Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
protagonists would seem strangely unresponsive
to them. Godard would even avoid covering the
edits of the sounds (Williams, 1985). This leads
to a sonic aesthetic that is diametrically opposed
to the transparency of the mix aimed for in most
Hollywood films, old and new. Thanks to these
unorthodox approaches, sonic aesthetics like
these are no longer taboo and are used in several
innovative sonic designs, such as subjectivization.
audience. Dream sequences or representations of
hallucination represent extreme cases of subjec-
tivization. For a direct and radical confrontation,
I recommend David Lynch's
Eraserhead
(1977)
or a look at the dreams of special agent Cooper
in
Twin Peaks
(Lynch, 1990-1991), in particular
the red room at the end of the second episode of
season one. Other striking examples are the explicit
audio-visual placement of the viewer into one of
the protagonists in first-person view, for example
in
Predator
(McTiernan, 1987).
I Feel Good: subjectivization
take Me Higher: High
Level semantics
The possibility of enunciating subjective experi-
ence is an important aesthetic possibility emerging
from the liberation of sound from its source and the
techniques of montage described above. Sounds
were now used in various ways to mark, or even
simulate, subjective experience. Flückiger (2001)
identifies several sound design strategies, which
are very common and unquestioned nowadays:
disassociation of sound and image, disappearing
sounds, non-naturalistic reverberation, montage of
unidentifiable sounds over slow-motion images,
enlargement relative to the image, body sounds
like breathing and heartbeats, and overempha-
sized, anti-naturalistic selection. For instance, in
The Terminator
(Cameron, 1984), and even more
so in
Terminator 2: Judgement Day
(Cameron,
1991) the sounds of the Terminator's leather
clothes and his interactions with his sunglasses
are moved towards the foreground. This creates
an uneasy intimacy with the deadly man-machine.
Another powerful (and aesthetically very differ-
ent) example for subjectivization can be found
in
Pi
(Aronofsky, 1998): The protagonist suffers
from violent headaches. These are both marked
as the protagonist's subjective experience of pain
through unidentifiable sounds, heartbeat-like mu-
sic or metaphorical sounds of grinding stones, as
well as simulated through high pitched screeches.
The simulation effect is enhanced through the
action-driven ducking of the painful sounds when
the protagonist switches the lights off, temporary
relieving the pain for both the character and the
Last but not least, the liberation of sound from
a strictly indexical function facilitated the emer-
gence of complex higher level semantics, where
primary semantics (related to the questions: What
creates the sound? What is it made of? How does
it move? Where is it?) became constituents of
higher level meanings (Flückiger, 2001). More
than before, sounds could now have symbolic
and metaphoric functions standing for cultural,
religious, or psychological entities (think of bells,
keys, animal sounds and so on). Sounds could be
established as “keysounds” within the narrative
context of a specific film, for example, the sound
of the scanner on the bridge in the original
Star
Trek
series (produced by Roddenberry, 1966-1969)
or the sounds of helicopters in
Apocalypse Now
.
From here, new stereotypes and meta-signs could
be established where artificial, non-referential
sounds achieve a new indexicality through system-
atic re-use within certain genres or filmic styles.
This connects to Altman's (1992) proposition of
understanding cinema as “event”. In this view,
cinema is no longer an autonomous aesthetic en-
tity, but a complex socio-cultural artefact which
emerges in the interaction of complex production
and reception processes (see also Metz, 1980). This
encourages us to think about the many complex
influences that make all aspects of cinema, not
solely sound and image, meaningful. Just con-
Search WWH ::
Custom Search