places the voiceover at
the opposite end of the “authorial” spectrum from Hellinger’s voiceover for Naked
City.
130
Though the speaker repeatedly says “I,” the voice belongs to friend and
fellow filmmaker Michael Snow.
131
The film’s detachment is aurally layered; the
grain of Snow’s voice is profoundly detached because the voice is not the director’s,
the speaker did not take these photographs and he is not examining them “now” with
his own eyes and memory. The speaker is not even watching the photographs burn.
The Rock n Roll Film and (nostalgia) contribute to the avant-garde practice
avoiding classical sync sound and Michael Snow’s Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot
(Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen goes beyond them to seemingly exhaust
sync sound options. Paul Arthur has argued for a tendency in avant-garde cinema he
calls the “First Film / Last Film syndrome.” This tendency is “underwritten by a
desire to supplant all previous versions of a given theme or formal practice. By
taking a facet of cinema to its furthest point of logical development, works . . .
situate themselves as beyond the reach of historical incorporation.”
132
Arthur
mentions Snow’s film in this category because its five hour plus running time
catalogs seemingly every possible combination of sound and image.
In a film full of puns and language games, the best is the section titled “sink
sound.” Here the frame is almost filled with image of a sink and a pair of hands
rhythmically hitting its surfaces. On the soundtrack, and perfectly “in sync” with the
image, are the sounds of percussive instruments. Sound and image are in sync yet
each is independent of the other while sharing time and space and bound by sync
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points. The hands of the sink “drummer” recall Jolson’s hands on the piano in The
Jazz Singer in that each stands in visually for the action of hands outside the frame.
The crucial difference is that the earlier film deceives. Snow, responding to the
tradition of which The Jazz Singer is emblematic, demonstrates the act of narration
required to create sync sound.
Snow’s film continues the Structural film project of examining the forms and
structures of cinema. While noting that in the film “sounds are often rendered in a
deliberately unnaturalistic manner through a series of self-conscious acts of
recording and editing: proximity to the microphone, modulation during a take,
superimposition of sounds, and substitution in editing,” Sitney relates the aural
elements to the visual properties of Snow’s other films:
This rendering of sonic perspective, which is analogous to the camera
movements of the earlier films, retards the immediate assimilation of
the sounds as language or as natural background; thus the range of
difficulty of recognition from raw noise to articulate speech (and
music) enters as a thematic element in the film.
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While this is correct, Sitney understates the centrality of the film’s sound. Though
concerned with sound in his earlier films such as Wavelength (1967), here Snow
builds on and responds to sound in both commercial and avant-garde contexts,
including his aural appearance as “Hollis Frampton” in Frampton’s a/synchronous
(nostalgia).
Rameau’s Nephew. . . embraces the film audience’s desire for unity in a
sound / image combination by creating each and highlighting their various
interactions. After hearing, and viewing, the film, it is difficult to imagine a more
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comprehensive investigation of how film brings together sound and image. The film
is itself an analysis of sound in film and mocks the efforts of film scholars (though
not maliciously). To discuss Rameau’s Nephew. . . is to turn the consideration of
sound in image into a meta-discussion.

Conclusion: Out of Sync
The preceding discussion has intended to show that across a range of production
modes (major studio, independent, avant-garde) connections to narrative, genres,
cinema brings together sound and image in a variety of relationships which can only
partially be explained with reference to the unfocused tradition of “sync” and
“async” sound. The classical era of American film depends, in part, on the
presentation of sync sound. Though initially contested, this became the norm. In
postwar / pre-Dolby cinema sound and image are treated as partners in film.
Steve Wurtzler demonstrates the usefulness of considering the temporal and
spatial relationship between an audience and an aural event, especially one involving
the voice. His test case is Whitney Houston’s performance of the “Star Spangled
Banner” at the Super Bowl in 1991 where she lip-synced to her own recording.
Spectators at the game thought they were both spatially and temporally co-present
with the performance and viewers at home thought they were spatially separate but
temporally co-present with the event.
134
When news of this “performance” emerged
Houston’s representatives explained that she actually did sing but her microphone
was not on. The complaints were short-lived and had no discernible effect on sales
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of Houston’s performance. In fact, the case is part of a cycle of outrage and
acceptance played out in reality and fiction films which begins in the late 1920s and
encompasses Milli Vanilli’s concert debacle, Ashlee Simpson’s exposure on
“Saturday Night Live,” and fictional representations from Singin’ in the Rain to The
Lizzie McGuire Movie (2003).
135

The issues which circulate around “sync” linger in the realms of performance
beyond the voice. In film, “sync” remains a concern in two ways. First, digital
technology records sound and image together easily and can also, like the
documentaries of the sixties, feature an “imperfect” soundtrack that functions as an
analog to the grainy images. For example, films made in compliance with the
Dogma 95 manifesto encourage the use of digital technology and must abide by rules
on sound.
136
Dogma bans music unless it occurs organically in the scene, so in the
first scene of his film Idioterne (The Idiots, 1998) Lars von Trier cheats by using an
offscreen musician.
137
Von Trier acknowledges the centrality of this rule, calling it
“the most interesting”
138
and stating “the most important rule was that the picture and
sound should be recorded simultaneously. It excludes manipulation – you cannot
cheat afterwards in the editing room.”
139
For Anne Jerslev, “Dogma 95 may be
regarded as an audio-visual transformation of Bazin’s thoughts. Sound represents or
underlines the embalming of time, the impression that what once was, is
simultaneously here and now; an idea Bazin connected to photography alone.”
140

Documentary films, particularly Direct Cinema and Cinema Vérité films had done
this already, and fiction films still rely on (some) sound from the moment of filming.
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The demand of Dogma is for sound to be “glued” to the image and become a marker
of reality, binding together sound and image and time and space.
Second, “sync” is still a term used to consider the interaction of sound and
image in film, and has legal implications. The domination of rock music and the use
of popular music in film has led to a new and vitally important meaning of the term:
the right to use a given song. According to ASCAP:
A synchronization or “synch” right involves the use of a recording
of musical work in audio-visual form: for example as part of a
motion picture, television program, commercial announcement,
music video or other videotape. Often, the music is “synchronized”
or recorded in timed relation with the visual images.
Synchronization rights are licensed by the music publisher to the
producer of the movie or program.
141

For the music and film industry today “sync” is the right – through payment – to
marry existing music to a film or other visual media. Filmmakers must provide
financial compensation to link sound and image (at least in a form other than a temp
track). This use of the term contributes to the nebulous and contradictory history of
“sync” in film. To acquire the rights to a song ensures that the film will not feature
truly “sync” sound because the music has not been recorded with the image. This
music – rock, pop, hip hop – is often “synced” with montage sequences and the
film’s (closing) credits. These songs and the intertextual baggage which each brings
to the film are not presented as a performance on screen and therefore the song has
no visible source. Films of the postwar / pre-Dolby era which foreground issues of
“diegetic” sound, visible sources, and film diegesis are the subject of the next
chapter.
178

Chapter 4 Endnotes

1
S. M. Eisenstein, V. I. Pudovkin, and G. V. Alexandrov, “A Statement,” Trans. Jay Leyda, Film
Sound: Theory and Practice, Ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia UP, 1985)
83. Though now not nearly as famous as his credited co-writers, Alexandrov served as Eisenstein’s
assistant on Strike and Potemkin and co-directed and co-wrote both October and Old and New. He
moved from documentaries to comedies and worked into the 1980s. An examination of the use(s) of
sound in his filmmaking career as director is in order.

2
For example, S. S. Prawer writes: “Herzog . . .likes to deprive audiences of the sound that they
have come to expect ever since Al Jolson spoke and sung those first words on the world’s screens.”
Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, BFI Modern Classics (London: BFI, 2004) 77.

3
Arthur Knight, The Liveliest Art: A Panoramic History of the Movies, Rev. ed. (New York: Mentor,
1979) 145.

4
Douglas Gomery, The Coming of Sound (New York: Routledge, 2005) 47-54. The author reveals
the integral role which Fox played in bringing sound to film.

5
Singin’ in the Rain is often regarded as an accurate, or at least not too inaccurate, portrayal of
Hollywood’s transition to sound. What is true about the film’s story of sound in Hollywood is that the
film portrays sound itself – in the form of beautiful voices which may or may not be attached to the
bodies presented on screen – as an attraction for audiences.

6
Perhaps the most famous is Rudolf Arnheim: “A New Laocoön: Artistic Composites and the
Talking Film.” Here the author rejects not simply sound – which he regards as a frivolous attempt to
combine two different forms of art – but even attempts to create counterpoint or asynchronous sound.
See Film as Art (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1957).

7
In Greystoke Andie MacDowell’s voice is dubbed by Glenn Close.

8
For Duras see, for example, William F. Van Wert, “The Cinema of Marguerite Duras: Sound and
Voice in a Closed Room,” Film Quarterly 33.1 (1979): 22-29. See also Barton Byg, Landscapes of
Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (Berkeley, CA: U of
California P, 1995).

9
Mary Ann Doane and Kaja Silverman are the most influential writers on sound who build on the
foundation of the “Statement.” Leo Braudy in a brief review of some New York Newsreel films
writes: “The non-sync film becomes more radical than the sync because sync suggests easy solutions,
the effortless marriage of word and image. But these films imply that neither the problems nor the
solutions are easy.” He also remarks, “The understanding needed to bring together sound and image
mirrors the understanding necessary to translate accurate analysis into appropriate political action.”
Leo Braudy, “Newsreel: A Report,” Film Quarterly 21.2 (1968): 49.

10
Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov 83.

11
Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov 83.

12
Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov 84.

13
Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov 84.
179

14
Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov 84.

15
Thompson argues that Soviet writers welcomed sound as an element of montage: “The sound film
was simply a major extension of the montage principle” (118). Thompson demonstrates that the best
way to understand the argument of the essay is to examine how films in the early Soviet sound period
put sound and image in a relationship which is something other than synchronous. She explains: “A
simple definition as a disjunction between sound and image will not do. First, it is vague; was
counterpoint different from the stylized sound use recommended by European writers? Second, the
definition does not deal with the functions which counterpoint devices played in the films. Styles are
defined not only by their typical devices, but also those devices’ typical functions (117). Kristin
Thompson, “Early Sound Counterpoint,” Yale French Studies 60.1 (1980): 115-140.

16
Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov 84.

17
Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov 84.

18
V. I. Pudovkin, “Asynchronism as a Principle of Sound Film,” Trans. Marie Seton and Ivor
Montagu, Film Sound: Theory and Practice, Ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York:
Columbia UP, 1985): 86.

19
Pudovkin 87.

20
Pudovkin 89.

21
Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film Art (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004) uses Marker’s film as
an example of a stable image and more than one voiceover sound track. Allen reworks the film
Kokusai himitsu keisatsu: Kagi no kagi (1965, International Secret Police: Key of Keys).

22
For one of the finest considerations of the film see Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise:
Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot, (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1996).

23
Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1987)
46.

24
A number of these shorts are available on the special edition DVD of The Jazz Singer.

25
Gorbman 46.

26
Gorbman 46.

27
Gorbman 46.

28
Richard De Cordova, “Genre and Performance: An Overview,” Film Genre Reader II, Ed. Barry
Keith Grant (Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 1995) 130.

29
De Cordova 131.

30
Jane Feuer, “The Self-Reflexive Musical and the Myth of Entertainment,” Film Genre Reader II,
Ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 1995) 442.

31
Feuer 449.

180

32
Feuer 453.

33
Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound 1926-1931 (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997) 516-531.

34
Crafton 120.

35
Crafton 509.

36
Sarah Kozloff, Overhearing Film Dialogue (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2000) 98.

37
Kozloff 99.

38
Eisler [and Theodor Adorno], Composing for the Films (New York, Oxford UP, 1947). They
argue: “The human ear has not adapted itself to the bourgeois rational and, ultimately, highly
industrialized order as readily as the eye, which has become accustomed to conceiving reality as made
up of separate things, commodities, objects that can be modified by practical activity. Ordinary
listening, as compared to seeing, is ‘archaic’; it has not kept pace with technological progress” (20).
They continue: “For this reason acoustical perception preserves comparably more traits of long
bygone, pre-individualistic collectivities than optical perception” (21). Burch calls for a dialectic
relationship between sound and image is clearly informed by the Eisler critique. Noël Burch, Theory
of Film Practice. Trans. Helen R. Lane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1981)

39
James Buhler and David Neumeyer connect synchronization to the desire to preserve the “filmic
illusion” and then to feminist film theory: “It seems hardly coincidental that the theory of
synchronization links music to the image in much the same way as classical film links the female
voice to the body; furthermore, in both cases this link ensures discursive order. Just as the illusion of
unity between voice and body is consistently upheld in the female characters so as not to disrupt the
discursive authority of the male subject, so too music that mimics the image allows music to be
integrated into the filmic world without challenging the discursive or narrative authority of the image”
(379-80). James Buhler and David Neumeyer, Review of Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and
Hollywood Film Music and Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film, Journal of
the Musicological Society 47.2 (1994): 364-385.
Composing for the Films, like the “Statement,” is used by many scholars to create a rigid
binary of synchronous music on the one hand and counterpoint on the other. Buhler summarizes the
uses in “Analytical and Interpretive Approaches to Film Music (II): Analysing Interactions of Music
and Film”: “Under the theory of synchronization, music may occasionally extend beyond what the
narrative presents in order to clarify what would otherwise be ambiguous, but its guiding aesthetic is
one of restraint, with the music allowed to depart from the image only if it effectively enhances
narrative clarity” (45). On the other side is counterpoint which, “takes its point of departure from the
technological separation of soundtrack and imagetrack,” and this allows the argument that
“synchronized sound contributes rather little to film, especially when compared to the more
autonomous musical sound that accompanies the silent cinema” (45). They conclude, in part: “In
actuality, synchronization and counterpoint are ideal types only rarely encountered in pure form.
Synchronized sound, though clearly a guiding norm, is hardly an absolute in classic cinema, even for
dialogue” (46). James Buhler, “Analytical and Interpretive Approaches to Film Music (II): Analysing
Interactions of Music and Film,” Film Music: Critical Approaches, Ed. K. J. Donnelly (New York:
Continuum, 2001) 39-61.

40
Quoted in Buhler 45.

181

41
For the non-musicologist at least, the experience of Hangmen Also Die! (1943) with its Eisler score
does not seem different from other Hollywood films of the era. It is perhaps worth noting that Eisler’s
work for Hollywood – after he fled Europe – occurs in the 1940s. More celebrated is his work for
Renais’ Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955).

42
Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film, (Madison, WI: U of
Wisconsin P, 1992) 34.

43
Eisler 4.

44
Eisler 9.

45
Philip Rosen, “Adorno and Film Music: Theoretical Notes on Composing for the Films,” Yale
French Studies 60.1 (1980): 165.

46
Eisler 11.

47
Eisler 132.

48
Kevin Donnelly, Film and Television Music: The Spectre of Sound (London: BFI, 2005) 11.

49
Chion also weighs in the on idea of “counterpoint.” Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on
Screen, Ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia UP, 1994) 35-36.

50
Chion, Audio-Vision 58.

51
Chion, Audio-Vision 63.

52
Chion, Audio-Vision 63.

53
Chion, Audio-Vision 63.

54
Crafton 509.

55
Crafton 509.

56
Crafton 510.

57
Crafton 511.

58
In his most famous roles Chaney disappears into characters. Some of his finest work is in The
Phantom of the Opera (1925), The Unholy Three (1925) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923).

59
Crafton 511.

60
Crafton 513.

61
Crafton 514.

62
For a comprehension and concise discussion of Hayworth’s career see Adrienne L. McLean, Being
Rita Hayworth: Labor Identity and Hollywood Stardom (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2004).

182

63
As Donald Crafton notes: “Most efforts to synchronize sound and image either did not make it out
of the lab or failed to win approval because they did not work. The illusion that a voice is emanating
from a person on-screen is very fragile. The tolerance is less than one frame of projection time, a
standard difficult to maintain for the duration of a ten-minute reel” (9).

64
Leo Braudy offers an interesting analysis of the films in The World in a Frame: What We See in
Films (Garden City, New York: Anchor, 1977) 238-239.

65
Columbia could not get the rights to Jolson’s songs. Warner Bros also declined to allow the studio
to use footage from The Jazz Singer.

66
Benson is a thinly disguised Ruby Keeler who did not allow the filmmakers to use her name. Drew
Casper remarks “Audiences did not seem to mind its unclassical non-reconciliation of the
biographee’s career and love life, a harbinger of things to come.” See Postwar Hollywood, 1946-
1962 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007) 282.

67
Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, Ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia UP,
1999). Chion begins this chapter by distinguishing between dubbing and playback. Of the former he
writes: “Words were uttered, but they have been lost or removed. What remains is an image of
moving lips, of the body that utters. An unseen actor molds her fiction to these moving lips and her
voice is hitched to the image to take the place of the absent words” (153). There is a “doubling” in
this process. “Sound loiters around the image like the voice around the body. What prevents it from
begin definitively fixed there is the words that have been lost or suppressed, the words of the original
utterance that the image attests to. These words can not be forgotten. Dubbing produces a palimpsest
beneath which there runs a ghost-text. It is a centrifugal process, tending toward rupture and
dispersion. It is proper to the sound film, since it was invented alongside the sound film” (153).
Of the latter he writes: “Words were / are uttered by voices. Over these words, actors (whether or not
they’re the owners of these voices) make their bodies sing, speak, move. This time it is the body that
molds itself precisely to the voice, the image that is constructed to match the sound.” In dubbing
there is a doubling and it is a centrifugal process. But playback, on the other hand, is a centripetal
process” (153).

68
Chion, Voice in Cinema 157.

69
Syberberg films the opera with actors rather than opera singers. Chion, Audio-Vision 155-156.

70
Lost in the discussions of The Jolson Story is that Jolson is also performing though not onscreen
(and perhaps also deserving of acting accolades).

71
Parks was one of the earliest victims of HUAC and the blacklist. “Although a reluctant witness,
Parks was the first Hollywood personality to admit publicly ever being a Red.” See Doug
McClelland, Blackface to Blacklist: Al Jolson, Larry Parks, and The Jolson Story (Lanham, MD:
Scarecrow, 1987).

72
See Barthes’ “The Grain of the Voice,” Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978).

73
This and the following line from Variety are both quoted in James Fisher, Al Jolson: A Bio-
Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994) 113.

74
Audiences could also attend screenings of “silent” films for the experience of hearing a particular
voice either describe the onscreen action or “dub” character voices. See chapters 8 and 9 of Rick
Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia UP, 2004).
183

75
Though the film was shot in Technicolor and in a nitrate print it is a truly striking film. On DVD
the film looks stagy and fairly bland.

76
The further implications for theorizations of diegesis presented by these films are briefly
considered in the next chapter.

77
See Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1987) 200-71.

78
Such concerns continue in recent biopics like Ray (2004) and Walk the Line (2005). In the former,
Jamie Foxx plays the piano but lip-syncs to Ray Charles’s famous recordings. In the latter Joaquin
Phoenix mimics the voice of Johnny Cash. Both men were nominated for Best Actor but perhaps
surprisingly only the lip-syncer won the award. At the 2008 Oscars Marion Cotillard won for her lip-
sync performance as Edith Piaf in La Môme (La Vie en rose).

79
Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (Berkeley, CA: U of California P,
1999) 468.

80
Offscreen Jolson wanted desperately to play himself in both films, and fought to do so – even
talking his way into a screen test for Jolson Sings Again. Columbia used this to assist Parks. He did
eventually get this opportunity when the films were turned into radio plays in the early 1950s. See
McClelland 36-39, 264 -70, and Michael Freedland, Al Jolson (London: Abacus, 1975) 202-212.

81
See Drew Casper, Postwar Hollywood, 1946-1962 (New York: Blackwell, 2007) 54.

82
Fisher 144-46.

83
Or by turning on the radio. Jolson took over the “Kraft Music Hall” show in 1947 and ran the
show into 1949. He also appeared with Bing Crosby on his radio show on multiple occasions.

84
Which in 1952 would purchase struggling Universal.

85
Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of Non-Fiction Film, 2
nd
rev. ed. (New York: Oxford UP,
1993) 80.

86
Renov’s “Towards a Poetics of Documentary,” Theorizing Documentary (New York: Routledge,
1993) 32-35.

87
Barnouw 251.

88
Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited (London: BFI, 1995) 122.

89
Winston 123.

90
Winston 147.

91
Though Mamber interestingly uses the term for a quite different documentary movement: Cinéma
Vérité. See Stephen Mamber, Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974). Mamber is perhaps the clearest example of a major writer who
conflates Direct Cinema with Cinema Vérité. The very title of his book would be more accurately
“American Direct Cinema” as he is concerned less with the display of Cinéma Vérité and more with
the concealed narration offered by Direct Cinema.

184

92
Winston 205.

93
The first rock documentary is normally regarded as Steve Binder’s The T.A.M.I. Show (1964). Its
status as a film is debated as it was shot with video but did, in fact, play in theaters. The work is a
document of a staged concert which brings together American and English recording artists. The film
begins not with the concert itself but a credit sequence featuring a song written and recorded for the
show playing behind footage of the various bands frolicking in Southern California.

94
The phrase is Paul Arthur’s in “Jargons of Authenticity (Three American Moments),” Theorizing
Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993): 108-134.

95
The films are, respectively, Jane (1962), Meet Marlon Brando (1965), Primary (1960), and What’s
Happening! The Beatles in the USA (1964).

96
Mamber refers to these films as offering “crisis narratives” in Cinema Verite in America.

97
The centerpiece of Todd Haynes I’m Not There (2007) is a skewed recreation of Pennebaker’s
film. For Haynes’ film it is a key moment in Dylan’s life, a key moment in representations of Dylan,
and the most important section of Haynes’ own film.

98
Dave Saunders, Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and Politics of the Sixties (London:
Wallflower, 2007) 59.

99
Dylan’s interest in this device – and clear input in making Dont Look Back – is the first example of
his keen interest in cinema which continues up to the present.

100
The DVD includes an alternate sequence with Dylan standing in a park (rather than an alley)
flanked again by Allen Ginsberg and Bob Neuwirth.

101
Saunders 80.

102
Saunders 80.

103
Saunders 59.

104
Another obvious deviation from the norms of sync sound is the direct cut to footage – clearly not
shot by Pennebaker – of Dylan singing in a field. In his commentary Pennebaker explains his
decision to cut away from Dylan. In the film the director’s offscreen voice asks Dylan about his
origins: “What started you off?” After a moment of Dylan thinking of a response the film cuts to this
other footage which was shot by someone else in Mississippi who was doing a film on civil rights.
That person passed the footage along to DA and he put it on a shelf. While editing the film he was
not sure what to do with Dylan’s response to the question and quickly decided to use this footage. He
describes it as, “Fortuitous” and says of the making of the film “a lot of it was just happenstance.”

105
One should be clear about terminology. Though the label has been applied to the work of a
variety of documentary filmmakers, its origins lie in the work of French filmmakers such as Jean
Rouch. As Brian Winston explains, French practitioners and theorists used cinéma direct and cinéma
vérité to describe the movement. The terms and style spread and in America the movement which
many call Direct Cinema took shape a few years later. Yet while Direct Cinema had the goal of
observation, the goal of Cinéma Vérité is better seen as provocation. One of the clearest rhetorical
innovations of the movement was allowing the film’s subjects to view the film (or portions of it) and
the display of filming. This includes the use of the interview which displays the interviewer (typically
185

the director himself). Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin have each written eloquently about their
collaboration on Chronicle of a Summer (1961), the film which is most often discussed as
representative of Cinéma Vérité. In his essay, “Chronicle of a Film,” Morin reveals the influence of
test screenings on the film’s most famous attribute: the filmmakers’ appearance in the film. He states
that the test screenings demonstrate that “spectators believe much more strongly in the truth of those
scenes in which Rouch and I appear in front of the camera, participating in the dialogue with our
characters.” Because of this reaction, the two incorporated more footage of themselves in the finished
film. This suggests that at least a little bit of the film’s uniqueness and originality is not simply the
product of revolutionary theory but also a product of striving to convince audiences that what is on the
screen can reasonably be called truth. See Edgar Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” Cine-Ethnography:
Jean Rouch, Ed. Steven Feld (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2003) 255-.

106
Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of Non-Fiction Film, 2
nd
rev. ed. (New York: Oxford UP,
1993) 231-62. Barnouw also locates the English Free Cinema movement as “observational.”

107
Quoted in Winston, Claiming the Real 188.

108
The film is self-conscious about contributing to the (then) existing discourse about the event.
There are numerous moments in the film where the discourse about “Woodstock” is addressed. Show
opener Richie Havens says that the next day everyone will read about “how groovy you were.” And
before he takes the stage a newspaper headline about traffic at “Hippiefest” is read to the crowd and
greeted with laughter. Much later John Sebastian asks the crowd to love each other, pick up a little
trash, “look out for the fence” because the “press can only say bad things unless there ain’t no
fuckups.” He then proclaims: “This is gonna work.” Discussions about the event being declared a
“disaster area” are sprinkled throughout. And the farmer sums up by saying “your producers have
done a mammoth job.” But really “the important thing that you’ve proven to the world is that a half a
million kids . . . can get together and have three days of fun and music and have nothing but fun and
music. And I God Bless You for it.” All of this material only serves to illustrate that the film seeks to
have the final word on explaining “Woodstock.”

109
Accompanying the film upon its release was a 3 LP soundtrack album that went to Number 1 on
the Billboard charts immediately. The concert itself was branded by Arnold Skolnick with a dove and
guitar logo which marks all releases.

110
The performance by The Who encapsulates nicely the past, present, and future of rock and its
relation to storytelling. They perform a song which concisely expresses the “rockist” way of life and
simultaneously pays homage to their predecessors: Blue Cheer’s “Summertime Blues.” They end
their set by performing “rock” as a way of life by destroying their instruments. And in between they
play a portion of Tommy, the new hybrid everyone agreed to call a rock opera. (Of course the band
played the entire album at the concert and this is reduced to a single number in the film). The set
therefore moves clearly from a simple statement – I am young and frustrated – to a complete (though
admittedly very odd) story. Rock’s transition from statement (narrative event), to story (more than
one related events), and finally a narrative with audio storytelling techniques beyond song matches the
ambitions of rock to be regarded as something more than just noise. This movement towards
narrative overlaps directly with the movement of rock from single to album to something which must
be described as something more-than a mere album.

111
The concert / film presents a record of what was popular at the time and a survey of the music and
expressive options available under the banner of “rock.” The film’s presentation of the Fifties is even
advertised on the video box of the film, which says it features “Sha Na Na, bring back the fifties
sound.”

186

112
The footage has been reedited and assembled on a series of videotapes and DVDs, the latest of
which is Jimi Hendrix – Live at Woodstock. The angle is that these offer different camera angles than
are seen in Woodstock.

113
This also helps to at least partially conceal the fact that the audience of Hendrix’s performance is
rather small compared to the crowds featured up to this point in the film.

114
This line of thinking was not wholly convincing in 1969 and was positively obliterated after the
events captured in the second most famous rock concert documentary: Gimme Shelter (1970). Here
we see the disastrous attempts of the Rolling Stones to create a “Woodstock of the West Coast” at the
Altamount Motor Speedway. The film and concert are additionally similar in that each concert is now
primarily known through its filmic representation. The film is very reflexive as it documents – as
much as the concert itself – members of the Rolling Stones watching the film’s footage on a flatbed
editing table. Not accidentally the Maysles’s camera shoots over the top of the editing screen, so
Jagger and drummer Charlie Watts (could and occasionally do) look right into the camera. The film
features extraordinary concert footage of the Stones and a few other bands, but the primary
performance of the film is that of the band members as burnt out, exhausted, and disappointed in how
the promises of the counterculture have offered too little change. The reflexivity of this film links the
viewer to the performer just as Woodstock does, but here the goal is quite different. Rather than
extolling the unity of music and youth culture, this film reveals that class and racial tensions, and the
death wish of the culture, have only been temporarily suppressed. In the logic of Gimme Shelter we
are all victims of a culture run amuck. We are all passive spectators of horror and the possibility of
meaningful action is nonexistent. Collapsing the binary of performer and audience has no real value.
Jagger’s final look at the camera is an admission not of guilt but complicity. Jagger is “one of us” but
in a sense much closer to the mantra from Tod Browning’s Freaks than in the sense of belonging to
the Woodstock Nation.
Also like Woodstock, Gimme Shelter opens with a presentation of filmic narration; the film,
from its opening, eschews the rigorous sound and image sync offered in Dont Look Back and other
Direct Cinema texts.

115
Charles Schreger notes “However elaborate the system allows filmmakers to be, there’s still room
for improvement. When the Crickets sing in The Buddy Holly Story, the movie sounds great; but the
rest of the film was recorded in mono, and you can almost hear the extra speakers click on when the
songs start, and off when they’re finished” (352). “Altman, Dolby and the Second Sound
Revolution,” Film Sound: Theory and Practice, Ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York:
Columbia UP, 1985) 348-355.

116
For some audiences in 1978 stereo sound itself in cinema theaters was an attraction.

117
Fred Camper, “Sound and Silence in Narrative and Nonnarrative Cinema,” Film Sound: Theory
and Practice, Ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia UP, 1985) 375.

118
For an extensive interview with Kubelka regarding his construction of the film and interpretations
of it, see Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 4: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley,
CA: U of California P, 2005).

119
Camper 375.

120
For Kubelka’s thoughts on “sync” see his “The Theory of Metrical Film” in P. Adams Sitney, ed.
The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (New York: New York UP, 1978) 139-
159.

187

121
Anderson would be justified in promoting this film as a corrective to how filmmakers have
(mis)used Los Angeles which he outlines in his bitterly hilarious expose, Los Angeles Plays Itself
(2003).

122
This offering of Jagger’s footwork is second seemingly only to his work in The T.A.M.I. Show.
Here Jagger seems to be imitating or striving to be James Brown as the Stones take the stage just after
a blistering set from Brown.

123
Donnelly, Spectre of Sound 12.

124
For a brief discussion of the film see David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-garde: History and
Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2005) 420-421.

125
Frampton is perhaps the most insular and pedagogically minded of the central American avant-
garde filmmakers. He uses other artists (including Michael Snow) in his work but offers little
information to outsiders about these figures. His film (nostalgia) features the voice of Snow and
images of a number of important artists. But of course this film – which is a lesson on sync film –
does not indicate that it is Snow’s voice we hear or fully explain each person in the film’s images.

126
Moore argues that the film taps into modernity in a unique manner: “Modernity’s shocks and
shifts created a world of epistemic melancholia; it left us bewildered, lost and bewitched by
technology, nostalgic for a when and a where in which time and space were easily felt and
understood. Our present era looks back on that very loss with nostalgia, for it is a loss we never really
experienced, yet it features prominently in our intellectual and social heritage.” Rachel Moore, Hollis
Frampton: (nostalgia) (London: Afterall, 2006) 9.

127
Frampton did not approve of video transfers of his work so there remains no official release to
home video of any of his films.

128
Moore 18.

129
Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film (Berkeley,
CA: U of California P, 1988) 108.

130
Kozloff analyzes the film’s voiceover in Invisible Storytellers 82-99.

131
Moore 38. She notes that Frampton initially tried the film with his own voice.

132
Paul Arthur, “The Resurgence of History and the Avant-Garde Essay Film,” Line of Sight:
American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965 (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2005) 63.

133
P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000, 3
rd
ed. (New York:
Oxford UP, 2002) 384.

134
Steve Wurtzler, “‘She Sang Live, But the Microphone was Turned Off’: The Live, the Recorded,
and the Subject of Representation,” Sound Theory / Sound Practice, Ed. Rick Altman (New York:
Routledge, 1992) 90.

135
Milli Vanilli were famously exposed as concert lip-syncers in July 1989 and almost immediately
became a punchline. The two “singers,” Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, were soon revealed as not
simply lip-syncing in concerts but also not actually singing on their album. Arista records was
embarrassed enough to cut ties with the band and delete the hit album. Ashlee Simpson was exposed
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in very similar fashion on the October 23, 2004 episode of “Saturday Night Live,” but while mocked
did not suffer the same fate as Milli Vanilli (in part because whatever the quality of the singing on her
recordings it is her own). Kelefa Sanneh used the event as an opportunity for a broadside against
“rockism” and the negative response to Simpon’s performance: “The Rap Against Rockism,” New
York Times, October 31, 2004.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/31/arts/music/31sann.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin&or
ef=slogin

136
See the official webpage for the “Manifesto” and “Vow of Chastity,” http://www.dogme95.dk/

137
Here the music is truly sync but nondiegetic. This is quite similar to Warhol’s use of the Velvet
Underground’s music in Chelsea Girls (1966). The band performs outside the frame and the music
functions as underscore, though in fact it is sync sound. The frame creates the appearance of
nondiegetic music, an issue which forms the core of the next chapter’s discussion. My thanks to
Carlos Kase for information about the film.

138
Peter Øvig Knudsen, “The Man Who Would Give Up Control,” Lars von Trier Interviews, Ed. Jan
Lumholdt (Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2003) 120.

139
Jørn Rossing Jensen,“Dogme is Dead! Long Live Song and Dance!,” Lars von Trier Interviews,
Ed. Jan Lumholdt (Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2003) 130.

140
Anne Jerslev, “Dogma 95, Lars von Trier’s The Idiots and the ‘Idiot Project’,” Realism and
‘Reality’ in Film and Media, Ed. Anne Jerslev, Northern Lights Film and Media Studies Yearbook
2002 (Copenhagen, Den.: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002) 51.

141
http://www.ascap.com/licensing/termsdefined.html

189

Chapter 5: Sound and Diegesis

This chapter explores films of the postwar / pre-Dolby era that complicate the
standard binary of diegetic and nondiegetic sound on which classical Hollywood
cinema depends.
1
The following discussion considers three groups of films that
present complex articulations of film diegesis, particularly in their use of sound
elements: films that present a “restricted aural diegesis,” those that offer an “unstable
diegesis,” and finally films with an “expanded aural diegesis.” These films contrast
with the “stable” diegesis of classical narrative cinema that neatly separates diegetic
and nondiegetic sound and presents an internally consistent diegesis (world).
The concept of diegesis is firmly entrenched in film studies but is typically
used in reference only to sound and the concept’s inherent connection to narration
becomes obscured. Though providing scholars and students with a clear and useful
analytical tool, diegesis in film studies creates two clear problems. First, scholars
often use diegesis to reduce aural elements of narrative film to either issuing from
the image present on screen or some nebulous “elsewhere.” Second, reducing
diegesis to a discussion about the apparent source of a sound conceals film narration
both in terms of sound and diegesis.
For example, a reader consulting Susan Hayward’s Cinema Studies: The Key
Concepts gains a promising working definition of “diegesis”:
Diegesis refers to narration, the content of the narrative, the fictional
world as described inside the story. In film it refers to all that is really
going on on-screen, that is, to fictional reality. Characters’ words and
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gestures, all action as enacted within the screen constitute the
diegesis.
2

Yet after this opening definition Hayward immediately turns to sound examples and
defines diegetic sound as that which “naturally” occurs within the screen space,
“such as an actor speaking, singing or playing an instrument on screen,” and
nondiegetic sound as, “sound that clearly is not being produced within the on-screen
space (such as voice-over or added music).” Her brief comments on “intra-diegetic”
and “extra-diegetic” elements are also limited almost exclusively to sound properties.
Similarly, Bordwell and Thompson’s textbook Film Art defines “diegesis” as a
concept best used to investigate narration, yet like Hayworth the authors’ primary
examples relate to sound.
3

While there have been several attempts to introduce nuance to the binary of
diegetic / nondiegetic sound (theorizations of “supra-diegetic,” or “ambi-diegetic”
4

sound), the blunt binary remains largely intact. For many writers, sounds are merely
the product of the diegesis and therefore not subject to the film’s narration.
“Diegetic” describes sound which would be captured by a microphone sitting next to
the camera. One set of alternate terms, used mainly by filmmakers, for diegetic and
nondiegetic sound are “actual sound” and “commentary sound.”
5
In this theorization
sound is separated into “captured” and “narration” rather than recognized as an act of
narration. For diegetic sound, “actual” suggests not simply that sound is the product
of the visual diegesis but it comes from the image. The label “commentary” is no
more useful. This sound is an intrusion and exists on a separate plane from the film
text.
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Most considerations of diegetic / nondiegetic sound focus on music and for
scholars nondiegetic music (underscore) is classical narration’s most overt function.
Music is film’s most ostentatious method for telling the audience how, what, and
when to feel. Kevin Donnelly writes that, “Some commentators choose to
downgrade the diegetic / non-diegetic divide,” but he argues, “this divide has been
crucial for the construction of the mimetic world on screen, where the non-diegetic
aspects are minimalized and marginalized. It is this divide that has made film music
special, providing it with its own space.”
6
As Donnelly hints here the divide is
significant not only for sound but for film narration.
Pre-classical cinema features music in its “own space” because it is separate
from the film text and varies with each screening. The “own space” of film music
which Donnelly welcomes in the Dolby age begins – anew – in the postwar / pre-
Dolby period because the films offer jazz and popular music in situations other than
opening and closing credits. In the postwar / pre-Dolby period sound is frequently
acknowledged by the films to be a core element in defining, and sometimes
interrogating, the film’s diegesis.
Following a brief discussion of film studies’ use of the concept of diegesis
and its complications by early classical films like The Jazz Singer (1927) and King
Kong (1933), the discussion focuses on films that embrace the diegetic / nondiegetic
divide and turn this separation into a form of spectacle. Some films of this period
foreground a restricted aural diegesis. Nearly the only sounds which the film’s
narration presents are those which could, and presumably do, issue from the visually
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presented conditions. In films like Rear Window (1954), Faces (1968) and The Last
Picture Show (1971) the narration seems to organize the image track and passively
record sound. Paradoxically, at the same time the films offer aural realism, they
display the restriction of sound to distinguish themselves from (classical) Hollywood
cinema.
Concurrently, in other films the diegesis is unstable because the possibilities
available in the film’s world are ambiguous. The boundary separating the diegetic
(inside) from the nondiegetic (outside) is complicated, for example, by the
foregrounding of a central character’s fragile subjectivity. When the character
encounters odd or unexplained events, the burden of an explanation is passed along
to the audience who may be forced to weigh events in terms of the natural and
unnatural (or supernatural). Tzvetan Todorov’s work on the “fantastic” helps
explain the aesthetics of films like Cat People (1942), The Beast with Five Fingers
(1946), and The Haunting (1963) which present the audience with contradictory
information about narrative events in part through a split between sound and image.
The sound and image tracks refuse to allow the audience to determine whether
events depicted on screen are the result of either natural or supernatural causes in
part because the material accesses the diegesis via a psychologically troubled
character’s subjectivity.
The third section turns to films which feature an expanded aural diegesis.
The direct address of the audience is a concern of film studies, and an accepted norm
of the musical genre. In the postwar / pre-Dolby period however some films –
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Hollywood, documentary and avant-garde – engage the audience aurally in a more
extreme manner than the musical. Some films foreground and perhaps shatter the
distance between the film’s diegesis and the space of exhibition. Narrative films
such as The Tingler (1959) and Woodstock (1970) ask the audience to engage
aurally with the film, in the case of the former to (supposedly) change the film’s
narrative events by screaming like the diegetic characters and in the case of the latter
to sing along with the film’s diegetic audience and take the film’s anti-war message
to society (which already overlaps with the film’s diegesis). On the other hand,
“participatory” avant-garde films such as Bleu Shut (1971) engage the audience
aurally to foreground the impossibility of interaction and create an atmosphere of
play.

Inside and Outside: The History of Film Diegesis
This section explains the introduction of the concept of “diegesis” to film studies and
argues that its connection to narration is elided by the focus on sound in narrative
cinema.
7
The section concludes with a consideration of The Jazz Singer and King
Kong to explore the complex creation of “diegetic” sound in narrative films at the
beginning of the Classical period.
Unlike the other large concepts which organize this discussion (sync and
sound-image hierarchy), diegesis connects to discussions of more than sound, in part
because it is imported from another discourse. While sync and sound / image
hierarchy are debated and theorized soon after the introduction of recorded sound,
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diegesis enters film discussion in 1953 through Etienne Souriau’s work on narrative.
It was then taken up in film theory by Christian Metz in the 1960s.
8
The delay
between the “introduction” of sound and film studies’ adoption of the concept
diegesis results in a lack of investigations of the diegesis of silent films.
Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle originate the concept and each
introduces mimesis and diegesis as opposed terms, with the former used to describe
telling and the latter matched with showing. As Richard Maltby comments on
Plato’s Republic,
While some forms such as epic poetry might contain both kinds,
Plato’s distinction between mimesis, in which the poet ‘makes a
speech pretending to be someone else,’ and diegesis, in which ‘the
poet speaks in his own person,’ was one between performance and
report.
9

In book three of The Poetics, Aristotle distinguishes between mimesis as “imitation,”
and diegesis which is “telling” rather than “showing”: “the poet may imitate by
narration—in which case he can either take another personality as Homer does, or
speak in his own person, unchanged—or he may present all his characters as living
and moving before us.”
In film studies only diegesis continues to be used regularly to describe the
world of a fiction film: both what is present on screen and implied to exist within the
film’s world. More common is to dissociate diegesis from narration. In film studies
the diegetic / nondiegetic divide, particularly with regard to sound, is often misused
to argue (sometimes implicitly) that nondiegetic elements are traces of narration and,
therefore, as the unstated corollary, diegetic elements are somehow not subject to
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narration. Diegetic sound such as dialogue, is often ignored because it comes from
the objects and situations onscreen.
The Jazz Singer begins the complications of the concept’s use in film studies.
In his moments of singing and speech, Jolson addresses both the audience in the
theater and the surrogate audience on screen (or just offscreen). Though Jolson’s
speech and singing are diegetic in nature, Gorbman writes that is “hardly accurate”
to simply label it nondiegetic “since the film constructs no consistent diegetic sound
space to which to oppose nondiegetic music. Scenes that do have sync sound clearly
take place on a sound stage as performances.”
10
The conflict is due in part to the
film’s amalgamation of silent and sound film aesthetics as it shifts between dialogue
and intertitles, music and sync singing with music. From this beginning of sound
features it is clear that diegesis is a relational concept and its stability, particularly in
terms of sound, varies from film to film.
It is also perhaps unsurprising that the first musical obfuscates the discussion
since musicals typically combine music whose source is present (a singer) and music
whose source is not visible (musicians) in the world of the film. Royal S. Brown
writes: “Nondiegetic music theoretically exists for the audience alone and is not
supposed to enter in any way into the universe of the filmic narrative and its
characters,” and he adds that this divide “has little meaning in the film musical.”
11

The difference between “little meaning” and no meaning is considerable however. It
is worth noting that the genre most responsible for instituting the Classical period of
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American cinema creates a legacy of complex sound and image relations which
cannot be properly examined with the blunt binary of diegetic / nondiegetic.
The first film to offer an almost continuous underscore is RKO’s King Kong.
Brown notes that a studio executive was not overly optimistic about the film’s
success and instructed composer Max Steiner to use existing materials, “But
producer Merian C. Cooper, a greater believer in film music’s drama-enhancing
potential, intervened and gave the composer free rein to come up with something
appropriate.”
12
Quality and benefit to the film were evident to the studio before the
release: “the score had far-reaching effects, even inspiring Murray Spivack, head of
RKO’s sound-effects department, to pitch some of the noises, from animal grunts to
Fay Wray’s screams, to the same level as the music.”
13
While the position of “sound
designer” would not appear until the late 1970s, this is an important example of the
careful construction of a film’s sound much earlier.
The presentation of Steiner’s score is complex, particularly in the scene
where Denham and his group encounter natives on Skull Island and begin filming.
Gorbman argues that “music is overwhelming the soundtrack at this point. We can
hear the tribal chanting and drum-beating, which we accept as diegetic – as well as
the RKO orchestra (to be considered nondiegetic) playing a rhythmically repetitious
figure in accompaniment.”
14
Brown concedes that diegetic and nondiegetic music
interact, noting that “the natives on screen dance to the rhythms of this music, even
to the point of periodic, quasi-gorilla chest thumps in time to a strong, two-note
motif in the score,” but he discounts the possibility of this mixture confusing the
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audience, because, “Even the most naïve listener, if he or she thought about it, would
realize that neither the cinematic images – the only instruments we see are drums –
nor the ethnic context allows us to interpret the music as diegetic.”
15
Brown’s use of
“naïve” and his statement that the listener need only “think” suggest an active
audience interestingly engaged in questioning the film’s narration rather than
focusing on the narrative.
Gorbman emphasizes the display of filmmaking in the scene. As Denham
cranks away on his camera, “The visual apparatus is exposed, made visible,”
16
yet
significantly Denham makes no effort to record sound, which leads to Gorbman’s
rhetorical query: “If a microphone and a soundman were accompanying Denham,
what would the mike pick up? Would it record the drumming, the chanting, and the
RKO orchestra?” For Gorbman the absence of audio recording technology is
indicative of tendencies in cinema, particularly Classical Hollywood:
It is as if sound in a film has no technological base, involves no
work, is natural, and will simply “show up,” just like the spectacle
Denham witnesses. Further, the classical paradigm would have us
believe that no work has gone into the sound of what we witness.
Sound is just there, oozing from the images we see.
17

Gorbman draws out two truths which this instance reveals. First, “When the musical
apparatus is visible, the music is ‘naturalized’ as diegetic,”
18
and second,
the visual representation of music making signals a totally different
narrative order, that is, the diegetic, governed by conventions of
verisimilitude (e.g., a dance band playing in a nightclub scene). And
this, even when the visual representation is not really the source of the
music we hear.
19

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In a manner not unlike the need to turn on prop lamps to “naturalize” lighting, when
a music source appears it causes the audience to read the music as diegetic. The
visualization of music-making equipment – speakers, instruments, singers, etc.
become anchors for music and an apology for the presence of music.
While Gorbman and Brown disagree about the significance of the mixture of
diegetic and nondiegetic music in this scene, they agree that the music serves the
narrative. The sync points in King Kong and the mixture of diegetic and nondiegetic
music set the precedent for presenting music in American cinema. The diegetic /
nondiegetic binary does not hold for The Jazz Singer, King Kong and many films of
the Classical period of American film but the audience is usually asked not to notice.
In “Teaching the Soundtrack,” and “Narrative Film Music,” Claudia
Gorbman uses diegesis to argue for a focus on the underscore and she expands this
goal in her book Unheard Melodies. It is her arguments, and terminology, that
continue to be taught. While effectively linking narrative to sound and diegesis,
Gorbman’s focus on music has the unintended effect of solidifying the perception
that diegesis is only useful for considering music.
20
But her work is particularly
important for noting the connections between diegesis, narration, and film history:
“Classical narratives emphasize the diegesis over the narration, efface narrational
presence. Modernist forms, on the other hand, problematize the transparency of
discourse, point out that it’s the narration that constructs the diegesis.”
21
She argues
that “Music enjoys a special status in filmic narration” in part because it “very often
crosses the boundary [of diegetic and nondiegetic], even in the most conventional
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films.” But while voiceover is “perceived as narrative intrusion . . . music is not.”
She continues: “Classical filmic discourse (mise-en-scene, camerawork, editing,
sound recording and mixing) contributes to the portrayal of a world, the
representation of a diegesis. The nondiegetic shot or sound is the exception, not the
rule – except in the case of music.” For Gorbman the nondiegetic score serves the
image and helps control / manage its meaning. Her own analyses of The Jazz Singer
and King Kong reveal however that the classical use of music was not defined
immediately and suggests that films after 1940 use sound to “point out that it’s the
narration that constructs the diegesis.”

The Restricted Aural Diegesis: The Display of Realism (and Concealment of

Aural Narration)

This section discusses films of the postwar / pre-Dolby period which restrict sound
elements to diegetic material often to support the film’s aesthetic and narrative
realism. Films with a restricted aural diegesis illustrate Gorbman’s argument that
music is “naturalized” as diegetic when the musical apparatus is on screen and
pushed this classical convention into the realm of spectacle. Each of the three films
under examination promote the sale of recorded music which potentially extends
diegetic film materials into the lives of the audience.
The restriction of sound has its origins in early sound films whose technology
required sound and image to be recorded together. Underscore was difficult and
required musicians to be positioned just outside the frame, making the score sync
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temporally. Such music is diegetic at the profilmic level and is heard by the actors
but not the characters. Technological limits on sound result in a “cohesive” aural
diegesis, one not disrupted by nondiegetic sounds. Once multitrack recording made
the addition of underscore easier in 1933, however, nondiegetic music became the
norm and films followed the example of King Kong (though with fewer questions
about the sources of music). Past this date the cohesive aural diegesis which avoids
nondiegetic music should be labeled a restricted aural diegesis because the absence
of such music is clearly a choice.
22

Kathryn Kalinak notes that diegesis must be considered in historical terms:
By the mid-thirties musical accompaniment which depended on
original composition and incorporated the selective nondiegetic use
of music became the dominant practice, replacing older traditions
(Chaplin’s use of continuous music in his early sound films, for
instance) and alternative practices (Warner Brothers’ cycle of social
realism films which omitted music entirely).
23

Here Kalinak offers a compelling statement on Classical sound by noting other film
sound tendencies it pushed aside. Her example of an “alternative practice” is
additionally significant because Warner Bros. films helped create the pattern of
“realist” films with restricted soundtracks that continues up to the present. Matching
gritty plots about urban life, criminal behavior, and a willingness to admit that all is
not right in America, Warner Bros. films such as I Am a Fugitive from the Chain
Gang (1932) and gangster films like The Public Enemy (1931) and Little Caesar
(1931) limited the presentation of music. The films, often featuring “city boys” in
Robert Sklar’s term, limit the use of underscore to accentuate their realist aesthetic.
For Sklar the “city boy” is “the urban tough guy – small, wiry, savvy, and street
201

smart, a figure out of the immigrant ghettos and ethnic neighborhoods . . . a
quintessential twentieth-century American city denizen, with no exact parallel in . . .
literary traditions and theatrical conventions.”
24
The sound of the city boy films
particularly in the 1930s is the sound of the city itself: the hustle and bustle sounds of
urban life, including the hardboiled speech of the city’s inhabitants. While Rouben
Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (1932) for Paramount presents a Paris literally filled
with song, Warner Bros. presents a city – usually New York – pulling in too many
different directions to offer a song, harmony, or a symphony.
The restriction of sound often relates to the thematic or aesthetic aspirations
of the film such as a focus on human relationships, for example, in The Last Picture
Show. In The Last Picture Show and Faces the restriction of sound separates the
films from melodramas which – while possibly depicting similar narrative events –
use underscore to press home (or even undermine) the emotion of the characters and
situations. Though increased “realism” is not to be discounted, this does not fully
explain the films which limit sound in this manner. The tendency of the restricted
diegesis to emphasize the human body is also central: what sounds the body can emit
(speech, breath), what sounds the body can experience (the act of hearing is
presented as cooperative with the film’s narration), and of course how bodies interact
with one another, especially in their use of language.
Another tack is to allow the audience to focus on problems in society. The
1930s Warner Bros. films and later examples such as Sydney Lumet’s 12 Angry
Men (1957) and Panic in Needle Park (1971) restrict sound to combine urban
202

settings with a realistic treatment of a problem.
25
In the first of these films the titular
group is a jury for a murder trial where they are not exactly the peers of the young
Puerto Rican defendant. Underscore appears at the beginning and end of the film,
bridging the credits to the film’s diegesis, and once in a dramatic – yet quiet –
moment when Juror #8 (Henry Fonda) and Juror #6 (Edward Binns) briefly talk in
the restroom after a heated point of debate and #6 asks #8 to consider the possibility
that they may let a guilty party go free. The sequence is brief and unobtrusive
enough that the film is sometimes discussed as having no underscore. Lumet
continued to explore realist effects through restricting the use of music to diegetic in
films such as Fail-Safe (1964), The Hill (1965), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and
Network (1976).
26
The Panic in Needle Park on the other hand excludes music
completely. Even the film’s titles have no score and the film’s heroin addicts
struggling to get from one fix to the next receive no solace from listening to music.
The soundtrack consists solely of dialogue and the honking of car horns in an aural
return to the Warner Bros. depictions of New York City of the 1930s.
Some noir(ish) films also feature a restricted aural diegesis.
27
While the use
of jazz in noir films is regularly discussed, films such as The Asphalt Jungle (1950),
The Narrow Margin (1952), and Touch of Evil (1958) are notable for their restricted
soundtracks although they do rely on music for narrative progressive and character
development. The Narrow Margin depicts the transportation of a gangster’s widow,
Mrs. Frankie Neall (Marie Windsor), by train to the trial date. A train whistle
accompanies the opening and closing credits rather than a theme, but the widow –
203

later revealed to be a police officer serving as a decoy – insists on playing records in
the train and this finally leads to her death (at which point her arm turns on the
record player and it blares a happy tune until the killers turn it off). The Asphalt
Jungle manages to humanize its conspiring criminals (after all: crime is just a left-
handed form of human endeavor in the film’s most famous phrase) as ordinary lower
class citizens out to earn a living. The film’s narration limits underscore to the
beginning and the end, leaving almost 2 hours to present voices, sounds, and some
diegetic music (which serves the plot because Doc Erwin Riedenschneider’s [Sam
Jaffe] insistence on watching young girl dance to a jukebox leads to his arrest).
Touch of Evil contains about a minute of underscore and a variety of diegetic music
sources (the rock music pumped into Mrs. Vargas’ hotel room that leads up to and
scores her attack, the player piano in Tanya’s [Marlene Dietrich] club which
becomes underscore at the conclusion). These restricted uses of sound are set
against crane shots, extreme wide angle compositions, and chiaroscuro lighting to
create a conflict between the seemingly non-narrated soundtrack and the obviously
narrated image track. Touch of Evil’s opening shot follows Ramon Vargas (Charlton
Heston) and Susan Vargas (Janet Leigh) in their car across the US / Mexico border,
and whether seen in its altered form with musical accompaniment or without (as
Welles intended) is a flamboyant display of visual narration. Welles restricts the
sound and thereby increases attention to its various uses and sources: voices with a
range of accents, music, radio transmissions, and the use of aural surveillance in the
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film’s final act (as Vargas’ bug on Sgt. Menzies [Joseph Calleia] broadcasts
Quinlan’s [Welles] confession of corruption).
Alfred Hitchcock paid considerable attention to sound and while The Birds
(1963)
28
and Rope (1948) also exclude traditional scoring, it is Rear Window’s
restricted aural diegesis which creates the most spectacle. Like some earlier
restricted aural diegesis films, Rear Window combines the emphasis on crime with a
desire to document the sounds of the city. Though often described for its
presentation of voyeurism and film narration, the film is as careful in its presentation
of aural material. In Rear Window the restriction of sound and music to diegetic
sound displays the film’s narration and has thematic, cultural, and economic
imperatives beyond character subjectivity. But the film is more commonly used as a
case-study in cinematic voyeurism.
29
In 1985 David Bordwell wrote that the film
“has long been used as a small-scale model of the spectator’s activity,” and adds “no
film I know fits more snugly into a perspectival theory of narration.”
30
Not
surprisingly, he next proceeds to use the film to explain his own theory of cinematic
narration and almost completely ignores the film’s sound. In this he is also not
alone.
Rear Window tells the story of photographer L. B. Jeffries (James Stewart)
whose broken leg encourages him to spy on his neighbors in a building across the
way. When he becomes convinced that a murder has been committed, he takes
actions that provoke the killer Thorwald (Raymond Burr). The film foregrounds the
act of looking by the protagonist and the audience, and links these activities. In this,
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the film is ideal for considering visual narration and how in the postwar period
Hollywood cinema became more open about its processes, including narration and
constructing a diegesis.
Rear Window begins with opening credits and music like most Hollywood
films. And, as in the case of films as different as Blackboard Jungle (1956) and
Pillow Talk (1959), the music bridges into the film’s diegesis. As the camera moves
from the titular window the sound apparently issues from a radio in the room. Once
a man’s voice replaces the music the radio is snapped off, but this action prevents
neither voices nor music from invading the apartment for the remainder of the film.
This rest of the film is full of music, and encourages active listening to heard – and,
importantly, quite likely familiar – melodies. And some of these are borrowed from
popular Paramount films. Ross Care catalogs the sources: “Obviously, aside from
their ironic (and cross-promotional) significance, the fact that Paramount did not
have to pay extra royalties for the use of these studio-owned tunes was another factor
in their inclusion.”
31

Rear Window’s narration matches these (existing) songs with (new)
characters and situations, and addresses the audiences on two levels: as (diegetic)
music acting like underscore and as aural intertextuality. The music of the film, and
its sound generally, is directed at and carefully arranged for both Jeffries and the
audience by the film’s narration. The most obvious use of songs to score onscreen
actions are Miss Lonelyhearts’s two dates: the first (non-existent and therefore
unseen) date is “scored” to “To See You (Is to Love You)” and the second
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(unfortunately real) man who assaults her is set to “Waiting for My True Love to
Appear.” The second song continues as the attention shifts to Thorwald packing up
his wife’s things (ensuring that she is not going to appear). Knowledge of the songs
(and their titles) deepen the experience of the scenes, perhaps for Jeffries as well as
the audience.
Eric Harvey situates the film in its historical moment, noting that radios were
in most American living rooms and televisions were soon to become as omnipresent.
He labels the film “The most profound artistic statement made on music’s new role
in post-war, post-modern America.”
32
Harvey investigates Hitchcock’s production
notes, including 18 pages for composer Franz Waxman and editor George Tomasini
about the film’s sound. One particular quote is telling as Hitchcock discusses how to
score the entrance of the newlywed couple (matched with “That’s Amore” in the
finished film):
The wedding march would of course be completely out because it
would be so obvious and on the nose. Perhaps some accidental
sentimental tune could come over, but not so obvious as to make the
audience feel we have deliberately put this in.

Of course Hitchcock and his collaborators “deliberately put this [music] in” and
there is nothing “accidental” about the use of “That’s Amore.”
The film only features one character who actively creates music: the
composer
33
who “works” on a song that is actually Waxman’s music for the film.
Initially heard in the film’s opening credits, the theme floats through the film as his
(diegetic) work in progress. For Harvey the composer is a counterpart to Jeff and
creates “an intriguing contrast in the film” which he interprets as “between the
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romanticized figure of the tireless music creator (the composer), and Jeffries, the
postmodern music user who surreptitiously observes his neighbors for their
entertainment value.” Harvey notes that Hitchcock’s cameo occurs in the
composer’s apartment and reasons that this is because he is the one true “artist” in
the film.
34
Though Jeffries brings Thorwald to justice it is the composer’s song
which convinces Miss Lonelyhearts not to take her own life and by the film’s
conclusion she is beginning a relationship with him. The fact that the composer
plays live distinguishes his art from the recorded music which dominates the film
and which Harvey labels “cold and impersonal” as it plays along indifferently to the
characters’ tribulations. But the composer’s apparently fortuitous performance fails
to temper the film’s cynical take on postwar culture: “We are left wondering what
will come of the two at the end of the film, however . . . we see Miss Lonelyhearts
inside the composer’s apartment listening to the finished song . . . on a record
player.” Hitchcock’s apparently happy ending displays the shift from live to
recorded music and mass culture so Harvey concludes that the film is “a love-letter
to the idea of the musical composer (and by association, the film director), especially
when contrasted against Jeffries, the embodiment of an increasingly affluent and
perpetually distracted society.” And yet the society of Rear Window is a listening
society: Jeffries hears the murder, Miss Lonelyhearts has her life changed by a song,
and audiences are encouraged to purchase the film’s theme. The film is perhaps
more “about” listening than looking.
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The composer’s success – his music has been recorded and is seemingly
destined to be a hit (since it prevents suicides apparently) – mirrors more than just
the idea of the artist. Hitchcock’s film also participates in this “perpetually
distracted society” beyond the space of the theater by promoting its theme. The
composer completes “Lisa” and it is now on a disc for sale. According to Brown at
the film’s conclusion it “seems to sneak out of the diegesis onto the nondiegetic
music track, performed by a male vocalist.”
35
The conclusion reverses the film’s
initial presentation of music. In the opening the music becomes diegetic and the
source – the radio – is turned off, while in the film’s ending the diegetic music (now
a pop version of the theme) moves via the credits out of the film’s diegesis and
becomes a not so subtle reminder that audiences can continue listening to the music
through a purchase. The film seeks to spread its sound – it’s theme to be precise –
out of this restricted diegetic space and beyond the space of exhibition. The situation
is therefore more dire than Harvey realizes; the classical, instrumental piece of music
becomes a pop song, and its banal lyrics (barely heard) confirm that there is little art
in the finished product. “Lisa” was an attempt to duplicate the success of Dimitri
Tiomkin’s theme for High Noon (1952). Tiomkin’s piece crossed over into the radio
and single market and fulfilled the promise of the monotheme score which rose in
the wake of David Raksin’s score for Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) (which was
also spun off into a single).
36
Hitchcock’s film is a terrific advertisement for the
tune, because “Waxman’s theme provides the score’s overall unity, recurring rondo-
like throughout the film.”
37
But years later in an interview with Truffaut, Hitchcock
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expressed his disappointment with the chart-performance of the tune and blamed the
creator, not his own promotional efforts: “I had a motion picture songwriter when I
should have had a popular songwriter.”
38
It is not surprising that for his remake of
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) Hitchcock had Jay Livingston and Ray
Evans compose “Que Sera, Sera” which became a hit and even won an Oscar.
Less than twenty years later pop (and even rock) songs like “Lisa” would so
dominate soundtracks that composers such as Elmer Bernstein and David Raksin
lamented their lack of opportunities for work. Julie Hubbert states “For both
composers, the dramatic change in the style and sound of Hollywood film music was
being fueled by a powerful extramusical and extrafilmic influence: commercialism.
As they saw it, the change was being motivated almost exclusively by studio
economics.”
39
This is an unhistorical complaint which ignores the efforts of Alfred
Hitchcock and Raksin himself (in Laura most obviously) to sell a piece of popular
music. Hubbert’s explanation for the shift is indicated by her title: “Certainly, music
tastes and practices in the early 1970s were being shaped by commercial concerns,
but they were also being shaped by an influential documentary film movement called
cinéma vérité.”
40

Cinéma Vérité embraced the opportunity to record daily life in a more direct
way due to faster film stocks, lightweight cameras, and smaller and easier-to-sync
sound recording equipment. The aesthetics of these documentary projects was
shaped equally by ideology and technology. The practitioners embraced a host of
previously taboo stylistic techniques and even errors (most of which had already
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been featured in avant-garde films of the 1940s and 1950s). Many, but not all, of
these impulses crossed the Atlantic to America and resulted in Direct Cinema.
While Dont Look Back opens by flaunting its lack of sync sound, others like
Salesman (1968) restrict sound to sync and diegetic and thus follow the mandate of
Jean Rouch, whose best quip on the subject is “music is the opium of cinema.”
41

These American films limit the imposition of sound in the form of nondiegetic music
and voice-over narration. More than the French cinéma vérité films these films seek
to gloss over their own narration; their ideology is that of “captured reality.”
Scholars often describe these filmmakers as rejecting music to separate their
films from Hollywood’s fiction films. Hubbert reframes the discussion of music to
one of “partial rejection” rather than avoidance:
By implication their more precise definition of vérité music, one
that excludes music external to the film, also includes music that is
internal to the film. Music could indeed be part of a vérité
documentary if it was observed to be part of the film’s live
synchronized sound. The “partial rejection” theory implies, in other
words, that if music occurred naturally and spontaneously within
the frame imposed by the camera and sound equipment, if its
source was visualized as part of the film’s diegesis, then a vérité
film could have music.
42

Hubbert’s theorization explains the presentation of popular music in Dont Look Back
and even the diegetic music in Salesman. Her phrase “source music only”
emphasizes that this documentary practice did not stifle the use of music. Music in
these films becomes sound on the same level as sound effects and the human voice.
All these sounds are – seemingly – recorded together, are the result of the material
visibly present, and are diegetic. Hubbert persuasively argues that the influences of
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cinéma vérité, Direct Cinema, new technology, and aesthetics cooperate to create a
space for a number of feature fiction films (The Last Picture Show, American
Graffiti [1973]) which follow the “source music only” policy.
One important filmmaker missing from Hubbert’s account is John
Cassavetes. Though perhaps over-praised as the father of American independent
cinema, Cassavetes’ career on the margins of mainstream cinema is undoubtedly
influential in both production and aesthetics. Cassavetes’ films (after his first)
typically limit the presentation of sound to diegetic sound in order to accentuate his
realist project and intense focus on human relationships. He combines the influence
of contemporary documentary film practice with Italian Neorealism to create
soundtracks which seem to be recorded. His realist project embraces the plot
mechanisms of melodrama but eschews the genre’s aesthetic excess.
His first film, 1959’s Shadows, features a score partially created by Charlie
Mingus that occasionally receives a comment.
43
Strikingly, Cassavetes noted that in
England particularly, the sound of Shadows was praised as “true” and an
“innovation” because of its cluttered and muddy sound.
44
More commonly scholars
debate to what degree the film was improvised, in part because of the closing
onscreen statement: “The film you have just seen was an improvisation.” The film’s
loose structure, dialogue which sounds improvised,
45
and the “natural” performances
result in a film unlike other features of the period. It is also the sort of film likely to
be described as one that lacks narration. The myth that Cassavetes’s films are
improvised is supported by the myth that they do not feature Hollywood film
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narration: “[Cassavetes] studiously declines to take the viewer by the hand (or by the
eyes and ears) by providing a stylistic map through the experience. The Hitchcock
or Welles method is the opposite.”
46
Ray Carney instead links the director’s first
four films (Shadows, Faces, Husbands [1970] and Minnie and Moskowitz [1971]) to
mid 1950s television presentations like Paddy Chayefsky’s 1956 The Bachelor Party
because of their “dramatic simplicity, intensity, and confinement to one or two sets,
their mobile camerawork, their interest in ordinary people, and their use of frequent,
extreme close-ups.”
47
Another link to early television Carney does not mention is in
terms of sound. Early television programs were broadcast live, so sound and image
were presented together and music was often limited to visible sources in a short-
lived return (of sorts) to early sound film aesthetics.
Cassavetes’ first films also bear the influence of Italian Neorealist
filmmaking and documentary production of the 1950s and 1960s, as Carney points
out.
48
In addition to bringing a new form of realism to world theaters, the films of
Vitorio De Sica and others also brought a post-sync aesthetic in which sound and
image at times seem barely related. Neorealist films were typically inexpensive and
the silent recording of image allowed for more freedom. Cassavetes follows their
aesthetic of realism and like them and due partially to technical and financial
limitations, also constructs – rather than captures – the soundtracks for Shadows and
Faces. While Shadows can be considered alongside Robert Frank and Alfred
Leslie’s Pull My Daisy (1959) as a Beat film,
49
Faces more obviously bears the
influence of documentary production in its restriction of music to diegetic, or “source
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music only.” The film can be grouped with others of the late 1960s and early 1970s
that sought to convey realism in part through an avoidance of underscore. Like 12
Angry Men, Faces restricts underscore to credit sequences and a moment of
significant, yet restrained, drama.
Though not as opposed to genre elements as some writers argue (melodrama,
female melodrama, noir) Cassavetes’ films largely eschew three act structures and
clear denouements. As much as a Bergman film, Faces allows the audience to
intensely focus on human faces as they torment others (intentionally or not). The
film is divided between four adults, two of whom are precariously married to one
another. Over the course of roughly 48 hours, Richard Forst (John Marley) grows
closer to pick-up Jeannie Rapp (Gena Rowlands), and his wife Maria (Lynn Carlin)
sleeps with young Chet (Seymour Cassel). The film’s black and white visual
aesthetic appears to rely on available light and a handheld camera. The film’s sound
is cluttered because characters talk over one another, shout to be heard, and
frequently refuse to listen. Faces largely abides by the “source music only” aesthetic
by featuring music most noticeably at the Whiskey a Go-Go where Maria and her
friends meet Chet and later at Maria’s home as the women compete for Chet’s
attention while he plays a record. The film’s narration does however present
underscore for a single important moment. When the others leave and Maria decides
to sleep with Chet the film allows less than a minute of melancholic underscore to
creep onto the soundtrack as she turns off the lights throughout the house, indicating
that she is perhaps not ready to fully reject her settled, domestic life. Music also
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begins shortly before the final credits, bridging the diegesis of the film into the credit
sequence as Maria and Richard sit on the stairs smoking.
Carney draws attention to Cassavetes’ use of sound in this film but overstates
the differences from Hollywood scoring:
Faces demonstrates an evenhandedness toward the complexity of
human relationships and the moment-by-moment unfolding of an
experience that extends right down to its avoidance of musical
scoring. Orthodox romantic movie music, like orthodox romantic
scene making and photography, inevitably elevates certain passages
and individuals at the expense of others. Nothing could be less in
sympathy with Cassavetes’ purpose.
50

The lack of a score serves the purposes Carney mentions yet Cassavetes “elevates”
the moment of Maria alone in her home above the surrounding scenes. More
importantly, the restriction of the film’s sound elements to diegetic sound is more
than an avoidance of “orthodox romantic movie music.” While Cassavetes’ later
films feature underscore more prominently, Carney maintains that he does so in a
way which is contrary to Hollywood norms.
51

Interestingly, however, while the sound of Faces is largely diegetic, it was not
wholly recorded along with the image. Cassavetes recounts that he talked to the
actors while filming Faces and did not realize that he was muddying the soundtrack
until after shooting was completed.
52
While filming in a roughly documentary
aesthetic and production model (one camera, one microphone) Cassavetes treats
sound as something to be added later. Or, to put it another way: Cassavetes handled
sound as an Italian neorealist would. And as he experienced with Shadows,
53
while
completing Faces he realized that the sound was not usable, in part due to defective
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equipment which lost speed and thus lost sync. After failing to find a technical
solution, “he went home and he and his volunteers spent the next two months hand-
trimming tiny sections out of the soundtrack to bring it back into synch frame by
frame, syllable by syllable (occasionally looping new sound where necessary).”
54

This convoluted and slightly contradictory story of the film’s sound – Cassavetes
both talked over the production sound and worked with defective equipment – is
typical of Cassavetes’ active myth-making. Regardless of the details, the result is the
same: a constructed soundtrack for his doggedly realist film.
Faces’ soundtrack is manipulated to seem captured and this extends to the
policy of “source music only.” Yet Carney offers one more explanation for the
film’s treatment of music: “the reason the film has so little outside music is that
Cassavetes had intended to use the music of Jimmy Reid but got into an argument
with him and had to rely on Cassel’s singing to fill in.”
55
Cassel barely sings in the
film so calling it a “fill[ing] in” is a stretch, and this also fails to explain why
Cassavetes did not use other music and deviates significantly from the statement that
Cassavetes avoids musical scoring. The economic and personal reasons for
Cassavetes’s decision can not be dismissed but the aesthetic motivation is of greater
importance.
56
Likely once the scoring fell through Cassavetes viewed the restriction
of sound as a virtue. Carney does not link Faces’ use (and non-use) of sound and
music to its reputation and instead references its near unity of time and space: “The
temporal burdens his characters must shoulder are of a piece with the other formal
constraints of Faces: the physical confinements, the editorial juxtapositions, and the
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restrictions on the number of characters and scenes.”
57
Cassavetes’ choice not to
add music – for a second time, really, since he had to redo the sound – indicates that
he regarded the exclusion of nondiegetic music as beneficial. Lastly, in a fascinating
turn of events, Cassavetes created a soundtrack album where he plays most of the
music though he was not a musician and this music does not even appear in the
film.
58

The Last Picture Show and especially American Graffiti build on the
examples of Rear Window and Faces by offering source music that is also available
for sale. Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show is filled with as much music as
Rear Window, but the songs are allowed to play for longer periods of time and some
even to completion. The conceit is that the audience hears the music in (basically)
the same way that the characters hear it whether inside a home, a bar or the cab of a
pickup. As Hubbert notes: “In addition to recreating ‘what’ music would have been
heard in 1951, Bogdanovich also carefully documents ‘how’ it would have been
heard, and in doing so he faithfully imports the vérité mandate of ‘source music
only,’” including the “distortions and interruptions that accompany the visualized
sources.”
59
Music in the film is diegetic sound: muffled, echoing, distant, etc.
Also like Rear Window, The Last Picture Show shows that popular music in
the 1950s was achieving ubiquity in both public and private spaces. Characters in
both films are surrounded by popular music, only some of which they choose to
experience. Based on Larry McMurtry’s book of the same name, the film depicts
Anarene, Texas, high school kids Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms), Duane
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Jackson (Jeff Bridges) and Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd). In Anarene and its
environs, young people (in trucks and at parties) and older persons (in homes and
bars) are always around music. The radio play songs selected by disk jockeys and
neighbors, friends, and strangers subject others to music. Of course the songs were
carefully chosen by the filmmakers, and the film’s narration controls their placement,
editing, and volume. More than one scene is matched with a song’s length and
emotional content. The film’s production (it was shot in the real Archer City
McMurtry fictionalizes), marketing, and reputation, all trade on the story’s “truth.”
The restricted sound of the film complements the black and white cinematography,
location shooting, and attempts to look like a film made in the classical era (most
famously by limiting the lens choice to a 50mm).
Hubbert notes that the two primary groups prefers two types of music:
While Sonny and Duane, the town’s working-class oil ‘roughnecks,’
listen almost exclusively to the country music of Hank Williams,
Lefty Frizzell, and Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, for instance,
the object of their attention, the wealthy, gentrified Jacy listens to the
smooth ballads of Tony Bennett and Eddie Fisher.
60

David Brackett explores the thematic implications of this split by arguing that
country music like that of Hank Williams: “tends to be linked with purity of
character, honesty, moral virtue, and rural life, while Tin Pan Alley or ‘mainstream’
pop music tends to be linked with the corrupting influence of money, the city, and
the desire for power.”
61
The film presents Sonny and Duane as more admirable than
the deceitful Jacy, for example. And significantly the country fans (Sonny and
Duane) support the cinema, attending the titular last picture show (Howard Hawks’
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Red River [1948]). For Brackett, the film “projects the cinema and honky-tonk
country music as uncorrupted forms of mass-mediated entertainment that are
gradually being displaced by corrupted forms such as television.”
62
The film doubly
endorses country music with a soundtrack album consisting solely of Hank Williams
material in a final attempt to profit from authenticity. But in the film the songs were
as scripted as the dialogue and, “For the music featured from radio sources,
Bogdanovich even scripted and voiced-over the disc jockey’s improvised radio
banter between songs.”
63
These phrases concisely summarize the director, and
film’s, use of existing popular music to score the film, and while the songs are
restricted to the film’s diegesis, their interaction with the images is as managed and
effective as classical underscoring and has the added attraction of (potential)
intertextuality.
This is also true of the most famous and successful film next to Rear Window
to feature a restricted diegesis: George Lucas’s American Graffiti. Like The Last
Picture Show, American Graffiti trades on its “truth” as a nostalgic remembrance of
a simpler, happier time in America, whether defined as the 1950s or pre-Vietnam
1960s. Lucas’ film has a song for nearly each scene and long before the characters
actually meet DJ Wolfman Jack it is clear that they and the songs they “listen” to are
not the work of a disk jockey but rather the maneuverings of the film’s narration.
The film, like Rear Window and The Last Picture Show, indicates the pervasiveness
of music in American life, and its embrace of early rock music resulted in a
soundtrack album that sold more copies than Rear Window’s “Lisa,” and the Hank
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Williams soundtrack for The Last Picture Show combined. Lucas’s unabashed
nostalgia trip was available in cinemas and in homes, but shrewdly directed at young
audiences for whom nostalgia had really nothing whatever to do with their
experience of the film and its score.

The Unstable Diegesis: Horror films and the Fantastic (and the Display of
Narration)
Classical films – with the noted exception of some musicals – offer a stable diegesis.
A stable diegesis exists because of the (mostly consistent) demarcation between the
diegesis and material the narration adds to it. A film’s diegesis is the world of the
film, what it actually is, and also what is possible within. This section discusses
films of the postwar / pre-Dolby era, most obviously horror films, which offer a
diegesis whose rules and boundaries are unclear because the film’s narration
emphasizes untrustworthy character subjectivity. The restricted diegesis films
examined above potentially send their music out into the audience’s daily lives
through sales of recorded music. The films discussed in this section further link
diegetic events to the audience’s experience by featuring debates about narrative
events in the diegesis. Fittingly there are no singles or soundtrack albums for Cat
People, The Beast with Five Fingers and The Haunting. One explanation is that
audiences already take the experience home in the form of an unfilled desire for
closure and certainty.
64

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If in the restricted diegesis films discussed above the audience experiences
sound along with, and in a manner approximately similar to, the film’s characters, in
many horror films the audience is likely to hear more – or less – than the characters
and to note the difference. The horror film, in examples ranging from Das Cabinet
des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920) to American entries like The
Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and The Wolf Man (1941), and the English Hammer
films such as Curse of Frankenstein (1957), often foregrounds its narration. Whether
a framing device which brackets the contents of the film as a tale or self-reflexive
discussions of monster characteristics and definitions, these aspects of the horror
genre render it as baldly narrated as the musical. Additionally, long before the
“stalker-cam” films of the 1970s and 1980s – gleefully mocked by Brian De Palma
in the opening of Blow Out (1981) – some horror films take perception as their
subject and extended optical POV shot sequences flatten out the separation of screen
from character subjectivity. This cooperates with the creation of suspense through
openly doling out and withholding narrative information. In many of these films the
audience knows more (or less) than the characters and this discrepancy is central to
the experience of the film. When horror films feature narration that relies on the
presentation of character subjectivity, and that subjectivity is coded as not fully
trustworthy (or worse, not fully sane) the laws of the film’s diegesis itself come into
question since character consciousness is part of the film’s diegesis and may control
the audience’s access to narrative events.
65

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Some of producer Val Lewton’s horror films and later texts such as The
Beast with Five Fingers and The Haunting foreground character subjectivity in their
use of sound / image combinations. In each the refusal to make sound and image
cooperate renders the film’s diegesis unstable.
66
Each film sets sound and image
against one another in a manner classical films forbid and which goes beyond
theorizations of asynchronous sound or counterpoint. These films are best
understood in light of what Russian Formalist Tzvetan Todorov calls “the
fantastic.”
67
Todorov considers texts which present two opposed interpretations of
narrative events: they are either the product of natural or supernatural forces: “First,
the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of
living persons and to hesitate between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the
events described,” and continues, “the reader must adopt a certain attitude toward the
text: he will reject allegorical as well as ‘poetic’ interpretations.”
68
For Todorov the
texts which exhibit these characteristics constitute a genre that exists in relation to
two others, the uncanny and the marvelous. An uncanny tale, such as “Hound of the
Baskervilles” where Sherlock Holmes unmasks the “hell hound” as simply a hound,
or any episode of “Scooby Doo,” eventually offers a natural explanation of events.
A marvelous tale, on the other hand, such as The Others (2001) and any number of
other ghost stories may delay the definitive revelation that there are ghosts within the
film’s world but eventually offers a supernatural explanation. Both tales can appear
fantastic right up until their conclusion and at this point the interpretive hesitation
(between natural and supernatural explanations) comes to an end. A fantastic tale,
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the paradigmatic example of which is Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw,
refuses to resolve.
Cat People, The Beast with Five Fingers and The Haunting achieve fantastic
effects through the judicious dis-union of sound and image at pivotal points in their
narratives.
69
The films reveal sound and image as fundamentally different and only
forced to cooperate through the workings of film narration, though only the last of
the three films – The Haunting – goes all the way in presenting an unstable diegesis
which remains fantastic and therefore undefined as the film concludes. Cat People
and Beast with Five Fingers each contain an interpretive loophole that flirts with the
fantastic and also helps explain conflicting interpretations of the film’s events
offered by characters. In all three, sound and image present the audience with
conflicting explanations for narrative events, and Cat People and The Haunting in
particular have puzzled scholars since their release in part for this reason. In these
films it is not that sound comes from outside the diegesis, but rather that sound
troubles the diegesis. Here half of the film’s address – sound or image – is aligned
with a supernatural explanation and the other half – image or sound – is supported by
a natural explanation. The rules and norms of a genre – in this case the horror film –
are certainly an interpretive asset but horror does not demand the supernatural.
Most of Val Lewton’s films are easily located in the horror genre and have
attracted general interest for over 60 years, especially Cat People. Scholars and fans
alike label Lewton a filmmaker who did more with less: tiny budgets, limited special
effects, and a short production schedule. Others note his influence on the AIP or
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“high concept” method of filmmaking because in some cases RKO assigned a title
and images before creating anything like a story (much less screenplay). Perhaps the
most significant intervention of Lewton is his emphasis on perception and film
narration. His most effective films – I Walked with a Zombie (1943),
70
The Leopard
Man (1943), and The Body Snatcher (1945), for example – are those in which the
film’s narration displays the act of withholding information. His first film Cat
People puts the issue – and question of – the supernatural at the center of its
narrative. At the film’s beginning Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) meets Oliver
Reed (Kent Smith) at a zoo and before long (as men and women are wont to do in
Hollywood films – though usually at the conclusion) they get married. But all is not
well. Irena tells Oliver about a legend of cat people in her home village and at times
seems to act like a cat herself. Oliver’s friends are not overly fond of Irena and soon
Alice Moore (Jane Randolph) comes between the married but not-quite lovers. A
cat, or something like a cat, menaces Alice on more than one occasion including the
film’s most famous scene at night by an indoor swimming pool. But neither she nor
the audience clearly see Irena become, or be, a large cat and instead see menacing
shadows and hear cat-like noises.
71
Scholars often point to producer Lewton’s
activation of offscreen space in order to proclaim that they prove (once and for all)
that what is unseen is scarier than what is seen (and in part to prove that recent horror
films are not scary and filled with gore). Few point out the obvious corollary: the
offscreen space of Cat People is activated through the use of sound and what is scary
in Lewton’s films is “unseen” but heard. Throughout Cat People cat-like sounds
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provide the best evidence of Irena’s condition but it is only near the end of the film
that the narration confirms her nature with the sound, and finally, image of a large
black cat. Now the diegesis is defined: this is a world where a woman can become a
cat.
Though he provides no evidence to support it, Tom Gunning writes that Cat
People is, “a film I believe most film scholars see as a locus classicus for the
fantastic in film.”
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Yet in Todorov’s terms the film is hardly the “locus classicus”
of the fantastic film, but is, rather, an example of the fantastic-marvelous because it
concludes with support for the supernatural interpretation of events. Gunning
concedes that: “whether Irena is a Cat Person or simply the victim of delusions is not
definitively answered until near the end” but, he argues, “doubts could linger for
some viewers.”
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Rather than a fantastic experience, the film offers something more
similar to the “loophole” that writer M. R. James describes in ghost stories that
allows the skeptical reader to dismiss the supernatural.
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Gunning has little to say
about the film’s sound but eloquently addresses figurative discourse in Todorov’s
work and Cat People:
As Todorov states, “The supernatural often appears because we take
a figurative sense literally.” Cat People makes this clear. If the idea
of Cat People were only a poetic figure expressing Irena’s
sexuality, grace, and a series of ideologically suspect feminine
characteristics (playful sadism, jealousy), the fantastic would
disappear. However, the cat figures in the film play a more sinister
role. Irena not only is like a cat, she is a cat. The figurative
transforms into the diegetic.
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For Gunning the movement from figurative to diegetic is what constitutes the genre,
as exemplified by Cat People. His point is well taken. Yet Irena is already a cat in
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the film’s beginning, and what changes is the treatment of her character by the film’s
narration. The film’s narration compares her to a cat visually by showing her move
like a cat, and through the simultaneous presentation of “cat sounds” and what seems
to be her physical presence.
Though Gunning overstates the popularity of the fantastic reading of the film,
Kim Newman insists on a supernatural (marvelous) reading of the film in part to
defend Lewton as a horror producer but also to apparently refute fantastic readings.
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When describing the scene in at a pet store where animals respond violently to Irena
he writes:
Make no mistake, the animals in the pet shop were psychic: this is not
. . . a respectable psychological study of a woman who turns into a
panther. Too much writing about Lewton is embarrassed that such a
tasteful man should have made horror pictures.
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He also argues that,
The innovation of Cat People was not ambiguity – which often in
horror films serves merely as a respectable get-out clause, allowing
audiences who don’t recognize the validity of supernatural stories to
read fantastical events as symptoms of a deranged mind (cf., The
Innocents, 1961) – but subtlety.
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This subtlety is visual apparently, because the film’s cat noises are not subtle and the
split between sound and image is not the product of “taste” but the desire to create a
unique experience.
Additionally, the film does not simply “allow” audiences to concoct a
psychological explanation; Cat People puts the psychological explanation right up
front most obviously in having Irena regularly visit – and eventually kill –
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psychoanalyst Dr. Judd (Tom Conway). A quote from Lewton refers to Judd and
indicates his awareness of the binaries his films offer:
a man, possibly a doctor, who always gives the scientific or factual
explanations for any phenomena that occur, brushing the
supernatural aside, and yet, who is always proved wrong by the
events on the screen. This device, I hope, will express the
audiences’ doubts even before they are fully formulated in their
minds and quickly answer them, thus lending a degree of credibility
to the yarn, which is going to be difficult to achieve.
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Lewton recognizes the usefulness of a diegetic resistance to a supernatural
explanation that slowly becomes untenable. Lewton’s use of the phrase “events on
the screen” is also striking because this is precisely what Cat People avoids until its
climax. As the sound track proclaims that a cat is loose, and that the cat is almost
certainly Irena, the image track declines to prove this by placing the cat “on the
screen.” Judd insists that Irena suffers from delusions, telling her “You’re that close
to real insanity,” and provides a psychological (or scientific) explanation for her
behavior and one that also excuses the narration’s activities.
Judd supports Irena’s doubts and the diegetic discussion of events fulfills
Todorov’s discussion of the hesitation between supernatural and natural explanations
in the fantastic text: “this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the
reader’s role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the
hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work.”
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Unlike a true
fantastic text, however, in Cat People the doubters all become convinced. Irena
confirms the truth, in death Judd admits he was wrong and Alice too comes to
believe that Irena is a cat person: “I believe Irena’s story . . . twice, I’ve been
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followed by something that was not human, something that attempted to take my life.
I believe that that was the cat form of Irena.” Oliver is naturally the final holdout
and when he succumbs to the supernatural interpretation he removes the last barrier
to the audience’s belief. Shortly thereafter the film’s narration unites cat sounds with
cat images to confirm this interpretation. Like Gunning, Newman argues that
someone desiring the fantastic experience can almost find it in the film: “For those
who want to preserve their ambiguity, at least until the very last scene, there is a
possible rational explanation: Irena stole the key to the panther cage.”
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Both
authors attempt to account for the film’s fascination for audiences and scholars.
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Far less discussed but equally of interest is Robert Florey’s The Beast with
Five Fingers, one of the few outright horror films that Hollywood released between
Lewton’s 1940s films and the influx of English horror films in the late 1950s. Like
Cat People, the film creates fantastic hesitation but the supernatural events – namely
a hand which crawls around and occasionally plays the piano – are finally revealed
to have a natural explanation, making the film an example of the fantastic-uncanny.
The natural explanation is that Hilary Cummings (Peter Lorre) has cut off deceased
composer Francis Ingram’s (Victor Francen) hand and arranged events to appear to
be the work of the hand. The hand – at least as a living, (thinking?) hand – exists
only in the addled mind and perception of Cummings but those interested in the
settling of Ingram’s estate and law enforcement officials are nearly convinced by
Cummings’ deception. Their investigation puts the question of the supernatural at
the center of the film’s narrative (and diegesis).
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Several characters hear Ingram’s piano playing. (Ingram has played only
with his right due to paralysis.) Cummings has been researching the occult in the
villa’s massive library for years and believes in the supernatural. Not surprisingly
then he alone – along with the audience – sees the hand. Cummings uses the severed
hand to create fingerprints, stages evidence of the hand’s escape from Ingram’s
tomb, places Ingram’s ring on the piano, and plays recordings of Ingram’s piano
playing at night with a hidden record player. Cummings uses physical traces of the
hand (which remains unseen by the other characters)
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and “impossible” sounds
(Ingram’s hand playing the piano after he is dead) to push a supernatural
interpretation of events. The recording of Ingram is itself “supernatural” to the other
characters, or perhaps something not unlike nondiegetic music. What complicates
the narrative – and makes the film’s narration confusing and frustrating to some
viewers – is that Cummings, because of his fervor for the library, the occult, and
belief in the supernatural, eventually believes his own ruse and the film shows him
wrestling with a moving disembodied hand but does not code the events as
subjective. For most of the film the audience does not know Cummings is
responsible or (so) unstable (though the presence of Peter Lorre is a hint).
Music – and sound – are central components of the film’s narration not
simply because music plays regularly throughout (and the narrative concerns a
pianist), but because sound is used to finally reveal Cummings’ addled subjectivity.
As Cummings wrestles with the hand the film’s narration cuts between shots of
Cummings’ feverish gazing and the hand moving towards him and pushing books off
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a shelf. When Cummings is in contact with the hand it continues to move even as
he drives a nail into it. Music loudly accentuates this bizarre fight but apparently
accompanies an encounter with the supernatural rather than the flowering of the
character’s dementia.
Though revealed to be a fantastic-uncanny text, the narration’s withholding
of Cummings’ madness generates differing interpretations and even expressions of
frustration in contemporary reviews reveal reactions to the film’s narrational
strategies. For example, the review in The Hollywood Reporter includes these
passages: “Direction by Robert Florey fails to make unmistakable the later disclosed
fact that it is only through the eyes of the insane secretary that the Beast is seen to
move and play the piano” and, “In horror stories such things have to be carefully
explained, or the offering falls into the category of cheating, like any tale that all
turns out to be a dream.”
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The reviewer’s frustration indicates an expectation for
wholly consistent narration. Other reviews indicate confusion about how clearly and
at what point the audience is meant to understand the film’s events. The reviewer for
Showman’s Trade Review writes of one of the hand’s attacks:
instead of being an illusion in the mind of the crazed individual who
severed it from the corpse, as it is supposed to be, takes on a
semblance of reality that may well make the scenes too repulsive for
the average adult.
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Both reviewers debate less what the film means than the merits of how it means;
each reviewer is unsatisfied with the film’s narration. What further links these
comments is the emphasis on the film’s visual information. Though the film
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presents a considerable amount of music – both nondiegetic and diegetic – most
discussions say little about the film’s presentation of music.
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This is also true of the critical consideration of the film. Brian Taves
successfully demonstrates the consistent visual style of Florey’s work, including the
early avant-garde film The Life and Death of 9413 – a Hollywood Extra (1928)
(made with collaborators Slavko Vorkapich and Gregg Toland) and Murders in the
Rue Morgue (1932). He argues that Florey’s films, including Beast with Five
Fingers, rely on Expressionistic tropes to depict altered states of consciousness. He
defends Florey and blames any confusion about the film’s narration on the studio:
“This central fault in the picture is the result of extensive editing . . . between its
completion, in February 1946, after which Florey left Warners, and its December
opening.”
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Yet Taves notes the virtues of how the film handles the (definitive)
revelation that Cummings is mad in spite of studio interference:
In the edited release version, the spectator is suddenly told that
what has been seen and accepted for most of the picture as
objective reality is instead wholly a figment of someone’s
imagination – a difficult switch to bring off, although it works
surprisingly well. However, not tying together all the clues
convincingly gives The Beast with Five Fingers a more modern,
surrealist tone, lauded by continental critics.
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Another way to discuss the film as “not tying together all the clues” is to argue that
the narration includes a loophole for a supernatural explanation and provides some
audience members with a fantastic experience. Though not precise in its restriction
of information – there is slippage in what Cummings sees and hears compared to the
other characters – the narration of Beast with Five Fingers is hardly an exception
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because Hollywood cinema presents information as needed, with little regard for the
nuances of point of view, subjectivity, or focalization. In this film, if the visual
stream of information is contradictory or unclear, the aural stream might be more
reliable for interpretive purposes.
Taves notes that Florey “suggested some of the eerie sound effects, such as
the reversal of a fire crackling and rooster crowing foreshadowing the hand’s
appearance, and air pressure escaping from an echo chamber to announce its
presence.”
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In addition to featuring piano performances and underscore, at other
points the screenplay – to which Florey made a number of changes – emphasizes
sound and especially music. More importantly, the film uses sound to indicate the
split between natural and supernatural explanations. In the film’s most striking shot,
the music drops in and out as the camera pans between Cummings and Julia Holden
(Andrea King). Julia confronts Cummings because she realizes his guilt. As they
move upstairs and Cummings threatens to kill her, piano music begins on the
soundtrack. Cummings looks down to the piano and the screen shows the
disembodied hand playing. Julia is puzzled and asks what he sees and hears and as
the two stand next to one another the camera pans between them. The screenplay
states: “(NOTE: camera, during the scenes, PANS quickly back and forth – there is
no soundtrack of music when Julia is shown. It is only heard when Hilary
[Cummings] is in the shot)”
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Reviewers may castigate the film and its makers for
not making it “excessively obvious” that Cummings has only imagined the hand
moving on its own, but the intent of this scene’s combination of sound and image is
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unmistakable. The handling of the optical POV shots from each character could
possibly be more direct and clear, but this panning shot is authoritative. In their
optical POV shots Cummings sees the hand but Julia does not. The panning shot
settles any confusion with its presentation of sound that overtly links an
interpretation of the diegesis with each character. Here an objective image – the
screen shows Cummings – conveys subjective information because the narration
matches it with aural subjectivity. The pan makes the music nondiegetic, in a sense.
More than conveying his emotion, Hilary hears the nondiegetic music, a clear
indication of his mental state.
As Taves notes, the film’s humor and romantic subplot
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also betray Florey’s
lack of control over the completed film. The films’ comedic elements, particularly at
the conclusion, are cited by some reviewers as negative qualities and perhaps suggest
why the film is not more highly regarded and frequently discussed. Beast is more
playful than any of Lewton’s films, but it uses humor to continue revealing narration.
And after seemingly defining its diegesis, the narration directly addresses the
audience and bridges into the space of exhibition. The diegetic explanation for the
mysterious events is as perfunctory as that offered in Psycho (1960, and seems the
true inspiration for “Scooby-Doo” wrap ups) but soon gives way to absurdity. After
Commissario Castanio (J. Carrol Naish) reveals the phonograph hidden in a suit of
armor (!) which has produced the piano sounds since Ingram’s death (apparently no
one noticed that the suit of armor sounded like a piano) the maid screams offscreen.
A cut reveals that she has seen a hand – the composer’s hand? – on the stairs: a white
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hand which glows. The Commissario marches over and reveals that the hand is in
fact simply a glove. But rather than simply laughing off the maid’s fears, the
Commissario looks into the camera and mocks the audience for sharing her fear and
possibly believing in the supernatural. For some film historians such moments of
direct address exist only in musicals, and / or were wiped out by the rise of narrative
cinema.
Beast with Five Fingers is something other than a classical film due to this
direct address, its display of its narration, and especially its refusal to present a
clearly defined diegesis. As a final touch while addressing the audience the
inspector is attacked by a hand grabbing his throat. His expression of terror however
turns quickly to more mocking laughter as he reveals that by placing his arm outside
the frame he has “attacked” himself. He is aware not simply of the audience but the
means by which he reaches them: the camera and frame. Though perhaps a bit too
jokey and frivolous compared to the seriousness of the film’s other presentations of a
menacing hand, this display of the film’s narration is of a piece with the film’s
decidedly non-classical use of narration and especially aural narration to create a
near fantastic experience.
Though Robert Wise’s The Haunting is a truly American fantastic film (even
changing the English setting of the novel to New England), The Innocents and The
Saragossa Manuscript (1965) are two films made outside the United States which are
more commonly evoked in discussions linking Todorov’s fantastic to cinema.
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These films foreground character subjectivity to create doubt in the audience as to
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the nature of narrative events. The Haunting sets sound and image against one
another to create permanently unstable diegesis and offer audiences an unsettling
experience more than The Innocents and The Saragossa Manuscript, and even the
near-fantastic films discussed above. Some commentators note the film’s effect and
come close to labeling the film fantastic. Aaron Smuts writes: “some puzzling visual
evidence is presented (mainly the closing of doors when no one is looking), but the
film refrains from other, more obvious means of visually presenting the threat,”
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and later adds:
The Haunting presents evidence for the house’s haunting and
punishes those who do not believe, but it never actually forces
viewers to accept the reality of the supernatural. The film is careful
never to show us too much, never to push our belief to the limit.
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The best example of the split between sound and image is the justly famous scene
where Eleanor (Julie Harris) and Theo (Claire Bloom) cower in bed from terrifying
noises just outside their door. Newman, on the other hand, indicates that for him the
film is fantastic-marvelous (though not using those terms) as he writes that the film,
“just tips toward being a psychological study rather than a gothic tale.”
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The Haunting tells the story of a group of investigators assembled by Dr.
Markway (Richard Johnson) to prove the existence of the supernatural at Hill House.
The film’s narration offers voiceover from two different characters and presents
contradictory information in its image and sound tracks. The film’s narration renders
voiceover as a form of address no more reliable than the image.
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In a manner
similar to Cat People the soundtrack presents seemingly supernatural content but the
image does not confirm this and even pointedly disagrees at times.
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The film’s complex presentation of sound and image begins immediately. As
ominous music slowly comes up and a large forbidding house fades in over the black
screen, a male voice – with a tone of authority and a recognizably English accent –
begins:
An evil old house, the kind some people call haunted, is like an
undiscovered country waiting to be explored. Hill House had stood
for ninety years and might stand for ninety more. Silence lay heavily
against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there,
walked alone.

After this statement, the film’s credits run
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and the voice continues with a softer
tone once they finish. The voice sounds less like the authoritative “voice of God”
from documentaries and uses the personal pronoun “I”: “Scandal, murder, insanity,
suicide. The history of Hill House was ideal, it had everything I wanted.” Images of
events accompany the voice as it continues, “It was an evil house from the
beginning, it was a house that was born bad,” and reveals that the speaker is one of
the people who call such a house “haunted.” He describes the death of Mrs. Crain in
a carriage accident in the drive to Hill House, and puts emphasis on “apparent” when
he says that the horses bolted “for no apparent reason.” The voice imputes the house
with evil import and suggests that it acts against those who attempt to live there.
While the accent (at least for American audiences) and the male voice connote
additional authority to this account, the images provide no substantiation of the
house’s supernatural power. The speaker demonstrates a degree of control over the
visual track however because optical POV shots depict Mrs. Crain’s carriage crash.
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This shift in style is jarring and asserts a connection between the speaking narrator
and the image track.
After a fadeout the narration shifts to an image of Markway – revealed as the
opening speaker – pleading with Hill House’s owner Mrs. Sanderson (Fay Compton)
to allow him to investigate the house, ending his voiceover and shifting apparently to
a more objective mode of narration. Voiceover narrators at the beginning of films
typically speak from a “present” and work to orient the viewer to the story which is
“past,” but in the beginning of The Haunting Markway speaks from a present about
the past (or at least his version of the past) and the film now moves forward in time.
His narration addresses the audience and sets up expectations that he is the
protagonist and will continue to dominate the narration and provide voiceover. But
the film, as it will do in multiple ways throughout its running time, frustrates these
expectations.
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His opening narration establishes a framing voice which presents
(narrates) a ghost story. But this frame is never closed because Markway’s
voiceover does not return.
Instead the remainder of The Haunting features Eleanor Lance’s voiceover.
After obtaining permission to go ahead with his experiment, Markway recruits
participants and the film’s narration introduces Eleanor at home with her overbearing
sister who refuses to let her borrow their shared car. Once Eleanor exits the parking
garage the next morning she is free and headed for what she thinks is adventure and
a new life. The narration provides a front view of Eleanor in the car and her voice-
over begins. According to horror director Brian Yuzna: “We are inside her mind
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now, and will remain so until the end of the film.”
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This is only a slight
overstatement since the film’s narration foregrounds Eleanor’s voiceover, privileges
her visually and provides several optical POV shots.
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Though Eleanor’s perception continually suggests that Hill House is haunted,
Markway fails to prove it. He does correctly determine that Eleanor is at risk to
herself and sends her home in the film’s final scene that nearly answers the film’s
opening but does not offer closure. The narration presents Eleanor’s death through a
series of optical POV shots and her voiceover. As she drives away alone she
expresses surprise at the steering wheel jerking in her hands both with her facial
expressions and voiceover yet the screen shows Eleanor in the car alone. An optical
POV shot shows a figure streaking through the frame into the car’s headlights and
the car smashes into a tree. The multiple supporting characters stand around
Eleanor’s body and move into a near-tableaux arrangement with no one privileged
visually or aurally. Theo says that Grace Markway (now revealed as the woman in
white) killed Eleanor: “Seeing her is what made Eleanor lose control of the car.”
Grace counters emphatically: “no, no, she only saw me at the last instant.” Luke
(Russ Tamblyn) offers his version, speaking initially to Grace and then perhaps to
the audience: “It wasn’t your fault, Eleanor did it to herself. Looked to me like she
deliberately aimed the car at this tree.” Markway weighs in with the last word on
Eleanor’s accident, saying, “There was something in the car with her, I’m sure of it.
Call it what you like, but Hill House is haunted.” His conviction has come at the
price of Eleanor’s life, but for the audience there is no new information about her
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mental state or whether Hill House is indeed “haunted.” The verbal explanations of
Eleanor’s death repeat the film’s diegetic debate about the supernatural but do not
account for what the audience has seen and heard, or reveal if “something” has gone
unseen.
Visual echoes of the film’s opening appear at various points in the film and
the last scene visually links Eleanor’s crash to the carriage crash of the first Mrs.
Crain.
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The two crashes share a location but more importantly similar imagery and
narration: a spinning wheel, a lifeless arm, and an optical POV shot that lurches
wildly at the moment of impact. The professor notes that this is the same tree where
“the first Mrs. Crain was also killed in an accident. There’s the mark,” and
practically spits “accident,” because he sees the same reasons behind the events.
Michael A. Morrison writes, “With Eleanor’s suicide, Wise brings The Haunting full
circle, recapitulating the death of the first Mrs. Crain.”
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The narration is better
considered the source of this repetition and the links between these two events signal
the return of the narration’s focus on Markway. While the discussion about
Eleanor’s death is objective, it is also a return to the interval between the opening
credits (with Markway’s voiceover) and the introduction of Eleanor and beginning of
her voiceover. It is therefore hardly surprising when the narration returns to a long
shot of Hill House and offers voiceover narration which is both similar to, and very
different from, the opening voiceover.
The voiceover narration presents a fractured frame for the entire film as
Eleanor’s voiceover almost answers and completes Markway’s. Eleanor’s voiceover
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repeats some of the film’s opening voice-over: “Hill House has stood for 90 years
and might stand for 90 more,” and concludes, “we who walk here, walk alone.”
These lines brings her voiceover into dialogue with Markway’s but she obviously
changes the last phrase to be both plural and present tense.
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Eleanor’s tone is
steady, measured and free from the insecurities and doubts heard throughout her
dialogue and voiceover. The house sits in darkness, repeating the film’s opening
shot yet the narration has labeled the house supernatural only through the perception
of Markway and Eleanor. This visual and aural return to the film’s beginning
underlines the narration’s refusal to provide closure and the fact that the diegesis of
The Haunting is unstable and hovers between one which includes the supernatural
and one which excludes such phenomena.

The Expanded Diegesis: Participatory Films (and the Proliferation of Aural
Narration)
This section discusses films which engage the audience aurally and seek to induce
verbal responses. Some films of the postwar / pre-Dolby period present an expanded
aural diegesis which hails the audience and connects the film diegesis to the space of
exhibition. These films expand on the “direct address” of musicals and pre-classical
films and encourage the audience to respond to, and in a sense take part in, the film’s
diegesis by participating. The diegesis of these films engages with the exhibition
space. The Tingler solicits audience response, Woodstock encourages the audience
to sing along, and participatory films such as Bleu Shut ask the audience to play
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along aurally with a guessing game. These films use sound to emphasize and blur
the distinctions between the film’s diegesis, the screen / frame, and the space of
exhibition.
Perhaps the most famous myth of cinema is that audience members fled from
the oncoming train of L’Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat as it played in Paris on
December 28, 1895. Many later films take up the idea that early audiences were
rubes and reinforce the myth as historical truth. Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture
Show (1902) is one of many films which both embrace and mock this myth of
cinema as Uncle Josh launches himself into the screen and ends the illusion. Other
films use similar scenarios to revel in the power of cinema rather than the supposed
naiveté of audiences. Reflexive films continue after the introduction of narrative,
especially in comic contexts. The most famous remains Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr.
(1924) where a dozing projectionist finds himself in the film and able to interact with
film elements.
Mary Ann Doane makes important distinctions between the three spaces of
film exhibition. First is the space of the diegesis which “has no physical limits, it is
not contained or measurable. It is a virtual space.”
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Second is the “visible space of
the screen as receptor of the image.” Third is “the acoustical space of the theater or
auditorium” and like the first two it is “for the spectator.” Doane next remarks that
“Different cinematic modes – documentary, narrative, avant-garde – establish
different relationships between the three spaces. The classical narrative film, for
instance, works to deny the existence of the last two spaces in order to buttress the
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credibility (legitimacy) of the first space.” In documentary works the voiceover has
a “radical otherness with respect to the diegesis which endows this voice with a
certain authority. As a form of direct address, it speaks without mediation to the
audience.”
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She does not however comment further on how avant-garde films
create a “different relationship between the three spaces,” perhaps because the sound
practices of the avant-garde do not offer nearly the homogeneity of the other two
categories. But expanded diegesis films do not conceal the differences between
diegesis, the screen, and the acoustical space of the theater, but emphasize each and
bind them through direct address.
This direct address can be interpreted as the use of second person address and
audience responses ensure the uniqueness of each screening. These films forcefully
embrace the fact that the presentation of a film is a performance. The postwar
emphasis on “first run” exhibition (stereo, 3D, widescreen) is a significant part of the
attempts to fight off competition from television and other entertainment media.
These expanded diegesis films however play in all theaters. Bruce Kawin discusses
films which use the second person:
Interactive Dialogue (let’s talk). The film addresses the audience
directly, and the audience is able to “talk” back, either by altering
the progress of the system (choosing a pathway on an interactive
Laserdisc), feeding in responses (voting on a program’s resolution,
giving instructions through a computer), or yelling at the screen
(The Rocky Horror Picture Show has become interactive in the
course of its history). The greater the possibilities for authentically
spontaneous response, the less easy it is to call this “a film,” but the
category nevertheless does exist, even if it wreaks havoc with
conventional notions of closure.
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Kawin’s summary of this type of “film voice” highlights the opportunity for film
performance in the absence of 3D technology, buzzers in theater seats, and surround
speakers. Since a film is a performance rather than a text it is better said that the
category of “second person” which Kawin considers is not exceptional but a
demonstration of cinema’s inherent (though neglected) qualities.
In his discussion Kawin mentions William Castle’s Mr. Sardonicus (1961)
because at the end of the film Castle addresses the audience and asks whether or not
the film’s villain should be killed. The emphasis on a singular exhibition is easily
seen in the works of exploitation filmmaker Castle who is something of a mythic
figure in postwar American cinema.
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Scholars are (finally) addressing his work but
there is still work to be done on his treatment of sound. John W. Law labels Castle
“A master showman,” who “left his mark by savoring the entire process of movie
making. But by allowing his moviegoers to participate in the filmgoing experience
he also offered them a chance to be a part of the movies.”
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Mikita Brottman
discusses Castle’s various gimmicks to involve the audience and argues that, “Castle
was in fact – albeit unknowingly – extending the principles of experimentation with
theater, audience, and spectacle initiated by Marinetti and the Italian Futurist
movement in the late 1920s.”
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More focused on film history, Kevin Heffernan
situates Castle among a host of other “carnival barkers” in the film industry who
solicited audiences with gimmicks for horror and other exploitation films in part by
selling themselves.
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As the major studios pushed 3-D effects with films like House
of Wax (1953) which seek to visually bridge the gap between screen and exhibition
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space, the marketing and narration of smaller productions like The Hypnotic Eye
(1960) directly addressed the audience and claimed to hypnotize them.
111

Though Castle is most noted for introducing physical elements – like
“Emergo” the plastic skeleton which helped The House on Haunted Hill (1959) –
into exhibition spaces, he also relied on aural elements to create unique performances
in Mr. Sardonicus, Homicidal (1961) and The Tingler. Homicidal includes a direct
address of the audience near the conclusion, as Castle himself invites terrified
audience members to seek a refund if they are too afraid to go on. The narration
presents his voice and the sound of a heartbeat along with a black screen. Feeling
the (justifiable) need to continue to top himself and keep audiences coming, Castle
came up with a grab-bag of tricks for The Tingler. The film would invade the
exhibition space through “Percepto”: small electric shock devices fitted to theater
seats. Second, one sequence of the black and white film would partially be in color
and allow red blood to pop out of the frame. Third, additional speakers at the rear of
the theater would aurally surround the audience in a method imitating the efforts of
the major studios with Cinerama and films such as Disney’s Fantasia. Finally, in the
most interesting gimmick, the film would ask audiences to scream in order to combat
the titular monster which has, the narration claims, ventured into the (audience’s)
exhibition space.
The Tingler, the film reveals, is named for the monster that lives at the base
of each person’s spine. In moments of extreme terror the tingler expands and will
crack a person’s spine if he or she does not scream loudly. The monster competes
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for the audience’s attention with a conniving silent movie theater manager, his
unloved deaf-mute wife, a doctor who discovers the tingler, and the doctor’s
wayward wife who may have killed her rich father and now refuses to share the
inheritance with her sister who is the girlfriend of the apprentice to the doctor. When
Dr. Warren Chapin (Price) discovers the monster and tells theater owner Oliver
Higgins (Philip Coolidge) about it, he has no idea that he is planting an idea in
Higgins’s head to gain control of his wife’s theater. Soon Higgins’s wife Martha
(Judith Evelyn)
112
is scared to death (by Oliver the narration later reveals) because
she is unable to scream and (unknowingly) combat the tingler. Chapin extracts her
massive tingler and (of course) it gets loose to set up the film’s climax in the theater
during a screening of Tol’able David (1921). The narration offers two films at once
in a manner much like the premiere of The Jolson Story within Jolson Sings Again.
The narration cuts between images of the audience and Tol’able David with some
shots lasting as long as 30 seconds.
In Castle’s autobiography, which is unsurprisingly more entertaining than
informative, he recalls laying out his plans to Vincent Price: “We’ll then make
believe that the theatre is where the picture is actually playing. The ‘Tingler’ will
attack the projectionist and then get onto the screen. It’ll be a movie within a movie.
. . . All hell will break loose.”
113
Castle creates a complex interplay of film,
performance, and (un)controllable audience response with the scene and combines
the film’s diegesis, screen and the acoustical (and physical) space of the theater. The
screen shows the tingler loose in the diegetic theater and then in the projection booth
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before moving across the screen after it disrupts Tol’able David. Before moving to
the projection booth the tingler sneaks up on a woman. After the woman screams
Chapin and Higgins run into the theater to try to quell the panic:
At this point in the showing of The Tingler, a planted female in the
auditorium screams in sync with the woman in the film, and the
projectionist turns up the house lights as the image goes black.
Further, the soundtrack is switched to the surround speakers at the
rear of the house and ushers run down the aisle and place the
“fainted” woman onto a stretcher. From the surround speakers,
which correspond with Warren’s position at the rear of the theater
within the film, come Vincent Price’s warning: “Ladies and
gentlemen, there is no cause for alarm…”
114

Through this interplay of direct address, special speakers, an emphasis on the screen
and the reflexive presentation of a film and audience, The Tingler offers audiences a
decidedly unclassical experience. The film matches the diegetic space of The
Tingler, particularly Warren’s “physical” position behind the audience and the point
of presentation of the sound. More impressively, even if never accomplished
precisely, performances of the film include performances in the exhibition space.
The scream of a woman in the exhibition space marks the point where diegesis,
screen, and exhibition space truly collapse. Castle even prepared different audio
material here for the very different experience of a drive-in screening.
115

When the tingler is loose the projectionist also participates in the
performance: “The exhibitor’s manual for The Tingler instructs the projectionist at
this point to ‘give two pushes in rapid sequence’ to the vibrating motors under the
seats. From the rear speakers moviegoers now hear the voices of terrified patrons
shrieking.”
116
In addition to managing the film experience by carefully switching
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between projectors, for The Tingler the projectionist gets to turn on the lights and
trigger “Percepto.”
117
The uniqueness of each performance of these Castle films is
programmed into the screening yet not every element was experienced by all
audiences. In ideal conditions however Castle can guarantee a thoroughly unique
performance to each audience. Castle ensures a unique performance by ironically
setting up a system for the same events to occur at each screening because the events
are the work of humans rather than the text. The narration of several Castle films
allows the diegesis to extend out into the unknown; the participating of the audience
is a variable not fully controlled but allowed by the film’s narration. The emphasis
on exhibition practices works the other way as well: “A saturation opening . . . was
impossible because of the needs of the Percepto stunt at the center of the film’s
publicity, including surround speakers at the rear of the theater and the tremendous
cash outlay for the vibrating motors.”
118

Long before Castle’s films asked audiences to talk or scream in response,
audiences in early cinema screenings and slide shows sang along with presentations.
The “song film” existed for a short period and served to add images to songs.
119
The
practice built on the “illustrated song,” which matched a slide with each line of a
song and prompted the audience to sing along with the live piano accompaniment.
120

Altman argues that these were pushed aside by film because they were tied to the
earlier magic lantern tradition and, more significantly, connected, and dependent on,
sheet music sales. When the phonograph became “America’s preferred home
instrument in the 1910s,” the days of illustrated songs and sheet music as significant
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cultural presences were numbered.
121
Lastra notes how sound outweighs the images
in these practices:
While truly audiovisual, these were essentially sound performances
that encouraged sing-alongs; the visual presentation was decidedly
secondary. Song promotion and sheet music sales drove this
practice and organized its formal properties, putting music ahead of
images. In economic, conceptual, and structural terms, the song –
sound – was clearly dominant over the image.
122

These tendencies were pushed aside by cinema and largely destroyed by the classical
norms. But in the postwar / pre-Dolby era is was clear that recorded music and film
had learned to be fast friends and a film sing along could benefit the film and record
sales.
Woodstock is variously described as a rock film, a documentary, and a
musical or a combination of all three. The film functions as an experience that
attempts to transcend its value as a document and links the film audience with
concertgoers. The marketing additionally suggests that attending a screening (and
preferably more than one) is roughly equivalent to physically attending the
Woodstock concert. For example, one teaser poster shows a group of youth on a car
hood and has the tagline “this way to Woodstock . . . the movie.” One release poster
features a photograph of the concert crowd and has the tagline “No one who was
there will ever be the same. Be there.”
123
Woodstock also includes moments of
narration which encourage audience participation and response. Two songs in the
film aurally address the audience: Country Joe McDonald’s “I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-
to-Die Rag” and Sly and the Family Stone’s “I Want to Take You Higher.” The
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narration makes each song a diegetic performance and a performance in cinema
spaces.
The film’s narration turns McDonald’s “I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die
Rag”
124
into a sing-a-long not just for the audience spatially and temporally present
but also the audience seeing the film audience.
125
McDonald offers a sing along
protest song set to a deceptively cheerful tune and tempo. For the cinema audience
the narration compliments the display of mass singing by printing the song lyrics at
the bottom of the screen along with a bouncing ball that helpfully cues when to sing.
The text uses the surface of the screen to bring together the film’s diegesis and the
acoustical space of the theater. The chorus is catchy and not hard to remember:
And it’s one, two, three,
What are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam;
And it’s five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! We’re all gonna die.

Kawin notes that “The most thoroughly realized interactive films were the ‘follow
the bouncing ball’ singalongs”
126
and Woodstock embraces the format for this
sequence. The sing-along accentuates the song’s message of unity particularly seen
in the lines, “What are we fighting for?” and “We’re all gonna die.” The logic of the
song argues that Vietnam is not a problem simply for those unfortunate enough to be
drafted but for the entire nation. While no one can confuse upstate New York with
Southeast Asia, McDonald denies their physical separation. The performance of the
song is an explicit moment of protest and potentially incites performances of
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objection to the Vietnam War in theaters across America (and around the world).
There is at least one report of participation. Dale Bell writes of a four hour early test
screening:
When the students knew the words to a tune, they sang along. As
the stereo sound traveled around and around the screening room,
behind and in front of them, their heads turned to follow it. As the
music modulated on the shock cut from a single panel to twin
panels heralding the arrival of crowds, there was an audible gasp
from our audience. After each act, they applauded and shouted.
When Country Joe McDonald asked for an “F” in the “F.U.C.K.
Cheer,” the students obliged in unison, adding their voices to
those on-screen in front of them and those they heard behind them.
The bouncing ball was greeted with hilarious cheers.
127

While testimonials from terrified or irritated theater owners do not accompany
discussions of Woodstock screenings, here the film and its narration explicitly
endorse the message of the song. McDonald stops short of explaining exactly what
must be done, but his complaint is plain enough, and the film entreats audiences to
audibly agree. This becomes more clear as the bouncing ball continues when
McDonald stops singing and demands greater participation:
Listen people I don’t know how you
Expect to ever stop the war
If you can’t sing any better than that.
There’s about 300,000 of you fuckers out there.
I want all of you to start singin’
Come on.

Even before this entreaty the cameras find a number of audience members singing
along and after this exhortation the camera finds whole groups standing and shouting
along, as though convinced of McDonald’s promise of change. The images serve as
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a potential example to cinema audiences who wish to join the Woodstock nation of
“about 300,000” initially addressed by McDonald.
While Sly and the Family Stone’s performance of “I Want to Take You
Higher” is not accompanied by a bouncing ball or printed lyrics, their song is as
participatory as McDonald’s sing along. The film’s narration complements the
band’s performance visually with slow motion images of Sly jumping as he
commands the audience to chant “higher” and put up a peace sign. Unlike the
Santana performance, for example, there are no reaction shots of the audience to
visually prove a positive response, much less split-screen shots where performers
and audience members share the frame since the night performance hides the
audience in darkness. The soundtrack provides evidence however, and like
McDonald’s song this performance causes thousands to chant along.
As Sly sings it becomes clear that he wants all audiences – present and future
– to participate. Though the group regularly engaged audiences in call and response
moments, this performance is particularly charged in this setting, as is his use of the
peace sign. His explanations of the action are also telling. As Stone encourages the
audience to join in, his pressure is knowing, gentle, and makes clear that he is
concerned with more than just singing out loud: “Most of us need approval. Most of
us need to get approval from our neighbors before we can actually let it all hang
down, you dig? But what is happening here is we’re gonna try to do a sing-along.”
After one attempt he complicates the exchange:
What I want you to do, is say “Higher” and throw the peace sign up.
It’ll do you no harm. Still again, some people feel that they shouldn’t
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because there are situations where you need approval to get in
something that could do you some good.

After a third attempt he talks a little more and explains that not participating is really
about not wanting to stand out: “There’s a whole lot of people here and a whole lot
of people might not wanna do it because they can somehow get around it. They feel
there are enough people to make up for it.”
Stone makes no promises about ending the war, but exerts just as much
pressure to sing as McDonald and promises that these actions might “do you some
good.” Stone entreats the audience in the dark in New York and audiences in
darkened cinemas to optimistically move forward, a position he would himself soon
find untenable.
128
Steve Lake writes of Stone’s portion of the concert and film and
offers evidence the film lacks: “What could be a better antidote to three days of mud,
rain, and dysentery than Sly’s ecstatic exuberance? Half a million clenched fists and
peace signs rising into the air in a massive human tidal wave of approval.”
129
Stone
provides more than just an antidote to 3 days of watching rock music in upstate New
York in unpleasant conditions.
Upon its release in England Sight and Sound called the film “a revolutionary
hybrid of commercial and underground cinema.”
130
Such a claim can be supported
by noting the film’s use of split-screen images, superimpositions, and doubled
images which rope together documentary practice, rock music and the more purely
“cinematic” processes of the avant-garde. The comment could also be linked to the
way in which Woodstock takes up the form of a participatory film. Sly Stone’s use
of “you” encompasses not simply the audience physically present at Woodstock but
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rather all who can hear his voice and Country Joe McDonald wants the whole
country to sing along with his angry “rag.”
Woodstock’s “revolutionary hybrid” potentially dilutes avant-garde
aesthetics and benefits commercial cinema by turning the underground into the
mainstream. Though it is only at the end of this chapter the discussion turns
explicitly to avant-garde film, films made outside the studio system have likely done
the most to disrupt the norms of film diegesis. Many avant-garde films function in a
manner far removed from a notion of diegesis, decline to offer fictional characters
and situations, and are typically exhibited in manners often quite different from
mainstream film. These factors foster practices which bridge the place of exhibition
with the film’s narration of image and sound, even when there is no diegesis.
Fred Camper argues that in situations where a film’s sound does not come
from the film strip “the audience is always made aware of sound-as-artifice, of the
sound as an addition to the image, rather than as an integral part of it.”
131
While
Camper’s statement betrays his feeling that the image is at the center of film his
insight points to the separateness of sound and image. It is also true that when sound
is not tied precisely to the image (by any number of technologies) the space of the
film (the diegesis and the screen) and the space of exhibition are potentially
recognized and linked. Camper mentions Ken Jacob’s Blonde Cobra (1963),
because “the sound on the film is added to by a live radio playing in the audience,
making the notion of sound-track-as-performance powerfully explicit.”
132
The film’s
recorded and “integral” soundtrack, according to Brakhage, consists of Jack Smith’s
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“artful, hysterical sounding monologues.”
133
The combination of recorded and
exhibition sound (from a source in the exhibition space and clearly not attached to
the film) is unique and makes not just the soundtrack a performance but the film and
cinema.
Another film from the same year that foregrounds the performance of cinema
is Barbra Rubin’s Christmas on Earth (1963). This striking film uses dual projection
to create a complex, layered image on a single screen. Though one image is often
only a close up of genitalia, it overlays / undergirds varying images of extravagantly
painted nude figures. Rubin’s instructions for presentation begin:
What you will be renting now is just what was filmed, uncut,
unedited. Projection instructions: The film remains on two reels (A
and B), requiring two projectors, to be projected simultaneously at
sound speed. The film on the first projector fills the screen, while the
image on the second projector is approximately one half smaller and
fills the middle of the screen, superimposing on the first image.
134

To make the image even more complex Rubin suggests the projectionist occasionally
place colored gels in front of either projector and so like The Tingler, her film
directly courts a performance from the projectionist.
135
She also explains how to
present the film’s sound: “To complete the cycle, a radio must be hooked up to a PA
system, with a nice cross-section of psychic tumult like an AM rock station, turned
on and played loud.” As in performances of Blonde Cobra, the radio adds an
element of aural chance to complement the visual opportunities for randomness and
unique projection. Rubin’s only stipulation is for volume and “psychic tumult”
(which was easier to find on radios in the 1960s than today) which makes Christmas
on Earth perhaps one of the great (potential) rock films. Rubin does not express any
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further instructions regarding what sort of music the radio offers or plays or any
concern about interruptions such as commercials or DJ chatter. She leaves the aural
half of the film to chance which is something that Rear Window, The Last Picture
Show, American Graffiti, and other restricted diegesis films only pretend to offer.
Other avant-garde films court chance sound occurrences by inviting
participation. P. Adam Sitney’s Visionary Film chronologically examines the phases
of American avant-garde film and offers a concise survey:
If we survey these forms diachronically, it would seem that the great
unacknowledged aspiration of the American avant-garde cinema has
been the mimesis of the human mind in a cinematic structure.
Beginning with an attempt to translate dreams and other revelation of
the personal unconscious in trance film, through the imitation of the
act of seeing in the lyric film and the collective unconscious in the
mythopoeic film, this cinema attempted to define consciousness and
the imagination. Its latest formal constructions have approached the
form of meditation – the structural film – in order to evoke more
directly states of consciousness and reflexes of the imagination in the
viewer. The participatory films follow the direction established by
the structural cinema in finding corollaries for the conscious mind.
136

Sitney labels Robert Nelson’s Bleu Shut “a prime example of the participatory film,
a form which emerged at the end of 1960s out of extensions of the structural film.”
137

Though the summary and explication offered by Sitney are typically excellent, this
discussion recounts the author’s participation with the film and focuses on its use of
sound.
Bleu Shut places emphasis on its diegesis – or at least its gesture toward a
diegesis, the film screen, and the exhibition space, particularly its acoustical
qualities. The film hails the audience as a second person (in Kawin’s terms) and
participatory (in Sitney’s terms) film. Roughly speaking, the running time is
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divided evenly between a guessing game between two men who are never seen about
the names of boats and one minute clips of a variety of audio-visual material. The
film offers a range of sounds (including silence) and a range of visual material that is
only loosely organized yet is also rigorously structured into (mostly) minute long
segments. Sitney states that Nelson, “invented a form which would be capable of
holding together many different kinds of film while maintaining their integrity as
home movies, advertisements, quotations, etc.”
138
Sitney argues that in the film “the
very question of synthesizing the materials of the film is handed directly to the
viewer.”
139
The question of guessing the boat names is also “handed directly” to the
audience. After the film’s first few minutes a woman’s quiet voice lays out the
structure of the film:
I’m now off-stage where Bob and Bill can’t hear me. This is how its
gonna be: This film is exactly thirty minutes long. The little clock in
the upper right hand corner tells the exact amount of time that has
elapsed from the beginning and the amount of time left…

She promises “wieners” at the 11:15 mark and “pornography” at 21:05. These
promises come true, but the statements about the film’s running time – both the
woman’s and the information printed onscreen – are proven false.
The woman’s conspiratorial whisper suggests that the players (Bob and Bill)
are being duped but hints as well that the audience is also being manipulated. The
film does not present these speakers onscreen but instead offers images of boats with
four possible names listed as text onscreen. The men guess at eleven different boats
and are very rarely correct. But the audience only knows this because the woman
says it is so. Though Sitney labels the voices “offscreen,” and the woman claims to
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be “off-stage,” the film does not establish a stable screen, frame, or diegesis and
instead delights in its refusal. The voices are assumed to be diegetic and offscreen
but there is a palpable disconnect between the image and the aural discussions about
them. While the voices are matched in time with the images, sound and image never
seem to fully cooperate and this strangeness is a deliberate effect is built into the
film.
Scott MacDonald’s interview with Nelson provides insight into the making of
the film and Nelson’s intentions. The director reveals that the first thing he thought
of was the clock and putting it in the upper right hand corner of the screen, though he
was unsure how to use it or why. A few questions later he acknowledges the
common exhibition context for avant-garde film where the audience shares a space
with the projection equipment:
the clock came out of my own arduous struggle to sit through a lot of
independent movies. I often have a powerful urge to look back and
see how much is left on the reel. When I succumb, the reel always
looks huge! I put the clock up there so no one would have to turn
around.
140

As for the film’s central game of boat-naming, he explains:
I had this peyote experience in San Rafael. I was walking down by the
yacht harbor watching boat salesmen taking families of people around
the boats, as if they were housing tracts. Kids were whining, “Oh I
don’t like that one, Mommy, the one with the red kitchen is much
better.” These were people with absolutely no connection to boats or
water – it was ludicrous… this shallow bullshit would someday have
to be smeared out … later I could only look at the situation
humorously.
141

The comment about finally laughing at the situation is typical of Nelson. He is
upset, angry even, but he does not lose his cool because to attack is to be engaged in
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a way that Nelson refuses. The quote provides more evidence of his disdain for
consumer / popular culture, his wit, and explains the cynical humor of Bleu Shut.
For Nelson it is inevitable that all “shallow bullshit” will be “smeared out” so hipster
practitioners do not actually need to do any smearing.
After this experience, Nelson created the boat names and describes recording
the voices of himself (Bob), his sometime collaborator painter William T. Wiley
(Bill) and Wiley’s wife Dorothy as he picked up various objects in his house.
Nelson did not have the pictures of the boats while recording the soundtrack (he later
got them from a yacht magazine) and this explain the odd aural feel of the game
sequences. He set up the cards with ridiculous boat names, placed these face down
and set them on a table with various household items: “I’d turn one over and pick up
an object – an ashtray, for example – and we’d talk about that.”
142
Nelson’s
production method separates the audio and visual tracks in time and space and results
in a film which declines to unite them by anything other than loose synchronization.
The game pulls the audience, potentially at least, into participation.
143

According to Sitney: “Naturally the viewer of the film is drawn into the guessing
game because of its duration, repetition, and the possibility of measuring his luck
against that of the two guessers within the film.”
144
The game presses at the
participatory limits of film because it can not really respond to the audience. Like a
TV game show the viewer can play the game but from a space where a response (and
therefore a reward) is impossible. What Sitney does not investigate is that this film
calls out for auditory participation, not simply mental (silent) participation. Like a
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sing along or The Tingler, Nelson’s film invites aural response but is more subtle in
its request.
This request can be emphasized prior to a screening in order to encourage the
audience to be aurally involved with the film. For example, the author has attended
three screenings of the film in Los Angeles: in a course on the avant-garde taught by
David E. James at USC in Spring 2003, at a Thursday night screening event he
organized and hosted at USC on September 23, 2004, and at an evening of Robert
Nelson films in the Roy and Edna Disney / Calarts theater on January 21, 2008.
145

The first screening was largely silent as only professor James and the author had
apparently seen the film before. There were no aural responses to the film. The
third screening had the reclusive Nelson in attendance and while a genial affair also
did not include audience responses (though the author and a few audience members
behind quietly participated with the film). But in the middle of these three
performances the audience audibly engaged with the film, in part because as host of
the event the author announced: “[Bleu Shut] is a participatory film so feel free to
participate. Or perhaps I should request that you play along with the film’s game.”
He then sat at the front of the room and loudly – and nearly always incorrectly –
guessed at the names of the film’s boats.
The boat scenes account for less than half of the film and each is surrounded
by segments of a variety of material. While certainly a participatory film, that is not
the only appropriate way to consider the text. The film can perhaps best be
discussed in three modes: Bleu Shut is participatory is its use of the game structure
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and concept. Viewers can play along if they choose. Bleu Shut is structural is its
foregrounding of structure and emphasis on duration (one minute blocks of images,
regular flashes of time, etc.) The film also takes part in the emotional distance and
irony, which circulates through many structuralist films. This last point helps
introduce the final category: “funk.” The term seems to have originated with Conner
and his collage work. It became used regularly in the Bay Area to describe, in the
words of critic J. Hoberman, “not so much a movement as a sensibility.” Works
which express the sensibility are variously described as “informal, idiosyncratic,
often deliberately weird,” or containing “raunchy, cynical eroticism,” and tend to
feature “the absence of arty concerns.”
146
Bleu Shut is informal, weird, cynically
erotic, and revels in a disdain for arty pretensions which were often associated with
the art world evil empire on the other side of the country: New York City. Bleu Shut
is funk in its scattershot assemblage of diverse materials in a desire to poke fun at
numerous subjects: TV, Hollywood, consumer culture, avant-garde filmmaking,
surrealism, structuralism, and finally Bleu Shut itself.
While quite funny, the film is not without arguments, especially regarding
film itself and language. The film reveals that our names for the boats – whether
thought or shouted out – are in a sense as valid as those the woman claims to be true
because the connection between any signifier and any signified is arbitrary; at one
point the “correct” answer “Bottom’s Up” carries over onto (literally) the next image
of a dog. The signifier “bottom’s up” floats to the dog. But is the signifier now with
the dog? Without the picture of the boat, what does this bit of text mean? The
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screen’s surface is emphasized as well as the three images unite on the flat surface:
an image (only an image) of a dog, declaratively filmic through its looping, text, and
the ever-ticking clock. The arbitrary potential or contradictory relationship of sound
and image in cinema is at the center of Bleu Shut.
147
The film demonstrates that
sound and image in film do not naturally cooperate and can interact in any number of
ways perhaps the least interesting, and perhaps necessarily the most common, of
which is diegetic and synchronous.

Conclusion
Classical cinema’s (largely) stable binary of diegetic / nondiegetic sound is
exaggerated, dismissed, and confused by films of the postwar / pre-Dolby period.
“Restricted aural diegesis” films create spectacle through avoiding nondiegetic music
and move out of the theater through soundtrack albums and singles. “Unstable
diegesis” films move out of the exhibition space through their lack of closure and re-
playability. Films with an “expanded aural diegesis” aurally link the film space with
the exhibition space and some such as Woodstock and Rocky Horror also offer the
opportunity for purchases in the form of albums. With the presentation of sound
effects, the voice, and music, films of the postwar / pre-Dolby era bridge the classical
to the postmodern and offer a return to the aesthetics of pre-classical situations.
K. J. Donnelly argues that music needs to be considered on its own, in part
because it is often nondiegetic: “Like a spectre, film music is disembodied and
denies the logic of the rest of the diegetic film world.”
148
He continues, “Since the
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advent of synchronized sound, non-diegetic music has graced films as a spectral
presence, one that sits uncomfortably with the mimetic ‘realism’ of the onscreen
world constructed in mainstream cinema.”
149
Donnelly’s discussion focuses on
recent texts and his examples move swiftly from the invention of nondiegetic music
to contemporary uses. He says that the rise of music to a higher level of attention
(both within films and without) “has rendered the diegetic / non-diegetic divide
irrelevant, in that music now often occupies a distinct space of its own anyway.”
150

The space of film music is truly wherever there are speakers – cars, homes,
etc. Sound, often in the form of music, moves beyond the film diegesis and into the
home. This happens increasingly in the late 1960s and into the 1970s and obviously
continues today. Radio airplay and purchased soundtracks occupy a space Doane
does not mention and one – in it myriad manifestations – which is perhaps the space
of postclassical film sound: everywhere but the theater space. Much of life is now
spent listening to what other folks are listening to at a higher volume, albeit at a
slight distance and (hopefully) reduced volume. Rear Window, The Last Picture
Show, and American Graffiti capture the beginning of this change in the public
sphere and are especially interesting because each also offers music which the
filmmakers hope will invade public spaces.
The postwar / pre-Dolby era includes films which drew audiences to theaters
to respond to the film. The last few years have seen texts take up the famous
interactive model of The Rocky Horror Picture Show which developed several years
after the film’s 1975 release. An episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has become a
262

touring sing-along event, as has The Sound of Music. In these events the music
occupies a place that binds together the film’s diegesis and exhibition space. Ian
Conrich discusses such events as constellations of film cults. As audiences gather
repeatedly around the same text, these events can transform and can turn into “a
direct interaction with the film, an active participation through a verbal response to
screen events, the recital of dialogue, or the replication of costumes and props in a
space beyond the screen.”
151
Conrich specifically discusses Sing-a-Long-a Sound of
Music which turns the famous 1965 musical into a participatory event. Likewise, the
Buffy episode “Once More, With Feeling” tours as a participatory event with some
alterations to the original text. In the program of the 2007 Los Angeles Film
Festival, Jonathan Wysocki describes the event and compares it to its most famous
predecessor:
In the grand tradition of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, this
audience-participation event goes beyond singing along to the
subtitled songs. Monster finger puppets, streamers, bubbles, kazoos,
vampire teeth, flying underwear and, of course, bunnies are all
provided for the interactive experience. So dress up as your favorite
Buffy character, massage those vocal chords, and come on out to
cheer the heroes, jeer the villains, and beg Buffy's little sister Dawn
to “shut up!”

What separates these events from the early responses to Rocky Horror, and
especially from the (potential) responses to The Tingler and Woodstock among other
films, is the degree to which they are controlled. Conrich is quick to note that while
the process offers the opportunity to respond, these recent money-making efforts
ultimately limit expression:
263

Significantly, while Sing-a-Long-a Sound of Music has seemingly
become the contemporary model of the cult film musical
experience, the event is highly staged, manufactured, packaged, and
controlled. Beyond the core venues, such as London’s Prince
Charles cinema, the film is often consumed in a conservative
manner, the apparent conformity of the audience members
challenging a notion that at such screenings the audience is
essentially spontaneous and transgressive.
152

While spontaneity is sacrificed in this commercial endeavor, the interactivity of the
expanded diegesis remains and demonstrates that audiences will attend in order to
interact, talk back, and sing along. Going to cinema theaters to listen to films (other
than musicals) is a defining trait of the postwar / pre-Dolby period and a return to the
pre-classical film experience. That one goes to “hear” rather than “see” a film brings
up the issue of image-sound hierarchy, the subject of the next chapter.
264

Chapter 5 Endnotes

1
It is worth noting at the outset that while diegetic sound and sync sound tend to co-exist they are not
necessary conditions for one another. For example, sound and image can cooperate but the source of
the sound is not required to be present in the image. Sound may come from character consciousness
(narration) and so be diegetic but not necessarily in “sync” with the image.

2
Susan Hayward, Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts, 3
rd
ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006) 101.

3
Yet the case of Film Art is significant not simply for its lack of comment on narration but also for
the sophistication of the analysis. In the first edition of the textbook the co-authors already see that
the diegetic / nondiegetic binary is too blunt and supplement it with a consideration of external and
internal diegetic sound: “External diegetic sound is that which we as spectators take to have a physical
source in the scene. Internal diegetic sound is that which comes only from the mind of a character; it
is subjective. (Nondiegetic and internal diegetic sounds are often called sound over because they do
not come from the real space of the scene)” (201). They include sound effects and voiceover here as
well, refusing to limit the concept to music. And later editions note directly that diegesis relates to
narration and that sound is simply a function of narration. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson,
Film Art: An Introduction, 7
th
ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004).

4
One attempt to massage the binary is Morris B. Holbrook, “The Ambi-diegesis of ‘My Funny
Valentine,’” Pop Fiction: The Song in Cinema, ed. Steven Lannin and Matthew Caley (Portland, OR:
Intellect, 2005): 47-62. For Holbrook diegetic music is tied to verisimilitude as it helps create a
realistic mise-en-scène. Nondiegetic music, on the other hand, assists character development or
develops a theme; this use of music is tied to narrative ends. Holbrook’s essay seeks to explain those
moments in film wherein both of these goals are achieved and this binary is transgressed. Indeed,
many films and filmmakers actively blur the distinction between diegetic and nondiegetic. And while
Holbrook explains that musicals often do this, it occurs even more regularly in “integrated” musicals.

5
http://filmsound.org/terminology/diegetic.htm

6
Kevin Donnelly, Film and Television Music: The Spectre of Sound (London: BFI, 2005) 13.

7
Chion offers a compelling complication of the diegetic / nondiegetic binary in Audio-Vision. He
distinguishes between onscreen sound, offscreen sound, and nondiegetic sound and then adds
ambient, “on the air” sounds and internal sounds. While this complicates the normal tripartite
division of film sound, it still does not account for situations where sound and image contradict each
other and the film’s narration refuses to privilege one over the other. While likely the best
consideration of the problems – both solved and created – by introducing the concept of diegesis to
film studies, Chion’s sole focus on sound does not acknowledge the dual address of sound and image
in cinema. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, Ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia
UP, 1994) 73-80.

8
Robert Stam, Robert, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, eds., New Vocabularies in
Film Semiotics (New York: Routledge, 1992) 38.

9
Richard Maltby and Ian Craven, Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Blackwell,
1995) 327. The authors continue: “The theories of Plato and Aristotle have been repeatedly
reinterpreted in the two millennia since their formulation, and both mimesis and diegesis have
acquired broader meanings than the specific, Platonic sense. Because most narrative theorists regard
narrative as a way of organizing data, they frequently elide the Platonic distinction between mimesis
265

and diegesis into something less fundamental” (327-328). Maltby argues that “For Bordwell, the
distinction between showing and telling becomes a way of distinguishing theories about narration, not
a fundamental distinction between ways of narrating” (328).

10
Claudia, Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1987)
47.

11
Royal S. Brown, Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music (Berkeley, CA: U of California
P, 1994) 67.

12
Brown 63.

13
Brown 63.

14
Gorbman 74.

15
Brown 41.

16
Gorbman 74.

17
Gorbman 75.

18
Gorbman 75.

19
Gorbman 75.

20
James Buhler and David Neumeyer, Review of Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and
Hollywood Film Music and Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film, Journal of
the Musicological Society 47.2 (1994): 364-385.

21
Gorbman 3. The following quotes are also from this source.

22
Stephen Handzo, “A Narrative Glossary of Film Sound Technology,” Film Sound: Theory and
Practice, Ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia UP, 1985) 391.

23
Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison, WI: U of
Wisconsin P, 1992) 72.

24
Robert Sklar, City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, Garfield (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992) 12.

25
Stephen Handzo argues that Executive Suite “set the trend” of films which emphasize sound effects
to build up “detailed aural backgrounds.” The film features “a sound effects track filled with street
noises evokes the harsh reality of the business world, fades and dissolves were replaced by direct cuts,
and underscoring was replaced by natural sounds, even under the main title (opening credits). On the
whole, sound effects have gained at the expense of underscoring” (408).

26
In his eclectic career Lumet also embraced underscore, and worked with composers such as Quincy
Jones (on The Pawnbroker [1964] and The Deadly Affair [1966]) and André Previn (Long Day’s
Journey Into Night [1962]). He also directed the film version of The Wiz (1978), featuring Michael
Jackson and Diana Ross. Finally, The China Syndrome (1979) clearly borrows the technique of
restricted sound from Fail-Safe to austerely present the threat of nuclear war.

266

27
An interesting contrast to such films is The Thief (1952) which lacks dialogue and places
considerable narrative weight in the underscore and sound effects. Ray Milland plays a scientist who
is selling government secrets. In the film’s climax he is pursued and caught because while above the
FBI agent in the upper reaches of the Empire State Building his foot dislodges a rock and noise gives
him away. After he accidentally kills the agent he realizes the error of his ways and Milland’s sobs
are shocking and effective. Herschel Gilbert’s score cooperates with the image to make the
(rudimentary) story clear at all times and was nominated for an Academy Award.

28
This film features “original music” by Bernard Herrmann which consists of electronic sounds made
with the Trautonium for the menacing birds. See Jack Sullivan, Hitchcock’s Music (New Haven, CT:
Yale UP, 2006) and Weis’ The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock’s Sound Track, (Rutherford, NJ:
Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1982).

29
For a recent example which also addresses Marnie (1964) and Vertigo (1958) see Clifford T.
Manlove, “Visual ‘Drive’ and Cinematic Narrative: Reading Gaze Theory in Lacan, Hitchcock, and
Mulvey,” Cinema Journal 46.3 (2007): 83-108.

30
David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1985) 40.

31
Ross Care, “Rear Window: The Music of Sound,” Scarlet Street 37 (2000): 62. Care locates many
examples: as Jeffries and Lisa talk to the policeman (Wendell Corey) we hear “Lady Killer” from the
film Red Garters (1954). Later as Lisa expresses her desire to get married we hear a song from the
Hope and Crosby film Road to Bali (1953).

32
Eric Harvey, “The Soundtrack of Our Lives,” Pitchfork 27 March 2007.
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/40617-the-soundtrack-of-our-lives

33
It is also of possible interest that the composer is played by Ross Bagdasarian who in the years
following the film would actually create songs that audiences would have trouble getting away from,
both psychologically and physically. As “David Seville” he made “(I Told The) Witch Doctor” and
then the Chipmunks, whose “The Chipmunk Song” (aka “Christmas Don’t be Late”) is still with us.
These songs – typically dismissed as “novelty” records – are created through no less of a capitalist
project to make money (while perhaps also expressing the personality of the artist) than the single
“Lisa” or the later “Que Sera, Sera” for the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).

34
Hitchcock can be seen setting the metronome on the mantle.

35
Brown 85.

36
See Kalinak 170-174. Kalinak argues – following Raksin’s own statements – that the score does
not represent a break from classical Hollywood. Yet both seem to concede that the score, and its
success as a single, suggest that scoring practices are changing noticeably in 1944.

37
Care 60.

38
François Truffuat, Hitchcock, Rev. ed. (New York: Touchstone, 1983) 216. He also admits, “I
wanted to show how a popular song is composed by gradually developing it throughout the film until,
in the final scene, it is played on a recording with a full orchestral accompaniment. Well, it didn't
work out the way I wanted it to, and I was quite disappointed” (216).

39
Julie Hubbert, “ ‘Whatever Happened to the Great Movie Music?’: Cinéma Vérité and Hollywood
Film Music of the Early 1970s,” American Music 21.2 (2003): 181.
267

40
Hubbert 184.

41
Jean Rouch, “The Camera and Man,” Cine-Ethnography: Jean Rouch, Ed. Steven Feld
(Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2003) 42.

42
Hubbert 189.

43
For example, Carney relates the score to the film’s inner structure and thematic values in American
Dreaming: The Films of John Cassavetes and the American Experience (Berkeley, CA: U of
California P, 1985) 47-48. Elsewhere Carney is fond of musical metaphors when discussing
Cassavetes, mentioning Charlie Parker (68) and “one’s first experience of bebop” (70) to help explain
the filmmakers’ unique style. Ray Carney, The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism,
and the Movies (New York: Cambridge UP, 1994).

44
“And our sound – when we opened Shadows in England, they said, ‘The truest sound that we’ve
ever seen.’ . . . . But we recorded most of Shadows in a dance studio with Bob Fosse and his group
dancing above our heads, and we were shooting this movie. So I never considered the sound. We
didn’t even have enough money to print it, to hear how bad it was. So when we came out, we had
Sinatra singing upstairs, and all kinds of boom, dancing feet above us. And that was the sound of the
picture. So we spent hours, days, weeks, months, years trying to straighten out this sound. Finally, it
was impossible and we just went with it. Well, when the picture opened in London, they said, ‘This is
an innovation!’ You know? Innovation! We killed ourselves to try to ruin that innovation!” (97).
Ray Carney, ed. Cassavetes on Cassavetes (New York: Faber and Faber, 2001).

45
For a consideration of Cassavetes’ dialogue, Todd Berliner, “Hollywood Movie Dialogue and the
‘Real Realism’ of John Cassavetes,” Film Quarterly 52.3 (1999): 2-16.

46
Carney, Films of John Cassavetes 36.

47
Carney, American Dreaming 26.

48
“Profiting from the photographic lessons of Italian neorealism in the 1940s (De Sica and
Rossellini, in particular), and from what might be called ‘American neorealism’ in the 1950s (the
films of Morris Engel and Lionel Rogosin, and the live television dramas of John Frankenheimer and
Delbert Mann), Faces’s style hints at a world in which more is always going on than can ever be
understood or cinematically ‘grabbed.’ Cassavetes’ style makes the same argument that James did in
his philosophy: that lived, felt experience is richer, more mysterious and more ‘overflowing’ than our
intellectual containers can ever hold” (Films of John Cassavetes 90).

49
See David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
UP, 1989). For a counter-reading of Shadows, see David Sterritt’s Mad to be Saved: The Beats, the
‘50s, and Film (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1998) 177-80.

50
Carney, American Dreaming 106.

51
Carney argues that Cassavetes’ use of underscore is restrained and carefully considered: “When he
does use background scoring in the films that follow Faces – with the important exceptions of certain
parts of A Woman Under the Influence, Opening Night, and Gloria – like the contemporary
choreographers whose work his own most resembles, he significantly chooses to use jazz musical
scorings as different as possible from the Max Steiner cadences and pacings of the orthodox
Hollywood pictures” (105). He continues: “Cassavetes’ scenes and the occasional musical scoring in
his soundtracks create a polyphonic reality of eccentric syncopations and competitive, but oblique and
268

unstressed, juxtapositions of rival rhythms, pacings, and emphases” (106). Finally, he notes the input
of longtime collaborator Bo Harward: “Specifically, in four of the six films following Faces,
Cassavetes relies on the brilliantly eccentric and energetic, though unstressed and ‘cool’, jazz scoring
of Bo Harwood, in which the musical phrases are as unpredictably syncopated and demanding of a
listener’s moment-by-moment attention as Cassavetes’ dramatic scenes themselves are” (American
Dreaming 106).

52
“In shooting parts of Faces I had this terrible habit of speaking over the soundtrack, almost like
being in a movie audience. . . . I hadn’t been aware that I was speaking, and then everybody jumped
on me and told me that I’d been talking all through the picture. [Laughs.] Later on I paid in the
editing when I had to clean up the crap I’d put on the soundtrack!” (Cassavetes on Cassavetes 174).

53
Cassavetes claims that the sound was unusable for Shadows, and worse, “incomprehensible”
(Cassavetes on Cassavetes 77). He then hired lip-readers and then, “It took us about a year just to
figure out the dialogue and dub it in” (77). Here, at least, is evidence that not every Cassavetes film
was precisely and fully scripted.

54
Carney, Cassavetes on Cassavetes 181.

55
Carney, Cassavetes on Cassavetes 175.

56
In addition to his willingness, along with the financial option, to use underscore, Cassavetes was
not averse to the creative use of sound in post-production. As Carney notes: “Just as he had added the
sound of the beeps in post-production in the parking lot scene in Minnie and Moskowitz, Cassavetes
added the sound of the car stalling and being restarted in this scene [in A Woman Under the
Influence] to make the moment even more comical. The sound of the ringing telephone in the film’s
final seconds – which was not in the screenplay – is another of Cassavetes’ editorial additions in terms
of his sound design” (Cassavetes on Cassavetes 342).

57
Carney, American Dreaming 92.

58
Carney recounts: “In the burst of interest that Faces generated, Cassavetes was offered the
opportunity to publish the screenplay with New American Library (though he was so busy working on
Husbands that the book did not appear until October 1970). He was also approached by Columbia
Records to release the film’s soundtrack on an LP. He was not about to let the fact that there was less
than five minutes of music in the entire movie stand in his way. He and long-time musical
collaborator Jack Ackerman went into a studio and created sixty minutes of music ‘inspired by the
film’, some of which Cassavetes – never lacking in confidence – performed by noodling on the piano,
though he didn’t play the piano and had no musical knowledge whatsoever. (In the liner notes,
Cassavetes covered up the degree to which the record was close to being a one-man show by crediting
some of the arrangements to an alter ego named ‘Jay Cee’.)” (Cassavetes on Cassavetes 192).

59
Hubbert 197.

60
Hubbert 196-97.

61
David Brackett, “Banjos, Biopics, and Compilation Scores: The Movies Go Country,” American
Music 19.3 (2001): 256.

62
Brackett 259.

63
Hubbert 198.
269

64
In the Fall of 2002 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presented a series of widescreen
(cinemascope) black and white films. The finest pairing was of Jack Clayton’s The Innocents from
1961 and Robert Wise’s The Haunting. The audience, as far as I can judge them as a group, was quite
taken with both films, applauding at the end of each (as audiences in Los Angeles are wont to do).
The Haunting caused a distinct murmur to ripple through the museum as the curtains closed and the
lights came up. Friends and partners turned to compare reactions. Some argued about whether the
titular house was indeed haunted. A woman seated a little behind me, sounding not a little
exasperated but also pleased, said to her friend “it is so frustrating because it doesn’t really end.”

65
Bordwell and Thompson argue that subjectivity is part of a film’s diegesis. See the distinction
between “internal” and “external” diegetic sound in various editions of Film Art.

66
An interesting case for comparison could be science fiction films such as Forbidden Planet. The
film’s electronic music has been written about by many scholars and strikingly a few consider the
music as diegetic rather than underscore. Royal S. Brown briefly discusses the status of the sounds /
music in Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music, see p. 183. For a more sustained
consideration of the role of the Theremin in creating diegetic sounds – without displaying the
instrument of course – see James Wierzbicki, “Weird Vibrations: How the Theremin Gave Musical
Voice to Hollywood’s Extraterrestrial ‘Others’ – Electronic Music From 1950s Science Fiction
Films,” Journal of Popular Film and Television (2002): 125-135.

67
There is a growing body of literature on the fantastic and film. Mark Nash’s essay on Vampyr is
the first. Matt Hill’s discussion in The Pleasures of Horror (New York: Continuum, 2005) is a
particularly useful summary of Todorov’s positions and how others have made use of them. Hill also
suggests one way in which Todorov’s model – mutually opposed interpretations embedded in a text –
can be put to work in situations other than natural versus supernatural interpretations. “Just as
cognitive theories of horror neglect their discursive and conceptual ‘Other’ (‘affect’), what the
Todorovian approach neglects is the possibility that a text may work to ‘master’ its audiences; that is,
the audience may be deliberately misled by a text that withholds key narrative information. This
process, usually culminating in a significant narrative ‘twist’ or ‘reveal’ that provokes the ideal reader
to reinterpret all that they have previously perceived, cannot always be readily theorized by recourse
to Todorov” (39).
“Such texts thus seek to misdirect their audiences by generating fantastic (or non-fantastic)
hesitation at one level of narrative ‘reality’ before revealing that events require a radically different
interpretation at a different level of diegetic reality. Hesitation thus may be incited for the ideal
reader, but it is then ultimately overwritten by a shift in interpretive framework that is forcefully
immediate (from diegetic ‘dream / delusion’ to ‘reality,’ or from natural to supernatural) rather than
occurring as the result of resolved hesitation” (42).

68
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Trans. Richard
Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1975) 33.

Literary theorist Terry Heller, in The Delights of Terror:
An Aesthetics of the Tale of Terror (Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1987) argues that the experience of
the fantastic text can be likened to a situation where the implied author continues to exist after the text
is complied. This feeling is one of suspension and much deeper than a lack of narrative closure.

69
Donnelly states “The music adds up to more than simply film music, manifesting what might be
called ‘non-diegetic sound effects.’ It can be interpreted as sounds that express the supernatural world
of the film, yet emanate from outside the diegetic world the film has created” (45). Kevin Donnelly,
Film and Television Music: The Spectre of Sound (London: BFI, 2005).

70
J.P. Telotte offers a striking analysis of the film in “Narration and Incarnation: I Walked with a
Zombie,” Film Criticism 6.3 (1982): 18-31. He persuasively argues that the film presents multiple
270

voices which throw interpretation into doubt. Put bluntly, the film sets science (medicine) against
mysticism. He also notes the film’s use of offscreen sound to startlingly introduce characters and
speakers and how the voiceover lacks the authority that is normally expected from this form of
narration.

71
These were created by Dorothy Lloyd though she is not credited on screen.

72
Tom Gunning, “‘Like Unto a Leopard’: Figurative Discourse in Cat People and Todorov’s The
Fantastic,” Wide Angle 10.3 (1988): 31.

73
Gunning 31.

74
M. R. James writes in the introduction to Ghosts and Marvels, “It is not amiss sometimes to leave a
loophole for a natural explanation, but, I would say, let the loophole be so narrow as not to be quite
practicable.” See Todorov 26.

75
Todorov 33.

76
Newman does comment that the sequel, The Curse of the Cat People (1944), is perhaps closer to a
truly fantastic film, but he still avoids the terminology. Newman writes, “When they requested a
sequel to Cat People, RKO can hardly have expected Lewton and Bodeen to reuse the characters of
the first film but tell a completely different story, about an imaginative and misunderstood child who
has an imaginary friendship with Irena (Simone Simon, dressed like a fairy-tale princess), who is
either a gentle ghost or a figment of the imagination. Evidence is presented to support both readings,
as Irena doesn’t have a face until Amy has discovered a photograph of her father’s first wife but the
apparition seems to have an independent personality and emotions, finally sacrificing her own
existence so that Amy can forge a real relationship with Oliver” (67-68).

77
Kim Newman, Cat People (London: BFI, 1999) 36.

78
Newman 36-37. The Innocents is Jack Clayton’s 1961 film of The Turn of the Screw.

79
Newman 36.

80
Todorov 33.

81
Newman 57.

82
In addition to work by Gunning and Newman, see Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror: or
Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990).

83
Commissario Ovidio Castanio sees the hand strangle Don Arlington (Charles Dingle) as he stands
in a doorway and the film’s narration support’s the Commissario’s interpretation. Yet this seemingly
disembodied hand is created in the same manner as the Commissario’s mocking self-strangulation at
the film’s conclusion. Don has just threatened Cummings so logically he attacked Don from behind
the door (but possibly used the disembodied hand to do so.

84
Beast with Five Fingers files Special Collections Division, Cinema-Television Library, Doheny
Library, University of Southern California.

85
Beast with Five Fingers files Special Collections Division, Cinema-Television Library, Doheny
Library, University of Southern California.
271

86
The production files reveal that the music was the subject of discussion and economic
consideration. The files reveal that producers investigated using Ravel’s “Concerto for Left Hand” as
Ingram’s composition and theme but were informed that “clips” of the piece were not allowed and
they would have to present the entire piece so they declined. Of course the music finally matters for
how the film’s narration makes use of it more than its meaning or value as music per se. Additional
music was cut from the film because of cost. Bideri owned “Torna a Surriento” which was to play as
Julia and Bruce (Robert Alda) walk through town and a guitarist approaches them. The producers
determined that $800 was too much and the scene was eventually cut. Beast with Five Fingers files
Special Collections Division, Cinema-Television Library, Doheny Library, University of Southern
California.

87
Brian Taves, Robert Florey, the French Expressionist (Metuchen, NJ.: Scarecrow, 1987) 277-78.

88
Taves 278-79.

89
Taves 275, 277.

90
Screenplay dated 9/29/45, p. 123. Beast with Five Fingers files Special Collections Division,
Cinema-Television Library, Doheny Library, University of Southern California.

91
Memo from Thames Williamson (dated 9/20/45) states that he wants more romance: “The other
big thing, more important, is that I felt the lack of some girl-boy angle in the story.” Beast with Five
Fingers files Special Collections Division, Cinema-Television Library, Doheny Library, University of
Southern California.

92
For example, see Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror 151-152.

93
Aaron Smuts, “Haunting the House from Within: Disbelief Mitigation and Spatial Experience,”
Dark Thoughts: Philosophical Reflections on Cinematic Horror, Ed. Steven Jay Schneider and Daniel
Shaw (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2003) 167.

94
Smuts 168.

95
Newman 71.

96
Furthermore, an examination of Robert Wise’s papers on the making of the film, including clipped
articles and numerous story drafts, reveals that Wise and screenwriter Nelson Gidding successfully
endeavored to provide the viewer with the effect of the fantastic. In an undated document (that can be
dated with some precision as January 1960 based on its contents) Gidding says of the film “We intend
to make our adaptation in such a way that all the supernatural events can be taken as just that,
supernatural events, or can be explained in . . . other ways” (np). And these other ways are that the
events happen in the characters minds only, are the hidden actions of one or more characters, or are
caused by natural occurrences.
There is also a doubleness in the film’s depiction of the supernatural, despite statements from
screenwriter Nelson Gidding such as: “The Haunting is a genuine ghost story. The house is honestly
haunted” (xii). Gidding, the screenwriter for The Haunting, reveals that while working on the script
he became convinced that Jackson’s novel is “about a mental institution . . . where the heroine,
Eleanor, is confined” (xii). He and director Wise flew to Jackson’s home where she reassured them
this was not true.

97
The credits are ghostly and are accompanied by Humphrey Searle’s score. The title of the film
forms out of swirling white smoke. The film’s concluding credit is in the same style.
272

98
The influence of Psycho on The Haunting is evident in this defiance of expectations and specific
scenes such as Eleanor’s drive to Hill House as her voiceover plays on the soundtrack and the screen
shows her staring apprehensively at the road ahead. These moments echo Marion Crane’s escape
from town.

99
Brian Yuzna, “Spiraling Fear,” Sight and Sound Feb. 1994: 43.

100
The only other optical POV shot in the film is Markway’s as he uses a magnifying glass at the
start of the group’s second morning in the house.

101
In the terrified and tattered face of Mrs. Markway as she looks through the trap door and frightens
Eleanor, the viewer can see the face of the second Mrs. Crain’s corpse after she falls down the stairs.
Morrison feels the film carefully establishes links between the companion and Eleanor (including that
each carried for an invalid and did not answer her call one night) and notes that the actress who plays
the companion “physically resembles Julie Harris” (27).

102
Michael A. Morrison, “Journey=s End: The Haunting from Book to Film,” Studies in Weird
Fiction 12 (1993): 29.

103
This also suggests a continuance of the status of Hill House, or that the house and the film has
now stepped outside the boundaries of linear time.

104
Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” Film Sound:
Theory and Practice, Ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia UP, 1985) 166.

105
Doane 168.

106
Bruce Kawin, “An Outline of Film Voices,” Film Quarterly 38 (1984): 43.

107
He did not, however, neglect the tried and true methods for making money with films. Like other
independent producers and companies in this period Castle typically used at least one recognizable
star in his films. Specifically, his collaborations with Vincent Price were to their mutual benefit. In
The House on Haunted Hill (1959), for example, Price adds just the right amount of gentle mockery to
the ridiculous proceedings. Of course putting Price on the screen was not enough to make money or
grab audience’s attention. Screenings for this film were accompanied by “Emergo,” The House on
Haunted Hill (1959) Castle’s fancy name for the plastic skeleton that would swing into theaters at the
same time a skeleton in the film terrorizes Anabella (Carol Ohmart). Castle marketed such gimmicks
almost as heavily as the films themselves and this leveled distinctions between the film text and the
gimmicks; all are part of the performance.

108
John W. Law, Scare Tactic: The Life and Films of William Castle (San Jose, CA: Writers Club
Press, 2000) xii.

109
Mikita Brottman, “Ritual, Tension, and Relief: The Terror of the The Tingler,” Film Quarterly
50.4 (1997): 5. Brottman puts a psychoanalytic spin on the proceedings, stating: “Put in its most
simple terms, the human fear of losing control of one’s defecatory functions – embodied by the sight
of an enormous, swollen faecal animal, alive and on the loose – is cathected into the socially
legitimate chaos of mass ritual screaming (itself inspired by the screams of the on-screen cinema
audience)” (9).

110
It is important to note that Castle’s work is part of a particular moment in film history and was
subject to the influence of other innovators. Rather than regard Castle’s work as unique, it is best
273

seen as the artful combination of other existing ideas and models according to Heffernan: “What
Castle had done with Macabre and House on Haunted Hill was to combine the saturation advertising
campaign perfected by Columbia and Universal in their Sam Katzman and William Alland packages
with centralized and standardized publicity stunts and gimmicks that had previously been the purview
of the local exhibitor” (97). Castle makes the local nearly global, so to speak. It remains both unique
(each showing is a performance) and also retains characteristics of the local.

111
Kevin Heffernan, Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business,
1953-1968 (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2004) 83-89. Note that the exhibition called for the adjustment
of the lights in the theater and the performance of a plant in the audience. And even more interesting
is Heffernan’s revelation that the audience member (a woman) is meant to scream in unison – or sync
– with a woman in the film.

112
While playing Miss Lonelyheart in Rear Window, actress Judith Evelyn was saved by music and
seems to find (fleeting?) love with the composer of the song which prevents her suicide. In The
Tingler, however, her character is a victim of sound.

113
William Castle, Step Right Up! . . .I’m Gonna Scare the Pants Off America (New York: G. P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1976) 151.

114
Heffernan 103.

115
The DVD of the film includes this audio portion of Castle himself (rather than Vincent Price)
warning the audience about the tingler on the loose.

116
Heffernan 103.

117
Of course for a last touch of reflexivity once the projectionist’s scream paralyzes the tingler
Chapin puts the creature in a film reel canister to transport it back to Martha’s corpse.

118
Heffernan 98.

119
Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia UP, 2004) 106, passim.

120
See Altman, Silent Film Sound 182, passim. Also Richard Abel “That Most American of
Attractions, the Illustrated Song,” The Sounds of Early Cinema, Ed. Richard Abel and Rick Altman
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2001) 143-155.

121
Altman 191.

122
James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation,
Modernity (New York: Columbia UP, 2000) 100.

123
The cast list is an alphabetical listing of the artists who perform and concludes with “and 400,000
other beautiful people,” a group which the film audience seemingly will join (and perhaps become
“beautiful” as a bonus).

124
The group also performed the song at the Monterey Pop Festival but it does not appear in the
released film (or even on the box set DVD which includes 2 hours of additional performances.)

125
Bill Belmont, artist coordinator and the manager of Country Joe and the Fish (so perhaps not an
impartial observer), testifies that the audience at Woodstock was fully engaged with the performance
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more than any other point in the festival: “it was so loud. I mean, it was just really loud. And it was
sort of mind boggling that it was so loud. That’s the only time I remember the crowd being intimately
involved with something.” Joel Makower, Woodstock: The Oral History (New York: Doubleday,
1989) 191.

126
Kawin 43.

127
Dale Bell, ed., Woodstock: An Inside Look at the Movie that Shook up the World and Defined a
Generation (Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions, 1999) 230.

128
Sly’s disheartening dissent into paranoia is well-chronicled but still depressing. See Greil Marcus,
Mystery Train, 3
rd
. revised ed. (New York: Plume, 1990).

129
Quoted in Ricky Vincent, Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One (New York:
St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996) 94.

130
Quoted in R. Serge Denisoff and William D. Romanowski, Risky Business: Rock in Film (New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991) 714-715.

131
Fred Camper, “Sound and Silence in Narrative and Nonnarrative Cinema,” Film Sound: Theory
and Practice, Ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia UP, 1985) 370.

132
Camper 370.

133
Stan Brakhage, Film at Wit’s End: Eight Avant-Garde Filmmakers (Kingston, NY: McPherson &
Company, 1989) 159.

134
Available in the Film-Makers’ Cooperative On-line catalog: http://www.film-
makerscoop.com/search/search.php

135
The same can certainly be asserted regarding the presentation of Warhol’s Chelsea Girls which
has imprecise instruction for the film’s dual projection (and these need not be followed precisely).
Morgan Fisher’s Projection Instructions (though made in 1976) should also be mentioned here. See
David E. James, Allegories of Cinema 135.

136
P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-2000, 3rd ed. (New York:
Oxford UP, 2002) 305-06.

137
Sitney 305.

138
Sitney 306.

139
The reading of individual segments between installments of the game (the dog, the wieners) and
the reading of how one segment relates to another one is left to the viewer. Nelson does not provide a
decoder to evaluate how each segment is interacting to create a theme, or argument. Sitney notes
correctly that each maintains its integrity. And yet connections are suggested. For example: the
segment made up of easily recognizable film footage, and the porn film – credited to Nelson and with
jokey intertitles – suggest a concern with Hollywood and mainstream filmmaking.

140
Robert Nelson, Interview, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, Ed. Scott
MacDonald, Vol. 1 (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1988) 272.

275

141
Nelson 271.

142
Nelson 272.

143
I saw this film for first time in class with Robert Sklar. He recounted seeing the film not long
after its release in NYC. He said that audience members called out boat names in a form of
interaction. They were playing along with the film and clearly engaged.

144
Sitney 307.

145
The event was titled “A Night of Experimental Films: Cartoons and Comedy.” Daniel Herbert
named the screening and was integral to its creation.

146
J. Hoberman, To Tightrope Walkers Everywhere: The Collaborative Films of Robert Nelson and
William T. Wiley (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center, 1979) 11.

147
The release is to a shot of the filmmaker, seated and facing the camera and seen in negative. The
Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” can be heard lightly playing in the background, an echo of Snow’s use of
“Strawberry Fields Forever” and perhaps even Harry Smith’s use of Beatles songs on the re-released
“abstractions.” Nelson’s speech is halting. He seems a little befuddled but academically earnest. He
speaks about the two planes of involvement, the horizontal in particular which extends from the
viewing space into the screen and all the way to infinity. Yet even he can not break the structure he
has set in motion as his speech is broken by the intrusion of the announcement of the minute passing
(which continues to be a moment of silence). His status as a negative image also undermines his
authority and this visual devaluation of the author creates more space for the viewer in the reading of
the film. Nelson’s appearance extends beyond the prescribed 30 minute mark but this is unsurprising
as he clearly is not in control of the text. Finally the sequence is halted by Nelson’s cursing of the
camera itself, which he says is making an odd noise. He apparently shuts off the camera and sound,
ending the film but without completing his lecture on aesthetics. Nelson can not fully reach us
through the medium / technology of cinema. And we can not fully respond to him or participate in
this or any film. Bleu Shut reveals the fragile and arbitrary connection between sound and image in
cinema.

148
Kevin Donnelly, Film and Television Music: The Spectre of Sound (London: BFI, 2005) 9.

149
Donnelly, Film and Television Music 8.

150
Donnelly, Film and Television Music 2.

151
Ian Conrich, “Musical Performance and the Cult Film Experience,” Film’s Musical Moments, Ed.
Ian Conrich and Estella Tincknell (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh UP, 2006) 115.

152
Conrich 118.

276

Chapter 6: Sound / Image Hierarchy

The following discussion builds on the earlier chapters to argue that in the postwar /
pre-Dolby era a number of films disrupt the hierarchy of image over sound – a core
component of classical narration – by three primary means: (1) foregrounding the act
of presenting sound in the exhibition space (in a return to the pre-classical tendency
to emphasize sound); (2) foregrounding the importance of music in the film’s
address often by forcing the image to relate to a soundtrack that may feature already
famous songs; and (3) using voiceover as a central element of storytelling. This
discussion addresses films and filmmakers largely absent from the previous chapters,
but most of the films discussed earlier also could be linked to this topic.
While also creating their (potentially rebellious and unruly) opposites in
async sound and nondiegetic sound, synchronous sound and diegetic sound situate
the aural half of cinema’s address to cooperate with the image. Yet as the previous
discussion argues, sync and asynchronous sound can each allow sound to serve as
spectacle to the same degree as the image. Similarly, sound which is diegetic,
nondiegetic, or which regularly crosses this boundary can draw attention to itself,
and convey more, or more important, (narrative) information than the image.
Amy Lawrence writes that early sound films, “momentarily disrupted the
traditional sound / image hierarchy. The requirement of sound demanded that film
producers retool and rethink how films were made in order to accommodate the
delicate new technology.”
1
When MGM marketed Anna Christie (1930) with the
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line “Garbo talks” the appeal to the audience was clear: the film offered something
new and unavailable in earlier films (which only displayed Garbo). But the sound of
Garbo was not simply an addition to the image of Garbo, it was rather a new and
separate attraction and worth being advertised as such. Proclamations like this
ceased as the initial novelty of recorded sound wore off and sound was relegated to
its Classical and “rightful” place: at the service of the image. Lawrence continues:
“In classical Hollywood film and much that is written about it, the sound / image
hierarchy survives intact. The image is assumed to be the source of enchantment,
‘the dream screen,’ the object of the ‘all-perceiving Eye.’”
2
Pre-classical Hollywood
encouraged exhibitors to market orchestras, regularly featured singers in films, and
gladly sold sheet music. But during the Classical era the aural elements of film were
largely rendered secondary to the visual elements and sold as commodities.
3

In the postwar / pre-Dolby era films such as Klute (1971) and Stage Fright
(1950) offer sound as the equal of the image and (re)play the disruption of the
expected sound / image of the early sound era. Since 1940, sound, like other aspects
of cinema’s address becomes more diverse in both Hollywood and avant-garde films.
The continuity editing system also responds to pressure; Italian neorealism and the
long take cinema of directors like Orson Welles, for example, offer filmmakers
alternatives to Hollywood’s aesthetics. In some films the causal relationship
between narrative events is less clear (or even nonexistent) and character psychology
takes precedence over action.
278

Early in Narration and the Fiction Film, Bordwell briefly discuses the
concluding moments of the detective thriller Klute and Colin MacCabe’s use of this
scene. In the image track Bree (Jane Fonda) and Klute (Donald Sutherland) pack her
things and leave while the soundtrack features her voice expressing doubt about their
relationship. For MacCabe the relationship will succeed because the visual narration
shows them together. Bordwell, however, feels that the film offers no “definite
closure,” and argues, “Klute is ‘open-ended’ in a way characteristic of those
American genre films influenced by the European art cinema of the 1960s and
1970s.”
4
The lack of closure and “ambiguity” are the result of “giv[ing] image and
sound equal interpretive weight.”
5
Klute does bear the influence of European art
cinema in a variety of ways (for example, the matter-of-fact presentation of
prostitution owes much to Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux
[1962, My Life to Live]), including its lack of narrative closure. Bordwell quotes
MacCabe as asserting that, “The camera shows us what happens – it tells the truth
against which we can measure the discourses,” because the “visual discourse . . .
guarantees truth.”
6
Bordwell concedes that, “Possibly he [MacCabe] is simply
claiming that what we see in a normal fiction film has stronger narrational force than
what we hear.”
7
But the “normal fiction film” is classical Hollywood and the
postwar / pre-Dolby era includes many moments when aural elements have “stronger
narrational force” than the image.
A host of films made between Anna Christie and Klute (and after Klute)
ignore or willfully subvert the assumed film hierarchy of image over sound.
279

Released half way between these films, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1950 film Stage Fright,
and responses to it reveal a number of assumptions about film sound and narration,
particularly that the image is truthful.
8
George M. Wilson notes that, “we tend to
assume, in watching a traditional film, that seeing is believing.”
9
Stage Fright, to the
frustration of some writers, is not traditional enough. In the film’s most (and really,
only) famous scene, Jonathan (Richard Todd) tells Eve (Jane Wyman) – and the
audience – how he became mistakenly implicated in a murder. As he begins to
recount his story the image track switches to an apparently objective rendering of the
events. Other than his voiceover nothing indicates that the images are Jonathan’s
subjective account yet the film eventually reveals him to be the killer (the flashback
is not coded visually as subjective through the use of optical point of view, for
example). Stage Fright was not as financially successful as several other Hitchcock
productions and many reviewers complained about the film’s “deception.”
Responses demonstrate the convention that characters may lie – aurally at least – but
the image track will provide truth and objectivity.
10
Sarah Kozloff indicates that
Hitchcock took the public and critical failure to heart and “never repeated this
experiment.”
11
She also states that its “lying flashback”: “has not caught on in
American cinema; for whatever reasons, the underlying need to believe in the reality
of the scenic presentation in general and the photographic image in particular is too
pervasive, too strong here.”
12
As evidence that “lying” flashbacks are common
elsewhere she offers up Rashomon (1950) and L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last
Year at Marienbad, 1961) but these films are hardly typical of Japanese cinema or
280

French cinema, respectively, and these two films are as much conscious deviations
from perceived norms of cinema storytelling as Stage Fright. More importantly, the
split between sound and image offered by the film’s narration had “caught on” in
American film years before the 1950s and even exists in pre-classical cinema.
While reviewers express anger about the film’s deception, later writers on
narration are more complimentary. Seymour Chatman defends it as exemplary and
influential:
Hitchcock was only challenging the convention of reliable narration,
as so many novelists had already done. Visuals are no more
sacrosanct than words. The cinema caught up, in 1951, with a fashion
established in verbal narratives well before the turn of the century.
13

While Chatman overstates the uniqueness of Hitchcock’s film and its position as a
key to a sort of paradigm shift in cinema, he articulates the film’s challenges of
classical film narration. Similarly, Kristin Thompson defends the film’s narration
against Truffaut (and Hitchcock himself),
14
arguing that objections to the film’s
flashback assume “that such a device is innately against the rules of cinema.”
15

Hitchcock’s “device” of a lying image is “innately against” the rule not of cinema
but the rules of classical Hollywood cinema.
16

This chapter focuses on films which break the classical hierarchy of image
over sound and the first section outlines some previous approaches to sound / image
hierarchy and considers Rick Altman’s articulation of the “audio dissolve” where the
sound of a film overtakes and controls the image. The chapter next considers the
exhibition of films where the presentation of sounds (issuing from speakers which
are decidedly not hidden) is the attraction. The discussion focuses on three pivotal
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films which invite audiences to theaters because of their speakers: 1927’s The Jazz
Singer which presents the talking and singing of Jolson as superior to that available
through other media, 1956’s Blackboard Jungle which presents “Rock Around the
Clock” in an aurally superior environment and even encourages dancing, and 1974’s
Earthquake which uses “Sensurround” to give audiences a physical experience with
its extreme presentation of sound. The chapter next examines films that present
sound as more important than the image. Music in early rock films such as Rock
Around the Clock (1956), the experimental cinema of Bruce Conner, specifically his
films Cosmic Ray (1961) and Breakaway (1966), and the “compilation scores” of
Hollywood cinema in The Graduate (1967), Easy Rider (1969), and American
Graffiti (1971) controls the image. The narration of these films create relationships
between images and famous popular songs and encourage audiences to recognize the
songs and read the film’s images (and narrative as well) as intertextual. Finally, the
chapter discusses films that feature voiceover narration. Though voiceover narration
is denigrated by some scholars as “not cinematic” and regarded as often a last minute
addition to help save an incoherent film (and there are production stories which
support this view), many films present voiceover which with every word declares its
ontological difference from the image. The section then briefly examines the work
of three feature film directors – Orson Welles, Joseph Mankiewicz, and Stanley
Kubrick. These serve as case studies for tendencies in postwar / pre-Dolby era
voiceover. Welles presents his own voice as an attraction; Joseph Mankiewicz
presents character voiceovers – even women’s – in order to foreground sound and
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interpret events; and Kubrick uses voiceover to display the difference between sound
and image.

The History of Sound / Image Hierarchy in American Film
This section surveys discussions of sound / image hierarchy, particularly Altman’s
idea of the “audio dissolve.” Altman describes moments in Hollywood musicals
where the audio portion of the film assumes control of the image. This chapter
builds on his theorization to argue that postwar / pre-Dolby films – other than
musicals – features moments of audio dissolve and some films systematically
prioritize sound over the image. Altman considers music primarily and the
movement between diegetic and nondiegetic sound in the musical. This chapter
builds on Altman’s idea to examine films which display the cinema speakers as
attractions, offer sounds elements a spectacle (or narratively significant), and use
voiceover narration.
The Jazz Singer begins the classical era of Hollywood cinema with the
introduction of sound yet its sound is more of an attraction than the image. But soon
classical narration places the image back in the center of filmic interest. This leads
to the “talkies” era, which in the popular conception consists of films where
characters stand still and talk incessantly while the single, stationary, camera films
them. In these films, in the popular conception of them at least, dialogue replaces
action and the movement of both characters and camera. What this conception
ignores, or at least does not examine enough, is that the recording and presentation of
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sound controls other aspects of film production (determining production design,
photography, actors’ movements) and sound is the primary attraction for audiences.
17

The classical era stifles this brief return to pre-classical elements but by the 1940s
films shake off these strictures with the musical providing a model. The genre relies
on music and at one level nearly always subordinates image to sound, as Altman
notes:
In most films, it has been argued, the sound track is simply a
tacked-on guarantee of the authenticity of the image; only in the
musical does the sound actually generate the movement within the
image. In standard musical practice, sound is recorded first, with
the image synchronized later to the sound – dancers dance to the
music, and not the reverse.
18

His concept of “audio dissolve” is the best theorization of moments when
music assumes a position of dominance over the image and also one of the strongest
articulations of the subordination of sound to image in Hollywood.
19
The focus on
moments where the hierarchy is “reversed” also (re)inscribes the image as the
dominant mode. But this is only true of classical cinema. “Audio dissolves” are
more exceptional in the classical period than before and afterwards. Altman argues
that a core element of Hollywood musicals is a moment when sound shifts from
diegetic – a character singing, typically – to nondiegetic as, for example, an orchestra
comes through on the soundtrack without an accompanying visual manifestation of
musicians. The audio dissolve bridges the prosaic world of speech to the romantic
world of singing and the ordinary world of walking to the magical world of dancing.
In these moments, “the traditional classical narrative hierarchy of image over sound
is reversed.”
20
In these, for Altman, exceptional moments, characters and the camera
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move with the music, and editing patterns respond to the beat and rhythm of the
music: “the movement which we see on screen is now an accompaniment to the
music track. A new mode of causality now appears, a simultaneous mode wherein
the image is ‘caused’ by the music rather than by some previous image.”
21
For
Altman this has additional influence on the content of the image track: “The logical
consequence of this progression is a treatment of the image itself as pure pattern.
Freed from the realistic and causal restraints of the diegesis, the image can now
reflect the music in its overall pictorial quality.”
22
He finds such in Busby Berkeley
films where human figures – often shot from high above – take on dehumanized
shapes and move in unison. The climax of most of his 1930s musicals begins on
stage as a group performance for a diegetic audience but becomes a presentation for
the camera.
23
For Altman the audio dissolve “lies at the very center of the musical
genre, so much so that any definition of the genre must take it into account,” and is
therefore a way for him to exclude films from his definition of the musical genre
(such as documentaries) which include several songs, “theme song movies,” and
films which use songs “only as accompaniment or interludes.”
24

Altman’s suggestive theorization is applicable for genres other than the
musical and can also be historicized to argue that this element “at the very center of
the musical genre” migrates to other genres after the postclassical period, just as the
presentation of music spreads into all sorts of films. The documentaries, theme song
films, and films which use music as “accompaniment or interlude” which are not
musicals for Altman may, and in fact often do, feature audio dissolves.
285

The increasing frequency of instances of audio dissolves in non-musicals (or
moments of similar hierarchical reversal), is one way to account for the shift between
the “inaudible” score Gorbman argues represents the classical period and the overt,
obvious music K. J. Donnelly argues is representative of contemporary film (and
television). The postwar / pre-Dolby era is the age of the audio dissolve as aural
elements increasingly serve as spectacle in both Hollywood and avant-garde texts.
Particularly since 1940, films incorporate popular songs as performances in
nightclub settings or in montage sequences. Drew Casper argues that such moments
“broke the plot thrust, sabotaging the transparency of the Hollywood classical style”
and advertise recordings.
25

While Altman’s focus is on the musical where the image is tailored overall to
the image (at least for musical numbers), other scholars use his concept to consider
films other than musicals and find examples in films such as Casablanca (1942) and
Henry V (1989)
26
and the Rita Hayworth vehicles Gilda (1946) and Affair in
Trinidad (1952).
27
Jeff Smith argues for a global shift in film sound / image
hierarchy that occurs after 1960 due in part to the influence of the French Scopitone
and Italian Cinebox “video jukeboxes” and “a larger trend toward inverting cinema’s
image-sound hierarchy for the purpose of selling title songs and soundtrack
albums.”
28
While this date fits with his (and Bordwell’s) definition of Hollywood’s
classical period, Smith does not press for a postclassical reading of post-1960 film or
their use of sound. The purported motivation for this change – to sell music – is also
probably overstated and not wholly new in the 1960s.
29
Smith supports his position
286

by examining films such as Un homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman 1966)
and the Ennio Morricone-scored westerns of Italian director Sergio Leone (some of
which had scores written before photography). The Scopitone shorts promote the
songs and singers, and for Smith, the Leone films do too: “By giving the music a
logical priority, they not only elevated Morricone’s music from a subordinate
position to one that was equivalent to the film’s image track, but it also served as a
perfect vehicle for selling the score.”
30
Smith does not discuss the inclusion of
famous songs in audio-visual texts. Silent films and sound texts from The Jazz
Singer to the present feature music which existed before the films’ release and
perhaps appeared in other audio-visual texts. The Graduate, Easy Rider, and other
New Hollywood films use popular (in both senses of the term) songs to reverse the
hierarchy of sound and image. The songs are therefore potentially complex
intertexts for audience members, and while they may help sell a single and / or
soundtrack album, the songs also assist the film text often by delineating character.
Donnelly addresses a broader range of films than Smith and the use of pre-
existing music. He argues that in many contemporary films, music, whether written
for the film or already popular, “enhances . . . yet at times obliterates their regular
processes and dominates proceedings.”
31
Donnelly states that the “regular” process
of cinema is to force music to serve the image. He refers to Altman’s audio dissolve
to discuss how, “At significant junctures, film music rises up powerfully, possessing
both the film and its audience,” and explains that these junctures are “related to song
sequences in film musicals . . . the moment where the regime of mainstream film
287

changes, with music moving into the foreground and diegetic sound and causality
receding – a reversal of cinema’s dominant regime.”
32
Like Smith, Donnelly’s
examples are predominantly postwar texts such as the horror films and thrillers Night
of the Demon (1957), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and Jaws (1975)
and the Warner Brothers romance melodrama Now, Voyager (1942). These texts
demonstrate the range of pre-Dolby and non-musical precedents for the current
tendency of music controlling the image.

Speakers as Attractions: Sound in the Exhibition Space
This section examines films which draw attention to the space of exhibition through
their use of aural material. These films are interesting deviations from the
explanation – and rhetoric – that audiences go to “see” a film. Audiences attend
some films for the sound they and the theater offers; cinemagoers pay for The Jazz
Singer to hear Jolson’s speech and singing, Blackboard Jungle to dance and hear
“Rock Around the Clock” at volumes unsuitable for the home, and to feel a natural
disaster in Earthquake. These films provide moments where the sound not only is
more important than the image but which do not require the audience to even watch
the screen.
The Jazz Singer’s success pushed exhibitors – many of whom worked for the
studios – to install speakers and put Hollywood in the business of selling sound, but
the history of film sound exhibition (before and after The Jazz Singer) is even more
neglected than the aesthetic history of film sound. In some moments of film history
288

going to “see” a film is more accurately described as going to “hear a performance”
because films and cinemas offer unique presentations of a text (a performance),
superior audio quality, and better volume than other venues:
For much of its history, the motion picture theater offered sound
equal or superior to that heard anywhere. The Vitaphone disc of the
1920s was a precursor of the LP in that it used the modern record
speed of 33 1/3 and lacked the abrasive that produced surface noise
in phonograph records of the day. In the early 1930s, the first
general use of the term “high fidelity” was in reference to RCA’s
improved optical sound system. The two-way woofer / tweeter
arrangement of theater speakers set the standard for the hi-fi
revolution of the 1950s. Cinerama, CinemaScope, and Todd-AO
inspired stereo LP’s, many of which at first were sound tracks, e.g.,
Around the World in 80 Days.
33

This concise and provocative summary forcefully argues that film exhibition
practices directly influence other experiences of sound. In this history, cinema – its
texts, exhibition spaces, and technology – are often at the forefront of audio practices
in the United States, well ahead of radio, auto audio equipment, home sound systems
and television and provide audiences with experiences second only to live concerts
(an ideal to which Fantasia [1940] and other films clearly aspire). In the wake of
The Jazz Singer films offer speech and in some cases performances of songs. The
stipulation, at least until television regularly played films, is that one must visit a
cinema theater to experience these sounds. Like the expanded aural diegesis films,
The Jazz Singer, Blackboard Jungle and Earthquake draw audiences to screening
spaces for performances. Also like the performance of expanded diegesis films there
is an element of participation and potentially (in)voluntary bodily response. One
element which separates the responses from films with an expanded diegesis is that
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the audience response is not necessarily an aural one: for performances of The Jazz
Singer the audience attends in order to listen to, rather than to sing along with, the
film. But listening is only one of the available responses to sounds in cinema spaces
because dancing and shaking in one’s seat are options (or demands) when attending
Blackboard Jungle and Earthquake respectively.
If audiences chose not to sing along with The Jazz Singer it was not because
the songs were unfamiliar but because they wanted to give Al Jolson their full
attention. Jolson’s fame allowed the company to sell him and sound, and to create a
fairly safe expenditure for both Warners and theater owners: “Though the price of
wiring for Vitaphone was exorbitant, the prospect of having Al Jolson ‘play’ in the
local theater made it a surefire investment.”
34
Crafton also reports that the studio
told all who would listen that their film would also include talking: “Though the
myth is that Jolson spontaneously blurted out his famous speaking part, all summer
[the film’s director Alan] Crosland had been telling the press that The Jazz Singer
would have some talking.”
35
Even more enticing is the film’s trailer which shows
Jolson but does not present his voice. The trailer offers sync sound but the visual
presence and aural absence of Jolson is a sly tease for the film and the cinema space
both: audiences would have to come to the theater to hear Jolson in The Jazz Singer.
Audiences for The Jazz Singer experienced not simply a film with an
indeterminate diegesis that sets the precedent for fake sync; they experienced Jolson
singing in a film theater where he almost certainly sounded better than on radio or
record. For some critics, this was about all the film offered. A reviewer for
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Exhibitors Herald wrote that it is “scarcely a motion picture. It should be more
properly labeled an enlarged Vitaphone record of Al Jolson in half a dozen songs.”
36

This comment anticipates records which audiences could take home that held half a
dozen (and more) songs: the long-playing 33 1/3 album. While denigrating the film
the reviewer provides a reasonable assessment of the film text, its performance, and
its appeal. The film is stodgy, visually uninteresting, and at times the narrative
barely drags itself from one Jolson performance to the next. However the film
allows audiences to hear and see Jolson conveniently and relatively cheaply at a time
when many citizens desired this experience. The reviewer’s comment also suggests
an alternate way to define and analyze cinema which this dissertation fully endorses.
According to the reviewer, The Jazz Singer consists most centrally of sound. It is
first a record and only secondarily a series of images. The Jazz Singer is truly a
sound film as its image track exists as added value. Audiences for the film gather in
reverence less of the screen than of the cinema speaker(s). All along audiences
attended films and cinemas in part to listen but this is not a central concern of film
history, or even sound theorists. Claudia Gorbman responds to a quote from Leonid
Sabaneev where he states that music is the “left hand” to the image, and labels it a
“bad business when this left hand begins to creep into the foreground.”
37
Gorbman
endorses this opinion: “Bad business, precisely, for it is good business to give ticket-
buyers what they have come for, namely a story, not a concert.” While it is true that
audiences for most Classical films (though perhaps not all musicals), attended for a
“story, not a concert,” Gorbman’s statement denies the (potential) experience of
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many films of the postwar / pre-Dolby period and moments when cinemagoers desire
(and receive) something more like a concert than a story. Such films include filmed
concerts (Monterrey Pop [1968], Woodstock [1970] and even Fantasia), rock
documentaries (Dont Look Back [1967], Gimme Shelter [1970]) and new forms (The
Jazz Singer). Perhaps the most significant of such moments is when audiences
bought tickets for Blackboard Jungle in part to hear, and dance along with, Bill
Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock.”
Though the Hollywood studios for years missed out on additional income
from record sales because they did not buy or partner with the record industry, The
Jolson Story (1946) and Jolson Sings Again (1949) point one direction that cinema
would take in the ensuing years: providing audiences with new, or at least desired,
sounds. The films are instances of a music delivery and marketing system largely
neglected by Hollywood in the classical era. And Hollywood must keep up even
with those trends it thinks are fleeting such as rock ‘n’ roll. There is no third Jolson
film in part because by the mid 1950s the music of Al Jolson sounded irredeemably
outdated to Hollywood’s increasingly targeted audience: teenagers. Thomas Doherty
states that in the face of teens and their buying power, Hollywood could no longer
make films for mass audiences, or even primarily adults:
The rise of television and the collapse of the old studio system
destroyed that kind of universality. Since the 1950s, moviemakers
have been forced to narrow their focus and attract the one group with
the requisite income, leisure, and gregariousness to sustain a theatrical
business.
38

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Though the category of “teenager” and the actual humans bearing the label
seemed to spring up out of nowhere, their conquering of Hollywood took a number
of years
39
and entertainers such as Jolson were not pushed aside without a fight.
Indeed, some took advantage of their cross-media opportunities more effectively and
with more astuteness than studios because they were free to partner with companies
in different fields. Actors, directors, producers, and agents all saw their power
increase in the postwar era and took on the responsibilities of the studios. Singers-
actors were particularly well suited to take advantage of the new opportunities.
Doris Day, for example, founded Arwin Productions, her own publishing firm: “The
concept behind the acquisition was to employ promotion people to hype songs to
boast [sic] film attendance. Young at Heart [1954], starring Day and Frank Sinatra,
contained four songs belonging to her company.”
40

The inclusion of “Rock Around the Clock” in Blackboard Jungle was not as
planned or economically managed as the use of Arwin songs in Young at Heart, but
it is the film’s opening credits which profoundly changed American cinema. Richard
Brooks’ film is an effective high school melodrama of teen violence and includes
some good performances, most notably Sidney Poitier and Vic Morrow as the
school’s most influential students. The film’s real impact then (and now) however is
in its use of “Rock Around the Clock.” Sociologically, the presence of Bill Haley
and the Comets’ version of “Rock Around the Clock” in this film about juvenile
delinquents solidified the nascent connections between youthful delinquency (and
criminality) and rock music. “Rock Around the Clock” bridges the credits to the
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film’s diegesis as students dance in the schoolyard and bang trashcan lids in time.
The song’s volume increases as new English teacher Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford)
approaches the school as though an unseen radio in the schoolyard plays the song.
As Dadier moves into the building the music stops, further suggesting a diegetic
presence. Music is one way films refuse to definitively separate credit sequences
from the film’s narrative or diegesis. However, unlike Rear Window (1954) for
example, in Blackboard Jungle rock music links the credits to the narrative: music
designed to be listened to, danced to, and which exists prior to its use in the film.
The blurring of the credits and diegesis, and the status of the music as diegetic or
nondiegetic is appropriate for the film’s beginning and suggests some of the
complexities of the film’s use of rock music.
In this opening scene “Rock Around the Clock” is indisputably audible;
audiences are as aware of the song as the teenage boys onscreen. At the beginning of
the movie the song provides a rhythm and suggests some of the aggression to come.
It plays again at the end of the film as Miller (Poitier) walks away from Dadier to
bridge the conclusion to “The End” onscreen.
41
If the song provides aggression in
its first appearance, here it reinforces the triumph of the film’s good guys: one a
dedicated (and physically strong) teacher and the other a bright student. The song’s
lyrics are not terribly appropriate to the narrative in either instance, but the song’s
energy and backbeat control the film’s visual address and potentially draw the
audience’s attention away from the screen entirely.
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Blackboard Jungle is an industry film which directly addresses the audience,
some of whom participate by dancing along with the film’s music. Here sound and
its source are not concealed but emphasized. “Rock Around the Clock,” does not
sooth the audience or prepare them for a fantasy or dream-like experience.
Attending a screening of Blackboard Jungle, at least in these opening minutes, is
only relatable to Plato’s cave if that is the name of a dance club. The song literally
rouses the audience from their seats and is the very definition of audible. The song
issues from speakers which are larger and more powerful than the puny speakers
teenagers had access to at home or in cars and the sound issues less from the
“screen” than from the theater speakers. At the beginning of the film the visual
material tells the audience who made the film, that it is set in a school, and little
else.
42
What seems inarguable is that audiences – particularly teens – were not
paying attention to the film screen, much less being engulfed or enraptured by it. If
anything, these audiences were paying attention to the cinema speakers, and the rock
‘n’ roll coming from them: “White kids had never heard a back beat number quite
that LOUD . . . if at all. Hearing the recording on a phonograph or radio missed the
reverberations bouncing from one theater wall to the other.”
43
As experienced by the
(young and possibly dancing) audience, the film is less a melodrama than a
celebration of recorded music and the technologies which make its construction and
reception possible even if for only a few minutes.
44

The trailer for the film promotes the song but does not mention the film’s
exclusive version. It begins with the shot of Dadier first approaching the school and
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“Rock Around the Clock” occupies the soundtrack. Unlike the same scene in the
film there are no diegetic sounds to compete with the rock song. A male voiceover
addresses the audience and answers a question that many did not need to ask: “You
are now listening to ‘Rock Around the Clock.’ This is the theme music for MGM’s
sensational new picture Blackboard Jungle.” Though the trailer and voiceover do not
mention the fact, interestingly, the version of the song which plays in the film is
longer than other official versions. To make the song play through the film’s credits
and the first few shots:
Brooks stretched it beyond its original two minutes and eight
seconds by duping the second instrumental break – the amped-up
vamp with everybody wailing along with Joey D’Ambrosio’s
honking saxophone – and inserting it right up front, after Bill
Haley’s first vocal verse. This edited version, with the instrumental
chorus appearing twice, plays again at the end of the film.
45

Here the instrumental break – which occurs after “8, 9, 10, 11 o’clock rock”
normally – is added to the song after the first verse and chorus (when screenplay and
song credits appear on screen) to create a unique version of the song that if released
today might be called the “Blackboard Jungle” mix, a 12inch remix, or perhaps even
the extended dance mix. By any name it provides teens with more dance time than
the “official” version which Decca put back into stores after the success of the film.
While not advertised as such, and probably unnoticed by most audience members
(and scholars as well) the only way to hear this version of the song is in Blackboard
Jungle.
46

Audiences in both the United States and England danced along with the song
and destroyed theater property. Some theater owners, though happy with the number
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of ticket sales, began to complain about youth dancing in the aisles during the song
(and vandalizing their theaters). Denisoff and Romanowski discuss the links
between violence, “Rock Around the Clock,” and Blackboard Jungle and argue that
the publicity helped sell the film:
The amount of vandalism and violence associated with the film
appears to have been minimal. There were instances of
misconduct, but most took place at live shows and record hops.
Unfortunately, this distinction was rarely made. The fanfare did
create a mystique for the movie, making it a boxoffice smash.
47

Many theaters did not allow dancing. Not surprisingly displays of authority from
theater owners were met with displays of defiance, including vandalism.
48
Reports
of violence and dancing (and actual dancing and violence) helped market the film,
and soon Bill Haley’s song – that had barely caused a ripple on its initial release –
was sitting at the top of the charts and was not directly benefiting MGM except by
promoting theater attendance.
More than a few teens purchased the song, and its various releases provide
interesting insights into the 1950s music business. Decca Records had released
“Rock Around the Clock” earlier with little fanfare and MGM paid $5000 for the
rights to use the song three times in the film (but could have had owned the song
outright for only $7500).
49
Soon after the film’s release, radio requests exploded and
audience attendance for the film spiked. Decca rushed the single back into
production and managed to meet the demand and “MGM attempted to musically
capitalize . . . producing a single titled ‘Rock Around the Clock’ backed by the ‘Love
Theme’ from the movie, which was performed by the MGM Studio Orchestra.”
50

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While this release put the melody of the song on stations that did not play rock or
rhythm and blues, the orchestral version of song disappeared quickly and presumably
increased the frustration of MGM personnel for not purchasing the song.
As the Decca and MGM versions of the song suggest, Blackboard Jungle
thrust “Rock Around the Clock” into the middle of struggles over how people
listened and what they listened to. The “Speed Wars” of the 1950s pitted the 78rpm
disc against the 45rpm, which was first issued in 1949 by RCA records (the previous
year saw the release of the 33 1/3 by Columbia records). Decca released “Rock
Around the Clock” in both speeds to cover its risks:
By now the 45-rpm single had gained parity with the venerable 78,
so Decca’s initial pressing for “Rock Around the Clock” had been
roughly fifty-fifty. But the 45s were the ones flying off the shelves.
Since older Americans were generally the ones still holding on to
their 78 players, the explosion in 45 sales meant “Rock Around the
Clock” was, to use a modern expression, “skewing young.”
51

It is not surprising that the song “skew[ed] young” because the whole entertainment
industry was skewing young. Teens had disposable income but the lower price for
45s and turntables further encouraged their purchase. In Blackboard Jungle when the
ruffians attack math teacher Joshua Y. Edwards (Richard Kiley) and destroy his rare
collection of Bix Beiderbecke 78s, they are not simply resisting institutional
authority (and a transparent attempt to win their favor), but rejecting a type of music
and the medium used to transmit that music. (Their actions additionally benefit from
the fact that the shellac 78s shatter much more cinematically than vinyl 45s or 33 1/3
records.)
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Blackboard Jungle also brings together a record format and publisher. The
act of destroying 78 jazz records potentially aligns the teens with music publishers
BMI, who catered to independent songwriters and local music (like rock, and rhythm
and blues). ASCAP was the venerable home of “real” music, and the company used
racially charged language in their attempts to maintain their market share against
upstart BMI. Among many striking quotes from Billy Rose are these: “Not only are
most of the BMI songs junk, but in many cases they are obscene junk, pretty much
on the level with dirty comic magazines” and this:
When ASCAP’s songwriters were permitted to be heard, Al Jolson,
Nora Bayes, and Eddie Cantor were all big salesmen of songs. Today
it is a set of untalented twitchers and twisters whose appeal is largely
to the zootsuiter and the juvenile delinquent.
52

Strikingly however “Rock Around the Clock” is an ASCAP song and through
Blackboard Jungle promotes “untalented twitchers and twisters” and the delinquents
who like “obscene junk.” Additionally, the students in Evan Hunter’s 1954 novel
destroy Edwards’ jazz records but express a preference not for rock but for Tony
Bennet, Perry Como, and the like.
53

Various parties take credit for the discovery of “Rock Around the Clock” and
suggesting its inclusion in the film, including director Brooks.
54
Regardless of who
is responsible, the largely unplanned union of song and film (it is not in the
screenplay for instance) creates a template for other films. After Blackboard Jungle
genres other than the musical increasingly present popular music as both underscore
and performance numbers. Additionally specific song and artist choices were often
motivated by economic decisions (price and shared connection to a company) as
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much as other concerns. While this moment when teens repurposed cinema theaters
into dance halls has not often been repeated, it demonstrates (again) that audiences
will buy cinema tickets in order to hear new and different sounds and possibly to
interact with a film performance. Though some dismissed “Rock Around the Clock”
as noise, its success encouraged other filmmakers to use similar noise in film.
Earthquake however demonstrates that audiences will pay to hear (or feel) actual
noise.
Earthquake director Mark Robson’s Hollywood career moved on to bigger
productions after he left RKO and Val Lewton, for whom he edited Cat People
(1942) and directed The Seventh Victim (1943). His foray into the disaster film
cycle of the 1970s however, is as significant for film sound as his work with Lewton.
Earthquake depicts an earthquake’s effects on Los Angeles and its (mostly all-star)
citizens. The film follows Airport (1970) and other disaster films of the period as
Hollywood strove to lure audiences into theaters with spectacles of destruction.
With planes (Airport), and a boat (The Poseidon Adventure [1972]) already covered,
and a burning building in production at the same time (The Towering Inferno
[1974]), Universal focused on a natural disaster (though the film throws in a flood
caused by a dam’s collapse for good measure). The film’s “gimmick” however, uses
sound to provide a physical experience. The film is therefore similar to Castle’s The
Tingler (1959) which startled audiences with electric shocks, and like that film and
Fantasia, the best experience of Earthquake was a performance in particular theaters
with their additional speakers.
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Theaters willing and able to pay $500 a week presented Earthquake in
“Sensurround,” a process advertised well in advance of the film’s fall opening and
boasting extreme low-end sound. Universal’s promotional material explains that the
name comes from combining “sense” and “surround” because, this system has
“added the sense of feeling to sight and hearing in motion pictures.”
55
The system is
“designed to surround and engulf an audience with special audible and sub audible
effects” and the “audience experiences the illusion of participating by feeling the air
movement, generated by the powerful SENSURROUND horns, which vibrates
against a person’s body and ears with a sound pressure waveform comparable to an
actual earthquake.” The elaborate and costly system meets these stated goals and
lives up to Universal’s promotional hype:
Specifically developed by Universal Studios sound engineers W. O.
Watson and Richard Stumpf for the theatrical release of
Earthquake, Sensurround essentially created subsonic, low-
frequency vibrations between 5 and 40 cycles at sound pressures of
110-120 decibels, causing the audience to feel low vibrations
during the main earthquake and dam collapse. The speakers and
amplifiers were designed and built by Universal Studios in
association with Cerwin-Vega.
56

As this explanation indicates, Sensurround is both a textual effect and an exhibition
process. The system includes six speakers – four speakers were placed directly in
front of the screen and two in the rear – which traveled to theaters: “Each speaker
was driven by a 1000-watt amplifier, which was controlled by a special optical
control track in the film, in addition to the normal 4-track magnetic soundtrack for
voices and music.” Sensurround also included, “a device connected to the projector
which allowed the optical control track to be read and trigger the Sensurround.
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Normal projectors could play the soundtrack, but not the Sensurround if they were
not specially equipped to do so.” While the projectionist of The Tingler had some
flexibility in buzzing theater patrons, Earthquake’s system always engages at the
same moments: the titular event, the quake’s aftershock and the bursting of the
“Hollywood” Dam
57
which sends water to kill off a few more stars (including hero
Charlton Heston). Each of these moments lasts a few minutes and is nearly
overwhelming – at least when Sensurround is involved. More than any other film in
this dissertation, Earthquake with Sensurround is a performance wholly different
from any other venue or format. As system developer W. O. Watson says of
attending the film in a “normal” theater: “You wouldn’t get the sensation of your
flesh or the diaphragm inside you or your auditory nerves actually vibrating. The
vibration also affects the little cavities behind your ears that give you balance when
you walk.”
58

Watson does not exaggerate the experience. The 2007 Los Angeles Film
Festival played the film in Sensurround at UCLA and tape was visible on the
theater’s exit signs that, the host announced, received damage during a test of the
system. The host also explained to the audience that the screening was in the James
Bridges Theater on campus rather than the Hammer Museum because of concerns
the sound could damage items in the museum. These concerns were reasonable
because Sensurround forces one’s body to participate and the entire space (walls,
chairs) seems on the verge of shattering into pieces like the Bix Biederbeck 78s in
Blackboard Jungle. Descriptions of postmodern cinema as a thrill ride have some
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validity but Earthquake engages the audience in a manner that Jaws and its progeny
cannot.
Earthquake, as much as Jaws perhaps, feeds into Hollywood’s blockbuster
production trend though the film was not as successful as the studio hoped. Leroy
Aarons describes the process and quotes producer Jennings Lang’s on hopes that the
film is one that, “could go through the roof. There’s no end to this if it hits. If it
works, I can eventually see audience participation in a picture. They could sing, talk
back at the screen, yell at it, anything . . .”
59
This sort of participation had already
been part of Hollywood and avant-garde cinema. Lang adds “It’ll be like a Disney
thrill-ride” and “We want to augment the film . . . with whatever theatrical values
before during and after the show, so that it becomes a theatrical event.”
60
The film
(and others) would be supported by complementary actions on the part of exhibitors
in another (seemingly unconscious) echo of William Castle and other 1950s film
showmen. Aaron reveals some of Universal’s other ideas: a falling chandelier,
smoke sent into theaters, and breakaway lamps in the lobby. Universal did not
pursue these other ideas however, because the successful film was not quite the
phenomenon Lang imagined. Audiences in 1974 turned out to hear, feel, and see
Earthquake, and it performed quite well, grossing $79,666,653 and placing fourth for
the year in total box office (behind the non-participatory The Towering Inferno).
Luckily for the company, Universal released Spielberg’s Jaws the next year and it
went “through the roof,” and for many film historians fundamentally changed the
way Hollywood makes, markets, and distributes films.
61
Sadly, audiences chose the
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comic book-Moby Dick shenanigans of Jaws over Earthquake’s “Augmented Film
Experience.”
62

Many audiences did not experience Sensurround, but some reviewers who
did were not overly impressed. Both Nora Sayre and Vincent Canby evoke Aldous
Huxley’s description of the “feelies” in Brave New World
63
to describe the (at least
ideal) experience of Sensurround. According to Sayre, the “special vibrations on the
soundtrack cause your spine and your throat to tingle. (You may also wonder if they
curdle the brain cells.) It seems greedy to wish that Earthquake were in 3-D.”
64

Canby is less generous, writing that, “Sensurround seems to be the last word in
audience participation gimmicks. It beats 3-D, CinemaScope and smellies by being
a kind of elaboration of stereophonic sound.”
65
Canby apparently did not enjoy
himself but grudgingly admits to a certain amount of involvement and (perhaps
undesired) suspension of disbelief. He writes that the vibrations of Sensurround:
act on the eardrums like thousands of angry Magic Fingers. Instead
of putting one to sleep, they help convince you that everything is
becoming physically unhinged, thus augmenting the visual
evidence in Earthquake to such an extent that you may want to
glance at the ceiling of the theater just to make sure that the
chandelier isn’t swaying.
66

If Lang had his way Canby might have seen a prop lighting fixture fall. Gary Arnold
compares the experience to the soon-to-be-complete Metro (subway) trains in
Washington D.C: “The effect shakes you up, all right. In fact, the vibrations are
powerful enough to make this a questionable treat for anyone with inner ear
problems or a queasy stomach.”
67
For Arnold, “The process is not what one would
describe as a pleasure, however, or a great esthetic leap forward,” but it, “covers up
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these deficiencies [of visual interest and editing] by brute auditory force.”
68
The
increasing presence of the “brute auditory force” of rock in American film is an
additional way that the sound track pushes aside the image track.

The Cinema of the Audio Dissolve: Aesthetic Equality
Blackboard Jungle and its cinematic followers offer audiences not so much music as
noise. If Max Steiner writes “classical” music for (classical) films, Bill Haley and
the Comets’ rock music is decidedly post-classical in comparison. Even if
“unheard,” Steiner wrote (or partially borrowed) what everyone agrees is music,
while rock, on the other hand, is perhaps a tuneless cacophony that nevertheless
demands to be heard (if not listened to).
This section considers films that feature audio dissolves and avant-garde texts
which present sound as at least equal to the image. Rock films build on the example
of Blackboard Jungle and present music which draws in the teen audience. Avant-
garde films also follow Blackboard Jungle in using rock music for their soundtracks,
and in some cases such as Cosmic Ray and Breakaway a popular song makes up the
entirety of the soundtrack. Feature films follow Rock Around the Clock in using
popular music as underscore and the “compilation” score creates intertextual
relationships that address more than one audience at once.
Music often acts as a crutch for lazy or indifferent filmmakers to express
emotions. The cliché of soaring strings to accompany romantic moments in the
classical period has been equaled in more recent films by the use of Hendrix songs to
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signify the “Sixties” and the Beach Boys to signify “California” in dramas, comedies
and horror films. Whether done artfully and uniquely or as a bald cliché, music in
film can dominate not simply the soundtrack but also usurp narrative importance.
David Raksin’s music for Laura (1944), for example, does not simply buttress the
film’s narrative and image track but is a commodity in its own right and the studio
(and film) invite audiences to experience the song in ignorance of the film in a partial
echo of pre-classical song films and film songs which peddle sheet music and
recordings. Songs from films were more available for purchase and this connected
to the theme song “craze” of the 1950s where films from a variety of genres offered
popular songs in their opening credits. Moments when a film’s narrative “stops” for
a song or musical interlude such as “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” in Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) are dismissed by some scholars as cynical
attempts to sell music, yet recognizing that the film’s narration still controls this flow
of sound and image (even if the drive of the narrative is impeded or apparently
ignored briefly) allows for a more developed consideration of such scenes and films,
and historicizing such occurrences allows films to be connected to changes (and
continuities) in the history of film.
Moments when the hierarchy of image over sound is reversed appear in
melodramas like those of Nicholas Ray. Bigger Than Life (1956) uses sound to
convey extreme emotional states and present moments of excess. Ed Avery’s (James
Mason) agony (which will eventually result in an addiction to cortisone) is expressed
aurally when he clutches the door frame and rings the buzzer to his own home. The
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incessant noise dominates the soundtrack for several seconds and drowns out all
other sounds. This moment of melodramatic (aural) excess is trumped by the use of
a television’s sound as Ed attempts to kill his son Ritchie (Christopher Olsen) in the
climax. After locking his wife Lou (Barbara Rush) in the closet Ed snaps on the
television to conceal her screams. The television displays images of an amusement
park but no narrative content; the screen shows the park (the Ferris wheel, etc.) and
the soundtrack blares a carnival-esque theme in Ray’s parody of television content.
The music dominates the soundtrack. Wally (Walter Matthau) finally subdues Ed
but the music drowns out the struggle and only ceases when Ritchie switches off the
television.
69
Similarly, at the end of The Savage Innocents (1960) as Inuk (Anthony
Quinn)
70
considers leaving his life and entering the bar and “civilization,” inane pop
music that comes from the jukebox increases in volume and dominates the
soundtrack and only returns to a more defensibly diegetic (objective) volume when
he turns away.
71

Such moments of aural centrality illustrate the bubbling to the surface of
sound elements in postwar American film. The uses of rock music in film was
greeted with less scorn than on radio, but theorists and historians attack the inclusion
of popular music, particularly rock, in film: “Often deemed musically inappropriate
and unsophisticated, the pop soundtrack is usually dismissed as a concession to the
greed and commercialism of the film producers.”
72
Susan Knobloch identifies “two
key apprehensions” shared by critics of rock films: “Films employing rock
recordings feel narratively deficient, and yet rock-scored films seem overcrowded,
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overloaded with distracting and disunified information.”
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Knobloch’s comment
addresses post-classical cinema and the loosening of classical storytelling norms.
The second half of her comment partially refers to the content rock / pop songs
provide through intertextuality and lyrics. The use of songs to connect scenes and
fill in narrative gaps carries the potential of creating new cracks. The argument that
Hollywood wants to sell more products has some validity:
Movie studios, reeling from television, begin in mid-1954 a
marketing technique called “two-way promotion.” The “gimmick,”
as Billboard’s June Bundy called it, was for a “top artist to record
the title tune from a new movie to be used as a prologue to or
background for the film.” In turn, “diskery is expected to release
the record at the very same time.” Movie production companies
controlled the publishing rights to many film scores and
soundtracks.
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And yet financial concerns can not fully explain changes in film scoring. This
cynical view of Hollywood’s use of popular music ignores the benefits of a
collaborative approach to music and film.
Whatever the motivation, in the 1950s rock music in American cinema is a
decidedly minor practice. But the influence of these rock films is indisputable.
Rock did not dominate radio in this period either: “In sheer numbers of stations,
those that featured ‘easy listening’ or ‘beautiful music’ or ‘golden records (oldies)’
or mainstream pop by Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, or Perry Como easily outnumbered
those that played rock ‘n’ roll.”
75
Rock films and radio stations in the mid-1950s
each represent something of an avant-garde. Comparing the use of rock music in
commercial cinema to advertisements fails to account for the fact that early rock was
largely the domain of independent record labels. Film studios owned publishing
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rights to many songs but most did not (yet) own labels. Denisoff and Romanowski
state of early rock films, “The goal, of course, was to lure customers to the box
office, not the record stores. Producers like Sam Katzman signed name artists with
established hits to star.”
76
This argument locates film producers’ desire for money
and implicitly links the use of singers to the use of stars in all films because the goal
of such casting is to attract an audience. Some filmmakers did have a piece of
recording artists, recordings, or publishing, but films are too expensive to
economically function as mere advertising. The authors also only explain the
motivations of filmmakers and say nothing about audience desires. The presentation
of “name artists” performing “established hits” brings audiences who wish to hear
the songs played loudly (and perhaps wish to dance).
The presentation of rock music accelerated the marginalization of one of
Hollywood’s most profitable and recognizable genres: the musical. In the 1950s
musical biographies increasingly turned to popular singers and musicians, and by the
1960s rock was a definite presence in documentaries, most obviously those focused
on rock stars. Films which to varying degrees present popular music pushed aside
the musical and this beloved genre’s diminishing importance contributes to the
critical neglect of rock films compared to the (classical) musical.
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Doherty argues
that Rock Around the Clock is “the first hugely successful film marketed to
teenagers to the pointed exclusion of their elders. By showing that teenagers alone
could sustain a box office hit, Rock Around the Clock pushed the motion picture
production strategy toward the teenpic.”
78
Rock Around the Clock offers teens
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performances of music rather than singing and dancing in a return to the episodic
form of the 1930s backstage musicals (minus the Berkeley style climatic audio
dissolve). Enterprising low budget producer Sam Katzman
79
combined the influence
of Blackboard Jungle and its use of “Rock Around the Clock,” the talents of director
Fred F. Sears,
80
the structure of a musical revue (the film presents a variety of music
and performers and culminates in a television show which unites all the musicians),
and more than a pinch of exploitation savvy to change the musical forever. Katzman
began filming on January 6, 1956, wrapped production in 13 days, and screened the
film in a Washington DC theater on March 14 to successfully cash in on the craze for
rock music and “Rock Around the Clock.”
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Rock Around the Clock is sonically innovative and narratively unoriginal
with a plot modeled on Orchestra Wives (1942), a Glenn Miller film where he is the
Bill Haley-like purveyor of new sounds. Bill Haley and the Comets perform several
songs and are part of the film’s perfunctory narrative about the efforts to cultivate the
popularity of rock. Music manager Steve Hollis (Johnny Johnston) stumbles across
the band in a backwater club and his eyes quickly turn into dollar signs when he
witnesses teens dancing ecstatically to Bill Haley’s music. The sounds are too new
for most customers so Lisa (Lisa Gaye) travels with the band (which includes her
brother Jimmy) to teach new audiences the “correct” responses to the music:
energetic dancing.
Audiences also (once again) danced in the exhibition space to “Rock Around
the Clock.”
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The film diegetically encourages dancing through Lisa’s actions. For
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Dawson, film’s the plot does not promote attention to the screen and is “simply there
to string musical interludes together and give teenagers time to roam the aisles or
neck in the balcony without missing anything. They could look up at the screen at
any moment and instantly comprehend where they were in the story.”
83
The film
was a hit and grossed around $4 million on a budget of $300,000. Like Blackboard
Jungle its success is due in part to planned and unplanned publicity:
Variety reported in April that the film “has run headlong into a
storm of trouble which the offbeat music has stirred in several
communities.” Many of those towns and cities “have already taken
legal steps to halt teenage hops and other gatherings at which rock
‘n’ roll is featured. In this connection, it’s known that theater men
have received warnings from local police, community groups,
newspapers, etc. In some cases, exhib[itor]s are being told they are
free to play the picture – but can use no campaign stunts which
might set off trouble among the cultists.”
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The film presented images of the performers but the audience was seemingly more
interested in the music, the theater’s speakers, and the communal experience of the
music and possibility of communal dancing. Interestingly however, the film has a
documentary quality beyond simply preserving the look and behavior of some of
rock’s first performers. Bill Haley and Comets’ performance of “Rudy’s Rock” in
the film’s climax was recorded live on the set and so provides the film a unique first:
the first sync spectacle of rock performance.
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Rock Around the Clock is the second film to begin and end with “Rock
Around the Clock”; the song plays over the opening credits and appears again as the
band performs it in the background of the last scene.
86
It also uses the song as
something like underscore. As Hollis struggles to promote the band, Alan Freed
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appears (as himself) and pledges to help. A brief montage follows which shows the
group’s rising popularity as they play to larger and more responsive crowds. The
montage is intertextually rich and does much more than advance the plot. It
proclaims that “Rock Around the Clock” is one of the prime reasons for rock’s
growing mainstream popularity, and the reason for Bill Haley and his Comets’
success. It also serves as a reminder of the main reason the film exists, and a
testament to the mutually beneficial relationship of rock and film. Cinema helped
turn rock ‘n’ roll into mass culture with films like Blackboard Jungle and Rock
Around the Clock, but filmmakers also immediately exploited rock music to attract
audiences, particularly a young audience at a time when film attendance was
continuing to decline from its mid-1940s peak. The montage includes some images
of the band performing so the music’s relationship to the diegesis is complex but it
suggests the use of rock music as underscore that is now a norm for cinema.
The montage of “Rock Around the Clock” – and two others featuring “Happy
Baby” and “Mambo Rock” – display filmmaking at the level of the image which is
not particularly sophisticated. But perhaps the relatively uninteresting visuals are not
merely a product of the filmmakers, budget, or available technology. In this
montage the film’s narration combines sound and image in a manner that privileges
sound. Montage sequences which present sound as more important than the image(s)
are similar to moments of audio dissolve Altman locates in Hollywood musicals and
spread from Rock Around the Clock to others genres. Such moments may not
advance the narrative, condense time, or collapse space but they do present a rock
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song for at least a verse and chorus. Montage sequences which match a rock song
and perfunctory images in a rudimentary editing pattern may offer a middle point
between the visually magnificent work of creators like Slavo Vorkapich for Classical
Hollywood films and those which structure Michael Bay’s contemporary
blockbusters and get a little faster, louder, longer and more numerous each year.
The film’s echoes of Blackboard Jungle are seemingly deliberate and
participate in the debate over the popular perception of rock and teenagers. David
Shumway argues:
Whereas the goal of the traditional film score was to cue an
emotional response in the viewer without calling attention to itself,
recent sound tracks, consisting mainly of previously recorded
material, are put together on the assumption that the audience will
recognize the artist, the song, or, at a minimum, a familiar style.
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Though pre-classical cinema used known audio material, the introduction of
recorded music in film allows the incorporation of specific performances of songs,
and performances which are the result of technology. Though referring to
Hollywood film production in a more recent period (his essay was published in
1999), Shumway articulates a change which began with cinema’s second use of
“Rock Around the Clock.” Blackboard Jungle links the song with disobedience and
violence. No such violence mars the narrative of Rock Around the Clock and as the
film progresses it is clear that in this presentation of rock ‘n’ roll (it was marketed as
“the whole story of rock and roll”) the music has no connection to teen violence.
Doherty says that the film portrays “rock ‘n’ roll as a valid teenage activity without
undue discussion or inquiry”
88
and further explains it and other early rock films:
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By placing the ultimate reins of rock ‘n’ roll power in the hands of
straight business types (for reasons of dramatic economy and
romantic subplotting, usually female), the teenpic deflates whatever
uncomfortable portents of evil influence the rock ‘n’ roll talent itself
conjures.
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Rock Around the Clock simply and explicitly argues that rock is not sinister,
that teens are not prone to violence, and that mixing teens and rock results only in
new (and exciting) forms of dance. In the vocabulary of the music industry Rock
Around the Clock is an “answer record”
90
to Blackboard Jungle because it rebuts that
film’s connections between rock and delinquency. The film presents Freed’s version
of rock and teen culture evident in his comments on the earlier film:
the most sickening thing I’ve seen in a long time is a marquee of one
of our prominent Broadway movie theaters showing the picture The
Blackboard Jungle . . . called the “bold story of a teenage terror,” and
I think it’s probably the most sickening thing I’ve ever seen.
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He is sickened because teenagers are “the greatest, most wonderful age-group in
America. Since when has it become a crime to be a teenager?”
92
Rock Around the
Clock works to reclaim “Rock Around the Clock” from those who link it to violence:
filmmakers, studio marketing executives, the popular press, and anyone who
denigrates teen culture. Blackboard Jungle solidified existing cultural links between
teens, rock, and violence but Rock Around the Clock and other early apologetic rock
films sought to sever these same links. The cultural implications of these initial uses
of “Rock Around the Clock” reverberate through history.
The aesthetic effects do as well, in part because the montage of “Rock
Around the Clock” is an extractable segment and so too are the credit sequences of
Blackboard Jungle and Rock Around the Clock. This suggestion is taken up by
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avant-garde filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger and Bruce Conner in films which
run the length of a rock song (or more than one). Scholars often mention Kenneth
Anger’s Scorpio Rising (1963) to argue for the film’s influence on commercial
cinema’s use of rock.
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Yet Anger’s innovation at the level of the soundtrack is
simply to eliminate the non-musical portions of the early jukebox musicals as well as
their dialogue and sound effects. Scorpio Rising matches Anger’s “mixtape”
soundtrack with an equally eclectic image track that binds together his own footage
with snippets from other texts. His editing bears the influence of Bruce Conner,
whose A Movie (1958) matches a recording of Ottorino Respighi’s “Pines of Rome”
with a collage of newsreel and film footage.
94
Even more significant is his 16mm
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version of Cosmic Ray, which brings together a live version Ray Charles’s “What’d
I Say” with an arresting kaleidoscope of images.
The significance of Conner’s choice of song and its dominance of the image
makes it as important as Anger’s film. For P. Adams Sitney Cosmic Ray is best
considered as a collage like Conner’s other films and gallery work and demonstrates
that he is “the first film-maker to employ ironically a popular song as a structural
unit in a collage film.”
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Sitney argues that the film’s images, including
advertisements and footage Conner shot of a woman, work toward “ridiculing
warfare as a sexual sublimation. The structure of the ideas evoked by Conner’s
collage is straightforward; unlike Anger’s film [Scorpio Rising], there is little room
for ambiguity in Cosmic Ray.”
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Though a strong and persuasive reading this can
position Cosmic Ray as little more than an avant-garde Dr. Strangelove (1964) that
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features a more eclectic mixture of visual information. The Ray Charles song brings
unity to the images that they lack on their own, yet for Sitney, the music supports
this visual system and “reinforces the tempo of the montage.”
98
Sitney regards the
title as “a pun, referring both to Ray Charles . . . as well as to atomic particles from
outer space,”
99
while Stan Brakhage regards the title as an “homage” to Charles.
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Yet neither comment acknowledges the significance of Conner’s song choice. The
entrance of popular music in avant-garde cinema is not a white performer covering
material written and performed by a black artist,
101
or even a proper rock song; the
use of popular music in the avant-garde begins with rhythm and blues, the secular
transformation of gospel music by black Americans. Additionally it is performed by
Ray Charles, who, along with Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin and few others, is
primarily responsible for this music. While Blackboard Jungle’s use of “Rock
Around the Clock” put commercial film’s uses of music in advance of avant-garde
film, with Cosmic Ray the avant-garde moves back in front. By 1961 Hollywood
had presented black performers, including Little Richard and Fats Domino in The
Girl Can’t Help It (1956) but these are lipsync performances. Conner’s film does not
attempt to depict or document a performance but instead to match the intensity and
energy of Charles’s transformation of gospel music with a rapid collage of images,
icons, and visual ideas. That the attempt is doomed to fail is perhaps Conner’s
argument. He acknowledges the superiority of Charles’ song simply by using it and
timing his images to it. Conner says of his filmmaking process: “I usually start by
timing the music with a stopwatch. Then I time individual phrases.”
102
Charles’
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recording exists before Conner’s film, determines its length, and shapes its content.
That Conner’s takes his cue from Ray is signaled immediately as some film leader
accompanies the introduction of Charles and a brief warm-up to the song.
Conner’s later Breakaway also demonstrates the centrality of sound and
music in his films and represents a complete collaboration of sound and image.
Building on the model of Cosmic Ray, the film features an entire pop song on the
soundtrack and black and white footage of singer Antonia Christina Basilotta.
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Basilotta is the performer in a double sense since she dances to her own
“Breakaway.” The image track records her striptease-like movements only as
Conner eschews his collage aesthetic and creates striking and forceful juxtapositions
in the footage of Basilotta. Brakhage is more forgiving of this photographed action
than some writers:
“Breakaway” does, as the title advises, permit the freedom to
experience sex as object – something many films advertise but do
not deliver. It springs the trap of seductive image altogether.
Pornography traps the viewer in seduction. Conner’s films, even
when seductive, comment on the process of seduction, so that it can
be seen in operation.
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Conner’s film offers more than titillation and also foregrounds how rarely sound and
image operate in cinema in a mutually beneficial and fully cooperative manner.
Sound and image are fully equal in the film and Breakaway represents the
collaboration of Conner and Basilotta, and between image and sound. Breakaway
includes the entire song two times: after the song concludes it plays again in reverse
and the image track runs backwards. Basilotta’s lyrics state the need to get away
from a boy and a relationship which no longer nurtures her. The film visualizes her
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attempt to escape in part by her occasional exit from the frame. Yet she is always
returned to the center and moves in slow motion for much of the film. The reversal
of sound and image further literalizes the singer’s inability to escape and the cyclical
nature of her attempt. Whereas in most films – Hollywood films, avant-garde,
documentary films and otherwise, a noticeable change in the image (slowed down,
sped up, reversed) does not result in a change in the soundtrack, in Breakaway sound
and image both go “backwards.” Conner’s film illustrates Basilotta’s song and the
film’s second half reveals that in the film sound and image are full partners.
Conner’s later films, including Mongoloid (featuring DEVO’s song of the same
name, 1978), Crossroads (with music by Patrick Gleeson and Terry Riley, 1976),
Marilyn Times Five (with Monroe singing “I’m Through with Love,” 1973)
105
and
Permian Strata (Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” 1969) demonstrate his
enduring interest in music. When he does place sound and image in a hierarchical
relationship more often than not sound dominates.
Conner’s films, the jukebox musical and Anger’s work, especially Scorpio
Rising and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965), point the way toward what Jeff Smith
calls the “compilation score” where various pop songs make up the soundtrack. This
scoring practice provides more evidence of the need to link narration and sound
theory to explore how sound creates moments of audio dissolve. While Conner, and
especially Anger, create (new) meaning through juxtaposing existing songs (and
their lyrical content) with a range of images, Hollywood films are less likely to
feature film narration which carefully brings together music and image. To consider
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the use of popular music in films such as Easy Rider and The Graduate the actions of
film narration need to be of greater concern than parsing rock lyrics in relation to the
film’s characters. These two oft-discussed non-musical films brought popular music
into theaters matched with a narrative and each spawned a successful soundtrack
album and simply expand on the practice of using rock music in lieu of “classical”
scoring which begins with Blackboard Jungle and Rock Around the Clock. The
significance of the films for the New Hollywood and in their presentation of popular
music is real, but leads some theorists to concretely and definitively link song lyrics
to onscreen action and / or characters.
Scholars interpret the lyrics to rock songs as something like character
monologues in The Graduate and Easy Rider. The music of Easy Rider offers a
great deal of meaning as Howard Hampton notes: “the rock soundtrack was as
integral to it as the dialogue and images those songs accompanied (maybe more
so).”
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Easy Rider begins with a largely dialogue-free drug deal between the
protagonists Billy (Dennis Hopper), Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and “the Connection” (Phil
Spector) as jets loudly fly overhead. Though some Spanish is spoken, the first lyrics
to Steppenwolf’s “The Pusher” act as the film’s first presentation of speech: “You
know I smoked a lot of grass / Oh Lord! I popped a lot of pills. / But I've never
touched nothin' / That my spirit couldn't kill.” Before the protagonists speak for
themselves the credits appear and Steppenwolf speaks “for” them again with “Born
to Be Wild”: “Get your motor running / Head out on the highway / Looking for
adventure / In whatever comes our way.” The film’s iconic use of “Born to Be
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Wild” shapes later uses in media. Acknowledging the thematic and even narrative
weight of the songs is essential when discussing Easy Rider, yet mapping the lyrics
onto the two lead characters simply makes an already visually and narratively
muddled film slide into incoherence. For every moment where the lyrics seem to fit
and suggestively describe characters or situations, such as those at the beginning of
the film, there are others like Hendrix’s “If 6 Were 9” that register nothing specific
or narratively with the images.
The Graduate provides even more vivid examples of this approach and the
need to discuss film narration beyond the link between song lyrics and images
because at least two essays read the songs as speaking for the characters. The
Graduate is probably the first (or at least most famous) example of a temp track
triumphing over a score (whether pop music or orchestral). Its case is similar to that
of Alex North’s score for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) losing out to the temp track
of classical pieces. Here Paul Simon was commissioned to contribute an number of
songs but only the new (and incomplete) composition “Mrs. Robinson” was able to
nudge out the existing Simon and Garfunkel songs on the temp track. Susan
Knobloch argues that in the film the “score matters intently . . . because the hero,
Benjamin Braddock as played by Dustin Hoffman, is himself so divided and silent
that it feels up to the songs to compensate for his lacks and for what seems the film’s
resultant thinness.”
107
She carefully links song lyrics (especially those of “Mrs.
Robinson”) to images of Ben and spatial representations of character relationships
throughout the film and so comes close to linking sound and narration. Yet
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eventually her own logic forces her to read portions of “Sounds of Silence” and
“Scarborough Fair” as presenting not Ben’s thoughts but those of Mrs. Robinson:
“overall, the rock songs are matched with the images in such a way that the ‘I’
speaking in them sometimes seems to fit Mrs. Robinson as much as Ben.”
108
She
presses forward and then admits that her reading is a result of assigning lyrics to
whichever character is onscreen after noting the use of “Scarborough Fair” in two
sequences, one featuring Ben interacting with Mrs. Robinson and the other as Ben
drives to meet with Elaine Robinson:
Although almost nothing else in the film suggests it, the scraps of
meaning collecting around the film’s use of music, and of bodies in
the frame, make it possible to read the singers’ sentiments during the
second sequence as (also) Mrs. Robinson’s.
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Knobloch’s argument inadvertently illustrates the potential dominance of music
because she feels compelled to interpret narrative events in light of song lyrics.
“Mrs. Robinson” is an aural spectacle that can push aside the image and narrative.
The less precisely the film’s narration uses the song the more likely it is to dominate
proceedings.
A similar and more sustained argument that 1960s rock songs in films are
best read as issuing from characters is Todd Berliner and Philip Furia’s “The Sounds
of Silence: Songs In Hollywood Films Since the 1960s.” Here they argue that the
use of songs and the presentation of singing changes in the 1960s (and for an
extended period of “classicism”):
At almost the very moment the classical era ends, The Graduate
(1967) helped establish a new technique for bringing song into film.
While no one would accept Dustin Hoffman – an actor whose
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cinematic presence is the furthest imaginable from that of Fred
Astaire or Gene Kelly – suddenly breaking into song, his very
unsuitability for singing makes him a perfect vehicle for fostering a
new convention of songs as musical soliloquy.
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The authors argue that as audiences demonstrated an increasing reluctance to watch
performers burst into song to express their inner emotions and thoughts, films use
popular music (and its lyrics) to speak for the characters (though nearly always with
a different actual voice). The jump to the late 1960s with The Graduate and Easy
Rider and into the 1970s with The Last Picture Show (1971) and American Graffiti
is common in discussions of music in Hollywood before the mid-1970s but these
films can only be understood as following in the wake of earlier films such as
Blackboard Jungle and Scorpio Rising. For the authors, the continuance of
conventions of the musical depends on audience expectations: “Without the steady
stream of musicals and with changes in song styles and film styles, audiences soon
lost touch with the convention of ‘spontaneous song’.”
111
The Graduate represents a
general trend in American film away from characters singing in the film’s diegesis to
presentations of “internal songs”: “Since Hoffman, in every sense of the phrase,
‘can’t sing,’ song becomes an interior monologue, a musical soliloquy that his
character would sing if only he could.”
112
Ben’s neurosis and difficulty expressing
himself is emblematic of the era’s confused youth and for the authors, Ben’s /
Hoffman’s: “very unsuitability for singing makes him a perfect vehicle for fostering
a new convention of songs as musical soliloquy.”
113
The break is not total, but rather
a new configuration of the musical for the era and audience. The film signals the
transition from performance musicals to the use of rock songs (popular songs) as
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underscore and displays the repressions of the age: “such songs oppose the tradition
of songs in movie musicals, signifying not the relief that comes through musical
expression but rather the frustration of a character with inadequate means or
occasions to express himself.”
114
Like the classical musical, these moments offer
potential audio dissolves because the songs offer not simply internal but privileged
character thoughts.
This argument ignores the use of underscore in Rock Around the Clock and
becomes more strained when applied to films with more than one artist on the
soundtrack. In films like The Graduate and Harold and Maude (1971) – whose
music consists almost entirely of Cat Stevens songs – the soundtrack offers literally a
single voice that the narration suggestively matches with the protagonist. Easy
Rider’s compilation score, on the other hand, mixes famous singers and styles.
These theorizations also do not sufficiently account for intertextuality and focus
mainly on original pop / rock compositions: “Songwriters often composed ‘internal
songs’ directly for the films in which the songs appeared; hence audiences would not
register them as pre-existent popular songs.”
115
The songs in both Easy Rider and
The Graduate, whether written for the film or not, have lives outside of the film.
They can really only have a clean application to a character’s subjectivity on the
initial viewing of the film and for audiences who have not heard the music before.
Finally, the specific example of “Mrs. Robinson” in these two essays is
complicated by the fact that Simon had not completed the lyrics when it was
included in the film. The released version of the song includes lines about a baseball
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player (“Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio? / Our nation turns its lonely eyes to
you”) who goes unmentioned in The Graduate. These lines edge the song into
something of a lament for America. Since its initial release and subsequent
popularity it is possible that most audiences since 1967 have heard the song – and its
lines about DiMaggio – before seeing the film and potentially have their experience
of the film (and Ben) shaped by Simon’s lyrics.
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Julie Hubbert’s discussion of American Graffiti is also applicable and
revealing in this context. She considers Lucas’s song choices and finds that they are
not necessarily the product of Lucas’ vision or authorial intent:
For instance, an expensive Elvis Presley song was exchanged for a
more reasonably priced Beach Boys song. The revision process,
however, revealed Lucas’s understanding of the music in the film to
be motivated by more than practical or stylistic concerns. As
crucial as song styles and texts were to the plot of the film, they
were also, on some level, completely insignificant.
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American Graffiti features perhaps Hollywood’s most famous compilation score and
perhaps its most emblematic. Hubbert locates a quote from Lucas where he tellingly
reveals “we found . . . we could take almost any song and put it on almost any scene
and it would work.”
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Importantly, by “any song” Lucas means any of the great (or
at least very popular) early rock songs he considered using in the film. The drop off
in quality from a Presley song to a Beach Boys’ number is not nearly as extreme as it
could be (and their music is closer to Lucas’ sensibility anyway). Hubbert does not
let Lucas’s admission slide past and explains: “While the impact of certain song texts
on the film’s narrative structure was certainly meaningful . . . those connections were
just as often, as Lucas himself admits, coincidental.”
119
For the film’s purposes
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having the songs read as “golden oldies” and offering the reasonable expectation of
being played by disc jockeys like Wolfman Jack are more important than concrete
and measurable connections to characters and situations.
In his desire to present music which could be heard on these radios by these
characters, Lucas allows himself freedom (within the confines of the rock canon).
His song choices which “play” on radios are, at the level of production, slightly less
controlled than Bogdanovich’s in The Last Picture Show and certainly less than
Anger’s in Scorpio Rising and therefore more characteristic of how Hollywood
cinema places music in relation to images. The songs are (potentially) narratively
significant and display the film’s narration, yet this narrative significance is not
tightly controlled; in American Graffiti the songs remain independent of the film’s
images and narrative and able to be enjoying as music rather than just as score.
American Graffiti would still provide audiences with a unique experience if its
soundtrack featured a completely different set of songs while Scorpio Rising would
suffer greatly if the soundtrack was altered.
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The Graduate, Easy Rider, and American Graffiti were all very successful
and demonstrate that rather than speaking for the characters, the songs interact with
the image because of the narration. The image of a character on screen and the
sound of a voice on the soundtrack does not require linking lyrics to subjectivity. A
focus on the dual address of cinema (sound and image) allows one to consider texts
like Scorpio Rising, Cosmic Ray and Breakaway which do not present characters or
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their subjectivity. Avant-garde and animated films are significant cases for the
discussion of the cinematic uses of rock and popular music.
In the opening of Saturday Night Fever (1977) Tony Manero (John Travolta)
moves to Bee Gees songs even when not in a nightclub or listening on headphones.
But he actually moves to the beat of any song which has the same rhythm and tempo.
The choice of “Stayin’ Alive” makes the scene a terrific presentation of the Bee Gees
song and a song fully equal to the spectacle of Travolta’s joyful traversing of the city
sidewalk. When put to use in films, rock and popular music may speak for
characters, about characters, or ignore the characters entirely. “Stayin’ Alive” is
(potentially) intertextual but remains internally coherent, exists apart from the film,
and was placed in relation to the images by the film’s narration. A different person
walking, or a different song, or having either image or sound sped up or slowed
down would result in a different set of associations and intertextual echoes. When
confronted with song lyrics some film theorists seem unable to think of this speech
act – which is actually singing – as anything but dialogue, or a monologue from the
consciousness of the protagonist. But the song lyrics are only necessarily the song
itself. The focus on rock lyrics as speech acts by character(s) does however
demonstrate the significance of speech in film and so the discussion will finally turn
to voiceover speech.

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In the Beginning is the Word: When Voiceover Dominates Narration
While voiceover narrators do not actually “control” the image (any more than the
image “controls” the soundtrack), voiceover can yield rich rewards. Voiceover
films, particularly in the postwar / pre-Dolby period, position sound as superior to –
or at least equal to – the image, yet the process is rarely described in these terms.
This section discusses voiceover in the work of three significant Hollywood
directors: Orson Welles, Herman Mankiewicz, and Stanley Kubrick. Each director
uses voiceover to convey important narrative information and to foreground the aural
properties of their films. All three directors use sound in non-classical ways beyond
their use of voiceover, but Welles and Kubrick in particular are normally discussed
in sound studies for their use of sound effects and music rather than voiceover.
Orson Welles in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and The Lady from Shanghai
(1947) uses voiceover to present a guide, or “host” who is a thinly disguised
presentation of himself, or at least “Orson Welles.” In this way his films foreground
Welles’ own voice as an attraction in a manner not unlike his work for radio. Joseph
Mankiewicz uses voiceover to make audiences aware of the narrator as the teller and
interpreter of onscreen events. The voiceover encourages audiences to consider the
narrator’s relationship (both temporal and emotional) to the tale. Mankiewicz’s
screenplays and direction ignore the classical tendency to conceal narration and the
use of voiceover contributes to his project of foregrounding the fact that films
actively present stories and never offer a “window on the world.” Finally, Stanley
Kubrick uses voiceover as part of his larger project of demonstrating that sound is
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wholly other from the image. Throughout his oeuvre elements of sound and image
work at odds with one another and his voiceover narration, like Mankiewicz’s,
displays subjectivity but goes beyond the earlier directors in offering contradiction
and conflict.
Though film is labeled a visual medium, in the beginning likely was the
word. For early cinema audiences the first (and likely several subsequent)
experience was preceded by an announcement explaining what they were about to
experience. Though not recorded as part of the film text, such speech participates in
the performance of the film. Much has been written about the practice of benshi in
Japanese cinema exhibition and scholars reveal that some benshi were more of the
attraction than individual films (which came and went with regularity).
121
These
figures demonstrate the power of the word and speech in cinema before film featured
recorded speech. Once films turn to recorded sound the human voice briefly
becomes an attraction for audiences whether singing or speaking as The Jazz Singer
and Anna Christie demonstrate. The power of the voice is evident in contemporary
“image-less” films such as Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) and the works which make
up the Audible Picture Show.
In American film the acceptance of (and complacency towards) recorded
speech paves the way for the use of voiceover narration and the technique truly
flowers in the 1940s. For Kozloff, 1939 is the mode’s pivotal year and she explains,
“it was in the late 1930s that radio narration came into its fullest flower, with among
other noteworthy programs, the Mercury Theater’s literary adaptations.”
122
She also
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adds that “it was at exactly this moment that classic documentaries . . . first reached a
wide American audience.” Radio and film documentaries built up the public’s
acceptance of voiceover and fostered innovative techniques and styles. More fiction
filmmakers took up the technique in the 1940s and the decade became “the
technique’s golden age, in terms of the sheer number of films that used it, the
proportion of narrated to non-narrated films, and the prestige, budget, and quality of
those using narration.” If the classical era of Hollywood is the window between the
implementation of sound (and the final codification of classical narration) and the
1940s, then voiceover is another indication of Hollywood’s changes. Brian
Henderson writes that “voice-over narrators . . .ruthlessly expose the mechanisms of
narration in classical cinema.”
123
The act of exposing film narration is more
common in the 1940s. Hollywood films of the 1940s present both character
narrators and disembodied voices. The latter use builds on voiceover in newsreels
and Welles’ mockery of it in the beginning of Citizen Kane (1941) signals
audiences’ familiarity with this technique and willingness to accept variations in
fiction films.
For Henderson the differences between voiceover and subjective narration in
literature are too profound to ignore. He notes that most Hollywood films typically
present voiceover narration at the beginning but it stops and then only returns “from
time to time to provide narrative summaries and to bridge ellipsis in the long period
covered by each film.”
124
The relative scarcity of voiceover bothers Henderson, and
he argues that it lacks the shaping power offered by the literary first person narrator:
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“voice-over narration in cinema does not comprise the whole text. It does not
pervade the text or inflect every detail of it, color it, shape it, lend it its entire flavor,
as character narration in fiction does.”
125
Kozloff however completely disagrees:
“frequency of narration per se does not make that much difference; voice-over is like
strong perfume – a little goes a long way.”
126

To his credit Henderson notes that voiceover narration is but one of the
options for filmmakers: “In the ‘complex system’ of cinema, it is just one element of
many elements, to be juggled along with them, often in shifting combinations.”
127

For Henderson this is a drawback of voiceover (and cinema) rather than a fact that
creates opportunities to join together sound and image. The heart of his frustration is
that film is inferior to literature. He complains that voiceover narrators are
“ludicrous stand-ins for the novelistic ‘I’ because, though they wind up elaborately,
they have nothing to pitch.”
128
But voiceover narrators are only “stand-ins for the
novelistic ‘I’” in as much as Henderson forces this comparison. By his own
admission voiceover is “just one element of many elements” that films can use. The
same thing can be said of any sound or image techniques that cinema offers:
dominance occurs because of tendencies in aesthetics, technology and culture, not
because there are inherent hierarchal relationships in cinema. Much of voiceover in
film, particularly that which begins a film, is closer to the clichéd phrase “once upon
a time…” than an attempt at subjective storytelling. For example, the beginning of
Red River’s voiceover (1948) is not a claim to offer one man’s insights (literal or
figurative) on events but rather to say “here is a story.” That is the classical use of
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voiceover anyway. Films of the postwar / pre-Dolby period do more than “expose
the mechanisms of narration,” they demonstrate that sound does not serve the image
and voiceover narration can offer moments – perhaps many in a given film – of
audio dissolve.

Orson Welles: The Salesman
Orson Welles did more than any other director in the 1940s to make voiceover an
appealing method of displaying narration. While James Naremore labels Welles a
“magician” (in part because of the artist’s interest in performing magic
129
), for his
voiceover work (and often ripe acting), he is perhaps better called a salesman. This
is perhaps most evident when he tells the story with his own voice in The
Magnificent Ambersons
130
and The Lady from Shanghai. Welles practiced selling
himself on radio as the host of The Shadow and as the man who described the
Martian attack in War of the Worlds.
131
In film he sells the idea of the author and
paves the way for auteurism.
132

Welles’ Citizen Kane and his career after this scandalous first film continue
to inspire film scholars and historians to pick through his films, interviews,
paperwork, and footage from multiple incomplete features to revel in his (mostly
early) triumphs and explain his (mostly late) failures.
133
Citizen Kane is, like
Fantasia, a key film in the transition away from classical sound norms. Kane’s
sound has been studied by scholars and extolled for its innovations and significance.
François Truffaut speaks for a generation of French cinephiles when he writes,
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“Citizen Kane, no doubt by the richness of its sound track, made us finally disgusted
with dubbing.”
134
He also remarks on a more personal level that when experiencing
the film again,
I noticed that I knew it by heart, but like a record rather than a film; I
wasn’t always certain of the image which was going to follow, but I
was sure of the sound which was coming, of the quality of voice of
whoever was going to speak, of the musical linking which led to the
next sequence.
135

This second comment indicates the expressive power of the film’s soundtrack and its
decisive influence on one’s experience of the film. François Thomas likewise writes
that the film, “contains not a single moment at which the demand on our attention is
left to the image alone. This being the case, no element of the sound design can be
modified without compromising the film as a whole.” For this reason “Citizen Kane
is, par excellence, a film impossible to dub; its web of sounds is too perfectly woven
to allow for the removal of a single thread.”
136

Thomas is correct that Citizen Kane’s “web of sounds” resists alteration but
so too does its image and most importantly the relationship between the sounds and
images. In Welles’ cinema sound and image are fundamentally equal. Welles shows
off the visual and aural capabilities of the medium of film with a delight largely
unmatched in American cinema. Adrian Martin remarks “Welles’ films provide us
with some of the most fertile examples of image-sound fusion in all cinema. On the
visual plane, they employ a baroque patterning of images . . . . But Welles’
management of sound is no less baroque.”
137

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Rick Altman examines the unique sound of Citizen Kane by considering
radio norms of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly Welles’s own programs. He argues
that the film’s structure – episodes set off by the foregrounding of speech – is similar
to how radio programs of the era presented stories interrupted by advertising. This
makes Citizen Kane “the first modern movie, the first film to structure itself around
the discursive necessities of a broadcast medium.”
138
Altman discusses the ways in
which radio sought to negotiate these required gaps and argues that “During the
thirties, radio established two genres involving personalities who would
systematically bridge the discursive / narrative gap. The first to be developed was
comic variety, in which the host doubled as a character in comedy sketches.”
139
The
second personality was Welles’ invention in his program “First Person Singular” and
later “Mercury Theatre on the Air,” the latter of which, “cast him in the ambiguous
triple role of host, narrator, and actor. Especially in view of the absence of a
sponsor, Welles takes on the, for him, very comfortable function of selling himself,
his show, and the Mercury Theatre.”
140
The list of things which Welles sells is not
ordered arbitrarily; the list reinforces the argument that Welles primarily sells
himself. This carries over into his films in the way they offer Welles as actor,
voiceover narrator, or both. Altman’s essay argues that while Welles did not invent
the radio narrator as some have suggested, “he may very well have invented the
intrusive episodic narrator, the one who bridges each pair of scenes rather than
appearing only at the beginning and end of the program.”
141
This narrator guides the
story throughout. Welles transfers his approach to sound from radio to Citizen Kane
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but does not act as the film’s narrator. Altman argues that this decision contributes
to the debate over the film’s authorship and “leaves us in doubt about the identity of
the sponsor responsible for the film’s hard-sell tactics.”
142

Altman therefore suggests that Welles’ voiceover for The Magnificent
Ambersons takes up the “intermittent intrusive narrator position,” and is a response
to this possible audience doubt. Furthermore, though he remains offscreen (and in
part because he remains offscreen), Welles’ “full responsibility for the film [is]
anchored visually and audibly by his final identification with the microphone
itself.”
143
The dominant sound of The Magnificent Ambersons is Welles’ voiceover
and the dominant voice in the film is Welles’. He even reads out the film’s
credits.
144
The film begins with a black screen and the most recognizable voice of
the era seems to speak the film into existence. Welles’ voiceover overwrites Booth
Tarkington (who wrote the novel) by reading (as author and voiceover narrator)
Tarkington’s words. This action also aurally presents the idea of (film) authorship.
The Magnificent Ambersons would play well on the radio (and Welles also adapted
the work for radio) because one can listen to the film and not just follow the
narrative but also receive the sense of a lost America in Welles’ readings.
While Welles (creatively) used direct sound for these first two films, the
soundtrack for The Lady from Shanghai was created largely in post-production.
145

This results in some awkward (and nonexistent) lip-sync, but not surprisingly Welles
uses this production method to his advantage. By this time it was normal for thrillers
and crime films to begin with voiceover from a man reflecting on his past and the
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woman who gave him a hard time. The Lady from Shanghai fits this pattern but in
the first scene Welles demonstrates that he will not simply follow the examples of
other films. The film begins not with an image of the speaker but the Golden Gate
Bridge and Welles says, “When I start out to make a fool of myself there's very little
can stop me.” Immediately Welles advertises his voice and its mediocre Irish accent
(that does nothing to disguise the spectacle of his voice) and indicates that his
voiceover will not simply explain the image. When Michael O’Hara (Welles) meets
Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth) in the park, the voiceover comments, “‘Good
evening,’ says I” and the film’s narration presents a brief exchange of dialogue
between the two before the voiceover returns and speaks over the image of O’Hara.
This is just one of the creative ways Welles uses voiceover narration in the film and
makes it of equal interest to his “baroque” visuals (in Martin’s terms). Like many
other films, The Lady from Shanghai particularly foregrounds voiceover near the
film’s beginning and end but the voiceover returns periodically (the longest gap
between statements is about 24 minutes) to reveal O’Hara’s thoughts and feelings
with lines like “Personally I don't like a girlfriend to have a husband, if she'll fool a
husband she'll fool me.” O’Hara / Welles explains the entire film as well in the
beginning of the film’s famous funhouse scene. The voiceover definitively reveals
that Elsa is responsible for the film’s central murder and ties up the narrative’s loose
ends. This information – and Welles’ voice which delivers it – are matched by the
film’s narration with the increasingly baroque funhouse montage and results in a
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highly audio-visual moment of cinema (before the climatic shootout) which
demonstrates Welles’ complex manipulation of voiceover as attraction.

Joseph L. Mankiewicz: The Storyteller
Joseph Mankiewicz is normally discussed as a screenwriter rather than a unique
writer-director-producer whose body of work centers on the words and the act of
storytelling. Cheryl Bray Lower writes: “The spoken word drives the visual image
in his work as director because he maintained that ever since sound came to films,
they had an obligation to say something.”
146
His films, and screenplays, emphasize
the act of telling and movements of narration. They often use voiceover narration to
provide important narrative information pointedly not contained in the image. Aural
information in Mankiewicz’s films can override, contradict, and complicate the
information offered by the image.
Voiceover narration in Mankiewicz’s films interprets the image, in part due
to the sustained representation of (aural) subjectivity even as they remain visually
objective (in part because Mankiewicz very seldom makes use of optical point of
view shots). The narration does more than “set the scene” in terms of establishing
character names, time, and place. It instead allows a character to offer opinions
about other characters and places and reflect on what has changed (or not changed)
between the time of the images and time of the voiceover. Mankiewicz uses
voiceover in some films, like House of Strangers (1949) and Five Fingers (1952), “to
reinforce the story’s announced claim to be true.”
147
Mankiewicz uses the
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conventions of the authoritative offscreen voice in films like Letter to Three Wives
(1949), All About Eve (1950), and The Barefoot Contessa (1954), to foreground the
subjectivity of the speaker and the selectivity of the narration in terms of sound and
image. The voiceover in Mankiewicz’s films at times seems to control the image
and scholars point specifically to the opening of All About Eve and Addison
DeWitt’s (George Sanders) voiceover. Kozloff remarks, “The first thing one notices
is that the voice here is actually in complete control of the image: the camera
illustrates the information that the speaker provides, successively changing its
position to match the content of the voice-over.”
148
The voiceover addresses the
audience as “you” and dominates the soundtrack but steps aside to allow the host of
the Sarah Siddons Award Dinner to speak briefly. The camera cooperates with the
voiceover in part by panning or cutting to other characters as Addison describes
them. After he quizzically remarks “What can there be to know that you don’t
know?,” he looks to his left and the narration cuts to an image of Karen (Celeste
Holm) whose voiceover then begins: “When was it? It seems a lifetime ago.” The
rest of the film (other than the objective conclusion that lacks a voiceover
introduction) moves between the memories of Karen and other characters (including
Addison) and each section is introduced by, and includes, moments of voiceover
narration.
The narration of The Barefoot Contessa acknowledges its debt to All About
Eve, Citizen Kane (and even The Power and the Glory [1933]) by beginning with a
famous person’s funeral then presenting characters’ accounts that combine to reveal
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the enigmatic figure at the center of the film. Here she is the mysterious movie star
Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner), the “Barefoot Contessa.” As in the opening of All
About Eve the camera cooperates with the voiceover narrators and shows each
speaker in turn and then shows the past. Eric Smoodin calls Mankiewicz “the grand
experimenter in voice-over narration”
149
and notes his use of an analepsis to take the
audience “back” to a time within the narrative. When the Contessa goes to Harry
Dawes’ (Humphrey Borgart) hotel room and talks about the events of her wedding
night the screen shows what happened – the Count revealed his war wound and
impotency. For Smoodin this device is ingenious and necessary: “it does not work
merely as a narrative flourish, or as a show of Mankiewicz’ skill as a storyteller.
Rather . . . it clarifies an enigma central to the film: Why did the Contessa’s marriage
fail?”
150
The narration folds together three times, (the present of the funeral, the
past of Maria in Harry’s hotel room, and the more distant past of Maria on her
wedding night) with two layers of voiceover narration: Harry’s and the Contessa’s.
The scene is an obvious – yet necessary – display of film narration and uses the
human voice to convey information and connect events. The use of the Contessa’s
voice is significant not simply for allowing the enigma herself to speak (unlike Eve
Harrington in All About Eve and Kane in Citizen Kane) but because she is a woman.
The film’s narration allows the Contessa to tell her own story rather than having
Harry recount it (even though it technically occurs within his flashback).
Mankiewicz uses female voiceover to transition to flashbacks in All About
Eve and The Barefoot Contessa but films which feature female voiceover narrators
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are few. Even more than in these other films Letter to Three Wives’ use of
voiceover is unique in its treatment of gender because the woman’s power endures.
Kaja Silverman, in “Dis-Embodying the Female Voice,” argues that women are
subject to “the rule of synchronization” more than men, and notes that in contrast to
the female voice, “from time to time the male voice speaks from an anonymous and
transcendental vantage, ‘over’ the narrative.”
151
Silverman’s psychoanalytically-
based essay states that “The capacity of the male subject to be cinematically
represented in this disembodied form aligns him with transcendence, authoritative
knowledge, potency and the law – in short, with the symbolic father.” She
continues, “the male subject finds his most ideal realization when he is heard but not
seen”
152
and this contrasts with the fact that in film “female subjectivity is most fully
achieved when it is most visible.”
153
Karen Hollinger responds to Silverman and
others who, “stress the subversion of the female narrator’s voice-over, which they
believe is only allowed expression so that it can be undermined by male
authority.”
154
For these writers the authority of the female speaker is “shut down in
some way by a final decisive male intervention that implicates the spectator strongly
in this masculine point of view.”
155
But Hollinger argues that films with first person
female narration include “narrative battles for control of the story between various
competing elements in the text, a dichotomy between word and image, and a
proliferation of point of view.”
156
One of her examples is Letter to Three Wives.
In the film just as the titular wives leave on a day trip they receive a letter
from friend Addie Ross (Celeste Holm) informing them that she has absconded with
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one of their husbands. Forced to wait until the end of the day to learn which of them
has been abandoned, the women reflect on their married lives. Addie’s voice reads
out her letter and marks the transition to each flashback. Throughout the film the
main characters discuss Addie as a feminine ideal and this fact, plus her visual
absence, work to “enhance her position of power.”
157

As Hollinger notes, “Addie is . . . an omniscient, omnipresent vocal presence
throughout the film. She seems so far above her surroundings that she is
contemptuous of them, and the spectator comes to identify with her contempt.”
158

As this quote indicates Hollinger is interested in the audience’s relationship to the
narrator and she argues that while Addie’s detachment is admirable initially, as the
film progresses and the audience witnesses the real affection which exists in the three
couples and Addie’s meddling in their lives, she becomes less admirable. Addie’s
voiceover has an ambiguous status in relation to the film’s visual narration in part
because her voice shapes the experience of the film from the beginning. As the
opening credits end Addie proclaims: “To begin with: all the incidents and characters
in the story might be fictitious and any resemblance to you, or me, might be purely
coincidental.” Addie describes the town as the visual narration shows it but her
voice is anything but objective and her mockery of the disclaimer for fiction films
foregrounds her personal take on the story. For Hollinger, Addie’s “detached
independence” (continually underlined by her visual absence and cynically
authoritative voiceover) presents a clear opposition to the lifestyle of the “devoted
wives”: “As a result, while the film is able to realign the three wives to their ‘proper’
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roles as devoted wives, Addie stands in opposition to this realignment, casting an
ironic commentary on its desirability.”
159
At the film’s conclusion the audience
learns that Addie has failed to break up a marriage. As she says “Heigh ho!
Goodnight everybody,” a glass falls over and spills its contents and the couples
dance in joyous matrimony. Though left alone, Addie does not sound overly
disappointed and the film has not punished her for her meddling. Mankiewicz’s film
uses female voiceover not to demonstrate the inferiority of women or to subvert the
authority of this particular female speaker.
160

Stanley Kubrick: The Ironist
The voiceover narration of Stanley Kubrick’s films contradicts the images, and
draws attention to itself. Kubrick embraces the fact that sound and image do not
exist in a necessary hierarchical relationship; his is not a cinema of audio dissolves
but one which is truly audio-visual. Kubrick places sounds and images in
relationships which suggest that he regards them as fundamentally different, and the
narration places them in situations which reveal their differences.
161
As Kozloff
notes, “the image track’s reliability is not essential; it is just a convention, and
conventions are made to be broken.”
162
Kubrick’s films, however, do not break this
convention but ignore it and bring together sound and image with all the calculation
of a chemist mixing dangerous ingredients stepping back to await the inevitable
explosion. His films use sound in a manner which demonstrates an almost blissful
disregard for classical uses of sound. If Welles invites the audience to admire his
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voice (while also attending to both sound and image), and Mankiewicz offers an
aural story, then Kubrick, even more than these artists, beckons the audience to
cinema, where sound and image are wrenched together by film narration to provide
an experience unavailable in other art forms. Kubrick follows the work of avant-
garde filmmakers like Conner, Anger, Frampton, Snow and Hollywood filmmakers
like Welles and Mankiewicz, who at least at times resist the sway of classical norms.
His films can not be experienced without listening and his voiceovers demand
attention.
Kubrick’s films, quite possibly, will eventually generate even more critical
commentary than those of Welles. His status can be seen in the fact that the ideas
expressed in his films on technology and humanity are frequently debated as ideas
rather than simply film content. Stylistically, his visual sense continues to be
examined, including his early work as a photographer.
163
While Kubrick lacked the
training in aural elements that Welles gained on radio and the stage, and unlike
Welles and Mankiewicz relied on collaborators to write his films (which are nearly
always adaptations of literary works), his films demonstrate as much attention to the
soundtrack as to the image. Yet the voluminous work on Kubrick’s cinema does not
fully reflect his obvious concern with sound. For example, the 1996 collection
Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick includes considerations of the photography and
lighting for 2001, Barry Lyndon (1975) and The Shining (1980), the special effects
of 2001 and the use of the Steadicam in The Shining, yet there are no essays devoted
to music, voiceover, or sound.
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Kubrick relies on voiceover in most of his films, mixing character-narrators
with omniscient narrators and presenting one of film’s most famous acousmêtres in
2001’s HAL, who does as much talking as any human in the largely dialogue-free
film.
164
Even his plans for the long-discussed film on Napoleon included the use of
voiceover narration.
165
The narrators in his films are no more or less “reliable” than
the image track; his voiceover narrators are wholly separate from the image track, in
part due to their status as sound rather than image.
Kubrick’s play with voiceover can be traced through his career. His first
feature Fear and Desire (1953), which he famously disowned, was shot silent for
budgetary reasons but this perhaps cemented in his mind the basic separateness of
sound and image.
166
Luis M. García Mainar states that Kubrick’s voiceover “usually
works as a creator of what we see, as a controller of the information we are given
and the way in which this is done.”
167
He also provides a summary of Kubrick’s
shifting treatment of voiceover narration, arguing that it:
evolves from an element that shows the mastery of the text by itself,
an element of coherence that assures the perfect fitting of each
element in the first films, to a more detached, ironic relationship of
narrator to text that hints at the growing feeling in the later films
that reality cannot be controlled and that the text is unable to
present it to us in a clear, reassuring way.
168

For Mainar 2001: A Space Odyssey is the transitional film because it lacks voiceover
and divides these two general periods. His overview is persuasive yet overstates the
reliability of the voiceover in the pre-2001 films. The Killing (1956) and Lolita
(1962) particularly offer voiceover narrators who do not “create” the visual narration
and are not all-knowing. Mario Falsetto compares The Killing’s voiceover to that of
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the Louis de Rochemont and March of Time documentaries, stating that this voice
has “similar expressive qualities, particularly its masculine, authoritative tone.”
169
A
little later he calls it “deeply resonant, and seemingly authoritative,”
170
and these
facts make it all the more noticeable when contradictions occur. Falsetto locates two
moments where the narrator’s voiceover statements are not consistent. First the
narrator says that Johnny’s day began at 7am but then later says he arrived at the
airport at “exactly” 7am. Additionally, the voice-over says that Johnny arrived at
7:29pm and was fifteen minutes late but earlier another character at 7:15pm says that
Johnny is fifteen minutes late. While these are only two instances of “errors” in a
film with a considerable amount of voiceover narration, Falsetto states, “I believe
that both errors are meaningful and that perhaps Kubrick is making an ‘authorial’
comment through them.”
171
The film’s narration does not acknowledge these
“discrepancies” or redress them and for Falsetto they have thematic import: “No
matter how predictable or rational the world, there are always unforeseen elements
that can potentially disrupt this orderliness. The errors involving the voice-over and
the film’s time structure may be connected to this Kubrickian theme.”
172
Falsetto
also considers the differences in aural and visual information in Lolita, noting
correctly that, “Although Humbert is the audience’s narrator and guide, there are
many instances in which the narrative and Kubrick’s descriptive camera points to
some piece of information of which Humbert is not aware (most particularly in
references to Quilty).”
173
He also states that the “difference between the generally
characterless, uninvolved voice that the audience hears and the sympathetic character
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that it sees, provides the film with added ironic distance and a level of complexity it
would otherwise not have.”
174
Falsetto’s examples indicate that while there may be
an evolution in Kubrick’s treatment of voiceover as different from the image, the
tendency and desire to create conflict exists all along.
It is Barry Lyndon’s narration, however, which (along with that of A
Clockwork Orange [1971]) receives the most attention from scholars. Barry Lyndon
is spectacle cinema in the best possible sense because it offers richly evocative sound
and image tracks that each hails the audience with varied and fascinating
information. More than Earthquake, Barry Lyndon is the sort of film that the
triumph of Jaws stifled: a personal, challenging film made for audiences older than
14 (and who are film-literate, or at least are working to be). Barry Lyndon’s image
track is famously fussed over, from its production design and costumes, to the new
lens and film stock used to create its widely admired look. The image track –
however immaculate – is only half of the film, however, as Kubrick (at least)
understood. The audience’s experience relies heavily on the voiceover narration as a
conveyor of information and as a constant source of contrast with the images. The
soundtrack is doubly important and interesting at the level of technology because
1975 also saw the release of Tommy, the first film exhibited with Dolby sound.
Barry Lyndon does not need sophisticated technology. The sound effects, music,
and the grain and volume of the narrator’s voice do not require Dolby (or even
stereo) to present a soundtrack that is the full partner of the image and at no point
works to serve it.
345

At the film’s opening the narrator explains the onscreen actions as Barry’s
father is killed in a duel: “Barry's father had been bred, like many other young sons
of a genteel family, to the profession of the law. And there is no doubt he would've
made an eminent figure in his profession had he not been killed.” His speech and
tone undercut any sense of tragedy in the event while also offering an explanation of
what the images mean. Throughout the film the narrator similarly offers
interpretations of events but his input is never simple or redundant. Perhaps the most
frequently quoted portion of the narration occurs as Barry (Ryan O’Neil) parts from
Lischen. Though the visual portion of the film’s narration, and particularly during
this moment of separation, makes the couple seem to have a genuine connection, the
narrator wryly remarks:
A lady who sets her heart upon a lad in uniform must prepare to
change lovers pretty quickly, or her life will be but a sad one. This
heart of Lischen's was like many a neighboring town and had been
stormed and occupied several times before Barry came to invest it.

Moments such as this force the audience to weigh both sound and image and reflect
on the film’s complex address.
Mainar states that the film’s voiceover, “ironic, compressing information,
playing with the audience (moving Barry toward and detaching him from the
audience), doing away with the beauty the text creates by introducing into each scene
the human factor, which is usually gross and base,”
175
and this is a common
interpretation of the film’s combination of sound and image. Kozloff uses it as a
case study to discuss “unreliable” narrators and irony.
176
She notes that while
Thackeray’s novel is first person, Kubrick’s film presents an anonymous and
346

seemingly omniscient narrator whose speech provides “ironic commentary upon the
hero and eighteenth-century aristocratic society.”
177
Kozloff convincingly
demonstrates that the narrator does not produce the images, but, because of her
reliance on literary narrative theory, argues for an “image-maker” who produces the
visual track and who she labels “Thackeray.” As evidence for this interpretation she
notes that nearly all of the narrator’s words are from the novel and the pronouns have
simply been changed for the film. Much of the narrator’s apparently omniscient
insight originates as observations from Lyndon’s mind, but the change is more
important than simply one of grammar: “In every case the move from novel to film is
from unreliability and unconscious irony to reliability and conscious irony.”
178

Kozloff’s comments locate the fact that Kubrick’s film – through its combination of
sound and image – creates a text as rich and complex as Thackeray’s novel.
Kubrick’s attention to both sound and image finally also highlights the tendency for
audiences to regard film as a visual medium. Kozloff notes that some scholars such
as Mark Crispin Miller conclude that the images prove the narrator is not
trustworthy.
179
Yet Kozloff responds concisely to Miller and others who doubt
voiceover because it is voiceover: “we are so used to believing that the camera does
not lie [that] we find it easier to start mistrusting the narrator.”
180
Kubrick’s film
refuses the hierarchy of image over sound and the film can not be fully examined or
appreciated if its use of sound and image is considered using the historically-specific
hierarchy of classical cinema.

347

Conclusion
This chapter has argued that many films of the postwar / pre-Dolby era give lie to the
assumption that the image is more important than sound through their use of the
screening space’s acoustical properties and equipment, use of sound – particularly
music – as spectacle, or use of voiceover narration to convey a film’s most important
(or interesting) information. These characteristics of postwar / pre-Dolby films
continue to the present.
Consider the recent box office successes of U2 3D (2007) and Hannah
Montana / Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour (2008).
181
Each film is a
digital 3D IMAX production and therefore similar to other recent films like Beowulf
(2007). While all three offer a 3D IMAX experience, the first two films (especially
the second) were more successful (relative to cost) than Beowulf. Their success
indicates audiences’ continued willingness to go to film theaters for a concert. The
move to IMAX and 3D production for many commentators signals a repeat of the
attempts of the studios in the 1950s to lure audiences to theaters with the spectacle of
3D and widescreen (and stereo sound). If rock had existed as a more mainstream
concern for Hollywood at the time there certainly would have been Elvis films in 3D
and stereo sound. The presentation of concert films in IMAX and 3D is an extension
of the lure of the concert film: to provide the “best seat in the house.” U2 3D and
Hannah Montana / Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour combine visual
spectacle (music stars, 3D and IMAX) with aural spectacle (famous songs performed
by artists who are difficult and expensive to see perform live) and therefore are not
348

so much exceptions in contemporary cinema as they are representative of what all
cinema offers: a combination of sound and image. That they each draw audiences to
the theater through their use of the exhibition space’s sound and image technology
connects them to film of the postwar / pre-Dolby period.
The music of U2 and Miley Cyrus is also available for use in fiction films
and in the Dolby era the use of existing music is an important narrational strategy.
The connections between the film and music industries have also grown more
complex. By the mid 1970s many individual songs appear in films. In the era of
Baz Lurhmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001), theories of narration must address sound
carefully to account for such dense aural (and visual) intertextual stews. Consider
the uses of Radiohead’s song “Exit Music (For a Film).” It was originally
commissioned by Lurhmann for his postmodern version of Romeo + Juliet (1996) to
play (not surprisingly) over the closing credits. In a few minutes the song faintly
sketches the backstory and last act to Shakespeare’s play (as well as the film). While
not precise in its summary (it is a rock song, after all), the story of the two young
lovers makes perfect sense to anyone who knows the story (and certainly anyone
who has just sat through the film). The song appears over the end credits but does
not appear as the last track on the soundtrack album (or the second volume either, for
that matter). In fact, the song does not appear on the film’s soundtrack album at all.
The song does appear on what many consider to be the best rock album of the 1990s:
Radiohead’s OK Computer (1997). Even here it is not the last track but track 4
(which amounts to side A on a cassette or LP). In the context of the album, even if
349

one does not know the story of its making, its lyrics make connections to
Shakespeare’s play and the music is both apocalyptic and saddening. Not
surprisingly (as many Radiohead songs have been covered by a variety of artists) a
year later pianist Brad Mehldau recorded an instrumental version for his album The
Art of the Trio, Vol. 3: Songs. While he transforms the song’s structure, Mehldau
leaves the melody intact and his instrumental version has in turn been used in other
films: most notably it appears as underscore for a death scene in Alias Betty (2001)
and a traumatic argument between adulterous lovers in Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful
(2002). The movement of a pop song which summarizes and concludes a
postmodern film of a Shakespeare play, to (lite) jazz that functions as underscore to
other films about love and violence, suggests much about the interdependence of the
film and music industries in the present age and demonstrates the work a
combination of narrative theory and sound theory should undertake. Perhaps
unsurprisingly a music video for the song is available on YouTube that consists of
footage from Franco Zefferelli’s 1968 film of Romeo and Juliet and demonstrates
immediately the ability of media users to match existing sound(s) and image(s) in
evocative ways.
182

Finally, voiceover narration in American film has never returned to its
heyday of the 1940s in terms of quality or quantity. But some filmmakers in the
Dolby era (including Kubrick with Full Metal Jacket [1987]) recognize the power of
carefully written, recorded and presented voiceover narration. Perhaps more than
anyone else in the period, the work of Terrence Malick represents the possibilities of
350

voiceover. From the child narrator of Days of Heaven (1978) to the multiple
narrators of The Thin Red Line (1998) and The New World (2005), Malick’s cinema
continually forces audiences to listen to the human voice and the stories which the
speakers tell about themselves and others. As beautifully photographed and
designed as Malick’s films are, they do not offer a hierarchy of sound and image but
rather a complex expressive of sound(s) and image(s).
The three tendencies and the films linked to them only represent a portion of
the ways in which films and filmmakers in Hollywood and outside Hollywood since
the classical era produce texts which – like those of Conner, Kubrick and others – are
audio-visual and do not force sound elements to assist, much less serve, the image.
351

Chapter 6 Endnotes

1
Amy Lawrence, Echo and Narcissus: Woman’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley,
CA: U of California P, 1991) 5. Lawrence regards silent cinema as dominated by the image: “This is
the hierarchy of languages in silent cinema, the image advanced as superior to words, more true to
verbal expression than words themselves could be – a hierarchy that was to be profoundly challenged
by early sound cinema” (63-64). Yet this generalization neglects song films, film songs, and other
moments where the sound of exhibition was equal to or more important than the images on display.
At the very least there were more options for sound before recorded sound.

2
Lawrence 2.

3
See Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia UP, 2004) 51-53.

4
David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1985) 20.

5
Bordwell 20. Richard Maltby and Ian Craven, Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (Oxford, UK:
Blackwell, 1995). The authors note the difference in the film’s visual aesthetic (the scenes with
Bree’s analyst are more “documentary” than other scenes) and Fonda’s performance (she behaves
differently with the analyst than other characters in the films) in order to argue that the film’s image
track is not monolithic in its seeming truthfulness. They also mention MacCabe and Bordwell and
state: “The confident dismissal of the closing contradiction between sound and image assumes, rather
than demonstrates, the hierarchy of image over sound. In the particular case of Klute, it could be
argued that the soundtrack has received more support as the authoritative discourse in the movie”
(356).

6
Bordwell 18.

7
Bordwell 20.

8
Bordwell 61. Nearly alone among writers on the film, notes that sound and image cooperate to
present a “lie”: “But in Stage Fright, probably the canonic case of unreliable narration in classical
cinema, we are given a flashback putatively both trustworthy and accurate but which turns out to have
been the visual and auditory representation of a lie. It is not just the character’s yarn that is unreliable.
The film’s narration shows itself to be duplicitous by neglecting to suggest any inadequacies in
Johnnie’s account and by appearing to be highly communicative – not just reporting what the liar said
but showing it as if it were indeed objectively true” (61).

9
George M. Wilson, Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1986) 40.

10
Even more importantly, responses also indicate that usually when a character seems to recount a
story, audiences (critics at least) do not regard the presentation as truly the subjective account of the
ostensible teller. In the movement from a closeup of the speaker’s face to the past event(s), the
depiction of these events is not typically regarded as wholly subjective, but rather as (mostly)
objective. Some directors like Hitchcock and Joseph Mankiewicz rely on this assumption in their
films. And yet here again this assumption is one connected to classical Hollywood cinema rather than
all cinema. By the time John Ford (for some the embodiment of “classical cinema”) makes The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance in the early 1960s and presents two opposed visual representations of
which character killed Valance, audiences were apparently less traumatized by a film refusing to offer
full disclosure visually and aurally. Robert Ray, in A Certain Tendency of American Cinema,
352

persuasively highlights this moment as a break with classical norms and helpfully includes a
reproduction of the shot sequence. Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema,
1930-1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985) 215-43.

11
Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film (Berkeley,
CA: U of California P, 1988) 115. While perhaps chastened, Hitchcock did not cease his experiments
with sound, making Rear Window (1954) a few years later (as explored in Chapter 3) and The Birds
in 1963, for just two examples.

12
Kozloff 115.

13
Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell UP, 1978) 237.

14
In Hitchcock / Truffaut the interviewer gets the director to express regret about this decision: “I did
one thing in that picture that I never should have done; I put in a flashback that was a lie” (189).

15
Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1988) 142.

16
At the end of the discussion Thompson provides some other examples of “duplicity.” Perhaps not
surprisingly, these include the 1947 noir Possessed and Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari, 1920) but no American films made between 1927 and 1947 (158-60).

17
Belton reveals in “Frozen Revolution” that this is repeated in the production of widescreen films in
the 1950s. Though usually discussed only in terms of changes in the image, these systems also
presented sound in ways that were also sold to audiences. Belton also notes that Cinerama introduced
“traveling sound” (161), a process in which the microphone was fixed with the camera. But Fox and
others did not follow this model: “In this way the microphones, like the camera itself, occupied quasi-
objective, unmarked positions and functioned as omniscient onlookers rather than as a subjective
presence identified with the position of the camera” (162). He also notes that “For a time, stereo
recording actually dictated onscreen composition; actors would be positioned across the frame so that
their voices would be picked up in different microphones, ensuring their separation upon playback in
the theater.” John Belton, “1950s Magnetic Sound: The Frozen Revolution,” Sound Theory / Sound
Practice, Ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992) 154-167.

18
Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1987) 230.

19
Kathryn Kalinak argues – without directly referring to Altman’s work – that while dialogue is
typically privileged in classical cinema, there are moments when music is at the top of the sound
hierarchy. While discussing the work of Erich Wolfgang Korngold for Captain Blood (1935) she
states: “The creation of spectacle in the classical narrative model afforded music this position, where
virtuosic technical display was heightened by the substitution of music for sound.” She continues:
“The closer narrative moved toward pure spectacle and away from the naturalistic reproduction of
sound, the more music moved toward the forefront of conscious perception in compensation” (97).
These comments indicate an allegiance to Maltby’s conception of classical cinema as much as to
Bordwell’s, which Kalinak directly invokes in her study. Kalinak notes such moments in montage
sequences, moments of spectacle (action scenes, for example), and credit sequences of classical films,
which makes a list not dissimilar to Altman’s list of films which are not musicals. Kathryn Kalinak,
Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1992).

20
Altman, American Film Musical 109.

353

21
Altman, American Film Musical 69.

22
Altman, American Film Musical 70.

23
Altman states that Berkeley, “alone among the early practitioners of the musical understood the
extent to which the audio dissolve liberates the picture plane of all diegetic responsibilities” and adds,
“When we reach the climax of a Berkeley production number. . . we have entirely abandoned the
representational mode. Everything – even the image – is now subordinated to the music track”
(American Film Musical 71). Busby Berkeley’s 1930s musicals are not “eccentric and atypical,” but
rather “representative, indeed symbolic of the musical’s most fundamental configurations” in their
buildup to moments of audio dissolve. For connections between Berkeley and avant-garde practice
see David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los
Angeles (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2005) 77-86.

24
Altman, American Film Musical 71.

25
Drew Casper, Postwar Hollywood, 1946-1962 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007) 396.

26
James Buhler emphasizes the movement from “real to ideal” realms negotiated by the dissolve and
argues for thematic values in the audio dissolves in the non-musical films. James Buhler, James.
“Analytical and Interpretive Approaches to Film Music (II): Analysing Interactions of Music and
Film,” Film Music: Critical Approaches, Ed. K. J. Donnelly (New York: Continuum, 2001) 41-43.

27
Adrienne L. McLean focuses on Rita Hayworth to argue that Hayworth’s bodily movements,
particularly her dancing, refuse to be controlled by the male-coded film system and express her
considerable physical joy as a response to the music and her dancing frees her from the gaze as she
takes pleasure in her own body. “‘It’s Only That I Do What I Love and Love What I Do’: ‘Film Noir’
and the Musical Woman,” Cinema Journal 33.1 (1993): 3-16.

28
Jeff Smith, The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music (New York: Columbia UP,
1998) 142.

29
Kalinak, for example, notes the use and promotion of David Raksin’s theme for Laura (1944), and
of course the theme for Rear Window is relentlessly “sold” by that film. Settling the Score 170-174.

30
Smith, Sounds of Commerce 153.

31
Kevin Donnelly, Film and Television Music: The Spectre of Sound (London: BFI, 2005) 20.

32
Donnelly 23. Donnelly notes Altman’s stipulation that the audio dissolve bridge the prosaic and
the transcendent and retains the diegetic component which some writers let fall away. In another
essay he evokes the audio dissolve to examine Performance (1970). K. J. Donnelly, “Performance
and the Composite Film Score,” Film Music: Critical Approaches, Ed. K. J. Donnelly (New York:
Continuum, 2001) 152-166.

33
Stephen Handzo, “A Narrative Glossary of Film Sound Technology,” Film Sound: Theory and
Practice, Ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia UP, 1985) 421.

34
Donald Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound 1926-1931 (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997) 110.

35
Crafton 109.
354

36
Quoted in Crafton 110.

37
Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1987)
76.

38
Doherty considers the rise of films for teenagers in the 1950s and 1960s, a development firmly tied
to the appearance of new, specifically rock, music. As Doherty notes: “The more enduring furors of
the 1950s, like rock ’n’ roll and juvenile delinquency, spawned whole exploitation cycles, historically
bound clusters of films sprung from a common source” (1). He argues that in this period
Hollywood’s audience becomes fragmented and has never been whole since: “In America, movies
reflect teenage, not mass – and definitely not adult – tastes. This was not always so. Prior to the mid-
1950s, movies were the mass medium of choice for a vast, multigenerational audience” (2).
Doherty’s focus is not on music, but rock’s participation in this new cinema receives discussion and
his work is valuable for its address of scores in the 1950s. Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics:
The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s, Rev. and expanded ed. (Philadelphia, PA:
Temple UP, 2002).

39
Doherty 32-53.

40
R. Serge Denisoff and William D. Romanowski, Risky Business: Rock in Film (New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991) 10.

41
Dawson reveals that Bill Haley’s “Crazy, Man, Crazy” similarly became caught in the web of
media, rock and delinquency: “ ‘Crazy Man, Crazy’ became so emblematic of disaffected youth that
two months after falling off the charts it found its way into a national television production that
touched upon juvenile delinquency. The ninety-minute program was Glory in the Flower, William
Inge’s first teleplay, airing live on CBS’s Omnibus on Sunday, October 5, 1953. It starred a
promising young actor, James Dean, as a rebellious kid named Bronco out on bail on a marijuana
charge. Faced with ejection from a café for spiking his Coke from a pint of hooch in his jacket, he
snarled at the owner, ‘I’m not gonna take orders from you. No one’s gonna tell me what to do’” (54).
Like Blackboard Jungle’s use of “Rock Around the Clock,” Glory in the Flower used “Crazy, Man,
Crazy” at its beginning and conclusion. Jim Dawson, Rock Around the Clock: The Record that
Started the Rock Revolution! (San Francisco, CA: Backbeat, 2005).

42
Certainly most teens were not taking notes about who actually made the film, but neither was every
teen slashing a theater seat with a knife or dancing in the aisles. Enough teens were however to create
some widely reported incidents which turned into media events and linger to the present day.

43
Denisoff and Romanowski 17. Race is certainly an important issue in this quote and for studies of
the history (and present) of rock music. There is a voluminous literature on the subject but these
issues fall outside this dissertation. For one entry point, and a reading of Elvis as a progressive
cultural force, see Michael T. Bertrand, Race, Rock, and Elvis (Champaign, IL: U of Illinois P, 2005).

44
“Rock Around the Clock” itself (in its most famous and original version) is the result of different
takes of the song mixed together. The song depends on technology not just in the form of electric
guitars and amplifiers but recording technology. See Dawson 85-86.

45
Dawson 118.

46
As of this writing, Apple’s iTunes still does not sell it either so Blackboard Jungle provides a
unique version of “Rock Around the Clock.”

355

47
Denisoff and Romanowski 25.

48
Dawson recounts the following fascinating exchange: “Shortly after Blackboard Jungle premiered,
Richard Brooks got a call from a friend in Boston telling him there was no sound during the first reel,
Brooks immediately phoned the theater manager to ask what was going on. The man replied, ‘We
don’t turn on the sound until the second reel.’ ‘Are you insane?’ ‘But it’s that music,’ the manager
insisted. ‘They get up in the aisles and dance.’ He was afraid that their stomping might collapse the
balcony of his aging Beaux Arts-era theater. Almost from the start, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ was
threatening to bring down an entire tradition of American entertainment” (126).

49
Denisoff and Romanowski 11.

50
Denisoff and Romanowski 13.

51
Dawson 133.

52
Quoted in Denisoff and Romanowski 36.

53
Evan Hunter, The Blackboard Jungle: A Novel, 1954 (Cambridge, MA: Bentley, 1971) 168.

54
Dawson summarizes Brooks’ claim that he heard it on the radio (113) and what he considers the
“more feasible” claim of Glenn Ford’s son that he was playing the record around the house during
meetings between his father and Brooks (117).

55
Reprinted in American Cinematographer, November 1974, p. 1351.

56
http://members.aol.com/earthquakemovie/trivia.html

57
The dam is actually the St. Francis dam and the film’s final act is clearly based on the dam break of
1928 which resulted in the deaths of several hundred people.

58
American Cinematographer 1149.

59
Leroy Aarons, “Rumble! Shake! Quaking in Your Seat,” Washington Post 7 May 1974: C9.

60
Aarons 1.

61
See Thomas Schatz, “The New Hollywood,” Film Theory Goes to the Movies, Ed. Jim Collins,
Hilary Radner, and Ava Preacher (New York: Routledge, 1993) 8-36.

62
Aarons 1.

63
Huxley describes media – “the feelies” – which provide audiences the full physical sensations of
the events depicted.

64
Nora Sayre, “Screen: ‘Earthquake’ Evokes Feelies,” New York Times 16 Nov. 1974: 20.

65
Vincent Canby, “Brace Yourself, Here Come the ‘Splat’ Movies,” New York Times 24 Nov. 1974:
1.

66
Canby 1.

356

67
Gary Arnold, “In an ‘Earthquake’ Tremor,” Washington Post 16 Nov. 1974: B1.

68
Arnold 3.

69
Richie would rather just watch television however, which the film suggests is not a superior
alternative to playing football. Indeed, television is both overtly present in Bigger Than Life and an
absent pressure on the film as a whole. Both of these technological “advances” were nothing new in
this era. What was new was the perceived need to incorporate them to combat the threat of television.
Television is not simply combated through these applications of technology; the television in the
Avery home allows a direct (and hardly subtle) critique of this new form of “entertainment.” Richie
is seen early watching a noisy western on television which Ed attacks as being “always the same
story.” Here television is labeled as the conveyor of (mindless, undifferentiated) genre. The western
is dismissed as simplistic entertainment, suitable only for children.

70
It is well known that Bob Dylan’s “Quinn the Eskimo” (made into a hit by Manfred Mann with the
title “The Mighty Quinn”) was inspired, at least partially, by the film. But perhaps Dylan was
particularly struck by this moment as popular music (bad music too) is made to stand for corruption
and defeat which Inuk (Quinn) rejects. Inuk is no “Mr. Jones” – he knows what is going on.

71
Ray’s melodramas are not the only ones which use sound in noticeable ways. In George Stevens’
A Place in the Sun (1951), George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) kills his fiancé Alice Tripp (Shelly
Winters) at Loon Lake, and the sounds of “loons” indicate the promise, threat, and act of murder.
These sounds could be diegetic as Eastman looks offscreen at a few points as the sounds occur but are
more readily explained as issuing from his consciousness (and conscience). After the murder a report
of the murder comes from the radio but is drowned out by the sound of Angela Vicker’s (Elizabeth
Taylor) boat which takes the couple temporarily away from his fate. As the couple leaves the camera
(visual narration) stays on the dock with the radio, putting the radio predominantly in the frame but
then flagrantly knocking out the aural power of the radio with the sound effect of the boat which
leaves the frame.

72
Smith 4.

73
Susan Knobloch, “The Graduate as Rock ‘n’ Roll Film,” Spectator 17.2 (1997): 61.

74
Denisoff and Romanowski 10.

75
Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination, from Amos 'n' Andy and
Edward R. Murrow to Wolfman Jack and Howard Stern (New York: Times Books, 1999) 228.

76
Denisoff and Romanowski 23.

77
Three major studio films of 1957 demonstrate the last gasps of the Golden Age of the Hollywood
musical and acknowledge that youth culture and its embrace of rock music is the primary cause. Two
are from MGM, the company which released Blackboard Jungle, and therefore rock music into
cinema theaters. In Paramount’s Funny Face (1957), Astaire and Kay Thomspson perform “Clap Yo’
Hands” as what Peter Lev labels “a dreadful parody of American folk / country / rock music” (221).
Another Astaire film attempts a similar, but more direct, response. Jane Feuer states: “In Silk
Stockings, Astaire’s final solo to ‘The Ritz Roll and Rock’ finds him in typical attire dancing to a
Cole Porter parody of rock and roll. The number implies that Astaire may acknowledge changes in
popular musical taste without ever being affected by them since he is above mere fashion and
temporality” (116). But Feuer is perhaps being too optimistic. When Astaire smashes his trademark
top hat he seems to be admitting defeat rather than proclaiming his protection from changes in public
357

taste. It is perhaps significant that this is Astaire’s last musical until Finian’s Rainbow, Coppola’s
1968 film.
The other major male musical star of the era, Gene Kelly, also stepped aside in Les Girls
(1957). In the number “Why Am I So Gone (About that Gal)?” Kelly sings and dances to a Cole
Porter tune while doing an impression of Brando in The Wild One. The setting is a mock juke joint
complete with a sockhop dressed girlfriend. This was Kelly’s final musical at MGM (and last musical
until 1980’s disco / roller skating oddity Xanadu). Like Astaire’s numbers, this is far from bad, but
rather than joyfully expressing that there is an alternative to the juvenile grunts of Elvis, the number
admits defeat. Teenagers – whose tastes were by this point effecting change on the creation of
television, radio, and filmic texts – are not interested in complicated melodies and lyrics sprinkled
with French.
The song “Stereophonic Sound” as an attack on the – by then already discernible – tendency
of Hollywood to present technologically based spectacle is hardly subtle either. Porter’s song did
nothing to stem this tide either.

78
Doherty 57.

79
It should really come as no surprise to learn that exploitation pioneer Sam Katzman helped Ron
Rice make his only film, Flower Thief (1959-60). Winston Wheeler Dixon writes in Lost in the
Fifties: Recovering Phantom Hollywood that Rice “wrote letters to all the major Hollywood producers
of the era, asking for support in this entirely improvised project. All of them turned Rice down flat
except for Sam Katzman” (64). Though hardly a “major Hollywood producer,” it was Katzman who
came through, providing Rice with, in his own words: “five thousand feet of unused 16mm war
surplus machine gun film” (64).

80
Winston Wheeler Dixon reports, “Heading for Los Angeles to pursue a career in Hollywood, Sears
persistently made the rounds from one studio to the next in search of employment, finally landing a
job as an uncredited extra in The Jolson Story” (76).

81
Dawson 145.

82
There are also reports of dancing and audience mayhem from the film’s screenings in England, and
not long after the film’s run Bill Haley and his Comets toured: “ The tour, exclusively playing
cinemas, started in London, went up north as far as Scotland and returned via Wales and even the
Republic of Ireland” (167).

83
Dawson 147.

84
Dawson 153.

85
Dawson 149. The film features “Rock Around the Clock” as it moves to the closing title “The
Living End” and the soundtrack includes the sounds of hands clapping and snapping in an apparent
attempt to make this recording seem live.

86
American Graffiti also opens with “Rock Around the Clock.” As Shumway notes “the film’s
opening homage to Blackboard Jungle seems unintentionally ironic; whereas ‘Rock Around the
Clock’ had been accused of inciting riots among some audiences of that 1955 film, here it serves
merely to remind us that we are in that quaint and innocent time called the fifties” (46). And the song
is used for the opening credits to the TV spinoff of American Graffiti, “Happy Days.” Bill Haley
recorded (one of many) versions of the song for this credit sequence. “When the film’s star, Ron
Howard, repeated his all-American preppie role in a wildly popular ABC-TV knockoff called Happy
Days, Haley was called in to make a new recording of ‘Rock Around the Clock’ as the show’s
358

opening theme song during it first two (1974-75) seasons. Decca reissued his original classic, and
like a comet it came back around to visit the American Top 40 for the third time” (Dawson 173).

87
David R. Shumway, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Sound Tracks and the Production of Nostalgia,” Cinema
Journal 38.2 (1999): 36-37.

88
Doherty 66.

89
Doherty 67.

90
An “answer record” is a direct response of one record to another. For example, not long after the
release (and success) of The Silhouettes’ “Get a Job,” in 1957 it was “answered” by, “I Found a Job,”
“I Got Fired,” “I Lost My Job,” and, perhaps even more pointedly, “Got a Job.” See Jay Warner,
American Singing Groups: A History from 1940s to Today (New York: Leonard, 2006) 291.

91
Douglas 231

92
Douglas 231.

93
For Smith 159-162 and Julie Hubbert, “‘Whatever Happened to the Great Movie Music?’: Cinéma
Vérité and Hollywood Film Music of the Early 1970s,” American Music 21.2 (2003): 205-206.

94
For an effective discussion of the film’s combinations of images and music see Bordwell and
Thompson’s Film Art. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 7
th
ed.
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004). Though Sitney comments on the use of sound in Report, he says
nothing about the use of music in A Movie (289). P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American
Avant-Garde 1943-2000, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford UP, 2002).

95
Bruce Jenkins reports that Conner created a 3 screen version of the work (with each screen
showing a different text) in 1965 for an exhibition at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University.
“Explosion in a Film Factory,” 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story, (Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art
Center, 1999) 198.

96
Sitney 108.

97
Sitney 109.

98
Sitney 299.

99
Sitney 108-09.

100
Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision, Ed P. Adams Sitney (New York: Film Culture, 1963) 141.

101
Dawson provides a thorough, though inconclusive, investigation of the origins of “Rock Around
the Clock” in his book. 61-67.

102
Bruce Conner, Interview, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, Ed. Scott
MacDonald, Vol. 1 (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1988) 252.

103
Better known to some as Toni Basil, Basilotta had a hit single in 1982 with the incessantly cheery
“Mickey.” Before this breakthrough she had a career as a singer, actor (in films like Head [1968)],
359

Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces [1970]) and choreographer for films including American Graffiti.
“Breakaway” is one of her better pop songs, though “I’m 28” is likely her finest moment on record.

104
Brakhage 142-43.

105
Paul Arthur, in A Line of Sight: American Avant-garde Film Since 1965 (Minneapolis, MN: U of
Minnesota P, 2005), argues that the film is often regarded as a “sadistic affirmation of the power of
male desire” (43). “Such a view, however, misses the film’s darker meanings and self-implicating
pathos. Although the viewer swiftly realizes that the three-minute song will receive five iterations,
the seemingly endless refrain ‘I’m Through with Love,’ played over increasingly dislocated nude
images, makes it clear that this subject – or rather her screen image – can never really be ‘through
with love.’ Her fetishistic fans will, in fact did, mine every scrap of erotic potential from her celluloid
presence” (44).

106
Howard Hampton, “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere: The Uneasy Ride of Hollywood and
Rock,” The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, Ed. Thomas
Elsaesser, Alexander Horwarth, and Noel King (Amsterdam, Neth: Amsterdam UP, 2004) 256.

107
Knobloch 61.

108
Knobloch 69.

109
Knobloch 69.

110
Todd Berliner and Philip Furia, “The Sounds of Silence: Songs In Hollywood Films Since the
1960s,” Style 36:1 (2002): 24.

111
Berliner and Furia 23.

112
Berliner and Furia 26.

113
Berliner and Furia 24.

114
Berliner and Furia 26.

115
Berliner and Furia 26.

116
Or even the cover version by the Lemonheads released in the early 1990s to help promote the
video release of the film.

117
Hubbert 200.

118
Hubbert 200.

119
Hubbert 200.

120
On the other hand, Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954 / 1978) exists with different
soundtracks (Leos Janáček’s “Glagolithic Mass” initially and later Electric Light Orchestra’s album
El Dorodo) and the film “means” equally, yet differently, with either score.

121
For example see A. A. Gerow, “The Benshi’s New Face: Defining Cinema in Taishô Japan,”
Iconics 3 (1994): 69-86.
360

122
Kozloff 33.

123
Brian Henderson, “Tense, Mood, and Voice in Film (Notes after Genette),” Film Quarterly 36.4
(1983): 17.

124
Henderson 15.

125
Henderson 15.

126
Kozloff 45.

127
Henderson 15.

128
Henderson 17.

129
See Naremore’s The Magic World of Orson Welles (New York: Oxford UP, 1978).

130
Kalinak explores the production of Bernard Herrmann’s music for Magnificent Ambersons and
the damage it sustained in the film’s messy completion by RKO. 135-58.

131
Welles’ experience in radio perhaps helped him appreciate the opportunities for presenting and
experiencing sound in film theaters. Stephen Handzo reports that Welles emphasized the sound of his
films at the level of exhibition as well, noting that the director “specified that Citizen Kane and The
Magnificent Ambersons be played at twice normal volume, with instructions on the projection leader
to raise 6 db (one fader setting) above the normal RKO level” (418).

132
Claudia Gorbman’s recent work lays out suggestions to combine auteurism with sound theory.
See her “Auteur Music,” Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, eds. Daniel
Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2007): 149-162,
and on Kubrick: “Ears Wide Open: Kubrick's Music,” Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing
Music in Film, Ed. Phil Powrie and Robynn Stilwell (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006): 3-18.

133
The influence of The Power and the Glory (1933) on Citizen Kane is noted by several scholars as
each film presents a kaleidoscopic portrait of a larger than life businessman. The Power and the
Glory features voiceover from a single figure but Welles’ film uses brief voiceover flashbacks from
multiple characters to provide the film’s structure.

134
François Truffaut, “Citizen Kane,” Perspectives on Citizen Kane, Ed. Ronald Gottesman (New
York: Hall, 1996) 238.

135
Truffaut 239.

136
François Thomas, “Citizen Kane: The Sound Track,” Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane: A Casebook,
Ed. James Naremore (New York: Oxford UP, 2004) 182. Thomas also provides information on the
treatment of Welles’ second film: “While a dubbed version of The Magnificent Ambersons has been
created in France by rerecording not only the dialogue but also the sound effects and music score, no
sound translation has been attempted in the case of Citizen Kane. The unhappy result of such a
translation can be observed in the dubbed German, Spanish, and Italian versions of the film, which
destroy the intermingling of the dialogue as well as the interplay of the voices with the sound effects
and the music – so much so that in more than one transition, the producers of the Italian version had to
cut a number of shots in order to eliminate untranslatable sound-image relationships” (182).

361

137
Adrian Martin, “Threads of Voice,” Cinesonic: the World of Sound in Film, Ed. Philip Brophy
(Sydney, Austral.: Southwood Press, 1999) 129. He also remarks: “Clearly, Welles’ first two films
continue the experiments he developed in radio – and particularly with acoustic depth, the actor’s
proximity to the live microphone, and how they produce their voice effects within this radiophonic
space” (142-143).

138
Rick Altman, “Deep-Focus Sound: Citizen Kane and the Radio Aesthetic,” Perspectives on
Citizen Kane, Ed. Ronald Gottesman (New York: Hall, 1996) 111.

139
Altman, “Deep Focus” 102.

140
Altman, “Deep Focus” 102.

141
Altman, “Deep Focus” 102.

142
Altman, “Deep Focus” 112.

143
Altman, “Deep Focus” 112.

144
Little surprise then that Welles would provide something like the voice of God for Nicholas Ray’s
King of Kings (1961) as his voiceover work in this film is something of a trial run for a voice in total
control.

145
The Lady from Shanghai also features the song “Please Don’t Kiss Me” but it is not allowed to
occupy the soundtrack alone. As Adrienne L. McLean notes, Welles “keeps cutting back to narrative
action and dialogue during the singing, which fades in and out as a consequence” (4). She argues that
the scene demonstrates the power of the singing woman which Welles seeks to limit through the
clutter on the soundtrack and staging the song with Hayworth prostrate and unable to move. The
audience is not encouraged to identify with this prone singing subject or song. Adrian Martin reads
the scene quite differently: “This scene in Lady from Shanghai stages the battle over Michael’s soul
or his will, and it is primarily a battle of sounds: Arthur’s speaking voice versus Elsa’s song” (131).
Martin also effectively discusses how Welles was forced to insert the song (and thereby provide
audiences with a Rita Hayworth performance – even though it is not her voice the film presents). The
immediate cut to a commercial jingle after the song is for Martin a wry joke by Welles about what his
own film has just done.

146
Cheryl Bray Lower, “A Biographical Sketch,” Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Critical Essays with an
Annotated Bibliography and a Filmography, Ed. Cheryl Bray Lower and R. Barton Palmer (Jefferson,
N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2001) 5.

147
R. Barton Palmer, “Mankiewicz’s Dark Cinema,” Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Critical Essays with an
Annotated Bibliography and a Filmography, Ed. Cheryl Bray Lower and R. Barton Palmer (Jefferson,
N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2001) 63.

148
Kozloff 65

149
Eric Smoodin, “The Image and the Voice in the Film with Spoken Narration,” Quarterly Review
of Film Studies 8 (1983): 31.

150
Smoodin 31.

362

151
Kaja Silverman, “Dis-Embodying the Female Voice,” Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film
Criticism, Ed. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams (Frederick, MD:
University Publications of America, 1984) 133.

152
Silverman 134.

153
Silverman 135. She also adds: “Through a kind of paradox, the male subject, with his ‘strikingly
visible’ organ, is defined primary in terms of abstract and immaterial qualities (potency, power,
knowledge, etc.) whereas the female subject, whose organ does not appeal to the gaze, becomes
almost synonymous with the corporeal and the specular” (135).

154
Karen Hollinger, “Listening to the Female Voice in the Woman’s Film,” Film Criticism 16.3
(1992): 34.

155
Hollinger 35. Hollinger summarizes the various forms this usually takes: “the female narrator’s
story can be finished, interpreted, or interrupted by a male character, exposed as a lie, or revealed as a
misinterpretation of events” (35).

156
Hollinger 35.

157
Hollinger 42.

158
Hollinger 41.

159
Hollinger 43.

160
For a thorough discussion of the film and its use of voiceover – including a reading which
disagrees with Hollinger’s – see Britta Sjogren’s Into the Vortex: Female Voice and Paradox in Film
(Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 2006): 159-187.

161
For example, diegetic and nondiegetic music are often opposed in Kubrick’s films. Most
importantly however, the diegetic music never feels accidental, or spontaneous. The conclusion of
Dr. Strangelove has been written about considerably and is often mentioned to demonstrate an
“ironic” use of music. Most notably the film begins with planes refueling while “Try a Little
Tenderness” plays and of course ends with mushroom clouds while Vera Lynn promises “We’ll Meet
Again.” In between the music is almost completely diegetic. Whether diegetic or not, the music in
his films is clearly positioned and managed by the film’s narration. When Mandrake turns on the
radio in Dr. Strangelove almost any music could appear on the soundtrack. But not just any music
does.
Kubrick incorporates existing music and original compositions in most of his films and
handles both with precision. For comment specifically on Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and more generally
on Kubrick’s use of music see Gorbman’s “Ears Wide Open: Kubrick's Music.”

162
Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers 115.

163
His work for Look magazine has been published as Stanley Kubrick: Drama and Shadows:
Photographs 1945-1950, Ed. Rainer Crone (London: Phaidon Press, 2005).

164
In Kubrick’s own estimation: “2001 is a nonverbal experience; out of two hours and 19 minutes of
film, there are only a little less than 40 minutes of dialogue” (48). Eric Nordern, “Playboy Interview:
Stanley Kubrick,” Mario Falsetto, ed., Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick (New York: Hall, 1996) 48-
71.
363

165
Joseph Gelmis, “Interview with Stanley Kubrick,” Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick, Ed. Mario
Falsetto (New York: Hall, 1996) 29.

166
Kubrick’s acknowledged first film Killer’s Kiss (1955) begins with the sound of a train and a
black screen. Dana Polan, in “Materiality and Sociality in Killer’s Kiss,” argues that “The initial
separation of sound and image, however, creates a conflict: already in this early film of Kubrick, we
find the opposition of machine and man that will run through many of his films” (87). Mario Falsetto,
ed., Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick (New York: Hall, 1996) 87-99.

167
Luis M. García Mainar, Narrative and Stylistic Patterns in the Films of Stanley Kubrick (New
York: Camden House, 1999) 57.

168
Mainar 58.

169
Mario Falsetto, “Patterns of Filmic Narration in The Killing and Lolita,” Perspectives on Stanley
Kubrick, Ed. Mario Falsetto (New York: Hall, 1996) 101.

170
Falsetto 101.

171
Falsetto 103.

172
Falsetto 104.

173
Falsetto 113.

174
Falsetto 116.

175
Mainar 58.

176
Kozloff also draws attention to the actor’s voice: “Nor can we leave out of consideration the sound
of Michael Hordern’s voice. Hordern, a British character actor then in his sixties, has often played the
role of a world-weary political or military leader. His voice is kindly, confident, worldly, with no
trace of self-importance or oiliness” (123).

177
Kozloff 117.

178
Kozloff 123.

179
Mark Crispin Miller, “Kubrick’s Anti-Reading of The Luck of Barry Lyndon,” Mario Falsetto,
Ed. Perspectives on Stanley Kubrick (New York: Hall, 1996). “The narrator is discredited in two
ways: temporally and contextually. When the narrator predicts Barry’s indifference to his wife, he is
proven wrong by the sequence of events. The passage of time renders the verbal report meaningless”
(240).

180
Kozloff 124.

181
Boxofficemojo.com provides the production budget and box office gross for these films. Beowulf
had a production budget of around $150 million and grossed $82 million domestically (and $113
overseas). U2 3D as of this writing has grossed over $7 million domestically and another $4.5
overseas). The Hannah Montana film has grossed over $65 million to date (and another $4 million
overseas).

364

182
http://youtube.com/watch?v=iMqXj-eVCjI
365

Chapter 7: Conclusion

This dissertation opens with a long quotation from Michel Chion in which he calls
for work on “progressive changes”
1
in the history of film sound. Shortly after this
passage Chion discusses what he calls the “superfield”: “the space created, in
multitrack films, by ambient natural sounds, city sounds, music, and all sorts of
rustlings that surround the visual space and that can issue from loudspeakers outside
the physical boundaries of the screen.”
2
Chion bypasses the postwar / pre-Dolby
period and its fascinating “progressive changes” and focuses on the Dolby era. He
regards sound as a support for the image so it is only in the Dolby era that sound
achieves a measure of autonomy (the autonomy this dissertation takes as a given). In
this theorization and articulation of sound history, Dolby allows a return to the
sensory cinema of the silent era before the voice became the center of film sound.
Chion excitedly concludes: “The cinema has been the talking film for a long time.
But only for a short while has it been worthy of the name it was given, a bit
hurriedly: sound film.”
3

Chion’s work is quoted here because of its continuing and largely benevolent
influence. But this celebration of the Dolby era sacrifices a more detailed historical
study of film sound and while recent technologies offer filmmakers a broader sonic
palette, the phrase “sound film” is as redundant and misleading as the phrase “silent
film.” Both “sound film” and “silent film” conceal the fact that “film” and “cinema”
already refer to sound because the medium is the combination of sound and image.
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Such a definition of film is central to this dissertation’s focus on the postwar /
pre-Dolby era. This dissertation has explored this relatively neglected period’s
sound practices to intervene in sound studies. Studies of film sound focus on the
classical era or the Dolby era and therefore neglect the postwar / pre-Dolby era’s
changes in aesthetics, and the shifts in technologies of production and exhibition that
are essential to understanding contemporary sound. Additionally, this dissertation
has argued that many of the aspects of postwar / pre-Dolby sound are not new but
represent elements of pre-classical sound suppressed by classical norms and the
initial expense of producing films with sound.
The chapters explore different aspects of film sound in the postwar / pre-
Dolby era and complicate the assumptions of the stated categories (sync sound,
diegetic sound, and sound / image hierarchy). Chapter 2 explored changes in film
production, aesthetics and exhibition of the period and argued that the 1930s is best
used to date Hollywood’s classical era. Chapter 3 surveyed the visual bias in studies
of Hollywood and the avant-garde cinema and explored the benefits of placing sound
theory and narrative theory in dialogue with one another. The chapter suggests that
film – even Hollywood narrative cinema – is the combination of audio and visual
spectacle. The following chapters addressed theoretical concepts commonly used to
define and study the relationship of sound to image.
Chapter 4 discussed the synchronous / asynchronous sound binary and
addressed films that present sounds and images which audiences likely know are
from different sources. Examples include documentary films that bind sound and
367

image together in time and space to offer the spectacle of synchronous sound, and
avant-garde texts that offer sound and image as separate addresses and which
undermine the convention of sync sound.
Chapter 5 discussed the binary of diegetic / nondiegetic sound and considered
films variously offering a restricted diegesis where the sounds are clearly limited to
only those which (apparently) issue from the diegesis, an unstable diegesis where
sound and image work at odds and limit the audience’s ability to define the rules of
the film’s diegesis, or an expanded diegesis created by the film’s aural address of the
audience and solicitation of an aural response.
Chapter 6 discussed the concept of sound / image hierarchy to argue that a
number of films of the period – including those discussed in earlier chapters – offer
sound as the full partner of the image or, in some cases, the primary attraction. The
chapter explores films which use sound to draw audiences to the space of exhibition,
films which present sound as controlling the image at times or for the duration of the
film, and films which use voiceover as spectacle and the primary means of
conveying information.
This dissertation has addressed a wide range of texts from the period to
adequately demonstrate the importance of film sound in this period, and suggest
avenues for future study. The chapters include a deliberately diverse collection of
films: fiction films, avant-garde films, documentaries, animated films, feature length
films, short films, films made in mono, films made in stereo, and films exhibited in
early forms of surround sound. Many of the films could be examined using the
368

terminology and arguments of other chapters. For example, the Jolson biopics
considered in chapter 3 could be explored in Chapter 5 since audiences attend in part
to hear Jolson sing and purchased his recordings in greater numbers after the release
of the films. Additionally, the Bruce Conner films explored in Chapter 5 could be
considered in Chapter 3 in terms of sync since they use an existing piece of music as
a guide to which he joins images in intense juxtapositions.
The chosen films challenge some of the assumed truths of cinema studies.
For example, it is not true that audiences (always) go to “see” a film. In fact
audiences often attend a screening (or watch a film at home) in order to hear a film
and its new or different (or impressively loud) sound. Additionally, some films can
be said to “tell” a story using language such as voiceover narration. It is not true that
film sound is redundant and only serves the image since many films offer sound
which contradicts the image or possibly even ignores it. It is not true that audiences
will object to non-sync sound since there are financially successful films which
flagrantly combine sound and image which do not “naturally” belong together (and
also equally a myth that non-sync sound is capable of producing social change).
Finally, it is not true that cinema trades in illusion and that the screening space forces
audiences to submit passively to the film’s address since some films encourage
audiences to respond either aurally or physically (and in some cases insist on such
responses).
Yet perversely this discussion risks re-inscribing the hierarchy of image over
sound. The search for, and discovery of, films whose sound is at least as important
369

as the image can – while drawing attention to these films – also inadvertently
suggests that these texts are exceptional. The chapters discuss more than 20 films
but the number of examples may, for some readers, indicate not a trend or truth of
sound in the postwar / pre-Dolby era but the results of an extended and diligent
search. The neglect of this period however demands a broad survey in order to
demonstrate that its sound riches await re(discovery). The preceding discussion has
not exhausted the aural properties of any of the films it examines and hopefully
suggests ways to continue to explore the period.
Though the dissertation is broad in scope, there are genres and categories of
film about which this dissertation says little, such as the musical, film noir, the
incorporation of jazz in film, and the technologies of sound recording and
presentation. There is also much more to be said about sound in animated and
documentary films. But it is the avant-garde (from all periods of film history) which
especially awaits attention in terms of sound. This dissertation only discusses a
handful of avant-garde texts and restricts itself to (relatively) famous examples and
filmmakers in order to promote this study to an audience perhaps only familiar with
a few such films.
This dissertation also intends to highlight the need to explore sound in the
periods both before and after the postwar / pre-Dolby era. While arguing that the
classical era largely restricts the uses of sound with its narration (in Hollywood) or
because of budgetary restraints (for avant-garde filmmakers) there is still much work
to be done on this period. This dissertation does not intend to suggest that film
370

sound in the 1930s has been exhausted. While Foley sound, for example, represents
a postwar / pre-Dolby change in production, classical sound did not create itself and
the history of the artists, technicians, and their equipment all await further inquiry.
Like the postwar / pre-Dolby era, the classical era is not monolithic in its approach to
sound and this study at a few points discusses films released as early as 1940 in part
to indicate that there is no single break between classical sound and something like
“postclassical” sound. Similarly, it is difficult to pinpoint the beginning of classical
sound but, whatever the date, the uses of sound before the classical era must continue
to be uncovered by scholars because this work will shape the study of all subsequent
periods of film history. The more scholars mine that history, the less it seems its
characteristics are truly lost.
Finally, while proportionally over-examined compared to other periods of
film history, studies have not exhausted the Dolby era and new technologies continue
to demand discussion. In this era films are more often seen in the home than in
theaters and are accessed with a variety of devices and technologies. New
generations of media users and practitioners seem well aware of the significance of
sound. With the rise of portable handheld communication and entertainment devices
– whether primarily used for phone calls, organizing, text messaging, listening to
music, or playing video games – films (and even television shows) perhaps rely on
sound more than ever before in order to accommodate the fact that audiences may
view the text on a screen smaller than a paperback book. Online options also lean
heavily on sound. For example, material accessed via YouTube does not even fill
371

half the screen. More importantly, user-generated content often puts an emphasis on
sound. YouTube and Google video (among other sites) feature texts that present
sound as at least equal to the image such as music videos, musical performances –
often lip-sync from old TV shows, children (and teens) lipsyncing to recorded songs,
live performances recorded using digital cameras (or mobile phones), and even texts
which consist of the literal performance of a record. In this last category texts
display the image of a record (typically rare or old) spinning on a turntable and the
sound is the album’s contents. Homemade music videos that combine footage with
still images necessarily (and nearly always unconsciously) echo the work of Bruce
Conner. Also of interest is the growing genre of the fake film trailer that promotes a
nonexistent film or deliberately misrepresents an existing film. The most famous
example remains Robert Ryang’s trailer for Shining, which matches footage from
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill,” and original
voiceover narration to advertise a (nonexistent) heartwarming story of a family
learning to love one another.
4
The work repurposes Kubrick’s horror film footage by
combining it with a nostalgic pop song and clichéd narration to create a text arguably
dominated by sound. Such work demonstrates the independence of sound and image
and the ability of users to create new meanings from combinations of known audio
and visual material.
Though media is increasingly consumed online, films for the moment are
experienced on home video or television and the importance of sound is made
apparent in these venues. Barbara Klinger reveals that sound and image are
372

marketed equally to home theater enthusiasts whom she dubs the “new media
aristocrats.” Klinger carefully examines how the shared technologies and two-way
exchange of innovations between cinema and home theaters are blurring the
boundaries between them. Like Chion, she argues that contemporary cinema often
promises (and delivers) a sensory experience and action blockbusters drive the
market for home theater systems. She also links her comments on home theater
sound to the introduction of recorded sound in film:
Insofar as it reintroduces sound as a crucial factor in exhibition,
home theater, like the contemporary public theater, represents an
intervention in film reception that parallels the coming of sound to
motion picture theaters. Certainly, the size of the image signifies
the media center’s ambitiousness and is integral to claims that it
rivals the public motion picture theater. But the delivery of
impressive sound effects and film music are just, if not more,
important in the domestic experience of films.
5

Klinger’s point is well taken and suggestive, and yet, like Chion, here she moves
from early sound to the Dolby era. She skips over the moments this dissertation
explores when sound is indisputably “a crucial factor in exhibition,” and a range of
film texts in which sound is “just, if not more, important” than the image. Whether
experienced online or via a home theater system, the aural performance of media
needs to be explored in detail and its history uncovered.
373

Chapter 7 Endnotes

1
Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, Ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York:
Columbia UP, 1994) 142.

2
Chion 150.

3
Chion 156.

4
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5
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation: (a) argues that the time between the end of World War Two and the introduction of Dolby technology constitutes a distinct historical period in the American sound film and labels this the "postwar / pre-Dolby era"

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Asset Metadata

Creator Reinsch, Paul N. (author)

Core Title At least half the picture: sound and narration in the postwar / pre-Dolby American film

School School of Cinema-Television

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 07/24/2008

Defense Date 05/27/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American film,OAI-PMH Harvest,sound

Place Name USA (countries)

Language English

Advisor James, David E. (committee chair), Braudy, Leo (committee member), Jewell, Richard B. (committee member)

Creator Email preinsch@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1388

Unique identifier UC195364

Identifier etd-Reinsch-20080724 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-205136 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1388 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Reinsch-20080724.pdf

Dmrecord 205136

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Reinsch, Paul N.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu