Blogging on sound, Chion, and... HORROR!!

I know this blog is a few days late but I find it to be much more appropriate today then if I had written it the other day. In my Intro to Editing class we watched our cuts of Gunsmoke and discussed different aspects of different groups’ work. One of the main things we discussed was sound because of the poor quality from the footage we were given. Many times, the music and noise, or the anempathetic sound, was louder and over took the empathetic sound, or dialogue. The country western score was louder than the characters voices and it causes you to lose touch when them, similar to what Chion is trying to state in his article. Like Chion stated, “the ear analyzes, processes, and synthesizes faster than the eyes,” so if we hear music we have a certain feeling that we think will be evoked and when it isn’t it is misleading to the audience and can cause confusion.

In silent films, it was easy for them to work without sound because there wasn’t a disposition between time and space. Shot A always followed shot B, and the editing techniques were very minimal. The shot duration was much longer too so the audience could use their eyes to perceive everything in the shot, including the space and time. But because it takes longer for the eye to perceive all of this than the ear, that is why the shots were longer. With sound added, it created a new depth that could match different shots together, even if they weren’t in the same time and space, because of overlapping dialogue or music. If the silent film did have a score, it still did not have any voices in it and was there to just be a background or filler to the action. Most of the time the music was expressed through a piano or some other type of instrument and it was meant to help intensify the scene, whether it was suspenseful or comical. With the use of the audiovisual illusion, the illusion located first and foremost in the heart of the most important of relations between sound and image, it could allow for much faster movement and story development. Chion follows that definition with a question. He asks if the notion of cinema as art of the image is just an illusion, and I believe it purely is. Cinema used to be the art of just the camera and what was seen through the lens. It has evolved over time, just like everything else, and has many components that each seek their own attention to detail to create what nowadays is cinema. It is not only the camera; it is the actors and the emotion they display, it is the cinematographer getting the right angle for a essential shot, it is the editor slowly and masterfully piecing each part of the film together and it is the director, above all, to make the right decisions to get the movie where it needs to be. These elements of all work together to make cinema and many other aspects like sound editing or screenwriting that one might not see on the surface but cannot be left out in the process of producing a film.

I have not done background research on Chion but if I were to guess, I think he is a master in sound and editing. This article is a very elaborate and detailed analysis of sound and provides definitions and examples to help the reader understand what he is trying to explain. For example, the added value to sound is the expressive and informative value with which a sound enriches a given image so as to create the definite impression, in the immediate or remembered experience one has of it, that this information or expression “naturally” comes from what is seen, and is already contained in the image itself; I guess I knew what this was but never knew the right term. Even when Chion discussed horror films I found it interesting. It is almost the opposite of any other type of genre and how sound is made for the film. Instead of focusing on the dialogue and the emotions that are created through the text of the frame, it is the music and the noise that builds suspense and makes the scene tenser than one with lots of text. Hearing a girl running and screaming isn’t as scary as hearing the slow footsteps of the killer and their weapon dragging on the ground as they go after their prey. Sound can be used in many different ways but I thought this interpretation was unique because of how different it is used from any other genre. I just wonder if the “scream” that is always talked about still exists in films, you know, the one that is the universal sign for “this is a horror film?” I wouldn’t know though, because with the exception of a few, most horror movies these days have lost touch with what horror is all about. But that’s another topic, for another day. Until then.

LWR