The Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening 9780190853617, 9780190853631, 0190853611

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T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k o f

CI N E M AT IC L IST E N I NG

The Oxford Handbook of

CINEMATIC LISTENING Edited by

CARLO CENCIARELLI

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2021 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cenciarelli, Carlo, editor. Title: The Oxford handbook of cinematic listening / edited by Carlo Cenciarelli. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020036844 (print) | LCCN 2020036845 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190853617 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190853631 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Motion picture music—History and criticism. | Film soundtracks—History and criticism. | Listening. Classification: LCC ML2075 .O915 2021 (print) | LCC ML2075 (ebook) | DDC 781.5/4209—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036844 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036845 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

Acknowledgments

The initial idea for this volume stemmed from a conference I organized in 2015 as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL), shortly before I joined Cardiff University. I thank the British Academy and RHUL’s Humanities and Arts Research Centre for funding that event (“Listening Cinematically: A Two-Day Interdisciplinary Conference”) as well as the School of Music at Cardiff University for subsequently supporting this work by granting me a sabbatical in the spring of 2019. I am also grateful to Oxford University Press, particularly Norm Hirschy for his encouragement and guidance and Lauralee Yeary for her editorial assistance. From initial design to publication, the project has also benefited from many colleagues’ generous feedback and support, and I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude in particular to David Beard, Rachel Beckles-Willson, Julie Brown, Jim Buhler, Richard Dyer, Jo Hicks, Sarah Hill, Anahid Kassabian, Miguel Mera, Roger Parker, Dylan Robinson, Holly Rogers, Christabel Stirling, Gavin Williams, Justin Williams, Ben Winters, Flora Willson, Keren Zaiontz, and the regular attendees of MaMI and SCMS’s Sound and Music SIG—an invaluable research community. My biggest thank you goes of course to all volume contributors for their wonderful work on this collection over a number of years and for the commitment and patience shown throughout this process. I will miss our exchanges and much look forward to a day when we’ll be able to resume the conversation in person. Finally, and most personally, my thanks go to Nicole, who has heard me talk about this project more than anyone else and—to my astonishment—is always prepared to listen.

Contents

List of Contributorsxi About the Companion Websitexiii

The Possibilities of Cinematic Listening: An Introduction Carlo Cenciarelli

1

PA RT I   G E N E A L O G I E S A N D B E G I N N I N G S 1. “Deeds of Music” in Bourgeois Opera (What the Listener Sees . . . ) Peter Franklin

27

2. Hearing the Shadows at the Chat Noir’s Pre-cinematic Theatre Emilio Sala

42

3. The Courtships of Ada and Len: Mediated Musicals and Vocal Caricature Before the Cinema Jacob Smith

68

4. The “Trickality” of Listening in Early Musical Trick Films Julie Brown

90

5. Cinematic Listening and the Early Talkie James Buhler

118

PA RT I I   L O C AT ION S A N D R E L O C AT ION S 6. Historical Sound-Film Presentation and the Closed-Curtain Roadshow Overture Ben Winters

139

7. Tasteful Networks of Attention: Language, Listening, Meaning, and Art House Exhibition Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece

156

viii   contents

8. “The Atmosphere Was Entirely Good Humoured”: The Cinema as a Venue for Live Music in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s Simon Frith

171

9. Out of the Frame: Live-Score Film Screenings and the Cinematic Experience Jeremy Barham

188

10. Leveraging a Long and Tuneful History: Perspectival Manipulation, Surround Sound, and Dolby Atmos Meredith C. Ward

211

PA RT I I I   R E P R E SE N TAT ION S A N D R E - P R E SE N TAT ION S 11. Making Sense of Noise and Silence in La Captive241 Richard Dyer 12. Hearing Hearing? Reflections on the Kubrickian Soundtrack David J. Code

252

13. Countercultural Listening in Malick’s Badlands (1973)271 Julie Hubbert 14. Music Lovers. Listening in (and to) Composer Biopics Guido Heldt

293

15. Hi-Yo, Rossini: Hearing Pre-existing Music as Post-existing Music Jonathan Godsall

317

16. “You Sorta Listen with Your Eyes”: How Audiences Talk about Film Music Martin Barker

336

PA RT I V   T H E L I S T E N I N G B ODY 17. Fist to Face: Corporeal Listening and the Cinematic Punch Lisa Coulthard

355

18. The Erotics of Cinematic Listening Danijela Kulezic-Wilson

368

contents   ix

19. Sensing Time and Space through the Soundtracks of Interstellar and Arrival385 John Richardson, Anna-Elena Pääkkölä, and Sanna Qvick 20. Listening–Feeling–Becoming: Cinema Surveillance Miguel Mera

407

21. Sonic Elongation and Sonic Aporia: Two Modes of Disrupted Listening in Film Holly Rogers

427

22. The Trailer Ear: Constructions of Loudness in Cinematic Previews James Deaville

450

PA RT V   L I ST E N I N G AG A I N 23. Pop Music, Processing Fluency, and Pleasure: Film Songs as Both Hype and Memento Jeff Smith

469

24. A Movie for Speakers: Queen’s Flash Gordon and the Unified Soundtrack Album Paul N. Reinsch

489

25. “If You Know Arabic, Indian Songs Are Easy For You”: Hindi Film Songs in Tamale, Northern Ghana Katie Young

508

26. Hearing and Teaching Soundtracks as a Mother and a Daughter: A Personal, Feminist, Pedagogical Approach to Flux Elsie Walker

529

27. Hearing Film Music Topics Outside the Movie Theatre: Listening Cinematically to Pastorals Janet Bourne

549

28. Hearing Secondary Explosions: The Naudet Brothers’ 9/11 and Audiovisual (A)synchronization in Twenty-FirstCentury Media Randolph Jordan

575

x   contents

PA RT V I   AC RO S S M E DIA 29. Evolving Storylines and Patterns of Listening: The Case of Invasion at the Dawn of the Binge Age (2005–2006) Robynn J. Stilwell

597

30. Projections of Image on Sound: Reassessing the Relation between Music Video and Cinema Mathias Bonde Korsgaard

619

31. Listen Again: Music Video’s Cinematic Soundscapes Laurel Westrup

639

32. Summon the Cinematic? Audio Mediation and Filmic Immersion in the Case of Remote Taipei655 Ya-Feng Mon 33. iPod Listening as an I-voice: Solitary Listeners and Imagined Interlocutors across Cinema and Personal Stereos Carlo Cenciarelli

669

34. Fantasias on a Theme by Walt Disney: Playful Listening and Video Games Tim Summers

690

35. Old(er) Media and New Musical Affordances in Virtual Reality Experiences712 Michiel Kamp Index

737

List of Contributors

Jeremy Barham  Professor of Music, Department of Music and Media, Surrey University Martin Barker Emeritus Professor, Department of Theatre, Film, and Television Studies, Aberystwyth University Mathias Bonde Korsgaard  Associate Professor, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University Janet Bourne  Assistant Professor of Music Theory, Department of Music, University of California Santa Barbara Julie Brown  Professor of Music, Department of Music, Royal Holloway, University of London James Buhler  Professor of Music Theory, Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music, University of Texas at Austin Carlo Cenciarelli  Lecturer, School of Music, Cardiff University David J. Code  Reader in Music, School of Culture and Creative Arts, University of Glasgow Lisa Coulthard Professor, Department of Theatre and Film, University of British Columbia James Deaville  Professor of Music, School of Studies in Art and Culture, Carleton University Richard Dyer  Professor Emeritus, Film Studies, King’s College London Peter Franklin  Emeritus Fellow, St. Catherine’s College, University of Oxford Simon Frith  Emeritus Professor, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh Jonathan Godsall  Independent Scholar Guido Heldt  Senior Lecturer in Music, School of Arts, University of Bristol Julie Hubbert  LaDare Robinson Memorial Professor of Music, School of Music, University of South Carolina Randolph Jordan  Visiting Assistant Professor of Film Studies, Concordia University Michiel Kamp  Assistant Professor of Musicology, Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University

xii   list of contributors Danijela Kulezic-Wilson  Lecturer, School of Film, Music, and Theatre, University College Cork Miguel Mera  Professor, Department of Music, City, University of London Ya-Feng Mon  Associate Research Fellow, Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute Anna-Elena Pääkkölä  Postdoctoral Researcher, Åbo Akademi Sanna Qvick  PhD Candidate, University of Turku Paul  N.  Reinsch  Associate Professor of Practice—Cinema, School of Theatre and Dance, Texas Tech University John Richardson  Professor, Art History, Musicology, and Media Studies, University of Turku Holly Rogers  Reader, Music Department, Goldsmiths, University of London Emilio Sala  Associate Professor, Department of Cultural and Environmental Heritage, Università degli Studi di Milano Jacob Smith Professor, Department of Radio-Television-Film, Northwestern University Jeff Smith Professor, Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison Robynn  J.  Stilwell  Associate Professor of Music, Department of Performing Arts, Georgetown University Tim Summers  Lecturer, Department of Music, Royal Holloway, University of London Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece  Associate Professor, Department of English and Program in Film Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Elsie Walker  Professor, Cinema Studies, Salisbury University Meredith C. Ward  Director, Film and Media Studies, Johns Hopkins University Laurel Westrup  Continuing Lecturer in Writing Programs, University of California, Los Angeles Ben Winters  Senior Lecturer in Music, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Open University Katie Young  Postdoctoral Fellow, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick

About the Companion Website

www.oup.com/us/ohcl Oxford has created a website to accompany The Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening. This Handbook brings listening into focus by exploring a wide range of sources. Materials that could not be made available in the book, such as excerpts from films, music videos, soundtrack albums, phonograph records, classroom rehearsals, and VR experiences, are provided on the companion website. The reader is encouraged to consult this resource in conjunction with the chapters. Clips available online are indicated in the text with the symbol

The Possibilitie s of Ci n em atic Listen i ng An Introduction Carlo Cenciarelli

In the thirty-first-century interstellar worlds of the animated TV series Futurama (1999–2013), the protagonist—Philip J. Fry, a cryogenically preserved pizza delivery guy from the late-twentieth century—comes into possession of a thirtieth-century musical instrument called the Holophonor. The instrument looks like a mix between a clarinet, a rattle toy, and a Turkish shisha, and—unsurprisingly—it is rather difficult to master. Our defrosted protagonist can only play the instrument thanks to alien parasites and Faustian pacts with the Robot Devil, but the results make it all worth it. The Holophonor produces musical moments of fantastical effect. Lights and smoke appear, and the music triggers holographic images, spectacular visions ranging from the abstract to the figurative. Fry uses the instrument to declare his love to Futurama’s main female character—the one-eyed, purple-haired Turanga Leela. His first Holophonor song is an audiovisual fantasy in which the two prospective lovers dance across time and space before exploding into stardust. The animation, tightly synchronized with music, has something of the associative and anthropomorphic nature of Disney’s Fantasia (1940); the music is an orchestral pastiche with echoes of Tchaikovsky’s symphonic waltzes, Danny Elfman’s music for Tim Burton’s gothic comedies, and the celesta arpeggios of a Harry Potter theme. Leela is charmed (Figure 0.1).1 The Holophonor puts a literal spin on the notion of music’s evocative powers, or—to use Simon Shaw-Miller’s phrase—it plays with an understanding of music as “a special category of enculturated sighted sound.”2 More specifically, it seems to give a material (if imaginary) shape to the process of “cinematic listening,” at least in the definition given by Michael Long.3 Through a number of virtuosic intertextual analyses, Long argues that cinema has shaped our musical imaginations by contributing to the creation of a

2   Carlo Cenciarelli

Figure 0.1  Listening to the Holophonor: screen grab from Futurama, “Parasites Lost,” Season 3, Episode 2 (2001).

widely shared audiovisual vocabulary, an expressive vernacular whereby “aural gestures can trigger the construction or recall of particular image registers and the reverse.”4 While the precise Holophonor mechanism is unknown, the instrument’s fusion of familiar orchestral sounds with romantic imagery suggests the possibility of it “registering” the kinds of audiovisual associations discussed by Long: music can literally be turned “on the fly into visual images”5 and the listener’s imagination can be “played” through sound. By relying on a transducer that can turn sonic inputs into visual representations, Fry’s holophonic performances take to extremes the processes of “musical acculturation” described by Long and Shaw-Miller and—before them—by Michel Chion, Simon Frith, and Peter Franklin. Drawing on Chion’s theorization of the pervasiveness of cinema’s sonic conventions, Frith puts forward the deceptively simple claim that “cinema is a school of listening.” “Film music has taught us how to see,” he writes, “while film images have taught us how to hear.”6 Franklin has likewise traced music’s ability to “summon a world of imagined cinematic experience” back to the proto-cinematic narratives of nineteenth-century music.7 Evoking Faustian myths and the phantasmagoria of magic lanterns, channelling Disney while being broadcast on Fox TV, and tapping into the promises of holography, the Holophonor acts as a reminder that, if “cinema” has something to do with the codification of our audiovisual vernacular, then its workings need to be studied in relation to multiple layers of media history.

The Possibilities of Cinematic Listening   3 A strange assemblage of sounds, technologies, discourses, and listening practices, Futurama’s imaginary machine thus lays bare some of the stakes and complexities of this volume’s object of study. In a basic sense, I would argue, studying cinematic listening means trying to understand what makes the Holophonor possible or—more precisely—what makes cinematic listening possible in the absence of a Holophonor. It means finding ways to qualify, theorize, historicize, problematize, and defamiliarize the hypothesis that cinema has taught us how to hear, unpicking the discourses, experiences, and technologies that bridge cinematic and aural cultures—past, present, and imagined. Thus, the study of “cinematic listening” entails a dual focus. First, it requires studying how listening to film is situated in specific textual, spatial, and historical practices. Did film bring about new ways of hearing, and how did listening practices change during the early years of cinema? How is listening framed by specific venues and presentational strategies? In what ways and to what extent can films shape their own aural reception, and does a “new cinema of the senses” involve new ways of experiencing sound? Second, the study of cinematic listening involves exploring what it means to listen cinematically: the ways in which modes of listening to film may have extended beyond the texts, places, and institutions of the cinema. To what extent do cinematic conventions shape our understanding of sounds and images outside the cinema? How does listening to film compare to the forms of aural attention and engagement afforded by interactive media? Does the cross-fertilization of screen genres lead to hybrid modes of listening? Does cinema provide a model for other forms of collective listening? Is the “soundtrack of everyday life” just a hackneyed expression or does it suggest a blurring of the boundaries between the virtual and the real? In pursuing these lines of enquiry, this volume builds on a complex network of scholarly developments. Questions of listening have underpinned the study of film sound since the foundational work of scholars such as Claudia Gorbman and Anahid Kassabian, Chion and Nicholas Cook, Rick Altman and James Lastra, who laid the groundwork for understanding film sound in relation to suturing and identification, multimedial semiosis and cognitive schemas, sonic ecologies and the history of technology.8 In recent years, with the emergence of sound studies and a humanities-wide “sensory turn,” the issue of how we listen to film is starting to be addressed more directly,9 and—even when the focus is not explicitly on listening—the rapid expansion of scholarship in all areas of audiovisual studies from pre-cinema to new media is contributing to a better understanding of the role of sound in the cinematic experience and of the relationship between the “local” and “global” economies of film sound,10 be it through the study of performance practice, commercial synergies, or film sound technology and sound design.11 Exploring the place of cinema in the history of listening entails connecting between these areas of film sound research, and also forging new links with film phenomenology, audience studies, and media archaeology. Indeed, while the starting point for the study of “cinematic listening” has been music, and while musicology remains an important perspective, the guiding hypotheses of this volume are that cinema not only has a profound effect on the way music is talked about, used, and experienced, but also on our

4   Carlo Cenciarelli understanding of what constitutes music and what counts as listening. And that, in turn, film sound extends beyond film, has the power to shape the way we make sense of the world around us, and is responsible for changing notions of the cinematic. Accordingly, in introducing this volume’s central topic, I try to problematize its definition, and to map out some of its constituent questions. In the first half of this introduction, I make a case for the importance of studying cinematic listening in spite, or—rather— precisely because, of the term’s elusiveness and of the methodological challenges it poses. In the second half, I provide an overview of the volume’s content, discussing how each section contributes to our understanding of the archaeologies, aesthetics, and extensions of cinematic listening. I conclude by connecting some of the ideas that cut across sections, sketching out the picture of cinematic listening that emerges from this volume, with a particular focus on the feedback loop between listening to film and listening cinematically.

The Cinema Effect To the extent that it engages with the idea that cinema has shaped the way we listen, the study of cinematic listening contributes to the broader, thorny discussion of cinema’s “ ‘invisible hand’ in our affective life and our modes of being-in-the-world,” or—as Thomas Elsaesser calls it—the “cinema effect.”12 The interest in how music can evoke cinematic narratives in our “inner eye”13 is essentially a musicological counterpart of Elsaesser’s argument that “key elements of cinematic perception have become internalized as our modes of cognition and embodied experience,” and that, as he puts it, “there is no longer an outside to the inside: we are always already ‘in’ the cinema with whatever we can say ‘about’ it!”14 As Elsaesser’s exclamation mark signals, trying to account for this “effect”—whether cinema’s effect on listening or the role of sound in the “cinema effect”—takes us into a perilous scholarly terrain marked by dangerous generalizations and long-standing anxieties about cinema as a technology of sensory training.15 Indeed, while the cinema has not yet received much attention in histories of music listening, when film’s contribution has been addressed, it has often been portrayed as reifying the Romantic link between music and subjectivity—an idea conveniently summed up by Leon Botstein’s argument that “the silent film era may then be regarded as the last phase of an historical evolution in listening,” because sound film brought to an end the time “when listening to music appeared highly individualized, when each listener was able to make a connection in the hearing of music rooted in personal experience.”16 Botstein’s quote is emblematic of well-established fears about cinema’s colonization of the listener’s imagination.17 His diagnosis resonates with Adorno’s (and Eisler’s) famous analysis of the pseudo-individualism of film and its damaging effects on musical listening, yet Adorno’s take on film is part of a broader critique of the cultural industry that does not equate the ideological workings of bourgeois culture with any particular ­technological development. Conversely, in Botstein’s version, the listening imagination

The Possibilities of Cinematic Listening   5 before sound film is presented as ideologically neutral, with the suggestion that listeners, untainted by cinema, were freely and routinely engaging in wonderful reveries that appropriately performed the music’s imaginative affordances, notions that both Adorno’s cultural critique and James Johnson’s historical work have complicated.18 This familiar teleological narrative also seems to assume that the relationship between music and film is fully consumed by the codification of film’s audiovisual language, with no space left for the imagination, whether through supplementary visualizations taking place during the film or through further “imaginings” after the film has ended. The study of cinematic listening has the potential and the responsibility to critique and enrich this narrative. It can challenge the particular forms of imagination that are valorized within the discourse of musicology and it can explore the effects of cinema’s vernacular imaginary, engaging with the way film contributes to what Elena del Río calls a “rigidification of the language and experience of emotion”19 while also tracing some of the possible imaginative pathways that cinema opens up, both in front of and in the absence of a screen. In the process, it can expand our conception of the relationship between cinema and experience, addressing urgent questions of pervasive mediation while also engaging with phenomenological and philosophical approaches that theorize the cinematic experience neither as an illusion nor as an intrusion, but rather as an “extension” of the viewer’s embodied experience of the world.20 The complexities of the cinema effect are not limited to its ideological implications. Alongside a question of whether cinematic listening is good or bad for you, Elsaesser’s suggestion that “there is no longer an outside to the inside” of cinema also raises fundamental methodological issues. If cinema has become internalized and embodied so that we are indeed already “inside it” with whatever we can say “about it,” then is discussion about “cinematic listening” intrinsically tautological? In other words, how cinematic is cinematic listening? And is it really about listening anyway?

The “Cinematicity” of Cinematic Listening At once invoking and dispensing with a notion of medium specificity, the “cinematic” is a term that is both problematic and productive when it comes to studying listening. The question of specificity has acquired particular urgency in view of convergent modes of production, distribution, and exhibition brought about by the so-called “digital turn.” In addition to fueling a rich debate on the loss of an indexical relationship with reality, cinema’s progressive turn to digital has renewed discussion about where the distinctive qualities of “film” may now reside, whether in its materiality, in formal properties, in a canon of artworks, in modes of production, or in gate-keeping institutions. And are such qualities dependent on the experiential conditions of theatrical exhibition or can they be “relocated” to smaller platforms?21 Logically, this debate has

6   Carlo Cenciarelli gone hand in hand with a re-thinking of the mutating ontologies and modes of ­spectatorship of early cinema.22 For the study of cinematic listening, one of the most important outcomes of the burgeoning debate on film’s early years and on its digital transformations is a greater awareness of the sense in which—as Elsaesser has argued—analytical definitions of cinema’s ontology (“what is cinema”) should give way to non-teleological, archaeological analyses of particular processes of ontologization (“when and where is cinema”).23 Just as changes in film sound practices can be a way of exploring cinema as something that is constantly in “emergence,”24 an analysis of cinema’s processes of ontologization can be a way of exploring the emergence of different modes of cinematic listening. That is to say, we should replace the question “what is cinematic listening” with questions such as “when is listening cinematic” and “where is listening cinematic,” jettisoning a search for essential qualities in favor of studies of how different understandings of listening as cinematic can and have emerged at particular times and in particular conditions. An important corollary to this is that cinema, and thus ideas of what constitutes cinematic sound, are constantly being renegotiated “off-site,” through the production, marketing, consumption, and public discussion of artefacts that do not claim to be “cinema.” In their study of Cinematicity in Media History, Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau emphasize that the term should not be seen as indicating a “quality intrinsic or proper to cinema” but rather as “a descriptor of how the cinematic can operate at more ephemeral and mobile levels.” Indeed, for them the cinematic is located in “precisely those art forms and systems of representation . . . that are not cinema per se,”25 such as video games and gaming cultures.26 This puts a particular spin on the debate about cinema’s seeming loss of a central place in today’s mediascape. If we agree with commentators such as Steven Shaviro that cinema in the twenty-first century has abandoned its place as a cultural dominant and has accrued a “residual” status,27 then the resilience of the term “cinematic” (something that is arguably manifest in Shaviro’s own decision to call the new regime of digital media “post-cinematic”), might be seen to suggest that cinema, rather than losing significance, is assuming something of a gaseous form, evaporating into an adjectival status that is constantly absorbed and transformed through other media engagements. In less vaporous terms, this is Lev Manovich’s idea of cinema as “a cultural interface,”28 but one that—more like a neural network—is constantly redefined by the encounter with new data. On the one hand, then, it is important to work against the vagaries of the “cinematic,” providing rich descriptions of what counts as cinema within specific cinematic sites. On the other, the very vagueness of the term—its seeming ability to be everything and nothing at once—deserves consideration. In a discipline-defining intuition, Anahid Kassabian has called attention to the ubiquity of music in contemporary life, exploring its relationship with pervasive media technologies.29 While for Kassabian interest in these forms of ubiquitous listening should eventually displace film music from the “center of the scholarly worldview,”30 we might alternatively ask in what ways, and to what extent, ubiquitous music continues to carry traces of the cinematic. Do musical

The Possibilities of Cinematic Listening   7 protocols from film provide invisible interfaces for interacting with other media? Does sound contribute to the mobility of the cinematic?

The “Aurality” of Cinematic Listening And what kind of traces might cinematic listening leave behind?31 In their introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer note that historians often have to read and interpret sources for what they “imply about listening.”32 The problem of traces applies to the internalized nature of listening—and not just music listening—past and present. Observational and experimental methodologies can provide an additional set of powerful tools for the scholar of contemporary culture, but of course they come with their own epistemological limitations, particularly concerning the interpretation of complex data and issues of ecological validity.33 Studying listening in the context of cinema is twice as tortuous, as it requires interpreting sources and data that—due to the nature of the apparatus, grammar, marketing, and writing conventions of film—tend to sideline the role of sound in the experienced event. In this volume, approaching these challenges from a humanities perspective, we look for evidence of actual and intended listening practices in illustrations and photographs, in debates in the trade press and technical instructions issued to projectionists and consumers, in the look of cinema interiors, in interviews with engineers and filmgoers, in industry audience surveys and court hearings, in large online questionnaires and small-scale experiments, in observed behavior inside the cinema theatre and in classroom debates, in patterns of vocal performance, in representational tropes and phenomenological structures, in the changing uses of pre-existing music and Foley sounds, and in ancillary materials and remediations. Not only does bringing listening into focus require various kinds of labor—archival, analytical, technical, observational, experimental, interpretative, rhetorical, and ­theoretical—but this labor seems part and parcel of listening’s recently found status as a particularly prized object of study. The elusiveness of listening is central to its growing theoretical and cultural appeal. Sander van Maas forges a link between the growing value assigned to listening and a re-thinking of what counts as listening, thus productively connecting a question of traces (the elusiveness of listening) to one of boundaries (what listening is). As he puts it, “listening emerges when it appears to end up or to run up against thresholds and limits,” “such as speaking, reading, touching, sensing or hearing.”34 The more we look for listening traces, the more its sensory specificity seems to dissipate, and with it also goes the theoretical separation between listening (as act of focused, deliberate attention) and hearing (as a pre-cognitive impression).35 Which is to say, not only is listening always on the verge of turning into something else, but is it ever just listening in the first place?

8   Carlo Cenciarelli Persuasive arguments have been made in favor of replacing the monosensory term “listening” with the more holistic category of “musical experience.”36 In this volume, we preserve the term “listening” precisely because, in combination with its “cinematic” modifier, it can serve to tease out the (still relatively overlooked) specific contribution of the aural to the broader cinematic experience while also drawing attention to the fact that the aural is always entangled in the multisensory nature of that experience.37 In other words, if—as Nicholas Cook has influentially argued—musical multimedia can provide a model for rethinking musical meaning as emergent and contextual, then cinematic listening can call attention to how listening, too, is “never alone.”38 Cinematic listening, that is, might highlight the uniqueness and cultural specificity of “modernist listening” as a “mode of listening predicated on pre-existing meaning defined through sensory reduction.”39 Issues of multi- and cross-sensoriality take us full circle back to the “cinema effect,” because the question of how cinema engages our senses is also implicitly a question of agency. Studying listening in the context of embodied spectatorship can be a way of developing classic theorizations of the viewer as “passive, vicarious, or projective,” and also of rescuing a more active role for them.40 On the one hand, building on Gorbman’s foundational theorization of film music’s ability to “render the individual an untroublesome viewing subject,”41 we can explore how new media and a new cinema of the senses use sound to capitalize on the vulnerability of the spectator’s body for aesthetic, commercial, and political purposes. On the other, we can identify the ways in which sound requires active engagement both inside and outside the cinema space, promoting forms of socialized spectatorship and turning cinematic reception into more outward-directed actions that have a different set of aesthetic, commercial, and political implications.42 In this sense, rethinking the epistemology and ontology of listening from the perspective of the cinematic also involves rethinking the nature of listening as an action, and can play into a broader recognition of listening as a performative act.43

Mapping Cinematic Listening: Archaeologies, Aesthetics, and Extensions In view of what I have outlined so far, this volume takes “cinematic listening” and its constituent terms as emergent concepts. In order to explore how changing notions of “listening” and of the “cinematic” have shaped each other, we look at the archaeologies, aesthetics, and extensions of cinema’s aural practices. We situate listening to film in specific venues, texts, and filmgoing habits, while also trying to illuminate cinema’s dynamic relationship with other representational models, industrial practices, and forms of live and electronic entertainment. We consider how ancillary objects use sound to prepare and prolong the cinematic experience, while also discussing how other media—in

The Possibilities of Cinematic Listening   9 the process of mobilizing the protocols of cinematic sound—appropriate and redefine ideas of the cinematic.

Archaeologies (traces and places) Part I and Part II find material and discursive traces of cinematic listening in a range of cultural sites, contributing to an archaeological (i.e. multi-layered and discontinuous) understanding of cinema’s aural practices. Part I (“Genealogies and Beginnings”) explores the genealogies of cinematic listening without searching for a continuous lineage or univocal origins,44 focusing on how cinema presented and reconfigured the relationship between sound and visualization found in earlier and contemporaneous forms of public entertainment. In the opening chapter, cutting across four temporal layers, Peter Franklin discusses forms of musical seeing cultivated in nineteenth-century popular theatre, Wagnerian operas, post-Wagnerian opera, and late twentieth-century opera films. Engaging with the argument that cinema might reify or obstruct earlier (more personal and more sensitively imagined) realizations of music’s visual potential, Franklin suggests that—in “fully realizing” operatic forms of musical seeing—cinema might actually reveal opera’s own fraught (and often suppressed) relationship with mass entertainment. In Chapter 2, zooming into one particular form of middlebrow entertainment popular at the time when moving-image technologies were being developed, Emilio Sala turns to the sonic practices of the Chat Noir (1885 to 1889). Through detailed philological work, Sala argues that specific kinds of musics, in combination with different forms of verbal address, were intended to promote a range of modes of spectatorial engagement, and links these heterogeneous forms of shadow entertainment to similarly heterogeneous configurations of distraction, absorption, and contemplation found in early cinema. In Chapter 3, Jacob Smith encourages us to listen more closely to early phonograph musicals. In an archaeological vein, and focusing on a well-defined corpus of records produced between 1905 and 1911, Smith highlights a potential but interrupted line of descent from phonographs to sound films, where the vocal types and representational tropes of these early records not only anticipate the heteronormative numbers of later Hollywood musicals but also indicate substantial changes in attitudes to ethnicity and courtship. Whereas Franklin, Sala, and Smith consider sound film in light of pre-existing practices, the last two chapters in the section focus on changes in listening at critical junctures in the early history of film. In Chapter 4, Julie Brown focuses on musical “trick films” by Georges Méliès and Segundo de Chomón as an example of how early cinema playfully engaged with the idea of visualizing inaudible diegetic music. Brown places trick films in a dialogue with new audio technologies of the time, showing how these indirect, multimodal constructions of audibility reversed the way in which the telegraph, the theatrophone, the telephone, and the phonograph unwittingly suppressed (and implied) music’s visual source. In the section’s concluding chapter, James Buhler focuses on the transition to the talkies. By means of analyzing trade journals and early

10   Carlo Cenciarelli audience reactions, Buhler shows how recorded synchronized sound was seen to be at odds with an existing paradigm of the “cinematic” based on live music, and thus how conceptions of the cinematic were being negotiated in relation to concertgoing and the sonic conventions of live theatre. What’s more, he shows that this new conception of cinematic sound—and particularly the use of synchronized voices and sound effects— was deemed by some notable commentators to require a shift between incompatible ways of listening, dispelling the reverie of early “silent” cinema. Part II (“Locations and Relocations”) explores how listening to film is framed by specific presentational practices, venues, and technologies, with particular attention paid to the relationship between live and recorded elements. These are aspects that have received increasing attention across the humanities over the last two decades, as scholars have turned more systematically to the idea of cinema as an event, to the material conditions of spectatorship, to the affective significance of musical performance, to the value of liveness, and to the study of architectural acoustics and sound technology. In Chapter 6, Ben Winters focuses on roadshow exhibition practices, and particularly on the way overture, entr’acte, and exit music, in careful coordination with lighting and curtain operations, was used to frame and punctuate these deluxe screenings. Winters argues that these musical paratexts presented a range of practical and aesthetic orientations towards the cinematic experience by means of calling patrons back to their seats, showcasing the theatre’s sound technology, and also inflecting the ontology, structure, effects, and connotations of specific films. In Chapter 7, turning to another practice with distinctive cultural status, Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece focuses on the exhibition of European films in American art houses between the late 1950s and the early 1960s. Combining a Foucauldian approach to discipline with a New Cinema History attention to the material histories of spectatorship, Szczepaniak-Gillece discusses the particular labour of viewing and listening that American viewers were required to perform in return for social distinction. Chapter 8 keeps the focus on the 1960s and on filmgoing behaviour, but considers the use of cinemas as venues for live music. Simon Frith explores the phenomenon in relation to the development of British rock music and offers a novel perspective on the topic of synergies between film and music industries. Drawing on press reports, newspaper clippings, concertgoers’ memories, and photographic evidence of audience behaviour, Frith discusses the ways in which the cinema—also thanks to popular rock ‘n’ roll movies—became a place “where young people learnt how mass youth culture should be performed.” In Chapter  9, Jeremy Barham tackles the in some ways complementary phenomenon of relocating the cinematic experience to a concert hall, with a live orchestra. Barham suggests that the phenomenon of live-score screenings, while seemingly unproblematic for audiences who have embraced the product without apparent misgivings for its hybrid mixture of real-time and pre-recorded events, in fact has far reaching philosophical implications, complicating the idea of a unified subject position and ­blurring divisions between story world and real world. In the section’s closing chapter, Meredith Ward turns a critical ear to Dolby Atmos’ contribution to the rich history of surround sound. Combining a historiographical

The Possibilities of Cinematic Listening   11 approach with first-hand interviews with Atmos engineers, Ward explores a mismatch between Dolby’s PR messages and the technology’s actual use. She considers how Atmos’ particular ability to engender a sense of spatial presence was in turn applied to the mixing and remixing of music, with the transmedia platform used to position listeners inside the mix, sometimes literally inviting them to walk through a space designed by sound.

Aesthetics (texts and bodies) In Parts III and IV, the emphasis shifts to the aesthetic specificity of films as complex experiential objects. Part III (“Representations and Re-presentations”) focuses on film as a system of representation and as a site for the remediation of previous musical presentations. Involving close readings, hermeneutics, and the changing cultural meanings of works and musical traditions, the study of representations has been a natural research area for music scholars, and a significant way in which film-musicology has engaged (more or less explicitly) with the question of how cinema can shape the way we attend to music, inflecting our understanding of its aesthetics and ontologies.45 One particular thread running through this section pertains to how the representation of listening turns a largely internal, mental operation into visible actions and reactions, in a process of externalisation that reflects (at the level of representation) the broader methodological challenges raised by the opacity of listening. Chapters in Part III scrutinize this opacity through careful analysis but also reflect upon the methodological limitations of textual hermeneutics. The section starts with two chapters that explore the idea of sound as representational surplus. In Chapter 11 on Chantal Akerman’s La Captive (2000), Richard Dyer establishes a parallel between the film’s male character’s obsessive desire to probe the mind of the captive female, and the cinematic listener’s normative desire to press sounds for their significance. He thus argues that the film—by asking its spectators to interrogate their own interrogation of sound—stages “a lethal and gendered epistemology of the ear” that deserves to be theorized alongside film studies’ familiar concept of the male gaze. If for Dyer sound’s refusal to yield to meaning is part of a distinct aesthetic and formal strategy, for David Code in Chapter 12, it is an opportunity to rethink the very usefulness of “narrative” as a theoretical frame. Code uses moments of “seeing hearing” and “hearing hearing” in Stanley Kubrick’s films to argue for a more nuanced approach to the interplay of mimesis and diegesis in film, drawing attention to how cinema—vis à vis the literary models on which its stories are often based—shapes our modes of listening and viewing through light, colour, sound, and acting. As with Dyer’s and Code’s chapters, Julie Hubbert’s analysis in Chapter 13 of Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) approaches listening from an authorial perspective. Hubbert positions Malick as a particular kind of countercultural listener, and argues that we should hear Badlands’ unusual musical and formal features—such as the mix of pre-existing popular and classical music and the suppression of diegetic sounds—in light of the changing listening practices of the countercultural youth and of their multiple (and sometimes contradictory) investments in experimentation, audiophilia, and eclecticism.

12   Carlo Cenciarelli In Chapter 14, continuing an exploration of the cinematic re-presentation of pre-existing music, Guido Heldt draws attention to the overlooked topic of “listening” in biopics of “classical” composers, a blind spot that reflects—in a microcosm—musicology’s historical tendency to privilege compositional process and performance practice over the study of listening. Heldt provides a taxonomy of listeners, of their motivations for listening, of the meanings they hear in the music, and of the ways in which—by exteriorizing these meanings—filmmakers cast musical features in particular biographical trajectories. Whereas Heldt gives us an overview of listening as a narrative trope across a large number of examples, in Chapter 15 Jonathan Godsall turns to the cinematic appropriation of one specific piece of musical material—the finale of the overture of Rossini’s William Tell—in one particular media franchise, the Lone Ranger. Godsall places the music’s latest cinematic adaptation (2013) in the long history of the finale’s affiliation with the franchise, showing how a mode of listening that he calls “the blockbuster cinematic” emerged out of previous radiophonic and televisual iterations and then shaped the music’s further re-uses as “post-existing music.” The section ends with Martin Barker, who takes issue in Chapter 16 with the theoretical and interpretive orientation of film music studies and calls for more empirically grounded accounts of the role of sound in cinematic representations. Writing from the perspective of audience research, and drawing on a vast database of responses collected through an international online project on The Lord of the Rings, Barker not only encourages us to test our hypotheses about diegesis, immersion, and identification against audience responses, but also argues that theorizing from the ground up will likely change the questions we ask ourselves as scholars, and puts forward a list of suggestions for the better integration of textual and empirical methodologies. Part IV (“The Listening Body”) continues the previous section’s exploration of the formal properties of specific films, but shifts emphasis from textual organization to a theorization of how sound engages the full body sensorium. While work on film phenomenology, haptic viewing, and affect has typically underplayed the importance of sound, contributions in this section show the extent to which these frameworks can be used to enrich our understanding of the embodied nature of cinematic listening and of the role of sound in a new “cinema of the senses.” In Chapter 17, drawing on Chion’s notion of “corporeal covibrations,” Lisa Coulthard explores cinema’s sensory impact through the paradox of the cinematic punch, where our bodies vibrate to the sound of physical contact that has not taken place on screen. Tracing the history of the punch from the standardized “John Wayne chin sock” to the individualized sound objects of contemporary cinema, Coulthard explores how these hyper-brief audiovisual gestures rely on our corporeal memories and at the same time mobilize the embodied knowledge of previous cinematic experiences. Whereas Coulthard focuses on short moments of sonic impact, in Chapter 18 Danijela KulezicWilson looks at the workings of soundtracks that need time to seduce their viewers. In this sense, Coulthard’s and Kulezic-Wilson’s chapters can be seen to develop two contrasting aspects of Laura Marks’ theorization of the haptic as involving a way of “making oneself vulnerable to the image.”46 In particular, Kulezic-Wilson extends (and

The Possibilities of Cinematic Listening   13 sonifies) Marks’ idea of the cinematic experience as an erotic tension between the bodies of viewer and film, where a discerning spectator enters in a “consensual” relationship with the body of film. She argues that this aural erotics depends on the musicalization of all elements of the soundtrack, a process that she couches in a broader history of twentiethcentury listening from John Cage to the World Soundscape Project and up to recent practices of “integrated” sound design. The next two chapters focus on the soundtracks of science fiction cinema. Similarly to Kulezic-Wilson, in Chapter  19 John Richardson, Anna-Elena Pääkkölä, and Sanna Qvick argue that music helps bridge, experientially, the gap between screen and spectator. However, their specific focus is on post-minimalist musical idioms and on how the soundtracks of Interstellar (Hans Zimmer) and Arrival (Jóhann Jóhannsson) provide opportunities for spectators to experience alien conceptions of time and space and to glimpse otherworldly solutions to political conflicts and ecological crises. The utopian dimension of cinematic listening teased out by Richardson et al. is reversed in Miguel Mera’s analysis of sci-fi and the cinema of the senses in Chapter 20. Drawing on the history and philosophy of surveillance, Mera traces a cinematic trajectory where the body is progressively (more intensely, and more invasively) colonized by technology, and shows how cinema’s ability to engage the spectator’s senses—accompanied by film theory’s own gradual awakening to the haptic nature of sound—is related, in unsettling ways, to increasingly complex and totalizing surveillant assemblages. Whereas Mera’s chapter explores a dystopian fusion of sensory modalities, in Chapter 21 Holly Rogers focuses on what is at stake in moments of audiovisual dissonance. Rogers identifies two types of soundscape composition—“sonic elongation” and “sonic aporia”— that, by stretching the relationship between hearing and vision, forestall traditional modes of cinematic listening and also trouble assumptions of coherence and morphological wholeness implied by some theories of embodied spectatorship. In this sense, if KulezicWilson and Richardson et al. consider how cross-modal fusion can lead to new forms of embodied knowledge, Mera and Rogers show that cross-modal fusion can compromise the ability of a distinct sense to act as a potential site of resistance. In the last chapter of Part IV, moving beyond the aesthetics of specific films and anticipating topics explored in Part V, James Deaville inspects the “listening body” from the perspective of the “trailer ear,” a listening orientation that revolves around the expectation of extreme loudness. Drawing on audiology accounts, medical guidelines, instructions for projectionist, audience surveys, and proposed legislation, Deaville describes the issue of cinematic loudness as a physiological, psychophysiological, and discursive matter, showing how the trailer becomes a site of contestation where issues of passivity have concrete implications for the spectators’ well-being.

Extensions (beyond film and across media) The two concluding sections focus more explicitly on how ideas of cinematic sound extend beyond the confines of cinema as a text, site, or event. Part V (“Listening Again”)

14   Carlo Cenciarelli explores a range of ways in which film sound is encountered (and reinterpreted) outside the cinema, through ancillary materials, in pedagogical contexts, in experimental ­conditions, and in everyday media experiences. In Chapter 23, Jeff Smith offers a novel perspective on the cross-promotion of cinema and popular music. Drawing on empirical and theoretical studies on aesthetic fluency, Smith argues that we should consider the commercial and aesthetic synergy between film and pop in terms of the ease of processing audiovisual stimuli. Looking at release dates, pop charts, and album sales of films from Saturday Night Fever (1977) to The Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2 (2017), Smith suggests that the marketing and formal strategies of music in film are underpinned by considerations about habituation, exposure, and hedonic peaks, providing an important example of how findings from the psychology of perception can inform the study of audiovisual aesthetics. In Chapter 24 Paul N. Reinsch then zooms into the little discussed case of what he calls the “unified soundtrack album,” a hybrid of music, dialogue, and sound effects, and an intriguing example of the commercial extension of a movie’s sonic footprint. Focusing specifically on Queen’s music for Flash Gordon (1980), Reinsch argues that unified soundtrack albums—in spite of their sonic heterogeneity—can present listeners with a version of the film that is aesthetically more coherent in that it bypasses some of the artificiality of cinema’s audiovisual synchronization. In Chapter 25, Katie Young approaches cinema’s ancillary musical materials from a contrasting cultural and methodological perspective. Through ethnographic research carried out in Northern Ghana, Young shows that, in postcolonial Africa, Hindi film songs have provided an important and resilient link between filmgoing and religious education. First, she finds evidence of a number of ways in which religious and linguistic schooling have shaped how audiences listened to Hindi film and how they behaved and still behave in cinema halls. Then she studies how these Hindi film songs have entered and shaped pedagogical practices in Northern Ghana, offering a striking example of the feedback loop between listening cultures inside and outside the cinema. One of the rare studies of cinematic listening outside Europe and North America, Young’s chapter also throws into relief some of the practices of disciplined silence that have become naturalized in Western contexts. Chapter 26 keeps the focus on pedagogy and—engaging with non-American cinema in an American educational context—it theorizes the act of teaching film and film soundtracks as a practice of introspection and a way of listening to one another with greater care. Positioning herself as the cinematic listener, Elsie Walker offers a personal and autobiographical account that is generalizable precisely because of its irreducible specificity, and calls for a scholarly practice that should include the listener’s evolving sense of self and the private circumstances that give film sound its constantly changing meaning. Chapter 27 approaches the question of hearing “again” from the perspective of cognitive psychology. Janet Bourne suggests that the kind of associational listening described by the musicological work on cinematic listening can be explained by combining topic theory with a cognitive framework of analogy. Through the close study of a well-defined corpus of films and through statistical analysis of free associations produced in a listening

The Possibilities of Cinematic Listening   15 experiment, Bourne’s chapter provides additional evidence of the “cinema effect” on music listening, thus corroborating some of the indirect findings of previous studies and sketching out a methodological template for the empirical testing of cinematic listening. In the section’s closing chapter, Randolph Jordan focuses on a piece of non-cinematic footage that indelibly marked the start of the twenty-first century: the sight of the first plane crashing into the World Trade Center, and the accompanying, asynchronous sound of its impact. Jordan explores that sonic delay against cinematic expectations for audiovisual synchronicity. He argues that the “breaking” of cinematic conventions was central to the epistemological value of the footage and to the dramatic power of its many subsequent iterations, and was tied into a broader rethinking of the performative nature of documentary filmmaking in an era of 24/7 remediation. With its transmedia focus, Jordan’s chapter also provides a link to the volume’s concluding section. Part VI (“Across Media”) considers the relationship between the protocols, textual patterns, audiovisual strategies, and phenomenological structures of cinema and those of TV series and music video, promenade theatre and personal ­stereos, video games and VR technologies. In Chapter 29, Robynn Stilwell turns her attention to “binge-watching,” a phenomenon that has been discussed as “cinematic” in the sense of involving high production values and a carefully crafted, long-range dramatic trajectory that can be enjoyed in one fell swoop. Focusing on the truncated show Invasion, originally intended to be shown weekly on ABC, Stilwell explores a potential mismatch between the TV series’ complex narrative and its original mode of consumption, arguing that the score, in particular, because of its contribution to intricate plot lines, affords and rewards the kind of attention associated with binge-watching protocols. Chapters 30 and 31 turn to a comparative study of film and music video. Focusing on David Lynch and Michael Gondry as two examples of “transmedia directors”47 and offering a new take on Chion’s listening modes, Mathias Bonde Kosgaard suggests that music videos and cinema share an ability to engender forms of “reduced viewing” where music can encourage an engagement with the material and formal qualities of the image. If Bonde Korsgaard focuses on the way music, both in videos and in film, can musicalize vision, Laurel Westrup calls attention to how music videos—through the integration of non-musical sounds—can invite us to listen to songs cinematically. In particular, Westrup focuses on a class of music videos that feature layered sound designs, and shows how the careful integration of music, dialogue, and sound effects is used to evoke broader narrative frameworks that can suture in the viewer or also create a gap by positioning the song at an ironic distance. The next two chapters explore the “cinematicity” of mobile listening. In Chapter 32, Ya-Feng Mon discusses Remote X, an example of headphone-based participatory performance that has toured across the globe and that makes many claims on the cinematic. Focusing on a particular instantiation of Remote X in Taipei in 2017, Mon explores a friction between the artists’ claims and the show’s actual reception. She identifies the reason for this tension in conflicting understandings of what it means to have a cinematic experience, and argues that Remote Taipei can be seen as emblematic of a dialectic between global strategies of technological mediation and the specificity of local reception.

16   Carlo Cenciarelli In  Chapter  33, complicating the notion that cinema and personal stereos are about ­invisibility and social withdrawal, Carlo Cenciarelli explores a range of ways in which mainstream cinema—because of its representational tropes and modes of spectatorial address—feeds into a broader media fantasy of personal stereo listening as an intimate form of interpersonal communication, where music always borders on becoming an utterance for one or more imagined interlocutors. Chapters 34 and 35 close the volume by focusing on the relationship between cinematic listening and interactive media. Tim Summers, studying a number of Fantasia-inspired video games produced between 1983 and 2014, discusses differences between listening within the “closed” system of film (where the audiovisual synchronization is fixed) versus an “open” system where players can respond to musical affordances with a degree of control over the forging of new audiovisual relationships and thus are able to engage with the music’s combinatorial possibilities. Michiel Kamp explores the way in which cinematic listening is remediated in VR experiences. He shows how acousmatic sounds, situational ambient music, sound advances, and other film protocols are utilized to negotiate the player’s transition across narrative levels and to create a sense of presence. At the same time, Kamp also notices that music in VR draws attention to its own presence (whether because of intertextual references, game functionality, or ecological salience), and, by so doing, actually reinforces the boundaries between virtual environments and the spaces of everyday life. If Part I started with an exploration of cinema’s archaeological past, Part VI thus ends with cinema’s role in the archaeology of new media.

Imagining Cinematic Listening In July 2013, Harrison Krix—a prop maker from Atlanta with a large portfolio of science fiction memorabilia and space guns—made a Holophonor. He collated multiple screenshots from Futurama, assembled materials including a $70 “Vito” brand clarinet, a fiberglass pipe, plenty of LED lights, an acrylic rod, and Arduino circuits, and produced an ingenious and well-crafted replica of Fry’s thirtieth-century instrument (see Figure 0.2). In the process, Krix became increasingly aware of the instrument’s shifting on-screen ontology. “Sometimes whole sets of keys are missing, sometimes it looks about a foot shorter than normal, and the lower bell seems to be anywhere from 6’’ around to over 18’’ depending on which frame you’re looking at.”48 Krix’s Holophonor doesn’t produce smoke, doesn’t project holographic images and—to the disappointment of various online reviewers—cannot be used to play music. If the Holophonor gives an imaginary form to the process of cinematic listening, Krix’s replica highlights some of the limitations involved in giving a material form to an intangible process. It foregrounds the continuing effort of the imagination required to move between sound and vision, ideas and realization, cultural processes and theorization. Through the exploration of genealogies and places, texts and bodies, ancillary products and transmedia experiences, this volume aims to provide a blueprint for the study

The Possibilities of Cinematic Listening   17

Figure 0.2  Making the Holophonor: screen grab from Holophonor walkthrough, YouTube video, 2:45, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd46WWayDUI, accessed December 9, 2018.

of listening to film and listening cinematically. It hopes to make cinematic listening more concrete while also opening up possibilities for future materializations. Significant patterns and motives emerge across sections and suggest alternative pathways through the volume’s materials. From the misplaced, compensatory loudness of canned music in early cinema (Ch. 5) to the adrenaline-fueled orchestrations of classical music in blockbuster movies (Ch. 15) and the sonic aggressiveness of film trailers (Ch. 22), this book’s contributors testify to the controversial, if long-standing, role that scale and sheer loudness have had in negotiating a sense of the cinematic. They also show how the eventfulness of loud sounds gains meaning in relation to the possibility of sonic intimacy provided by the closeness of a voice, the details of sound effects, or the sensuousness of a musicalized soundtrack that position the spectator in the role of an eavesdropper (Ch. 5, 11, 18, 20, 33). Throughout the volume, sound is seized upon as an important, discrete channel of narrative information (Ch. 16) that requires the complex co-ordination of socially recognizable interpretative labor (Ch. 7) while also being an affective vehicle that engages the body at a more visceral level (Ch. 12 and 17–22). And while these different forms of auditory knowledge are not necessarily in conflict, in that a wide range of information (haptic, narrative, personal) is encoded in forms of embodied listening (Ch. 17 and 26), chapters in this volume show how films sometimes dramatize the friction between narrative information and sensory impressions through their plots (Ch. 11) or through the (near) rupture of the audiovisual contract (Ch. 21). Thus listening to film is caught in a dynamic relationship between narrative information and sensory engagement, between normative visualizations and imaginative leaps, between control and passivity, between discipline and noisiness, between the large scale

18   Carlo Cenciarelli and the intimate. The loud and the quiet, the semantic and the somatic, the visceral and the tasteful, the personal and the intersubjective—mediated by specific venues, presentational practices, aesthetics, and discourses—provide some of the broad coordinates within which this Handbook’s cinematic sounds engage the listener’s imagination. In the process of tracing these emergent notions of cinematic listening, the book also identifies some of the logics that regulate the movement from listening to film to listening cinematically. The connections between cinematic and aural cultures are mediated by shared venues (Ch. 6) and transmedia platforms (Ch. 10), by listening protocols and phenomenological structures (Ch. 32–35), by specific directors, sound engineers, and musicians who work across screen media (Ch. 10, 13, and 31), and also more broadly by a dialogue between music composition and composing for film and between sound design and sound art (Ch. 18 and 21). Musico-imagistic associations travel across and beyond cinematic texts thanks to representational tropes, musical topics, and preexisting materials (Ch. 1–4, 15, 27, and 29); they are disseminated by ancillary materials and commercial synergies and reinforced by pedagogical practices (Ch. 23, 24, 25, and 31). What is more, to the extent that cinema frequently refers to its own well-established ways of rendering the world, these processes of repetition and habituation make listening to film always already a form of listening cinematically (Ch. 17 and 28), in a feedback loop that is central to the workings of cinematic listening (Ch. 25). The patterns and logics that emerge through this volume show some of the possible directions of cinematic listening as an interdisciplinary research area. Collectively, in this volume, we continue to explore the material and aesthetic specificity of cinema while also extending the study of cinematic sound beyond film and beyond the screen. The intention is not to define cinematic listening but rather to open up a debate about what it can be and how it can be studied, in the hope of furthering a dialogue between historical, speculative, technical, and empirical perspectives on film, music, sound, and media, that might—with time—give us an increasingly detailed and differentiated understanding of the relationship between listening cultures and ever-changing notions of the cinematic.

Notes 1. See “Parasites Lost,” the second episode of Futurama’s third season (2001). The Holophonor returns in the finale of Season 4 (“The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings”) and makes a few other appearances in Seasons 5, 6, and 7. 2. Simon Shaw-Miller, Eye hEar: The Visual in Music (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 187. 3. Michael Long, Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 246 n36. 4. Ibid., 7. 5. Ibid., 24. 6. See Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 120. Frith is drawing on Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press,

The Possibilities of Cinematic Listening   19 1990), 108–9. He also cites evidence from work by Philip Tagg that would later be published as Philip Tagg and Robert Clarida, Ten Little Title Tunes: Towards a Musicology of the Mass Media (New York: The Mass Media Musicologists’ Press, 2003). 7. See Peter Franklin, “The Boy on the Train, or Bad Symphonies and Good Movies,” in Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Richard Leppert, Lawrence Kramer, and Daniel Goldmark (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 13–26: 20. 8. See, respectively, Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Anahid Kassabian, Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (New York: Routledge, 2001); Chion, Audio-Vision; Nicholas Cook, Analyzing Musical Multimedia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Rick Altman, Sound Theory/Sound Practice (New York: Routledge, 1992); James Lastra, Sound Technologies and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 9. See, in particular, Peter Franklin, Seeing Through Music: Gender and Modernism in Classic Hollywood Film Scores (Oxford: Oxford University Press,  2011); Ben Winters, Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film: Shared Concert Experiences in Screen Fiction (New York: Routledge,  2014); Jacob Smith, “Listening to Film Sound,” The Cine-Files 8 (2015, “Dossier on Film Sound”); Giorgio Biancorosso, Situated Listening: The Sound of Absorption in Classical Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press,  2016); Frank Lehman, “Film-asConcert Music and the Formal Implications of ‘Cinematic Listening’, ” Music Analysis 37, no. 1 (2018): 7–46; and Meredith C. Ward, Static in the System: Noise and the Soundscape of American Cinema Culture (Berkeley: California University Press, 2019). The term “cinematic listening” is also found in Sindhumathi Revuluri, “Stereos in the City: Moving through Music in South India,” in the Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies Vol. 2, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 382–98. 10. The locution is taken from Rick Altman, “Film Sound, All of It,” Iris 27 (1999, “The State of Sound Studies”): 31–48. 11. It would be foolish to even try to sum up these scholarly achievements here, so I will leave the task of mapping out relevant scholarly networks to individual chapters and the Handbook as a whole. I must, however, flag up the work on film sound technology and sound design, which is growing at particularly rapid pace and—arguably—would deserve its own separate volume. For a significant sample, see the pioneering work of William Whittington, Mark Kerins, and Jay Beck: William Whittington, Sound Design and Science Fiction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007); Mark Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); and Jay Beck, Designing Sound: Audiovisual Aesthetics in 1970s American Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016). 12. See Thomas Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 71. 13. Franklin, “The Boy on the Train,” 16. 14. Thomas Elsaesser, “The New Film History as Media Archaeology,” Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies 14, no. 2–3 (2004): 75–117: 76. 15. On the foundational myth of the “train effect,” see Martin Loiperdinger, “Lumières Arrival of the Train: Cinema’s Founding Myth,” The Moving Image 4, no. 1 (2004): 89–113. Concerns about the combined ideological power of music and moving images are also famously at the center of Theodor Adorno and Hans Eisler, Composing for the Films (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947).

20   Carlo Cenciarelli 16. Leon Botstein, “Hearing is Seeing—Thoughts on the History of Music and the Imagination,” The Musical Quarterly 79, no. 4 (1995): 581–9: 582, 586. 17. Imaginary machines such as the one we find in Futurama bring these anxieties to the level of representation. Not only does playing the Holophonor require a pact with the Devil, but Fry’s instrument of seduction is a direct descendant of Isaac Asimov’s Visi-Sonor, a mysterious musical instrument that can impress images directly upon the brain, and even kill its listeners. See Isaac Asimov, “The Mule” (Part II), in Astounding Science Fiction (December 1945): 60–99 and Asimov, “Tyrann” (Part I), in Galaxy Science Fiction (January 1951). Both short stories fed into Asimov’s first interplanetary novel, Foundation, which is one of Futurama’s frequently acknowledged sources of inspiration. By literally “weaponizing” music, these futuristic cross-sensory machines show what is at stake in cinema’s mediation of the relationship between music, imagination, and subjectivity. 18. For a discussion of the discursive, social, and political dimensions of the role of subjectivity in the musical experience of Romanticism, see James Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995). 19. See Elena del Río, Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance. Powers of Affection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 179. Quoted in Julian Hanich, The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinema Experience (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 25. 20. For an emblematic view of cinema as an “extension of the viewer’s embodied existence,” see Vivian Sobchack’s work. The quote is from Laura Marks’s discussion of Sobchack’s phenomenological approach in Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 149, my emphasis. 21. The argument about “relocation” is famously made by Francesco Casetti. See for example Casetti and Sara Sampietro, “With Eyes, with Hands: The Relocation of Cinema into the iPhone,” in Moving Data: the iPhone and the Future of Media, ed. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 19–32. A contrasting perspective on cinema after the digital turn is provided by Raymond Bellour, who has argued that “the projection of a film in a cinema, in the dark, as part of an audience” is the only experience that “deserves to be called ‘cinema’.” Raymond Bellour, La Querelle des dispositifs: ­cinema—expositions, installations (Paris: POL, 2012), 14. The passage is translated and discussed in Martine Beugnet, “Miniature Pleasures: On Watching Films on an iPhone,” in Cinematicity in Media History, ed. Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,  2013), 196–201. Beugnet compares Bellour and Casetti’s positions and touches on some of the implications this has for sound. 22. See Tom Gunning and Elsaesser’s bodies of work. 23. Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology, 94–97. In this sense, talking about “film” and the “cinematic” presents us with problems that are not dissimilar to the ones handled so productively by Lydia Goehr’s discussion of the work-concept in her paradigm-changing The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 24. Cfr. Altman’s famous critique of the ontologies of sound film in Sound Theory/Sound Practice. 25. Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau, “Introduction: Cinematicity and Comparative Media,” in Cinematicity in Media History, ed. Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 1–20: 6. 26. See for example Leon Gurevitch, “Cinema, Video, Game: Astonishing Aesthetics and the Cinematic ‘Future’ of Computer Graphics,” in Cinematicity in Media History, ed. Geiger and Littau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 173–95.

The Possibilities of Cinematic Listening   21 27. See Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Winchester: O Books, 2009), 177. 28. See Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), esp. 78–88. 29. Anahid Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). 30. Anahid Kassabian, “The End of Diegesis as We Know It?” in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 89–106: 95. 31. Similar questions about traces are found in the introduction to two recent anthologies about listening. See Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer, “The Art of Listening and Its Histories,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 1–33: 21; and Sander van Maas, “Introduction,” in Thresholds of Listening: Sound, Technics, Space, ed. Sander van Maas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 1–17: 4. 32. Thorau and Ziemer, “The Art of Listening and its Histories,” 21, emphasis in the original. 33. About the difficulty of studying film holistically in experimental settings, see e.g. James Cutting, “Narrative Theories and the Dynamics of Popular Movies,” Psychonomic Bulletin 23, no. 6 (2016): 1713–43. For useful reviews of experimental methods applied to film music research in the arts and humanities, see Annabel J. Cohen, “Congruence-Association Model and Experiments in Film Music: Toward Interdisciplinary Collaboration,” Music and the Moving Image 8, no. 2 (2015): 5–24; and Siu-Lan Tan, “From Intuition to Evidence: The Experimental Psychology of Film Music,” in The Routledge Companion for Screen Music and Sound, ed. Miguel Mera, Ronald Sadoff, and Ben Winters (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 517–30. 34. van Maas, “Introduction,” 2. 35. On intersensoriality and the liminality of listening see also Steven Connor, “Edison’s Teeth: Touching Hearing,” in Hearing Cultures: Essays in Sound, Listening and Modernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 153–72. 36. See Georgina Born, “Listening, Mediation, Event: Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives,” in The Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135, no. 1 (2010): 79–90. 37. The term also has the advantage of preserving the identity of the aural as a distinct sensory point of access, which is something that—as Chion has noted—should not be confused with the multisensory nature of the cinematic experience. See Chion, “Sensory Aspects of Contemporary Cinema” in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 325–30. 38. For a discussion of “musical culture as irreducibly multimedia in nature,” see Cook, Analyzing Musical Multimedia, 23. 39. Nicholas Cook, “Seeing Sounds, Hearing Images: Listening Outside the Modernist Box,” in Musical Listening in the Age of Technological Reproduction, ed. Gianmario Borio (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 185–202. For a cinematic critique of modernist listening, see also Lehman, “Film-as-concert music,” 11. Frank Lehman argues that listening to film-as-concert-music can help us move beyond either “naïve formalism or reflexive anti-formalism.” 40. The latter orientation is epitomized by Laura Marks, who sees Steven Shaviro as exemplary of the former. See Marks, The Skin of Film, 151. 41. Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 5.

22   Carlo Cenciarelli 42. For an important line of scholarship that emphasizes the “active” dimension of cinematic listening, see Jeff Smith, “Unheard Melodies? A Critique of Psychoanalytic Theories of Film Music,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 230–48; Gianluca Sergi, “The Hollywood Sonic Playground: The Spectator as Listener,” in Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences, ed. Richard Maltby and Melvyn Stokes (London: British Film Institute,  2001), 121–31; and Paul Grainge, “Selling Spectacular Sound: Dolby and the Unheard History of Technical Trademarks,” in Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound, ed. Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 251–68. 43. In recent years, there has been a distinct effort to reframe listening as an “intentional act” (Deborah Kapchan), a move that might be related—among other things—to the participatory turn in new media and thus to new ways of textualizing and recording other previously implicit forms of reception. This rethinking of listening has taken a number of forms, from an emphasis on “listening out” as a form of political engagement to a redefinition of listening as a form of creativity, to a cognitive understanding of listening as “covert performance.” See respectively Deborah Kapchan, “Listening Acts: Witnessing the Pain (and Praise) of Others,” in Theorizing Sound Writing, ed. Deborah Kapchan (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2017), 277–93: 280; Kate Lacey, The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013); David Hargreaves, Dorothy Miell, and Raymond MacDonald, eds. Musical Imaginations: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Creativity, Performance and Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Ian Cross, “Listening as Covert Performance,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 125, no. 1 (2010): 67–78. 44. In keeping with Elsaesser, I see the archaeological perspective on film history here as “a radicalized version of the genealogical way of thinking . . . where no continuity is implied or assumed.” Elsaesser, Film History as Media Archaeology, 93. 45. See for example Kassabian, Hearing Film; Phil Powrie and Robynn Stilwell eds. Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-Existing Music in Film (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Winters Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film; Biancorosso, Situated Listening. 46. Marks sees the punch and the caress as metaphorical understandings of cinema’s visuality, where “haptic visuality implies making oneself vulnerable to the image, reversing the relation of mastery that characterizes optical viewing.” See Marks, The Skin of Film, 185. 47. The term is forged and defined by Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers, and Lisa Perrot (eds.), Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry, and New Audiovisual Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). 48. See Harrison Krix, “Holophonor, Futurama,” Volpin Props, blog, July 22, 2013, http:// www.volpinprops.com/holophonor-futurama/, accessed December 9, 2018.

Select Bibliography Altman, Rick. Sound Theory/Sound Practice. New York: Routledge, 1992. Altman, Rick. “Film Sound, All of It.” Iris 27 (1999, Special Issue “The State of Sound Studies”): 31–48. Beck, Jay. Designing Sound: Audiovisual Aesthetics in 1970s American Cinema. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016.

The Possibilities of Cinematic Listening   23 Beck, Jay, and Tony Grajeda, eds. Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Biancorosso, Giorgio. Situated Listening: The Sound of Absorption in Classical Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Born, Georgina. “Listening, Mediation, Event: Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135, no.1 (2010, Special issue “Listening: Interdisciplinary Perspectives”): 79–90. Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Cook, Nicholas. Analyzing Musical Multimedia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Cook, Nicholas. “Seeing Sounds, Hearing Images: Listening Outside the Modernist Box.” In Musical Listening in the Age of Technological Reproduction, ed. Gianmario Borio, 185– 202. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Elsaesser, Thomas. Film History as Media Archaeology: Tracking Digital Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016. Franklin, Peter. “The Boy on the Train, or Bad Symphonies and Good Movies.” In Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Richard Leppert, Lawrence Kramer, and Daniel Goldmark, 13–26. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Franklin, Peter. Seeing Through Music: Gender and Modernism in Classic Hollywood Film Scores. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011. Geiger, Jeffrey, and Karin Littau, eds. Cinematicity in Media History. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Kassabian, Anahid. Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music. Abingdon: Routledge, 2001. Kassabian, Anahid. Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Kerins, Mark. Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Lastra, James. Sound Technologies and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Lehman, Frank. “Film-as-Concert Music and the Formal Implications of ‘Cinematic Listening’.” Music Analysis 37, no. 1 (2018): 7–46. Long, Michael. Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001. Marks, Laura. The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Richardson, John, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis, eds. The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Sergi, Gianluca. “The Hollywood Sonic Playground: The Spectator as Listener.” In Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences, ed. Richard Maltby and Melvyn Stokes, 121–31. London: British Film Institute, 2001. Shaviro, Steven. Post-Cinematic Affect. Winchester: O Books, 2009.

24   Carlo Cenciarelli Shaw-Miller, Simon. Eye hEar: The Visual in Music. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Smith, Jacob. “Listening to Film Sound.” The Cine-Files 8 (Spring 2015, “Dossier on Film Sound”). Tan, Siu-Lan, Annabel J. Cohen, Scott D. Lipscomb, and Roger A. Kendall, eds. The Psychology of Music in Multimedia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Thorau, Christian, and Hansjakob Ziemer, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. van Maas, Sander, ed. Thresholds of Listening: Sound, Technics, Space. New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Ward, Meredith. Static in the System: Noise and the Soundscape of American Cinema Culture. Berkeley: California University Press, 2019. Whittington, William. Sound Design and Science Fiction. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. Winters, Ben. Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film: Shared Concert Experiences in Screen Fiction. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014.

pa rt I

GE N E A L O GI E S AND BE GI N N I NG S

chapter 1

“ Deeds of M usic ” i n Bou rgeois Oper a ( W h at the Listen er Sees  .  .   .   ) Peter Franklin

My aim here is to align two long-standing suspicions I have about the relationship between musical reception and film, and then to raise some questions about a specific example of what might be called “cinematic listening” that has been turned back into something more like “musical seeing.” The first suspicion (which I cannot elevate to the status of a theory, as it is unprovable), concerns the relevance of the notion of cinematic listening to the popular reception of symphonic music in the nineteenth century; the second, more firmly grounded, is that a form of that mode of reception was itself one of the sources of later cinematic narrative techniques. The promised questions will concern the connection of lay audiences’ symphonic listening to post-Wagnerian European opera, ca. 1885–1920, and of both listening and opera to the pre-cinematic experience of metropolitan theatre in the same period, when mass-entertainment was mobilizing the various technologies of modernity. At the heart of this essay will be an 1856 German story, by the Swiss writer Gottfried Keller, that was inspired by a newspaper report of the double suicide of two young lovers. In its turn that story inspired an opera that inspired a film whose narrative goal, like that of Keller’s tale, was to be a country inn that stands almost as a symbol of the genre in which it was created—a story of poor folk for bourgeois readers who might sigh and shed a tear before setting it aside as a piece of popular entertainment that had aspired to art. The inn was called “The Paradise Garden.” After the death of the house’s eccentric owner, Keller tells us that it fell into disuse until adopted as a hostelry “frequented by the lower classes, children of poor farmers and labourers and all kinds of vagabonds.” Just such were the story’s protagonists and their real-life originals.1

28   Peter Franklin

Wagner’s Deeds Wagner and the Leitmotiv are invoked with almost ritualistic frequency in discussions of classical Hollywood cinema. I will nevertheless begin by proposing that it might be no less important to invoke cinema in the discussion of Wagner—particularly when considering his mature music dramas as examples of what Adorno would simply call “Bourgeois Opera.” Adorno did so in a curious, intriguing essay in Klangfiguren.2 His label is one that I want to retain, with its powerful aura of twentieth-century Marxist cultural criticism, as suggestive of the way in which late nineteenth-century European opera came both to reflect and to arouse the subjectivity in whose construction it participated. It mediated influentially between the public and the private in a theatrical space hedged by moral and ideological censorship. Opera was also characterized by subtle and complex ways of secretly subverting that censorship by how it addressed its subject matter and its growing entertainment-hungry audience, eager for escapism. That, of course, is deliberately to locate this kind of opera where its many contemporary critics often placed it: in a territory scarred by contestation between high aesthetics and “low” entertainment, between decent expression of the highest values and the potentially manipulative pandering to audiences’ increasing appetite for pleasurable distraction. Pleasure was the domain of sensation, of spectacle and identificatory “involvement” with dramas of love and power, of aspiration tragically thwarted or miraculously consummated. Their music, as Brecht would intemperately suggest in 1935, could appear to turn spectators into “helpless and involuntary victims of the unchecked lurchings of their emotions.”3 Adorno’s view of all this would be coruscatingly elaborated in his 1933 Versuch über Wagner, in which he characterized the composer as a self-made bourgeois Artist who leapt across the footlights to appropriate the musical theatrical stage and make it his own, “beating” time as conductor-composer, and “beating” his audience into perhaps willing submission.4 What Wagner, in 1872, famously called his “deeds of music made visible”5 (ersichtlich gewordene Thaten der Musik), inevitably and precisely anticipated what Adorno believed to be the lamentable products of popular cinema, peddling ideological conformity under the banner of diverting the masses with consumable sensation. I shall aim to adopt a less prescriptive, more neutral approach, since I discuss here things that large numbers of people, bourgeois and otherwise, have both loved and enjoyed—I include myself, thus properly marked as a vulnerable figure within Adorno’s stern critical frame. I nevertheless take some courage from the ambivalence of that essay on “Bourgeois Opera.” In it, Adorno, canny bourgeois critic that he was, tacitly admitted to having learned as a child to be “bowled over by opera and to respond to its outrageous requirements,” while noting scornfully (perhaps regretfully?) that its canonic works “have long since been relegated to the living-room treasure-chests of the petty bourgeoisie.”6 Given the implied deadness and experientially devitalized character of those canonized “treasure-chest” works, Adorno believed that opera must now want to dispense with its

“Deeds of Music” in Bourgeois Opera   29 own illusionary aspect. The critical child in him also accepted that “to present a Lohengrin in which the swan is replaced by a beam of light” would be to attack “the premise of the entire work . . . to such an extent as to be rendered pointless.”7 I note the silent critical implication that there was or had been a point to such naturalistic intention behind the composer’s stage directions. I have identified elsewhere what might objectively be called the “proto-cinematic” aspects of Wagner’s mature music dramas and the way in which his descriptions of symphonic music, including his own overtures, could be deemed early models of “cinematic listening.”8 Here the concept relates not only to the rich visual imagery of those descriptions, but also to their implied effects of montage and their jump cuts signaled by Wagner’s recurring punctuation of them with phrases like “We see . . . ,” “There then appears . . . .” The following comes from his elucidation of the Tannhäuser prelude: As night breaks, magic sights and sounds appear: a rosy mist floats up and exultant shouts assail our ear. The whirlings of a fearsomely voluptuous dance are seen.9

My concern is to identify the relationship of such descriptions to preceding, as well as to later forms, in an historical narrative that is not, however, simply progressive in some evolutionary sense. It can as well be read backwards as forwards. The mature music dramas were not simply “products” of Wagner’s own theorizing about the redeeming union of opera and the Beethovenian symphony—of the more frivolous with the more serious, of the still socially and culturally high-status historical form of opera with what he hoped might be something more inclusively transcendent and universal. Wagner’s “deeds of music” nevertheless required not only a new kind of theatrical space but also a special compositional approach; this would unify the formal elements of conventional opera and give them consistent dramatic significance and purpose. Those “deeds of music” were further characterized by an immersive theatrical, musical-dramatic manner that seemed somehow born out of the music: music made visible as action. This incidentally threatened to collapse the ideological binary between Absolute and Programmatic music, between what were deemed music’s elite and popular modes of reception, in an implicitly morganatic marriage of high and low. It was something Adorno affected to mock, but we might equally view it in an unpartisan way, as of considerable cultural and historical interest. The mixed generic nature of that morganatic marriage characterized city-center cinematic experience in the “silent” era, where orchestras were employed, but it has been further historically elucidated by James Q. Davies in a fascinating article on one possible, decidedly “popular” source of Wagner’s transitional study in turning Romantic opera into the music-drama: The Flying Dutchman (1843).10 The source to which Davies devotes most of his article was a popular theatrical melodrama which Heine could well have seen in London in 1827, on the evidence of an episode in the poet’s 1833 “Memoirs of Herr Schnabelewopski.” This refers to a scene in which the melodrama’s “young heroine contemplates a portrait of the Flying Dutchman.”11 Heine’s ironic account may in turn have inspired Wagner’s conception of Senta’s ballad, which the composer believed to

30   Peter Franklin contain “the thematic germ of the whole music of the opera.”12 Davies elaborates on the much-discussed suggestion that Wagner, via Heine, might have referenced precisely that popular melodrama, whose full title was The Flying Dutchman; or, The Phantom Ship. Davies describes it in some detail, categorizing it as “a colonial melodrama by Edward Ball, a.k.a. ‘The Terrible Fitzball’.”13 Whatever the truth of the connection between Wagner’s Holländer and Fitzball’s Dutchman (other versions of the tale were to be found on both sides of the English Channel), anxiety about the cross-generic, low-to-high-art transfer manifest themselves intriguingly in nervous doubt about Heine’s source, as expressed perhaps a little too tendentiously in 1992 by Barry Millington in The Wagner Compendium: the play is a farcical trifle, as evidenced by the printer’s preface, which congratulates the author on a piece in which “mirth and moonshine—murder and merriment— fire and fun, are so happily blended!” . . . But it is unlikely that either Fitzball’s execrable doggerel or his frothy treatment of the nautical yarn, which ends with much waving of the British flag and shouts of “Huzza!,” would have inspired Heine.14

Tenuous it may be, but the connection and efforts to deny it are instructive on many levels. After all, Wagner’s Holländer can easily be linked to other popular Romantic tales and operas like Weber’s Der Freischütz (1821), itself originating in a widely-read collection of ghost stories. I will return to the subject of popular melodramas, with their rich musical accompaniment, sensational subjects (often derived from current successful novels) and elaborate scenic devices. For the moment I want rather to move from that Adornian slant on the mixed and apparently opposing taste levels on which Wagner’s music dramas worked to one of their most significant legacies to post-Wagnerian opera: the orchestral interlude, born out of material necessity (to cover scene changes), but rapidly growing in musico-dramatic significance. Here my recommended guide must be Christopher Morris, whose 2002 book Reading Opera Between the Lines focused on the exemplary way in which the orchestral interlude in Wagnerian and post-Wagnerian opera appeared to re-inscribe the high, “Absolute” aesthetic of the Beethoven symphony (also contradictorily embraced by Wagner), bringing forth pure music out of the illusory appearances of the scenic drama.15 On the other hand, that music (as in Siegfried’s “Rhine Journey” or the Götterdämmerung “Funeral Music”) often proved not only programmatic, in its relation to and of narrative events, but elsewhere able to bypass the censors (actual or internalized) to reveal not elevated “spirit” but bodiliness and even sexuality that positively invited the kind of “musical seeing” that I am proposing as the correlative of cinematic listening. The end of Act I of Die Walküre is a celebrated early example: the urgent, excited rush to the long-awaited final cadence brings the act to a joyous end after the curtain “falls quickly,” twenty-three bars before the resounding closure in G major. Which is to speak in “purely musical” terms, of course. Only the most obtuse of audiences would fail to notice that the music more convincingly depicts something the transgressive new brother-and-sister lovers must clearly do before they take flight in anticipation of

“Deeds of Music” in Bourgeois Opera   31 Hunding’s wrath—something that will lead to Sieglinde having become pregnant with Siegfried (as Brünnhilde assures her) when we next encounter her some way into that long theatrical night before the fight in which both Brünnhilde and Wotan intervene before Siegmund and Hunding will die. Wagner precisely directs that the Act I curtain be lowered as if to protect the singers from having to appear to perform on stage what the music unequivocally presents as a short, passionately triumphant sex-scene. For the professional critics (guardians of pure musical mysteries, given to assurances of organic unity that betokened spiritual transcendence), later, and longer, deliberately graphic musical love scenes—read sex-scenes—in, for example, Massenet’s Esclarmonde or Strauss’s Feuersnot, proved as embarrassing as they were infuriating, as signs of music’s inexorable debasement.16

Music and Spectacle in the Popular Theatre If we seem to be slipping rather too lightly into serious and thorny matters of musical meaning, then so much the better. They have perhaps always been only as thorny or as abstractly “serious” as the dominant cultural discourse has chosen to permit. It is here that I need to return to the subject of theatrical melodrama. Davies, like other scholars in the field, draws attention to the “burletta laws” that were in force in the earlier nineteenth century in Edward Fitzball’s London. Apparently grounded on a quasi-legal assumption of music’s innocence of all meaning and seriousness until or unless proved otherwise, popular or “illegitimate” theatre was denied the right to present dialogue, or indeed any speech that was not accompanied and thereby effectively drowned or muted by musical accompaniment. Post-French-Revolutionary anxieties may have justified this curious reinforcement of the ideology of musical meaninglessness. Davies suggests that the requirement for the “perpetual presence of melody and ­harmony” (note the harmony—meaninglessness of course always means something) ensured that “melodramatic music generally was heard both by audiences and by the characters onstage as menacing, as a sign of Evil Intent.”17 Yet the musically censored form learned subversive ways of circumventing its enforced meaninglessness: in the melodramatic theatre it adopted a generically confusing mixture of “dance, dumbshow, burlesque, farce, opera and drama,”18 deliberately becoming what Davies calls “a moving target cooperatively engineered to resist lawful classification.” He thus describes it “not as a form or genre (musical or otherwise), but as a social category.”19 Davies goes on to point out that the aims of “enforced musicalization” failed: In fact, the persistence of music—far from arresting clear expression—gave melodrama an enormous, enabling energy . . . though actors had been condemned to pantomime and song, to being drowned out by the orchestra, they in fact achieved

32   Peter Franklin heightened intelligibility by speaking through the music, by struggling over and against its imposition.20

Davies admits that his reading of the situation is tendentiously political. His characterization of early nineteenth-century melodrama as generating “a counter-discursive theatre”21 is perhaps best modified by turning to the later chapters of Michael Pisani’s richly interesting book Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth-Century London and New York. This offers, in effect, an historical account of what we might call  the “bourgeoisification” of metropolitan melodrama.22 Napoleon seems to have responded to the counter-discursive tendency of French melodrama by attempting to restrict its popular spread, limiting it to designated “Royal Theatres.” Pisani reinforces the cultural positioning of the medium by insisting on the term “popular drama” to cover the many types of melodrama he describes.23 Nevertheless, in London, for example, the gradual widening of the social base of the popular theatrical audience (Victoria and Albert were to grace it with their royal presence)24 seems also to have entailed a creeping appropriation by entrepreneurial actor-managers of melodrama’s theatrical manners and technologies in the performance of supposedly high-culture poets and writers (Shakespeare amongst them). Attention to the music quickly followed, favoring the employment of “name” composers like Arthur Sullivan, Charles Villiers Stanford, and Edward German, rather in the way that Vaughan Williams, Alwyn, and Walter Goehr would venture into film music composition a few decades later. Nineteenth-century popular dramas were characterized by sensational staging effects and powerfully engineered climaxes, both emotional and scenic. As ephemeral, crossgeneric entertainments feeding off the established forms of canonic high culture, their influence seems to have spread in inverse proportion to their ability or need to survive as integrated “texts,” as “works” in their own right. Long gone are grandiose spectacles like Henry Irving’s production of Tennyson’s Queen Mary (1876), which nearly had a score by Stanford, or like his lavish stagings of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with a score by Sir Julius Benedict in 1882, or Macbeth with music by Arthur Sullivan in 1888.25 Sullivan returned to the melodramatic theatre to score J. Comyns Carr’s 1895 King Arthur, which had highly elaborate sets designed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones. Indeed Shakespeare and historical romance seem to have played a similar role in the attempt to raise the status of melodrama to “high art” as they would in film of the 1920s and 1930s. Pisani’s description of the elaborately proto-cinematic scenic musical theatre of King Arthur provokes me to envisage an inchoate category of popular musical theatre embracing such works but situated consistently somewhat outside the temple of High Art by being too ­obviously sensational, too richly spectacular, too pleasurable as “entertainment.” The category would include opera and even other ostensibly “musical” genres that may have contributed to and learned from productions like King Arthur. In its musicallyunderscored Prologue, Arthur received Excalibur from the fabled lake as a solo-violin motif rose out of a shimmering string tremolando. In Act One, the king assembled his knights for a quest whose nature was revealed only as the hall darkened, thunder rolled and lightning flashed before an orchestral Grail motif accompanied a beam of light

“Deeds of Music” in Bourgeois Opera   33 revealing a vision of a maiden bearing the miraculous vessel.26 Pisani adds: “Much of the act used music in a similar way, running in subordinate fashion under a long dialogue sequence in order to culminate in some visual moment for which the music moves into the foreground.”27 This is the enacted musical seeing, one of Wagner’s “deeds of music,” that might be the historical precursor or indeed companion of cinematic listening, in one interpretation of that phrase. It indicates for me why the historical stage directions and scenic descriptions of operas from the period are, pace the now culturally powerful directors and regisseurs who have other ideas, so fascinating and revealing. Think, for example, of the experience of David Belasco’s influential turn-of-the-century extravaganzas that survive in the vestiges of their staging lodged in the scores of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly or The Girl of the Golden West (Puccini, a composer resolutely excluded from the temple of high art in the early twentieth century).28 This leads me to my selected, perhaps cautionary, example of one film director’s attempt to “realize” the first of the orchestral interludes discussed by Christopher Morris in Reading Opera Between the Lines. I refer to “The Walk to the Paradise Garden” from Delius’s 1907 opera A Village Romeo and Juliet.

Weigl’s “Walk” Pisani’s observation about melodramatic music moving “into the foreground” to accompany some culminatory “visual moment,” points interestingly, if contradictorily, to the genre of the operatic orchestral interlude. Its apparent reinstatement of “pure” music is something Morris questions in his analysis of operatic interludes as modelling graphically meaningful streams of pleasurable subjective consciousness, visualizable “quasi cinematically”29 as narratives of bodiliness and sexuality, or as dynamic streams of images in which—as I would now put it—the bourgeois subject releases the tension of growing identificatory involvement with the drama in a form of intense “cinematic listening,” as co-creator in private of the musico-dramatic work being experienced in sight and sound. Here music even seems in some sense to have taken back the role envisaged by James Davies for those subversive melodramatic actors, who were forced to articulate their feelings and meaning through and in spite of it. But this music speaks in many tongues, including perhaps that of a Narrator who frames and structures the characters’ story. I am not sure I agree with Morris that the implication of such a thing in the cinema would ultimately be a black screen, with continued underscoring (like the end of Die Walküre Act I after the curtain falls).30 Certainly modern opera directors can now rarely tolerate a correspondingly “black” or empty stage—even for an overture. Sir Thomas Beecham insisted in 1920 that Delius’s interlude should be implicitly staged. For all its practical origin in the need for time to change the scene between the fifth and the final “picture” or “tableau” of Delius’s opera,31 Beecham wanted to guide the audience in the necessary technique of musical seeing it seemed to invite, and so had the curtain briefly

34   Peter Franklin raised on the ill-fated lovers walking to the inn that is called “The Paradise Garden,” where they will re-encounter their strange mentor, the Dark Fiddler.32 There, poor and dispossessed, literally as well as metaphorically left with nowhere else to go, they tacitly agree to commit suicide together, casting out into the river in a barge whose bilge-plug they pull. The relevant portion of Petr Weigl’s 1989 film of the opera (utilizing appropriate Swiss locations with young actors rather awkwardly lip-synching to Helen Field, as Vrenchen, and Arthur Davies, as Sali) offers both an illustration of and provocation for further thought about musical seeing of this kind.33 Does it drag Delius down into the debased cinematic world of film- and TV-ads, or rather reveal something about the mixed generic category I have proposed? It is quite a complex piece of filming, using “silent” shot/reverse-shot sequences to suggest shared interiority, but otherwise perhaps imposing an over-literal cinematic narrative of “the walk” that becomes repressive of other more sensitively imagined virtual montages of images and reflections back and forth, in and about the drama of which it forms an integral “scene.” These Morris links to what he calls “the broader plots of shared understanding that made such music meaningful” in the period.34 This striking example of cinematic listening, “realized” and turned back into a stretch of musical seeing nevertheless merits closer examination. On one level, in the light of comments just made, it presents a challenge, even an affront, to one type of listener, one type of bourgeois opera-goer for whom this interlude is a cue to close one’s eyes—not upon some unlikely vision of the abstract, geometrical shapes so often associated with notions of pure or “absolute” music, but with a more concretely and personally realized version of what that music might, in context, express (“more potently than mere words,” as we sometimes say). This might awaken or animate an associative inner vision, born perhaps out of intimate memories, that could indeed “bring tears to the eyes.” At first Weigl seems naturalistically intent upon following the lovers as they walk away from the town and its bustling fair. They complete a Romantic journey from the world of urban modernity (we glimpse buildings associated with a modern industrial cityscape as they cross the bridge) into a more pristine, unpeopled Nature. Its nostalgic character is heightened by their passage through the ruin of a modern building once used and inhabited, but which now acts as the gateway to a kind of Urwald, which becomes the idealized context of their deferred or even somehow bypassed eroticism. The music’s relation to Wagner’s Tristan is nevertheless emphasized by the E major/ minor–B major cadence figure, linked by a rising upper line from B through C-sharp to D-sharp, that is explicitly quoted, six bars after cue 52.35 Its cumulative, seemingly tragic intensity seems to derive its character from an overlaying of Sali and Vrenchen’s bodily, erotic anticipation with a wider burden of nostalgic regret—the sadness, perhaps, of such passion remembered—in which the Narrator’s voice subsumes those of the ill-fated young lovers. Wilfrid Mellers’s occasional, but always illuminating, references to Delius include a sensitive assessment of “The Walk to The Paradise Garden” as “miraculously poignant but consistently elegiac.”36 A little earlier in Caliban Reborn he had ventured this characterization of Delius’s style:

“Deeds of Music” in Bourgeois Opera   35 the contrast between the chromaticism of the harmony and the pentatonic tendency of the melody produces, in Delius’s most characteristic music, the pronouncedly nostalgic flavour which differentiates it from Wagner: it longs for a lost Eden, not for a Paradise Regained.37

Much of this is subtly realized in Weigl’s cinematic staging of the entire Walk, which seems intent upon opening the inner eye of the music and showing us what it perhaps “sees” (as we might, if left to our own devices). The young lovers leave the social bustle, and the gossiping and prying inhabitants of the town and its fair, and cross the bridge in search of the out-of-town inn which Sali has heard about. They do so in an attempt not least to lose their middle-class inhibitions and self-consciousness, exacerbated by the significant looks of former neighbors who spot them at the fair and know what their foolish parents did to pitch their children into their current sorry plight. Gottfried Keller, author of the 1856 story from which Delius’s libretto was derived, had his Sali exclaim: “Let’s go and join the poor folk, that’s where we really belong, and they won’t look down on us there. People always dance in the Garden of Paradise when the Fair is here.”38 But, as we know, it is in that short journey, dwelt upon by Delius (it barely figures in Keller’s story), that everything (and nothing) happens. Weigl’s first significant contribution, after showing Sali and Vrenchen walking together across the bridge out of town, apparently at twilight, is to have them pause, shortly after Cue 39 in the score—the labelled beginning of “The Walk to the Paradise Garden” (Lento molto)—and exchange subtly meaningful looks in a shot/reverse-shot sequence. Vrenchen’s suddenly intensely serious demeanor awakens in Sali (played with great sensitivity by Michal Dlouhy) an expression that suggests growing comprehension of her unspoken meaning (see Figure 1.1 and Video 1.1). They are crossing a boundary that they cannot re-cross. Is their fate already sealed? There follows the passage through the remains of the largely collapsed and disused building which provides a kind of gateway into an Edenic fantasy-world (we know from the sunshine suddenly glimpsed through the trees that it must be a fantasy). They enter the welcoming wood via another, now rustic, wooden bridge; shortly they come across a clearing where a secluded lake is fed by a magical waterfall. This coincides with the central section of The Walk, where Beecham had the curtain raised and where the audience saw the two lovers pause to embrace and kiss, as they do here. But now we see more. Sali opens his little case on the grass, which proves to be a rather tidily-packed middleclass picnic basket whose contents he prepares to lay out. Suddenly noticing that Vrenchen has disappeared, he turns to see her bathing in the waterfall, wearing just a white shift (she has left her dress in the bushes). The erotic promise of this sight encourages him to follow suit, and the interlude’s climax finds Vrenchen now watching Sali in the waterfall, naked to the waist in his long “period” underwear. Wet, but in pure white, they reunite on the grassy bank for a brief love-scene in which his hand tentatively finds her breast, but is pushed gently away. They nevertheless passionately kiss and embrace, but are soon seen walking on, fully dressed, towards the inn (see Figure 1.2 and Video 1.2).

36   Peter Franklin

Figure 1.1 Weigl’s A Village Romeo & Juliet: (a) Vrenchen and Sali begin their “Walk to the Paradise Garden”; (b/c) Vrenchen and Sali communicate silently on the bridge.

Video 1.1 Weigl’s A Village Romeo & Juliet; Sali and Vrenchen begin their Walk to the Paradise Garden. ORF Symphonieorchester, Sir Charles Mackerras. Mediascope & Decca Music Group DVD video 074 177-9, 1992.

To watch, to describe this scene, with its own integral thematization of acts of erotic watching, is inevitably to confront its modern filmic sources or equivalents in the potentially kitsch, soft-porn eroticism of TV advertisements for any number of commodities, from hair shampoo to deodorant—and then, perhaps, to regret having made the connection and to try to concentrate on the evident subtlety and faithfulness of Weigl’s assumed intention here. Has this realized “cinematic seeing” revealed or obscured a connection between the many mind’s-eye interpretations of the interlude

“Deeds of Music” in Bourgeois Opera   37

Figure 1.2 Weigl’s A Village Romeo & Juliet; Vrenchen and Sali beside the waterfall.

Video 1.2 Weigl’s A Village Romeo & Juliet; The climax of The Walk to the Paradise Garden sequence (at the end, Sali and Vrenchen soon appear upon the rustic bridge, fully clothed, to continue on their way to the inn and their eventual suicide). ORF Symphonieorchester, Sir Charles Mackerras. Mediascope & Decca Music Group DVD video 074 177-9, 1992.

which audiences might have been expected to make, encouraged by Delius’s narrating musical voice? Has it enhanced our understanding of what Delius might have been trying to express, inspired by Keller’s text, or have its frank naturalism and contemporary references to comparable cinematic scenes, supported by music of this kind, debased or obscured its sought-after authenticity? Weigl extends Beecham’s nervous decision to raise the curtain for a glimpse of what an inattentive and distractible audience might have been intended to “see” as they listened before the closed proscenium curtains; has he trumped or subverted that move? There can be no answer free of socio-cultural implications or pressures in a world now habituated both to musically accompanied love- or sex-scenes, and the ironic or humorously embarrassed mockery of such things that has become an almost clichéd response to musically heightened cinematic eroticism. Perhaps the varied, inexact mind’s-eye “cinematic seeings” of this (just) pre-cinematic operatic interlude, with their charge of remembered desires or intimacy and their securely protected privacy from the subjective imaginings of one’s neighbors in the public theatre, are what gave the interlude that effect of dramatic and emotional intensity that assured its frequent repetition as an independent concert item, and later as a popular inclusion in record compilations. Between the proto-cinematic chemistry of this meeting of scenic practicality with musical invention and regret at the post-cinematic “fixing” of that once hovering envisionment lies a still too rarely traced cultural history of one generation’s aesthetic entertainment becoming part of the historical vocabulary of later mass culture, albeit no less complex and subtle in its way.

38   Peter Franklin Christopher Morris begins the final paragraph of his chapter on the Delius interlude by suggesting that (“on first observation”) its “whole thrust . . . seems to be towards escapism, isolation, and autonomy,” suggesting that the specific character of that escapism is towards “nature” and away from “corrupt social existence.”39 He concludes that paragraph, however, by conceding that Nature, as construed by Delius, is more than a pastoral metaphysics, and his music here asserts its relation to the body in its capacity to assume a narrative burden alongside word and image.40

Morris’s interpretation moves from the aesthetic experience of “escapism” as being towards “autonomy” (with its late-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century freight of abstract idealism—arguably always a mask for the practice of “cinematic listening”), towards a music whose bodiliness is linked to narrative, word, and image. This is what Weigl’s cinematic “Walk to the Paradise Garden” realizes as an imaginatively imposed reading that could invite a revised version of the critique of Hollywood film in the 1940s. Was film here tending to trivialize and render into cliché what the untethered music could even more “cinematically” release in the mind of its theatrical listener, deprived of external scenic “seeing”? That critique of Hollywood music, most clearly encountered in Adorno and Eisler’s famous 1947 study Composing for the Films,41 always echoed the haughtily elitist highculture interdict against the implied desecration of “translating” music’s secret truths into the subjective vernacular of common bourgeois or petit-bourgeois concert-goers (worse still, of the “maid servants” for whom Adorno considered Schreker’s protocinematic opera Der ferne Klang, with its even longer last-act orchestral interlude, to have been best suited).42 Liszt’s “New German School” programmaticism of the 1850s was closely linked to Wagner’s project in the music-drama, and both had often been regarded rather like Keller’s description of the “Paradise Garden” quoted at the outset here: the home of a “rich eccentric” and his fantasies, now stripped of its riches (and its numinous power?) and filled with an inn-keeper’s means for satisfying the “escapist” desires of “the lower classes, children of poor farmers and laborers, and all kinds of vagabonds.” Perhaps not only its appearance, but also its function might nevertheless have remained oddly unchanged—think less of the glitterati in their boxes than of the impecunious denizens of the fourth balcony, of “the gods” in turn-of-the-century opera houses. To criticize Weigl for a kind of desecration of Delius might therefore be to echo criticism of the very type of post-Wagnerian opera that the composer was creating in A Village Romeo and Juliet—one in which the cinematic seeing and feeling of a later age were being prepared with literally visionary mastery. Would it be entirely irrelevant to suggest that “deeds of music” were being democratized there in precisely the way Wagner had once intended? Or perhaps Weigl’s young lovers, at home neither in the bourgeois world they have now lost, nor the bohemian “vagabond” world to which

“Deeds of Music” in Bourgeois Opera   39 the Dark Fiddler would entice them, have come to know by the end of their walk what the bohemian Delius had known or simply longed to recapture at the start of his interlude’s “longing for a lost Eden.” That knowledge of a certain kind of “innocence,” defined by desires hedged and heightened by internalized mechanisms of repression, admitted a kind of experience that was almost already lost to Weigl’s late twentieth-century audience, for all its familiarity with the cinematic fantasies to which such things had helped to give birth.

Notes 1. Keller’s story was Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe. The quotations here are from Three German Classics, Immensee, Lenz, A Village Romeo and Juliet (London: Calder and Boyars, 1966), 173; the translator of A Village Romeo is Ronald Taylor. Where Taylor’s inn is called the “Garden of Paradise,” I have adopted the simpler “Paradise Garden” to harmonize with the libretto of Delius’s opera, discussed in what follows. 2. The translation by David Levin in his Opera Through Other Eyes (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 25–43, is revised by Rodney Livingstone in his complete translation of Theodor Adorno, Sound Figures (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 15–28. 3. “On the Use of Music in Epic Theatre,” in Brecht on Theatre ed. John Willett (London: Methuen and New York: Hill and Wang, 1964/1974, with later reprints), 89. 4. Translated as Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: NLB 1981). 5. In his essay “On the name ‘Musikdrama’,” in Richard Wagner, Actors & Singers, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 302. 6. Livingstone translation in Adorno, Sound Figures, 26. 7. Ibid., 16. 8. See Peter Franklin, “Underscoring Drama—Picturing Music,” in Wagner & Cinema ed. Joe Jeongwon Joe & Sander  L.  Gilman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 46–64, in particular 52–55. 9. Richard Wagner, Judaism in Music and Other Essays, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 230. 10. James Q. Davies, “Melodramatic Possessions: The Flying Dutchman, South Africa, and the Imperial Stage, ca. 1830,” The Opera Quarterly, 21, no.3 (2005): 496–514: 497. 11. Davies, “Melodramatic Possessions,” 497. 12. Wagner, “A Communication to My Friends” (1851), in Richard Wagner, The Art-Work of the Future and Other Works (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 370. 13. Davies, “Melodramatic Possessions,” 496. (Edward Ball was also known as Edward Fitzball). 14. Barry Millington, ed. The Wagner Compendium. A Guide to Wagner’s Life and Music (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 277. 15. Christopher Morris, Reading Opera Between the Lines. Orchestral Interludes and Cultural Meaning from Wagner to Berg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 16. Both of these operas, and their musical love-scenes, are discussed by Morris in his Chapter 2. “What the conductor saw,” in Morris, Reading Opera Between the Lines, 38–67. 17. Davies, “Melodramatic Possessions,” 503.

40   Peter Franklin 18. Ibid, 504. 19. All from Ibid., 504. 20. Ibid., 503. 21. Ibid., 502. 22. Michael V. Pisani, Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth-Century London and New York (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014). 23. Ibid., xi–xii. 24. In Pisani, Music for the Melodramatic Theatre, 186, we learn that Victoria and Albert saw Boucicault’s spectacular The Colleen Bawn at the Adelphi no fewer than three times. 25. Ibid., 250–8. 26. Ibid., 271. 27. Ibid., 273. 28. See Richard Leppert, Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), ch. 1, “The Civilizing Process. Music and the Aesthetics of Time-Space Relations in The Girl of the Golden West,” 21–55. 29. Morris, Reading Opera Between the Lines, 207. 30. Ibid. 31. In its revised form, Delius presented the opera in German as a “Lyrisches Drama in Sechs Bildern” (literally “Lyrical Drama in Six Pictures,” although the term “scene” would be as appropriate an English equivalent as the term “tableau” used in the published, bilingual Universal-Edition score). The revised score of 1931 includes directions about the opening and closing of the curtain in the interlude as detailed later in this chapter. 32. The “Dark Fiddler” (Schwarze Geiger—“black fiddler” in Keller and in Delius’s German character-list) is a wandering “vagabond” or gypsy who owned the land over which Sali’s and Vrenchen’s fathers had fought; in Keller, Vrenchen’s father complains that he “spends half his time with the gypsies, the other half playing for village dances” (Three German Classics, 105); he is both a Pan-like embodiment of Romantic “Nature” and a tempting, amoral, and potentially anarchic fiddler-Devil. 33. Delius, A Village Romeo and Juliet. ORF Symphonieorchester, Sir Charles Mackerras. A film by Petr Weigl. Mediascope & Decca Music Group DVD video 074 177–79, 1992. 34. Morris, Reading Opera Between the Lines, 30. 35. In Tristan it supports Isolde’s final words “versinken, unbewusst, höchste Lust!” 36. Wilfrid Mellers, Caliban Reborn. Renewal in Twentieth-Century Music (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1968), 41. 37. Ibid., 40. 38. Gottfried Keller, “A Village Romeo and Juliet,” trans. Ronald Taylor, in Three German Classics, 173. 39. Morris, Reading Opera Between the Lines, 36. 40. Ibid., 37. 41. Theodor Adorno & Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (London and Atlantic Highlands: The Athlone Press, 1994 [1947]). 42. The Adorno quotation comes from a letter to Alban Berg, see Henri Lonitz, ed. Theodor Adorno and Alban Berg: Correspondence 1925–1935, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 150.

“Deeds of Music” in Bourgeois Opera   41

Select Bibliography Franklin, Peter. Reclaiming Late-Romantic Music. Singing Devils and Distant Sounds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Grimley, Daniel. Delius and the Sound of Place. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Morris, Christopher. Reading Opera Between the Lines. Orchestral Interludes and Cultural Meaning from Wagner to Berg. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.  Pisani, Michael  V. Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth-Century London & New York. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014.

chapter 2

Hea r i ng th e Sh a dows at the Ch at Noir ’s Pr e- ci n em atic Theatr e Emilio Sala

Although the prefix may suggest otherwise, pre-cinema studies have not been affected by what Marc Bloch, in his discussion of teleological historiography, calls an “obsession with origins.”1 Beginning with Mémoires de l’ombre et du son: une archéologie de l’audio-visuel by Jacques Perriault (published in 1981), and developed particularly in France over the last three decades, the study of pre-cinema screen practices was immediately influenced by Michel Foucault and his archeological approach, which rejected the diachronic coherence of traditional history.2 For Foucault’s archaeology, the past is not an origin of the present; it is not something in which the present must recognize itself. Rather than go in search of the “origins” of our identity in order to reaffirm it, the archeological method reveals its “multiple beginnings” so as to show how in all existing identities we may also identify missed opportunities, unrealized possibilities, and alternative trajectories. As Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka have pointed out, the discovery of the “archeological” dimension of media has culminated in opening up a wider research field—that of media archaeology—into which also pre-cinema studies have been gradually subsumed.3 In this context, we certainly cannot underestimate the impact of sound studies, one of whose founding fathers—Rick Altman—is also, and not by chance, a silent cinema historian.4 In the methodological introduction to his book Silent Film Sound (2004), Altman put at the center of attention “the extremely diverse pre-cinema sound practices that served as early models for film sound.”5 Combining approaches from musicology and sound studies, this chapter analyzes some of these “pre-cinema sound practices”—specifically those of the Chat Noir’s Shadow Theatre between 1885 and 1897. What musics were used to accompany the shadows at Montmartre? How was this aural and visual experience

Hearing the Shadows    43 remediated after the closure of the Chat Noir? And what can all this tell us about the ­pre-cinematic history of cinematic listening?

The Second Chat Noir and Its Shadow Theatre The cabaret of the Chat Noir was founded in Montmartre (Boulevard Rochechouart, Paris) in 1881. Such was its success that its proprietor and director Rodolphe Salis, a failed painter from Châtellerau, was soon forced to find a new venue at which to welcome its expanding clientele. In 1885 the widely circulated weekly magazine of the same name, also owned by Salis, published on its front page a grandiloquent announcement of a move that would become a memorable event in the cultural and social history of the “City of Lights”: From 15 to 20 May in this year of Our Lord 1885, Montmartre, the capital of Paris, will be shaken by one of those events which, sometimes, change the fact of the world. The cabaret of the Chat Noir will leave Boulevard Rochechouart, which has been for so long adorned by its presence, for its new home in the Rue de Laval.6

The rowdy event took place a month later, at midnight precisely. Accompanied by a carnivalesque fanfare, the procession of bohémiens made its way through the streets of Montmartre, singing in full voice the refrain from the Ballade du Chat Noir, composed and dedicated to Salis by Aristide Bruant.7 In its new premises in the Rue Laval (which in 1887 would become the Rue Victor Massé), the second Chat Noir opened up the bohemian subculture to the bourgeoisie. As Elena Cueto-Asín puts it, “There the cabaret became one of the most popular nightspots of the city, not only among artists and intellectuals but also among a curious bourgeois and tourist crowd ­anxious to be admitted to the busy locality to rub elbows with the extravagant world of bohemia.”8 By far the greatest attraction at the second Chat Noir was the Théâtre d’Ombres, which, with its first two major successes—Caran d’Ache’s L’épopée (December 27, 1886) and Henri Rivière’s La tentation de Saint Antoine (December 28, 1887)—was to become a regular feature of Tout Paris from the years 1886–1887 onwards. According to CuetoAsín, it was the Chat Noir’s Théâtre d’Ombres that triggered the process of transforming the bohemian avant-garde into a more commercialized mass-culture. Other scholars, such as Bernard Gendron, have underlined the importance of the Théâtre d’Ombres as emblematic of the change in culture that took place between the first and the second Chat Noir. In Gendron’s words: “The most palpable manifestation of this change was the gradual displacement of the older minimalist programs of alternating poets and singersongwriters by the extravaganzas of the shadow plays that became the rage of Paris.”9 But what were the consequences of this new alliance between bohemianism and

44   Emilio Sala commercial entertainment in performative and musical terms? Can observing the Chat Noir’s Shadow Theatre through the lens of film music practices help us understand some of the genealogies of cinematic listening? In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to examine more closely the material conditions of the shadow plays at the Chat Noir. Let us begin with its first two greatest successes. L’épopée dramatized the Napoleonic legend, as Maurice Talmeyr said, “in the spirit of a caricature and an epic at one and the same time.”10 The famous perspective and depth effects of the Chat Noir’s Shadow Theatre appeared for the first time in the thirty tableaux of this show. But what exactly happened during the performance, in terms of music and sound? According to Steven Moore Whiting, “While Caran d’Ache, [Alphonse] Allais, and [George] Auriol provided sound effects on a variety of percussion instruments, Salis narrated the plot with his usual display of verbal virtuosity, which excited as much admiration as the stunning silhouettes.”11 The pervasive use of sound effects and the importance of the commentary suggest both the tradition of popular storytelling and the soundscape of the early cinema.12 What needs to be added to Whiting’s description, however, is the importance of the music. All the witnesses agree on this point. In a notable article published in the newspaper Le Temps, even the name of the pianist who accompanied L’épopée is revealed: “when the little curtain went down on the transparent screen and the last chord of the poet-pianist Tinchant made me realise that the rehearsal was finished, I was profoundly moved because . . . I had the disturbing [troublante] revelation of epic grandeur [grandeur épique].”13 When Albert Tinchant’s music signaled the end of the performance, the reviewer seems to have emerged from a state of aural and visual absorption. We shall return to the notion of absorption, as conceptualized by Michael Fried in the field of painting, at the end of this chapter;14 but here we can already see how music contributes to it: if the sound effects behind the screen and the lecturer’s voice in the middle of the audience create an immersive participation space, Tinchant’s piano placed under the screen would seem to have encouraged a state of mental absorption. Another article, published in L’univers illustré, clearly underlines the relationship between Tinchant’s music, the sound effects from behind the scenes, and the voice of Salis in the theatre: A warlike march sounds on the pianoforte, the curtain rises, and then, for more than an hour, we see appearing before us the officers of the grande armée; we see the military encampment before the conflict, the battle of Austerlitz . . . The effect produced by these thousands of men in line, who present arms with the same automatic movement while the Emperor, followed by his general staff, reviews the troops, has to be seen. His silhouette becomes smaller and smaller as he moves away towards the horizon until, at the end, in the far distance a tiny emperor passes. And, to increase the illusion, behind the scenes there are ten or so people who intone the military commands in loud voices, produce musical sounds, beat drums and smoke enormous pipes, the smoke from which, rising in a spiral, gives the precise sensation of a battle. Everybody is moved; Salis calls out his “Long live the Emperor!,” which electrifies us, and we all applaud with the utmost enthusiasm.15

Hearing the Shadows    45 Tinchant’s music, the sound effects from behind the scenes, and the voice of the ­bonimenteur (extempore commentator) in the theatre can all be interpreted as elements that anticipate a dynamic interplay between screen space and audience space that would become characteristic of early cinema; they also suggest an oscillation or combination between modes of “distraction” and “immersion” that Elsaesser sees as central of the “cinema of attractions.” In this sense, the “attention economy” at the Shadow Theatre seems similar to that of early cinematic media, in that they both expose “the contradictions between Erfahrung and Erlebins (two kinds of ‘experience’: integrated and continuous vs. shock-like and intermittent).”16 This conceptual map, as we shall see, will be further complicated by the end of the chapter.17 Pictures of the Chat Noir’s Shadow Theatre quickly began to circulate. The theatre was located in the Salle des fêtes, on the second floor of the cabaret’s new premises. The première of L’épopée (December 27, 1886) was immortalized by Paul Merwaert in a ­drawing, now kept at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris, which portrays the most famous people present at the event including, amongst others, General Boulanger, Alphonse Daudet, Augusta Holmès, Francisque Sarcey, and Émile Zola. On either side of the screen can be seen Salis and the chansonnier Maurice MacNab, both standing. At the center, below the screen, there is a piano. Another picture was published in L’univers illustré of February 12, 1887 (Figure 2.1). In the accompanying text, we read: “Our artist, Mr. Tinayre, has faithfully reproduced the state of the theatre at the moment in which, with the gas lamps turned down, the scene of L’épopée moves across the screen, with a commentary performed by the marvellous gentilhomme-cabaretier [Salis] and greeted without fail by the enthusiastic acclaim of the audience.” As in early cinema, the absorbing character of the show does not at all rule out a high level of audience participation. These considerations about sound, of course, rest on a broader understanding of the Chat Noir’s Shadow Theatre as a pre-cinematic model. In the L’univers illustré article mentioned above (published in 1887), we read that Caran d’Ache’s show consists of a succession of tableaux “whose effect is so prodigious that they give a compelling impression of reality and at the same time seem like an evocation.” As with cinematic representations, realism and oneirism stand here as two sides of the same coin. On this topic, Maurice Talmeyr writes that L’épopée poses a new and hitherto unknown question: that of the “impression of the crowds on the stage.”18 Referring to the Chinese shadows of the Chat noir, he adds that “the strongest impression of reality” he had ever experienced was produced “not by real soldiers, actually armed with real rifles . . . but by simulacra, the most fragile and impalpable of simulacra.”19 Let us now consider the second great success of the Théâtre d’Ombres of the Chat Noir: Henri Rivière’s La tentation di Saint Antoine (premiered on December 28, 1887). Unlike the musical accompaniment to Caran d’Ache’s play, about which very little is known, we have fairly detailed information about the music for Rivière’s “féerie à grand spectacle.” Le tentation de Saint Antoine was published, in fact, in the form of an ­illustrated oblong album (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie 1888), in which each of the odd-numbered pages (recto) contains one of Rivière’s pictures, while on the facing, even-numbered pages (verso) we see the corresponding music composed by Albert

46   Emilio Sala

Figure 2.1  Louis Tinayre, “A performance of L’épopée by Caran d’Ache at the Chat Noir,” in L’univers illustré, February 12, 1887: the figure of Salis is circled in white.

Tinchant and Georges Fragerolle. The music consists of a compiled score (a mix of pre-existing music, both classical and popular) with some original material. The penultimate tableau, for example, is accompanied by the well-known Christmas carol “Adeste fideles,” here erroneously attributed to Haydn (Figure 2.2). As can be seen in Figure 2.2, the music is not complete (after the last two A major chords the piece should continue, of course). However, we should bear in mind that both the musical text and Rivière’s lithograph represent nothing more than an outline of the performance. How would a tableau such as this have been realized? A valuable clue to this is to be found in Hugues Le Roux’s review, which describes in minute detail this part of the show. Having resisted all the attempts at his seduction, Saint Anthony kneels and begins once again to pray: Now, behind him shines a bright light. A group of angels with harps [and other musical instruments] appears. The piano stops playing and from behind the scene an organ [or harmonium?] accompanies a children’s chorus singing the Venite adoremus. It is an actual choir of boys’ voices, on loan from the chapel of the church of Notre-Dame-di-Lorette.20

The final apotheosis (a feature we shall return to later) then follows—a kind of “showstopping” number very characteristic of the shadow performances at the Chat Noir.

Hearing the Shadows    47

Figure 2.2  Henri Rivière, La tentation de Saint Antoine, 84–5: (a) recto with Rivière’s picture; (b) verso with corresponding music by Tinchant and Fragerolle.

48   Emilio Sala

Figure 2.3  The screen of the Chat Noir’s Théâtre d’Ombres.

A careful comparison between Figure 2.2 and another view of the same tableau, originally published in an article by Paul Eudel (Figure 2.3), confirms the presence of an upright piano under the screen of the Théâtre d’Ombres.21 The pianist shows a resemblance with Eric Satie, and Whiting has indeed suggested that Satie, a very close friend of Tinchant, stood in for the latter when he was too drunk to stand at the piano.22 Tinchant (1862–92) was to die, consumed by alcohol, at the age of thirty, shortly after the première. Whiting also emphasizes the influence that La tentation de Saint Antoine would have on the composer of Upsud.23 Conversely, as I have shown elsewhere, Satie’s use of repetition and archaism influenced the music composed by Tinchant for La tentation de Saint Antoine.24 If we compare the compilation scores for silent films with the music composed and arranged by Tinchant and Fragerolle for La tentation de Saint Antoine, some very strong similarities emerge. In both cases there is a notable presence of original music, but the majority of the cues consist of arrangements of pre-existing pieces and the eclecticism of the repertoires from which the compiled materials are drawn is very similar, ranging from classical music (Gounod, Schumann, Wagner) to operetta (Lecocq, Massé, Offenbach) and popular music (a famous Paulus’s song). The importance of pre-existing music is also clearly evident in Tinchant’s own pieces. For instance, the first of these (p. 4), which accompanies the tableau with which the show begins (“Le désert de la Thébaïde,” 5), starts with five chords that follow very closely the opening of the “Sonata

Hearing the Shadows    49

Figure 2.4  Henri Rivière, La tentation de Saint Antoine, 5. Tinchant’s music for the opening tableau, “Le désert de la Thébaïde.”

II” of Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Jesus on the Cross (“Hodie mecum eris in Paradiso”). Once again the source only includes the first nine bars, though given that the last bar is incomplete we may conjecture that the piece continued by returning to the beginning (Figure 2.4). What we have here is thus a piece of music that stands midway between a pre-existing work and an original one. One interesting element in Tinchant’s arrangement (perhaps aided by Satie?) is the lack of an accidental to raise the seventh degree of the scale to F sharp in the final cadence, which gives the piece a strong archaic, modal feeling (see the circled note in Figure 2.4). Perhaps what is most striking in this “compilation score,” however, is the presence of two pieces that were to become film music “classics” in the era of the early, “silent” cinema: Schumann’s “Träumerei” (pp. 34, 36, and 38) closes the first act of La tentation de Saint Antoine, accompanying the tableau entitled “Le ciel” (Heaven, 35, 37, and 39); and Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” (69) accompanies the second act tableau “Les dieux scandinaves” (The Gods of Scandinavia, 68).25 Another pre-cinematic feature typical of La tentation de Saint Antoine and of the entire repertoire of the Chat Noir’s Shadow Theatre (including Caran d’Ache’s L’épopée) is that of the final apotheosis. As Tom Gunning has pointed out, the apotheosis ending, which was so widespread in the early cinema, is a “non-narrative form of closure” that wraps up the performance with a spectacular tableau, “shifting spectator interest from what will happen next to an enjoyment of the spectacle presented to them.”26 The same may be said of the Chat Noir’s Shadow Theatre, highlighting, perhaps, the importance of the music in this form of enjoyment. After the penultimate tableau accompanied by the chorus “Adeste fideles” (see Figure 2.2), La tentation de Saint Antoine ends with a tableau aptly titled “Apothéose” (p. 87) in which we see Saint Anthony in paradise while the music sounds an instrumental adaptation of “Anges purs, anges radieux” (p. 86) from the finale of Gounod’s Faust. This type of apotheosis ending would reappear, for example, in a narrative feature-length film such as Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914). The final scene on the Roman ship which takes Fulvius and Cabiria back home, in which we see the vessel surrounded by superimposed angels, was in fact accompanied by an arrangement of Mendelssohn’s overture The Hebrides.27 The absorptive attitude, the aesthetic of astonishment, and the lecturer’s interaction with the audience are all distinct elements that characterize both early cinema and the Chat Noir’s Shadow Theatre, and can be

50   Emilio Sala seen as part of heterogeneous programs that—both in the case of early cinema and of the Chat Noir—were a mix of projected images shows, songs, monologues, and so on. La tentation de Saint Antoine, for example, ended a program that included four very different shadow plays: Sahib’s one-act nautical play Une partie de whist (music by Albert Tinchant); Adolphe Willette’s pantomime with nine tableaux L’âge d’or (music by Claudius Blanc and Léopold Dauphin); Henry Somm’s one-act farce Le fils de l’eunuque (the music of which is not specified); and finally La tentation de Saint Antoine, a “féerie à grand spectacle” in two acts whose apotheosis ending would have brought the whole evening entertainment to a spectacular close. Between each of these acts there were live performances by poets and chansonniers such as Émile Goudeau, Maurice Mac-Nab, and Jules Jouy, to name but a few.

Different Sounds for Different Shadows In his book on the shadow theatre in Paris, Paul Jeanne distinguishes between two fundamental types of spectacle: the satirical and the lyrical.28 He also points out that in the satirical plays both the music and the text were improvised, the former by Tinchant and Charles de Sivry, the latter by the cabaret’s director, Rodolphe Salis. In actual fact, as we have seen, Salis also improvised his boniments (commentaries) in a féerie such as La tentation de Saint Antoine or in an epic spectacle such as L’épopée. Indeed all these types of shadow play came in varied combinations. The repertoire of the Chat Noir’s Shadow Theatre was eclectic and heterogeneous. As well as the shows with Salis as bonimenteur, the satirical and humorous productions could also be provided with a written text, which would then be read aloud by an actor. To this category belong Maurice Donnay’s Phryné and Ailleurs, given at the Chat Noir in 1891 (tableaux and silhouettes by Henri Rivière, musical accompaniment by Charles de Sivry).29 Moreover, a humorous pantomime such as Willette’s L’âge d’or required on one hand a boniment improvised by Salis and, on the other, an original score composed by Blanc and Dauphin. Before moving on to consider the lyrical shadow plays, it is worth looking in more detail at this pantomime, which revolves around one of the icons of the Chat Noir cabaret: Willette’s Pierrot who, poor and cut off from society (besides being playful, eccentric and lascivious), is a clear allegory representing the fin-de-siècle bohemian artist. L’âge d’or is a pantomime based on a series of cartoon drawings of Pierrot published by Willette in the Chat Noir journal and also reproduced in the musical edition of the shadow play.30 As can be seen in Figure 2.5, Pierrot attempts in vain to seduce Pierrette with his artistic talents: the only thing that counts in contemporary society is money, and only money can touch Pierrette’s heart. In the nine tableaux of the pantomime, Willette follows very closely the plot of the cartoon, also modelling his jointed silhouettes on its drawings.

Hearing the Shadows    51

Figure 2.5  Adolphe Willette, L’âge d’or, in Le Chat noir, September 23, 1882.

52   Emilio Sala Carlo Piccardi and Matteo Sansone have dedicated two interesting studies to the ­ gure of Pierrot, considering music as the “common denominator” of a path leading fi from pantomime to cinema.31 The case of L’âge d’or suggests that this path also passes through the Chat Noir’s Shadow Theatre, just as it passes via the hand-drawn animated film Pauvre Pierrot presented by Émile Reynaud at the Musée Grevin in Paris (October 28, 1892), with a piano accompaniment by Gaston Paulin.32 Both the music of Dauphin and Blance for L’âge d’or and that by Paulin for the “pantomime lumineuse” Pauvre Pierrot are of a descriptive type, following the visual narrative step by step and already assuming in places the relationship of over-synchronization between music and image that in sound films would become known as “mickey mousing.” What Lea Jacobs says for the early Disney sound cartoons largely applies also to pantomimes of the late nineteenth century: “The inventiveness of mickey mousing rests on the clever synthesis of music and movement, not the musical mimesis of the depicted action.”33 Moreover, Gillian Anderson has written an important study designed “to change the idea that synchronized sound only arrived with the talking picture.”34 According to Jacques Deslandes, Paulin’s score is “the first film score ever written,”35 but it is clear that this music must be considered to be closely related to that of Dauphin and Blanc for L’âge d’or, as well as to the more famous scores of André Wormser for L’enfant prodigue and of Mario Costa for Histoire d’un Pierrot. The last two are pantomimes that were subsequently adapted for the screen with the same music. The first, L’enfant prodigue, is a pantomime by Michel Carré fils which was given in Paris in 1890 and transferred on to the screen by Carré himself in 1907 (and later in a second version in 1916); in the same way, Fernand Beissier’s pantomime Histoire d’un Pierrot, first performed in Paris in 1893, would later become an Italian silent film by Baldassarre Negroni in 1914.36 Another important aspect to consider with regard to the music for L’âge d’or is the mimetic sychronization with the four-hand piano part of the diegetic music suggested by the images. Pierrot is an artist—more particularly, a musician—and in all the pantomimes we have cited he is seen singing and playing various instruments. In the fourth tableau of L’âge d’or, entitled “Pierrot poète,” which corresponds to the second vignette of Figure 2.5, according to the description: “Pierrot tries to touch the heart of the indifferent beauty by improvising for her some verses, which he accompanies with the sounds of his lyre: he sings of his love.”37 As can be seen from Example 2.1, before launching into the melody, the four-hand piano music imitates in a very “realistic” manner the musician as he tunes up the open strings of his guitar (measures 1–5). Musically, in fact, Pierrot’s lyre becomes a guitar imitated by the piano. Despite the difficulty of synchronizing these scenes in live performance, the scene with Pierrot playing and singing is a trope that is ubiquitous in all pantomimes of this type. One very interesting example is in Mario Caserini’s silent film Il romanzo di un Pierrot (Romance of a Pierrot) of 1909 for which Romolo Bacchini composed the original film score, which was published in Italy.38 The score was considered lost until now39 but I discovered a copy of it, and the historical and musical evidence it provides is of exceptional importance. In the penultimate tableau Pierrot performs his love song, which in the film becomes a sort of recurring theme for the character: just as in the case of Example 2.1, this

Hearing the Shadows    53 Example 2.1  Claudius Blanc and Léopold Dauphin, L’âge d’or, fourth tableau: “Pierrot poète.”

song is preceded by a “realistic” or “diegetized” scene in which Pierrot tunes his instrument (Example 2.2). It will come as no surprise that, after the first 8 bars, the second phrase of the song consists of a variation of Pierrot’s old air “Au clair de la lune” which, as Sansone has demonstrated, by the end of the century had become a real musical symbol of Pierrot. To sum up, in the various types of musical accompaniment of the pièces bonimentées (plays with a live lecturer) in the first two years of activity of the Chat Noir Théâtre d’Ombres we already find the full range of practices that would be used twenty years later in the cinema: improvisation, compilation scores, and original compositions. Here we are dealing with musical practices that exist side by side, equally and simultaneously, in a relationship that is neither hierarchical nor evolutionary. It is not a case of following a path of progressing “narrative integration” from improvisation to compilation and then from compilation to composition: showing and telling are two polarities that act within the same dramatic and performative space. The lyrical plays at the Chat Noir are characterized by a different set of presentational strategies and audiovisual aesthetics. This type of shadow play was developed only a few years after the great success of pièces bonimentées such as L’épopée (1886), La tentation de Saint Antoine (1887), and L’âge d’or (1887). The first example of lyrical shadow theatre was a “mystère” (as it was called) recounting the birth and death of Christ: La marche à l’étoile, with words and music by Georges Fragerolle and silhouettes and tableaux by Henri Rivière (Théâtre du Chat Noir, January 6, 1890).40

54   Emilio Sala Example 2.2  Romolo Bacchini, Il romanzo di un Pierrot, eleventh tableau: “La forza dell’amore.”

Unlike the shadow plays in pantomime style, lyrical plays do not tend to deploy diegetic music. And the voice of the narrator, which in the pièces bonimentées was improvised by Salis and completely separate from the musical accompaniment, is integrated into the score in the form of a sung voice part. Fragerolle, already well-known at the Chat Noir as a chansonnier, was the inventor and principal interpreter of the ombres lyriques. He was a baritone with a voice that was greatly admired. We also have revealing historical accounts of Fragerolle’s method of composition. In the words of one of the chansonniers at the Chat Noir: “Fragerolle uses the organ and the piano for composing. He begins with the organ, and having arranged the chords on this instrument very quickly he then moves to the piano, where he works with great skill [to continue the score].”41 Fragerolle’s need first to create the harmonic mood of the piece at the organ, and then to compose the vocal melody over it at the piano is an approach designed to illustrate musically each individual tableau in its dual dimension: the background, often distant and evocative, and the silhouettes in the foreground. Slightly departing from the composer’s usual textures, the tableau entitled “L’adoration” features a four-part canon sung a cappella by the chorus of the faithful in front of the crèche of the nativity scene; furthermore, the penultimate tableau (“Le Golgotha”) includes a voice from behind the scenes that sings on a repeated note the famous phrase of Christ on the cross: “Eli! Eli! Lamma sabactani!”42 The last tableau consists once again of an “Apothéose” recalling the resurrection of Christ. Fragerolle’s illustrative approach was not always well received, as is clear from an 1898 article by Gaston Bonhomme, which suggests that “a number of critics treat Fragerolle’s music with a certain scorn, claiming that it adds nothing to the work of the illustrator, which is already harmonious and complete in itself.”43 In a pre-cinematic perspective,

Hearing the Shadows    55 however, Fragerolle’s music is interesting for this very reason. Although, differently from the shadow pantomimes, it does not reveal traces of “mickey mousing,” it appears invested in finding its own more abstract and ethereal manner of fitting music to images. Let us take the beginning of La marche à l’étoile (Following the star). After a short “Ouverture,” with the curtain down and during which the voice of the narrator introduces in recitative the story that is about to commence (“Herod is king, Caesar rules the world”), the curtain rises on the first tableau, which—at first—appears almost empty, consisting only of a starry sky stretching into the far distance. The music illustrates the twinkling of the stars with a series of ascending and descending arpeggios which create a sense of anticipation and culminate in the following two lines, pronounced by the narrator: “Quel bonheur ou quel deuil encor / Viens tu prédire étoile d’or?” (What joy or what grief/have you come to announce, oh star of gold?). On the final note of the sung text, which ends on the dominant of the key that follows (G major), enter the shepherds (“Les bergers”), accompanied by a pastoral melody on the oboe over which the voice is heard singing in an “arioso” operatic style.44 The music accompanying their entry, which corresponds to Rivière’s tableau as reproduced in the lithography of the illustrated oblong album (Figure 2.6), is transcribed in Example 2.3. Both Rivière’s images and Fragerolle’s music share a sense of continuity and strive for spatial coherence. The succession of the tableaux, which follow one another in relative autonomy with respect to the course of the narrative, appear to be orientated more towards creating a general atmosphere rather than to representing the individual situations

Figure 2.6  Henri Rivière, La marche à l’étoile, 13.

56   Emilio Sala Example 2.3  Georges Fragerolle, La marche à l’étoile, 12 and 14.

or gestures present within each scene. This dreamlike and dematerialized at­mos­phere of the ombres lyriques, not infrequently associated with religious subjects, contributed enormously to Rivière’s reputation as a shadow artist and as a man of the theatre; in the words of Jules Lemaître, “The circle of light in his theatre was a peephole into the invisible.”45 The great depth of field of the décor is to be associated with the broad chronological sweep of the narrated stories, which often assume cosmic or apocalyptic connotations. Another example is Fragerolle’s Le sphinx (with tableaux and silhouettes by Amédée Vignola). First given at the Chat Noir on January 21, 1896, as an “épopée lyrique,” Le sphinx met with resounding success. It begins with the tableau of the Sphinx of Giza as it was at the time (“Le sphinx moderne”) and then flashes back several thousand years when the sphinx had just been built (“Le sphinx antique”). The shadow play then proceeds chronologically (“Les Assyriens,” “Les Romains,” “Les Arabes,” and so on) to arrive finally at the Egyptian campaign of Napoleon, whose voice is heard from behind the scenes pronouncing the famous phrase: “Soldats, du haut de ces pyramides quarante siècles vous contemplent!” (Soldiers, from the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries are looking down on you!). We then return to the present time (“Aujourd’hui”), but the final tableau (“La fin du monde”) unexpectedly introduces a narrative proleptic of apocalyptic type, showing how the sphinx will be after humankind has become extinct. A narrative construction of this kind brings to mind many silent films whose plots “cut through the ages,” such as L. Maggi’s Satana (1912) or D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916).

Hearing the Shadows    57

Remediating the Shadows Following the death of Roldolphe Salis (March 20, 1897), the cabaret of the Chat Noir closed down, never to re-open. The last shadow play to be performed at Salis’s cabaret was an ombres lyriques show entitled Clairs de lune, with words and music by Fragerolle, and silhouettes and tableaux by Rivière (Théâtre du Chat Noir, December 14, 1896). Little more than a year later, on March 16–18 and 20, 1898, the objets d’art that had belonged to the gentilhomme cabaretier, including some materials relating to the shadow theatre, were put up for sale at the Hôtel Drouot. The fashion for shadow plays continued, however, in other cabarets in Montmartre such as the Quat’z’Arts and La lune rousse. Moreover, as Piotr Sadowski has recently pointed out, the shadow theatre “became part of nightclub entertainment in fin de siècle European cities.”46 But more important in the context of our discussion is the fact that in these years the history of the shadow theatre overlaps with that of the cinema. The closure of the Chat Noir and the birth of the cinema were, in fact, soon to be seen as related phenomena. According to the editor of the monthly magazine Le Cinéopse, Georges-Michel Coissac, amongst others, the historical importance of the Chat Noirs Shadow Theatre was its role as the avantgarde of the cinema: “We pay homage to these shadows, the avant-garde of the cinema, which contained the germs of so many film productions.”47 Other commentators, however, considered the Chat Noir’s Shadow Theatre to be in opposition to the emerging cinema. Gendron is right to point out the “middlebrowism” of the ombres chatnoiresques. Drawing attention to how, at the second Chat Noir, “the high and the low were sutured into such an evenly textured whole that they were no longer recognizable as separate,” Gendron considers the shadows a sort of commercialization of artistic experimentation: “The result was a third species of aesthetic production clearly delineated from the low and the high, and located solidly in between—tasteful, witty, sometimes ‘deep,’ easy and accessible, conspicuously technological and in its own way utterly modern.”48 It should not be forgotten that the productions of the Chat Noir were always advertised and perceived as ombres artistiques. Their “popular” character was partly due to the ability of Salis and Rivière to render the esoteric magic of the symbolist art theatre accessible to a bourgeois audience. The “artiness” and the “popular” of the ombres chatnoiresques are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. In this context, Maison Mazo’s production played a fundamental role. Founded by Élie Mazo, the firm began its activities when the Chat Noir was still open (around 1889), producing magic lanterns and various other materials for fixed projection on an industrial scale. After the death of Salis, the Mazo company relaunched the ombres artistiques of the Chat Noir in a simplified version for the home: the highly complex stage machine developed by Rivière was remediated through the use of the magic lantern so that it could be brought “chez soi,” and thus became available to everybody who could afford it (it was also possible to rent the apparatus at a cheap price). This mediatization and commercialization of the ombres chatnoiresques was developed in a cultural and industrial

58   Emilio Sala context in which the cinema had already begun to play a fundamental role. The Maison Mazo, which also produced equipment for the cinema, constantly strove to enhance the artistic value of its “ombres lumineuses” by setting them in opposition to the mere entertainment of the photographic moving pictures. In his Grand manuel de projection, published by Mazo in 1897, the illusionist and lanternist Alber, a close collaborator of the firm, asserts the artistic superiority of the shadows over the cinema: we do not deny the great attraction of certain moving pictures, but we are of the opinion . . . that a beautiful static projection, though perhaps less curious, has an artistic character that the former does not possess and has over it the same a superiority as does an original artist’s painting over sand-powered moving figures, however well these are made.49

Arguing for the shadows’ artistic superiority vis a vis cinema’s photographic realism was a recurrent theme in the important monthly magazine Ombres et lumière, published by the Maison Mazo from 1895.50 But above all it was Gaston Mazo, the son of the firm’s founder, who theorized on the superiority of the shadows. In his book entitled Les ombres modernes, he made a number of revealing declarations, arguing that “Le Cinéma, c’est la précision, l’Ombre, c’est le rêve” (Cinema is exactitude, Shadow is dream); and that “L’Ombre est au cinématographe ce qu’est la peinture à la photographie” (The shadow is to the cinema what painting is to photography).51 On the basis of these guiding principles, the Maison Mazo gained a reputation as a sort of spiritual heir of the Chat Noir, numbering among its closest collaborators one of the leading lights of the shadow theatre of Salis’s cabaret, Georges Fragerolle. Fragerolle wrote new ombres lyriques shows for the Maison Mazo, including L’aigle (images by E. Courboin) and Les martyrs (images by H. Callot), both of which were released in 1905. He also participated in the launch of a new product, the “chansons lumineuses,” that to all extents and purposes was Maison Mazo’s challenge to Gaumont’s “phonoscènes,” which consisted of both a disc and a film (with the latter synchronized to the former). In the words of Thomas Schmitt, “The disc was recorded first. It was then played during the shooting of the film. ‘Phonoscènes’ were already recorded by using the lip sync method.”52 The “chansons lumineuses,” on the other hand, were generally sung live, as the Maison Mazo had developed a system for synchronizing the image of the magic lantern with the phonographic disc. As explained in the Manuel Mazo de projections, the chansons lumineuses are simply songs illustrated in the manner of the shadow plays. Basically they are merely short pièces d’ombres with couplets and sometimes with refrain. Like shadow plays, they include a décor that functions as a background, and a number of défilés of silhouettes that are projected during the singing.53

To make it easier to synchronize the succession of silhouettes and the singing performance the Maison Mazo developed a system involving a “châssis à crémaillère” (a rack

Hearing the Shadows    59

Figure 2.7  Élie Mazo, Manuel Mazo de projections, 116.

and pinion system, see Figure 2.7): “with this mechanism, the operator can obtain with only one hand the passage of the défilé in an absolutely regular manner, with neither jumps nor jerks.”54 In the articles published in the monthly magazine directed by Élie and Gaston Mazo, Ombres et lumière, there are several references advertising the “châssis à crémaillère” as a system for ensuring a smooth, synchronized succession of silhouettes. Maison Mazo also produced a special screen (called the Lumen) which was extremely sensitive to the light of the lantern and which was available in two sizes, each perfectly square: the smaller as 1 meter and 50 centimeters square and cost 40 Francs; the bigger was 2 meters square and cost 55 Francs.55 Neither should we forget that the firm also sold equipment for the cinema, for photography, and for sound recording and reproduction (first on cylinders, later on phonographic discs). A long article published in  Ombres et lumières in 1911 (unsigned, but probably by Gaston Mazo) claims that despite the efforts of producers such as the Société Film d’Art to elevate cinema to high art, the shadow projections remained the truly artistic type. According to the article, while the cinema is superior in the fields of entertainment, documentation, and pedagogy, the shadow show nevertheless scores higher in terms of artistic quality. The two media are, in fact, “made to complement each other.” As the author puts it: “Where the field of experience of the cinema ends, there begins the field of its brother in arms, the latter being, in my opinion, a far more extensive field.”56 Long before the Société Film d’Art commissioned famous, influential composers such as Camille Saint-Saëns to write scores of a high artistic quality for its films, the Maison Mazo had already secured the services of a prestigious composer, Fernand de la Tombelle. Tombelle wrote several “chansons lumineuses” for the firm of Élie e Gaston Mazo, but the voice part was usually recited rather than sung. Two of the most interesting titles of this corpus of works are Un rêve au pays du bleu, a “féerie lumineuse” with text by E. Depré, music by F. de la Tombelle, and tableaux by H. de Callias (already mentioned in various periodicals in 1892); and Le circuit des étoiles, this too described in a similar manner as a “fantaisie lumineuse,” words and music by F. de la Tombelle and “tableaux lumineux” by H. de Callias (ca. 1906). In the context of these articles, all written to emphasize the artistic character of the shadow show, music played a fundamental role. Maison Mazo simplified the Chat Noir’s shadow theatre and put it within the reach of a larger audience, while at the same time maintaining and even enhancing its artistic value. The music is, in fact, one of the guarantees of the artistic qualities of the shadow theatre. The atmosphere in which the

60   Emilio Sala shadow show takes place must be one of a “lyrisme enchanteur” (an enchanting lyricism), where the music makes a crucial contribution. In this sense, it is no accident that neither shadow plays of the satirical genre nor comic pantomimes such as L’âge d’or form part of Maison Mazo’s repertoire. The utilization of the double lantern, which allows the possibility of dissolving views, also plays a significant role in creating the lyrical at­mos­phere of the “ombres lumineuses.” Gustave Mazo is clear in this respect: the room must contain only the screen. The projections and the singing must seem as if they are dematerialized. Everything must remain invisible, mysterious to the audience. In this way an atmosphere is created, an ambiance full of fascination and of  poetry in which the enchanting lyricism of the ombres lumineuses is allowed full sway.57

A picture taken from the Manuel Mazo of 1910 illustrates quite clearly the effect (or at least the intended effect) of this “ambiance full of fascination and of poetry” on the audience (see Figure 2.8). The picture shows a moment in the projection in a private house of L’aigle, Fragerolle’s shadow play of 1905 which—like Caran d’Ache’s L’épopée—evokes the Napoleonic legend. More precisely, it is a scene from the third tableau entitled “L’Égypte,” which corresponds to the music I have transcribed in Example 2.4, an atmospheric piece that combines the detached mood of a slow waltz with an emphatic close in C-major. Despite the presence of the singer beside the screen, the singing “voice over” of Figure 2.8 seems to belong more to the screen space of the shadows than to the physical space of the audience. This is very different from the case of the flamboyant bonimenteur Rodolphe Salis in L’univers illustré of 1887 (Figure 2.1). While Salis the bonimenteur interacted with the audience in a provocative manner, the singer of Maison Mazo’s “ombres lumineuses,” in Gaston Mazo’s own words, is a more “impersonal” narrator: “his voice carries through the darkness, as if emanating from the projector at the same time as the image. It is impersonal.”58 The audience in Figure 2.8 is facing the screen. In this sense, in Mazo’s “ombres lumineuses,” the clear separation between screen space and audience space that—as Elsaesser reminds us—was gradually to become the norm in the “cinema of narrative integration” already seems to be established. Still, we need to tread carefully. While we are a long way from the distracted spectatorship of the early cinematic attractions, the atmosphere of enchanting lyricism and sublime reverie that wraps the “ombres lumineuses” also seems to have little to do with the logic of narrative integration that would contribute to making the presence of the lecturer gradually obsolete. It must not be forgotten that Mazo’s “ombres” consist of a succession of relatively autonomous tableaux inserted into a narrative container. To each tableau corresponds a piece of music that is also relatively autonomous, and the succession of (relatively) autonomous tableaux, illustrated by an “atmospheric music” and by the narrator’s singing voice (characterized by a detached, impersonal style), provides the supporting structure of the “ombres lumineuses.”59 So how are we to interpret the absorptive attitude of the audience in Figure 2.8, which—as we have already pointed out—seems emphatically directed at the screen and not at the performance of the singer?

Hearing the Shadows    61

Figure 2.8  Élie Mazo, Manuel Mazo de projections, 121.

Trying to go beyond the chronological-teleological model of traditional film history, new historiographical approaches have emerged in the last few decades.60 From the viewpoint of media archaeology and sound studies, the variegated, changing panorama of the Chat Noir’s Shadow Theatre and of the “ombres lumineuses” of Maison Mazo would seem to confirm the widespread need to make the opposition between the “cinema of attractions” and the “cinema of narrative integrations” more open and more flexible, as proposed more than thirty years ago by Tom Gunning.61 Considered from a music(ologic)al perspective, the shadow plays of the Chat Noir already present all the musical practices that would later be used in the context of film, and it is not possible to say whether the “music of attractions” came before the “music of narrative integration” or vice-versa. But the impersonal, detached style that characterizes the narrator of the “ombres lumineuses” would seem to require another type of attention that we could define as one of “artistic contemplation,” which differs both from the astonishment of the attractions and from the voyeurism of narrative absorption. The enchanting lyricism of Mazo’s “ombres lumineuses” seems to encourage a type of audiovisual experience that might be described, using Charles Musser’s words, as “a state of contemplative absorption.”62 In this sense, the connections between film and painting drawn by Musser to theorize what he called the “cinema of contemplation” find an intriguing parallel in the ombres lyriques of the Chat Noir and the tableaux lumineux of Maison Mazo. I hope this chapter has shown that a historiographical account of musical practices can inform our understanding of the archaeology of cinema and—more specifically—of the emergence of a wide range of modes of engagement. The category of “contemplative absorption,” which Musser conceptualized starting from Michael Fried, is better understood when the musical element is also considered. The detached, evocative elegance of Fragerolle’s music helps create a “music of contemplation,” which is distinct

62   Emilio Sala Example 2.4  Georges Fragerolle, L’aigle. Épopée en douze tableaux (Paris: Élie Mazo, 1905), third tableau: “L’Égypte,” which corresponds to the moment we see in Figure 2.8.

both from a “music of attractions” such as Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” and other pre-existing music in La tentation de Saint Antoine, and from a “music of narrative integration,” as with the mimetic attitude and the character-based, recurring motifs found in Pierrot’s pantomimes. In this sense, the archaeological evidence that I have dug up might give us a provisional map of the role of music in the pre-history of ­cinematic listening.

Notes 1. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 24. French original: Apologie pour l’histoire ou Métier d’historien (1949). 2. I do not consider here the pre-Foucauldian book by C. W. Ceram, Archeology of the Cinema (1965), whose pioneering—and in many ways problematic—approach is discussed by Stephen Herbert in his introduction to A History of Pre-cinema, ed. Stephen Herbert (London: Routledge, 2000), xxv–xxvi. The two fundamental works in which Foucault developed his archaeological approach are Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (1966) and L’archéologie du savoir (1969). 3. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, “Introduction. An Archeology of Media Archeology,” in Media Archeology. Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 1–21: 3–5. 4. For Altman’s prescient 1999 manifesto, see “Sound Studies: A Field Whose Time has Come,” Iris, 27 (1999): 3–4. 5. Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 22. 6. Le Chat Noir, May 9, 1885.

Hearing the Shadows    63 7. The Ballade du Chat Noir was published with an illustration by Steinlen in Le Chat Noir, August 9, 1884. 8. Elena Cueto-Asín, “The Chat Noir’s Théâtre d’Ombres. Shadow Plays and the Recuperation of Public Space,” in Montmartre and the Making of the Mass Culture, ed. G. P. Weisberg (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 223–46: 226. 9. Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the AvantGarde (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 57. 10. Maurice Talmeyr, “La foule en scène,” in Revue d’art dramatique, 5 (January–March 1887), 75–8: 75. 11. Steven Moore Whiting, Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 48. 12. As regards the state of research into aspects of live performance in the early film exhibition in Britain, see Julie Brown, and Annette Davison, “Overture,” in The Sounds of the Silents in Britain, ed. Julie Brown and Annette Davison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1–14. 13. “Chronique” [an unsigned article], Le Temps, December 23, 1886. This is a review of a rehearsal that took place at the Chat Noir only a few days before the première. 14. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988). 15. Gérome, “Courrier de Paris,” L’univers illustré, January 15, 1887. 16. Thomas Elsaesser, “Archeologies of Interactivity: Early Cinema, Narrative and Spectatorship,” in Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture, ed. Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier (New Barnet: John Libbey, 2009), 9–21: 13. 17. This is not the place for a detailed theorization of (the difference between) immersion and absorption, but see the following remarkable articles: Meredith C. Ward, “The Soundscape of the Cinema Theatre: Acoustical Design, Embodiment, and Film Theatres as Vehicles for Aural Absorption,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 10, no. 2 (2016): 135–65; Niels Christian Nilsson, Rolf Nordhal and Stefania Serafin, “Immersion Revisited: A Review of Existing Definitions of Immersion and Their Relation to Different Theories of Presence,” Human Technology 12, no. 2 (2016): 108–34; and Valerio Sbravatti, “Bagni sonori. Nuove frontiere del suono immersivo tra cinema e altri media,” Imago 14, no. 2 (2016): 109–20. 18. Maurice Talmeyr, “La foule en scène,” Revue d’art dramatique, 5 (January–March 1887), 75–8: 75. 19. Ibid., 78. 20. Hugues Le Roux, “La vie à Paris,” Le Temps, December 28, 1887. A description very similar (but far less precise) of this tableau is to be found in the review by Jules Lemaître, “La semaine dramatique,” Le journal des débats, January 9, 1888, reprinted in Lemaître, Impressions de théâtre, II (Paris: Société française d’impr. et de libr., 1888), 331–43. 21. Paul Eudel, “Théâtre du Chat Noir,” Le monde moderne, 16 (April 1896), 563–79: 573. 22. Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 77. 23. Ibid., 72. 24. Emilio Sala, “Dalla bohème all’avant-garde: ancora nel segno dei fumisti,” in Erik Satie e la Parigi del suo tempo, ed. Gianmario Borio and Mauro Casadei Turroni Monti (Lucca: LIM, 2001), 29–44. 25. With regard to the cinematographic and popular reception of “Träumerei,” see Jeremy Barham, “Recurring Dreams and Moving Images: The Cinematic Appropriation of Schumann’s Op. 15, No. 7,” 19th-Century Music 34, no. 3 (2011): 271–301; and Yael

64   Emilio Sala Braunschweig, “Domestic Dreaming: ‘Träumerei’ and the popular reception of Schumann,” Music & Letters 94, no. 4 (2018): 544–72. Schumann’s “Träumerei” was included by Erno Rapée in his anthology Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists (New York: G. Schirmer, 1924) in the category “Quietude and Purity” (596). The “Ride of the Valkyries” is found in Ernö Rapée, Encyclopaedia of Music for Pictures (New York: Belwin, 1925), 370 (in the category “Operatic Extracts”). 26. Tom Gunning, “Now You See it, Now You Don’t: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions,” The Velvet Light Trap 32 (1993), reprinted in Silent Cinema, ed. R.  Abel (London: The Athlon Press, 1996), 71–84: 81. 27. For a detailed description and analysis of the “compilation score” used to accompany the first Italian projections of Cabiria, see Emilio Sala, “For a Dramaturgy of Musical Reuse in Silent Cinema: The Case of ‘Cabiria’ (1914),” in Film Music. Practices, Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives, ed. Annarita Colturato (Turin: Kaplan, 2014), 73–109. 28. Paul Jeanne, Les théâtres d’ombres à Montmartre de 1887 à 1923 (Paris: Les Presses modernes, 1937), 19–24. 29. The texts of these two shadow plays were published in Maurice Donnay, Autour du Chat Noir (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1926): Phryné, 103–34, and Ailleurs, 135–92. 30. Claudius Blanc and Léopold Dauphin, L’âge d’or: symphonie-pantomime pour piano à quatre mains (Paris: Heugel, 1893). 31. Carlo Piccardi, “Pierrot at the Cinema. The Musical Common Denominator from Pantomime to Film,” Music and the Moving Image, trans. Gillian Anderson, published in 3 instalments: Part I, in vol. 1, no. 2 (2008): 37–52; Part II in vol. 2, no. 2 (2009): 7–23; Part III in vol. 6, no. 1 (2013): 4–54. See also Matteo Sansone, “Pierrot: A Silent Witness of Changing Times,” Voyages: Journal of Contemporary Humanism, Issue 6 (2017): http://voyagesjournal. org/pierrot-silent-witness- changing-times/, accessed November 27, 2018. 32. “Pauvre Pierrot,” in Gaston Paulin, Pantomimes lumineuses (Paris: G.  Ducrotois, 1892), 1–13; an example of this extremely rare piano score is conserved at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (CNAM) in Paris. The volume also includes “Clown et chiens” (14–18) and “Un bon bock” (19–28). 33. Lea Jacobs, Film Rhythm after Sound: Technology, Music, and Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 66. 34. Gillian Anderson, “Synchronized Music: The Influence of Pantomime on Moving Pictures,” in Music and the Moving Image 8, no. 3 (2015): 3–39: 3. 35. Jacques Deslandes, Histoire comparée du cinéma, I [“De la Cinématique au Cinématographe: 1826–96”] (Tournai: Casterman, 1966), 293. 36. In all these pantomimes for the theatre, just as in their cinematographic versions, the role of Pierrot was interpreted by female actors in male costume: an eloquent symptom of the androgynous nature of the modern Pierrot (it is not by chance that in both Wedekind and Berg the character of Lulu appears on stage dressed as Pierrot). 37. Blanc and Dauphin, L’âge d’or, 23. 38. R.  Bacchini, Il romanzo di un Pierrot. Azione cine-drammatica in 12 quadri (Rome: A. Marzi, n. d. [ca. 1909]). Mario Caserini first directed this short in 1906 for Alberini & Santoni, but the film was withdrawn for copyright problems. Caserini restaged the same script in 1909 for Cines. 39. With regard to this question, see Marco Targa, “The Use of Cue Sheets in Italian Silent Cinema: Contexts, Repertoires, Praxis,” in The Sounds of Silent Films: New Perspectives on

Hearing the Shadows    65 History, Theory and Practice, ed. Claus Tieber and Anna K. Windisch (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 49–65: 59. 40. A number of illustrated oblong albums of this “mystère en dix tableaux” were also published. The example I consulted is: G. Fragerolle and H. Rivière, La marche à l’étoile (Paris: Enoch/Marpon and Flammarion, [ca. 1890]). There is also a recording on disc of the orchestral version of this (Lumen 35,003, 78 rpm, ca. 1940), interpreted by the tenor René Hérent and conducted by Roger Guttinguer. 41. Horace Valbel, Les chansonniers et les cabarets artistiques (Paris: E. Dentu, n. d. [ca. 1895]), 110–11. 42. G. Fragerolle, La marche à l’étoile, 36. 43. Gaston Bonhomme, “Auteurs-interprètes: origines d’une mode,” Anger-Artiste 6, no. 1 (May 28, 1898), 8–9: 9. 44. La marche à l’étoile calls for an oboe in the tableau “Les bergers” and for a violoncello “con sordina” in the tableau “Les lépreux.” 45. Jules Lemaître, “Le Chat noir.” Introduction to the collective book Le gaîtés du Chat noir (Paris: Ollendorf, 1894), 5–11: 7. This definition recalls the title of Noël Burch’s famous book, La lucarne de l’infini (The peephole to the infinite), which refers to an expression of Baudelaire and which has been translated into English with another title: Life to Those Shadows, trans. Ben Brewster (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 46. Piotr Sadowski, The Semiotics of Light and Shadows: Modern Visual Arts and Weimar Cinema (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 63. 47. Georges-Michel Coissac, Histoire du cinématographe de ses origines à nos jours (Paris: Éditions du “Cinéopse,” 1925), 43. 48. Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club, 58. 49. Alber, Le grand manuel de projection (Paris: E. Mazo, 1897), 65–6. 50. See for example an article entitled La projection et le cinématographe (no. 33 published on April 1, 1898), by A. Hégé, which makes a similar point to Alber’s. 51. Gaston Mazo, Ouvrage historique, technique, descriptif sur les ombres chinoises. Les ombres modernes (Paris: E. Mazo, n. d. [ca. 1920]), 10 and 43. 52. Thomas Schmitt, “The Genealogy of the Clip Culture,” in Rewind, Play, Fast Forward: The Past, Present and Future of the Music Video, ed. Henry Keazor and Thorsten Wübbena (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2010), 41–57: 45. 53. Élie Mazo, Manuel Mazo de projections (Paris: E. Mazo, n. d. [1910]), 115. 54. Ibid., 115–16. 55. A detailed advertisement for the Lumen screen can be found on the first page of Ombres et lumières 162 (December 1908). 56. “Plaidoyer pour les pièces d’ombres: de la popularité de l’ombre et de sa comparaison avec le cinématographe,” in Ombres et lumière 188 (February 1911), 2124–28. The article is unsigned, but was probably written by Gaston Mazo. He tells also how a correspondent of Mazo’s writing from Brussels expressed his surprise as to the success in the Belgian capital of Fragerolle’s shadow plays L’aigle and Les martyrs, which were shown at the end of evenings of film projections. 57. G. Mazo, Les ombres modernes, 38. 58. Ibid., 36. 59. I am taking the expression of “atmospheric music” from Julie Brown, “Framing the Atmospheric Film Prologue in Britain, 1919–1926,” in The Sounds of the Silents in Britain, ed. Julie Brown and Annette Davison (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 200–21: 201.

66   Emilio Sala 60. For a discussion of these approaches, see James Chapman, Mark Glancy, and Sue Harper, “Introduction,” in The New Film History: Sources, Methods, Approaches, ed. James Chapman, Mark Glancy, and Sue Harper (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1–10. 61. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 8, no. 3–4 (1986): 63–70. 62. Charles Musser, “A Cinema of Contemplation, a Cinema of Discernment: Spectatorship, Intertextuality and Attractions in the 1890s,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 159–79: 162.

Select Bibliography Abel, Richard, ed. Silent Cinema. London: Athlon Press, 1996. Altman, Rick. Silent Film Sound. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Anderson, Gillian. “Synchronized Music: The Influence of Pantomime on Moving Pictures.” Music and the Moving Image 8, no. 3 (2015): 3–39. Brown, Julie, and Annette Davison, eds. The Sounds of the Silents in Britain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Burch, Noël. Life to Those Shadows, trans. Ben Brewster. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Colturato, Annarita, ed. Film Music. Practices, Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives. Turin: Kaplan, 2014. Elsaesser, Thomas. Film History as Media Archaeology. Tracking Digital Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970 [1966]. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.  M.  Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge, 2002 [1969]. Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988. Gendron, Bernard. Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the AvantGarde. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Spectator and the Avant-Garde.” Wide Angle 8, no. 3–4 (1986): 63–70. Herbert, Stephen, ed. A History of Pre-Cinema, 3 vols. London: Routledge, 2000. Huhtamo, Erkki, and Jussi Parikka, eds. Media Archeology. Approaches, Applications, and Implications. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Jacobs, Lea. Film Rhythm after Sound: Technology, Music, and Performance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. Ligensa, Annemone, and Klaus Kreimeier eds. Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture. New Barnet: John Libbey, 2009. Nilsson, Niels Christian, Rolf Nordhal, and Stefania Serafin. “Immersion Revisited: A Review of Existing Definitions of Immersion and Their Relation to Different Theories of Presence.” Human Technology 12, no. 2 (2016): 108–34. Perriault, Jacques. Mémoires de l’ombre et du son: Une archélologie de l’audio-visuel. Paris: Flammarion, 1981. Sadowski, Piotr. The Semiotics of Light and Shadows: Modern Visual Arts and Weimar Cinema. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

Hearing the Shadows    67 Sbravatti, Valerio. “Bagni sonori. Nuove frontiere del suono immersivo tra cinema e altri media.” Imago 14 7, no. 2 (2016): 109–20. Strauven, Wanda, ed. The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. Tieber, Claus, and Anna K. Windisch, eds. The Sounds of Silent Films: New Perspectives on History, Theory and Practice. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Ward, Meredith C. “The Soundscape of the Cinema Theatre: Acoustical Design, Embodiment, and Film Theatres as Vehicles for Aural Absorption.” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 10, no. 2 (2016): 135–65. Weisberg, Gabriel P., ed. Montmartre and the Making of the Mass Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Whiting, Steven Moore. Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Chapter 3

The Cou rtships of A da a n d L en Mediated Musicals and Vocal Caricature Before the Cinema Jacob Smith

Before Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper; before Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol; before Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge; before Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers; before  Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald: there were Ada Jones and Len Spencer. You might not have heard of them, but Jones and Spencer were stars of a series of popular musical comedies produced during the first decades of the twentieth ­century. These musicals were not performed onstage, nor were they the products of the film industry. Instead, Jones and Spencer were stars of the early phonograph industry, and the records they produced between 1905 and 1911 are some of the earliest media texts to combine narrative with musical numbers and to juxtapose dramatic dialogue and singing. The Jones and Spencer phonograph catalog should be added to the list of precursors to the film musical, along with vaudeville, burlesque, the minstrel show, and the circus.1 These records preserve the first encounter between nineteenth-century musical traditions and modern media, and the result is a series of sonic snapshots of turn-of-the-century musical culture. As records that depict department store music counters, illustrated song performances, dance halls, barn dances, parades, street performances, and popular theatre, the Jones and Spencer archive stands at a crossroads, memorializing the sites of musical performance that would soon face competition from the emerging sound industries of phonograph records, talking pictures, and radio.2 Jones and Spencer’s records add to our knowledge of the pre-history of the film musical, and they also enrich our understanding of the aesthetics of the musical genre. Many of the themes and techniques that have been associated with film musicals can be found on these records: the dissolve from narrative to number; the presence of a diegetic

The Courtships of Ada and Len   69 audience; a “dual-focus” on the romantic couple; and the staging of dancing, singing, and kissing.3 The Jones and Spencer records thus allow us to appreciate a history of musical media that extends beyond and before the cinema. When we attend to that longer historical trajectory, we notice continuities as well as discontinuities between phonographic and cinematic musicals. The most striking of those discontinuities has to do with the way in which the Jones and Spencer records depict ethnic stereotypes. The phonograph industry emerged during the “halcyon days” of American vaudeville, which first rose to prominence in the 1880s and lasted into the 1910s. The “dominant . . . force” in vaudeville comedy took the form of acts reliant upon ethnic and racial stereotypes.4 The popularity of such acts coincided with an influx of immigration into the United States during the mid- and late 1800s, and caricatures of German, Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants, along with the continued presence of blackface minstrelsy, constituted a vocabulary of comedic stage types.5 Much has been written about the social functions of these caricatures: their construction of white American masculinity, for example; or their utility as negative role models for recent immigrants; or their provision of a sense of “order and organization” during a time of rapid urbanization.6 The unvarnished enactment of troubling stereotypes is certainly one reason why Jones and Spencer’s records have been forgotten, and I have sometimes wondered if they are best left that way. I agree with Joseph Boskin and Joseph Dorinson that “ethnic humor against supposedly ‘inferior’ social groups,” in this case, African Americans and newly arrived immigrants, can be “one of the most effective and vicious weapons in the repertory of the human mind.”7 My goal in this essay is not to explain the social functions of these caricatures, or to make a case “for” or “against” them. My goal is less ambitious than that. I want to situate these records in the history of modern musical media and listen to them more closely and systematically than previous scholarship has done. In the process, I aim to provide a new degree of precision in discussing the vocal characteristics of vaudeville stage types. Thus, while the Jones and Spencer records are troubling in their enactment of ethnic caricature, they provide a rare archive that preserves turn-of-the-century musical narratives and vocal performances in all their sonic specificity, allowing us to hear the vocal conventions for enacting difference at the dawn of the modern media.8 Dale Knobel writes that “stereotypes are essentially verbal constructs. They consist of what one group of people says about another.” “For all intents and purposes,” he writes, “the antebellum stage Irish man was just such a collection of words—a vocabulary, if you will.”9 Scholarship in sound studies has indicated that vocal ­performances are more than “a collection of words,” rather, they are “thick events” in which meaning is conveyed via the non-verbal nuances of prosody, pitch, timbre, and rhythm.10 Attention to such elements of performance is what I mean by listening more closely. My listening was aided by digital tools that align text with audio, produce visual representations of vocal performance, and calculate data about pitch.11 This essay is thus a modest foray into “digital sound studies,” a method that uses ­digital tools for the purpose of “close listening and deep historical analysis” in order to “[amplify] the humanities.”12

70   Jacob Smith With regards to listening more systematically, Knobel claims that “stereotypes are not simply about groups of people; they reflect relationships between groups of people.”13 The Jones and Spencer records allow for an analysis of a system of turn-of-the-century vocal types, with the sonic signifiers of each type standing out all the more clearly when heard in relation to each other.14 In what follows, I advance two distinct but related arguments: one about phonograph records as precursors to the Hollywood musical; and another about the early-twentieth century system of vocal types. I structure the essay around the five most prevalent types enacted on the seventy-three Jones and Spencer records I have heard.15 I begin by situating these records in the history of the American phonograph industry.

Vaudeville Specialties The American phonograph industry had gotten underway by the 1890s, with “phonograph parlors” in many urban centers and a domestic market for records established around the turn of the century.16 Len Spencer (1867–1914) was one of the first stars of that industry. Spencer was born into the family that invented the Spencerian style of penmanship, and his father operated the Spencerian Business College in Washington D.C., where Len worked as an instructor. Spencer was introduced to the phonograph via an office recording device at the college, and by that route he came into contact with the Columbia Phonograph Company. He was soon embarking upon a career as a recording artist, singing “ragtime” songs, reciting famous speeches, and acting in dramatic scenes and comedic sketches.17 During this era, the recording studio was an almost entirely male environment, with men performing the female roles in dramatic productions. According to several accounts, Len Spencer was recording a duet with singer Billy Murray in 1904, when studio supervisor Victor Emerson became “appalled” by Murray’s female impersonation. When Emerson “insisted that a woman play the female role,” Murray recommended Ada Jones (1873–1922), who was performing illustrated songs at Huber’s Palace Museum in New York City.18 Jones was born in England in 1873, and moved to Philadelphia as a child, where she began a career on the stage.19 Jones was hired on Murray’s suggestion, and though comic dialogues between a man and a woman were “virtually unprecedented” in the phonograph industry at the time, the resulting Jones and Spencer records were a success.20 Jones and Spencer went on to record a string of popular recordings in a genre that was known as the “vaudeville specialty.” Recording companies began producing records identified with the vaudeville stage in 1900, and the Jones and Spencer records became some of the most prominent in the genre.21 Phonograph historian Patrick Feaster explains that records of the “vaudeville specialty” genre tended to feature comic dialogues and songs that were depicted as part of a simulated live performance. Vaudeville records thus replicated both the content of an act and an “imaginary theatrical context,” the latter

The Courtships of Ada and Len   71 signaled by the sounds of a fictional audience and the simulation of the performer’s interactions with the audience or musical accompanist (as in “Hey, Professor!”)22 We can hear the sounds of a simulated audience on the Jones and Spencer record, “Heinie” (1905). The record begins with a spoken announcement (“Vaudeville specialty, ‘Heinie,’ by Ada Jones and Len Spencer, Edison Records”), followed by a musical vamp and applause before the two characters, Heinie and Katrina, engage in some comic dialogue, sing a duet, dance together, and share a kiss as a final musical flourish and round of applause bring the proceedings to a close. “Ludwig’s Air Castle” (1910) is even more explicit about keying the performance as a depiction of an amateur variety show. An emcee’s voice declares, “Ladies and gentleman, I take great pleasure in announcing, as an extra feature this evening, a German character sketch entitled . . . er, what’s the name of that sketch?” An off-stage voice interjects: “Ludwig’s air castle.” “Oh yes, ‘Ludwig’s air castle.’ Introducing Herr Ludwig and his famous . . . er, er, what do you do?” The voice from off-stage says: “Wooden shoe dancing and trombone specialty.” “Oh yes, wooden shoe dancing and trombone specialty. Alright, professor.” After this cue to the diegetic orchestra, there is a musical introduction and the sketch begins.23 (Listen to Audio 3.1). The presence of the hearable audience on Jones and Spencer records is notable in the history of mediated musicals because film scholars have identified the presence of such an audience as a hallmark of the Hollywood musical. Jane Feuer writes that, “long before television invented the studio audience and canned laughter, the Hollywood musical was putting audiences into the film for the purpose of shaping the responses of the movie audience to the film.”24 The Jones and Spencer records show that long before the Hollywood musical was putting the audience into films, phonograph producers had established that convention in explicit emulation of the vaudeville stage.25 Records like “Heinie” also resemble the Hollywood musical in their emphasis on courtship. Following Kathy Peiss, we might say that the Jones and Spencer records were among the “new cultural forms” like movies and amusement parks that linked “heterosocial culture to a sense of modernity, individuality, and personal style.”26 Jones and Spencer’s “vaudeville specialty” records predate the Hollywood musical’s depiction of courtship, which, in Rick Altman’s influential analysis, tends to take the form of the “dual-focus” narrative: a structure that is “built around parallel stars of opposite sex,” and attains closure with the formation of the heterosexual couple. Altman argues that the “primary sexual division” between male and female star is supplemented with a set of secondary oppositions, such that the two leads are identified with attitudes and values that are “diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive.”27 The engine of the dual-focus narrative works to resolve those oppositions. The Jones and Spencer records are perhaps the first modern media texts to feature something akin to a “dual-focus” narrative, since they are “built around parallel stars of opposite sex.” However, these parallel stars are not typically given “radically divergent

Audio 3.1 Creating the imaginary theatrical context of vaudeville on Ada Jones and Len Spencer’s “Ludwig’s Air Castle” (1910).

72   Jacob Smith values.”28 Time restrictions were certainly a factor, since the three- to four-minute limitations of phonograph records during the 1900s prevented the kind of character development possible in a feature-length film. There is another factor at work however, which derives from the conventions of the vaudeville stage.29 In Altman’s terms, Jones and Spencer’s records present the courting couple without a set of secondary oppositions; instead, they are presented as matching male and female embodiments of a particular social group. In the case of “Heinie” and “Ludwig’s Air Castle,” they are male and female embodiments of the German stage type. We might say that the Jones and Spencer records do not so much negotiate social oppositions as enact and confirm ethnic and racial templates. We turn then, to an examination of how courtship is refracted through the prism of ethnic caricature on these recordings, taking one side of that prism at a time. Along the way, I will muster more evidence that the phonographic musical can be understood as an overture for the Hollywood musical.

Chimmie and Maggie Len Spencer was known for his versatility as a performer, but one of his specialties was enacting characters of the “Bowery Boy” type: William Howland Kenney calls him the phonograph’s “leading Bowery Boy” before 1910.30 As a stage type, the Bowery Boy was not associated with a single ethnic group, but with a kind of urban, working-class, youth subculture.31 Similarly, Bowery “gals” were young, urban, workingwomen who became the object of fascination for middle-class men, due to their “implicit rejection of bourgeois female decorum.”32 Spencer’s Bowery Boy is sometimes an amateur boxer or a newsboy, while Jones tends to play a female worker in the “expanding office complex” of white-collar labor: in “Fun at the Music Counter” (1908) she works in a department store, and in “Cherry Hill Jerry” (1907), Jerry meets Liz after her shift at the candy store.33 Jones and Spencer’s Bowery records tend to depict scenes of youthful flirtation ­situated within urban settings, such as the appropriately titled, “A Bowery Flirtation” (1909).34 The duo’s Bowery records depict scenes that are particularly youthful and up-to-date, and they were marketed for their presentation of the modern urban vernacular. An advertisement for “Pals” (1910) in the Edison Phonograph Monthly declared that “it is doubtful if two artists can be found who can better imitate the vernacular of the street.”35 “Honor Bright, I Loves Yer Right” (1910) was said to be “written in the thoroughly up-to-date vernacular of the street. . . an example of the latest and most expressive slang phraseology.”36 As an example of such “expressive slang phraseology,” consider how, in “A Bowery Flirtation” (1909), Chimmie tells Maggie, “that swell little mug of yours is tin-typed right on me heart.” She replies, “Don’t make me laugh, me lips are chapped! Why Chimmie, so many guys has given me that spiel that I set it to music.” Digital analysis of Spencer’s Bowery Boy performances reveal that they are among his highest in terms of average pitch, perhaps a sonic index of the youth of the “newsie”

The Courtships of Ada and Len   73

Figure 3.1  Len Spencer’s Bowery Boy, from “A Bowery Flirtation” (1909). Created with the software Gentle and Drift.

Figure 3.2  Ada Jones’ Bowery Gal, from “Cherry Hill Jerry” (1907). Created with the software Gentle and Drift.

character. At the same time, Spencer’s “Chimmie” tends to employ a fairly narrow pitch range, remaining in the higher register to create a rather sing-song or musical impression on passages like “Oh, getting wise to yourself, eh?” (See Figure 3.1). Jones’ performances in the Bowery mode are not particularly high in pitch, and a youthful, casual tone is conveyed instead through elongated words in exclamations like “Sure, but I’m your press agent now.” (See Figure 3.2). A number of Jones and Spencer’s Bowery records are set in the spaces of popular amusement. “Coming Home From Coney Island” (1906) depicts an excursion to the iconic amusement park, with the action taking place on an elevated train. When the lights go out, the two take the opportunity to steal a kiss, and then Jones sings, “Coming home from Coney Isle on a summer night.” “Blondy and Her Johnny” (1907) is set in a dance hall, a site that Kathy Peiss calls “the favorite arena in which young working women played out their cultural style.”37 We hear a dance orchestra finish a tune, the crowd applauds, and there is a call for “intermission for refreshments,” before the snappy dialogue begins. The moniker “Blondy” indicates the dyed hair worn by Jones’ character, an example of how working-class women were becoming models of “sexy behavior,” with “platinum blondes” soon to be models of female sexual desirability in Hollywood.38 In addition to amusement parks and dance halls, the Bowery records depict a range of up-to-the-minute popular amusements, making them distinctly reflexive. In that regard,

74   Jacob Smith they foreshadow the Hollywood musical, which Altman describes as being “always about Hollywood”: the musical, he writes, is “the most reflexive, the most aware of its status, and thus the most complex of all the Hollywood genres.”39 Feuer agrees, writing that the musical is a self-referential form that incorporates into itself the same types of popular entertainment of which it is an example.40 The reflexive tendency of musical media can be heard on Jones and Spencer’s Bowery records, like “Chimmie and Maggie at the Hippodrome” (1905), in which the couple attend a variety show; “Chimmie and Maggie at the Merry Widow” (1908), which takes place after an evening at the theatre; and “Chimmie and Maggie in Nickel Land” (1907), which is set in a Nickelodeon movie theatre where Maggie sings illustrated songs.41 With their youthful vigor, urban setting, sparkling vernacular, and high degree of reflexivity, we can hear in these records a template being forged that would shape Hollywood’s streetwise, backstage musicals of the 1920s and 1930s.

Henny and Hilda The record “Heinie,” described earlier, was said to have broken “all records for the sale of a single selection” when it was first released.42 “Heinie” was one of Jones and Spencer’s German selections. German immigration peaked in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the German stage type became established as a man who was “hairy, rotund, and dull,” wearing a “peaked cap, short coat,” and large wooden shoes.43 The stage German was obsessed with food, especially sauerkraut and cheese, drank copious amounts of beer, and had a tendency to play a wind instrument in a street band.44 All of these stereotypes are on full display in the Jones and Spencer archive. Advertising copy for “Ludwig’s Air Castle,” described the eponymous hero as an “amorous trombone player,” who dreams of “a cottage surrounded by gastronomic comforts that would delight the heart of the most exacting Teutonic epicure. Sauerkraut vines are to climb about the porch, a big ‘Dill pickle tree to grace the front yard, and a river of beer will be handy to the rear.”45 Jones’ average pitch is lowest on the German sketches, with her low voice perhaps meant to indicate a large body in alignment with visual stereotypes. Spencer’s German voice is notable for its particularly broad range, and analysis of short passages shows a tendency for him to switch from a low-pitched voice (again, perhaps indicating a large body) to high-pitched laughter, as on “Ha ha, hello Louisa, [lower] hey!” (See Figure 3.3.) Here is a vocal analog of the stereotypical stage German as both jolly and “rotund.” Jones and Spencer’s German records, like their Bowery ones, are frequently set in spaces of popular amusement, as in “Louis and Lena at Luna Park” (1905) and “Rudolph and Rosie at the Roller Rink” (1907). The German records feature another setting for musical entertainment as well. Peiss writes that German communities enjoyed multigenerational and mixed-sex amusements at beer gardens and beer halls, where “all indulged in drink, song, and socializing.”46 Such a scene is depicted in “Henny and Hilda at the German Picnic” (1908), where we hear Hilda and her papa taking turns at the shooting

The Courtships of Ada and Len   75

Figure 3.3  Len Spencer’s German type, from “Fritzy and Louisa” (1906). Created with the software Gentle and Drift.

gallery. Henny (Spencer) enters the scene, on a break from playing his “big b ­ assoon” with a band that provides entertainment for the picnic-goers. Henny and Hilda share some beer, cheese, and wurst, before he gets a signal calling him back to the bandstand. In addition to depicting these distinctive musical spaces, the German records are notable for their representation of dance. Recall that “large wooden shoes” were part of the attire for German types on the vaudeville stage. The sounds produced by such shoes became the motivation for phonographic dance sequences. Ads for “Ludwig’s Air Castle” announced that the record concluded with “a wooden shoe dance,” which we hear as percussive effects while the couple sings a duet.47 The record “August and Katrina” (1908) features the couple singing and dancing together in a delicatessen. An ad for the record describes Spencer’s “Dutch wooden shoe dance” as being “so realistic that if you shut your eyes you can almost see his feet.”48 Jones and Spencer’s records suggest that conventions were being established for the sonic depiction of dance in musical media well before the arrival of the talkies. Moreover, some of the ideological dynamics of “screen dance” are beginning to crystalize here. Richard Dyer argues that dance numbers in Hollywood musicals have tended to enact a certain model of heterosexual attraction. Dyer finds a pattern whereby couple-dance arrangements move from an initial stage of “side by side” and “mirroring” relationships suggestive of “the thrill of instinctive rapport,” to numbers in which “relations of dependency” predominate, manifested by one partner holding another. “What this pattern suggests,” he writes, “is the difference between the promise of happiness at the moment of courtship/dating and the form it takes at the point of consummation.”49 In the audio-only context of records like “Heinie,” there is a certain ambiguity about couple-dance relationships, as the listener might hear only the clicking of feet such that the interpersonal dynamics between the dancers is left open to the imagination. “Heinie” features a telling interjection during the dance, as Katrina declares, “Oh, Heinie, don’t squeeze me so tight!” This is a subtle moment to be sure, but one in which a Hollywood-esque model of couple-dance power dynamics—who is holding who—is communicated to the audience. (Listen to Audio 3.2.)

Audio 3.2  Phonographic couple-dance, from “Heinie” (1905).

76   Jacob Smith

Mandy and Her Man Dancing can also be heard on one of the records in which Jones and Spencer enact ster­e­o­typ­i­cal representations of African Americans. On “Happy Mammy and her Joe” (1909), we hear the interaction between an older African American couple, who pause to say goodnight to a group of young men heading home from work. “They are all happy,” Joe (Spencer) says, and Mammy (Jones) replies, “we’re happy too.” The implied setting is a plantation, with the racist suggestion that the workers are happy and contented. Joe complains that he is tired, but Mammy convinces him to dance, and swishing sounds indicate his movements, as percussive tapping represents his cane.50 Jones and Spencer’s German and “minstrel” records both feature dance sequences, and they both prominently feature the performance of the kiss, an act that was to become central to depictions of sexuality and romance in the cinema. Film scholars like Linda Williams have traced the significance of the kiss in film history back to Thomas Edison’s 1896 film, The May Irwin Kiss. Williams argues that “the new technology of projection on a screen to a darkened theater distinguished itself especially through the particular act of the kiss.”51 Later, during the era of the feature-length film, the kiss became a means of effecting narrative closure, and in the case of musicals, it served as the culmination of the dual-focus narrative.52 The Jones and Spencer records reveal that the kiss had already been identified as a powerful and multifunctional gesture in pre-cinematic musical media.53 As with dance, the phonographic depiction of the kiss is somewhat ambiguous, since it is easily perceived from either participant’s subjective experience or from an objective distance. Furthermore, the sonic smack of the kiss does not necessarily convey information about the position of the participants, whether or not one party initiates or dominates the act, or even whether one pair of lips or two makes the sound. Williams argues that the kiss is “unique among sex acts” in its “great potential for reciprocity”: “unlike heterosexual intercourse, mouths and tongues can interpenetrate in a potentially mutual give and take.”54 The potentially egalitarian quality of the kiss can blossom in the context of a sound-only media form like the phonograph. That said, as was the case with the sounds of dancing, the Jones and Spencer records embed the kiss within dialogue that signals specific interpersonal dynamics. For example, on the 1905 recording “Heinie,” Jones exclaims, “Oh, Heinie!” after a smacking sound, leading us to interpret that Spencer was the “giver” of the kiss.55 Kisses can be heard on many of the Jones and Spencer records, but they seem to have had a particular association with the minstrel type. The act of the kiss is emphasized in promotional materials for some of these records. In an ad for “A Coon Courtship” (1907), Jones’s character Susie is called “a connoisseur at the osculatory game,” and an ad for “Jim Jackson’s Affinity” (1908) claims that the “climax” of the record comes “with ‘A Soul Kiss’ that stops the music.”56 On “Ev’ry Little Bit Helps” (1905) Jones, in minstrel dialect, tells Spencer, “Kiss me!” “I don’t like to,” he bashfully replies, “the audience is

The Courtships of Ada and Len   77 looking.” He eventually concedes and even gives her “more” when she asks for it. An article in the trade publication, Talking Machine World, made reference to “Ev’ry Little Bit Helps,” stating that “this record enables one to identify . . . what we may call ‘The Coon Kiss’ as distinguished from other kisses . . . the sound their lips produce when they come together made a deep impression upon us.”57 Here we find an example of what Jennifer Stoever calls the “sonic color line,” the process of “racializing sound” and constructing hierarchies between “white” and “black” sounds.58 Kisses are prominent on Jones and Spencer’s minstrel records, but despite such aural signs of affection, these records tend to depict a decidedly negative portrayal of courtship and marriage. On “Burying the Hatchet” (1907), the male character refuses to enter the house until she agrees to throw out potential household missiles like the rolling pin, flat iron, washboard, and frying pan. On “Let Me See You Smile” (1906), she refuses to marry until he gets a steady job. “Jim Jackson’s Last Farewell” (1906) begins with a wedding march, but the couple are soon bickering, and by the close of the record he is headed off on the honeymoon without her.59 A couple in “Travel On” argue about marriage and life insurance before she tells him to “travel on . . . I want to see you gone.” The title of “Jealous Julie” (1907) announces the title character’s key trait. On “Mandy and Her Man” (1906), it is Jim who is jealous, knocking down her door as she sings, “on your way.” The racist stereotypes depicted on these recordings are utterly conventional, but no less damaging in their portrayal of the African American man as an unreliable, “noaccount roustabout,” and the African American woman as hen-pecking, jealous, and domineering.60 Here we find the most pronounced tendency of vaudeville comedians to depict “ethnic” men as troubled by “nagging” wives, “jealous girlfriends,” or “attractive flirts,” and ethnic women as the “victims of the men’s infidelities, broken promises, [and] fiscal irresponsibility.”61 As the offensive titles of some of these records indicate, these audio dramas also show the influence of the “coon song” craze of the 1890s, which portrayed Africa Americans “as often-violent simpletons unequipped for either citizenship or domestic love.”62 As Karl Hagstrom Miller reminds us, records such as these were made during the same years when “Southern white violence against African Americans reached epic proportions,” making them a soundtrack to a horrific era of lynching and Jim Crow.63 A byproduct of the unpleasant narrative terrain of the Jones and Spencer minstrel records is that they allowed for an exceptionally broad range of vocal expression. The two performers engage in more kissing, eruptions of anger, and raucous laughter than on their other records. Jones in particular, is given the chance to inhabit a more forceful and powerful presence than on other records in the archive. Jones’ range of vocal pitch on the minstrel records is quite broad, manifested in moments of anger and jealousy. The broad emotional range of the minstrel records may have been appreciated for a sense of dynamism and presence, thereby helping to overcome the still-novel dislocation of performer and audience in early phonography. In this way, the Jones and Spencer phonographic musicals are precursors to the rhetorical strategies described by Alice Maurice, whereby filmmakers of the early sound era

78   Jacob Smith emphasized “the hyperpresence of black bodies in order to deflect attention away from the apparatus” while simultaneously “using those same bodies and their supposedly ‘inherent’ talents to show off the prowess of the apparatus.”64 We might also understand Jones and Spencer’s minstrel voices in relation to what Sianne Ngai calls “the exaggeratedly emotional, hyperexpressive” image for “racially or ethnically marked subjects in American culture.” Ngai reminds us that the cultural representation of African Americans has been one in which “emotional qualities seem especially prone to sliding into corporeal qualities.”65 In this regard, the Jones and Spencer minstrel records are perhaps best understood as precursors, not so much to the Hollywood musical, but to the animated cartoons of the sound era, which perpetuated these racist tropes in the musical media of the 1920s and ’30s. Audio 3.3  Phonographic kisses and minstrel vocal types, from “Ev’ry Little Bit Helps” (1905).

Mr. and Mrs. Murphy The minstrel sketches are not the only negative portrayals of courtship in the Jones and Spencer catalog. They share that distinction with many of the duo’s Irish records. 3.6 million Irish people emigrated to the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the “comic Irishman” became a staple of American comedy, characterized as a “muscular laborer, with cheek whiskers, a broad upper lip, a button nose, and prognathous jaws.”66 Dale Knobel cites a 1913 source describing the stage Irishman as speaking with “an atrocious Irish brogue,” uttering a constant stream of inadvertent jokes and a “wild screech or oath of Gaelic origin at every third word.”67 The most negative aspects of the Irish stereotype can be heard on the Jones and Spencer record, “Flannigan’s Night Off ” (1906). A mother beats her crying baby before her husband arrives home drunk, they bicker, he falls asleep, snoring loudly (“he makes a noise like a horse”), and when she wakes him up, he falls out the window.68 Irish men had a lowered life expectancy at this time because of harsh working conditions, and that sad reality was mapped onto dynamics of courtship on “The Widow Dooley” (1908).69 Molly is visited by Larry O’Connor, a friend of her recently-deceased husband, Mike. He is disappointed to learn that she has already accepted another marriage proposal at Mike’s funeral. “You’re quick in leaving,” Molly says as he gets up to go. “No,” he replies, “I was too slow in coming.” Compared to other types, the Irish type was more associated with civic life and political activism, as can be heard on “Flannigan’s St. Patrick’s Day” (1906). Mike (Spencer) carries a banner for the “Ancient Order of Hibernians” during a St. Patrick’s Day parade, and Molly (Jones) opens a window to sing to the cheering crowd, “I’d like to see old Ireland free once more.” On “The Suffragette” (1910), Jones plays a speaker at a suf­f ra­gette meeting, which is broken up by Alderman Tom Harrigan (Spencer). The record ends with Jones

The Courtships of Ada and Len   79 saved from arrest by Alderman Harrigan, and promotional materials explain that “she consents to confine her ambition to rule in the future to the Harrigan household.”70 In both cases, the depiction of political activism on the Irish records is ambiguous, open to being read in either positive or negative terms. The Jones and Spencer Irish records are not entirely disparaging in their portrayal of the type, and some feature quite tender scenes between the central couple. For example, in “Mr. and Mrs. Murphy” (1905), the two recall when they first met, and exchange kisses.71 Even at their most insulting, these records reveal a great affection for Irish musical traditions. On the otherwise bleak “Flannigan’s Night Off,” Jones sings a beautiful lullaby to her baby before the scene of domestic discord. On “The Widow Dooley,” Molly sings a sea chanty, and Larry performs a reel on the flute while she dances. “Maggy Clancy’s New Piano” (1906) presents a scene between Maggy and her father in which he asks her to perform a series of Irish tunes. As Jennifer Mooney points out, this record embodies the contradictory representation of the Irish at this time, saddling the father with some of the worst aspects of the Irish stereotype, while allowing Maggie, the representative of a new generation of American-born Irish immigrants, a much less demeaning depiction.72 As with Jones and Spencer’s minstrel records, the Irish records allow the duo a particularly wide range of vocal performance. For Jones, the Irish records feature among her highest average pitch, as well as a broad pitch range. Short passages provide illustrations of those dynamics, with a lilting, musical style that often bends upwards at the end of phrases. Spencer’s Irish voice is his lowest in terms of average pitch, while also maintaining a very broad range. Short passages reveal phrases that tend to lilt downward, as with, “Do you remember the time when first I met ya?” (See Figure 3.4). A distinctly nostalgic and sentimental tone predominates on several Irish skits that are set in the “old country.” On “Sweet Peggy Magee” (1909), Peggy looks for her lost cow, and runs into Paddy. With evening falling and bells tolling in the distance, Paddy proposes to Peggy, and they catch the coach to the village to get married, hitching the cow behind them. On “How Kathleen Proposed” (1905), Barney flirts with Kathleen as he plays his fiddle. Thunder rumbles, and she sings, “Come in out of the rain, Barney McShane.” On these records, Jones enacts the nineteenth-century figure of the Irish “colleen,” which Mooney describes as “a beautiful young woman with long red or dark hair, often barefooted and usually dressed in traditional clothes.” For Mooney, this was a Romantic image of “a simpler, more traditional femininity . . . a nonthreatening ethnicity that could be easily assimilated through marriage.”73 Records such as these can be heard as precursors to the cinematic folk musical. Folk musicals take place in rural and small-town settings, celebrate ordinary “folk,” and feature musical numbers that seem to arise organically from the fictional community. Musicals such as these create utopias of community, transparency, and togetherness that are an antidote to the social atomization, fragmentation, and manipulation of modern life. For Feuer, these musicals enact a “myth of integration,” with the individual integrated into a community or group; here, she writes, is the “mass art” of cinema aspiring to “the condition of a folk art.”74

80   Jacob Smith

Figure 3.4  Len Spencer’s Irish type, “Mr. and Mrs. Murphy” (1905). Created with the software Gentle and Drift.

One example of Hollywood’s folk musicals are “black cast” productions such as Hallelujah! (1929), Cabin in the Sky (1943), and Carmen Jones (1954). These films show how the “folk” could be understood as people of color whose song and dance was deemed premodern, authentic, and natural. Jones and Spencer’s “Happy Mammy and Her Joe” can be placed in this lineage. Irish records like “Sweet Peggy Magee” and “How Kathleen Proposed” function as folk musicals to the extent that they feature a utopian sense of community (as when Paddy and Peggy are cheered on their ride to be married), and when music seems to arise organically from the setting of the scene (as when Barney plays his fiddle). Records such as these should be heard then, as precursors to “old world” folk musicals like Brigadoon (1954).75

John and Jane There are a number of records in the Jones and Spencer catalog that are racially and ethnically unmarked, which I am grouping together under the designation, “White.” These portray what Dyer would call social types; those who “live by the rules of society,” as opposed to stereotypes like the German, Minstrel, and Irish ethic types we’ve encountered thus far, whom the rules of society are “designed to exclude.”76 Digital analysis of Jones and Spencer’s White records shows that their vocal performances tend to fall in the middle of the spectrum in terms of pitch range and average, suggesting that these recordings offer a set of average or unmarked vocal parameters, a “normal” against which the other types become hyper-audible. If the minstrel records in the Jones and Spencer archive display an exceptionally broad range of vocalization, the White records depict an exceptionally broad range of narrative contexts for the central couple. That range results in records that differ from the conventions of film musicals which, Altman argues, tend to depict marriage as the “capstone of a glorious romance, the symbol of a successful courtship.” “Like

The Courtships of Ada and Len   81 the fairy tale,” he writes, “the musical ends with marriage . . . in order to disguise the fact that American mythology has no model for intersexual relationships other than that of ­courtship. [italics in original]” “American marriage, during the heyday of the musical,” he concludes, “is never a lifetime shared but a dream concentrated into a single moment.”77 Jones and Spencer records like “Heinie” and “Sweet Peggy Magee” establish closure with a marriage proposal or the end of courtship, but their White records reveal something different. “Schoolday Frolics” (1908) features Jones and Spencer as a pair of children who argue about the relative merits of boys and girls, get chased by a farmer, and ride a seesaw. At the other end of the age spectrum are a number of records depicting the reminiscences of older married couples. “The Golden Wedding” (1906) concerns John and Jane, who relive memories of their wedding over melodramatic music. A trade advertisement described this record as “the happy reminiscence of an aged couple on the morning of their fiftieth wedding anniversary . . . interspersed with songs and the pealing of church bells.”78 Similarly, “Wedding Bells” (1907) features an “old couple” who “review their courting days,” and “A Picture of Long Ago” (1908) concerns Samantha and Hezekiah, who find an old photograph from their wedding day.79 Contra Altman’s assessment of the Hollywood musical, these records portray marriage as “a lifetime shared,” apparently a privilege reserved for middle-class white characters. The portrayal of middle-class courtship on these records is not entirely rosy, however. Consider “House Cleaning Time” (1908), which an ad describes as “a thrilling domestic episode that everyone knows about from sad experience.”80 Jones plays a middle-class housewife, who complains about her dreary job cleaning the house. Spencer plays the husband, arriving home wet from a rain storm. They bicker before stumbling upon some of their old love letters. “Why can’t we be as happy now,” she asks as melodramatic music swells. “Why, we can wife, and we will!” he asserts.81 A kind of proto-screwball comedy, “House Cleaning Time” enacts some of the tensions and resentments that lay behind the façade of a quintessential middle-class domestic scene. Cultural anxieties can also be heard on “The Fair Fisher and Her Catch” (1905), billed as “a summer resort flirtation scene.”82 Jones opens the record with a monologue: “What silly fools these men are, to be sure. They come to the seashore to be in the swim and to go fishing. Little do they dream that it is they who are the fish so soon to be caught by the coy fisher-maid.” A car approaches with a wealthy man behind the wheel, and she pretends to be injured. The ruse works, and it is not long before the gentleman proposes to her. “Poor foolish boy,” she laughs as he drives away, “I landed him easily.” Jones’ characterization of the “fair fisher” is an early example of the “gold digger” type. Note that this record was produced almost fifteen years before the term “gold digger” entered the American lexicon with the production of Avery Hopwood’s play The Gold Diggers in 1919, the scandalous notoriety of Peggy Joyce Hopkins in the 1920s, and the publication of Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925).83 This is another instance then, of the Jones and Spencer archive exploring thematic terrain that would be developed by film musicals in the decades that followed.

82   Jacob Smith

Conclusion I’ve been arguing that the Jones and Spencer archive should be heard in relation to the film musical, and that when we do, we notice a host of continuities between the two with regards to character types such as the gold digger, the streetwise platinum blonde, and the denizens of the folk musical; techniques such as the representation of dance, the kiss, and the hearable audience; and narrative tropes such as the reflexive depiction of musical culture and the dual-focus on the romantic couple. Along with these compelling continuities between phonographic musicals and film musicals, I have returned again and again to a significant discontinuity, with the former embedded in a system of vocal caricature associated with the vaudeville stage. How might we account for that difference? The last record that Jones and Spencer made together was “The Crushed Tragedian” (1911). A fascinating variation on their Bowery records, it features Jones as a wise-cracking Bowery gal who banters with an out-of-work actor. Jones asks, “Say, are you a for-real actor on the stage or just in the moving pictures?” “Do I look like a reel of moving picture film?” he asks. “Well, you look pale and thin,” she quips, “but maybe you’re a little out of focus.” He moans, “Crushed again!” In fact, Spencer had begun working in the film industry during the years when he was recording for the phonograph companies, supplying actors to talk behind cinema screens, patenting a sound-and-image “picture apparatus” in 1900, and performing on a record that served as the basis for an early “Cineophone” film that combined sounds and images.84 Two years after “The Crushed Tragedian,” the Edison company began marketing Kinetophone films with synchronized sound, which were shown in vaudeville theatres. The content of these films drew from the same set of stage stereotypes heard on the Jones and Spencer records: a list of twenty proposed scenarios for Kinetophone production includes an “Irish Comedy,” a “Dutch” or German comedy scene, filmed versions of a minstrel show, an “Italian story,” an amateur night, and a series of vaudeville numbers.85 The Kinetophone was not a commercial success but the surviving films, like the Jones and Spencer records, reveal how the Hollywood musical might have begun, if the technology had been successful when it was first attempted. Talking pictures did not become the norm until over a decade later, with the introduction of Warner Brothers’ Vitaphone system. There are still elements of racial and ethnic caricature on the early Vitaphone shorts—including Al Jolson’s “A Plantation Act” (1926)—but during the fifteen years between the last Jones and Spencer record and the emergence of talking pictures, considerable changes had occurred with regards to the performance of ethnic comedy. Paul Distler writes that “ethnic comics faded from vaudeville and burlesque in the early years of the twentieth century, when the immigrants upon whom they patterned their creations . . . either died or became assimilated into the mainstream of American society, when glorified vaudeville and burlesque showed preference to the straight, stand-up comedian, when musical comedy began to

The Courtships of Ada and Len   83 develop sophisticated libretti, and when the sons and daughters found the exaggerations of their immigrant parents a form of ridicule.”86 By the mid-1920s, the repertoire of stage types we hear on the Jones and Spencer records was falling out of fashion, and in the era of the Hollywood musical, versatility at dialects was less important in determining the success of musical couples than projecting “physical vitality, good humor, and middle-classness” along the lines of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, or Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler.87 That said, those iconic cinematic musical couples still embodied tropes associated with the stage types of the Jones and Spencer era: they seem, in fact, to have struck a balance between the “middle-classness” of Jones and Spencer’s White records, and the youthful energy of their Bowery records.88 Not only were vaudeville types fading from prominence by the 1920s, but a new model of courtship had emerged, one based on the “melting pot” concept. Werner Sollors contrasts an orientation towards the “descent” relations of ethnic identity with an orientation towards the “consent” relations of courtship and marriage. Sollors refers to Israel Zangwill’s 1909 stage play, “The Melting Pot” as a paradigmatic example of “consent” trumping “descent,” since it presents a love relationship spanning two religious faiths that wins out over “parental desires and old descent antagonisms.”89 As we have seen, the Jones and Spencer records are organized in such a way as to make this kind of “melting pot love” impossible. When there are hints of such an emergent model on the Jones and Spencer records, they are played for laughs.90 On “Santiago Flynn” (1908), Spencer plays a Mexican named Santiago who serenades the Irish Norah McCarty. As promotional materials put it, “Norah has nothing for him but sneers and quips, til he tells her that, although born in Mexico, his father’s name was Flynn. Then nothing is too good for Santiago.”91 The record flirts with a consent relation between characters of different ethnicity, but can only find resolution by asserting a descent relation.92 The “melting pot” metaphor is not without its problems of course, as can be seen in one of the landmarks of early film musicals, King of Jazz (1930). A revue musical built around numbers by Paul Whiteman and his orchestra, the film concludes with a sequence in which representatives of European national musical traditions are lowered into an enormous melting pot to emerge as the uniform, metallic embodiments of American jazz. This odd sequence both shows the prevalence of the “melting pot” metaphor at this time, and the ways in which it could exclude non-European people, with the absence of African Americans being particularly galling in what purports to be the origin story of jazz. By contrast, the Jones and Spencer catalog presents a pre-melting pot musical form that fractures the experience of courtship through the prism of the conventional stage types of the time, presenting its spunky and youthful aspects on Bowery records, its comic and homely aspects on the German records, its contentious and antagonistic aspects on the minstrel records, and its sentimental aspects on the White records. That approach avoided the depiction of America as a uniform mass of whiteness à la King of Jazz, but maintained a strict segregation of musical narratives along ethnic lines, and so militated against other kinds of class-based or political mobilization,

84   Jacob Smith thereby helping to foster “rivalries—and sometimes violent animosities—between people who shared many of the same problems.”93 Jones and Spencer’s 1905–1911 records and the Hollywood musicals of the late 1920s are separated then by a sea-change in attitudes about ethnicity and courtship, as well as the cultural formulas for representing them. When we expand the history of musical media beyond film to include these phonographic texts, we can better appreciate what was distinctive about the strategies adopted by filmmakers to navigate this shifting cultural terrain, such as the “dual-focus” narrative. We might also recognize that forms of musical media have long been drawn to the cultural pressure points where tradition, futurity, identity, authenticity, romance, and courtship intersect. We still have much to learn about the historical and emerging arrangements of that old, familiar score.

Notes 1. Martin Rubin, “Busby Berkeley and the Backstage Musical,” in Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader, ed. Steven Cohan (London: Routledge, 2002), 53. 2. Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 201. 3. Ibid., 95, 110. 4. Paul  A.  Distler, “Ethnic Comedy in Vaudeville and Burlesque,” in American Popular Entertainment, ed. Myron Matlaw (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1977), 36–7. See also Lawrence E. Mintz, “Humor and Ethnic Stereotypes in Vaudeville and Burlesque,” MELUS 21, no. 4 (1996): 19–20. 5. “Most of these type characters had been formalized in the decades previous to the rise of vaudeville and had become almost unalterable comic masks by the time they appeared on the vaudeville stage.” See Albert McLean, Jr., American Vaudeville as Ritual (University of Kentucky Press, 1965), 120. Distler, “Ethnic Comedy in Vaudeville and Burlesque,” 36–7. Dale T. Knobel, “A Vocabulary of Ethnic Perception: Content Analysis of the American Stage Irishman, 1820–1860,” Journal of American Studies 15, no. 1 (1981): 45–71: 48. 6. On blackface, see Susan Manning, Modern Dance, Negro Dance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), xv; Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). On ethnicity, see Werner Sollors, “Theories of American Ethnicity,” in Theories of Ethnicity, ed. Werner Sollors (London: MacMillan Press, 1996), xvi. On social types and “the crowd’s massive alterity,” see Robert Ray, The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 27–28. 7. Joseph Boskin and Joseph Dorinson, “Ethnic Humor: Subversion and Survival,” in American Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1985): 81–97: 81. For Mooney, stereotypes are “associations and beliefs about the characteristics and attributes of a group and its members that shape how people think about and respond to that group . . . often used as a form of shorthand, a way of simplifying a complex environment,” Jennifer Mooney, Irish Stereotypes in Vaudeville, 1865–1905 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 4. 8. On race and ethnicity on radio, see Michele Hilmes, Radio Voices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 93. 9. Knobel, “A Vocabulary of Ethnic Perception,” 53. 10. See Eidsheim, Nina Sun. The Race of Sound (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 5.

The Courtships of Ada and Len   85 11. This research was made possible by my participation in “Tools for Listening to ­Text-in-Performance,” sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and led by Project Directors Marit MacArthur (Cal State Bakersfield & UC Davis) and Neil Verma (Northwestern). 12. “Digital sound studies holds the possibility of changing the text-centric and largely silent cultures of communication in the humanities into more richly multisensory experiences, inclusive of diverse knowledges and abilities.” Mary Caton Lingold, Darren Mueller, and Trettienm Whitney, eds. Digital Sound Studies (Durham: Duke University Press,  2018), 3–4. See also, Marit MacArthur, Georgia Zellou, and Lee M. Miller, “Beyond Poet Voice: Sampling the (Non-) Performance Styles of 100 American Poets,” in Journal of Cultural Analytics, April 18, 2018, https://doi.org/10.22148/16.022. 13. Knobel, “A Vocabulary of Ethnic Perception,” 48. 14. Jennifer Lynn Stoever, The Sonic Color Line (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 7, 11. 15. There are fifteen Bowery records; eleven German; eleven Minstrel types; eleven Irish; seven “White”; six “Rube”; three “Hebrew”; three Italian; two Western or Native American; and a few that depict stage actors as comic social types. 16. William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 26. 17. Tim Gracyk, Popular American Recording Pioneers, 1895–1925 (New York: Routledge, 2008), 314–16. 18. Patrick Feaster, The Following Record: Making Sense of Phonographic Performance, 1877–1908, Ph.D. Dissertation (Indiana University, Bloomington, 2006), 600. 19. On Jones’ early career and recording debut, see Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 35; Gracyk, Popular American Recording Pioneers, 186–87. 20. Feaster, The Following Record, 600, see also Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 35. Also see, “Ada Jones Tells Story of Career,” Talking Machine World 13, no. 2 (February 15, 1917), 47. 21. Feaster, The Following Record, 590. Feaster writes that Jones and Spencer set a precedent by which “the designation ‘vaudeville’ could be applied to any kind of phonographic ‘scene,’ regardless of whether or not it sought to represent or exploit any actual conventions specific to the vaudeville theater” (605). 22. Feaster, The Following Record, 595–97. 23. “Mariutch at Coney Isle” (1907) is framed as an amateur night. 24. Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 26. 25. We might note that the Jones and Spencer performance settings are quite realistic, and do not resemble the “impossible” Busby Berkeley sequences featuring underwater shots or kaleidoscopic overhead shots, which are framed with shots of an attentive audience, as though the number is taking place in an actual performance space. Many numbers in musicals are “impossible from the standpoint of the realistic discourse of the narrative.” Berkeley, numbers are “blatantly and audaciously impossible in terms of the theatrical space in which they are supposedly taking place” (Rubin, “Busby Berkeley and the Backstage Musical,” 57–58). 26. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 6. See also Ellen K. Rothman, Hands and Hearts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 31, 103. 27. Altman, The American Film Musical, 24–25.

86   Jacob Smith 28. Ibid., 19. 29. For Richard Dyer, a type is any vivid, memorable, and widely recognized characterization in which a few traits are foregrounded and variation or “development” is kept to a minimum, (Richard Dyer, “Stereotyping,” in Gays and Film, ed. Richard Dyer (New York: Zoetrope, 1984), 28. 30. Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 34. 31. Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004 [1984]), 300. Also see Christine Stansell, City of Women (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 91. 32. Stansell, City of Women, 93. Also see E.  Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 125. 33. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 38–9. 34. Ibid., 58. 35. Edison Phonograph Monthly (June 1910): 16. 36. Edison Phonograph Monthly (October 1910): 17. 37. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 88. 38. Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life, 36. This becomes the topic of discussion in “Peaches and Cream” (1906), “Ah Chimmie, you’re all the cream for fair and I thought all the time youse liked brunettes the best.” “Well, ain’t youse a brunette?” “I don’t know.” “I’ll take you down to Coney Island and take you in swimming, huh?” “And then youse can tell what me natural complexion is like, huh?” 39. Rick Altman, “Introduction,” in Genre: The Musical, ed. Rick Altman (London: Routledge, 1986), 7. Feuer describe the Hollywood musical as “a mass art which aspires to the condition of a folk art, produced and consumed by the same integrated community” (Feuer, The Hollywood Musical, 3). Altman asserts that the folk musical “plays up the togetherness and communitarianism characteristic of the genre’s general choral tendencies” (Altman, The American Film Musical, 126). 40. Jane Feuer, “The Self-reflective Musical and the Myth of Entertainment,” in Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader, ed. Steven Cohan (London: Routledge, 2002), 31–40: 31. 41. Edison Phonograph Monthly describes Chimmie and Maggie’s trip to see the operetta “The Merry Widow”: “The Record begins as they are leaving the theatre. The calls for carriages are heard and the boys are selling the sheet music in the lobby. Maggie is inclined to be sarcastic about the members of her sex whom they have just seen on the ‘stoige.’ She especially comments on the ‘Widow’ thusly: ‘little puffs of powder, little dabs of paint, makes the merry widow, look like wot she ain’t,” in Edison Phonograph Monthly (May 1908): 2. 42. Edison Phonograph Monthly (June 1905): 9. 43. Peter Conolly-Smith, “Casting Teutonic Types from the Nineteenth Century to World War I: German Ethnic Stereotypes in Print, on Stage, and Screen,” in Columbia Journal of American Studies 9 (2009): 51–52, 55–56. 44. William R. Linneman, “Immigrant Stereotypes: 1880–1900,” Studies in American Humor 1, no. 1 (1974): 28–39: 35. 45. Edison Phonograph Monthly (February 1910): 16. 46. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 30. 47. Edison Phonograph Monthly (February 1910): 16. 48. Edison Phonograph Monthly (December 1907): 5. 49. Richard Dyer, In the Space of a Song (London: Routledge, 2012), 92. 50. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks [5th ed.] (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 5–7. For more on the minstrel stereotype, described as, “happy

The Courtships of Ada and Len   87 in their exclusion from urban civilization” and dancing “in a land of natural abundance and familial love,” see Miller, Segregating Sound, 145. 51. Linda Williams, “Of Kisses and Ellipses: The Long Adolescence of American Movies,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 (2006): 288–340: 291. We might note that May Irwin made records for Victor in May 1907 that resemble the style of Ada Jones. 52. Virginia Wright Wexman, Creating the Couple (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 18. I cited this in Jacob Smith, “Kissing as Telling: Some Thoughts on the Cultural History of Media Performance,” Cinema Journal 51, no. 3 (2012): 123–28. 53. J.  A.  Sokalski, “Performed Affection: the Spectacle of Kissing on Stage and Screen,” in Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital, ed. John Fullerton and Jan Olsson (Eastleigh: John Libbey, 2005), 299. Charles Musser, “The May Irwin Kiss: Performance and the Beginnings of Cinema,” in Visual Delights Two: Exhibition and Reception, ed. Vanessa Toulmin and Simon Popple (Eastleigh: John Libbey, 2005), 96–115: 98–99. 54. Williams, “Of Kisses and Ellipses,” 313. 55. See Smith, “Kissing as Telling,” and Williams, “Of Kisses and Ellipses,” 2. 56. Edison Phonograph Monthly (September 1907): 5. Edison Phonograph Monthly (September 1908): 18. 57. “A Record of a Kiss,” Talking Machine World 1, no. 9 (September 15, 1905): 23. “Why not a collection of kiss records?” asked the author, “Cleverly classified it should prove of immense interest.” 58. Stoever, The Sonic Color Line, 7, 11. 59. “Bashful Henry and His Lovin’ Lucy” (1906). 60. Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, 5–7. 61. Mintz, “Humor and Ethnic Stereotypes in Vaudeville and Burlesque,” 21. 62. Miller, Segregating Sound, 41. Spencer recorded minstrel material, see Miller, Segregating Sound, 124–25. 63. Ibid., 42–43. 64. Alice Maurice, “Cinema at Its Source: Synchronizing Race and Sound in the Early Talkies,” Camera Obscura 17, no. 1 (2002): 1–71: 45. 65. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 93, 95. 66. Linneman, “Immigrant Stereotypes: 1880–1900,” 29. 67. Knobel, “A Vocabulary of Ethnic Perception,” 61, citing 1913 source. 68. On “Flanagan’s Night Off,” see Jennifer Mooney, Irish Stereotypes in Vaudeville, 1865–1905, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 116–17. 69. Mooney, Irish Stereotypes in Vaudeville, 100–1. 70. Edison Phonograph Monthly (March 1910): 24. 7 1. Edison Phonograph Monthly describes how “Mr. and Mrs. Malone” begins with “the strains of an Irish reel,” before Mr. and Mrs. Malone enact “a side-splitting line of talk as each one accuses the other of some particularly bad ‘break’ at the party,” Edison Phonograph Monthly (May 1910): 25. 72. Mooney, Irish Stereotypes in Vaudeville, 116–17. 73. Ibid., 150–51. 74. Feuer, “The Self-reflective Musical and the Myth of Entertainment,” 35–36. I am also drawing upon Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” in Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader, ed. Steven Cohan (New York: Routledge, 2002), 19–30. 75. Other “folk” musicals in this archive focus on rural white communities. See “Si Perkins’ Barn Dance,” “a most realistic side-splitting sentimental imitation of an old-fashioned

88   Jacob Smith country dance in the barn.” This record provides another fascinating sonic snapshot of the context of musical culture: the band leader divides the dancers by gender (“Gals all on one side and boys on t’other!”); there is a break from the music for cider and donuts; and enactment of dance calls like “forward and back,” “sashay,” and “all promenade,” Edison Phonograph Monthly (March 1909): 25. 76. Dyer, “Stereotyping,” 29. 77. Altman, The American Film Musical, 262–63. 78. Edison Phonograph Monthly (October 1909): 17. 79. Edison Phonograph Monthly (November 1907): 4. 80. Edison Phonograph Monthly describes “House Cleaning Time” as follows: “Ada Jones as the ‘lady behind the broom’ is as peevish as the occasion demands . . . he is given a good dusting until he feels he is the most unnecessary piece of furniture in the house . . . Household cares fly out of the window with the remembrance of happy bygone days.” Edison Phonograph Monthly (August 1908): 15. 81. Ellen K. Rothman argues that around this time, “the image of a man returning home from his labors in the world” came to represent “the quintessence of being married.” Rothman, Hands and Hearts, 263. See also Joyce Henri Robinson, “Hi Honey, I’m Home: Weary (Neurasthenic) Businessmen and the Formulation of a Serenely Modern Aesthetic,” in Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, ed. Christopher Reed (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 98–112. 82. Edison Phonograph Monthly (October 1905): 2. 83. Pamela Robertson, “Feminist Camp in Gold Diggers of 1933,” in Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader, ed. Steven Cohan (London: Routledge, 2002), 129–42: 137. 84. On Spencer and early cinema, see Patrick Feaster and Jacob Smith, “Reconfiguring the History of Early Cinema through the Phonograph, 1877–1908,” Film History 21 (2009): 311–25. 85. Rosalind Rogoff, “Edison’s Dream: A Brief History of the Kinetophone,” Cinema Journal 15, no. 2 (1976): 64–65. Also see the recent DVD collection, The Kinetophone: A Fact! A Reality! (Undercrank, 2018). 86. Distler, “Ethnic Comedy in Vaudeville and Burlesque,” 40–41. In terms of the last point, we might compare this to the recent sea-change in popular attitude towards the character “Apu” on the television show, The Simpsons (1989–). In his documentary, The Problem with Apu (2017), the comedian Hari Kondabolu says that voice actor Hank Azaria sounds like “an impression of a white guy making fun of my dad.” 87. William Paul outlines the “second couple formula” in films like Ernst Lubitsch’s The Love Parade (1929), “the Lillian Roth-Lupino Lane servant characters were set aside” from the primary couple of Jeannette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier by being “more physical in their relationship with each other, they sang sprightlier songs and, importantly, they danced.” For Paul, Astaire and Rogers brought the second couple “into primary position” (William Paul, Ernst Lubitsch’s American Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 96–97). 88. The other types made occasional appearances, as in the “Bojangles of Harlem” number in Swing Time (1936). 89. Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 72. See also Edna Nahshon, From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2006). Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 6. Also see George De Vos, “Ethnic Pluralism: Conflict and Accommodation,” in Ethnic Identity, ed. Lola Romanucci-Ross

The Courtships of Ada and Len   89 and George De Vos (London: Sage, 1995), 18; John Lowe, “Theories of Ethnic Humor: How to Enter, Laughing,” in American Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1986): 439–60: 440; Elliott Oring, Folk Groups and Folklore Genres (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1986), 24. 90. Early twentieth century, marriage of Jew and Irishman “outstripped all other ethnic themes.” Mooney, Irish Stereotypes in Vaudeville, 43, citing Thomas Cripps. 91. Edison Phonograph Monthly (April 1908): 4. “An Irish maiden is courted by an Italian wooer.” (September 1908), 27. 92. On “Sadie and Abie” (1906), one of three “Hebrew” records in the Jones and Spencer catalog, Sadie says she wants to marry an “Irisher,” which again, is only a prompt for laughs. 93. Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 31.

Select Bibliography Altman, Rick. The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Cohan, Steven, ed. Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader. London: Routledge, 2002. Eidsheim, Nina Sun. The Race of Sound. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Feuer, Jane. The Hollywood Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Kenney, William Howland. Recorded Music in American Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Lingold, Mary Caton, Darren Mueller, and Trettienm Whitney, eds. Digital Sound Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Miller, Karl Hagstrom. Segregating Sound. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Mooney, Jennifer. Irish Stereotypes in Vaudeville, 1865–1905. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Stoever, Jennifer Lynn. The Sonic Color Line. New York: New York University Press, 2016.

chapter 4

The “ Tr ick a lit y ” of Listen i ng i n E a r ly M usica l Tr ick Fil ms Julie Brown

After seeing one of the first Lumière programs, Georges Méliès is famously said to have described cinema as an “extraordinary trick,” a potential he developed into a film genre.1 An over-reduction perhaps, but—as the twentieth century started—every major international moving-picture manufacturer offered films on subjects broadly described as “magic,” “magical,” “mystery,” “mystical,” “phantasmagoric,” and “trick.”2 “Transformation views,” or trick films, created special effects using newly available cinematic techniques, and are examples of what Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault have characterized as the “cinema of attractions,” moving pictures which offered new phenomenological experiences that were less a way of telling stories than “a way of presenting a series of views to an audience, fascinating because of their illusory power.”3 In approaching moving pictures as an extension of stage magic, Méliès and others created not only a vibrant new screen genre but, within it, a small but distinct body of audio-visual trick scenes. Here the transformations and jokes include imaginative visualizations of commonplace notions about music and the marvels and problems associated with new audio technologies. Given that the moving pictures were in and of themselves silent, it is not obvious why filmmakers would so often revel in visually materialized sounds.4 (More than 60 of 170 Méliès films contained intrigue around a sound or musical event, according to Isabelle Raynauld).5 It is particularly intriguing given the uncertainty as to how these films were accompanied in real musical terms in particular places. At the Théatre Robert-Houdin in Paris, Méliès had at his disposal theatrical resources for stage magic, including musical accompaniment and sound effects, and may always have intended these to be used with his trick films.6 But of course trick films went out into the world and were shown in a variety of exhibition spaces that may or may not have had such resources. We know, from the research of Rick Altman and others, that during the early cinema period live sonic practices were highly varied, de­pend­ent

The “Trickality” of Listening   91 upon country, region, exhibition space, and entirely contingent upon the resources and attitude of the exhibitor him/herself.7 It may therefore be simplistic to assume that sounds materialized onscreen were always realized in the theatrical space of exhibition—in an implied “sound effects” approach to accompanying—even if this might often have been the intention, in the way Alison McMahan suggests.8 As we will see, although some trick films imply particular music at particular points, others might easily have served as the unaccompanied final-item on a nickelodeon program, a mechanical entertainment that could run without musical accompaniment.9 Sound materialized onscreen that substitutes for aurally present sound may have served simply to induce active and empathetic audience participation, which is part of Dominique Nasta’s explanation for its presence in melodramas of the early teens.10 For Sheila J. Nayar, who draws parallels with Hindi sound cinema, silent (and Hindi) cinema’s prominent visualization of voices that do not sound points to an oral episteme of visual storytelling. It is possible, she argues, that “norms . . . induced by literacy” weighed on “celluloid storytelling as both a generative and a spectatorial act.”11 Because storytelling was partly tied to the voice, audiences might have needed moments of even silent speaking, singing, and music-making in order to engage meaningfully and comfortably with the new moving-picture tales. McMahan addresses films closer to our subject here, suggesting that early vaudeville-based moving picture “attractions” with prominent singing, dancing, and other sound events “were all meant to be read as sound films without the sound.”12 In the particular case of trick films, however, we need to acknowledge the often collusive relationship between audience and entertainer in comedy and magic. For Gaudreault, trick films, specifically, almost always establish a relationship between spectators and the screen based on a recognition of the cinematic illusion, and this recognition is what constitutes “trickality.” One might therefore suggest that music-themed tricks films astonished partly because of the very disjunction between the fact that, on the one hand, music and sound were in the foreground of scenarios that themselves unfolded in hearing worlds, and, on the other, those sounds were either imperfectly present in a live rendition or not present at all.13 Indeed, an alternative explanation for the ubiquity of musical themes in early comedy and trick films is that their audio-visual incongruity struck filmmakers as an inherent joke and source of play; in other words, the “trickiness” of the auditive domain in early cinema may substantially explain the appeal of such scenarios to filmmakers exploring trick techniques. It also seems telling that trick films often focused on new audio technologies, for which the opposite audiovisual relationship was true: sound (re)produced by audio technologies lacked its visual source. For films involving sound reproduction subjects, there was a double incongruity—and perhaps, double the pleasure. My topic is therefore about more than cinematic listening. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that it is best to speak about “apprehension” of sound and meaning in the silent cinema, given the way in which sound visualized on screen worked with (and against) that which might have been sonorously present in the ephemeral moment of exhibition— a mechanical musical instrument? a pianist playing light classical or popular music? sound effects? a phonograph recording? nothing at all?14 The notion of “subception”

92   Julie Brown which Nasta draws from psychology to explain the “subliminal auditive perception” of visualized sound provides some nuance, but in practice, an audience derives meaning from silent films in a way that is highly multimodal. Here I draw on Nicholas Cook’s observations about the multimodality of listening to recorded music, listening that necessarily mobilizes remembered experiences of the visual, and of embodied music-making, as too sight mobilizes other remembered multimodal experiences.15 Simon Shaw-Miller makes a similar observation with reference to percussionist Evelyn Glennie: we hear sounds with our whole body, hearing not only acoustically, but also as a form of both touch and sight.16 I argue that while trick films likewise engage with listening in highly varied, mediated and largely indirect, ways, and encourage their audiences to do the same, they often use cinematic trickery to explore what I call the trick potential of listening and audio-visuality themselves, incongruities and mysteries attaching to music as a phenomenon that would have been familiar to audiences. I focus on three aspects of what I would call the seeming “trickality” of musical audibility as conveyed in these early trick scenes: the mysterious, almost magical functioning of new audio technologies underpinned by electrics and physics; the ontological mysteries of music as something that exists in both written and sonic forms; and music’s astonishing powers to mediate expression of various sorts, above all to bring images to mind.17 I conclude by drawing attention to ways in which the public’s appetite for magical audio-visual trickery was also exploited as part of the wider presentation and marketing of early films.

Mystery, Wonder, Attractions of Artful Deception Trick films—“transformation views” or “transformation scenes,” as then often described—emerged in France with Méliès around 1896 and developed into a prominent genre category, scènes à trucs, largely as a result of Méliès’s own production. Pathé became the dominant company in terms of production and distribution, both in France and globally, the peak of production being in 1901 when trick films constituted 31% of Pathé’s production. Besides Méliès, the other key creator of trick films was Segundo de Chomón, initially a sales agent for Méliès, but from 1906/1907 director of trick films for Pathé.18 For this study, I have examined surviving films by these film-makers plus a few others, because surviving prints provide an opportunity to analyze film texts more deeply than is permitted by the brief descriptions found in period catalogue descriptions. Yet because only about 10–15% of films from this early period survive, according to FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives), I have also drawn on some catalogue descriptions, and their online equivalents—for example, that of Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé—as well as descriptions of films found in existing studies of trick films and film magic for which other paper sources were accessed.19

The “Trickality” of Listening   93 In his trick films, Méliès did more than just repeat the routines that he had performed on stage at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin; he developed stage tricks in a specifically ­cinematic direction using techniques that displayed the “magical” properties of the moving pictures themselves, and other film-makers quickly followed suit. Popular forms of stage magic performance were among the first such films, to which film techniques were often added to enhance the overall impression of their already extraordinary demonstrations. Visible displays of physical strength or virtuosity constituted one such form, and typically involved sleight of hand, or quick-change artists, or performances involving stage machinery.20 A musical example of this type in a screen version is the very early Maestri di musica (1898), in which Italian stage star and actor Leopoldo Fregoli performs a quick-change act, waving a conductor’s baton while ducking down behind a podium for a few seconds each time in order to change his costume from that of Rossini, to Wagner, to Verdi, to Mascagni, before finally ­taking his bow.21 The film appears to exploit the possibility of under- or intermittentcranking while Fregoli was under the podium in order to enhance the impression of astonishingly fast costume-change. Representations of musical “virtuosity and strength” are also cinematically enhanced in Pik Nik ha il do di petto [Pik Nik as King of the High C] (Italy: L’Aquila 1911),22 in which “singer” Pik Nik performs extraordinary feats with his voice for comic effect. Although we cannot hear Pik Nik’s voice, his vocality is visually materialized as a “shown sound,” to use Raynauld’s terminology.23 We see bodily gestures consistent with astounding vocal projection: deep breaths, wide opening of the mouth, and great physical strain. To confirm our reading of his body language, other onscreen characters in the film’s “hearing world”—our listening surrogates—react to his enormous vocal volume, and other things happen as a result: characters fall over (Figure 4.1), ceilings cave in, windows blow out, and the trick technique of using reverse motion makes it seem as if his voice causes automobiles to go into reverse.24 In addition to under-cranking and reverse motion, the latter of which could also be harnessed to un-do chaos or damage as if by magic, there were many other techniques to exploit. Stop motion could give rise to disappearances or substitutions; multiple exposure involving re-winding and re-exposing the film stock (with the use of a black cloth to hide the backdrop) permitted effects such as the multiplication of Méliès’s body to sit on each of a row of seats in L’Homme orchestre [One-man Band] (Méliès, 1900), or of his head alone to appear on telegraph lines in Le Mélomane [The Melomaniac] (1903); reduced-scale double exposure enabled effects such as a troupe of tiny musicians seeming to walk along the baton of the band mistress in En avant la musique (Chomón, 1907); invisible cutting and splicing of sections of film, the earliest form of “invisible” editing, could juxtapose different footage and enable substitutions, as in Symphonie bizarre (Chomón, 1909), where a succession of musicians seem to leap into a bass drum while the drummer continues to play. All of these scenes are discussed in detail below. Animated films were treated as part of the trick film genre at this time; stop-motion animation permitted such effects as the voluntary movement of a music stand and various musical instruments in Professor Do-mi-sol-do [The Luny Musician] (Méliès, 1906);

94   Julie Brown

Figure 4.1  Pik Nik ha il do di petto [Pik Nik as King of the High C] (Italy: Aquila 1911): characters fall over.

a simple animated overlay permitted by double-exposure made drawn musical notes dance in the air in Le Compositeur toqué [The Crazy Composer] (Méliès, 1905) (Figure 4.2). If the trick film embodied the “aesthetic of astonishment” that characterized the “cinema of attractions,”25 its astonishments were of a particular sort. Although trick films created wonder in making the impossible seem possible, and left the audience with a mystifying incredulity about what they had seen, their deceptions were “artful,” as Matthew Solomon puts it.26 Audiences enjoyed knowing that they were being tricked; this was the essential “trickality.” The presentational modes used in L’Homme orchestre and Le Mélomane are examples of this, with Méliès maintaining “the scenic conventions needed for the smooth unfolding of the magic act.” including stage-derived direct address which interpellates both camera and spectator into the text.27 The films feature Méliès as both presenter and self-replicating subject, who at the end of the film takes a bow. Multiplication or doubling of the self in this way is both a brilliant trick and a new kind of virtuosity in which performance was tailored for mechanical reproduction. In trick films about music and sound, audiences would likewise have recognized that they were being tricked, and also—I suggest—have recognized that the focus of the trick was inherently absurd.

The “Trickality” of Listening   95

Figure 4.2  Le Compositeur toqué [The Crazy Composer] (Méliès, 1905): animated notation.

Visualizing the Impact of New Sound Technologies on Listening The way early film-makers negotiated cinema’s relationship to the sounding bodies and objects on screen, to the deafness of the audience to these sounds, to ideas about listening, and to then new sound technologies such as the telephone and phonograph, can be revealing. During the first thirty years of moving pictures, speech, sound, and music were constantly present in the filmed world but were first and foremost materially visualized. This “visualized sound cinema,” as Raynauld calls it, showed or implied sound of a wide variety of sorts—from noises, to music, to voice. At this time, sonic presence is a separate ephemeral “live” category—even if “live” meant turning on a phonograph player in the space of exhibition. It was entirely subject to the space of exhibition, resources available, and the whim of the exhibitor himself. In the subsequent sound-film era, materialized sound emphasizes the creation of a realist relation to film sound; sound becomes diegetic—part of the film’s story world—as opposed to potentially extra-diegetic, “pit music” for instance.28 In early film, the relationship between materialized and sonorous sound and music was less clear; live production of sound effects was

96   Julie Brown subject to periodic changes in practice, and although onscreen music-making might have prompted a relatively obvious musical response from the cinema musicians, it could not be guaranteed.29 In trick films and their hybrids, materially visualized sound seldom provides that sort of clarification. To the contrary, trick work made anything possible; it not only released cinema to pursue short-term explorations of more symbolic means of sonic expression, those forms of expression enabled early cinema to muse upon listening itself. Le Mélomane, one of Méliès’s most famous trick films, anthologizes several of the devices already discussed, and is a fascinating fantasy on sound, cinematic listening, and listening with new audio technologies, all of which depend upon a complex interaction between different visualized sounds. Here, Méliès seems to recognize the marvelous in new sound technologies. The film materially visualizes music-making and musical presence through rhythmic marching, musical conducting, and musical notation. Using direct address for his magic performance, a music master—Méliès himself— leads his band to an imaginary field. We see rocks and a cottage in the background, and what looks like telegraph poles in the foreground, each with five wires. The music master throws a giant treble clef onto the lines, using them as a giant musical staff. He explains to the audience by way of a drawing that he is going to produce musical notes. He throws up a bar line. He then magically produces copies of his own singing head, which he throws up onto the staff, doing so six times using editing and multiple exposure; slowly but surely, he spells out the tune for “God Save the King.”30 He adds the note stems, again one by one. He then invites his assistants (who have provided him with his note stems) to come forward and reveal cards of the written-out musical solfège (Figure 4.3), while the note heads themselves sing very obviously; all the while he conducts the cinema audience in a highly animated manner, as if inviting it to sing along too—possibly (and if so, with a huge Gallic nudge and wink) celebrating the newly crowned Edward VII.31 In the end the musicians march off, only for a substitution shot magically to produce a stage magician’s stock trick for moments of revelation or transformation: the note heads are transformed into white doves which fly off through the country air. It is productive to approach Le Mélomane as a trick fantasy that celebrated the ability of moving pictures in 1903 “to show something” about contemporary listening. The ability to show was for Gunning the essence of the “cinema of attractions” and emerged at a time when invisible worlds became important in physics, astronomy, psychology, and art,32 and as technologically mediated “sounding” became mass phenomena in the telegraph, telephone, and the gramophone. Film became “an important scientific tool, and the indexical medium par excellence for depicting, evidencing and disseminating new knowledge and insights to audience everywhere,”33 but it also became a medium for providing vivid fantasies of processes that could only really be understood metaphorically—such as the conveying of the sound of voices across telegraph wires. Indeed, the stylized set of wires in Le Mélomane alludes to new long-distance means of sonic communication; they seem to be attached to telegraph or telephone poles.34 Another related device was the théâtrophone, a precursor to radio that enabled the

The “Trickality” of Listening   97

Figure 4.3  Le Mélomane [The Melomaniac] (Méliès, 1903): “God save the King” visualized.

broadcasting of concerts or plays through wires (though usually underground wires), to listening points up to two kilometers away from the event.35 As Giusy Pisano and others have argued, a process of incorporating the spectator into audio technologies such as the telephone and théâtrophone “made it possible to dissociate the reception of sounds from their recorded source,” such that “perception is no ­longer defined in terms of self-presence and instantaneity.”36 Jonathan Crary claims, rather more dramatically, that new media technologies annihilated previous concepts of space and time, and brought about a “sweeping reorganization of visual/auditory culture.”37 “[B]y calling into question the model of the natural voice and of the physical co-presence of performer and audience,” not only gramophone recording, but transmitting across distance such as with the telephone and théâtrophone, contributed to a de-throning of the “here and now” principle.38 This all happened before visual devices such as the kinetograph. Inventions such as the telegraph turned the job of communicating across a distance from a slow, into an almost instantaneous process, which clearly tested the limits of people’s faith in reality. In his study of the close relationship between science and spiritualism, Jeffrey Sconce shows that the mechanical separation of body and the sound that it produced led to fantasies about the separation of body and consciousness, and related notions of a “spiritual telegraph” carrying transmissions from the dead.39 By being able

98   Julie Brown to carry human messages, the wires of these new long-distance audio technologies were understood by some to have a mysterious animated quality. “The world, it has been said, will be made a great whispering gallery,” wrote an early telegraph enthusiast; “I would rather say, a great assembly, where everyone will see and hear everyone else.”40 The animated quality given to the wires in Le Mélomane’s duplicated talking heads seems to be a deliberate play with spiritualist sentiments such as this. Another long-distance listening situation thematized in early films, including trick films, was the telephone conversation. Indeed, telephones were a ubiquitous feature of silent film narrative, introducing and connecting characters, serving as the conduit for narrative information, and connecting spaces. Scholarship has tended to focus on the ways in which onscreen telephone conversations were imbricated in the development of narrative editing; split-screen visualisations of the adjacent spaces of telephone calls developed into sequences involving cuts to and from those spaces, thereby facilitating the imagining of spaces outside the immediate frame and the development of classical continuity editing, with its insistence on spatial cohesion.41 However, as Jan Olsson demonstrates, the split-screen idea had a history, being intermedially connected with visualizations of telephone conversations from postcards, advertising cards, and song slides.42 Edwin S. Porter’s College Chums (1907) follows one such model, using double exposure to include the speaking and listening characters on the same negative, top left and top right of screen, and materializing the words of the conversation as animated text travelling in the upper part of the frame (Figure 4.4). No actual telephone lines are visible. As a moving picture technique for conveying spoken content, these animated words may have originated in a film aiming to represent spiritualist communication—in yet another example of the phenomenon described by Sconce.43 L’Homme orchestre might be brought into a broader consideration of trick film explorations of new audio technologies. This short, but highly skilled direct-address trick film uses multiple exposure to replicate Méliès, who plays a magician-musician, no fewer than seven times within the same frame. Its musical visualization might be read as an imaginative, futurist vision of how sound might one day be subject to similar techniques to moving pictures. Méliès lines up seven chairs on a stage and, successively exposing the same film multiple times, superimposes seven versions of himself, each sitting on a different seat with a different instrument.44 One starts “conducting” the rest (Figure 4.5). They soon take a bow, then sit down again, only for the conductor to stand up and urge the outside musicians to move in one place and sit on the same chair as the person next to them, using more multiple exposure. The conductor jumps behind his chair, then uses his baton in more of a magical gesture to make all the seats disappear, before finishing with a couple of non-musical tricks. There is no phonograph in frame, but in light of Méliès’s fascination with the tales of Jules Verne in A Trip to the Moon (1902) and The Impossible Voyage (1904), and evident fascination with music, it is not entirely fanciful to detect here a rich imagination extending the concept of multiple-exposure in the visual domain to predict multiple-exposure, or multiple “tracking,” in the sonic domain. In effect, Méliès materially visualizes what we would today describe as multi-tracking—the sonic creation of an entire musical band from the musical input of one person, as people

The “Trickality” of Listening   99

Figure 4.4  College Chums (Edwin S. Porter, 1907): telephone conversation as animated overlay.

Figure 4.5  L’Homme orchestra [One-man Band] (Méliès, 1900): multiplication of the musical self as imagined multi-tracking?

100   Julie Brown can do today by recorded and technological means. In a world in which you can hear music but not see its source, you can suddenly imagine all sorts of things happening to the physical moment of musical creation.

Visualizing Music’s Mysterious Properties Musical trick films also explored mysterious aspects of music as a phenomenon. Outside the realm of musical professionalism, where certain assumptions enable us to proceed working with or writing about music, music’s complex ontological status and specially powerful expressivity have long been the subject of philosophical reflection—often in ideal terms. Lydia Goehr describes musical works of the notated tradition as “ontological mutants,” enjoying “a very obscure mode of existence.” They “cannot, in any straightforward sense, be physical, mental, or ideal objects”; they are “a) created, b) performed many times in different places, c) not exhaustively captured or fixed in notational form, yet d) intimately related to their performances and scores?”45 Related musings about music’s mysterious ephemeral status were reflected in trick films. For the ancient Greeks, the mythological Muses enabled music and the other arts to become the work of the human mind in the first place, as is both represented and questioned in Méliès’s Le compositeur toqué (1905), a féerie. The film starts with a stereotypically mad composer bashing wildly at the piano, and conducting randomly, unable to find inspiration. When he falls asleep he is visited (via a double-exposure) by a Muse, who is soon joined by four living statues of women playing different instruments, and then five ballet dancers; the strumming of the lyre and the other performances lead the sleeping composer to start to beat time gently with his baton. He wakes, continuing to beat time, as an animation of musical clefs and notes dance in the air, all suggesting musical inspiration that resulted directly from the Muse’s appearance. Yet a burlesque second half subverts everything that we have just seen, creating an ideal-grotesque structure to question the idealizing myth of the Muse. The scene changes to a grotto, and the statues, the Muse, and the composer himself all fade away as he resumes his sleep. A succession of can-can dances and acrobat performances ensue as troupes of dancers re-enter the grotto; three Graces also slowly enter and stand statue-like on a podium in the rear, but clap and support the acrobats as they perform head stands. The composer’s fury at the end of the film encourages us to read this “low” materialization of music as the poor fruit of a compositional imagination. The film ends with a kind of musical suicide as he gestures to kill himself with his baton and jumps into a piano, which then explodes. The message—admittedly delivered in comic, throw-away gestures—seems to be that the very idea that a Muse visits a composer is idealistic nonsense. What if he creates rubbish? Segundo de Chomón reflected upon the trickality of notated musical ontology itself. En avant la musique (US title: Music, Forward!) (1907), another “multiplying musicians”

The “Trickality” of Listening   101 film, looks at first glance to be a copy-cat version of Méliès’s Le Mélomane. Yet rather than musing upon modern modes of musical mediation, it reflects upon one of the oldest technologies of musical visualization. Chomón explores how musical notation conserves music and enables it to be communicated from one person to another, two of the purposes of notation identified by Nicholas Cook,46 and is strikingly literal in the way he cinematically materializes the ontological questions raised. Musical notation becomes a record of real musicians, not just of pitches and instruments; reduced-scale double-exposure allows us to see a tiny, full figure of a performing musician appearing in individual written note heads, then on the conductor’s baton as a directrice passes it over each note: instrumentalists seem to walk in and out of musical score, twice materializing its latent sonorousness (Figure 4.6). Another cut again reveals the directrice in front of the portico, where she opens a larger score from behind which, following a substitution cut, the band emerges—likewise materializing the “score” as sonorous music that needs to be played in order to be heard, or that in some mysterious way embodies some part of music’s being.47 What at first seems to be a copycat film turns out, by virtue of its constantly multiplying staff-based examples, to be an exhaustive account of notation’s ontological significance not only in mediating music in different ways, but in  providing visual compensation in film for music’s various levels of invisibility and inaudibility. If Méliès’s Le Mélomane anthologizes many of the tricks that were available to filmmakers by 1903, Chomón’s Symphonie bizarre from six years later (1909) may sum up the very existence in moving pictures of trickality as a musical matter. It makes no reference to notation, but instrumentalists repeatedly and surreally materialize, dematerialize, fragment, and even transform into other objects. For Dahlquist, the opening shadow imagery is key, suggesting an allegory of music’s very material presence on the silent film screen. In the restored print, black color moves along the footpath from frame left to frame right, where a shadow takes form on a wall, followed by seven ­others.48 A substitution cut then transforms these shadows into musicians who start to play.49 After they have played in the street, a series of substitution shots sees the musicians jump one after the other into the bass drum (much as they disappear “into” the musical score in En avant la musique). The drum rolls on alone of its own volition (courtesy of the trick technique of animation), and suddenly a single arm appears out of the drum beating it (Figure 4.7). At one point the musicians help themselves to umbrellas outside a shop, and are subsequently themselves transformed into umbrellas animated to dance without apparent motivation. Here, musicians ostensibly conveying real music in the film’s diegetic world are dematerialized only to have their music rematerialized in a purely animated form. To the extent that animated “dancing” umbrellas, or visualized rhythm, are what remains of the music as pure cinematic form, Symphonie bizarre is a harbinger of the sorts of music-focused films created as cinéma pur in the 1920s, such as those by Germaine Dulac and Walter Ruttmann. By dematerializing the musicians into mere form—umbrellas—the film acknowledges the relationship between movement on screen and the concept of “music”: cinematic rhythm as a musical concept.50

102   Julie Brown

Figure 4.6  En avant la musique (U.S.  title: Music, Forward!) (Segundo de Chomón, 1907): musical score as “containing” music.

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Figure 4.7  Symphonie bizarre (Segundo de Chomón, 1909): dematerializing music.

Chomón seems to have been especially interested in the idea that music possessed a kind of magical power, particularly as something that animates. In Le charmeur [The Charmer] 1906) a specific magical power is invested in the sound of the flute played by a snake charmer (describe by Pathé as a sorcerer) variously to lure a giant silk worm out of hiding, to make butterflies “hatch,” and to “fly,” before finally turning the charmer himself into a silk worm. More of the same idea comes in Hallucination musicale (1906) in which statues come alive to the sound of a violin, whose power grows as its sound develops. In his féerie, La flûte enchantée (1906), the print of which seems not to survive, yet more appears: here a flute tune is enough to cause a captor “to become a fool and begin to dance” thereby allowing captives to go free.51 This sort of immediate, and often involuntary dancing as a response to the playing of music becomes a repeated theme in early films, whether trick or not. When in Lully, or The Broken Violin (Méliès, 1908) a character (Lully?) plays the violin, everyone hears it, comes into the room and moves to the music, apparently as a result of being swept up by it. In O You Ragtime (1912), a man having his upright piano moved starts playing it when the job is done, only for the removalists to enter the room carrying other things and start to dance, this time seemingly involuntarily. The scene ends with everyone exhausted from having to move too much. In The Policeman’s Nightmare, a detective and thief film from 1908–10, playing music is a

104   Julie Brown criminal’s trick.52 Here, the criminal plays the piano to make the policeman, and nearby chairs, (involuntarily) dance while he effects his escape. In reflecting on notions that music was a kind of mysterious force, these scenes belonged to a subgenre of trick films that featured a variety of agents, extending to fantastic liquids, powders, and electricity, all of which invested other objects with magical power.53 Other films reflect on one of music’s roles in cinema exhibition. Does Symphonie bizarre, for instance, also play with knowledge that music, played live in the space of exhibition, could be synchronized with movement on screen, or at very least, serve as a quasi-parallel to movement on screen? Could Symphonie bizarre’s surreal “fort-da” approach to materialized music be read as self-reflexive of the on-screen/ in-theatre situation of the theatrical moment of moving picture exhibition? Musicians onscreen serve as “spectral” musicians, specters of a music that needs to come from elsewhere (the cinema pit) and actual characters (albeit thinly narrativized characters) on the screen?

On Audio-visual Synchronization To suggest a link between some of these films and the musical circumstances of early film exhibition gains traction when one considers that from at least as early as 1909, trick techniques had been used in scenarios that acknowledged music’s long-standing conceptual links with imagery. It is therefore useful to approach this type of musicallythemed film as an early reflection among film-makers upon the very relationship between music and moving pictures, and also upon then emerging technologies. Edison’s 1909 film The Origin of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata places the long-standing linkage of musical meaning and imagery at the center of the story, depicting a young blind woman in a scenario whose central trick, double exposure, creates a simultaneous subjective perspective onscreen. The proto-narrative scenario reveals Beethoven at home unable to find inspiration for a new piece. He and his friend walk around Vienna where, hearing music coming from an apartment, they go up to find a blind girl. Beethoven sits down at the piano and creates the “Moonlight Sonata” as the moonlight floods through the window. At the key moment, the piano-playing Beethoven is in a dark medium shot at the extreme left of the screen; the blind girl is standing beside the piano, also frame left. In the bulk of the frame, a double-exposure facilitates the appearance of a series of still images showing different scenes in moonlight (Figure 4.8). Here, Beethoven makes the girl see via the music. An intertitle reads: “Though your eyes be sightless yet will I make you see the beauty of the moonlight.” In this film, the girl is encouraged to see in her mind’s eye. Dahlquist considers this film, and for her it is a sort of cultural hybrid, a dream sequence that resembles an illustrated song—that is, a musical entertainment typical of the Nickelodeon period for which a song was sung between films, and illustrated with a number of themed slides.54 Yet the way in which the girl listens to Beethoven creating

The “Trickality” of Listening   105

Figure 4.8  The Origin of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata (Edison, 1909): blind girl “sees” music as Beethoven plays.

his “Moonlight Sonata” also reflects the way in which people listened to program music in and of the nineteenth century, and, as Peter Franklin argues, is in turn how they listen to film music today: with images and story to clarify musical meaning. Franklin recounts a story of a seven year old boy on the train humming the Star Wars march: “deprived of

106   Julie Brown the actual movies that had inspired his daydream, [the boy] was visualizing a musical narrative in a way that could have been equally appropriate to a symphony in the nineteenth century, if we attend to historical evidence of the popular reception of such music.”55 The film seems symptomatic of the often close relation between moving pictures and music even in 1909, by which time dance and opera films already existed, as well as various types of phonograph-based synchronization systems. By the early teens the exhibition trade started to depend upon shared notions of music’s descriptive capacity, as trade paper columnists began reflecting in earnest upon the desirability of pairing moving pictures with “suitable” or “appropriate” music, a concept that remained fairly loosely defined for a long time, but clearly depended upon some shared notion of music’s descriptive ability. The ideal accompanying music for The Origin of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata would have been obvious to a cinema musician with a basic knowledge of classical repertoire. But it is striking how the subjective images projected on the wall within the film scene in question mimicked the projection of moving pictures themselves, which likewise had the power to bring music to life, and vice versa. Rosalie et son phonographe (Roméo Bosetti, 1911) extends such connections. Here stopmotion animation brings to the screen the trick of music as something that not only can be closely synchronized with physical movement, but that seems to have a one-to-one relationship with physical movement. It is not just that music is imagined as a magical force; here, music produced by a phonograph player in the onscreen world involuntarily animates all movement within, and of, the screen image. Aspects of mise-en-scène (objects and furniture in a room), Rosalie herself (who is moved around by virtue of stop-motion animation, rather than by herself involuntarily walking (Figure 4.9)), and an almost dead man sitting motionless in a chair are all apparently animated by the phonograph player. Music is visually materialized via musical notes and genre indications (e.g., “Polka” and “Mazurka) emanating from the horn and moving through the air. The timing of this target for trick cinematic techniques coincided not only with increasing attention to the “appropriateness” or “suitability” of the music chosen to accompany the moving pictures in theatres, and hence increasingly close relationship between the tempo and mood of music played and action seen. It also came in the wake of the second intense concentration on the commercialization of various phonographbased film synchronization systems. The first efforts took place before 1900, starting with Thomas Edison’s Kinetophone of 1894.56 Edison’s and others’ peepshow devices were followed by a succession of inventions that permitted various means for synchronizing phonograph recordings with projected moving pictures; though all suffered from poor quality amplification and synchronization between images and cylinder recordings, these included, from c.1900, the Phono-Cinéma-Théatre or Lioretographe of Gratioulet and Lioret and the Biophon of Oskar Messter, and competitors elsewhere in the world. The second period of efforts (dating from c.1907) produced somewhat better sound owing to a number of technical improvements, such as the use of sound on disks rather than cylinders (Gaumont’s Elgéphone), larger and more numerous horns attached to the record player, and compressed air to improve amplification. By the time of Rosalie et son phonographe, the idea that moving pictures might be synchronized to a particular

The “Trickality” of Listening   107

Figure 4.9  Rosalie et son phonograph (Roméo Bosetti, 1911): Rosalie and objects in the room move around, via stop-motion animation, as phonograph plays.

108   Julie Brown piece of recorded music was also established. Gaumont produced “Phono-scènes” and Biophon “Tonbilder” from as early as 1902, for which performers lip-synched to the sound recording. Sometimes the product did not even depend upon an elaborate synchronization system: in 1904 Siegmund Lubin created “Cineophone Films” to synchronize with certain Victor Monarch records which were to be played on the exhibitor’s own “Talking Machine.” However, Rosalie can also be approached in the context of other films that thematize phonographs on screen.57 The seemingly uncanny effect of listening to the otherwise lifeless gramophones in such films registers a certain anxiety about the life the devices seem to contain. Il grammophono di Polidor (1912) does not itself use trick film techniques, but rather story-telling and mise-en-scène in order imaginatively to explore the apparent trick of the gramophone player itself. A man hears someone playing a gramophone on the street and enlists him in order to accomplish a trick. He wants to pass himself off as an excellent singer. “You have to play your gramophone and I’ll pretend I sing.” He does that from the street, in an attempt to seduce a lady in an apartment upstairs. She hears the singing, is entranced, and invites him to perform at a concert at her home, where the ruse is discovered. The gentleman sings to his onscreen audience, including the lady, while Polidor operates the gramophone player from behind some flowers. Alas, a waiter accidentally tips the gramophone over and Polidor is revealed, Wizard-of-Oz like. This sort of unmasking of technology’s “trick” broadly paralleled any number of incidents at the cinema in 1912, from the regular snapping of brittle film stock itself, to the dubious synchronization efforts of the various phonograph-based synchronization systems discussed earlier. For these systems, two technologies had to be started simultaneously, typically by two different operators, the synchronization had to be constantly checked and possibly corrected, and film and disc had to match exactly; torn and respliced film would mean the loss of some frames and poor subsequent synchronization. The unmasking exposed another real aspect of early synchronized sound films. Like the later Hollywood musicals and Bollywood films, these early films routinely filmed actors miming to sound recordings made by others. For example, Henny Porten, later one of the first German film stars, appeared at first miming in Oskar Messter’s 1906 Meissner Porzellan, followed by other Tonbilder for other companies.58 To that extent, Il grammophono di Polidor followed the tradition of magic tricks that were exposed both onstage and in the popular press, and formed the basis of burlesque magic acts by such performers as Martini and Maximillian, and Ziska and King, for whom magic and comedy went hand in hand. Exposing magic tricks seemed to appeal to audiences as inherently funny, and of course concealing objects and apparatus in some way “had been one of the foundational principles of modern magic.”59 It is pointed that Il grammophono di Polidor created a kind of mise-en-abyme for the audience watching in the cinema theatre at the time: an onscreen performer tries to trick an (onscreen) audience using a gramophone hidden behind some plants. The scene mirrored that of the audience subjected to various synchronization systems. And yet, watching it today we not only recognize its anticipation of the unmasking of Oz; we note that this was only the start of an age of

The “Trickality” of Listening   109 technologically mediated performances, and the blurring between notions of “liveness” and “realness” in concerts delivered with the help of recorded voices.

Trickality in Performance In an essay about early musical trick films it would be remiss not to mention that audio-visual trickery went beyond the screen itself. As Jeffrey Klenotic has shown, whether mechanical or “live,” early sound synchronization in and of itself was approached by many exhibitors, and received by some audiences, as itself part of the “trick” tradition.60 Live synchronized dialogue performance behind the sheet had existed since at least as early as Lyman Howe’s impersonators had provided dialogue as well as sound effects, and in the United States, Havez and Youngson’s Spook Minstrels did something similar.61 Spook Minstrels was a show involving a series of short films simulating a vaudeville stage—with scenes of numerous singers and performers, whose performances were “lip synched” from behind the sheet by “live” performers in the actual theatre. After 1908 in the United States, voices behind the screen—“talking pictures” as often then described— became an industrywide boom with traveling troupes such as Actologue, Dramograph, and Humanovo following mass interest in the Chronophone and Cameraphone syncsound systems.62 “Speaking to” pictures (in local parlance) from behind the screen was also a phenomenon in the U.K. from this time.63 Film “talk” behind the screen was fascinating at once as part of the tradition of carefully rehearsed theatrical realism, and as part of a showman’s tradition of sensational attractions and magical “tricks.” Some exhibitors seem to have tried to fool the public into thinking that they were coming along to hear a mechanically synchronized performance, urging in newspaper publicity that, for instance, “the details of the [Humanovo] plan will not be presented here, as the management is desirous that the public tell for itself how the thing is done.”64 Such acts were promoted not just as “talker” troupes, or “talking pictures,” but as “talking machines”—deliberately aiming (it seems) to create confusion about the precise nature of the “trick.” Trick films themselves began to go into steady decline in 1907.65 A modest number still continued to be made, but there was a broad genre migration whereby tricks were incorporated into other series. To begin with these tended to be féeries (fairy plays) and comic films, though as Ian Christie reminds us in his study of early British filmmaker Robert Paul’s trick film The Magic Sword (1901), even that broad-brush account of the development of filmmaking only tells part of the story. Longer féeries consisting of trick elements, and amounting to something “almost like a compressed pantomime,” such as The Magic Sword, had emerged much earlier, probably out of eclectic forms of popular stage entertainment—including the magic theatre of J.N. Maskelyne in England.66 At any rate, tricks became part of the language of film, most obviously film of a prenarrative framework, but ultimately of narrative filmmaking as a whole, which absorbed as standard procedures the trick film techniques of cuts, splices, replacement shots, and

110   Julie Brown superimpositions. The eclectic approaches to music characteristic of the early cinema period also gave way to new ones. Films continued to visually materialize music on screen, but at the same time increasingly to conventionalise “accompaniment,” and attendant questions of “appropriateness” and “suitability,” and later specific concerns with supporting the construction of narrative. By the time accompaniment advice and manuals emerged in the 1910s providing guidance to cinema musicians, the era of trick films had largely passed and so those manuals did not generally address them. Playing to Pictures, by W. Tyacke George, is an exception, being one of the earliest manuals for moving picture musicians, first published in 1912 and reprinted in 1914.67 George’s brief discussion of what sort of music might accompany trick films marks the move from the more unruly, unpredictable context of early cinema, to the more disciplined narrative focus of subsequent cinema. As with all subsequent such manuals, George approaches the question of musical accompaniment from the point of view of providing moving pictures with “appropriate music,” and although that extended to focusing on music to provide appropriate narrative mood and dramatic situation (“cowboy, Indian and Mexican pictures,” mythological, biblical, religious subjects, tragedy), he also approached it from a classification of moving picture types (comic, dramatic, comedy, burlesque, farce, melodrama, hurries, educational, fairy tales, historical, horticultural, industrial, military, natural history, naval, performers, scenic, scientific, sporting, topical, etc.). This latter category included “trick,” and that entry is worth quoting in its entirety. TRICK This, if of an acrobatic nature, will fall under the section devoted to Performers. Try and judge the film as a whole. If it is a series of surprises, a tricky polka or lively and characteristic piece will see you through. Pictures showing ghost or magic scenes require something weird, say the First Movement from Bendix’s “Pasha’s Dream,” or Schubert’s “Erl King” [sic]. “Angels and Demons” (Grand Polka Fantastique), by A. Lamotte, is a fine piece for Trick films, and has a weird and dramatic introduction.68

These instructions allude to the wide variety of scenarios in which trick techniques featured by 1912 but also mark the genre’s incorporation into a more standardized mode of presentation. In the “Performers” section (which the author cross-references here), George describes how musically to handle a “sensational act” by bringing together both stage-magic and narrative sensibilities: don’t “spoil the illusion,” he advises, claiming that audiences think they are seeing the real thing “owing to the perfection of the kinematograph,” and the musician’s concern is “to keep up that illusion.”69 His characterization of musical choices in terms of “weird,” “upbeat,” “lively,” and “characteristic” all depended upon an inter-subjectively understood set of expressive categories: “characteristic” being essentially a genre type; “upbeat” and lively” about tempo and a type of character, “weird” being more specifically descriptive (and helpfully elaborated by a series of musical examples). What is meant by “tricky” in a “tricky polka” is a little obscure and may mark a limit to the “trick potential” of music.

The “Trickality” of Listening   111 In early cinema the imaginative use of moving picture technology to materialize music had been a way to explore on the one hand what we might call music’s audiovisual “trickality,” that is, the surprisingly close relationship between seeing and hearing, and on the other hand, the inherent disjunction between the phenomenal silence of the technology itself and its use to show scenarios that took place within a “hearing world.” All were potentially rich grounds for play. Always begging reflections on listening, such scenes could do more than amuse and create a sense of astonishment and wonder; they had the potential to accomplish fascinating cultural work reflecting upon contemporary sound technologies. These visual forms registered some of the ways in which technology had changed the way in which people communicated and received sound and music. Self-reflexively they also seem to register ways in which the cultural form that more or less defined modernity—moving pictures themselves—interacted with music and sound, often using the trick film’s dominant theme of “transformation” in order to do so.70 But above all they reflect a certain wonder and delight at what this new cultural form, and parallel developments in sound technology, meant, and could show. What it could show was a long history of imaginings about the relationship between music and imagery, and between listening and seeing.

Notes 1. This much-cited anecdote seems to originate in Madeleine Malthête-Méliès, Georges Méliès l’enchanteur (Paris: Hachette litérature, 1973), 157. 2. As Matthew Solomon notes, Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 61. Ian Christie notes that the 1901 catalogue of early British filmmaker Robert Paul included the category of “Novel Trick and Effect Films”: “The Magic Sword: Genealogy of an English Trick Film,” Film History 16 (2004): 163–71: 165. 3. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI Publishing,  1990), 56–62: 57. See also André Gaudreault, Film and Attraction: From Kinematography to Cinema, trans. Timothy Barnard (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011). 4. Here I borrow Isabelle Raynauld’s expression, in “Dialogues in Early Silent Sound Screenplays: What Actors Really Said,” in The Sounds of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel and Rick Altman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 69–78. 5. Raynauld, “Présence, fonction et représentation du son dans les scénarios et les films de Georges Méliès (1896–1912). Mise en scène du son,” in Georges Méliès, l’illusionniste fin de siècle?: Actes du Colloque de Cerisy, sous la direction de Jacques Malthête et Michel Marie (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1997), 201–17: 202–4. 6. According to Alison McMahan, “Sound Rewrites Silents,” in Le son en perspective: nouvelles recherches/New Perspectives in Sound Studies, ed. Dominique Nasta and Didier Huvelle (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), 69–97: 74. 7. See especially Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 8. McMahan, “Sound rewrites Silents,” 74–75. 9. See Altman, Silent Film Sound, 196.

112   Julie Brown 10. Dominique Nasta, “Setting the Pace of a Heartbeat: The Use of Sound Elements in European Melodramas before 1915,” in The Sounds of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel and Rick Altman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 95–109: 96. 11. Sheila  J.  Nayar, “Seeing Voices: Oral Pragmatics and the Silent Cinema,” Early Popular Visual Culture 7, no. 2 (2009): 145–65: 147. 12. McMahan, “Sound Rewrites Silents,” 73. She goes so far as suggest that we might redefine “attractions” films as “incompletely mechanized” sound films (75). 13. Raynauld, “Dialogues in Early Silent Sound Screenplays,” 69. 14. Julie Brown, “Apprehending Human Voice in the ‘Silent Cinema’, ” in Voicing the Cinema, ed. James Buhler and Hannah Lewis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020), 17–33. 15. Nicholas Cook, “Seeing Sounds, Hearing Images: Listening Outside the Modernist Box,” in Musical Listening in the Age of Technological Reproduction, ed. Gianmario Borio (Burlington: Ashgate, 2015), 185–202: 189–90. 16. Shaw-Miller, “Imaging Beethoven,” in Late Eighteenth-Century Music and Visual Culture, ed. Cliff Eisen and Alan Davison (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2017), 201–22: 205. 17. Leigh Mercer has likewise looked beyond the sheer trickality of some Segundo de Chomón’s trick films to find a self-reflexive anxiety regarding modernity: “Fear at the hands of technology: The proto-Surrealism of the films of Segundo de Chomón,” Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 4, no. 2 (2007): 79–90. 18. Solomon, Disappearing Tricks, 71. 19. http://www.fondation-jeromeseydoux-pathe.com/, accessed July 25, 2018. 20. Solomon, Disappearing Tricks, 73. 21. Where films are readily available to view on YouTube, as here, I make no reference to a source, unless I wish to point to a particular print. 22. The print that survives in the Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, is German: Teddy Holzbock als Ritter vom Hoben C. I am grateful to the Museum for making it available for me to view. 23. Raynauld categorizes the intradiegetic materialized sound in these earliest films according to two key forms: “shown sound,” where the source of the sound is explicit, and as “heard/ unheard sound,” for which the sound source is implicit (invisible) and for which reaction to the sound might be filmed. See “Le ‘sonore visible’ dans les scénarios et dans les films Pathé dits ‘muets’, ” in La firme Pathé Frères, 1896–1914, ed. Michel Marie and Laurent Le Forestier, with Catherine Schapira (Paris: L’Association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma, 2004), 213–18: 216. 24. A singer’s voice also knocks over a group of policemen at the receiving end of a telephone line in Gaumont’s 1907 Le debut d’un tenor, mentioned in Jan Olsson, “Framing Silent Calls: Coming to Cinematographic Terms with Telephony,” in Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital, ed. John Fullerton and Jan Olsson (Eastleigh: John Libbey, 2004), 157–92: 164. 25. See Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” Art and Text 34 (1989): 31–45. 26. Solomon, Disappearing Tricks, 72. 27. André Gaudreault, “Theatricality, Narrativity, and Trickality: Reevaluating the Cinema of Georges Méliès,” trans. Paul Attallah, Journal of Popular Film and Television 15, no. 3 (1987): 110–19: 113. 28. Although the narrative descriptors of “diegetic,” “extradiegetic,” and “nondiegetic” have been contested, they remain heuristically useful. See, for instance, Ben Winters, “The

The “Trickality” of Listening   113 Non-diegetic Fallacy: Film, Music, and Narrative Space,” Music & Letters 91, no. 2 (2010): 224–44, and Guido Heldt, Music and Levels of Narration in Film: Steps Across the Border (Bristol: Intellect, 2013). In contrast to silent film, the sound of sound film is sometimes audible but its source invisible; as Michel Chion has noted, this “acousmatic” effect tends to imbue the sound with considerable power; see Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 32, 60, and 72. 29. On early approaches to sound effects, see for instance Stephen Bottomore, “An International Survey of Sound Effects in Early Cinema,” Film History 11, no. 4 (1999): 485–98: “The Story of Percy Peashaker: Debates about Sound Effects in the Early Cinema,” in The Sounds of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel and Rick Altman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 129–42. 30. This trick idea was more or less copied in Le Tailleur habile (Pathé, 1907), in which “a tailor’s assistant throws pieces of fabric up into the air, which tailored falls on the customer’s shoulders whereupon he is suddenly magnificently dressed”: original resumé translated in Marina Dahlquist, The Invisible Seen in French Cinema Before 1917 (Stockholm: Aura förlag, 2001), 80. 31. A coronation connection is suggested by Richard Abel in The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1897–1914, rev. edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 64. 32. Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions,” 57. 33. Dahlquist, The Invisible Seen in French Cinema Before 1917, 107. 34. Abel (The Ciné Goes to Town, 488, n26) repeats a suggestion that Méliès draws here on the perception of telegraph lines as seen from an express train, as (supposedly) described in Paul Verlaine’s poem cycle La Bonne Chanson. However, the translation he quotes (“Whose wires looks strangely like a music-score”) is a mistranslation of the original (“Où tombent les poteaux minces du télégraphe /Dont les fils ont l'allure étrange d'un paraphe.”) “Paraphe” is not a music score (which is “partition”); it is a flourish or initials in the form of a signature. 35. Giusy Pisano, “The Théâtrophone, an Anachronistic Hybrid Experiment or One of the First Immobile Traveler Devices?,” in A Companion to Early Cinema, ed. André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 80–98. 36. Pisano, “The Théâtrophone,” 81. 37. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 2. 38. Pisano, “The Théâtrophone,” 81. 39. Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence From Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University Press,  2000), 81–82. See also Tom Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny,” in Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era, ed. Murray Leeder (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 17–38. 40. Quoted in Sconce, Haunted Media, 22. 41. See especially Bernard Perron, “The First Transi-Sounds of Parallel Editing,” in The Sounds of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel and Rick Altman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 79–86. 42. Olsson, “Framing Silent Calls,” 159. 43. In one scene of Biograph’s August 1906 comedy feature film Looking for John Smith, “the characters are made to speak their lines by means of words that appear to flow mysteriously from their mouths.” Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound, 167.

114   Julie Brown 44. Méliès remembered that achieving such effects was so difficult that it became “a veritable Chinese water torture.” Potential frustrations included the film breaking “after three or four hours of work and sustained attention.” Quoted in Solomon, Disappearing Tricks, 35–36. 45. Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 2–3. 46. Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 51. His third function is that of allowing certain people (composers, performers) to “conceive” of music—to imagine and think about it. 47. This account follows the order of the film print digitally restored by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino in 2011, from a colored nitrate copy belonging to the Museum’s collections. It is available via GaumontPathé Archives, http://www.gaumontpathearchives. com/and can be viewed at https://vimeo.com/130075777, accessed July 25, 2018. It is only a pity that Chomón did not take the musical advice that Méliès clearly did for Le Mélomane. In En avant la musique the notation is nonsensical in terms of pitch, rhythm, meter, and stemming. 48. See Symphonie Bizarre as shown at Festival de Gindou 2015, video, Lobster Films, https:// vimeo.com/137583009, accessed July 25, 2018. 49. Dahlquist (The Invisible Seen in French Cinema Before 1917, 160–61) addresses her commentary to the surviving film print, not to the position that these shadows occupied, and the role they served, in the original film—as evidenced by the Pathé catalogue description. In the original, the shadows emerged in the middle of the film, as one of the many processes of materialization and dematerialization of music. The key phrase in Pathé’s original film résumé is: “Deafened people in peaceful pavilions throw buckets of water on the heads of musicians that dissolve by magic and spread in the streets.” http://filmographie.fondationjeromeseydoux-pathe.com/2964-symphonie-bizarre 50. Influenced by French film of the 1920s, Sergei Eisenstein later developed these sorts of ideas into a complete theory. 51. From Pathé catalogue scenario résumé: http://filmographie.fondation-jeromeseydouxpathe.com/6144-flute-enchantee-la 52. Described by Dahlquist, in The Invisible Seen in French Cinema Before 1917, 137–38. 53. Dahlquist, The Invisible Seen in French Cinema Before 1917, 55, 82. 54. Ibid., 169. 55. Peter Franklin, “The Boy on the Train, or Bad Symphonies and Good Movies: The Revealing Error of the ‘Symphonic Score’, ” in Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California, 2007), 13–26: 14. 56. My account of early synchronized sound film draws on Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound, 157–66. See also Martin Loiperdinger, “German Tonbilder of the 1900s: Advanced Technology and National Brand,” in Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture, ed. Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier (New Barnet: John Libbey, 2009), 187–99. 57. For Richard Abel (The Ciné Goes to Town, 391–92), Rosalie et son phonographe was also a marketing opportunity; it not only marketed Sarah Duhamel as a new screen comic, but also the phonograph itself—a new commodity with a seemingly magical effect: “The only thing lacking in the opening emblematic C[lose] U[p] of Rosalie smiling next to her phonograph is a brand name.” As Abel reminds us, Pathé also sold phonographic equipment.

The “Trickality” of Listening   115 58. Between 1903 and 1911 a total of 850 Tonbilder were available, although another film history puts it at approximately 1,500 between 1903 and 1913. Reported by Martin Loiperdinger, “German Tonbilder of the 1900s,” 190. 59. Solomon, Disappearing Tricks, 73, 81. 60. Klenotic, “ ‘The Sensational Acme of Realism’: ‘Talker’ Pictures as Early Cinema Sound Practice,” in The Sounds of Early Cinema, ed. Abel and Altman, 156–66. 61. Altman, Silent Film Sound, 109–11. 62. Ibid., 168. 63. See Trevor Griffiths, “Sounding Scottish: Sound Practices and Silent Cinema in Scotland,” in The Sounds of the Silents in Britain, ed. Julie Brown and Annette Davison (New York: Oxford University Press,  2013), 72–91: 79–81. Interestingly, Griffith reports that the practice seemed to have been largely peculiar to Aberdeen; when Paterson transferred the show to Glasgow, it did not catch on. 64. Quoted in Klenotic, “ ‘The Sensational Acme of Realism’, ” 159. 65. From 1902, Pathé’s trick percentage fell to 9%, where it rested almost unchanged until 1904. In 1905 it saw an increase to 15%, but thereafter it steadily declined. There was a certain declining interest in trick films in the United States in 1908, according to Variety. See Dahlquist, The Invisible Seen in French Cinema Before 1917, 18–23; Solomon, Disappearing Tricks, 62. 66. See Laurent Le Forestier, “Une disparition instructive. Quelques hypothèses sur l’évolution des ‘scènes à trucs’ chez Pathé,” 1895, revue d’histoire du cinéma 27 (1999): 61–74: 64; and Abel, The Ciné Goes to Town, 102–78. On Robert Paul and Maselkyne, see Christie, “The Magic Sword,” 165–66. 67. W.  Tyacke George, Playing to Pictures: A Guide for Pianists and Conductors of Motion Picture Theatres (London: The Kinematograph Weekly, 1912). 68. George, Playing to Pictures, 28. 69. Ibid., 27. 70. Le Forestier (“Une disparition instructive,” 61–62) finds that the themes of the new scientific films, including transformation, “were surprisingly similar to the trick film.”

Select Bibliography Abel, Richard. The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1897–1914, rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Altman, Rick. Silent Film Sound. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Brown, Julie. “Apprehending Human Voice in the ‘Silent Cinema’.” In Voicing the Cinema, ed. James Buhler and Hannah Lewis, 17–33. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020. Christie, Ian. “The Magic Sword: Genealogy of an English Trick Film.” Film History 16 (2004): 163–71. Cook, Nicholas. “Seeing Sounds, Hearing Images: Listening Outside the Modernist Box.” In Musical Listening in the Age of Technological Reproduction, ed. Gianmario Borio, 185– 202. Burlington: Ashgate, 2015. Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. Dahlquist, Marina. The Invisible Seen in French Cinema Before 1917. Stockholm: Aura förlag, 2001.

116   Julie Brown Franklin, Peter. “The Boy on the Train, or Bad Symphonies and Good Movies: The Revealing Error of the ‘Symphonic Score’.” In Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert, 13–26. Berkeley: University of California, 2007. Gaudreault, André. “Theatricality, Narrativity, and Trickality: Reevaluating the Cinema of Georges Méliès,” trans. Paul Attallah, Journal of Popular Film and Television 15, no. 3 (1987), 110–19. Griffiths, Trevor. “Sounding Scottish: Sound Practices and Silent Cinema in Scotland.” In The Sounds of the Silents in Britain, ed. Julie Brown and Annette Davison, 72–91. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Gunning, Tom. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,” Art and Text 34 (1989): 31–45. Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, 56–62. London: BFI Publishing, 1990. Gunning, Tom. “Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny.” In Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era, ed. Murray Leeder, 17–38. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Klenotic, Jeffrey. “ ‘The Sensational Acme of Realism’: ‘Talker’ Pictures as Early Cinema Sound Practice.” In The Sounds of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel and Rick Altman, 156–66. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Le Forestier, Laurent. “Une disparition instructive. Quelques hypothèses sur l’évolution des ‘scènes à trucs’ chez Pathé.” 1895, Revue d’histoire du cinema 27 (1999): 61–74. Loiperdinger, Martin. “German Tonbilder of the 1900s: Advanced Technology and National Brand.” In Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture, ed. Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier, 187–99. New Barnet: John Libbey, 2009. Malthête-Méliès, Madeleine. Georges Méliès l’enchanteur. Paris: Hachette literature, 1973. Mercer, Leigh. “Fear at the Hands of Technology: The Proto-Surrealism of the Films of Segundo de Chomón,” Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 4, no. 2 (2007), 79–90. Nasta, Dominique. “Setting the Pace of a Heartbeat: The Use of Sound Elements in European Melodramas before 1915.” In The Sounds of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel and Rick Altman, 95–109. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Nayar, Sheila J. “Seeing Voices: Oral Pragmatics and the Silent Cinema.” Early Popular Visual Culture 7, no. 2 (2009): 145–65. Olsson, Jan. “Framing Silent Calls: Coming to Cinematographic Terms with Telephony.” In Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital, ed. John Fullerton and Jan Olsson, 157–92. Eastleigh: John Libbey, 2004. Pisano, Giusy. “The Théâtrophone, an Anachronistic Hybrid Experiment or One of the First Immobile Traveler Devices?” In A Companion to Early Cinema, ed. André Gaudreault, Nicolas Dulac, and Santiago Hidalgo, 80–98. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Raynauld, Isabelle. “Dialogues in Early Silent Sound Screenplays: What Actors Really Said.” In The Sounds of Early Cinema, ed. Richard Abel and Rick Altman, 69–78. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Raynauld, Isabelle. “Le ‘sonore visible’ dans les scenarios et das les films Pathé dits ‘muets’.” In La firme Pathé Frères, 1896–1914, ed. Michel Marie and Laurent Le Forestier, with

The “Trickality” of Listening   117 Catherine Schapira, 213–18. Paris: L’Association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma, 2004. Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence From Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Solomon, Matthew. Disappearing Tricks: Silent Film, Houdini, and the New Magic of the Twentieth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010.

chapter 5

Ci n em atic Listen i ng a n d the Ea r ly Ta lk ie James Buhler

Scholarship on the transition to sound has focused on, among other things, the economic issues driving the change, the effect of recorded and reproduced sound on filmmaking, the disruption of the existing system of production and exhibition, resistances to the talking film among filmmakers and theorists, and the cultural negotiations required to establish the conventions of the sound film. But less attention has been paid to a more basic and fundamental issue: how was electronically reproduced sound made to be recognized and accepted as properly cinematic? What was the proper recorded sound to accompany film? These are not questions only of convention, though convention obviously plays a significant role in them. For there are many conventions of reproduced sound. At the time of the transition to sound these conventions included: phonograph, radio, telephone, public address systems, as well as mechanical contrivances such as the player piano and other automatic instruments and previous attempts at making films with synchronized sound. In addition, film sound also confronted the existing conventions of the cinema, that is, accompaniment by live musicians, a mixed program often including live performers, the stratification of exhibition, each stratum with its own particular conventions, and so forth. Finally, the talking film in particular had to situate itself with respect to live theatre. Talking film was not itself theatre; or when it sounded like theatre it stopped seeming like cinema. At least, if reports from the time are to be believed, this was the understanding of most filmmakers and also of audiences. Indeed, one reason dialogue was such a difficult topic during the period was that it was hard for anyone to conceptualize and articulate what dialogue in a fictional film was supposed to sound like if it did not sound like theatre. Most tellingly, it is clear—at least it should be clear—that no convention or set of conventions could simply be imposed by the producers. Had this been the case, all evidence suggests that the sound film would have ended up being a canned form of deluxe silent film performance for the feature supplemented by short films of recorded vaudeville and newsreels.

Cinematic Listening and the Early Talkie   119

Mechanical Reproduction and “Cinematic” Sound Part of sounding “cinematic” in the silent era consisted in the music being live. “Cinematic” was indeed largely the distinctive audiovisual spectacle that resulted from combining edited film with live music, especially performed by a large orchestra. And the fact that recorded music, even of a large orchestra, generally failed to draw audiences suggests that the live performance was a more essential aspect of the “cinematic” in the silent era than was the size of the ensemble. Audiences often complained that the reproduced sound was too loud, and this suggests that exhibitors may have confused big and loud with “cinematic,” a misapprehension that should not simply be dismissed as an error since it continues today. The appellation “big and loud” belongs to the concept of the “cinematic” and defines a particular aesthetic of spectacle even when it is denigrated,1 but “big and loud” was not necessary or essential to the appearance of the “cinematic” in sound film in the way that live musical performance was in the silent film. At the same time, the fact that live performance was built into the concept of the “cinematic” placed certain constraints on the concept that sound film could not simply will away. Exhibition during the silent era was highly stratified, and this stratification was reflected in the concept. As Vachel Lindsay put it, “The picture with a great orchestra in a far-off metropolitan Opera House, may be classed by fanatical partisanship with Grand Opera. But few can get at it. It has nothing to do with Democracy.”2 Lindsay’s recommendation to eliminate music from the moving picture house might have made the cinema more democratic but at the cost of eliminating the “cinematic” itself. This is surely one reason why his suggestion was little heeded even if his diagnosis was sound: the “cinematic” represented the fantasy of the mass audience, not the commitments of its political economy. Nevertheless Lindsay’s formulation—“the reels run through as well on Broadway or Michigan Avenue”3—points to the machine as remedy, to the stand­ard­i­za­tion of exhibition through recorded sound, which Lindsay recognized would “be the basis of such a separate art that none of the photoplay precedents will apply.”4 Standardization was celebrated and the belief that film was a visual medium allowed the industry to believe uplift and the appearance of a democratic spirit were enough. Standardization used mechanical reproduction to improve, elevate, “uplift” the exhibition standards in those theatres that could not otherwise compete artistically due to the high cost. In that respect, sound film did make the cinema more thoroughly democratic however else it might have altered the representational economy and politics of the cinema. Many critics and filmmakers from the time reported great enthusiasm for the stand­ ard­i­za­tion of exhibition that would result from canning accompaniment especially. Although he would come to oppose sound film as an inherently hybrid and deficient form, German critic and theorist, Rudolf Arnheim, for instance, observed that the sound film assured that “the music no longer has to be played anew every evening, and

120   JAMES BUHLER in the villages the barber’s wife will not have to be coerced to appear Wednesdays and Saturdays at the horse-hair piano in the ballroom of the Golden Lion, for now the music will be provided up front by the distributor.”5 Jesse Lasky, head of Paramount Studios, similarly noted how the standardization of sound film allowed for the full transmission of culture and entertainment from center to periphery: “Talking, singing, musical productions which bring the talent and melodies of Broadway to theatres in every little hamlet throughout the country; the personalities of popular film stars brought out to an even more appealing degree through the sound of their voices; pictures synchronized with theme music played by the world’s leading symphony orchestras—all of these things have been accomplished in the short space of a few months.”6 In keeping with the American film industry’s ideology, Lasky portrayed this transfer as essentially democratic. Clifford Howard neatly summarized the implicit stakes of the ideological project: where live theatre was “the last stronghold of the aristocracy of art,” sound film’s drive to universalize and uplift belonged to a democratic spirit.7 In this way, the presence of living labor in the theatre was slyly transformed into an aristocratic value to be opposed. Mechanical reproduction was, it seems, to be the sound of democracy that Lindsay had first imagined in the buzzing conversations of audiences. But was recorded sound “cinematic” or merely the democratization of the theatre through mechanical reproduction? And did standardization via mechanical reproduction in fact democratize either the representation or the apparatus? Director Edmund Goulding, in an early consideration of the talking picture, attacked the silent film on the grounds of the divided sensorium it presupposed. The attack was rooted in the ableist politics of eugenics. “The picture has suffered for the lack of sound exactly as the radio now suffers from the lack of sight. With the sound and sight picture it is about to happen. With all the various perception powers of auditors engaged and functioning with completeness the situation will be startlingly changed.”8 In particular, Goulding pointed to sound as a fundamental lack of the silent film, and this affected not just the sense of the scene but its emotional tenor as well: “Silence implies the loss of 50 percent of the observer’s logical emotional reaction.”9 Indeed, Goulding argued that fear was the most important emotion that the silent film had difficulty instilling. “No producer or director of a motion picture ever has truly thrilled an audience with actual fear by showing them the silent drama. The eye is not afraid. Fear comes through the ear or sense of pain.”10 Goulding predicted nothing less from sound film than a veritable political revolution, “a change in human life,” and, more curiously, “an upward step in racial development, which is dependent, absolutely, on the arts of communication.”11 The stakes, in any case, were momentous: “The sound picture is a possession almost of the ultimate.”12 Goulding presented an imperial rather than democratic vision of sound film, as the complete recording of the world, a device, evidently, of development, cultural exploitation, and colonizing patriarchal white supremacy. The scenario that Goulding sketched indeed made sound film into an apparatus of terror, a machine that surveilled the world to deliver a theatre of fear rather than an edifying image of the world: Now, the whole will be presented, for the story, being seen and heard will be fully sensed for the first time in human history. This theatre of the future will completely

Cinematic Listening and the Early Talkie   121 picture human life. The world and all its human mind and soul reactions, every detail of its drama—its tensity, throbs, holiest emotions and worst iniquities—will be, not merely thinly imitated, but will be reproduced in actuality, including sound! What an inconceivable vaudeville is now being born! No audience in any theatre on earth ever has had the great train tragedy presented to it in the full force of its true terror; ever has had complete conception of it and a full emotional reaction. Now, with the machinery at hand for such full presentation, we must be cautious even while we are bold and enterprising. Neurologists and psychiatrists can tell you more of this than I can.13

Given the apparent awesome power of the device, Goulding not surprisingly counseled caution, but the implicit political links he drew from sound film to race and power made the “inconceivable vaudeville” of this “theatre of the future” seem less than benign, a technology of total control, with fear as its principal lever. Goulding’s account also drew attention to the dark political currents teeming under the seemingly benevolent project of democratic uplift, describing the fantasy at the heart of the sound film as in fact totalitarian in conception and recorded sound tapped for its power to terrorize its audience into submission. Goulding’s reading of the terrifying image of the sound film may account for the ambivalences of audiences, who seemed fascinated by the power of the technology even as they were apprehensive about the social and economic dislocations it caused. In any case, the public itself was less convinced about the value of canned entertainment, especially the recorded accompaniments to silent film. For whatever reason, whether due to inadequate installation in theatres that greatly reduced the dynamic range of the music, general anxiety over reproduced instrumental music that displaced theatre musicians, or unanticipated competition from talking films, the canning of deluxe silent film pres­ en­ta­tion proved remarkably unviable as an entertainment. Indeed, Lee DeForest, whose Phonofilm was a precursor to Movietone and who had experimented with both recorded accompaniment to features and canning vaudeville for several years prior to the introduction of the Vitaphone, claimed that the novelty of sound film as such wore off after roughly three to four months.14 Despite filmmakers’ embrace of the idea and a strong push from the film industry and from corporate behemoths such as AT&T interested in providing the equipment, silent films with canned accompaniments seemed to audiences mere imitations of current cinematic sound. In 1928 Variety reported one prominent manager “overhearing many customers express annoyance and distraction because of the canned music and a desire for the human orchestra, of which this house carried a particularly good one, plus resolutions to avoid future synchronized films with the recurring expression. ‘If that’s what sound pictures are like, we don’t want any more’.”15 In order not to scare off the patronage, the theatre experimented with periodically spelling the recorded accompaniment with live musicians “just to relieve the ears of the audiences. It has found that audiences become restless under the monotone of canned music.”16 Surveys of theatre patrons from the time and published occasionally in Variety confirmed that, of those who were willing to

122   JAMES BUHLER respond to questionnaires, few were willing to admit that they liked the use of recorded music as a substitute for live musicians. Dissatisfaction with canned accompaniment was noted regularly in the trade press, and in the United States the Better Business Bureau opened an investigation into misleading advertising that purposely confused sound films and talking films. Variety even took to clearly marking in the heading of its reviews how much recorded dialogue was in each film because of a general sense that films with only recorded musical accompaniment and sound effects were not “real” sound films. Whereas audiences remained mostly unimpressed by recorded music accompanying a silent feature—at least in part because it represented a canning of the entertainment and a loss of cinematic value—they responded much more favorably to synchronized dialogue and filmed musical performances. Indeed, if silent film had ultimately bound itself to being a screen of representation, to the illusion of its image constructed and produced through framing and montage rather than to a reality depicted onscreen, the new sound film initially sought nothing less than to be a theatre of reality, to capture and reproduce the very feeling of life itself, an aim that Aldous Huxley would famously parody with “the feelies.” Writing about the potential for a cinema of sound, color, and 3D in 1929, Clifford Howard forthrightly declared that cinema now presented “the illusion of aliveness.”17 Hearing the synchronized voice, audiences found that the picture seemingly came to life, and this sense of “aliveness” rather than live performance itself would increasing become the mark of the “cinematic” in the sound film. Edwin Hopkins, explaining a method for dialogue replacement to the Society of Motion Picture Engineers in 1928, claimed that “a full half of the life of the talking picture is in the talk, if not more.”18 Harold Franklin enthused: “Thanks to the miracle of the new art, the screen takes voice and life. Titles give way to actual dialogue spoken from the lips of the players. The phantom figures of the silent screen become real characters of flesh and blood. They live—they talk—they sing—just as in real life!”19 Mordaunt Hall, film critic of the New York Times, celebrated the success of the early Vitaphone shorts: “Even today there has been no better specimen of sound and shadow than the rendition by Martinelli of the Vesta la Giubba aria of ‘Pagliacci.’ It was so excellent, so real, that one felt as though Martinelli would eventually burst through the screen, as if it were made of paper.”20 Rudolf Arnheim likewise wrote of his initial experience of the sound film: “The impression that this is not a copy but a living being is completely compelling.” Irving Cummings in 1928 claimed that the soundtrack of In Old Arizona (1929), the first talkie filmed on location, “not only caught and reproduced with fidelity the voices of the actors, but actually filmed and reproduced the natural sounds of the outdoors, the whispering of the wind, the song of the birds.”21 These were for the most part industry reports rather than accounts of reception, but they nevertheless point to a power of recorded sound, especially synchronized dialogue, to animate the images. Synchronized sound evidently made the screen image seem more real, and the life-like quality resided in the impression of reality, which would become bound up with the newly emerging idea of sound film as talking film. The “cinematic” was being rewritten under the sign of realism to move from live musical

Cinematic Listening and the Early Talkie   123 performance to synchronized dialogue as the dominant strand. Cinema was becoming the talkie and changing what it meant to listen cinematically.

Recorded Theatre and the Theatre of Reality The spectacle of synchronized dialogue and singing alone was not, however, sufficient to sustain the commercial viability of the entertainment. In particular, sound film as canned theatre often seemed to kill the very impression of life that the synchronized film otherwise promised, especially in feature films. In a 1928 interview, director William de Mille posed a vital question of the talking film and the future of cinema. “How is this new development going to affect the art form of motion picture stories? . . . Is it going to be simply a photographic reproduction of a stage play or is it going to be the foundation of a new motion picture art in the method of telling a story?”22 Although de Mille’s phrasing made clear that he favored the development of “a new motion picture art,” some, such as French playwright and film director Marcel Pagnol, celebrated the possibility of recorded theatre because the talkie solved certain inherent difficulties of the theatre . With the talking film, he claimed in 1930, “We can write a scene in whispers, and make it understandable to three thousand people, without changing the pitch and tone of the whispering.”23 Harold B. Franklin, writing the same year, agreed. “A great advantage which sound pictures hold is their ability to present every word so clearly and distinctly that no one need strain to hear what is being said, at least when recording and reproducing is properly conducted. A whisper is clearly audible from the front row in the orchestra to the last row in the balcony.”24 J. Stuart Blackton thought that specifically the “close-up . . . differentiates the new art” and was one of the principal advantages that film as recorded theatre would have over live theatre.25 An intimate talk that extended the feeling of proximity was a new proposal for the cinematic that would reconfigure cinematic listening as well. Taking issue with Pagnol’s defense of recorded theatre, director René Clair attacked all influences of the theatre, especially the vocal cadences of the stage, which he feared would “destroy everything I had hoped for in” the cinema.26 Clair rejected outright the mimetic realism at the heart of recorded theatre and also thought that the talking film would “survive only if the formula suitable to it is found, only if it can break loose from the influence of the theater and fiction, only if people make of it something other than an art of imitation.”27 Author Luigi Pirandello protested against the loss of presence, arguing that talking film produced only “an ugly copy of the theatre; listening to the photographed images of actors talking incongruously with machine-made voices mechanically transmitted, I shall prefer to go to the theatre, where at least there are real actors talking with their natural voices.”28 One Variety critic forthrightly stated that talking and singing shorts, while generally more effective than the features, nevertheless remained

124   JAMES BUHLER hampered by being reproductions. “No matter how good the screen compositions may be, it still remains that they’re in a can. No one has yet been able to time a screen laugh in the making and none of the devices is as yet entirely free from the mechanical interpretation which is always present.”29 Although he would later soften toward the talking film, director Herbert Brenon initially thought it would result in the subordination both of the picture play to the stage script and of the camera to the phonograph. “That will be a sorry day for the movies! They will be nothing but a mechanical imitation of the real thing—the flesh and blood presentations of the stage.”30 Where some had celebrated synchronization for enlivening the picture with the reality of sound, these authors criticized synchronized speech for draining film of life and vitality—of focusing on capturing theatrical values rather than developing specifically cinematic ones. The issue revolved around the voice as a theatrical value, and the recognition that what was captured in recorded theatre was precisely the theatrical voice rather than the voice the actor was portraying.

Uncanny Synchronization Besides theatrical diction, the reproduced voice was also strange and even uncanny in itself, and it apparently often put audiences on edge. Variety, for instance, reported that patrons complained that talking films “prevent the relaxation which silent versions afford; that they are a strain on nervous systems; that the reproduction of ‘so-called human voices are weird’.”31 Synchronized dialogue, a Variety critic argued, was often “overdone. In its place it is good and fitting; over accentuated it becomes an annoyance which the nerves are incapable of standing. No one has yet denied that a bad talker is much worse than a bad silent picture—the added risk dialog films must take.”32 “Sound,” this review added, “has killed off that sense of relaxation in a picture house, either to plain orchestra or organ accompaniment.”33 Relaxation here serves as a figure of cinematic fantasy, of being able to let go and lose oneself in the world of the film, and for this writer at least, the experience of relaxation, like distraction and diversion, was an integral part of the silent cinema; it was something that evidently inhered in or at least was facilitated by the musical accompaniment. In the sound film, on the contrary, the synchronized figure onscreen seemed real and alive, but the realism made the artifice of the play acting evident. Synchronized sound evidently had the effect of making viewers more aware of the “reality” that they were seeing a photographic image. The uncanny effect of the talking film was that, for at least some in the audience, the realism appeared not natural but mechanical. In any event, many commented on the uncanny character of the sound film and the peculiar way it combined realism and artifice. For some, this strangeness marked a loss of fantasy that seemed to position sound film initially as incompatible with the “cinematic.” Wilbur Needham thought the effect of synchronization was so fraught that it actually undermined the impression of reality that it promised. “Echoing from photographs upon a screen in which the actors have

Cinematic Listening and the Early Talkie   125 reality only by their silence, the human voice shatters that reality.”34 His point was that the conventions of silent film gave form to a cinematic reality that belonged to the medium of silent film, and talking film destroyed that fiction without being able to rebuild it. For Kenneth Macpherson, filmmaker and editor of the influential film journal Close Up, synchronized recorded sound did not so much add depth to the image as it underscored the picture’s inherent flatness, destroying its cinematic properties. “The tendency [of the apparatus] . . . is to make flatness or photographs out of all the depth and quality of the film that was.”35 Macpherson argued that the image and sound did not fuse into a unity and so exposed the mechanical basis of the film. “I must say that the figure on the screen and the voice that was going on with it, just were unrelated. A voice was going on, very clearly, very interesting . . . no, give it up, you do not get the illusion of reality at all. Suddenly it’s only photographs.”36 Writing in 1933, Georges Neveux similarly noted that “The ear hears an in-depth film, while the eye gazes at a flat film.”37 One Variety critic, reviewing a Vitaphone program in early 1927, wrote: An hour of mechanical sound production, together with its flicker accompaniment is a pretty severe experience. There is something of colorless quality about the mechanical device that wears after so long a stretch, not because the reproduction is lacking in human quality, for it has extraordinary exactitude and human shading. It must be that the mere knowledge that the entertainment is a reproduction has the effect of erecting an altogether imaginary feeling of mechanical flatness such as one gets from a player piano.38

For American critic Gilbert Seldes, synchronized dialogue also made the sound film less real: “Speech adds another element of realism and weighs down the balance in favor of the movies’ weakness. At the same time, the moment a character begins to speak from the screen his bodily unreality becomes marked—at least until one becomes accustomed to it.”39 The uncanny effect of the talking film was that the realism appeared not natural but mechanical. Robert Spadoni reports several additional accounts of this sort and explains “Initially, viewers were unable to process synchronized speech as routinely and transparently as they had the silent film intertitle.”40 He adds that “synchronized speech carried a strong potential to impress viewers with its strangeness and its materiality, two qualities the speech would substantially lose once viewers grew used to sound film and once the quality of the sound itself had sufficiently improved.”41 Spadoni attributes this perception to an increase in “medium sensitivity” that persisted until audiences became acclimated to recorded sound, and he notes that the novelty would quickly fade into convention, an important moment in the history of cinematic sound. Yet for some, the strangeness marked a difference that seemed to position sound film as incompatible with the cinematic. Writing in an early issue of Close Up, author H. D. (the pen name of Hilda Doolittle) gave a thorough analysis of her alienating experience of seeing a set of Movietone shorts in 1927. She complained that synchronized sound stripped the “mask” of the silent film of its magic and private wonder. She compared film to a toy doll. With synchronized dialogue,

126   JAMES BUHLER the screen image, a mask, a sort of doll or marionette was somehow mechanized and robbed of the thing behind the thing that has grown to matter so much to the picture adept. A doll, a sort of mask or marionette about which one could drape one’s devotions, intellectually, almost visibly like the ardent Catholic with his image of madonna, became a sort of robot. Our old doll became replaced by a wonder-doll, singing, with musical insides, with strings that one may pull, with excellent wired joints.42

Though appearing closer to reality, the image mechanically synchronized to sound endowed the ghostly silent image with substance but not with life. The insistent reality of the mechanically synchronized image was disenchanting and halted the mind’s productive regression into the distinctive and peculiar diversion of fantasy and play that recalled childhood. H. D. complained: I didn’t really like my old screen image to be improved (I might almost say imposed) on. I didn’t like my ghost-love to become so visibly incarnate. I didn’t like my intellect to cope with it any more than I should have liked Topsy (of the old days) suddenly to emerge with wired in legs and arms and sewed-on bonnet and really grown-up bead bag dangling (also sewed on) from the wrist. We want, don’t we, our old treasures? Or do we want a lot of new toys, mechanical and utterly proficient?43

The mechanical proficiency and indeed perfection of synchronized sound dislocated the desire for which the silent image served as mask—the lack that the audience of the silent film imaginarily completed but that in the sound film was completed by the apparatus itself through the technique of synchronization. In a provocative metaphor that would become the common conception of the soundimage relationship, H. D. distinguished the mechanical “welding” of sound to the image in most of the Movietone shorts she experienced from its proper sanctified “wedding,” which appeared only infrequently and was not sufficient, in her mind, to redeem synchronized sound.44 “The Movietone,” she said, “has to do with the things outside the sacred precincts,” that is, outside those aspects of cinema that had to do with its art, those aspects that seemed to transform the movie theatre into a temple. She continued: There is something inside that the Movietone would eventually, I think, destroy utterly, for many of us. That is the whole point really of the matter. Is the temple, our inner place of refuge, to be crowded out with gods like men, not masks, not images, that are so disguised, so conventionalized that they hold in some odd way possibility of some divine animation? If I see art projected too perfectly . . . don’t I feel rather cheated of the possibility of something more divine behind the outer symbol of the something shown there? The mask in other words seems about to be ripped off showing us human features, the doll is about to step forward as a mere example of mechanical inventiveness.45

What is provocative in this perhaps esoteric formulation is the claim that the increased  substantiality of the synchronized image emphasized its mundane quality,

Cinematic Listening and the Early Talkie   127 the actuality of the projection as a recording, which moreover revealed “not a mask” but “a person, a personality.”46 And this appearance of personality, the substance of an actual person, interfered, she thought, with the symbolic signification of the mimetic image, which she tied to the sacred and thereby to its secularized form as art but which we might also link to the imagined, fictional world of representation. In essence, synchronized sound, for H. D., embodied the image, and in so doing encumbered it, manifested and insisted, she thought, upon the body of the profilmic actor, the actor before the camera, in a way that made it difficult for the actor to disappear into the fictional role, for that body to appear not simply as recorded image but as belonging to the imagined world of the film—that is, to the diegesis. What she doubted—and herein lay the danger she sensed in synchronized sound—was that representation could ever free itself from the value of fidelity, from the perfection of recording, from the ontology of reproduction. H. D.’s concern, then, was not principally the materiality or medium sensitivity that Spadoni points to but whether the synchronized sound film could represent, could become a semiotic, could serve as a signifier of an imagined world. And for H. D. there was no cinema without this appearance of representation.

Dorothy Richardson’s Listening “Modes” and the Patriarchal Order of Sound Film Dorothy Richardson waged battle with the sound film longer and on more explicitly gendered ground than did H. D., who largely stopped publishing in Close Up once the ascent of the talkie had become evident. Richardson likewise located her opposition to sound film in the realism of synchronized sound, which she argued had the effect of disrupting the imagined reality proffered by the image. Although she thought film was generally improved by a musical accompaniment—“any kind of musical noise is better than none”47—she opposed the use of realistic sound effects for silent film. “In our small palace we object to any sound coming from the screen. We dislike even the realistic pistol-shot that was heard once or twice during our period of great ambitions. With the help of the puff of smoke and our pianist’s staccato chord we can manufacture our own reality.”48 The problem with realistic sound effects, she said, was that they interfered with the formation of the imagined world, with the “rousing of [the spectator’s] collaborating creative consciousness,”49 and she heard in the appearance of such sound effects an attempt to overwrite this imagined world with a less rich, and more determined reality. It was this image of determined reality that sound film offered. She admitted that often these sounds were “relatively harmless,” but thought they were also “fore-runners, evidence of a blind move in a wrong direction, in the direction of the destruction of the essential character of the screen-play.”50 Music, by contrast, facilitated “the concentration that is essential to collaboration between the

128   JAMES BUHLER on looker and what he sees”51 so long as “it is the film that uses the music, not the music the film.”52 When she later came to appraise the sound film itself, Richardson posited that the sound film engendered two modes for apprehending it, each with quite distinct l­ istening and viewing attitudes. The dialogue scenes, she said, demanded a mode of “concentrated listening,” which focused attention on “hearing the spoken word,” and directed the relation from image to sound, resulting in a “diminution of the faculty of ­seeing” to a kind of crude scanning of the image for its source. “In becoming suddenly vocal, locally vocal amidst a surrounding silence, photograph reveals its photographicality.”53 Much like H. D., Richardson thought that the substance given by the mechanical synchronization yielded the impression of the mechanical basis of the reproduction. For this reason, she thought the mode of concentrated listening was “immediately fatal to cinematography.”54 The other mode she called “distributed hearing,” and she found this much more amenable to the cinema, since music and song served “directly as enhancement rather than diminution of the faculty of seeing.”55 Distributed hearing used listening to establish a context for action; it was a mode of hearing focused on constructing a background for the visual action from music and sound. At the same time, because sound film required this passing back and forth between concentrated and distributed listening, Richardson found the experience disjunctive and ultimately thought it gave the effect of an “ambitious pudding of incompatible ingredients.”56 She concluded from this “that it is impossible both to hear and to see, to the limit of our power of using these faculties, at one and the same moment.”57 She continued: The two eloquences, the appeal to the eye and the appeal to the ear, however well fused, however completely they seem to attain their objective—the spectator-auditor— with the effect of a single aesthetic whole, must, in reality, remain distinct. And one or the other will always take precedence in our awareness. And though it is true that their approximate blending can work miracles the miracle thus worked is incomparably different from that worked by either alone.58

The silent film was addressed principally to the eye, the faculty of which was used to its fullest, and that replete singular address was indeed “the secret of its power,” which would therefore be lost in the sound film, wherever else the appeal of the latter might be. In a later essay Richardson would step back slightly from this absolutist position and acknowledge that sound film shared with silent film the representation of a distance and a perspective “exactly fitting the contemplative state,” and this representation of distance and perspective distinguished film, whether silent or sound, from theatre.59 Here, she surveyed a potential location for the “cinematic” in sound film, almost the precise opposite of the proximity valorized by those, like Pagnol, advocating for recorded theatre. Indeed, the facilitation of this contemplative distance, the inner sight that it seemed to engender, rather than the singular address to the eye, now became the source of film’s power: “The film, by setting the landscape in motion and keeping us still, allows it to walk through us.”60 A proper use of sound and dialogue would be to open the contemplation of distance.

Cinematic Listening and the Early Talkie   129 Yet Richardson remained suspicious of the implicit political priorities of the s­ ynchronized sound film, which she adroitly heard as ultimately endowed, like the stage, with a patriarchal voice that required woman to betray themselves whenever they spoke.61 The commitment of sound film to represent a specific reality—“the absolute faith in speech as a medium of communication”62—also imposed a hierarchical order and plan that presupposed and reflected a male perspective in a way that silent film never could because it required the contemplative collaboration of the spectator to complete it. The film, regarded as a medium of communication, in the day of its innocence, in its quality of being nowhere and everywhere, nowhere in the sense of having more intention than direction and more purpose than plan, everywhere by reason of its power to evoke, suggest, reflect, express from within its moving parts and in their totality of movement, something of the changeless being at the heart of all becoming, was essentially feminine. In its insistence on contemplation it provided a pathway to reality.63

On this point, Richardson’s diagnosis would find support from Béla Balázs and Rudolf Arnheim, who similarly criticized synchronized dialogue on the basis of an inherent anthropocentric political order that elevated the human figure above things.64 Through the representation of distance, on the contrary, the talking film also retained this “insistence on contemplation” inherited from the silent film.

Dialogue Contra Image If H. D. and Richardson each doubted that synchronized sound could ever be properly “cinematic,” others sought a conception of sound film that was something other than recording. Many advocated various forms of asynchronous sound, arguing that a properly cinematic sound needed to contribute something that was not simply redundant with the image. When used as anything other than special effects, these, however, invariably ran into extensive resistance from audiences and critics. Rudolf Arnheim, for instance, warned that The danger always exists that the viewer will misunderstand such a montage of image and sound and expect the sound to come from the scene; when the drunkard at the bar hears the warning voice of his far-off wife, the viewer will quite likely look around for the woman in the picture, assuming that since he can hear her, she must be nearby.65

Others sought a modality of synchronized sound that might be distinctly “cinematic,” and here the idea of intimacy returned but in a way that moved it outside the theatre and tied it instead to realistic representation. Edmund Goulding, for instance, intuited already in 1928 that the sound film would be unkind toward stage diction. “The fallacy of

130   JAMES BUHLER voice training will soon be discovered. The pompous, grandiloquent actor will be a ­nuisance. Grand sayings in sound pictures will be as utterly ridiculous as they usually are in actual fact.”66 In 1929, Harold Franklin wrote similarly: “What the public will expect most in dialogue pictures is a clear, understandable voice rather than one that is specially trained for that purpose. The natural voice will go farthest, and the first and most important requisite of a player is to be understood.”67 We might take Franklin to be emphasizing the representational ideal of clarity, but that is only one aspect of it, since stage diction also seeks clarity of enunciation. Franklin took particular issue with the “specially trained” theatrical voice. His concern was that the trained voice would not sound “natural.” And by “natural” Franklin seemed to mean a voice that appeared to belong to the depicted scene, that is, a diegetically appropriate voice. The concern was that the trained voice recorded above all its theatrical training, and the “trained voice” would therefore reproduce as the real artifice that it was, as stilted and affected, rather than as the “natural” voice of a diegetic character that would help the audience believe in the imagined, fictional world onscreen. Something similar seemed to be at work with complaints about tempo, which as Lea Jacobs notes were common during the transition period.68 Richardson was especially struck by the “effort” of speech—“slow and laboriously precise in enunciation” she said—when she first saw a talking picture.69 Commenting on Give and Take, a Universal talking feature released at the end of 1928, New York Times critic Mordaunt Hall similarly observed, “in the talking passages the players appear to be reciting rather than ­conversing. There are many spots where the long silences cause one to feel that the people in the story are waiting for the sound wizards to unlock their tongues.”70 But it was not just tempo per se but the way the slow pace seemed to draw attention to the dialogue as a recording or as a theatrical performance rather than as emanating from a diegetic world that seemed to attract comment as inappropriate to the cinema. Perhaps thinking of radio, Goulding believed that softer, more intimate voices would prevail on the soundtrack—but he focused more on the sound and character of the voice than on any sense of clarity. “The soft, insinuating voice of an Elsie Janis, the attractive utterance of a whispering Smith, the characteristic gruff shout of a policeman, voices which can imply so much more than their words say, will be sought-for treasures [in the sound film]. Voices will be effective more because of their color and implication than because of any mere sound quality.” Much as the close-up allowed a voyeuristic perspective on the diegetic action, so too the microphone allowed for a kind of eavesdropping on the diegetic sound world: “The girl who in a close-up can sing a soft lullaby to her baby and whisper—‘Good night, my darling’, in such a way that the camera might be listening in through the key-hole—she will be the new star.”71 In early 1929, Variety summarized the emerging cinematic convention: “When two people are holding a conversation in close up on the screen, the same dialog used on the stage makes the picture inane and draggy. Only important and pointed dialog is used, merely the pith of stage dialog. The main attempt is to get away from a recorded play and make a rapid, snappy talking picture.”72 The emphasis here falls on tempo, but it was less pace than the avoidance of theatrical cadences that was at stake.

Cinematic Listening and the Early Talkie   131

Conclusion Hearing sound film cinematically meant in the first place hearing diegetically, that is, hearing synchronized sounds as belonging to a diegetic world represented (not reproduced) onscreen.73 And sound and dialogue that seemed to emanate from the screen to signify the reality of the fictional world accomplished this. That is, cinematic sound was sound that unmuted the world screened in silent film, that intensified the fantasy image by making it seem like it had actual substance. Long after the advent of the sound film, director Robert Flaherty spoke ruefully that his most famous film, Nanook of the North, was silent and so lacked something crucial: “I wish I could have had sound for Nanook . . . It takes the hiss of the wind in the North and the howls of the dogs to get the whole feeling of the country.”74 It was the sound of that diegetic world not the meaning of the words—certainly not the grandiloquent utterance—that was decisive to the appearance of realism. The principal sound affected was dialogue because it was the sound that was most prominently muted in the silent film. But audiences also responded favorably to animated shorts closely synced to music. A regime of synchronization that made for a compelling representation of a world—this is what technicians and audiences meant when they said “realism”; but realism in this sense did not need to be realistic so much as representationally consistent. The fantastic world of the animated sound short was also in this sense a kind of realism in as much as the diegetic world it presented was cinematically compelling. As it has become increasingly clear that the effective rerecording of background music was technically feasible from at least 1928, the explanation for music’s disappearance from the soundtrack between 1929 and 1932 has grown ever more inscrutable.75 If the alternative explanation that filmmakers’ concern that background music lacked diegetic and so also realistic motivation also seems unconvincing, perhaps we can nevertheless recognize this formulation as registering a fundamental uncertainty about this music. The lack of diegetic anchoring may not have been at issue, but perhaps its close resemblance to silent film accompaniment was. Much as the cadence of theatrical speech was not cinematic because it produced only the imitation of theatrical speech, so too perhaps recorded silent film music could not be cinematic because it produced only the imitation of silent film music. In any event, musical scoring in sound film had to negotiate a tricky terrain to convention, where audiences came to hear music as a properly cinematic aural background to the dialogue and action onscreen.76

Notes 1. Larry Gross, “Big and Loud,” Sight and Sound 5, no. 8 (1995): 6–10. 2. Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916), 193. 3. Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, 191. 4. Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture, 193.

132   JAMES BUHLER 5. Rudolf Arnheim, Film Essays and Criticism, trans. Brenda Benthien (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 29. 6. Quoted in Clifford Howard, “Signs of the Times,” Close Up 4, no. 5 (1929): 51–58: 53–54. 7. Clifford Howard, “Cabbage and Kings,” Close Up 4, no. 6 (1929): 45–51: 45. 8. Edmund Goulding, “The Talkers in Close-Up,” Variety, June 13, 1928, 7. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Lee DeForest, “The Talking Pictures,” American Cinematographer (February 1928): 4. 15. “Coast Managers Find Patronage Tiring of Synchronized Scores,” Variety, September 5, 1928, 20. 16. “Coast Managers Find Patronage Tiring of Synchronized Scores,” 20. 17. Clifford Howard, “What of the Future,” Close Up 4, no. 3 (1929): 73–78: 76. 18. Edwin Hopkins, “Re-Vocalized Films,” Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 12, no. 35 (1928): 845–52: 852. 19. Harold  B.  Franklin, Sound Motion Pictures: From the Laboratory to Their Presentation (Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1929), 10. 20. Mordaunt Hall, “The Reaction of the Public to Motion Pictures with Sound,” Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 12, no. 35 (1928): 603–13: 603. 21. Quoted in Kathryn Kalinak, “Classical Hollywood, 1928–1946,” in Sound: Dialogue, Music and Effects, ed. Kathryn Kalinak (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 38. 22. “Directors and Talkers,” Variety, May 16, 1928, 42. 23. Marcel Pagnol, “The Talkie Offers the Writer New Resources” (1930), in French Film Theory and Criticism, Volume II: 1929–1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 56. 24. Harold B. Franklin, “A Year in Sound,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 14, no. 3 (1930): 302–08: 302. 25. “Directors and Talkers,” Variety, May 16, 1928, 42. 26. René Clair, “Talkie versus Talkie” (1929), in French Film Theory and Criticism, Volume II: 1929–1939 ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 39. 27. René Clair, “Film Authors Don’t Need You” (1930), in French Film Theory and Criticism, Volume II: 1929–1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 58. 28. Luigi Pirandello, “Pirandello Views ‘the Talkies’,” New York Times, July 28, 1929, 70. 29. Sid [Silverman], “The Smothering Talker,” Variety, January 2, 1929, 17. 30. Herbert Brenon, “Opposition to Sound Film,” New York Times, October 21, 1928, 124. 31. “Universal’s Talkers Held Up by Many Opinions Secured from Lay Letter Writers,” Variety, January 9, 1929, 3. 32. Sid, “The Smothering Talker,” 17. 33. Ibid. 34. Wilbur Needham, “The Photography of Sound,” Close Up 3, no. 2 (1928): 28–32: 30. 35. Kenneth Macpherson, “As Is,” Close Up 1, no. 5 (1927): 5–10: 10. 36. Macpherson, “As Is,” 7. 37. Georges Neveux, “The Tunnel, 1930–1940,” in French Film Theory and Criticism, Volume II: 1929–1939, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 120.

Cinematic Listening and the Early Talkie   133 38. Rush (Alfred Rushford Greason), Review of Vitaphone, Colony, New York, Variety, March 23, 1927, 15. 39. Gilbert Seldes, “The Movies Commit Suicide,” Harper’s Magazine (June 1928): 710. 40. Robert Spadoni, Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 94. 41. Spadoni, Uncanny Bodies, 18–19. 42. H. D., “The Cinema and the Classics: III. The Mask and the Movietone,” Close Up 1, no. 5 (1927): 18–31: 21. 43. Ibid., 21. 44. Ibid., 20. 45. Ibid., 30. 46. Ibid., 22. 47. Dorothy M. Richardson, “Continuous Performance: II. Musical Accompaniment,” Close Up 1, no. 2 (1927): 58–62: 60; see also Richardson, “Continuous Performance: A Tear for Lycidas,” Close Up 7, no. 3 (1930): 196–202: 200. 48. Richardson, “Continuous Performance: II. Musical Accompaniment,” 61. 49. Richardson, “Continuous Performance: A Tear for Lycidas,” 199. 50. Richardson, “Continuous Performance IV: A Thousand Pities,” Close Up 1, no. 4 (1927): 60–64: 64. 51. Richardson, “Continuous Performance II: Musical Accompaniment,” 61. 52. Richardson, “Continuous Performance: A Tear for Lycidas,” 200. 53. Richardson, “Continuous Performance: Dialogue in Dixie,” Close Up 5, no. 3 (1929): 211–18: 215. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Richardson, “A Tear for Lycidas,” 198. 58. Ibid. 59. Richardson, “Continuous Performance: Narcissus,” Close Up 8, no. 3 (1931): 182–85: 184. 60. Ibid., 185. 61. Richardson, “Continuous Performance: VIII,” Close Up 2, no. 3 (1928): 51–55. 62. Richardson, “Continuous Performance: The Film Gone Male,” Close Up 9, no. 1 (1932): 36–38: 36. 63. Ibid., 37. 64. Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010), 23; Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 227. 65. Arnheim, Film Essays and Criticism, 51. 66. Goulding, “The Talkers in Close-Up,” 7. 67. Franklin, Sound Motion Pictures, 234. 68. Lea Jacobs, Film Rhythm after Sound: Technology, Music, and Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), ch. 1, esp. 7–9. 69. Richardson, “ Continuous Performance: Dialogue in Dixie,” 213. 70. Mordaunt Hall, “The Screen: Hesitant Talkers,” New York Times, December 27, 1928, 31. 7 1. Goulding, “The Talkers in Close-Up,” 7. 72. “Film Actors’ New Chances,” Variety, January 16, 1929: 1.

134   JAMES BUHLER 73. Nancy Wood, “Towards a Semiotics of the Transition to Sound: Spatial and Temporal Codes,” Screen 25, no. 3 (1984): 16–24. 74. Quoted in Arthur Rosenheimer, Jr., “They Make Documentaries: Number One— Robert  J.  Flaherty,” Film News 7, no. 6 (1946), 10 and 23; quoted in Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 128. 75. Lea Jacobs claims rightly that the vast improvement of re-recording processes for film after 1931 facilitated adding music to the soundtrack. But the Vitaphone process did not suffer from the same limitations in re-recording, and background music was in fact not as uncommon in the years before re-recording as has occasionally been claimed in the ­secondary literature. Nevertheless, the use of music did decrease after 1929 until it returned after the re-recording technology was improved. See Lea Jacobs, “The Innovation of Re-Recording in the Hollywood Studios,” Film History 24, no. 1 (2012): 5–34. 76. The literature on the codification of scoring practices during the transition era is extensive. For some recent overviews, see Nathan Platte, “Before Kong Was King: Competing Methods in Hollywood Underscore,” Journal of the Society for American Music 8, no. 3 (2014): 311–37; Michael Slowik, After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926–1934 (New York: Columbia University Press,  2014); James Buhler and David Neumeyer, “Music and the Ontology of the Sound Film: The Classic Hollywood System,” in The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, ed. David Neumeyer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 17–43; James Buhler and Hannah Lewis, “Evolving Practices for Film Music and Sound, 1925–1935,” in The Cambridge Companion to Film Music, ed. Mervyn Cooke and Fiona Ford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 7–28.

Select Bibliography Abel, Richard, ed. French Film Theory and Criticism, Volume II: 1929–1939. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Arnheim, Rudolf. Film as Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. Arnheim, Rudolf. Film Essays and Criticism. Trans. Brenda Benthien. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Balázs, Béla. Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010. Buhler, James, and Hannah Lewis. “Evolving Practices for Film Music and Sound, 1925–1935.” In The Cambridge Companion to Film Music, ed. Mervyn Cooke and Fiona Ford, 7–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Buhler, James, and David Neumeyer. “Music and the Ontology of the Sound Film: The Classic Hollywood System.” In The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, ed. David Neumeyer, 17–43. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. DeForest, Lee. “The Talking Pictures.” American Cinematographer (February 1928), 4. Franklin, Harold  B. Sound Motion Pictures: From the Laboratory to their Presentation. Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1929. Franklin, Harold B. “A Year in Sound.” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 14, no. 3 (1930): 302–08. Goulding, Edmund. “The Talkers in Close-Up.” Variety, June 13, 1928, 7. Hall, Mordaunt. “The Reaction of the Public to Motion Pictures with Sound.” Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 12, no. 35 (1928): 603–13.

Cinematic Listening and the Early Talkie   135 Hall, Mordaunt. “The Screen: Hesitant Talkers.” New York Times, December 27, 1928, 31. H.  D.  (Hilda Doolittle), “The Cinema and the Classics: III. The Mask and the Movietone,” Close Up 1, no. 5 (1927): 18–31. Hopkins, Edwin. “Re-Vocalized Films.” Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 12, no. 35 (1928): 845–52. Howard, Clifford. “What of the Future.” Close Up 4, no. 3 (1929): 73–78. Howard, Clifford. “Signs of the Times.” Close Up 4, no. 5 (1929): 51–58. Howard, Clifford. “Cabbage and Kings,” Close Up 4, no. 6 (1929): 45–51. Jacobs, Lea. “The Innovation of Re-Recording in the Hollywood Studios.” Film History 24, no. 1 (2012): 5–34. Jacobs, Lea. Film Rhythm after Sound: Technology, Music, and Performance. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. Kalinak, Kathryn. “Classical Hollywood, 1928–1946.” In Sound: Dialogue, Music and Effects, ed. Kathryn Kalinak, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Lindsay, Vachel. The Art of the Moving Picture. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916. Needham, Wilbur. “The Photography of Sound.” Close Up 3, no. 2 (1928): 28–32. Pirandello, Luigi. “Pirandello Views ‘the Talkies’.” New York Times, July 28, 1929, 70. Platte, Nathan. “Before Kong Was King: Competing Methods in Hollywood Underscore.” Journal of the Society for American Music 8, no. 3 (2014): 311–37. Richardson, Dorothy M. “Continuous Performance: II. Musical Accompaniment.” Close Up 1, no. 2 (1927): 58–62. Richardson, Dorothy M. “Continuous Performance: IV. A Thousand Pities,” Close Up 1, no. 4 (1927): 60–64. Richardson, Dorothy M. “Continuous Performance: VIII.” Close Up 2, no. 3 (1928): 51–55. Richardson, Dorothy  M. “Continuous Performance: Dialogue in Dixie,” Close Up 5, no. 3 (1929): 211–18. Richardson, Dorothy  M. “Continuous Performance: A Tear for Lycidas.” Close Up 7, no. 3 (1930): 196–202. Richardson, Dorothy  M. “Continuous Performance: Narcissus.” Close Up 8, no. 3 (1931): 182–85. Richardson, Dorothy M. “Continuous Performance: The Film Gone Male.” Close Up 9, no. 1 (1932): 36–38. Rush (Alfred Rushford Greason). Review of Vitaphone, Colony, New York. Variety, March 23 1927, 15. Seldes, Gilbert. “The Movies Commit Suicide.” Harper’s Magazine (June 1928), 706–12. Sid (Sid Silverman). “The Smothering Talker.” Variety, January 2, 1929, 17. Slowik, Michael. After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926–34. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Spadoni, Robert. Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Wood, Nancy. “Towards a Semiotics of the Transition to Sound: Spatial and Temporal Codes.” Screen 25, no. 3 (1984): 16–24.

pa rt I I

L O C AT IONS A N D R E L O C AT IONS

chapter 6

Histor ica l Sou n d -Fil m Pr esen tation a n d the Cl osed - Cu rta i n Roa dshow Ov ertu r e Ben Winters

In musicology over the last fifty years or so, the discourse surrounding historically informed performance practice (often abbreviated to HIP) has both generated vast swathes of opinion and controversy and provided academic legitimacy to living performance traditions—ones that have kept musicians and instrument makers in jobs, and propped up an ailing recording industry. Crucially, too, it has helped to reconfigure our understanding of the relationship between text and performance in the context of the musical work-­ concept. No longer are musicologists prepared to accept uncritically the notion of an ideal aesthetic object (the musical work) with its own set of a priori meanings that can be considered independently of the circumstances of its reception. Nor are they willing to overlook the important role that performance traditions and surroundings play in shaping the meaning content of a musical text. The ideological underpinnings of the historically informed performance practice movement and the aims of its proponents, though, have been subject to a good deal of academic scrutiny. Nicholas Cook, for example, has recently drawn our attention to these ongoing debates: to the ways in which some have argued that the movement constitutes a late-modernist performance style; and to the underlying power dynamic that suggests that historically informed performance practice represented a disciplining of performance by academics.1 Yet although differences of opinion between practitioners and critics over the best use of evidence continue to arise (witness the debate between Sir Roger Norrington’s idea of pure tone in early-twentieth-century orchestral string playing and the measured response of David Hurwitz)2 there is little doubt that this is one area of music in

140   Ben Winters which performers and academics alike can contribute to a shared discourse; indeed, Cook has claimed that the movement, in involving a two-way interaction between the two groups, might ultimately be seen as a liberating rather than a disciplining force.3 With an art-form like film, though—which is, after all, a medium designed for mechanical reproducibility—such issues might be thought to have far less intellectual valency. Unlike a score realized by live musicians, the celluloid on which film text is inscribed is a mechanical copy and it is “performed” using a mechanized projection apparatus. Provided the film stock survives, one might think that performing it is a simple task. Yet, as is well known, there are performative aspects to the mechanical presentation of silentera film—most notably variances in projection speed—that when combined with the liveness of musical accompaniment, ensure that the relationship between text and performance continues to be of importance even in this most mechanically reproducible of media. Moreover, such issues do not entirely disappear even after the point at which projection speed was standardized and live musical accompaniment gave way to synchronized recorded sound. Rick Altman bemoaned as long ago as the early 1990s the effacing of cinema’s heritage as a performing art and stressed the instability of the cinematic event, calling for the notion of “Cinema as Event” to replace that of “Cinema as Text” in approaches to the medium.4 The continued relevance of such questions is often highlighted when we encounter historical cinematic texts in a theatrical environment. This is a chance for those of us who study historical film and who encounter it primarily in home-entertainment formats to experience it anew and to ponder the nature of the cinematic event and its relationship with text—and, specifically, to consider music’s role in the definitions of such a text. In a 2006 article, Carolyn Abbate wrote of one such experience. In watching a showing of The Thief of Baghdad (1939, dir. Ludwig Berger et al.) at Loew’s Grand Cinema in Jersey City, Abbate argued, the presentation circumstances she encountered were of paramount importance to her response. Regarding the film as a “lived aesthetic experience” comparable to opera, she suggested that the sensations that fired her synapses and encouraged her to make connections between the film’s score and the world of opera were contingent on the circumstances of the screening, through a parallel [between The Thief of Baghdad and Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman] perceptible only when the physical conditions of pre-war film exhibition are recreated, when the speakers are positioned behind the screen and the auditorium is acoustically live. Every time one of the movie characters shouted into silence, shouted from the screen into the void of the Loew’s Grand, his or her voice reverberated off the walls for many seconds . . . The space of the Loew’s Grand approximated the acoustics of opera ­theaters in performances of The Flying Dutchman, the shouts of “wachet auf ” reverberate in the hall.5

Her explanation noted the similarities between opera and film as events happening in a performance space—one that, in the case of Wagnerian opera, has the ability to blur boundaries between comic performance tropes and tragic texts, a relationship between

Historical Sound-Film Presentation   141 text and event she described as both contingent and fugitive. For all that Wagner wished his performers might disappear into their roles, then, Abbate noted the presence among spectators of states of mixed absorption and distraction engendered by the circumstances of performance, and posited that this attitude is one of taking delight in understanding how the fiction is created. In extending this state of mind to her experiences of cinema, and emphasizing those performative aspects, that notion of cinema as event that Altman called for in the early 1990s is realized. Abbate’s example suggests, then, that encountering an historical sound film in an historically informed cinematic viewing environment is not simply a larger visual or auditory experience when compared with the home entertainment formats generally available to us, but is one that may transform in fundamental ways the way we hear and respond to a film. Important as Abbate’s observations are, though, little about her experience of the live historical cinematic performance suggests a fundamental challenge to the identity of the text encountered: it was the performative space and technology in which, and through which, the text of The Thief of Baghdad was brought to life that played such a vital role in her response—though one could, of course, usefully debate their relationship with film ontology. Beyond the acoustical properties of individual theatres or the peculiarities of historical sound reproduction technology, though, are there other aspects of sound-film presentation that might affect (more obviously) our conception of the text and thus shape in different ways our cinematic listening experiences? A relatively recent encounter I had suggests one possible answer. In December 2014, I paid a visit to my local multiplex just outside Oxford in order to attend a screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick), a film I had only ever seen on television. I had absorbed the folk wisdom that the movie simply must be experienced on the big screen, and although conscious of the fact that I would not have access to the kinds of historically rich spatial experiences Abbate outlines, I was nonetheless curious to see what a cinematic viewing of this film might entail. I was surprised to find, then, that the most striking part of the screening took place before the notional start of the movie, when the film’s overture was played—an extract from György Ligeti’s 1961 work Atmosphères. Although other 2014 showings of the film—for example at Glasgow’s Film Theatre6—reportedly did so with screen curtains closed and house lights up, at the multiplex screening I attended the overture was played with darkened auditorium lights and a blank, uncovered screen; and my fellow audience members, I was fascinated to discover, sat in rapt silence—though whether in confusion or perhaps just to luxuriate in their comfy seats would be hard to say. It might be possible, however, to suggest that they were listening attentively, that they had adopted a mode of attentiveness appropriate to the beginning of a filmic experience. The same thing occurred with the film’s intermission music, and it triggered a number of questions. What kind of cinematic listening experience was this? What role did lighting and the lack of screen curtains play in encouraging the audience to listen with such apparent concentration, and how unusual was it to find an audience responding in this way? Moreover, as the audience’s apparent quiet attentiveness might suggest that they considered the film to have begun, what might the ontological implications of this extra music be for the

142   Ben Winters identity of the film text? How important were the presentation parameters of this ­particular showing for indicating the boundaries of a film? Although encountering a film in theatrical presentation with these kinds of specially prepared extra music is now very much the exception rather than the rule—which may itself partially explain the audience’s reaction—it was a relatively common part of the cinematic experience during the era of roadshowing movies, when a film might be played twice daily at a single local movie theatre, before going on general release (at which point any extra music provided, such as the overture and intermission music for 2001, would disappear). Undoubtedly, the multiplex outside Oxford at which I saw 2001 was not interested in trying to—or indeed set up to—recreate a more-or-less historically authentic roadshow viewing environment for their screening. My experience in witnessing the behavior of the audience has nonetheless prompted me to think about the kinds of historical listening that may have taken place in the cinema outside the borders of a film’s narrative text, yet within the physical boundaries of the filmstrip itself, and to consider how these might be affected by the circumstances of a film’s presentation. In this chapter, then, I want to draw attention to a number of different possible listening experiences instigated by the presentational practices of historical sound-era cinema, concentrating on the roadshow phenomenon, and to speculate about the functions those listening experiences may have served. Moreover, I want to continue questioning the impact such “performative” presentational practices have on questions of soundfilm ontology and our definition of the film text, and finally to examine the ways in which home entertainment formats may mislead us into making false assumptions about historical cinematic practice.

Film and Presentational Practices Studying the presentational aspects of film is evidently more regularly encountered in silent-film scholarship, where the live-ness and thus the flexibility and non-repeatability of the cinematic listening experience is not only an assumed given but also able to generate some fascinating historical research. Rick Altman’s comprehensive historical work on silent-film sound, for instance, reveals how the same film might be shown in any number of entertainment venues across the United States, each with its own representational codes and sound traditions.7 Likewise, Julie Brown’s work on British silent-era film has revealed important extra-filmic elements of screenings. These included live theatrical prologues, in which film actors or look-a-likes acted out a film scenario prior to its screening, and the dressed theatrical stage or theme-costumed ushers.8 Such extrafilmic elements, alongside the ballyhoo music used to attract patrons that Altman discusses,9 certainly complicate the simple marriage of a universal viewing or listening experience with a particular cinematic text, and reveal the potential for contextual factors to shape the reception of a film (ballyhoo music, after all, could be heard within the theatre too). Yet variance in the presentation of cinematic texts—and, in particular,

Historical Sound-Film Presentation   143 the musical choices that surround them—does not disappear altogether with the widespread adoption in film of synchronized recorded sound and the disappearance of live musicians from the American movie theatre. As late as 1961, an article in International Projectionist noted: In many of the smaller theatres, the projectionist is practically the “director” of the show, arranging its order, selecting short subjects, sometimes editing the newsreel, and choosing appropriate overture and intermission music. This is art. It is also true that the projectionists in some theatres even “dress” the stage in respect to the curtains, the general color scheme, and the effect lighting to provide the most pleasing setting and atmosphere for the film presentations. This, too, is art.10

Overture and intermission music for these general-release showings was usually played on commercial phonograph record. Writing in 1957, Joseph Holt emphasized the importance of this “non-synch[ronous]” music, bemoaned the fact that little if any thought went into the selection of accompanying music, and stressed the choosing of the right kind of overture and intermission music to match the mood of the film as a part of so-called “projectionist showmanship.”11 Other presentation strategies were warranted by specific theatrical environments, such as the outdoors setting of drive-in movies. Drive-in movie presentation in the United States involved a number of variances from indoor movie showings, owing to the excessively large screens and undersized, inferior in-car loudspeakers—but it was recommended that non-synchronous phonograph records were also used as overtures, and coordinated with lighting effects, as a “showtime theme”: A specially-selected overture theme may be placed upon the phonograph turntable 2½ or 3 minutes before show time; and the moment this begins to play, the red or rose footlights should be switched on to provide a spectacular flood of color . . . The overture record . . . should have a character different from that of the preceding interlude music . . . The show-opening music, by being more “theatrical” than a runof-the-mill hit of the day, and by being played at the opening of every performance (and at no other time) “cues” the audience to prepare itself for the immediately ensuing screen entertainment.12

Even live musical elements persisted to some degree after the advent of recorded synchronized sound, though only for special events. Erich Korngold, for instance, provided live theatrical overtures for the Hollywood or New York premieres of some of his films, which he himself conducted.13 These overtures, in presenting significant musical material from the films they preceded, clearly gave that particular premiere the sense of a unique theatrical occasion, and also blurred lines of demarcation between cinematic texts and strategies of presentation. The occasions also warranted special souvenir programs emphasizing the one-off nature of the event. Although the use of non-synch records, live music performance, and the particular circumstances surrounding drive-in presentation are all performative aspects that may

144   Ben Winters have an effect on our conception of film text, one kind of musical practice that ­challenges the perceived boundaries of a film text was recorded as optical or magnetic sound on the film stock itself. This was the extra music provided to accompany the cinematic roadshow—an historical distribution and exhibition strategy that dates back to the silent era but did not come to an end until the early 1970s.14 Such music often disappeared when the film was sent on general release,15 and thus represents a variant cinematic text that could be encountered only for a short period of time and in certain quite specific locations. Moreover, in most often lacking any kind of screen visuals, the roadshow overture also raises intriguing ontological questions about its relationship with its host film.

Music and the Roadshow Roadshowing a movie in the United Sates has its origins in the touring practices of stage theatre, and was widely practiced in the silent era to showcase prestige pictures that were longer than regular features, and often imported from Europe. Its exhibition strategies included reserved bookable seating at specific performance times (usually twice a day), at least one intermission, and a concomitant higher ticket price. Roadshow runs at particular metropolitan venues could continue for weeks, months, or even years before a film was released to other movie theatres and shown in the more usual continuous performance manner at a lower price.16 As Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale argue, by the early sound era the meaning of the term was certainly changing, since no touring orchestra, stage manager or crew were needed, but roadshowing a movie in the 1930s nonetheless preserved many of the features of its silent-era predecessor. Sometimes also known as a “hard ticket” or “reserved seat” showing, a roadshow film from the sound era (as defined by Kim R. Holston) retained the idea of an initial theatrical release in which a single theatre in an urban area would have exclusive rights to show the film twice daily in separate performances that were both more expensive than regular features and needed to be reserved in advance.17 Moreover, such roadshow films—especially in later years— were usually of greater length than the general release version and thus utilized an intermission; accompanying the higher than normal ticket prices, they also often had lavishly illustrated programs in the best theatrical tradition that could be purchased from the lobby. The theatrical trappings associated with this exhibition strategy also extended to the treatment of music and meant that many roadshow prints featured an orchestral overture. Along with any intermission, entr’acte, and exit music, this overture was provided on the film stock itself as optical or magnetic sound, to be listened to rather than watched. Very occasionally, though, a filmed overture might be provided. This appears to have been the case with How to Marry a Millionaire (1953, dir. Jean Negulesco)—which, as Nathan Platte reveals, opened with a filmed performance by 20th Century-Fox’s studio orchestra, conducted by its music director, Alfred Newman. After playing a composition

Historical Sound-Film Presentation   145 written for the film Street Scene (1931, dir. King Vidor), Newman “turns to face the camera, shrugs a bow, and strikes up the next selection: the opening credits music for the main feature.”18 Similarly, Platte has revealed that the recorded audio overture provided for roadshow prints of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935, dir. Max Reinhardt/ William Dieterle) was initially planned as a recorded film of composer Erich Korngold conducting the Warner Bros. orchestra.19 More usually, however, such music was provided purely as optical or magnetic sound to be played against a blank screen covered up by heavy curtains with the projection apparatus closed: the sound was often adjusted to allow the output of screen speakers to be heard through the thick curtain material. As distribution and exhibition practices continued to change, the meaning of roadshowing likewise altered still further. Yet as studios sought the most profitable methods of selling their product while remaining simultaneously conflicted by the desire to promote their films as artistic achievements, this element of extra music—which, in some senses, replaced the live musical elements of theatrical and silent-film practice20—appears to have continued, well into the 1960s and beyond. Defining the functions and identity of this music is, however, problematic. It is paratextual (in Gérard Genette’s terminology)21 in the sense that it can be regarded as separate from, yet surrounding, the narrative text, but—as with many paratextual elements throughout film history, such as the movie trailer—its thematic musical content ensures it is often closely linked to that narrative. It is also profoundly filmic, in that the music is inscribed on the film strip itself as optical or magnetic sound, yet it is not normally designed to be accompanied by filmed images. By exploring the instructions issued to film projectionists, along with the content of this music, it is possible, however, to not only speculate about questions of ontology but also to make some assertions about the music’s possible functions (intended or otherwise).

Roadshow Music Functions On a practical level, entr’acte music—played after the end of an intermission—could be used as an indication to an audience that a film was set to resume. In the case of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 biblical epic The Ten Commandments, for instance, projectionists were advised in respect of the four minutes and forty seconds of optical music provided for this purpose that “it has been found that people return from the lobby when the . . . music is heard. It is suggested that this music be started approximately 3 minutes before the time established for the start of Part II of the picture.”22 The projectionist’s notes state that the music was to be played through the screen speaker with the scrim (the curtain) and the projection douser closed, thus preventing any projector light from reaching the screen—as was also the case with the film’s overture and its exit music. The filmmakers, it seems, did not expect such music to be actively listened to, only registered and interpreted in the same way as an interval bell—although undoubtedly the ending would be heard if it were successful in attracting patrons back from the lobby. Other

146   Ben Winters functions for such music were also possible, though. In the case of Cinerama, the vast three-strip widescreen technology devised by Fred Waller, extra music could be used to demonstrate the equally impressive fully directional stereo sound. The aural prelude to the 2nd act of This Is Cinerama (1952, dir. Merian C. Cooper et al.)—the documentary designed to showcase the technology—played orchestral sounds aurally separated and issuing from speakers placed all around the auditorium, as Lowell Thomas’s narration explained the soundtrack’s power. In that sense it was just as important as the visual display in the rest of the film. The screen curtains, however, remained firmly closed.23 One senses, too, that the short film that preceded How to Marry a Millionaire, which was presented in CinemaScope, was designed to showcase the format’s widescreen technology and, in particular, its four-channel magnetic stereo sound, which Hall and Neale suggest was CinemaScope’s most innovatory aspect.24 Nonetheless, music designed to showcase technological advance reminds us of the proliferation of wide-screen technologies in the 1950s and the difficulties many cash-strapped theatres had adapting to the new technology. As a result, viewers would have experienced a variety of sound technologies even with the same movie. Indeed, after May 1954, 20th Century-Fox agreed to release all CinemaScope films in three different sound formats: four-track magnetic, four-track optical, or one-track optical.25 Aside from its secondary functions of calling an audience back from the lobby or showcasing new sound technologies, the chief role of this extra music was undoubtedly to help transition viewers in and out of the world of the film, and to inculcate the proper attentional attitude towards the aesthetic experience—both of which were added value functions appropriate to the roadshow’s higher cultural status. An overture that successfully prepared the film that followed frequently did so with the help of controlled theatre lighting and well-timed use of the curtain. For example, MGM’s original instructions for showing 2001: A Space Odyssey asked projectionists to play the overture with curtains closed and house lights fully on, but to lower the lights just before the end.26 Similarly, David O. Selznick’s nine-page set of instructions that accompanied Gone With the Wind some three decades earlier specified in respect of the beginning of the picture: Reel 1 of Gone With the Wind begins with a 2 minute and 31 second musical Overture preceding the Main Title. During the last 30 seconds of this Overture, it is urged that the house lights be gradually dimmed so that all the lights in the auditorium . . . will be fully out by the end of this Overture. Between the Overture and the Main Title there is a 7-second drum roll before the music of the picture begins. This is designed as your cue for opening the curtains. They should be fully open before the Main Title music commences, so that the first part of the long-awaited title of the film comes on the full and unobscured screen. . . . The opening bars of the musical accompaniment consist of ringing bells. The first bell is your cue to open the dowser to achieve the full effect of the picture fade-in.27

Clearly, Selznick viewed the overture and theatrical lighting as ways in which to transition the audience into an ideal viewing attitude—the film’s title is “long-awaited”

Historical Sound-Film Presentation   147 because it has been prepared and signaled by the changing environment. The film’s intermission—and its shift in required listening attention—is likewise indicated by a combination of textual elements with presentational ones. Max Steiner’s conclusive statement of the Tara theme is heard as the camera dollies back from a silhouetted Scarlett O’ Hara. A silent title card reading “Intermission” would then have appeared, running for ten feet, over which the curtains were to be closed—with the house lights gradually coming up only after the curtains were fully drawn. The projection douser would then be closed. This was followed by thirty seconds of silent black leader, allowing an audience the space to reflect on the dramatic close to part one of the picture before the four minutes of appropriately “Southern” intermission music started.28 In other words, the intermission music is isolated from the listening experience of the narrative despite its apparent links with the film’s subject matter. Part two of the film was preceded by a shorter overture (this one, a minute and thirty-one seconds) and exhibitors were encouraged to follow the same procedures with the lighting and use of the curtain as with the opening: once again, there was a seven-second drum roll to cover the opening of the curtains. Selznick notes in emphasized italics in these projectionist notes that “The Overtures to the two acts of the film have been carefully designed to establish a mood for the enjoyment of the film, and the cooperation of house managers is earnestly sought to this end.”29 Whether or not house managers were fully cooperative in this regard, it seems that the film was designed with the effects of these presentational strategies in mind. Other films’ instructions suggest similar close control of lighting and curtain use in conjunction with the provided extra music. For the 1961 historical epic El Cid (dir. Anthony Mann) three minutes and twenty-five seconds of overture by Miklós Rósza were provided. Projectionists were asked to dim the lights over the last minute, and to calculate the time it took to open their curtains so that the opening title text “Samuel Bronston Presents” appeared on screen with the curtain fully open.30 Occasionally, though, more unusual practices were warranted. The instructions for West Side Story (1961, dir. Robert Wise) were particularly specific owing to the special design that had been provided for the overture. This was a colored graphic by Saul Bass that changed tint from red to blue and eventually morphed into the opening shot of the film: an aerial view of Manhattan. The curtains were to be opened on the first of three whistles so that the design was visible by the start of the overture, and projectionists were warned that any house lights directed at the screen needed to be off to avoid washing out the image. They were informed that it was “of vital importance that the first 4 1/2 minutes of this design be projected with the house lights lowered by only 25%.” At this point the red color tint gave way to blue, and the house lights were to be dimmed completely. “If the house lights are dimmed all the way at the beginning,” the notes go on to say, “the audience will expect the actual picture to start much sooner than it does. If the opening design is played with the house lights well up the audience will accept the music for what it is—the overture.”31 These practices, then, suggest that directors and producers recognized the value of coordinating the presentational aspects of film with the provided extra music to achieve

148   Ben Winters a smooth transition between various viewing and listening environments. But perhaps what these instructions reveal is the difficulty of defining boundaries in the first place between the filmic and extra-filmic. At what point does the film begin, we might ask? In the case of an overture, film may be running through the projector yet with the curtains closed and house lights fully up. Similarly, the intermission of Gone with the Wind involved film running through the projection apparatus—although the douser and curtains would be closed, and few patrons may be in their seats. Only if the projectionist and theatre manager thought the audience required longer than seven minutes of intermission (the combined time of the intermission music and the overture to part two) would film stop running through the projector: the projectionist would simply delay starting the next reel of film. The fact that music was inscribed on the filmstrip without an accompanying picture nonetheless threatens to overturn comfortable assumptions we may make about the boundaries of a film text in theatrical experience, particularly as such music would disappear once the film went on general release. It also implies that  the point at which viewers might be expected to start consciously attending to music is an ever shifting one. Sometimes—as Bruno David Ussher reveals—the effect of the overture on the beginning of aural attention was rather spoiled by exhibitors. Talking of Alfred Newman’s music for The Hurricane (1937, dir. John Ford) Ussher remarks: “the long and impressive overture seems rather wasted, being played before a closed curtain. This is all the more the case for the reason that it was followed by a newsreel, so that whatever atmosphere it engendered in preparation for the film, was dissipated.”32 Ussher’s comments, in the first instance, hint at a frustration with the audience’s listening attention to music he obviously rates (a frequent issue on which he commented in various contexts). Yet one senses that it is the separation of the overture from its at­tend­ant film that rankled with him most: the carelessness of a projectionist or theatre manager had disturbed a carefully considered ontological relationship. The thematic content of this extra music tends not be arbitrary either, and thus also suggests a closer correspondence with the film text than might be assumed from its lack of attendant visuals. Like the “Southern” intermission music for Gone with the Wind, Alfred Newman’s Entr’acte music for MGM’s How the West was Won (1962, dir. John Ford et al.) featured appropriate American songs dating from 1840–1865, such as “Home in the Meadow” “I’m Bound for the Promised Land” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”33 In the case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the overture, arranged like the rest of the score by Erich Korngold,34 consists of a Mendelssohn medley. Starting with a heavily edited version of the 1826 Midsummer Night’s Dream concert overture, it is followed by extracts from the nocturne, intermezzo, scherzo, and wedding march from the composer’s incidental music, all of which re-appear in the film as part of the Korngoldarranged score. Following the film’s overture, the opening credits then reprise a differently edited version of the Mendelssohn concert overture. Having already potentially heard the opening woodwind chords of the title sequence in a closed-curtain overture, though, a roadshow audience would no doubt see and hear the start of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a subtly different way from one attending a later general release

Historical Sound-Film Presentation   149 showing. The repetition in the opening title music of elements already heard in the film’s closed-curtain overture might seem to create a sense of structural resolution by returning to the material of the concert overture: having finished in C major with the wedding march, the film returns to E major for the start of the title sequence. Although, in reprising an edited version of the concert overture’s sonata exposition, this title music enacts its own move to B major before returning to E major in a kind of truncated sonata form, taken as a whole the pair of musical items (closed-curtain overture followed by main title) creates a satisfying arch structure that moves from E major via A major, D minor, and C major back to E major (as the main titles begin) to coincide with the return of the concert overture material. As such, the title sequence works tonally on its own and as part of a larger tonal and thematic structure. For a general release audience, then, the main titles present a gesture of musical beginning that a roadshow audience might conceivably have heard as one of return. The undoubted familiarity and pre-existing status of Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream may have triggered other extra-textual associations for a 1930s roadshow audience beyond those short-term structural reminiscences. Other examples of extra music, however, were more obviously tied to their parent film: the content of Dimitri Tiomkin’s entr’acte music for The Alamo (1960, dir. John Wayne), for example, is particularly closely linked with the narrative. A choir retell the legend for an audience returning after the intermission, and in their final lines expectantly set the scene for the second half of the film: “Every musket is ready, every hand holds a sword, just a small band of soldiers standing tall in the eyes of the Lord.” Some lines of text even reference the act of listening itself, an irony when heard issued from a screen speaker covered by a heavy curtain: “You can hear a ghostly bugle as the men go marching by. You can hear them as they answer to that roll call in the sky.” Needless to say, Tiomkin’s music provides the ghostly bugle, and it also creates simple spatialization effects. By increasing and decreasing the volume of the snare drum, Tiomkin simply but effectively conjures images of marching soldiers passing by in ways that have been exploited in narrative concert music by composers including Charles Ives or that have been employed in descriptive band music repertory,35 while attentive cinemagoers might have stared at closed curtains, imagined the scene, and anticipated the restart of the movie. Voices also feature in Ernest Gold’s comedic intermission music for It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963, dir. Stanley Kramer) though here the effect is to emphasize the presentational nature of the film-going experience. Rather than the potentially more immersive nature of The Alamo’s entr’acte music, Gold uses the opportunity to sneak in another gag that plays deliberately on the boundaries between the narrative and the real world. Viewers are told: “Now step into the lobby for whatever is your hobby: a drink, a smoke, or repeat some joke from the Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World.” It is a point where those negotiated states of musical listening that Abbate explores in connection with opera are rendered plain: where an audience is encouraged to reflect on their position as spectators watching a created fiction, instead of being caught up in its presentation.

150   Ben Winters

Historically Informed Movie Presentation To return, then, to my 2014 viewing of 2001. As with many of the films to which I have referred, the lowered lighting probably provided the main impetus for the audience to (apparently) listen with such concentrated attention, or at least to refrain from talking— though the continued blank screen in the absence of a curtain to obscure it may have confused or worried some. Then again, as an audience that may have been predominantly composed of film cognoscenti, they may even have been familiar with the content of the overture, which features in home entertainment versions of 2001.36 Was listening quietly to this music a behavior that a roadshow audience of 1968 might have exhibited? It is difficult question to answer given the lack of available evidence, though I would imagine not; undoubtedly, they would have been more used to encountering such extra music in a way that an audience of 2014 might not (unless they were regular attenders of historical screenings or had access to the rare instances of contemporary roadshow presentation). But, in any case, the multiplex on the outskirts of Oxford at which I watched the film could not generate the listening environment of a typical movie theatre of 1968, both acoustically and in terms of comfort. I would not be foolish enough to claim that seeing and hearing 2001 on the big screen, and noting the reactions of audience members, gave me any real insight into an actual historical experience. What it did, however, was to remind me that not only silent film but also sound-era cinema may be subject to ­presentational strategies that subtly change the nature of the listening experience, and that the apparent stability of a film text does not necessarily ensure stability in reception conditions—even in a movie theatre. Importantly, roadshow versions of films have been appearing increasingly in home entertainment formats since the 1980s, and thus have the ability to further blur an audience’s expectations about the stability of a film text. It appears this practice, which is a convenient way of creating a new product, is justified primarily by the restoration of the extra scenes often appearing in such edits and which were cut when a film was put on general release; but these laser discs, DVDs and latterly BluRays have sometimes also included any existing overture, intermission, entr’acte, or exit music—though not always without controversy or confusion. The tinting and dissolves in the special visual design for West Side Story’s overture, for instance, generated online debate when the film was released on Blu-Ray in November 2011, in part because it supposedly represented a “corrected” version of the overture recreated for the DVD release, yet was still wrong.37 Other films must find alternative ways of presenting the music with no set visuals to accompany it: a DVD release of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, includes a still title card entitled “Overture”;38 whereas a DVD of Lawrence of Arabia plays its overture over a blank screen, albeit with an accompanying warning to allay fears of faulty discs:

Historical Sound-Film Presentation   151 Director David Lean intended that the score play without any visual images on screen during the Overture, Entr’acte and Exit Music. Therefore, at the introduction of the movie, the introduction of Part 2 (Entr’acte) and the end of the feature you will only hear music but not see any visual images.39

Undoubtedly, it would be straightforward enough in such cases for producers to provide some filmed curtains that would open on cue. Doing so would certainly be more historically appropriate than presenting a title card or a blank screen. In the case of a Gone with the Wind DVD,40 which fades the picture in for the start of part two at the wrong point, it would also help to articulate this opening. But does it make sense to fix in a home-entertainment text something I have revealed to be a performative aspect of film presentation? Home-entertainment encounters with film certainly have the potential to mislead in this respect. Michael Long, for instance, comments with great insight on the overtures for both Gone with the Wind and 2001, paying attention to their hermeneutic value without relegating them to the status of added extras; however, he talks anachronistically of visual imagery he assumes would have been seen on the cinematic screen, yet was actually created for subsequent home-entertainment formats. Of Gone with the Wind, he states: [Gone with the Wind] begins with a preparatory, anticipatory formal gesture: a two-and-a-half minute overture. The screen presents a motionless snapshot of a single mature tree of many branches silhouetted against a semi-dark sky . . . a space-time marker . . . that director Victor Fleming revisits throughout the film . . . We need only recall the fixed image of the grand, dark, lonesome tree that had been on screen during the film’s overture to understand the associative connection that inspired Steiner’s choice of Handel’s shade tree [in “Ombra mai fu” from Serse] as a model.41

Long proceeds to ask questions about moviegoers of the 1930s, and their understanding of these connections, without acknowledging that the static imagery of the tree was not present historically: 1930s viewers would simply have seen closed curtains (indeed, Selznick’s instructions state that “The film running past the picture aperture during the Overture and the drum roll is black leader”).42 Moviegoers in the 1930s would therefore not have had access to quite the same significatory contexts provided by the tree im­agery as those watching the film in later home entertainment formats. Similarly, of the 2001 overture, Long notes: Kubrick’s film also begins with an overture and a screen in stasis, the featured typeface only marginally different from Fleming’s 1939 model (Kubrick opted for an appropriately chunkier three-dimensional metallic). Its dimensional aspects with respect to the frame are virtually identical, as is the equal-sized all-capital type (i.e. OVERTURE, not Overture or Overture). Just as [Max] Kozloff ’s [1970] observations suggested, the frame’s corporeality—that is, an object within the real

152   Ben Winters architectural space of the venue—has been mitigated by the black background behind the text. In a darkened theater this creates the effect of an “infinity edge.”43

Again, unfortunately, he is confusing a later home-entertainment text—in which the word “OVERTURE” is displayed to identify the function of this music for potentially confused contemporary viewers—with an historical cinematic experience where, as with Gone with the Wind, the screen curtains would have been closed. The historical cinematic event, then, is not simply a larger visual or auditory ­experience—or, if using historic locations and equipment, one marked by radically different acoustic properties that in our post-Dolby world may be marked as sub-standard—but one in which the boundaries of a film text may also be questioned.44 These boundaries are often simply not apparent from the home entertainment format in which most of us now tend to view and study older film, or indeed from contemporary cinematic presentational practices in multiplexes that no longer feature screen curtains. The extra music required by the roadshowing practices of the sound era, and the presentational strategies associated with it, ensures that the research questions asked by scholars of silent film about performativity remain pertinent to film presentation for much of the twentieth century. Indeed, Long’s understandable confusion is evidence that the answers to such questions were still unclear as relatively recently as 2008. With tantalizing evidence of variances emerging all the time through fan culture,45 these questions might even prompt a new academic sub-discipline, an historically informed movie presentation practice that seeks to recreate the experience of specific versions of movie texts utilizing period technology in appropriate settings and fully recognizes cinema as an “Event” as well as a “Text.” Such a practice is, of course, already undertaken to some degree with the reconstructions of silent-film texts, but if extended to sound film it would need to be approached with not only the caveats and lessons learned from music’s own historically informed performance practice but also an understanding of the textual variances that presentation strategies like roadshowing introduce.

Notes 1. Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 2. David Hurwitz, “ ‘So klingt Wien’: Conductors, Orchestras, and Vibrato in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Music & Letters 93, no. 1 (2012): 29–60. 3. Cook, Beyond the Score, 28. 4. Rick Altman, “General Introduction: Cinema as Event,” in Sound Theory/Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992): 1–14. 5. Carolyn Abbate, “Wagner, Cinema, and Redemptive Glee,” The Opera Quarterly 21, no. 4 (2006): 597–611: 608–9. 6. http://www.glasgowfilm.org/theatre/whats_on/6712_2001_a_space_odyssey (accessed June 10, 2015). The building was first opened in 1939. 7. Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 20.

Historical Sound-Film Presentation   153 8. Julie Brown, “Framing the Atmospheric Film Prologue in Britain, 1919–1926,” in The Sounds of The Silents in Britain, ed. Julie Brown and Annette Davison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 200–21. 9. Altman, Silent Film Sound, 126–31. 10. “Monthly Chat: Is Projection an ‘Art’?,” International Projectionist 36, no. 1 (1961): 3, 14: 14. 11. Joseph Holt, “Using Non-Synchronous Music as Good Showmanship,” International Projectionist 32, no. 12 (1957): 12, 38: 12. 12. “Why Should Drive-in Projection be Below Standard?,” International Projectionist 36, no. 6 (1961): 5–6, 17–18: 18. 13. Korngold provided a live overture for Juarez to be played for the world premiere at the Warner Bros. Beverly Hills Theatre on April 25, 1939. Examination of the full score at Warner Bros. Archives shows that relevant cues (6A, 9E, parts of 10D, and Trailer Part 1) have been removed with a note indicating “use for overture.” Likewise, Korngold also prepared live overtures for the premieres of The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex on September 27, 1939 and The Constant Nymph in July 1943. The Constant Nymph overture, rather than being assembled after the scoring process, was even sketched out in Korngold’s hand in short score and is preserved in the Erich Wolfgang Korngold Collection (Box 4 Folder 6) at the Library of Congress. 14. The concept of the roadshow has been occasionally revived (in limited form), mostly recently by Quentin Tarantino, who released The Hateful Eight (2015) in a limited roadshow format. It had an overture by the score’s composer, Ennio Morricone, extra footage, and an intermission. Such material disappeared when the film went on general release. See http://variety.com/2015/film/in-contention/quentin-tarantino-hateful-eight-roadshowmultiplex-70mm-1201615357/ (accessed August 7, 2020). 15. Or so-called grind showings. There are exceptions, however. For instance, Cecil B. DeMille suggested that in general release theatre presentation, The Ten Commandments deserved the same showmanship and technical care as in roadshow engagements. Therefore, it was suggested that since the overture was not included in the print, the Dot sound track album be played. See http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/demillegenlrelease1.htm (accessed August 7, 2020). 16. Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale, Epics, Spectacle and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 3–4. 17. Kim R. Holsten, Movie Roadshows: A History and Filmography of Reserved-Seat Limited Showings, 1911–1973 (Jefferson: McFarland, 2013). 18. Nathan Platte, “Dream Analysis: Korngold, Mendelssohn, and Musical Adaptations in Warner Bros.’ A Mdisummer Night’s Dream (1935),” 19th-Century Music 34, no. 3 (2011): 211–36: 231. 19. Ibid., 226. 20. Indeed, in the case of Juarez Brendan Carroll claims that the live overture Korngold performed for the New York premiere in April 1939 was recorded the following month and added to roadshow prints of the film. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xtp1f-bLPk (accessed August 7, 2020). 21. Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 22. http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/demille2.htm (accessed August 7, 2020). A similar instruction exists in the projectionist notes for It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, where 9 minutes and 58 seconds at the beginning of reel 6 consisted of “POLICE

154   Ben Winters CALLS and RE-ENTRY MUSIC” which “should be piped out to lobby and rest-rooms as well as in the theatre.” See http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/mad_world_ presentation.htm (accessed August 7, 2020). 23. See Hall and Neale, Epics, Spectacle and Blockbusters, 142. 24. Ibid., 148. 25. Peter Lev, Transforming the Screen, 1950–1959 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 119. 26. http://www.in70mm.com/news/2014/2001_presentation/index.htm (accessed August 7, 2020). 27. http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/road-gwtw3.htm (accessed August 7, 2020). 28. Ibid. 29. http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/road-gwtw4.htm (accessed August 7, 2020). 30. http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/elcidcues1.htm (accessed August 7, 2020). 31. http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/wss_presentation.htm (accessed August 7, 2020). 32. “Music in Current Films” review for the Hollywood Spectator dated April 12, 1937 and quoted in Bruno David Ussher, Music in the Films 1937–1941, ed. G.  D.  Hamann (Hollywood: Filming Today Press, 2011), 19. 33. Holston, Movie Roadshows, 156. 34. Nathan Platte indicates that Korngold himself prepared the overture. See Platte, “Dream Analysis,” 226, n55. 35. Rick Altman has recently explored the descriptive band repertory and its resonances with music for early cinema. See “The Early Cinema Soundscape” in The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound, ed. Miguel Mera, Ron Sadoff, and Ben Winters (New York: Routledge, 2017). 36. The Blu-Ray version included in the Stanley Kubrick: Visionary Filmmaker Collection contains no text whatsoever, merely a blank screen. 37. http://www.highdefdigest.com/blog/west-side-story-bluray-error/ (accessed August 7, 2020). 38. DVD Publisher number 65912 (Released 2007). 39. DVD Publisher number CDR 10055CE (Released 2000). 40. DVD Publisher number 65009 (Released 2000). 41. Michael Long, Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 68–69. 42. http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/road-gwtw3.htm (accessed August 7, 2020). 43. Long, Beautiful Monsters, 71. 44. Not to mention, of course, the studio-era practice of recutting, redubbing, and even reshooting ostensibly the same film for different overseas markets. See, for example, Ginette Vincendeau, “Hollywood Babel: The Coming of Sound and the Multiple Language Version,” in The Classical Hollywood Reader, ed. Steve Neale (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012). 45. One particularly interesting example was posted to YouTube in September 2015: an (illegal) in-theatre sound recording that claimed to be taken from a 1980 70mm showing of The Empire Strikes Back (dir. Irving Kershner) prior to the addition in the final scene of certain lines of expository dialogue, and the re-editing of sound and dialogue in the

Historical Sound-Film Presentation   155 35mm print. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmbl8tLOfFE (accessed August 7, 2020). Given the close Lucasfilm control of, and constant tinkering with, the Star Wars films to the extent that earlier versions are almost aggressively suppressed, this is a useful reminder that even back in 1980, variant versions could be found. In being an intheatre audio recording, it also recorded the reactions of the audience, which constitute valuable historical evidence of reception.

Select Bibliography Abbate, Carolyn. “Wagner, Cinema, and Redemptive Glee.” The Opera Quarterly 21, no. 4 (2006): 597–611. Altman, Rick, ed. Sound Theory/Sound Practice. New York: Routledge, 1992. Altman, Rick. Silent Film Sound. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Brown, Julie. “Framing the Atmospheric Film Prologue in Britain, 1919–1926.” In The Sounds of the Silents in Britain, ed. Julie Brown and Annette Davison, 200–21. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Cook, Nicholas. Beyond the Score: Music as Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Hall, Sheldon, and Steve Neale. Epics, Spectacle and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010. Holsten, Kim  R. Movie Roadshows: A History and Filmography of Reserved-Seat Limited Showings, 1911–1973. Jefferson: McFarland, 2013. Long, Michael. Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

Chapter 7

Tastefu l N et wor ks of At ten tion Language, Listening, Meaning, and Art House Exhibition Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece

To listen in the movie theatre is to invite contemplation, focus, and civil behavior. Or to listen is to attend to the array of noises that make up the theatre’s ambient texture: shuffling, coughing, whispering, talking, and the rustle of bodies shifting from side to side. Yet despite sound’s usefulness for either discipline or disruption, spectatorship’s behavioral demands typically center vision as the locus of pedagogy. But film, the art that in its early iteration Jean Epstein described as “unisensual” or “cyclopean,” and its environmental companion, exhibition, have borne a particularly fraught relationship with listening.1 From one point of view, the development of synchronized sound ruptured vision’s primacy in silent film; alternatively, it signified a new, post-movie-palace form of spectatorship where cinephilic viewers sit silently in rapt attention, cowed by the flood of image and sound filling the auditorium.2 One only must consider the root word audito—“to hear”—to recognize that the cinema auditorium owes a debt to listening. Borrowing from the stage, the movie theatre has always, if cautiously, betrayed its familial commitment to sound, despite the continuous changes in quality and form of those sounds. If filmic sound has often been a forgotten stepchild to vision, then it has also—quietly—shaped the place and experience where vision occurs. In the auditorium, hearing is seeing’s subtly acknowledged compatriot. Many moments in the history of American exhibition illuminate the entanglement of hearing and discipline. But few point as clearly at the intertwining of listening, class, architecture, language, taste, and technology—all of which culminate in a particular dispositif of institutional indoctrination via sensory discipline—as the art house theatre and its promise of aspirational uplift for the price of good audience behavior.3 Art house exhibition and cinephilia have shared a mutually constitutive relationship for decades.

Tasteful Networks of Attention   157 Typically defined as an overwhelming love for—even obsession with—cinema, the term cinephilia has seen multiple iterations since its appearance in postwar France. As Dale Hudson and Patricia Zimmerman explain, however, in the twenty-first century ­cinephilia’s definition has stabilized into a “nostalgia for the audiovisual pleasures of flickering celluloid in a darkened cinematheque.”4 Hudson and Zimmerman note the term’s fluctuation between the popular and the academic as well as its generally agreed moments of importance: the 1920s ciné-clubs in the United States, the 1950s and its attendant zeal for filmic possibilities among French literati, and the post-1968 era of apparatus and screen theory. Yet the term has persistently connoted some possibilities of excess past the rigors of the academy, the proscriptions of capital, and taste’s unsavory connections to class. American cinephilia’s material histories, however, tell another, also integral part of the story. There, attention, pedagogy, and discipline were embedded in the very auditory and visual structures in which audiences typically experienced film: the movie theatre. At mid-century, from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, the second wave of ­cinephilia swept from France through the United States, borne on a flood of new European imports and art film. In response, art house theatres sprang up across the country, especially in urban environments. Unlike the “little theaters” and ciné-clubs of the 1920s, the new art house cinema of the 1950s and early 1960s featured a luxurious and sophisticated setting that often included rotating art galleries, free coffee in lounges, and pristine interior design.5 Alongside its fashionable look, the art house theatre was typically characterized by exceptional projection and sound, with features such as state-of-the-art screens, projectors kitted out for centering films with differing dimensions, stereophonic sound such as Simplex and RCA with multiple speakers, and convex ceilings for proper acoustical clarity. For clientele expecting an experience of cinematic excellence, the art house offered all of the trappings. But the art house was not only meant to be a lovely experience of absorption and sophistication. It also highlighted both the disciplinary aspects of hearing in exhibition and the troublesome qualities an engaged ear might inspire. Foreign language imports, in particular, exemplified the ways in which exhibition both sought to maintain a silent spectator and grappled with the impossibility of fully creating one; specifically in the debate around subtitles versus dubbing, sound proved to be a site of ambivalence between semiotic meaning and a lack thereof. The shuffling of bodies remained a clear bugaboo, and its solutions also relatively clear, from the provision of totally comfortable seats to generous spacing between them.6 But the question of what kind of cinematic sound was most valuable—language immediately apprehended by English-speaking ears, or a morass of unfamiliar vocabulary whose meaning depended upon the legibility of projected printed language—was a source of anxiety and debate for exhibitors eager both to attract spectators and to wield the power of silence to integrate them into proper civic behavior. The dream of the art house, then, was one of a calibrated ear for calibrated taste. And taste and its attendant pleasures—recognized sophistication, the envy of others, and upward economic mobility for an expanding American middle class— was an essential component of art house listening’s dispositif. Audiophilic cinephilia is

158   Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece therefore not only a slip into a movie dream, but an indication of the ideology that undergirds tasteful appreciation. In the American mid-century, such an ideology of tastes was built upon distinction, or a separation of the sophisticated from the less so.7 As such, an ideology of cinephilic taste was, at its most fundamental, one of individualism and of choice: of what movie to see, of what kinds of sounds to hear, of what meaning to retain access to, and of what decision-making markers to affix to one’s public persona. To listen, and to listen well, is to submit willingly to a filmic network of sensory attention, to civil, social, and industrial governance, and to the desirable segmentation of self from others.

Foucault and the Structure of Listening The theatre’s connections to ideology and to governance repeatedly have assigned primacy to vision; Western ocularcentrism, per Martin Jay, has insisted on modes of seeing as the means by which both enlightenment and civic behavioral structures have found refuge.8 Jean-Louis Baudry’s apparatus famously relies upon the triangulation between camera, projector, and screen—not speaker.9 And both Baudry’s (and others’) theories of the apparatus and Michel Foucault’s work on sensory configurations and the dispositif have proposed complementary ways to determine how discipline’s debts to vision find expression in the movies. But while both the apparatus and the dispositif seem centered entirely on vision, their function as tools of spectatorial governance depend in large part on a behavioral practice of listening. Whereas the eye marks the site of discipline’s first encounter, the ear enacts both a promise of resistance and the instruments of subjugation. While Foucault is primarily considered a historian of ocularcentrism, Lauri Siiasiäinen has pointed to the central role that auditory perception plays in his approach—one that, Siiasiäinen insists, is often multi- or pluri-sensual.10 One of sound’s most important components for Foucault is its usefulness for and disruption of the tools of governance. Sound can be both chaos and signifying force. In Madness and Civilization, Foucault distinguishes between background noise, which anticipates but is not signifying language, and sound that makes lingual and semiotic meaning.11 Here, then, is the division from which reason and madness come into being—meaning and lack of meaning.12 In noise, madness and reason are not yet separate; indeed, the root of language is noise, a noise prior to the stultifying structures of grammar and word. While, according to Foucault, one should “prick up one’s ears” to the mumblings of the world before the distinction between sense and madness, toward the primary state of madness, we have as yet been unable to do so, trapped as we are by a world where directed perception has already captured and imprisoned madness. Noise, therefore, is indicative of a state where such divisions have not yet been made—a state where discipline has not yet fully taken hold, and where the empirical regime has not fully cohered.

Tasteful Networks of Attention   159 Sound, then, can function as a tool of disciplinary power, as in the panopticon, which Jeremy Bentham had originally designed with “speaking-tubes” for guards to hear the whispers of prisoners.13 Yet it can also function as a site of disruption, particularly in terms of masses, swarms, multitudes, and crowds, which participate in howling, chattering, chanson, merging, mingling, and confusion: a maelstrom of unfettered noise that antagonizes and threatens the imbricated modes of disciplinary power.14 What noise promises—belligerently—is a dissolution of the coherent persona so essential to a society based on civil governance. In the chaos of sound, individual subjects trade and share what should remain discrete and bordered. As a result, noise-abatement is not only a tool of disciplinary power, but a sign of the utopian state of governance, purified.15 The crowd is therefore manageable, understood not as a whirling mass of non-individuation, but as an orderly array of separate beings. As in the panopticon, where diffuse groups are divided into fixed coordinates in space, disciplinary power seeks to regulate via empirical systems. The disruptive crowd is thereby fixed in place in order to maintain a controllable and docile arrangement of beings. Where noise dismantles a wieldy form of individuality, signifying sound restores it for the purposes of power. For Foucault, hearing serves an additional disciplinary function in the church with Cassian’s instructions for Christians in the fifth century. In Cassian’s directives, novices appearing at the convent must learn to conquer their wills via a “complete, exhaustive, and permanent regime of obedience.”16 One aspect of this regime was the immediate revelation of shameful thoughts to a novitiate’s elder; in effect, the line between novitiate and elder must be kept open by a continual and uninterrupted pathway of listening, not dissimilar to the panopticon’s “speaking-tubes” and their constant unidirectional guideline from prisoner to guard. In the case of the novitiate, the explication of impure thought was meant to spur self-reflection, and thereby instate an internalized voice of authority that supersedes the brain’s chatter. Obedience, examination, and confession thus formulate a dispositif in Christian rule; or, “a triangle: listening to the other, looking at oneself, speaking to the other about oneself.”17 In the Christian tradition, then, sound and listening entangle with an embedded self-surveillance: to listen, to look, and to speak under the will of another, such that truth emerges from deep within oneself and formulates a fundamental aspect of obedience. Far as it may be from fifth century convents, American exhibition’s movement from silent to synchronized sound cinema reflects Foucault’s description of discipline’s tamping down of noise. At the height of silent film projection from about the mid-1910s until the late 1920s, theatres may have shown movies without synchronized dialogue and ambient recorded sound, yet they were hardly quiet spaces. Organs, narration, sound effects, and the constant buzz of the audience emanated throughout the auditorium; film viewing in the silent era was characterized by a convivial and social atmosphere bolstered by the dull roar of the crowd.18 Yet once synchronized sound entered the exhibition landscape at the end of the 1920s, keeping spectators quiet became of utmost importance. As Meredith Ward has demonstrated, “aural absorption” was a significant goal of American sound engineers by the late 1920s; by suppressing the noises of bodies, voices, and other sources extraneous to the movie, auditoriums gauged for pristine

160   Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece sound embarked on a quest for sonic intimacy.19 This drive would find resonance for decades to follow, including in the domain of high art, such as Peter Kubelka’s muchdiscussed Invisible Cinema from 1974. Ward explains these efforts paired with the constant presence of the body, which, despite efforts at noise reduction, was always an object of sound. But in addition to bodily transcendence, theatrical sound absorption served another purpose: quiet, attentive, cinephilic spectatorship was convenient for exhibitors looking to maintain order in their theatres. In this way, cinephilia is a tool not only of aesthetic cultivation and taste distinction, but of disciplinary power. Bodily comfort keeps spectators still in their seats; ambient silence further maintains their pliancy.20

The Malleable Listener and Meaningful Sound For American exhibition in the mid-century, a compliant spectator is marked by obedience, sophistication, class, and distinction. To know the rules of listening and stillness is to submit to cultural capital’s orderly nature, and to gain the power to model for others. Cinephilic listening pairs with cinephilic watching in establishing a pedagogical mode of spectatorship tied to taste, class, and, in the realm of the foreign import and art house theatre, the respective values of written and spoken language. These discourses resonated in the late 1950s, when the second wave of cinephilia and its attendant flotilla of foreign language films all but conquered the shores of American exhibition. By a few years after World War II, European films had evaporated from the American cinematic landscape, leaving studios to fill in the gaps. French and Italian films in particular had disappeared; in 1953 alone, at least ten American distributors of European film went out of business due to lack of profit.21 The “swank” art houses that had emerged in response to imports just a few years before were forced into creative business models. For some in New York, this meant opening high-quality Hollywood films that could enjoy a long run with good returns. MGM relied significantly on this option, opening films like Lili with Leslie Caron at the Trans-Lux on 52nd St.22 Warners, Columbia, and Universal also picked up on the practice of appreciative, experienced audiences and relatively low opening budgets. But by the late 1950s, foreign pictures imported to the United States began to pick up steam once again, due both to the war’s end and to the films’ appeal as elite and often titillating product. During the later course of the 1950s, the number of imported movies increased dramatically from 93 to 585, and in 1958, foreign films generated close to $15 million in profit.23 Certainly, foreign cinema bore an indelible mark of sophistication compared to the efficient, consistent, and glamorous yet rarely experimental narratives churned out by Hollywood studios. Knowledge of international fare befitted an American subset of intellectuals eager to prove their access to cultural capital. Yet additionally, censorship that the Production Code Administration required of American films was laxer or at least less consistent when it came to imports. As a result, European cinema gained notoriety as more risqué and salacious, willing and able to test boundaries left intact by Hollywood productions.24 Such a connection between art and exploitation—and

Tasteful Networks of Attention   161 the attendant ramifications for taste distinctions—had been in place in coastal American exhibition for at least two decades.25 While the art house was undeniably profitable, it also posed significant difficulties for exhibitors; like the drive-in, its economic appeal was undercut by links to vice and seediness. In this sense, civil behavior was an urgent need for owners in order to ensure that the art house maintained a primary association with urbanity rather than lasciviousness. Coupled with Hollywood’s reduced number of movies, international cinema enjoyed a significant boom time for the next two decades. 1959 saw the first recognizable products of the French New Wave movement and New Italian Cinema; both Mark Betz and Eric Schaefer, among others, point to the year as a much-returned-to moment, for better or for worse, in both art house modernism and Classical Hollywood historiography.26 In 2002, Landmark Theatres in Los Angeles declared 1962 the “Greatest Year in Motion Picture History” over the more commonly cited 1939 in large part due to the wave of experimental and stylish European and Asian films entering the market: Shoot the Piano Player (François Truffaut), Jules and Jim (François Truffaut), La Notte (Michelangelo Antonioni), L’Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni), Through a Glass Darkly (Ingmar Bergman), Devi (Satyajit Ray), Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa), and Cléo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda), among others.27 And alongside the bountiful product streaming in from the continent, American exhibition answered the call by opening more and more art house cinemas across the country, with record construction and renovation highs in the late 1950s and early 1960s. By 1959, exhibitors saw considerable profit potential in foreign films, which were ­becoming “regular fare” rather than risky ventures: The  U.S.  exhibitor who used to relegate all features tagged ‘produced in Great Britain’ to the lower half of a midweek twin bill, and argued that to play a picture made in a non-English speaking country would lower the prestige of his house, is now happily booking features produced in almost every country on the globe—and in many instances probably unaware that the picture on his screen is the ‘foreign’ film he once avoided. Deceit is not involved. It is simply that, globally speaking, the picture makers are getting smarter, the range of location is expanding, the art of dubbing has achieved a state of perfection, and world markets are demanding that more pictures with cosmopolitan appeal be produced.28

Also by 1959, thirty-four companies had sprung up to handle foreign-language ­distribution, with an additional 85 independents across the country that could market and sell product to regional theatres. While about 700 features were then available in total going back to the 1930s, about 115 had been sent overseas just between 1958 and 1959, with the most coming from France, Germany, and Italy.29 Once foreign films were more regularly accepted as part of the American art house circuit in the late 1940s, sound was of particular—if not necessarily regularly discussed—consideration. In the silent era, film’s universal language of gesture and image ensured a relative ease of global distribution. Intertitles could be quickly substituted for multiple international markets and languages. But sound film posed a new problem of illegibility with few easy technical solutions. In the early days of synchronized sound,

162   Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece audiences excited by the new technology turned away from foreign imports. Little cinemas, the progenitors of later art houses, became known as the “last bastion” for silent films and often showed them in revival to turn a quick profit.30 What international sound product was possible often required various creative solutions, such as multiple language production at the end of the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s at studios like Joinville in Paris, which was purchased by Paramount in the early 1930s. By the time foreign films had returned in wide swathes to American shores, such massive undertaking rarely bore much economic benefit. Instead, foreign films required either subtitling or dubbing. For distributors eager to take advantage of burgeoning American interest in sophisticated Continental fare, dubbing and subtitling presented two quite differing alternatives. While a dubbed film tended to be more likely to play larger mainstream theatres, a subtitled film appealed to cinephilic audiences at art houses. Barbara Wilinsky quotes distributor of foreign pictures Thomas Brandon as insisting that many producers ­considered the erasure of a foreign language to be of ultimate economic benefit.31 Recognizable language—as opposed to an unfamiliar tongue paired with written English—appealed to the American viewer across the country. Subtitling risked a frustrated spectator unsure of where to place her eye on the screen while maintaining a refined network of multidirectional attention: to image, to ambient and musical sound in the film, and to the meaning-making dialogue printed across the bottom of the projected movie. Yet the “serious” art house spectator was generally understood to prefer original language productions in keeping with their cosmopolitan outlook. For René Clair, one solution was a dual production comparable to Paramount’s The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg) in 1930; Silence d’Or and Man About Town were both released in 1947, with the former directed at the art house and the latter for “those who don’t like to read subtitles.”32 This, however, was an outlier and only a temporary solution, one too cumbersome to really grow legs. Beyond the annoyed spectator, subtitling presented substantial technological difficulties for American projectionists and exhibitors. By the late 1950s, technology writers warned that the new wave of imports signaled a need to retrain projectionists for ­foreign-language films, especially those with subtitles: Because of variations in technical standards since the introduction of the new proc­ esses, these films my [sic] require special handling. Aspect ratio is an important point to consider. Films made in Europe do not always have their action contained within an area of the film frame that allows for cropping at the top and bottom by a wide-screen aperture. Heads and feet and parts of the superimposed English titles may be lost. It is also true that some of these pictures, particularly if black-and-white, may emphasize dark low-key lighting that makes wide-screen projection difficult.33

Not only were European films enigmatic in terms of the image’s murky lighting and modernist composition, they also spoke in words illegible to many American ears and, given the subpar tech specs, sometimes to the American eye. The so-called “battle of the ratios” waging across mainstream exhibition thus promised to wreak havoc in both art house and mainstream theatres, especially in the few short years when the art house

Tasteful Networks of Attention   163 c­ ircuit appeared to be on the downswing.34 Once widescreen projection became an expectation for most audiences, subtitling could be an even bigger headache. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, most foreign films tended not to be shot in American-style widescreen. Non-anamorphic projection generally required an aperture masking to reduce the film frame’s height and accommodate for squarer pictures. Yet this clumsy solution unfortunately masked the subtitles at the bottom of the image. Potential alternatives included positioning the titles higher on the negative—a process that had to occur at the printing lab—or adding height to the wide screen itself with variable masking, which could be done on-site with the flexible masking relatively commonplace at the time.35 Widescreen aspect ratio debates plagued art house exhibition through the early 1960s, leading projectionists to question if they should “chop off the subtitles or the heroine’s fancy hairdo?”36 But the subtitles on a foreign language film underwent significant changes not only in terms of their position and potential visibility, but also their line length. Before the introduction of widescreen, each subtitle line’s maximum length was 19 mm. At that time, up to three lines could contain up to 30 letters of 0.6 mm each. But with the mid-1950s’ introduction of widescreen, line length for non-anamorphic projection was reduced to 15 mm, while each letter could only be 0.33 mm high; however, with a horizontally broader aspect ratio, total letters per line could go up to 45.37 What written words and letters lost in height, they gained in breadth and number. Widescreen projection of foreign films thus implied a significant change in how subtitles were read: viewers were forced to scan more of the titles from side-to-side rather than with up-and-down eye movements. Alongside changes in cinematographic practice to include the new deeply American vistas of western landscapes in The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) or Marilyn Monroe’s seductive legs in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953), widescreen meant that subtitled foreign language films shown in the United States underwent a reinvention in the delivery of semiotic lingual meaning. Now, monolingual spectators were forced to run their eyes across a longer surface to translate the sound pouring out of actors’ mouths into sense-making English dialogue. Reading subtitles in this way shifted the visual process more toward that of reading a large book: further across, in a longer sweep from left to right. While technicians at subtitling labs suggested that projectionists minimize focus on subtitles, fears of eye strain—a common stressor for decades of motion picture projection—from continuous reading while watching meant proscriptions for exhibitors to make titles sharper and therefore more legible.38 In any case, foreign language imports reignited discussions over the relative value of sound or image in the theatre. Yet in the case of subtitling, the sound that proved most pressingly onerous was less that of music or ambience, but language. The kind of cinephilic attention that art house exhibition expected of its audiences, then, was a multifaceted combination of sensory and media behaviors. Spectators still had to maintain rapt eye connection with the images, many of which necessitated a ­concurrent negotiation of international cultural and aesthetic contexts. A longstanding tradition of imported modernist European cinema since at least the ciné-clubs of the 1920s meant that most regular viewers of import films would already be prepared for reading a Bergman, Rossellini, or Bresson film. At the same time, art house import

164   Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece ­icture exhibition required spectators to navigate between an indistinguishable p ­quagmire of exotic and, for monolingual audiences, unfathomable dialogue and the muscular memory of visually scanning a book. The construction of semiotic meaning in the mid-century art house therefore demanded a network of sensory attention, not the least of which was a constant vacillation between image and sound. For the cinephile, this labor of listening, watching, and fluctuating between both demonstrated the effort required for good taste—an effort that marked the knowledgeable from the less-so. Both the analytical labor required by art films’ difficulty of interpretation and the process of determining lingual meaning thus constituted a set of demands for import film viewing. This intensity of effort also distinguished between the dumbfounded viewer—a lowerclass, less sophisticated watcher—and the attentive listener/viewer, who modeled a proper, and properly confounding, mode of behavior. Participation in the cinephilic art house proc­ess implied a different kind of viewer: one whose attention was enmeshed in a dynamic web of delicate meaning negotiation. Linked more broadly with art cinema’s popular definition as an object of ambiguity, legibility of foreign films hinged on a question of language, image, and the number of directions a spectator’s attention could be asked to follow. Still, distinction’s rewards made attention’s labors seem worthwhile. Despite the handwringing around the projected written word and widescreen, by the height of the second wave of cinephilia from the 1950s through the early 1960s, most imports were subtitled. Some, like Grigori Kozintsev’s Russian-produced Don Kikhot, was first released in 1957 in its original language, and then by MGM in a dubbed version in 1961.39 Don Kikhot was a dramatic and extravagant production, filmed in Russian widescreen and color formats Sovscope and Sovcolor with a mono sound track. Such spectacular imagery seemed destined for bigger profits in larger mainstream theatres, making the film a good candidate for the relatively rare practice of dubbing. Dubbing could also be completed after the fact once an international picture proved its staying power. In 1960, René Clément’s French and Italian language Purple Noon hit the European market to great fanfare. By 1961, Jean Goldwurm, the president of foreign film distributor Times Film Corp., had bought the American rights despite the warnings of multiple colleagues. First shown subtitled in the art house circuit, Purple Noon was such a sensation that Goldwurm had it dubbed into English for a second release in mainstream theatres.40 As Goldwurm noted, the steady increase in art house exhibition meant between 400 and 500 art houses dotted the American exhibition landscape in 1962. Yet a mainstream release still promised far more substantial dividends. Goldwurm and Clair were hardly alone in asserting dubbing’s relationship to less sophisticated but far broader audiences. In fact, this debate had been raging among ­distributors for quite some time. Around 85% of foreign pictures were subtitled by 1960 with the rest either dubbed or available in both versions, yet the choice of which way to play them remained controversial. Generally, the decision was tied up in whether American audiences desired aural comfort or sophisticated branding. Per Cohen, “while the big pictures in dubbed versions made the first-run theatres successfully, the question of debate was whether patrons of art houses want their foreign pictures stamped ‘English spoken here’.” Joseph Green at President Films suggested the value of the subtitled picture, pointing to Rome, Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945), The Bicycle

Tasteful Networks of Attention   165 Thief (Vittorio De Sica, 1948), and Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, 1946) as subtitled success stories when fewer than 100 art houses were open across the country in the mid-to-late 1940s. Yet J. Tillmann Orr, an art house exhibitor in suburban Dallas, voiced his desire for “all pictures dubbed, even those made in England in which the clipped English dialog is difficult for his Texas patrons to understand.”41 For Orr as well as many exhibitors getting in on the suddenly very profitable art house market, a film’s international sheen proved less important to his audiences than ease of comprehension. And these distinctions spoke of American divides between urban/rural and East/West geographies— lines that reiterated typical cultural gaps between art house and mainstream exhibition. But the boundary between art house audience and mainstream audience blurred increasingly at the beginning of the 1960s. Recalling his first job at a summer art house, tech writer Bob Mitchell spoke of a venue that featured uncut foreign films interspersed with a generous program of live concerts, opera, and ballet. It was a ritzy operation. The theatre, called a Building of Arts, was filled with fresh flowers every day. Jeweled lorgnettes flashed during ‘curtain teas’ at which society caterers served exotic hors d’oeuvrs [sic]. And the screen fairly scintillated with films of classic stature.42

This was a relatively common image for an art house in the early 1940s: luxurious and glamorous, and truly accessible only to the upper echelons of society. But by 1962, this audience had transformed. A few decades ago, “an art theatre catered only to a small and commercially insignificant minority—the intellectual snobs, the wealthy pretenders to culture, and a few genuine devotees of the off-beat. These audience types are still with us; but the art theatre, in expanding beyond them, has captured an important new patronage of mature movie-lovers.”43 Mitchell’s memories, then, were of a smaller clientele. But in post-World War II America with its accompanying economic boom time, an art house audience was not only snobbish and elite. Expanded access to leisure time and money, a more educated public, and an increase in imported films meant that patrons might come to the art house from multiple social and economic classes. And these new audiences, who expected well-appointed surroundings and obsequious service akin to that formerly found in fancy downtown mainstream theatres, were learning how to watch and how to listen alongside a generation trained in cinephilic spectatorship. This generation seemed only too happy to model the civility and gentility assumed by entrance into the art house environment.

The Economic Man and the Cinephilic Listener This mid-century art house version of a wealthy, mature, and tractable spectator was hardly a unique specimen. Such a viewer of sophistication and taste coincides with Foucault’s discussion of homo æconomicus, or economic man, in post-World War II

166   Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece American neoliberalism. As opposed to the classical homo æconomicus of exchange, this is, instead, the entrepreneur-subject and entrepreneur of oneself. The economic man is a producer who “produces very simply his own satisfaction,” and who does so, according to Siiasiäinen, by “making choices and orienting its conduct according to calculative reason, and being sensitive in perceiving, accepting, and responding systematically to the ‘reality’ and its modifications.”44 Homo æconomicus is both rational and sensitive, marked by accurate perception. And the art house traded on accurate perception: recorded sound in the art house auditorium could be characterized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by its debt to a specific version of fidelity located in excellent craftsmanship. Certainly, the art house’s high point was marked by a richness not only of acoustics and projection, but of location and décor. In 1963, the Festival Theatre opened at 57th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan. Described as “the most luxurious of intimate cinemas,” the Festival was located at “the apex of the exclusive department store, officebuilding, and residential area uptown.”45 Alongside its private art gallery, the Festival included acoustical work by Jacobson & Company, which was established by Gustave Jacobson in 1889 as an ornamental plastering business. Victor, Gustave’s son, entered into ceiling work for sound in 1932, and quickly pioneered acoustical plastering for major projects such as Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall at Julliard, among others.46 Art houses, particularly those in urban locales, provided elegantly appointed lounges, espresso bars, imported candies, soft seats, murals by artists like Norman Ives, and staff attired in smart uniforms and even tuxedoes.47 Sometimes, light orchestral music was played stereophonically in lobbies to contribute to the pleasurable atmosphere.48 At the Apollo in St. Louis, owner Grace Piccione joined audiences for post-film discussions in the lobby featuring “continental music, performed by accordionist Victor Jahoda and drummer Radko Jansky on Fridays and Saturdays.”49 The homo æconomicus would surely find much appeal in the possibilities of consumption, that “enterprise activity by which,” as Foucault put it, “the individual, precisely on the basis of the capital he has at his disposal, will produce something that will be his own satisfaction.”50 But alongside these tasteful trappings, Foucault’s homo æconomicus could be found in the techniques of audiences who knew how to behave in the theatre according to a set of rules defined in no small part by sound. By demonstrating attentive spectatorship and the right ways to watch a film, art house audiences echoed a dispositif rooted in part in cinephilia’s disciplinary potential—a potential that exhibitors could harness to create environments that were sellable to aspirational audiences. Discipline, after all, is not only punitive; it can also operate as a desirable signifier of propriety. Without a doubt, art houses during the boom relied on critically acclaimed foreign imports to boost their standing and profits. Yet their history also reveals how the spatial and semiotic context of defined taste develops its own class-advancing appeal. And taste in the art house— like taste in many aesthetic arenas, according to Bourdieu—was founded on distinction: distinction between media objects, between social, economic, and cultural classes, and between individuals placing themselves into discrete slots by producing their own satisfactions.

Tasteful Networks of Attention   167 Both taste and discipline organized one another in the art house via the relationship between filmed image, unrecognizable lingual sound, and written language.51 There, proper cinematic behavior proved to be a complex network of multifaceted attention requiring absolute dedication to the screen, and thus absolute submission to the correct dimensions of civic behavior. The cinephile’s reward was a veneer of distinction and elegance both deeply European and deeply American. Cinephilia, then, finds commonality with audiophilia beyond the bracket of simple sophistication. Instead, both also reveal the allegiances between hearing, seeing, knowing, and choosing. In this way, Foucault’s American neoliberal homo æconomicus in the art house conspicuously and willfully sidestepped the noise of verbal chaos in favor of sound made meaningful by the written word. And such lingual meaning could find an echo in the sophisticated sonic structures of European art cinema at this moment. There, sparseness and silence frequently compensated for the typical bombast, musical and otherwise, of Hollywood cinema, and, in tandem with art house cinemas, approximated the dimensions of what Emily Thompson has described as efficient, modern, and streamlined approaches to acoustics in the American midcentury.52 Whereas non-meaning-making noise might threaten rupture of the social contract, unfamiliar language rendered legible eased the anarchic dimensions of sound into a larger system of attentive absorption. To listen, to watch, to read, and to combine all information on-the-fly into an object of sense was the labor the art house required from its spectator. By considering the methods and difficulties by which exhibition approached international product in the art house market, several things become clear. First, that the lingual markers of taste that distinguish viewers of subtitled and dubbed films were established from quite early on in the American import market. Second, that a forced separation between seeing and hearing obscures the essential work performed by both meaningful and non-meaningful sound in structuring a proper viewer. Third, that American cinephilia is neither a self-sufficient nor natural category; one of its functions is as a tool of disciplinary power, and its multiple technological, aesthetic, social, industrial, and cultural discourses underscore its operation as a dispositif. And finally, that the tasteful distinction here exemplified by language, hearing, and seeing in the art house is one of many avenues by which the rhetoric of individual choice is homo æconomicus’ means of empowerment. To distinguish oneself from the crowd, sometimes by listening and watching in the right ways, is to be imbricated in a sensory network of product clamoring in an almost infinite number of vocabularies for our vectors of attention.

Notes 1. Jean Epstein, “On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie,” trans. Tom Milne, in French Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Richard Abel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 314–18: 318. 2. See Amir Ameri, “The Architecture of the Illusive Distance,” Screen 54, no. 4 (2013): 439–62. 3. For more on taste and the art house, see Barbara Wilinsky, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), esp. ch. 4 [“ ‘Any Leisure That Looks Easy Is Suspect’: Art House Audiences and the Search for Distinction”].

168   Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece 4. Dale Hudson and Patricia Zimmerman, “Cinephilia, Technophilia and Collaborative Remix Zones,” Screen 50, no. 1 (2009): 135–46: 135. 5. See Wilinsky, Sure Seaters. 6. Bodies moving in the theatre were a consistent problem for exhibitors, who sought to keep spectators calm, quiet, and in their seats. I detail some of these concerns in Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, “Revisiting the Apparatus: The Theatre Chair and Cinematic Spectatorship,” Screen 57, no. 3 (2016): 253–76. 7. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Oxon: Routledge, 1984). 8. See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 9. Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” trans. Alan Williams, Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1974): 39–47. 10. Lauri Siiasiäinen, Foucault and the Politics of Hearing (Oxon: Routledge, 2013). 11. Background noise, while meaningless, also suggests the future possibility of sense-making sound. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1988). 12. Siiasiäinen, Foucault and the Politics of Hearing, 10. 13. Ibid., 57. 14. Ibid., 70–3. 15. Ibid., 74–5. 16. Michel Foucault, On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–1980, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2012), 289. 17. Ibid., 289. 18. See, for example, Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). 19. Meredith  C.  Ward, “The Soundscape of the Cinema Theatre: Acoustical Design, Embodiment, and Film Theatres as Vehicles for Aural Absorption,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 10, no. 2 (2016): 135–65. 20. For more on spectators, comfort, and seating as a mode of discipline, see SzczepaniakGillece, “Revisiting the Apparatus.” 21. Mandel Herbstman, “Majors Turn to Art House for Specials,” Motion Picture Herald, August 29, 1953, 23. 22. Ibid., 23. 23. “Monthly Chat,” International Projectionist, October 1959, 21. 24. See Barbara Wilinsky, “ ‘A Thinly Disguised Art Veneer Covering a Filthy Sex Picture’: Discourses on Art Houses in the 1950s,” Film History 8, no. 2 (1996): 143–58. 25. See Mark Jancovich and Tim Snelson, “Horror at the Crossroads: Class, Gender, and Taste at the Rialto,” in From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse: Highbrow and Lowbrow Transgression in Cinema’s First Century, ed. John Cline and Robert  G.  Weiner (New York: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 109–25. 26. Mark Betz, “Art, Exploitation, Underground,” in Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Tastes, ed. Mark Jancovich, et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); Eric Schaefer, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).

Tasteful Networks of Attention   169 27. Stephen Farber, “Film; 1962: When the Silver Screen Never Looked So Golden,” New York Times, September 15,  2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/15/arts/film-1962-whenthe-silver-screen-never-looked-so-golden.html (accessed March 15, 2018). 28. Nathan Cohen, “Foreign Films Gaining Favor in U.S.,” Boxoffice Barometer, February 16, 1959, 50. 29. Ibid. 30. Wilinsky, Sure Seaters, 55. 31. Ibid., 35–36. 32. Ibid., 36. 33. “Projecting Foreign Films,” International Projectionist 31, no. 10 (October 1956): 5. 34. “Art Circuit Disappearing?” International Projectionist 32, no. 3 (March 1957): 37. 35. “Cropped Titles Create Problems at Wide-Screen Art Houses,” International Projectionist 31, no. 1 (January 1956): 12. 36. “Monthly Chat,” International Projectionist 36, no. 12 (December 1961): 3. 37. “Cropped Titles Create Problems,” 12. 38. Ibid., 12. 39. “Don Quijote,” Film Bulletin, January 23, 1961, 19. Barbara Wilinsky outlines the lead up to and effects of the second wave of cinephilia in the post-war period in Sure Seaters. 40. “Times Film Chief Sees Art Theatres Maturing,” Boxoffice, January 1, 1962, 15. 41. Cohen, “Foreign Films Gaining Favor in U.S,” 50. 42. “Monthly Chat: The ‘Art Theatre’ Trend Promising,” International Projectionist 37, no. 9 (September 1962): 3. 43. “Monthly Chat: The ‘Art Theatre’ Trend Promising,” 3. 44. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,  2008), 226; Siiasiäinen, Foucault and the Politics of Hearing, 79. 45. New York’s Festival Theatre So Luxurious It Includes Private Art Gallery,” International Projectionist 38, no. 7 (July 1963): 14. 46. “A Short History of Jacobson & Company,” http://jacobsoncompany.com/history/ (accessed April 10, 2018). 47. “An Art House for Las Vegas,” Boxoffice, Modern Theatre section, March 6, 1961, 6–9; “Three Dimensional Murals in New Art House,” Boxoffice, Modern Theatre section, October 22, 1962, 16; “The New Look in Two Cincinnati Houses,” Boxoffice, Modern Theatre section, July 8, 1963, 16. 48. “An Art House for Las Vegas.” 49. Joan S. Pollock, “  ‘Flicks and Pub’ a Hit with Patrons,” Boxoffice, Modern Theatre section, September 9, 1963, 24–25. 50. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 226. 51. Music, of course, presents an additional aspect of this structure. While it is beyond the aims of this chapter to discuss the connotations of music in film texts, its presence in European art cinema of the 1950s and 1960s added a dimension of quality and taste supporting larger aims toward cinephilia. In addition, some of the art house theatres discussed here featured stereophonic sound and instrumental music played in lobbies or after films in order to help create an atmosphere of distinction and sophistication. 52. See Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).

170   Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece

Select Bibliography Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” trans. Alan Williams. Film Quarterly 28, no. 2 (1974): 39–47. Betz, Mark. “Art, Exploitation, Underground.” In Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Tastes, ed. Mark Jancovich et al., 202–22. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice. Oxon: Routledge, 1984. Epstein, Jean. “On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie,” trans. Tom Milne. In French Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Richard Abel, 314–18. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Farber, Stephen. “Film; 1962: When the Silver Screen Never Looked So Golden,” New York Times. September 15, 2002. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/15/arts/film-1962-when-thesilver-screen-never-looked-so-golden.html. Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Vintage, 1988. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Foucault, Michel. On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–1980, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2012. Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Hawkins, Joan. “Sleaze Mania, Euro-Trash, and High Art: The Place of European Art Films in American Low Culture.” Film Quarterly 53, no. 2 (1999): 14–29. Jancovich, Mark, and Snelson, Tim. “Horror at the Crossroads: Class, Gender, and Taste at the Rialto.” In From the Arthouse to the Grindhouse: Highbrow and Lowbrow Transgression in Cinema’s First Century, ed. John Cline and Robert G. Weiner, 109–25. New York: Scarecrow Press, 2010. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Schaefer, Eric. Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–59. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. Siiasiäinen, Lauri. Foucault and the Politics of Hearing. Oxon: Routledge, 2013. Ward, Meredith C. “The Soundscape of the Cinema Theatre: Acoustical Design, Embodiment, and Film Theatres as Vehicles for Aural Absorption.” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 10, no. 2 (2016): 135–65. Wilinsky, Barbara. Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Chapter 8

“ The Atmosph er e Was En tir ely G ood H umou r ed ”

The Cinema as a Venue for Live Music in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s Simon Frith

There used to be a weekly feature in The Guardian called “That’s me in the picture.” Each week a familiar photograph was published with a commentary by someone who could be seen in it. The photo published (online) on June 19, 2015, first appeared in the Daily Mirror on November 14, 1963. It shows a group of teen and pre-teen girls in the front few rows of a Beatles concert. They are overcome with emotion—screaming, crying, on their knees, heads in hands. This became an iconic picture of Beatlemania. The Mirror’s headline was “Hands, knees and—yeah, yeah, yeah!” The person writing about this picture, Carol Cuffe, is the girl pictured in the middle of the front row, kneeling, fists clenched, staring at the stage. It’s hard to tell if she is crying or yelling (see Figure 8.1). What interests me about this picture, though, is not who is in it but where it was taken. The Guardian headline description is “Carol Cuffe at a Beatles concert in Plymouth, November 13, 1963.” In her commentary Cuffe notes that the concert was in Plymouth’s ABC cinema. When the show had been announced, the previous month, she had gone to the cinema straight from school, arriving at 4.15 p.m., the first in the ticket queue (the box office didn’t open until the following morning). Earlier that year I had also queued all night for Beatles tickets—outside the Regal cinema in Cambridge, where I was at boarding school. I’d like to remember that I climbed out of the dormitory window and broke all school rules, but I suspect, in fact, that I had my Housemaster’s permission to do so, just as 16-year-old Carol Cuffe’s father, far from disapproving (or not knowing) of her overnight vigil, brought her soup and sandwiches—I’ll come back to the significance of this later. I didn’t join the queue until around eleven; if she got front-row tickets, mine

172   Simon Frith

Figure 8.1  The Beatles Autumn Tour of Great Britain at the ABC Plymouth, November 13, 1963. First appeared in Daily Mirror on November 14, 1963. Copyright licensed by Mirrorpix.

were quite far back—which meant I couldn’t actually hear the Beatles at all; the rows in front were louder than the PA system. For young pop fans in the early 1960s it was quite customary to see their idols playing live in the local cinema; cinemas had been key venues on the pop circuit since the emergence of rock ’n’ roll and teen pop stars in the mid-1950s. The Beatles played 49 UK shows on their winter 1963 tour; at least 25 (including that in Plymouth) were in cinemas. (When in 1957, aged around 15, Paul McCartney had been to see Bill Haley and the Comets in Liverpool, it was at the Odeon.) Cinemas, then, played a significant role in the post-war history of British popular music. The first live shows I went to as a young teenager were in the Rialto cinema, York (owned by John Q. Prendergast, John Barry’s father). Even when I was the Sunday Times rock critic in the 1980s (based in Coventry), the Birmingham Odeon was still an important rock venue. I saw there such varied acts as Lou Reed, Bob Marley and the Wailers, the Cure, and U2 on their first British tour. For commentators then and since, cinemas were obviously entirely inappropriate venues for youth music, both a setting for and an implicit cause of the so-called rock ’n’

The Cinema as a Venue for Live Music in Britain   173 roll riots that in 1956 accompanied national showings of Blackboard Jungle (on the ABC circuit) and Rock Around the Clock (on the Gaumont circuit). The term “riot” here described what happened both inside cinemas (young audience members jiving in the aisles while cinema staff tried to stop them; damage to seats and carpets) and outside on the streets, where evicted teenagers continued to dance, sing and protest their treatment. A headline in The Manchester Guardian on September 10, 1956, is typical of press coverage: “ ‘Rock’ Devotees Turn Hose on Cinema Manager: Dancing in the Street After Film Show.”1 There’s no doubt that the scale of these riots was exaggerated. As Humphrey Lyttelton suggested a couple of years later: All that the much-publicized rock ’n’ roll riots have amounted to is a handful of youngsters getting up and dancing in or outside cinemas, often at the instigation of enterprising newspaper reporters.2

That said, the fact remains that seated venues were not appropriate for audiences who wanted to dance, a problem for town halls too, which in the next two decades took over as the settings for moral panics, cancelled gigs, and bans on particular acts, genres, and audiences, if only because they were the venues under local councilors’ control. The continued use of cinemas for live youth music is therefore usually explained negatively: there were no other suitable venues available. Thus when Bill Haley toured the UK in 1957 (having come to fame through the use of “Rock Around the Clock” in the opening and closing credits of Blackboard Jungle (1955) and as star of the instant commercial cash-in, the film, Rock Around the Clock (1956)), at least 14 of his 24 performances were booked into cinemas (this was the tour which Paul McCartney attended in Liverpool). This suggests both that their owners were not particularly concerned about potential riots and that promoters considered cinemas if not ideal certainly good enough venues for rock ’n’ roll shows.3 And for the young people who had first heard and seen Bill Haley in films, the local cinema might well have seemed an entirely appropriate place to see him perform live, an argument that I will explore in the rest of this paper.

The Cinema as a Space for Youth In 1957 the number of cinema tickets sold in Britain fell below a billion for the first time since 1939—attendances had reached a high of 1.635 billion in 1946. Ticket sales steadily declined thereafter, reaching their lowest figure, 54 million, in 1985.4 Ticket sales dwindled similarly for live entertainment in variety theatres and dance halls; showbiz historians assume that “the main culprit was television.”5 It could be argued, though, that the growth of the television audience was as much a symptom as a cause of changes in leisure habits, which were the result of more profound changes in the

174   Simon Frith urban environment—suburbanization, domesticity, new kinds of housing (with central heating), the rising number of motorists and so forth, all leading to the decline of street culture.6 This was the context in which young people came to be seen as an increasingly important audience for both cinema managers and live music promoters. What also became clear in the late 1950s and early 1960s was that to attract young people to cinemas (or variety theatres or dance halls) it was not enough simply to add a young audience to the declining adult audiences for the same sort of entertainment (as promoters added rock ’n’ roll acts or teen pop stars to the bills of their variety shows). It was also necessary to create explicit youth spaces and events from which adults were effectively (if only symbolically) excluded. It is striking that in press reports of the rock ’n’ roll riots, for example, one gets the sense that everyone in the audiences for the films concerned was young; the only adults present the cinema’s staff and, possibly, the police—Allen Eyles quotes a customer’s description of a showing of Rock Around the Clock at the Saltaire Gaumont: The atmosphere was entirely good-humoured and, as far as I could tell, the policemen were not called upon to arrest anyone. Since they were all young, perhaps they were too absorbed in the music themselves.7

As this comment attests, there were grown-ups, regular cinemagoers, at showings of youth films but they were increasingly irrelevant. This separation of adult and youth leisure spheres didn’t happen immediately in Britain but the consequences were already apparent in the USA, where the rise of the exclusive teenage film audience is reflected in the history of American International Pictures, founded in 1954 with a particular concern to attract teenage cinemagoers (not least to drive-in movie theatres). AIP initially specialized in juvenile delinquency stories; following the success of Beach Party in 1963 it switched focus to surf movies. The equivalent British company, in its focus on low budget second feature films, was Anglo-Amalgamated, which soon began collaborating with AIP in the youth movie market. For example, AIP distributed the Anglo-Amalgamated film The Tommy Steele Story (1957) in the USA (under the title Rock Around the World) and invested in Cat Girl (released in the same year). But before the mid-60s, when California’s hippie culture began to impact on British youth, US and UK teenagers had rather different life-styles and tastes in entertainment. On the one hand, surfing and beach parties had little resonance for young British holiday makers, on the other hand British pop stars had little appeal to US record buyers: Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday (1963) was a major box office success in Britain and a total flop in the USA (not helped by being released in the week of President Kennedy’s assassination). And AIP’s rock ’n’ roll movie, Shake, Rattle and Roll (1956), had rather less impact in the UK than the major studio releases, The Girl Can’t Help It (Twentieth Century Fox, 1956) and Don’t Knock the Rock (Columbia, 1956), the follow-up to Rock Around the Clock. The former was a showbiz comedy, featuring performances by, among others, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Eddie Cochrane, the Platters, and Gene Vincent, and an inspiration for the young John Lennon and Paul

The Cinema as a Venue for Live Music in Britain   175 McCartney when they saw it in Liverpool (separately—they hadn’t yet met); the latter was another Bill Haley vehicle, also featuring Little Richard. And then, of course, there was Elvis Presley. Love Me Tender (1956) was followed by Loving You and Jailhouse Rock in 1957 and King Creole in 1958. After his return from army service, Presley then made two feature films a year from 1960–1963, and three a year from 1964–1969, ending his film career with a couple of concert documentaries in 1970 and 1972. What was significant about these films was not the acting or plots but the chance it gave people around Britain to see performances from someone who never played here live. For Elvis fans, the cinema was the only place to see their idol; for the music industry, Presley’s movies established the importance of films—and cinemas— for youth music promotion. American studio policies were, then, paralleled in the way in which British film studios thought about the youth market. There was, for example, a British tradition of UK delinquency films, beginning with The Blue Lamp with Dirk Bogarde (1950) and Cosh Boy with James Kenney (1953). Serious Charge (1959) cast teenage pop stars, Cliff Richard and Jess Conrad, among its delinquents and Richard featured on the soundtrack. Conrad went on to make The Boys, with music by The Shadows (1962) while Adam Faith featured in Beat Girl (1960), a film about “beatniks” with music by John Barry, Never Let Go (1960), Faith as a car thief, and Mix Me A Person (1962), Faith on trial for murder. While the casting of pop stars in these films was obviously designed to attract teen viewers, these were not really youth films; their points of view were still those of the mainstream adult audience. In the 1960s, though, such films about youth and crime morphed into “cop and pop” films, such as Dateline Diamonds (1965) a B-movie featuring the Small Faces, The Chantelles, Mark Richardson and Kiki Dee, filmed at a Radio London promotion at the Watford Rank Ballroom.8 A second strand of British youth films focused on the exploitation of teen idols by unscrupulous adults—managers, record company executives, publicists, and promoters (a theme in Presley’s early films). The starting point here was Espresso Bongo (1959), starring Cliff Richard. The original West End musical was a fairly unpleasant satire of the British pop industry, showcasing with much glee (and good songs), its financial and moral corruption. The teen pop idol at the story’s core, Bongo Herbert, turns out to be as corrupt (and stupid) as all the people who try to exploit him. In the movie version, the original music is almost entirely replaced by material written specifically for Cliff Richard, and the cynicism is much softened: Bongo Herbert is now a sympathetic character. Subsequent films with similar themes include Catch Us If You Can (1965), John Boorman’s directorial debut, featuring the Dave Clark Five, Privilege (1967) with Paul Jones, Stardust (1974) with David Essex, and Flame (1975) with Slade. Third, there were youth musicals beginning with The Tommy Steele Story (1957). Such films were essentially celebratory biographies or fantasies, made with more or less accuracy, comedy, and sugar coating. Cliff Richard thus starred in The Young Ones (1961) and Summer Holiday (1963), the Beatles in Hard Day’s Night (1964), Gerry and the Pacemakers and Cilla Black in Ferry Cross the Mersey (1965), Herman’s Hermits in Hold On! (1966), and Freddie and the Dreamers in The Cuckoo Patrol (made in 1967, released in 1969).

176   Simon Frith The Tommy Steele Story was advertised as “Grand Entertainment the Whole Family will Enjoy,”9 a slogan that one could apply to all these films, at which parents joined their children in cheering on teenagers against petty bureaucrats and politicians, blue meanies, jobsworths, and so forth. Finally, there were films that recreated on cinema screens the kinds of package show that audiences were used to seeing on cinema stages, the plots held loosely together by narrative devices such as talent shows. Examples include What a Crazy World (1963) with Joe Brown, Freddie and the Dreamers, Susan Maugham, Louise Cordet, and Mark Wynter; Just for You (1964) with Freddie and the Dreamers, the Bachelors, Millie, Peter and Gordon, the Merseybeats, the Applejacks, and Sam Costa as the film version of a compere; and Everyday’s a Holiday (1965), set in Butlin’s Holiday Camp, Clacton, with John Leyton, Mike Sarne, Ron Moody, the Mojos, the Leroys, the Baker Twins, the Gillian Lynne Dancers, and Freddie and the Dreamers again.10 Klaus Nathaus has argued that “cinemas’ involvement in live music” in this period “reveals a continuing focus on a mass audience.”11 This is undoubtedly true but the important point here is that this audience was increasingly addressed as a youth audience. On the one hand, then, what we have here is a mass youth audience, age specific but otherwise crossing class and geographical divides. On the other hand, cinemas were able to present themselves as safe—wholesome—places for young people, even when there were few adults present, as was increasingly true for both live and filmed performances of rock ’n’ roll and teen pop music. In March 1959, for example, the Sheffield local paper, The Star, launched a Teenage Club, which “held teenage parties in the Green Room above the Gaumont where they could ‘meet their favourite pop stars, talk with them, have a cup of tea with them and get their autographs’.”12 Out of this came the Teenage Show, a regular Saturday morning event at the Gaumont, combining a film showing with a “jive session” in which local bands played. Similar ­initiatives, for similar reasons, were taken by cinemas across the UK. In 1958, for example, Cliff Richard’s first manager, John Foster, booked an early gig for Cliff Richard and the Drifters on the Gaumont Teenage Show at the Gaumont in Shepherd’s Bush. This was, he claims, when Cliffmania began “in a wave of frenzied screams.”13 In short, when Carol Cuffe saw the Beatles at the Portsmouth ABC in 1963, the c­ inema was not just a familiar setting for youth music and youth culture, but also a safe setting, not associated with bad behavior but, rather, a place where young people learnt how mass youth culture should be performed. Cinemas were not just appropriate settings for young people, they were the places where, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they learnt how to be young.

The Cinema as a Space for Music I referred earlier to the suggestion that British cinemas were only used for live pop music in the 1950s and 1960s because there were no other venues of the right sort available.

The Cinema as a Venue for Live Music in Britain   177 Although this is true—if better venues had existed they would have been used—the argument is also misleading. Properly alternative venues for pop shows at that time were not only non-existent; they hadn’t yet been conceived. As Sergio Pisfil notes, while American rock venues like the Avalon Ballroom, the Fillmore East and the Boston Tea Party had installed sound systems with dedicated sound engineers since their earliest concerts [in the mid-1960s], in the UK those practices were virtually nonexistent until the Roundhouse [which had been a pioneer in staging rock in the UK since 1966] started experimenting with their own sound technologies in 1970. Only later did places like the Rainbow Theatre or the Sundown Theatres became famous for their in-house audio configurations. By that time, British bands had already been in contact with the American industry and learnt new ways to deal with live sound on the road.14

In the early 1960s, “alternative” venues to cinemas were the larger city halls and the ­surviving variety theatres, which were, on the whole, only to be found in the bigger cities and which, anyway, were not really much different from cinemas in the resources they offered. Indeed, given the alternative venues available, cinemas had clear attractions as live music venues. Most of them used Vitavox’s cinema sound system, which provided a reliable and consistent sound across the many different acts in a package show. Indeed, on the basis of its experience with cinema sound, Vitavox went on to develop a highly successful business providing live music amplification systems for outdoor and stadium rock shows.15 Cinemas also had better sightlines than most halls and theatres. For promoters, as 1960s tour manager Jef Hanlon explains: The outlook [when booking venues] was the cinema circuits because they had seats, they had box offices, they had a stage, they had stage lighting, they had stage lighting switchboards—the old grandmasters with the big wheel. So they were equipped and that’s where they [promoters] went.16

And even for rock musicians, cinemas in the mid-60s had sonic advantages over the sorts of clubs in which they had started out. As Charlie Watkins of WEM notes about his invention of the Slave PA system in 1966, it was designed to fill a need in a world bristling with the likes of Alvin Lee and his Ten Years After, The Faces, Jethro Tull, Rod Stewart, Hendrix and indeed the Rolling Stones, with so many brilliant groups waiting to emerge but who were unable to do so for the lack of a powerful and competent sound system. This limited the exposure of groups to small venues and pubs or whatever size a couple of lashed up Marshall 100 or Hi Watt Guitar stacks could handle.17

Until WEM and other amplification companies such as Shure and Vox developed high quality and high volume portable PA systems in 1965–7, the sound of live music in cinemas was not obviously “inadequate.”

178   Simon Frith At the same time, for cinema owners looking for alternative sources of income as box office takings fell, it made sense to further develop their use as live venues, initially on Sundays and then on other nights. As Allen Eyles explains, in the mid-1950s more and more cinemas returned to live shows, including several of the well-equipped Gaumonts. This was not just a Sunday event but spread to weekdays interrupting the run of the film programme. Artists would even perform on Saturday nights despite tough resistance by film distributors loath to forfeit their share of takings on the best night of the week.18

Britain’s major cinema chains (Rank, Gaumont, and ABC) thus took their place alongside municipal halls and the surviving variety theatres, as settings for popular music entertainment. Initially, in the 1950s, this meant variety shows of a traditional sort, but with rock ’n’ roll acts and teen pop stars added to the line-up. Bill Haley’s 1957 tour, for example, had him headlining an evening that included Vic Lewis and his Orchestra, the ballad singer, Irma Logan, the comedians Kenneth Earle and Malcolm Vaughan, and Desmond Lane on tin whistle. Lonnie Donegan’s tour of the same cinemas earlier in the year featured, besides his Skiffle Group, Rita Martell (Youthful juggler), Ray Allen & Steve (Two thoughts with a single voice), Flying Rosinas, Clifford Stanton (Personalities on Parade), Curzon Trio (Cyclomaniacs), Lester Sharpe & Iris (Dexterous deceiver), and Kay & Valerie Glynn (Dancing to delight).19 As the youth audience and the youth market became more important, such variety shows were replaced by the youth pop package show, pioneered in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Arthur Howe, who had become the exclusive promoter of Britain’s biggest pop star (Cliff Richard) and Larry Parnes, who had begun his music industry career as co-manager of Tommy Steele and developed a stable of teen singers. Parnes developed the package show as a matter of commercial necessity, “in order to provide his artists with both publicity and live experience.”20 It made much better financial sense to put together bills of young acts than to negotiate one or two of them brief appearances on a show featuring all kinds of other showbiz attractions, especially when it was the youth part of the audience that was growing, the adult part declining (and even more especially if, like Parnes, you had a number of young pop stars available). Howe and Parnes thus began staging evenings of youth music acts going up and down the bill according to their current record sales.21 Such package shows were the norm of live music performance for the beat groups that emerged in the early 1960s. In 1963, for example, Brian Epstein got Arthur Howe to put together the Beatles’ first national UK tour, following the release of their first two singles, “Love Me Do” on October 5, 1962, and “Please Please Me” on January 11, 1963. The tour (in February and March 1963) involved eleven cinema gigs, two theatres, and two city halls; the Beatles opened the show for the headliner, Helen Shapiro. The rest of the package, compered by Dave Allen, featured Danny Williams, Kenny Lynch, the Honeys, The Kestrels, and the Red Price Band. The Beatles toured England three more times that year. Their second trek, in March (involving thirteen cinemas, two theatres, and five city halls), was headlined by Tommy Roe and Chris Montez, though after the release of the

The Cinema as a Venue for Live Music in Britain   179 Beatles’ first album, Please Please Me, and its unprecedented sales success, the Beatles took over the closing spot. Other acts featured were the Viscounts, Debbie Lee, the Terry Young Combo, and Tony March. The Beatles co-headlined their next tour with Roy Orbison (visiting fifteen cinemas, two theatres, and four city halls); the rest of the line-up was Gerry and the Pacemakers, David Macbeth, Louise Cordet, Ian Crawford, and Tony March again. Even the final tour of the year (following a handful of dates in Scotland and Sweden), which included the Plymouth show Carol Cuffe attended, had supporting acts: Peter Jay and the Jay Walkers, The Brook Brothers, The Vernon Girls, The Kestrels, and compère/comedian, Frank Berry.22 I draw two conclusions from this. First, a decade of rock ‘n’ roll acts and/or teen idols playing cinemas, initially in variety shows, then in package shows, made live youth music in the local cinema seem entirely normal. Second, seeing acts in such line-ups was not so odd as it now seems. Musical genres in Britain were not then defined very clearly by radio programmers (not even on commercial stations like Radio Luxembourg) and pop culture was still organized around the production and sales of singles. A program like the BBC’s Top of the Pops (launched on January 1, 1964) was, in effect, a package show, a ragbag of different performers, appearing and disappearing according to their singles’ chart positions. Audiences didn’t expect to like (or even notice) every act on the bill. It is striking, for example, that in Carol Cuffe’s photo memory there’s no sense that the Beatles were just a part of the evening’s entertainment. The Guardian headline refers to “a Beatles concert,” and I certainly have no memory whatsoever of the other bands that played when I saw the Beatles in the Cambridge Regal.

Cinema Culture Although British newspapers responded to the announcement of Bill Haley’s 1957 UK tour with the usual scare stories about rock ’n’ roll rioting, delinquency and so forth, in fact, as the front page headline in Melody Maker on February 9, 1957, put it, “Haley opens—and there is no riot.” The paper reported, rather, that “the large audiences exhibited ‘the orderly fashion of regular cinema-goers’ as they entered the cinemas, and exited with similar decorum.”23 Carol Cuffe remembers the Beatles’ appearance in Plymouth in similar terms: The four of them were very smart. They arrived on time, and there was no security. It was so civilised. There was a big gap between the front row and the stage, and it never once occurred to us to invade that space. You didn’t do things like that. After an hour, they bowed and walked off. There was a second show later that evening when they did the whole thing again.24

Shows like these were thus absorbed into cinema-going culture. Cinemas were public spaces but familiar, providing entertainment that was both escapist and an aspect of everyday life; they were places where young people could gather without parents, with a

180   Simon Frith sense of excitement and occasion but without fear of the unknown. Watching music in the cinema, on screen or on stage, was a quite different experience from watching the same performers in domestic settings, on television shows in the living room, but, on the other hand, teenagers in the late 1950s and early 1960s were well versed in cinema culture through their membership of children’s film clubs, which had their heyday in the 1940s and 1950s25—the Sheffield Teen Club I described earlier was in many respects simply a remodeling of the cinema’s Saturday morning children’s shows. Traces of such cinema culture, noisy groups of young teens and pre-teens celebrating the cinema as their own space, could still be seen more than thirty years later, in 1997, in the audiences for the Spice Girls film, Spice World. The norm for package shows throughout this period was two shows a night, which meant that young teenagers could go too: Carol Cuffe took her 12-year-old sister. They missed the last bus home because they hung around “hoping to catch a glimpse of [the Beatles] after the second performance” and, having no money for a taxi, set off to walk the eight miles home, before being met by their father in his car—it was only at this stage that he was “livid.” As I have already suggested, for him, as for my housemaster, in itself the cinema was a safe place. It could thus be argued that the rock ’n’ roll “riots” attracted so much media attention precisely because they seemed so contrary to the established norms of cinema behavior. The second important aspect of cinema culture in the 1950s was its ubiquity. Seeing live rock ’n’ roll performances on cinema stage or screen was something young audiences could do all over the country, regardless of class, education, and whether or not they lived in a big city. A package tour, like a film on general release, enabled fans to share locally in a national event—a Beatles tour, for example. Provincial teenagers could see pop stars in Plymouth, York, or Cambridge in much the same settings (and with much the same sound) as teenagers in London, Manchester, or Birmingham. The decline of cinemas as pop music venues also meant a decline of provincial opportunities to see big tours, which increasingly visited only big city stadia, although, ironically, local cinemas have in recent years once again given small town audiences the chance to see on a regular basis live music performances, streamed now from big city venues. Although these days these audiences are primarily old rather than young, the streamed music opera rather than pop, the notion of “the local” remains central to how this cinematic musical experience is valued: for small town opera buffs now, as for small town teenagers sixty years ago, the cinema is a local space that can be owned.26 Although pop or rock events are not screened to cinemas routinely like operas, such showings have been used to launch new records. For example, Madonna’s 2000 album, Music, and David Bowie’s 2003 album, Reality, were both launched with special concerts (a “secret gig” in Bowie’s case) streamed to cinemas globally. In 2009, the premiere of Julien Temple’s Dr. Feelgood documentary Oil City Confidential was simulcast across British cinemas; it was followed immediately by a streamed live performance by Wilco Johnson: “it was a bizarre experience. Some people applauded, some didn’t.”27 Otherwise, the acts mostly involved in such cinema events seem to be ageing boy bands (or ageing boys) like Westlife and Robbie Williams. Take That’s 2015 London O2

The Cinema as a Venue for Live Music in Britain   181 Arena show has probably been the most successful of these, reaching cinemagoers in “twenty-two territories.” A blogger’s report from the Cineworld showing in Nottingham echoes 1950s descriptions of the cinema audiences for Rock Around the Clock: Most people were jumping, dancing, clapping and singing along to the songs. It did feel weird doing so in a cinema but, hey, everyone was doing it. When I spoke to a member of staff about the audio during a toilet break (you know when a not so popular song is on) they said they had already turned up the volume three times, so when I got back to my seat the volume sounded a lot louder, which meant I didn’t have to hear the singing of the group of women behind us who for some reason kept shouting out “I love you Gary.” He can’t hear you, love! You’re in a cinema for heaven sakes.28

My final point here is that what became thought of as pop fandom, of which Beatlemania was a particularly spectacular example, was an aspect of cinema culture in two respects. First, the idea of the fan, fan clubs, and fan paraphernalia—pinups, gossip, the integration of star marketing and high street fashion—originated in the film industry. 1950s and 1960s teen pop fandom was shaped and serviced similarly. The new pop-oriented teen girl magazines, comic books, pinup posters, and so forth were modelled on film prototypes. For example, in the early 1960s Britain’s longest running film fan magazine, Picturegoer (founded before the First World War) merged with and was, in effect, replaced by one of the many new pop publications, Disc Date.29 Pop stars and pop music were thus constructed and experienced through the same sort of fantasies as film stars and film musicals (with the same sort of references to the American dream). This is obvious in Elvis Presley’s integration of pop and film stardom, for example, and Elvis Monthly, a fan magazine published from 1960, was clearly the model for Beatles Book Monthly, published from 1963. Second, people didn’t go to the cinema only to see the stars perform; they also got to see—and learn—audience behavior (this was the problem of Blackboard Jungle: it showed audiences how to behave badly to rock ’n’ roll). Klaus Nathaus suggests that the so-called hysteria of female pop fans, from fainting to “swoon singers” like Johnnie Ray in the 1950s to Beatlemania in the 1960s, can be understood in terms of Peter Bailey’s account of the knowingness of the music hall audience in the late nineteenth century: In the early 1950s . . . British teenage girls established an equally conspiratorial relationship with their stars and other audience members who demonstrated that they were in the know through their swaying, swooning and screaming. In this case, the relevant knowledge consisted of conventions that had been developed in America at least ten years earlier.30

The Carol Cuffe picture provides persuasive evidence for this argument. In the front row, the girl on the very left, while screaming, looks across the aisle at her peers, while the girl second right looks directly into the camera; in the second row the two girls

182   Simon Frith behind Carol Cuffe look as if they are watching a horror film rather than a pop group! Either way, audience behavior here is of as much performative interest as that of the musicians on stage.31

Into the 1970s The Beatles stopped touring after a ten-date trip in December 1965. This was still a ­package tour, with the Moody Blues, the Paramounts (soon to become Procul Harum), the Marionettes, and three Liverpool acts, the Koobas, Beryl Marsden, and Steve Aldo. But the tour now focused on the biggest venues in the bigger cities; the three cinemas involved were Odeons in Glasgow, Birmingham, and Hammersmith. This marked the end of the Beatles’ live pop performances in Britain; future performances were as a rock group. The same transition can be seen in the Rolling Stones’ career. The group’s first UK tour, on a bill headlined by the Everly Brothers and Bo Diddley, opened on September 29, 1963; the group’s first tour as headliners (in a package including the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, The Yardbirds, Long John Baldry, and Peter Jay and the New Jaywalkers) opened on January 6, 1964.32 The group’s final UK package tour was in late 1966. The Stones were still doing two shows a night but, like the Beatles, by necessity now only played the bigger cities and venues—Odeons in Leeds, Glasgow, and Birmingham, ABCs in Stockton and Ardwick (Manchester), the Southampton Gaumont. The Southampton shows were the last Rolling Stones live performances in Britain until their very different Hyde Park concert on July 5, 1969.33 These final Beatles and Stones shows in 1965 and 1966 marked a turning point in popular music entertainment. The emerging rock culture involved different demographics, sound technologies, financial returns, ideologies, and aesthetics. Pop stars, their ­success measured by the sale of singles, became rock artists, their success measured by the sale (and critical value) of albums, and cinemas became less significant as live music venues, replaced by student unions, stadia, purpose-built clubs and arenas, and the rock festival, which in its early days, at least, was a setting for decidedly disorderly consumption.34 The changing place of the cinema in live music culture can be in traced in local historical documentation. Drawing on Chris Groom, we can take the London borough of Croydon as an example.35 Throughout the 1960s the ABC cinema (restored after a major fire in 1953 and reopened in 1958) was the largest music venue in the town, with a capacity of 2,118 seats (the Fairfield concert hall had a seating capacity of 1500–2000 people), and a significant site of live entertainment, whether the variety show headlined by Tommy Trinder in 1960 or subsequent package pop shows headlined by, for example, Cliff Richard and the Shadows (1962), The Everly Brothers, Billy Fury, and Chris Montez and Tommy Roe with the Beatles(1963), Gerry and the Pacemakers, Bobby Rydell and

The Cinema as a Venue for Live Music in Britain   183 Helen Shapiro, and The Searchers (1964), Cilla Black and PJ Proby, the Bachelors, and the Walker Brothers (1965), Gene Pitney (1966), and Traffic (1967). The latter was one of the last of the youth package tours to visit Croydon (the bill included The Flowerpot Men, the Mindbenders, and Tomorrow featuring Keith West); thereafter the major acts that came to Croydon (usually with just one support) played the Fairfield Halls. In 1971 Croydon ABC did host Deep Purple, with Ashton, Gardner, and Dyke as support act, but the following year it was converted into a three-screen cinema. Renamed Cannon in 1986 and Safari in the late 1990s (it was now an outlet for Bollywood films), it closed in 2004 and was demolished in 2005. This pattern can be found elsewhere. The Birmingham Odeon, for example, ceased to be a live music venue in 1988, when it was converted into a six-screen cinema. The sort of bands I saw there as Sunday Times rock critic in the 1980s now play Birmingham’s O2 Academy (which occupies the site of what was then the Hummingbird and previously a Rank ballroom). The histories of the Croydon ABC and Birmingham Odeon suggest that their importance as live music venues for young people from the 1950s to 1970s marked an interruption to their underlying history as cinemas. Elsewhere, though, youth use of cinemas for musical entertainment was simply an episode in their underlying history as venues of live family entertainment. Of the most important venues for 1960s package shows, the Gaumont Ipswich, for example, opened (in 1929) as a cine-variety hall and only became a Gaumont cinema in 1955. Since 1991 it has been the council-owned Regent Theatre. The Gaumont Southampton, similarly, opened in 1928 as an Empire Theatre (part of the Moss chain) and was a Gaumont cinema only from 1950–86 before reopening as the council-owned Mayflower Theatre in 1987. By contrast, the Ardwick ABC opened as the Apollo Theatre in 1938 and was an ABC cinema from 1943–1977, after which it was operated as a music venue with occasional films, eventually becoming the O2 Manchester Apollo. Whatever the particular histories of particular cinemas, it seems that in general ­cinemas were central to the development of rock ’n’ roll and teen culture but marginal to the development of rock and counter-culture. If in the 1950s and 1960s something new seemed to be happening in cinemas, whether this was reported as riot or hysteria, in retrospect, as Klaus Nathaus suggests, “1950s British youth appears not so much as the harbinger of subsequent subcultures or scenes, but as an inheritor of a declining mass culture that had originated in the late nineteenth century and flourished in the years between the World Wars.”36 From the early 1950s to the late 1960s youth and youth music were thus integrated into mass culture, into what Nathaus describes as “accessible and affordable entertainment for the majority of the people, provided for by national chains and traditional show business impresarios”; in other words, into the commercial, pop world to which rock became “counterculture.” The key term here is “accessible.” Cinemas were important as a setting for youth music because they were accessible to young people of all sorts, they were a familiar setting for working class, female, and provincial leisure. Rock, by contrast, especially in its

184   Simon Frith countercultural forms, was exclusive culturally, defined itself against the mainstream, was music for bohemians, students, males, and metropolitans. In practice, of course, the ideological distinction between pop and rock was messier than this binary description suggests. In his study of online accounts of the live music experience, Paul Long quotes this ­comment on the Birmingham Odeon Memorial Facebook page about a Judas Priest ­concert there in 1981: “I was in the balcony for the gig with my mom & dad . . . in my defence I was 12.” In 1981, then, this cinema was still giving a pre-teenage girl, and her family, access to live music and, indeed, in this case, to live rock music.37 The Birmingham Odeon, as already noted, stopped being a concert venue in 1988, by when the new map of music venues that had begun to be drawn in the 1970s could be applied to Birmingham too.38 Cinemas, nevertheless, continued to have a part to play in rock’s live music economy. The imbalance of the demand and supply of tickets for major rock tours meant that many rock fans were unable to go to see the biggest acts or to get to the most publicized festivals; there was therefore a demand for concert films. Far more people learnt, for example, how a rock festival worked from seeing the film Woodstock (1970) than from being at the original live event, and documentary films of festivals, concerts and performances had a significant role in shaping rock culture in the 1970s. Throughout the decade, for example, ambitious bands produced their own concert films. Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (1972), lifted them “from a well known and successful rock band to megastars”39; David Bowie employed D. A. Pennebaker to make Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars as a historical documentary of the Ziggy show at the Hammersmith Odeon on July 3, 1973, at which he announced the end of his Ziggy persona; Led Zeppelin’s 1976 The Song Remains the Same, using footage from the band’s 1973 performances at the Madison Square Gardens, was, according to its publicity material, “the band’s special way of giving their millions of friends what they had been clamouring for—a personal and private tour of Led Zeppelin. For the first time the world has a front row seat for Led Zeppelin.”40 The role of the cinema here is to give audiences a way of seeing live music that is impossible in an actual stadium concert: everyone can now have a front row seat. In the 1980s video technology reinforced this new relationship between the live and the screened. Writing about Bruce Springsteen’s mid-80s shows, Steve Connor notes that Whereas audiences at the great pop festivals in the ’70s had to make do with the sight of tiny figures performing inconsequentially on a stage nearly half a mile away (“Is that Bob Dylan in a hat?”) and a sound system that worked efficiently only with a following wind, Springsteen’s [Wembley Stadium] appearances made sure that no member of their audience could escape the tiniest nuance of music or voice. Behind him, an enormous video screen projected claustrophobically every detail of his agonized expression. The guarantee of intimacy, Springsteen’s face, was made available in a close-up which at one and the same time abolished and re-emphasised the actual distance between him and his audience.41

Rather than the cinema being a site for seeing live music, rock concerts became a site for watching screens.

The Cinema as a Venue for Live Music in Britain   185

Notes 1. Quoted in Gillian  A.  M.  Mitchell, “Reassessing ‘the Generation Gap’: Bill Haley’s 1957 Tour of Britain, Inter-generational Relations and Attitudes to Rock ’n’ Roll in the Late 1950s,” Twentieth Century British History 24, no. 4 (2013): 573–605: 581. 2. Quoted in Simon Frith, Matt Brennan, Martin Cloonan, and Emma Webster, The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume 1: 1950–1967 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 30. For a nice example of the contrast between a youthful aisle-dancer’s memory of going to see Rock Around the Clock in the Colosseum cinema in Leicester and the local paper’s over-the-top account of the audience’s “rowdiness,” see Stephen Wagg, “Gonna Rock Around the Clock (Tower) Tonight: Leicester and the Coming of ‘the Sixties’, ” in Leicester: A Modern History, ed. Richard Rodger and Rebecca Madgin (Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 2016), 292–311: 299. 3. Frith et al., The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume 1, 30. 4. Attendance data taken from UK Cinema Association website: http://www.cinemauk.org.uk/ the-industry/facts-and-figures/uk-cinema-admissions-and-box-office/annual-admissions/ (accessed December 22, 2017). 5. Frank Bruce, Scottish Showbusiness. Music Hall, Variety and Pantomime (Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, 2000), 127. 6. See Klaus Nathaus, “ ‘All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go’? Spaces and conventions of youth in 1950s Britain,” Geschicte und Gesellschaft 41 (2015): 40–70: 49–51; Stuart Hanson, From Silent Screen to Multi-Screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition Since 1896 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 87–116. 7. Quoted in Allen Eyles, British Gaumont Cinemas (London: BFI/Cinema Theatre Association, 1996), 143. 8. I take the term “cop and pop” from Paulo Hewitt and John Hellier, Steve Marriott: All Too Beautiful (London: Dean Street Press, 2015), 100. 9. Quoted in Nathaus, “ ‘All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go’?,” 50–51. 10. There was also a package show film, Pop Gear (1965), which was primarily designed to promote the British pop “invasion” of the USA (where it was distributed by AIP under the title, Go Go Mania). Hosted by Jimmy Saville and featuring a range of British beat groups lip-synching (plus footage of a Beatles performance), it was marketed as “the new international beat that’s rockin’ the world.” 11. Nathaus, “ ‘All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go’?,” 51. 12. John Firminger and Martin Lilleker, Not Like a Proper Job: The Story of Popular Music in Sheffield 1955–1975 as Told by Those Who Made It (Sheffield: Juma, 2001), 24. 13. Quoted in Steve Turner, Cliff Richard: The Biography (Oxford: Lion, 1993), 94–95. 14. Sergio Pisfil, “Live Sound Research” (University of Edinburgh: unpublished paper, 2017), 3. 15. For the history of Vitavox see http://www.vitavoxhifi.co.uk/about.php?page=heritage (accessed December 22, 2017). 16. Quoted in Frith et al., The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume 1, 173. 17. http://www.wemwatkins.co.uk/history.htm (accessed December 22, 2017). 18. Eyles, British Gaumont Cinemas, 148–49. 19. The best sources of such tour information are local music history websites, which reproduce newspaper advertisements and reports from the time. I took these details from a Bradford site: https://www.bradfordtimeline.co.uk/mindex57a.htm (accessed December 22, 2017). 20. Johnny Rogan, Starmakers and Svengalis (London: Futura, 1989), 42.

186   Simon Frith 21. Frith et al., The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume 1, 188. 22. Information from one of the many Beatle fan sites: http://thebeatles.bizhat.com/tour_ dates.htm (accessed December 22, 2017). 23. Mitchell, “Reassessing ‘the Generation Gap’,” 583. 24. Although at the final date on this, the first Beatlemania tour, at the Gaumont, Southampton, “a steel barrier was erected to keep the fans away from the stage. This was the first time that such drastic measures had been felt necessary.” http://thebeatles.bizhat.com/tour_ dates.htm (accessed December 22, 2017). 25. For an excellent account of the significance of children’s film clubs for working-class ­communities in Belfast in the 1950s, see Sam Manning, “Post-War Cinema-Going and Working-Class Communities: A Case Study of the Holyland, Belfast, 1945–1962,” Cultural and Social History 13, no. 4 (2016): 539–55: 544–45. 26. I take this argument from Martin Barker, Live to Your Local Cinema. The Remarkable Rise of Livecasting (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 31–32. 27. Personal communication from Mark Percival. 28. http://www.itsmuchmore.com/review/take-that-live-from-the-02-arena-cinema-feed (accessed December 22, 2017). 29. See Frith et al., The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume 1, 128–30. 30. Nathaus, “ ‘All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go’?,” 66. 31. Thanks to Klaus Nathaus for this reading. 32. Frith et al., The History of Live Music in Britain, 200. 33. Roy Carr, The Rolling Stones. An Illustrated Record (London: New English Library, 1976). 34. Frith et al., The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume 1, 192–94. 35. Chris Groom, Rockin’ and around Croydon (Purley: Wombeat, 1998). 36. Nathaus, “ ‘All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go’?,” 70. 37. Paul Long, “Warts and All: Recording the Live Music Experience,” in Coughing and Clapping: Investigating Audience Experience, ed. Karen Burland and Stephanie Pitts (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 147–58: 150. 38. The Birmingham Odeon was one of the cinemas used in 2003 for the streamed Bowie concert that launched Reality. It was chosen because of its historical importance as a rock venue. 39. Matthews, Simon, Psychedelic Celluloid. British Pop Music in Film and TV, 1965–1974 (Harpenden: Oldcastle Books, 2016), 169. 40. For a detailed account of rock and cinema in the 1970s, see Simon Frith, Matt Brennan, Martin Cloonan, and Emma Webster, The History of Live Music in Britain since 1950. Volume 2 1968–1985 (Routledge: London and New York, 2019), ch. 8. 41. Steve Connor, “The Flag on the Road: Bruce Springsteen and the Live,” New Formations 3 (1987): 129–37: 131.

Select Bibliography Barker, Martin. Live to Your Local Cinema. The Remarkable Rise of Livecasting. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Bruce, Frank. Scottish Showbusiness. Music Hall, Variety and Pantomime. Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, 2000. Connor, Steve. “The Flag on the Road: Bruce Springsteen and the Live.” New Formations 3 (1987): 129–37. Eyles, Allen. British Gaumont Cinemas. London: BFI/Cinema Theatre Association, 1996.

The Cinema as a Venue for Live Music in Britain   187 Frith, Simon, with Matt Brennan, Martin Cloonan, and Emma Webster. The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume 1: 1950–1967. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Frith, Simon, with Matt Brennan, Martin Cloonan, and Emma Webster. The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume 2: 1968–1985. Routledge: London and New York, 2019. Groom, Chris. Rockin’ and around Croydon. Purley: Wombeat, 1998. Hanson, Stuart. From Silent Screen to Multi-Screen: A History of Cinema Exhibition Since 1896. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Long, Paul, “Warts and All: Recording the Live Music Experience.” In Coughing and Clapping: Investigating Audience Experience, ed. Karen Burland and Stephanie Pitts, 147–58. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Manning, Sam. “Post-War Cinema-Going and Working-Class Communities: A Case Study of the Holyland, Belfast, 1945–1962.” Cultural and Social History 13, no. 4 (2016): 539–55. Matthews, Simon. Psychedelic Celluloid. British Pop Music in Film and TV, 1965–1974. Harpenden: Oldcastle Books, 2016. Mitchell, Gillian A. M. “Reassessing ‘the Generation Gap’: Bill Haley’s 1957 Tour of Britain, Inter-generational Relations and Attitudes to Rock ’n’ Roll in the Late 1950s.” Twentieth Century British History 24, no. 4 (2013): 573–605. Nathaus, Klaus. “ ‘All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go’? Spaces and Conventions of Youth in 1950s Britain.” Geschicte und Gesellschaft 41 (2015), 40–70. Pisfil, Sergio. “Live Sound Research.” University of Edinburgh: unpublished paper, 2017). Rogan, Johnny. Starmakers and Svengalis. London: Futura, 1989. Turner, Steve. Cliff Richard: The Biography. Oxford: Lion, 1993. Wagg, Stephen. “Gonna Rock Around the Clock (Tower) Tonight: Leicester and the Coming of ‘the Sixties’, ” in Leicester: A Modern History, ed. Richard Rodger and Rebecca Madgin, 292–311. Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 2016.

Chapter 9

Ou t of th e Fr a m e Live-Score Film Screenings and the Cinematic Experience Jeremy Barham

Introduction: Live-Score Practice Live-score film screenings have become increasingly prevalent in recent years, especially in the Anglo-American environment.1 The advocacy of production companies such as CineConcerts, Film Concerts Live,2 and groups such as the former LFO (Live Film Orchestra)—whose approach seems to have been latterly co-opted by several leading mainstream orchestras and concert venues—suggests and has fostered a vibrant current market for, and perhaps belief in the aesthetic value of, types of sound spectacle that tap into the audiovisual pyrotechnics and undoubted commercial viability of the live pop/rock-concert aesthetic. This trend has also perhaps developed in partial response to the threat posed by illegal internet streaming of film in the same way that the music industry responded at the turn of the millennium to digital file-sharing’s undermining of record sales, by promoting live performance.3 Prior to the digital era, however, a significant early precedent for the practice, considered bizarre by some at the time, came with the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 1987 performance of Alexander Nevsky at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with André Previn conducting Prokofiev’s score live to picture.4 This event, which sparked a series of repeat performances across the United States and in England and Italy through to the early 1990s, was primarily intended by its producer John Goberman to provide a corrective to the poor quality of the original film’s mixing and cutting of Prokofiev’s music, which was of low fidelity and contained ineffective loopings of material and surprisingly thoughtless splicings of it into musical non sequiturs: The premise was that the recorded track unfairly represents Eisenstein’s intent and that by making audible the full richness of Prokofiev’s music, the live performance uncovers a truer dynamic balance between music and image. The historical warrant was that

Live-Score Film Screenings   189 neither Eisenstein nor Prokofiev could have actually approved the recorded track and that only political pressures prevented them from expressing themselves publicly.5

Although no such technical or political considerations are evident in latter-day ­examples, the idea of exploring a “truer dynamic balance between music and image” raises interesting aesthetic and philosophical questions about contemporary practice. In recent years the audiovisual sensationalism of live-score film screenings seems to have become the overriding concern. Films given such treatment in venues such as London’s Royal Albert Hall, Barbican Centre, and Southbank Centre, New York’s Lincoln Center, Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium, and numerous other theatres across the world, have become generically diverse (see Table 9.1). In 2015, for example, the Royal Albert Hall hosted live-score screenings of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Titanic, Gladiator, Interstellar, Back to the Future, Ratatouille, The Godfather, and Alice in Wonderland (see Figure 9.1 for a promotional image for these performances, typically emphasizing the scale, instrumental forces, and live performativity of the screenings), as well as the compilation Star Trek: the Ultimate Voyage, billed as “Five decades of Star Trek com[ing] together for the first time in this Galaxy or any other with live orchestra.” In the same year, the Lincoln Center in New York showed The Godfather and On the Waterfront, as well as staging The Lord of the Rings trilogy with “250 MUSICIANS ONSTAGE BENEATH A GIANT SCREEN”; and in 2019 Rudy was screened at the Microsoft Theatre in Los Angeles (see Figure 9.2, which shows not only the orchestral and choral forces assembled on stage but also the substantial array of playback speakers deployed to enhance the live sound). Indeed, at the time of writing, the programming of similar events suggests no diminishment in the appetite for such experiences (for example, the September 2019 issue of Sight & Sound contains a full-page advertisement for the forthcoming ­season of live-score screenings at the Royal Albert Hall entitled “Films in Concert”), and the following theoretical and aesthetic discussion of the live-film-score phenomenon should be seen in the light of the growing establishment of the practice within contemporary cultural economies.

Live-score Performance, the “Real,” and Theories of Representation In a recent chapter on the aesthetics of screen music, I allowed myself a brief riff on Slavoj Žižek’s 1990s idea of film sound as the “ ‘aquarium’ of the real surrounding isolated islands of the [visual] symbolic”: . . . in the silent film era the presence of live musical accompaniment, coupled with that musical repertoire’s denotational-connotational malleability, had already both wedded the fictional with the real, and at the same time highlighted their

Table 9.1  Selective list of live-score film screenings in Europe and the United States since 2014 Casablanca

1942

dir. Michael Curtiz, mus. Max Steiner https://www.ludwig-van.com/toronto/event/toronto-symphony-orchestra-casablanca-film-live-orchestra/2019-02-15/

Henry V

1944

dir. Laurence Olivier, mus. William Walton https://www.philharmonia.co.uk/concerts/2494/henry_v_live_screening

Brief Encounter

1945

dir. David Lean, mus. mainly Sergei Rachmaninov https://www.rsno.org.uk/brief-encounter-with-live-orchestra/

On the Waterfront

1954

Dir. Elia Kazan, mus. Leonard Bernstein https://www.liverpoolphil.com/whats-on/classical-music/on-the-waterfront-film-with-live-orchestra/2906

Vertigo

1958

dir. Alfred Hitchcock, mus. Bernard Herrmann https://upstatefilms.org/alfred-hitchcocks-vertigo-live-at-the-fisher-center

Psycho

1960

dir. Alfred Hitchcock, mus. Bernard Herrmann https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/114251-psycho-2017

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

1961

dir. Blake Edwards, mus. Henry Mancini https://www.cineconcerts.com/breakfast-at-tiffanys-in-concert

2001: A Space Odyssey

1968

dir. Stanley Kubrick, mus. Richard Strauss, György Ligeti, Johann Strauss II, Aram Khachaturian https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/123439-2001-space-odyssey-live-2018

The Godfather

1972

dir. Francis Ford Coppola, mus. Nino Rota https://www.cineconcerts.com/the-godfather-live

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

1982

dir. Steven Spielberg, mus. John Williams https://filmconcertslive.com/movies/e-t-extra-terrestrial/

Back to the Future

1985

dir. Robert Zemeckis, mus. Alan Silvestri https://filmconcertslive.com/movies/back-to-the-future/

Home Alone

1990

dir. Chris Columbus, mus. John Williams https://filmconcertslive.com/movies/home-alone/

Rudy

1993

Dir. David Anspaugh, mus. Jerry Goldsmith https://www.rudyinconcert.com/

Titanic

1997

dir. James Cameron, mus. James Horner https://titanic-live.com/

Gladiator

2000

dir. Ridley Scott, mus. Hans Zimmer/Lisa Gerrard https://www.royalalberthall.com/tickets/events/2018/gladiator-live-in-concert-2018/

The Lord of the Rings trilogy

2001–3

dir. Peter Jackson, mus. Howard Shore http://lordoftheringsinconcert.com/

The Triplets of Belleville

2003

dir. Sylvain Chomet, mus. Benoît Charest https://news.wsu.edu/2018/04/11/animated-film-triplets-belleville/

Ratatouille

2007

dir. Brad Bird & Jan Pinkava, mus. Michael Giacchino https://www.royalalberthall.com/about-the-hall/news/2015/august/ experience-your-first-orchestra-at-ratatouille-live-in-concert/

There Will be Blood

2007

dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, mus. Jonny Greenwood https://nyphil.org/concerts-tickets/1819/art-of-the-score-there-will-be-blood-live

Star Trek

2009

dir. J. J. Abrams, mus. Michael Giacchino https://www.rpo.co.uk/whats-on/eventdetail/1050/-/star-trek-in-concert

Alice in Wonderland

2010

dir. Tim Burton, mus. Danny Elfman https://www.royalalberthall.com/tickets/events/2015/ disney-in-concert-alice-in-wonderland-featuring-the-music-of-danny-elfman-2015/

Beasts of the Southern Wild

2012

dir. Benh Zeitlin, mus. Dan Romer/Benh Zeitlin https://www.get-offline.com/inspiration/see-a-beasts-of-the-southern-wild-with-a-live-orchestra

Star Trek into Darkness

2013

dir. J. J. Abrams, mus. Michael Giacchino https://www.minnesotaorchestra.org/buy/tickets/browse-calendar/eventdetail/1215/-/star-trek-into-darkness

Under the Skin

2013

dir. Jonathan Glazer, mus. Mica Levi https://www.londonsinfonietta.org.uk/whats-on/mica-levi-under-skin

Interstellar

2014

dir. Christopher Nolan, mus. Hans Zimmer https://www.royalalberthall.com/about-the-hall/news/2015/march/ the-stars-turn-out-for-the-world-premiere-of-interstellar-live/

192   Jeremy Barham

Figure 9.1  Promotion of live-score screenings at London’s Royal Albert Hall, 2015.

Live-Score Film Screenings   193

Figure 9.2  Screening of Rudy with live score in 2019 at the Microsoft Theater, Los Angeles. Reproduced by kind permission of CineConcerts/Timothy Norris.

ontological separation: the “real” of the “unreal” screen images is less accessible than the “unreal” of the “real” music.6

The present study consists of fleshing out this incipient formulation in a more precise philosophical consideration of the recently revived and increasingly widespread practice of performing live scores to sound films just described. For though the everyday experience of such screenings may be superficially unproblematic, they nevertheless raise some profound theoretical questions about the nature of filmic diegeses, representation, illusions of the real, and the concept of liveness. My description of the screen image in this comment (and I was referring only to mainstream narrative film) indicates its typical presentation of recognizably “real” events that are nonetheless mediated as fiction through the film apparatus, and hence are “unreal” and lack live presence. In an echo of Hugo Münsterberg’s text on the “photoplay” from a century ago, in which music is described as an art “further removed from the reality we know than any other artistic creation,” and yet which “arouse[s] in us the deepest emotions,”7 by “unreal” I suggest music’s lack of concrete referential or denotative ability as an art form, and by “real” nevertheless affirm both its reliance in film contexts on strongly embedded and effective conventions, and its live presence in silent film. By “less accessible” I allude to the paradox that powerfully affecting, if ultimately semantically indefinite, musical gestures can in many ways and on different levels be more communicative, more narratively “informative” than mute, but figurative and

194   Jeremy Barham apparently denotational images, especially in the absence of the spoken word and ­ambient sound. Conflating “fictional” with “unreal,” “realness” with denotation and liveness, and “unrealness” with connotation and non-liveness, is of course problematic, and this is partly the point I wish to make here.8 In the first place, connotation and mediated images may have real implications for recipients however oblique the former may be and however dissimilar the latter are from reality, just as denotation and liveness may be unconvincing, implausible, and uninvolving regardless of their closeness to reality. Both can appear realist, non-realist, realistic, or unrealistic, thus introducing further terminological and conceptual complications into the argument. This is because realism invokes a different, wider historical discourse and as a cultural practice may also involve the presumed projection of illusions of the real, and illusion theories of film’s ontology, along with those addressing its very nature as representational, have been exhaustively and hotly contested.9 Degrees of film’s realist credentials are but one of many considerations here, and it should be noted that neither realism (as a broader aesthetic or movement) nor realisticness (as a basic quality of representational fidelity to the real world) are necessary conditions for either creating (narratively or otherwise) or perceiving and understanding filmic diegeses, which can exist effectively with only minimal filmic materials, as Noel Burch long ago noted.10 Similarly it is important not to confuse realism of approach with intensity of experienced dramatic effect, as George Burt appears to do: “While I can think of scenes in which music would have detracted from the realistic flavor of a sequence, I can also recall innumerable moments that have been made more real—certainly more dramatic—because music was involved.”11 Here two meanings of “real” are conflated, the first relating to the degree of verisimilitudinous correspondence between what and how things are (re)presented on screen and what and how things happen in the real world (what Gregory Currie terms “perceptual realism”),12 while the second relates to the degree of cognitive and emotional persuasiveness of what is shown on screen as felt in the minds of viewers—the more impactful, the more apparently “real” the sense of psychological response, impression or involvement, regardless of verisimilitudinous correspondence. In the present context I am interested in the philosophical implications of live-score performance for the notions of diegesis, representation, and illusion in film, since ostensibly this is a practice that indeed threatens to consign much of the realism debate to history, and to operate against any lingering ideas of “unheard melodies” or the “invisible art of film music.”13 More than that, the practice appears to render problematic Richard Rushton’s debunking of political modernism’s logic of representation in film studies,14 as well as to cloud somewhat the musically integrated, inclusive diegetic model championed by Ben Winters.15 To begin with, what significance does live-score practice have for longer-established theoretical positions subscribing to what Richard Rushton would call an (albeit misguided) politically modernist logic of film as representational art form?16 While all representations might be said to “posit an absent original event” whether historically actual or fictional, unstaged, staged, or partly staged,17 film’s production and reception history

Live-Score Film Screenings   195 have been characterized by an increasing technical sophistication whose effect, ironically, has been to mask the representational process and to favor an enlivened, posited event as presented diegesis, seemingly regardless of how unrealistic, fantastic, and outlandish that represented event might be. As in popular music production, film has balanced differently in its history the audiovisual documenting and constructing of a prior event. When constructing (what Michel Chion calls “rendering”)18 significantly begins to outweigh documenting through the employment of highly sophisticated production and post-production techniques, the result may seem perceptually more “real” but, because it is “obtained most often from something besides a high-fidelity recording of the real cause” that “feels true” though it has “nothing to do with what is true,”19 philosophically the idea of a posited original event is eroded such that instances of actual liveness may assume a privileged position beyond or outside representation. In this vein, elaborating Steve Wurtzler’s formulation,20 live-score performance to picture would straddle the divides of temporal and spatial alignment with the viewing subject, simultaneously occupying opposing categories (see Figure  9.3).21 Although Wurtzler refers to those forms of communicative media in groups I and IV as “representational dominants” because of the unified nature of their posited events (either wholly present or wholly absent), he also acknowledges, in ways that anticipate Philip Auslander’s work, the “often-tenuous maintenance of [the live/recorded] binary opposition” and the problematizing of it (along with binaries of “event/representation” and “original/copy”) by those forms in groups II and III.22 Live-score film screenings hybridize these historical categories yet further since within the same medium live music is spatially co-present and temporally simultaneous, but image and remaining audio are spatially absent and temporally anterior. Furthermore, live orchestral performance provides its own significant visual content that proceeds before the audience, for the most part in intentionally patent manner (though degrees of spectatorial focus may well vary widely), and forms a primary part of the marketing strategy for such events. This activity of additional live “seeing” is difficult to align with established concepts Spatial co-presence Temporal Simultaneity

Temporal Anteriority

PARTIAL LIVE AUDIO (I)

(III)

Spatial absence

live score to picture

(II)

PARTIALLY RECORDED AUDIO; FULLY RECORDED IMAGE (IV)

Figure 9.3  Relation of spectator-auditors to the “event” posited by representation. (Adapted from Wurtzler, “ ‘She Sang Live, But the Microphone Was Turned Off ’.”) I: public address, vaudeville, theatre, concert; II: telephone, “live” radio, “live” television [to which can now be added internet streaming, webcam, remote music-making such as virtual choirs]; III: lip synching, Diamondvision stadium replays [to which can now be added karaoke, in part]; IV: motion ­pictures, recorded radio and television [to which can now be added internet video].

196   Jeremy Barham of  sound film diegesis, but rather recalls the more obviously compartmentalized multi-medial framework of silent film. Indeed, for Wurtzler, the pre-sound era similarly disrupted centered subject positions, creating an imbalance of representational acts favored over the posited event that was only “rectified,” as it were, on the arrival of synchronized sound when sound and image were reunited in their spatial and temporal location.23 But this came at a cost. Removing all live sound meant conversely that in the constructed recording of more unified posited event (or fictional pseudo-event), sound as well as image retreated to a state of spatial absence and temporal anteriority, even though we might agree with Jerrold Levinson that in sound film “one imagines the sight of these happenings to be brought to one in ‘real time’ (rather than via a recording made in the past).”24 But in terms of music, if the presence of so-called “non-diegetic” underscore “specif[ied] a subject position different from that of the synchronous recording of voices,” undermining that subject position’s stability and disturbing film’s “ability to posit an original event that precedes representation,”25 then with live-score performance, not only is there no longer a unified posited event prior to representation, but also the ­performance itself foregrounds all the more deliberately the multiple nature of its textuality and technological (re-)production. A dislocating gap would appear to open up between the constructed film world and the manner of its presentation, in which what usually is numinously abstract and embedded now becomes concretely present and physically separated. This potentially educes a necessarily greater degree of—or at least a differently configured—“imaginary puissance” on the part of recipients, faced on the one hand with potentially disunified and unstable signifying strategies and points of audition, and on the other hand with a visceral closing of the gap between voice, body, and sound source that enhances the sense of unfolding “liveness.” A further complication attached to this scenario is that at most screenings the “live” (usually orchestral) music is likely to be subject to a degree of amplification and real-time sonic re-processing in an attempt, with remarkable circularity of purpose, to emulate the enhanced-reality experience of current cinematic sound. Theoretically this could even include the possibility of real-time deployment of Dolby surround sound, given an appropriate speaker arrangement. Because most of these screenings happen in concert halls and not cinemas, usually some kind of PA system (including huge line arrays for more lavish events) is used for subtle sound reinforcements and for relaying the synthesized and sound-design elements common in contemporary film music.26 We are left with the conundrum that untreated live music in such screenings can seem an impoverished version of that which is reprocessed by contemporary audio projection and replay technology. The question arises as to whether, in the latter case, the faux-live sound is compensated for by the novel visual presence of large, conducted orchestra in the maintaining of the desired “sensational” effect. Cynics might say that these are thin grounds indeed on which to sustain such an effect, all of which is at risk of lapsing into mere ­gimmickry, rather than aspiring towards some latter-day profound philosophical rehabilitation of, and rapprochement with what Walter Benjamin describes as “the uniqueness of every reality” which the contemporary “masses” were all-too keenly disposed to overcome “by accepting its reproduction.”27

Live-Score Film Screenings   197 Theories of film as representational of prior events whether fictional or actual already have an inherent problem with music as “underscore” (or “non-diegetic” music) since for them, too direct and unmediated a form of expression to be anything other than, as Gilles Deleuze writes, “abstract and autonomous,”28 such music, as David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson assert, has “no relation to the space of the story,”29 and “no time or space of origin, no event or source” prior to representation, according to Wurtzler.30 The problem identified in this theoretical context is compounded in the case of live-score screenings. At, for example, concerts and sporting events the displacement of the live at the hands of hyper-real cinematic and TV representation becomes blurred by huge video screens, through their “inscription into the ‘real’ of its representation.”31 By contrast, in a different kind of codal dichotomy live-score performance inscribes into the representation its “real.” But it is the liveness/realness of something that not only is ­probably technologically mediated or processed but also, according to representational theory, is undetermined and does not occupy a legitimate place in the diegesis in the first place. Live scores compensate for the absent “real” such theories identify at the heart of cinematic production, and fulfil the desire for “presence” suggested by Mary Ann Doane.32 But this comes at the expense first of answering the modernist “ideological ‘need’ for positing a centered subject and event existing prior to its representation”33— something that pre-sound cinema by nature also resisted—and second of answering the need to promote the “impression of a homogeneous [sound] space.”34 Perhaps, like early reservations about the effect of surround sound, live scores all the more “diminish the epistemological power of the image,” countering the long-held idea that all sounds must unambiguously appear as if they emanate from the screen.35 The location of speakers used for projection (and any real-time enhancement) of the live sound at such screenings becomes crucially important in this regard. Such a position is dependent, of course, on first maintaining that the live and the recorded are sufficiently mutually distinct classes of utterance, and then subscribing to a fetishizing of the former that is widely shared in commercial and individual artistic contexts.36

Live-score Performance and Theories of Illusion If the cinema, as Doane suggests, is a “series of spaces . . . often hierarchized or masked . . . in the service of a representational illusion,”37 what significance does live-score performance have for illusion theories of film? Ostensibly, such theories (which typically say little about sound and even less about music) are predicated on perceptual and/or cognitive belief that something which is not the case, is the case, for surely an illusion is only an illusion if this is so. Though paradoxically illusions therefore peddle in supposed realities, we may either believe these realities to be true or their irresistible effects, even if outlandish, persist despite us knowing they are not true (in which case it would be better

198   Jeremy Barham perhaps to label them “unavoidable impressions,” since cognitive awareness that ­something is an illusion cannot be reconciled with the perceptual effect of the illusion). The idea of film as representing reality or illusions of reality depends on a variety of mental states pertaining among recipients ranging from total belief, through a more knowing suspension of disbelief built on learned, unspoken acceptance of media conventions, to a completely conscious make-belief. But opponents of the theory have questioned the need for any such belief when experiencing films, in part because representing reality through illusion is not what film does, and in part because, despite all its technological apparatus, cinema’s capacity for genuine perceptual or cognitive illusion is quite poor compared with that of, for example, trompe l’oeil or other classic optical deceptions such as Kanizsa’s Triangle. Noël Carroll famously claims that “[t]he realist approach to film theory, either as an ontological thesis or in its more contemporary, psychologized variations, is a dead end.”38 From a light-hearted industry perspective Randy Thom suggests that “if feature films were about depicting reality, the average actor wouldn’t be better looking than the average person on the street. It’s all about . . . playing fast and loose with reality.”39 In other words, illusion theories of film are mistaken because they are built on a credibility that is itself rooted in supposed depictions of reality which are in fact nothing of the sort. For Murray Smith, contrary to what illusion theorists claim, the “ontology of the cinema” does not “override the epistemology of fiction.”40 We engage with, even participate in, filmic fiction according to its “known rules and roles” but are not “duped” by it;41 and this happens through “attention, imagination, perception, and sensation” rather than belief (whether mistaken or playful).42 At first sight it would seem that, if this rejection of illusion theory is accepted, then all that live film scores do is confirm even more obviously that what we are experiencing is a constructed fiction. However, the value (aesthetic, emotional or intellectual) of the cinematic experience is not dependent on, and does not necessarily lie in, any purported fiction-status of what is being screened and whether or not we are cognizant of that status: neither do we have to believe that something is true or real, nor does it have to be true or real, for it to have real meaning for us.43 That said, it is the case that in a cinematic screening (of anything from mainstream narrative film to abstract experimental film) we actually see and hear a (re)presented filmic diegesis of some sort. Whether an underscore is believed to be internal or external to this diegesis, and whether this diegesis is taken to inhere in an overarching “virtual space,” the “visible space of the screen,” the “acoustical space of the theater or auditorium,”44 or some combination of all three, the unambiguous physical materialization of the score’s medium in the form of a ca.150-piece orchestra present before the screen and therefore outside its frame and subject to the vagaries, however small, of live performance, is bound to impinge on states of perception of what is represented, if not also on the belief states of illusion theory in relation to what is represented. As Peter Kivy proposes, albeit somewhat unreflectively, in his comparison of live theatre with film: “being in the real presence of the speaker . . . provides a more intimate expressive connection and more subtle expressive cues than can be got in the movies, isolated in darkness, from a talking image.”45 Although Philip Auslander for one would disagree about the valorizing of presence in performance,46 nevertheless

Live-Score Film Screenings   199 thinking along these lines about music, live scores certainly reinforce the validity of the third of these putative filmic diegetic spaces at the expense of the first two, and potentially move significantly beyond those “highly codified and conventionalized” moments in classical cinema through which audiences are “quite commonly made aware of film music as part of the cinematic experience” but which, according to Jeff Smith, “neither disrupt nor weaken the cinematic illusion.”47 On the cusp of the sound era in 1929 René Clair lamented that audiences of sound films came out of the theatre humming tunes and that, in contrast to the effect of silent film, they “had not lost their sense of reality.”48 Latter-day live scores to sound pictures seem both to reinscribe the “real” into the cinematic space, whilst also recreating the “fantasy space” of the operatic orchestra pit that was so crucial to pre-sound film (as recently discussed by James Buhler and David Neumeyer).49 Such scores reintroduce the “performing body” that had been denied by sound film, arguably “restor[ing] this music to perceptual integrity and sensory vividness” as Kramer describes live music in general,50 and reinstating what traditionally would be seen as live music’s privileged ­evanescence—and this accords with the marketing strategies put in place for these screenings, which often highlight the visceral, emotive, fleeting, and collective value of experiencing the moment.51 At the same time, perversely in view of the emphasis on instrumental spectacle, considerable technological efforts are made to reunite and fuse the music again with image and remaining sound, to reclaim for it its prior virtual arena (through, for example, sonic enhancement and inevitable commercial repeatability),52 not unlike a Wagnerian operatic aesthetic that strives to suppress all visible signs of orchestral presence. Counterintuitively traditional underscore aspires to presence, live score aspires to absence. This tension invokes, albeit in a different mode and with greater technological prowess, the uncertainty of sound placement characteristic of early synchronized film—sound which according to Buhler and Neumeyer neither belonged “fully to the diegetic screen world nor to the theater.”53 As such, one may wonder first if live scores serve as a denial of the frame as a limit—extending that “denial” exhibited by surround sound—only to become an affirmation of the larger cinematic space as a limit; and secondly to what degree such scores exchange anything of the enigmatic authority of the disembodied for the prosaic complicity of the demystified. After all, as Doane says of the omniscient off-screen voiceover commentary that speaks directly to the audience, “the guarantee of knowledge, in such a system, lies in its irreducibility to the spatiotemporal limitations of the body.”54 The corporeal nature of live score’s presence makes at least some trade-off between spectacularly pervading the delineated parameters of a real enlarged space and aesthetically depleting the unfathomableness of virtual space, between immediately sensationalist and enigmatically acousmatic forms of power. Michel Chion persists in calling non-diegetic music “pit music,”55 a figurative term that nevertheless conjures up earlier theatrical forms. Like all non-diegetic sound, it is inherently acousmatic (its source remains unidentified, if not unidentifiable). It may be a different order of the acousmatic, but for Chion the materializing of acousmatic sound’s origin, its de-acousmatization, is a reifying loss, a disempowering process, almost a sacred fall from grace from something that was mystically unified and whole to

200   Jeremy Barham something that becomes irreparably split and broken.56 By visibly conjoining sound with source, and placing that source beyond the virtual diegetic space and outside the film frame between screen and audience, live scores potentially nullify the premises of illusion theory. They also intensify or at least confuse further the “approximate [and] relational” subject positions generated by surround-sound-capable conventions in Hollywood audio practice which are built on a variety of unrealistic subjective listening perspectives in relation to a represented auditory space, just as continuity editing creates visual understanding of a scene by shifting the viewer improbably from one camera angle to the next.57 Moreover, live scores participate first in new media’s contemporary destabilization of the very idea of diegesis (in the sense of a constructed, narratively presented world) claimed by John Richardson and Claudia Gorbman, and in the yielding of diegesis to “sensory experience” as “primary organizing principle of audiovisual forms” suggested by Anahid Kassabian.58 Second, they participate in a modern-day re-working of the kind of spontaneous “disconnect between the visual source of sound on the screen and the sound experienced in the cinematic viewing space” that was common in the pre-sound era. In the process they once again raise the question asked by Kathryn Kalinak of “whether film’s future might lie in its past”59—that is, in a denial of the unchanging mechanically reproductive process and hence in a resistance to certain perceived levels of industrial commodification.60 Reversing Auslander’s formulation,61 such film screenings challenge the “sensory norm” of the age and surrender a substantial measure of their mediatized nature to liveness. From the illusion-theory point of view, live scores diminish the validity of the aesthetic partly by compromising the nature of filmic diegesis and rendering film’s potential ­illusoriness unsustainable. From the point of view of film’s hyper- or non-realism and the dramaturgy of its presentation, live scores appear to have the capacity to enhance the aesthetic through being part of purveying such a multi-faceted diegesis, and through foregrounding the artifice of the apparatus in a heightened theatricality akin to the music-plus-spoken-dialogue combination of stage melodrama in a way that suits ­current-day preferences for, and acclimatization to, all manner of mixed-media and remediated phenomena. Where might lie the end point of this dialectical tension between reality and hyper-/non-reality, and where might live scores’ place be within it? To pick up a thread from the previous section of this chapter: if, as Rushton believes,62 films transcend all theoretical distinctions between illusion and reality by creating reality entirely on its own terms (filmic reality) without a representational relationship with any prior real-world reality, then it becomes difficult to argue any coherent position on live-score film music ontology at all. However, it is one thing for Rushton to say that “films are part of reality . . . part of the reality we typically inhabit,” a statement which seems so self-evident as not to need saying.63 It is quite another for him to deny that “the diegetic worlds of films are a step removed from ‘real world reality’, ”64 a suggestion which seems strangely reminiscent of the modernist “utopian dream of a time of pure presence, a space beyond representation.”65 If it is indeed the case, care of Kassabian through Baudrillard, that “our sense of the primacy of the division between story world and real world is beginning to fade . . . [o]r . . . has been fading for some time,”66 then we

Live-Score Film Screenings   201 would perhaps be perilously close to reaching the final stage of dialectical collapse between the “real” and the “constructed” or “represented” that I described in my earlier study, cited at the beginning of this chapter, with reference to Žižek. This would signal at least the end of the notion of diegesis, and perhaps finally dissolve any sense of there being boundaries to created art works, leaving us to float in an undifferentiated “aquarium of the real” with no means of orientation: The soundtrack gives us the basic perspective, the “map” of the situation, and guarantees its continuity, while the images are reduced to isolated fragments that float freely in the universal medium of the sound aquarium. It would be difficult to invent a better metaphor for psychosis . . . we have here the “aquarium” of the real surrounding isolated islands of the symbolic.67 In current hyper-mediatized . . . environments, either by choice or imposition, ­non-musical portions of human existence are becoming gradually scarcer. Whether this is a symptom of the final psychotic, dialectical collapse (between screen worlds and real worlds) or whether it is just another case of life imitating art for all our ­collective enrichment, remains to be seen and heard.68

Conclusions Whilst we may not have travelled this far, live scores certainly toy with blending categories of story world and real world and with short-circuiting film’s mediated nature, by allowing part of a film’s sound to traverse a cinematic fourth wall (in as much as there can be said to be one) and to attain an obvious, real-world point of audition, as if the film now “knows” that it is musical or has music. This is something that may well lend ­further support to Edgar Morin’s view of cinema (recently revived and discussed by Ben Winters) as “the dialectical unity of the real and the unreal.”69 But instead of the unreality of music “illuminat[ing] cinema as if from inside,”70 it now destabilizes the dialectic from an exterior position.71 In one sense this mitigates first against audiences “disavowing the apparatus”72 in order to experience and directly identify with the diegesis, since a barrier to absorption in the “ ‘invisibly’ edited film”73 and to what Richard Allen calls “projective illusion” and Levinson the “Participation Thesis” seems to have been set up.74 This incites more frequent focal, rather than the usual subsidiary, attention to a score that now self-reflexively foregrounds conventions which historically had been embedded and concealed.75 And it mitigates second against the notion of a holistic diegesis that integrates underscore into its virtual space so as to exist on the same categorical, narrative, and perceptual plane as other audiovisual elements. Instead, live scores invert typical production scenarios, playing with hierarchies of temporal and spatial alignment with the audience in the service of a result that, at one end of the interpretative spectrum, might be said merely to recreate for audiences the extruded mechanics ­old-school studio production sessions in which score was attached to picture (film art’s equivalent of the expressed structural exteriors of some postmodern architecture

202   Jeremy Barham perhaps). At a more interesting level, such performances allow live music from its foregrounded vantage point to pose as pre-assimilated intradiegetic music (to borrow Ben Winters’s term):76 mimesis (embodied showing) masquerading as diegesis (narrative telling) in the Aristotelian sense. This is both a separating-out of music’s semantically more indeterminate “unreality” from more clearly legible ambient sound, and yet at the same time an injecting of the cinematic space with a large dose of the conflicting “reality” of music’s live presence. The live score may replace “hyper-real” sound with more “real” sound (depending on audio replay quality, as discussed above) but it simultaneously heightens implausibility by the mere presence of its physical source. A Deleuzian reading might welcome this expulsion of music as film’s “foreign body,” but the music’s “autonomous, special power” that “presents or fills the absolute” in cinema’s “immense ‘internal monologue’ ”77 suggests that an aesthetic and representational tangle underpins such conflicted bodily manifestations of the subliminal musical sublime.78 In a more constructive sense, however, live scores reinforce the idea that audiences are at a performance, a dynamic concert with moving images, a dramatic presentation, part of whose fictional and representational apparatus is exiled from its virtual and acousmatic origins, to impinge directly and palpably on their world as spatially co-present as well as temporally simultaneous. This is no longer the illusory presence so strenuously sought by projective illusions attempting to overcome cinema’s “two removes from emotive reality” as “an image of a pretense,”79 but the actual presence of something (the underscore’s performance medium) that trades its even greater lack of narrative or diegetic justification for an intense sensorial and sensational effect that ultimately in its own way may be just as powerfully persuasive as its differently configured acousmatic counterpart. Indeed the result is an event, the recognition of whose more obvious representational strategies would likely be seen by Currie as all the more “productive.”80 It is an event that is all the more “musicalized” due to its actual recourse to a liveness (rather than just a simulated recourse to diegetic codes of liveness) that is enhanced by partnering with its defining other of technological reproduction,81 and which has at least some of the qualities of a freshly presented scenario unfolding or being enacted before, rather than being solely mechanically reproduced and recounted to, an audience—simultaneously giving the “presence” coveted by projective illusion and taking away the sense of the plausible “real” that is the raison d’être of such illusions. Physically separated and its medium made visible, the “fractious nature” of live music in an otherwise mediated ­context—contra Auslander for whom liveness “reassert[s] the unbridgeable distinction between audience and performance” and thereby acts as a bar to the “promise of unity” and “community”82—may in fact because of this very aesthetic friction become more intensely implicated in filmic expression. Again contra Auslander who reduces “presence” to a matter of mere social cachet,83 music does this through the weight of that presence, through its “drastic” nature (as Carolyn Abbate puts it in her attempted recuperation of a critique that addresses music in the moments of its (live) unfolding)84 while at the same time countering film’s rhetoric of persuasion to suspend disbelief and medium awareness. For Paul Ricoeur this function of fiction would serve to “suspend our attention to the real” (because the reality of music’s live presence diminishes

Live-Score Film Screenings   203 c­ inema’s ability to project illusions of reality), so as to liberate the creative activity of imagination.85 If there is a filmic diegesis, it must in these cases be an environment that accommodates real-world and screened, actual and virtual, presented and represented, live but acoustically treated, temporally anterior/spatially absent and temporally simultaneous/ spatially co-present (as well as hybrid combinations of these), embodied and mediated, sound-spectacle phenomena. Perhaps such multiplicity needs to be differently formulated in order better to understand the scope, limits, and very validity of “diegesis” as concept, as percept, and as practice. It could be, as Wurtzler suggests, that “a variety of coexisting, even diametrically opposed representational techniques can produce the same effect in different ways, so that subject positioning by the cinematic apparatus is always only approximate and overdetermined”86—the mediatized is assimilated into the “live,” as traditional hierarchies might have it. As alluded to above, experiencing the practice of live-score-to-picture seems largely unproblematic and indeed attractive for recipients. This may be because, in a Baudrillardian “implosion” or “contraction” of live and mediated into each other,87 despite the material persistence of the “body” and its more immediate expressive externalizing of the previously invisible, eventually or at times during that experience audiences even lose awareness of these embodied, live, massed orchestral forces arrayed before them, just as ordinarily film relies on degrees of suppressed medium awareness based on familiarity with convention (though a different set of perceptual rubrics is at work): the initial disembodied voiceover yielding to embodied (though virtual) diegetic dialogue, or the music-rich opening credit sequence as “telling” segueing into intermittent underscore as mimesis (“showing”), for example. Or it may be simply because sensory novelty enhances conscious and unconscious enjoyment of the essential illusion-resistant fantasy of cinema in which the presumed “live” is assimilated into what Auslander calls the “cultural dominant” of mediatized presentation and performance,88 in what is a currently fashionable form of multi-media and multi-modal entertainment. Whatever the case, if they are interested, film theory and film-music theory might wish to explore, as I have done here, certain subtle ways to accommodate this aesthetically idiosyncratic variant of the cinematic sound-spectacle tradition, with its differentiated cultures of seeing and listening and its challenges to notions of filmic representation, illusion, and diegesis.

Notes 1. I am using the term “live” to denote the co-presence of human performers and audience, and not in Philip Auslander’s expanded sense of technologically mediated (human and algorhythmic) relationships enabled by the internet, social media, and chatbots. See Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge,  2008), 60–62, 69–72. 2. See http://www.cineconcerts.com/ (accessed June 2015); http://filmconcertslive.com/ (accessed February 2017). 3. On the latter, see Auslander, Liveness, 29.

204   Jeremy Barham 4. See Russell Merritt, “Recharging ‘Alexander Nevsky’: Tracking the Eisenstein-Prokofiev War Horse,” Film Quarterly, 48, no. 2 (1994–95): 34–47, esp. 34. 5. Merritt, “Recharging ‘Alexander Nevsky’,” 45. 6. Jeremy Barham, “Music and the Moving Image,” in Aesthetics of Music. Musicological Perspectives, ed. Stephen Downes (New York: Routledge, 2014), 224–38: 233. 7. Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1916; rev. ed., ed. Allan Langdale, London: Routledge, 2002), 125. 8. Auslander in Liveness devotes an entire book to rethinking the concept of “live” performance in a mediatized culture. See n1. 9. See, for example, Richard Allen, “Representation, Illusion, and the Cinema,” Cinema Journal 32, no. 2 (1993): 21–48; Projecting Illusion. Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); “Film Spectatorship: A Reply to Murray Smith,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 1 (1998): 61–63; James Buhler and David Neumeyer, “Music and the Ontology of the Sound Film: the Classical Hollywood System,” in The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, ed. James Buhler and David Neumeyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 17–43; Noel Burch, “Narrative/ Diegesis—Thresholds, Limits,” Screen 23 (1982): 16–33; Gregory Currie, “Visual Fictions,” The Philosophical Quarterly 41, no. 163 (1991): 129–43; “Impersonal Imagining: A Reply to Jerrold Levinson,” The Philosophical Quarterly 43, no. 170 (1993): 79–82; “Film, Reality, and Illusion,” in Post-Theory. Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 325–44; Daniel Morgan, “Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 3 (2006): 443–81; Richard Rushton, The Reality of Film. Theories of Filmic Reality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011); Murray Smith, “Film Spectatorship and the Institution of Fiction,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53, no. 2 (1995): 113–27; “Regarding Film Spectatorship: A Reply to Richard Allen,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 1 (1998): 63–65; Ben Winters, Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film: Shared Concert Experiences in Screen Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2014). 10. Noel Burch, “Narrative/Diegesis—Thresholds, Limits,” 28. However, that is not to say that the ideas I present here may have no retrospective bearing on these debates, and what exactly it is that we experience when consuming a film audio-visually. 11. George Burt, The Art of Film Music (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994), 213. 12. Gregory Currie, “Film, Reality, and Illusion,” 326. 13. The titles, respectively, of Claudia Gorbman’s groundbreaking study, Unheard Melodies. Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), and of Laurence Macdonald’s “comprehensive history,” The Invisible Art of Film Music (New York: Ardsley House, 1998). 14. See Rushton, The Reality of Film. 15. See Ben Winters, “The Non-Diegetic Fallacy: Film, Music, and Narrative Space,” Music & Letters 91, no. 2 (2010): 224–44. 16. See Rushton, The Reality of Film, 1–19. 17. Steve Wurtzler, “ ‘She Sang Live, But the Microphone Was Turned Off ’: The Live, the Recorded and the Subject of Representation,” in Sound Theory/Sound Practice, ed. by Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 87–103: 88. 18. See Michel Chion, Film, a Sound Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 237–45, 488. 19. Chion, Film, a Sound Art, 239, 241.

Live-Score Film Screenings   205 20. Wurtzler, “ ‘She Sang Live, But the Microphone was Turned Off ’,” 89. The starting point for Wurtzler’s study was the controversy over “liveness” in relation to Whitney Houston’s emotional rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the 1991 Super Bowl held at Tampa Stadium at the height of the first Gulf War. It was discovered that Houston’s vocals had been pre-recorded, and that she was also singing live into a non-functioning microphone. 21. Latter-day media such as those video games which allow the player to govern elements of the soundtrack though choices made in the playing of the game, would complicate this framework in other ways, since elements of temporal simultaneity and temporal anteriority would coexist. 22. “ ‘She Sang Live, But the Microphone Was Turned Off ’,” 88, 90. Diamond Vision is the proprietary name given to large replay screens constructed by the Mitsubishi Electric Corporation that have been employed since 1980 at major sporting and other entertainment events. 23. Wurtzler, “ ‘She Sang Live, But the Microphone Was Turned Off ’,” 95–96. 24. Jerrold Levinson, “Seeing, Imaginarily, at the Movies,” The Philosophical Quarterly 43, no. 170 (1993): 70–78: 75. 25. Wurtzler, “ ‘She Sang Live, But the Microphone Was Turned Off ’,” 100. 26. I am grateful to Alan Haigh for this information. The visibility of large speaker arrays at such screenings forms a similar part of the “perform[ing of] the inscription of mediatization within the im-mediate” that Auslander ascribes to the use of microphones or headsets by singers such as Elvis Presley, James Brown, and Madonna (Liveness, 57). 27. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999 [1936]), 211–44: 217. See also Lawrence Kramer’s more recent discussion of live musical performance in general as “an embodiment of the event as singularity”: Kramer, “Classical Music for the Posthuman Condition,” in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 39–52: 51. 28. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003 [1985]), 239. 29. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, “Fundamental Aesthetics of Sound in the Cinema,” in Film Sound. Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 181–99: 199. 30. Wurtzler, “ ‘She Sang Live, But the Microphone Was Turned Off ’,” 100. 31. Ibid., 92. 32. Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 335–48: 336–37. 33. Wurtzler, “ ‘She Sang Live, But the Microphone Was Turned Off ’,” 103. 34. Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema,” 338. 35. Ibid. 36. See Auslander, Liveness (esp. ch. 2), in which the argument is made that the hierarchical relationship between live and mediatized performance (with primacy being accorded to the former) has been historically and contingently developed, rather than being rooted in indisputable ontological qualities. 37. Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema,” 346–47.

206   Jeremy Barham 38. Noël Carroll, “The Power of Movies,” Daedalus 114, no. 4, The Moving Image (1985): 79–103: 80. 39. Randy Thom, “Designing a Movie for Sound,” in Soundscape. The School of Sound Lectures 1998–2001, ed. Larry Sider, Diane Freeman, and Jerry Sider (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 1998), 121–37: 124. 40. Smith, “Film Spectatorship and the Institution of Fiction,” 116. 41. Ibid., 114, 115. 42. Ibid., 113; original emphasis. 43. Ibid., 117. 44. Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema,” 339. 45. Peter Kivy, “Music in the Movies: A Philosophical Enquiry,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 308–28: 318. 46. See Auslander, Liveness, 41, 66–68. 47. Jeff Smith, “Unheard Melodies? A Critique of Psychoanalytic Theories of Film Music,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 230–47: 236 and 237. It should be noted that this claim is made without due recognition of what that illusion might be or how it might work. Replacing “illusion” with “psychological identification,” “immersion,” or “involvement” either in the sense of Burt’s previously discussed claim of music’s intensification of cinema’s felt “realness,” or Murray Smith’s notion of the “activation of imagination” (“Film Spectatorship”: 118) would be more accurate and productive here. 48. René Clair, “The Art of Sound,” [1929] in Film Sound/Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 92–95: 95; original emphasis. 49. Buhler and Neumeyer, “Music and the Ontology of the Sound Film,” 22. 50. Kramer, “Classical Music for the Posthuman Condition,” 50. 51. See, for example, http://www.cineconcerts.com (accessed February 2017); http://www. denofgeek.com/movies/music-in-film/31062/why-movie-scores-sound-better-live (accessed February 2017); http://io9.com/star-trek-movies-to-tour-with-live-orchestrasplaying-t-1,563,355,276 (accessed February 2017). 52. Auslander writes similarly of interactive plays: “the ostensible evanescence and nonrepeatability of the live experience ironically become selling points to promote a product that must be fundamentally the same in each of its instantiations” (Liveness, 52). However, there is informal evidence that in some live-score screenings there are intended differences, at least between the content of the live rendition and that of the fixed, recorded score, that would merit further research. Consider, for example, the following passage: “Typically, you’d expect a composer/conductor to stick heavily to the original score for a live screening, and that may well be the case here. But Zimmer’s live renditions at last year’s mini-series showed that he was eager to pull pieces apart and find new ways of putting them together again, and I’m very interested to see if he wants to do something like that here. The experience of hearing Zimmer’s Interstellar score performed live to the film would be spectacular, no doubt. But hearing a new version of that score, performed for one night only in the country, would make the evening that much more special.” Kenji Lloyd, “Interstellar to Screen at London’s Royal Albert Hall with Live Score from Hans Zimmer & Orchestra,” Final Reel, February 17, 2015; http://www.finalreel.co.uk/interstellarlive-hans-zimmer-orchestra-royal-albert-hall/ (no longer available). 53. Buhler and Neumeyer, “Music and the Ontology of the Sound Film,” 23.

Live-Score Film Screenings   207 5 4. Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema,” 341. 55. Chion, Film, a Sound Art, 483. 56. See Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 129–31 and Film, A Sound Art, 473–74. 57. Wurtzler, “ ‘She Sang Live, But the Microphone Was Turned Off ’,” 99. 58. John Richardson and Claudia Gorbman, “Introduction,” in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis, 3–35: 22. Anahid Kassabian, “The End of Diegesis as We Know it?” in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis, 89–106: 102. 59. Kathryn Kalinak, “Introduction,” in Sound. Dialogue, Music, and Effects, ed. Kathryn Kalinak (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015), 1–14: 8. 60. Nevertheless, classical orchestras are understandably all-too aware of the income-generating potential of such popular spectacles (see Jon Burlingame, “Live Movie Concerts a Cash Cow for Orchestras,” Variety (April 29, 2015), available at: http://variety.com/2015/music/ features/live-movie-concerts-a-cash-cow-for-orchestras-1,201,483,456/ (accessed March 1, 2017). Auslander (Liveness, 7, 44–45, 47) likewise suggests that, because of its increasing mediatization, live performance of any kind is not somehow immunized against the marketplace, and can participate fully in the “economy of repetition.” 61. Auslander, Liveness, 36. 37. 62. See Rushton, The Reality of Film. 63. Ibid., 2. 64. Ibid., 15. 65. Hal Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), xv. 66. Kassabian, “The End of Diegesis as We Know It?,” 102. 67. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,  1991), 40; cited in Barham, “Music and the Moving Image,” 233. 68. Barham, “Music and the Moving Image,” 233. 69. Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man, trans. Lorraine Mortimer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2005[1956]), 169; cited in Winters, Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film, 10; original emphasis. 70. Morin, The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man, 81; my emphasis. 7 1. The “representational-presentational” and “film world-real world” axes should be differentiated from the “fiction-truth” axis in cinematic works, which is not at play in this case. See fn. 10 for details of various important philosophical discussions on this point. In terms of the first two axes, it is worth considering whether, or to what degree, the live-score effect is negated if a real-world screening of this type is itself being viewed on a screen, or if it is a viewed event (staged or real-world) that forms part of the fictional world of a narrative film. 72. Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (London: Macmillan, 1982), paraphrased in Rushton, The Reality of Film, 100. 73. Levinson, “Seeing, Imaginarily, at the Movies,” 77, after George Wilson, Narration in Light (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 74. See Allen, Projecting Illusion, 81–119; Levinson, “Seeing, Imaginarily, at the Movies,” 70.

208   Jeremy Barham 75. See Carroll, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). 76. Winters, “The Non-Diegetic Fallacy,” 237. 77. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 239, 241. 78. The question of what “liveness” might mean in the context of largely synthesized, electroacoustic or computer-based film scores being performed to picture by musicians in the cinematic space is interesting. Acoustic differences between what is heard in this scenario and what is heard at a normal screening may be far less marked, leaving the effect of liveness to reside more in just the visual presence of performers than in what sound or music they produce. However, any reliance on real-time improvisation in the “scoring” would restore a measure of the live aesthetic given the resulting creative individuality of each performance. These scenarios are ripe for the kind of philosophical investigation of representation, reproduction, and repetition which Auslander applies to notions of live vs. mediated performances (Liveness, 45–46). 79. Kivy, “Music in the Movies,” 323. 80. Gregory Currie, “Impersonal Imagining,” 80. 81. Auslander notes that the concept of liveness only came into existence once recording technologies had been invented and with the “maturation of mediatized society itself ” (Liveness, 56–58: 58). 82. Ibid., 66. 83. Ibid., 66. 84. Carolyn Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 3 (2004): 505–36. 85. Paul Ricoeur, “The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality,” [1979] in A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdes (London: Harvester 1991), 117–36: 128. 86. Wurtzler, “ ‘She Sang Live, But the Microphone Was Turned Off ’,” 98. 87. See Auslander, Liveness, 43–44. 88. Ibid., 42.

Select Bibliography Abbate, Carolyn. “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 3 (2004): 505–36. Allen, Richard. “Representation, Illusion, and the Cinema.” Cinema Journal 32, no. 2 (1993): 21–48. Allen, Richard. Projecting Illusion. Film Spectatorship and the Impression of Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Allen, Richard. “Film Spectatorship: A Reply to Murray Smith.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 1 (1998): 61–63. Auslander, Philip. Liveness. Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2008. Barham, Jeremy. “Music and the Moving Image.” In Aesthetics of music. Musicological Perspectives, ed. Stephen Downes, 224–38. New York: Routledge, 2014. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn, 211–44. London: Pimlico 1999 [1936]. Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. “Fundamental Aesthetics of Sound in the Cinema.” In Film Sound. Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, 181–99. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Live-Score Film Screenings   209 Buhler, James, and David Neumeyer. “Music and the Ontology of the Sound Film: The Classical Hollywood System.” In The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, ed. James Buhler and David Neumeyer, 17–43. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Burch, Noel. “Narrative/Diegesis—Thresholds, Limits.” Screen 23 (1982): 16–33. Carroll, Noël. “The Power of Movies.” Daedalus 114, no. 4, The Moving Image (1985): 79–103. Carroll, Noël. Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Chion, Michel. Film, A Sound Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Clair, René. “The Art of Sound.” [1936] In Film Sound. Theory and Practice, ed. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton, 92–95. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Currie, Gregory. “Visual Fictions.” The Philosophical Quarterly 41, no. 163 (1991): 129–43. Currie, Gregory. “Impersonal Imagining: A Reply to Jerrold Levinson.” The Philosophical Quarterly 43, no. 170 (1993): 79–82. Currie, Gregory. “Film, Reality, and Illusion.” In Post-Theory. Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, 325–44. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2. The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press [1985] 2003. Doane, Mary Ann (1986). “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space.” In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen, 335–48. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Kalinak, Kathryn (2015). “Introduction.” In Sound. Dialogue, Music, and Effects, ed. Kathryn Kalinak, 1–14. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015. Kassabian, Anahid. “The End of Diegesis as We Know It?” In The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis, 89–106. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Kivy, Peter. “Music in the Movies: A Philosophical Enquiry.” In Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith, 308–28. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Kramer, Lawrence. “Classical Music for the Posthuman Condition.” In The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis, 39–52. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Levinson, Jerrold. “Seeing, Imaginarily, at the Movies.” The Philosophical Quarterly 43: no. 170 (1993): 70–78. Macdonald, Laurence. The Invisible Art of Film Music. New York: Ardsley House, 1998. Merritt, Russell. “Recharging ‘Alexander Nevsky’: Tracking the Eisenstein-Prokofiev War Horse.” Film Quarterly 48, no. 2 (1994–95): 34–47. Metz, Christian. Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti. London: Macmillan, 1982. Morgan, Daniel. “Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics.” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 3 (2006): 443–81. Morin, Edgar. The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man, trans. Lorraine Mortimer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005 [1956]. Richardson, John, and Claudia Gorbman. “Introduction.” In The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis, 3–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

210   Jeremy Barham Ricoeur, Paul. “The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality.” In A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdes, 117–36. London: Harvester [1979] 1991. Rushton, Richard. The Reality of Film. Theories of Filmic Reality. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. Smith, Jeff. “Unheard Melodies? A Critique of Psychoanalytic Theories of Film Music.” In Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith, 230–47. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Smith, Murray. “Film Spectatorship and the Institution of Fiction.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53, no. 2 (1995): 113–27. Smith, Murray. “Regarding Film Spectatorship: A Reply to Richard Allen.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56, no. 1 (1998): 63–5. Winters, Ben. “The Non-Diegetic Fallacy: Film, Music, and Narrative Space.” Music & Letters 91, no. 2 (2010): 224–44. Winters, Ben. Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film: Shared Concert Experiences in Screen Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2014. Wurtzler, Steve. “ ‘She Sang Live, But the Microphone Was Turned Off ’: The Live, the Recorded and the Subject of Representation.” In Sound Theory. Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman, 87–103. New York: Routledge, 1992. Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991.

Chapter 10

Lev er agi ng a L ong a n d Tu n efu l History Perspectival Manipulation, Surround Sound, and Dolby Atmos Meredith C. Ward

Boasting a nearly 360-degree surround sound experience, Dolby Laboratories’ ­sub-brand of Atmos was originally released for cinema in 2012. It was designed to be the industry-standard surround sound system for film mixing and playback in cinema ­theatres. Atmos allowed mixers to place individual “sound objects” anywhere within a three-dimensional space, and to play them back on up to 128 discrete tracks and 64 speaker feeds.1 These “objects” could be moved anywhere in their own tracks, and speakers allowed sound to come from the front, rear, sides, and the space above the listener. It was originally intended to be a system of cinema surround that brought the listener “into the action” of a fully realized sound world that imitated a nearly complete sphere.2 In this way, Atmos surpassed the “channels” of earlier surround sound systems including Dolby’s 5.1, as well as its successors.3 Atmos for cinema has been marketed by its company as groundbreaking, and it has become the industry gold standard for high-level immersive cinema sound. At the time of writing, more than 200 mixing studios and 4,300 theatres worldwide (120 of which are in the United States) are equipped for Atmos, and there are more than 45 Atmosonly theatre complexes.4 However, its reach has been insufficient to the ambitions that Dolby holds for it. This is because Dolby has made Atmos an example of a larger mission: Dolby conceived of Atmos as a means of leveraging existing technology to create what it calls a “platform” that would reach across the movie theatre, home theatre, music and virtual reality for maximal profit.5 In this sense, Atmos is more than a surround sound system; it is a test case to see how far surround sound systems can travel from a cinema application to a platform incorporating multiple sound systems to stretch over a spectrum of products.6 Atmos is an attempt to expand moving surround sound media

212   Meredith C. Ward from cinema to a full range of surround sound contexts and applications that have ­previously been kept separate.7 The platform’s existence raises questions about how Atmos fits into a longer history of the design of multimedia surround sound technologies. This essay is not the first to consider Atmos critically, but it is the first to think of it historically. Atmos has either been discussed as a technological novelty that is full of promise or as an example of Dolby trying to get Hollywood sound mixers to work on its own terms. I believe these approaches miss the point in several registers: first, because the idea of the “new” fails to account for Atmos’s complexity as a historical construct; second, because prior approaches fail to recognize the fact that Atmos is not just a ­cinema application. Here, I will argue the model of hybridity that Atmos presents is prefigured by that history of surround sound, though leveraging was missing as a business practice. Atmos’s expansion from cinema sound into music serves as an opportunity to identify how the implications of earlier models of surround sound have been reconfigured in the twenty-first century. It presents us with a chance to trace how the relationship between cinema surround and musical surround has developed over time. At the end of the chapter, I also indicate how Atmos offers a slight new twist on this history—exploring how we experience surround sound with methods that encourage us to move through virtual sound space. Atmos is simultaneously a part of a long history in placing the auditor in a virtual relationship to three-dimensional space that moves around her and an intervention due to the increasingly complex mobility of its auditor: listeners themselves can now move within what Dolby calls “moving audio” that pans throughout a space.8 The form of involvement that Atmos invites is physically active on the part of the auditor.

Atmos for Cinema: 2012–2016 Created for cinema, Atmos was designed to move beyond it. Atmos for cinema was designed to add what sound designers call “presence” to filmic events—so that the action occurring all around one “makes you feel that you are there.” PR from Dolby emphasizes being “in someone else’s shoes.”9 However, the story as told by its engineers is somewhat more specific. As Atmos engineers Jon Leidecker and Joel Kustka state, Atmos was originally designed not merely as a narrative immersion apparatus that brings you deeper into the story—as some of the original Dolby PR went—but as a sound effects application that had the potential to span across contexts. Atmos doesn’t “put you in the story”—it simply surrounds you with sound effects to create “a more realistic effect.” Much of the efforts of engineers designing Atmos were dedicated toward enabling fictional world-building, which has a more specific and more sophisticated aim than drawing listeners into the film’s storyline or inducing empathy with characters. Their efforts have aimed to create a sense of presence to the verisimilar unfolding of ­virtual sound events. In this sense, Atmos is an innovation but not just in terms of its

Leveraging a Long and Tuneful History   213 relationship to storytelling; it is a chapter in the broader history of the multimedia manipulation of auditory perspective. According to Leidecker, fully realized Atmos mixes often operate beyond the realm of just narrative clarity, empathy with characters, or character identification. Atmos has the capacity to do something more pervasive, and that is what its engineers, consciously or unconsciously, aim for. As Leidecker notes, the clarification of story and the creation of lifelike auditory perspective have at times been at odds with one another in the history of Atmos mixing processes. Atmos engineers often spend so much concentrated effort providing a sense of imagined space that they emphasize sound elements that are inessential to the story’s propagation—and can, indeed, even be distracting from it. Leidecker states that films mixed at major studios do not use Atmos to realize a true sense of presence. Even sympathetic practitioners at times do not use the technology to its full potential and—contrary to the company’s discourse about how Atmos opens up possibilities for cinema—on any given film almost 80% of all the most ambitious spatialization planned by Atmos engineers is pulled before the mix is finalized.10 Film directors do not elect for the extensive verisimilar spatialization that would make listeners truly feel that they have “presence” in the story world. Leidecker describes the feeling of listening to the finalized version of an Atmos mix, after it had been reduced in this way: You’d be sitting in a room with 40 speakers, and most of them would be dead. Like people would just not be taking advantage of immersive surround at all. And quite frequently, we’d see a very advanced, very creative, immersive mix, with sound zooming all around . . or even just subtle things, like sounds being where they were supposed to be, in the mix . . . and the director would pull back all of the extensive, extreme spatialization, saying, “This is getting in the way of my image, my film.”11

Examples abound of what gets cut from Atmos soundtracks, in conversations with ­specialists. Instances mentioned by Leidecker include having an airplane travel from behind the listener to above her head, mimicking an actual perception of its flight path, or having the sound of rain hitting above her head because the camera, the viewer’s visual surrogate, is positioned under a table onto which rain is falling.12 Rather than building sonic worlds the way Atmos is designed to do, however, directors are not biting. They are simply telling stories much as they always have. Leidecker states: “People in general use it [the multi-channel tracking system] to make the film louder.” The sonic world-building aspect of Atmos has, then, been present in released Atmos films but it has been underutilized. Rather than adding spatiality, Leidecker notes, “everything was just LCR.”13 The new platform could redefine our understanding of cinema sound; the question, then, becomes: do we want to re envision it? Gianluca Sergi wrote about Dolby Atmos as a potential game-changer when it first emerged, in 2013, stating that it would provide the industry with an opportunity to decide what the future of surround sound would be. His initial response was that it was “alarmingly lifelike;” with “the feeling of actually having been ‘there’, ” and a noted sense of “awe.” On the topic of Dolby Atmos as a potential

214   Meredith C. Ward industry standard, as Sergi puts it, it depends on how it “will ultimately be ‘interpreted,’ negotiated and employed.”14 Sergi refers to Atmos as “a powerful weapon [that] can create a large disruption, hence a substantial window of opportunity for change.”15 He notes that Atmos “provides a platform” for filmmakers to reconceive the role that sound plays in cinema, making it a true partner to the image via more intensive and thoughtful collaboration. However, “There is a crucial caveat to this.” As Sergi suggests, “the bigger the disruption to the system, the greater the task of suturing the rupture” between cinema sound’s past and present, and the greater “the fear of leaving too much” of the ability to cooperate “behind in the process.”16 Sergi wrote in 2013: For Atmos to fulfil its remarkable potential at an industrial, creative and aesthetic level, a number of different conversations will need to take place amongst various constituencies and groups who ordinarily have little time or inclination to compromise, from studios to filmmakers and from exhibitors to audiences. What is more, there is no obvious space for these conversations to take place in the industry right now.17

Atmos has not yet provoked that conversation due to the inertial character of film ­production systems. Despite this, a broader understanding of auditory perspective is built into the technology’s DNA. This, I would argue, is precisely what is new and exciting about Atmos. Media scholar Benjamin Wright, on the other hand, critiques it for failing to meet the needs of Hollywood as it stands: he makes a case that Atmos is a misrecognition of the needs and desires of the mixing industry. He writes: “The tenor of its advertising campaign and industry outreach suggests that Atmos is a fait accompli, but an analysis of contemporary sound mixing practices and Dolby’s historical relationship with the sound community suggests that the future of Dolby’s next-generation platform actually depends on its adaptability to the shared networks, resources and conventions of Hollywood sound production.” He argues that the platform’s lifespan might be limited by its lack of alignment with those networks and conventions.18 Quoting film mixer Randy Thom, Wright articulates that the sound mixer’s goal is to subtract, rather than to add, sounds and to focus on what is most narratively significant rather than what has perceptual verisimilitude. In conclusion, Wright surmises that there is a gap “between Atmos as a theoretical concept and as a practical mixing tool,” arguing that Atmos misrecognizes its audience and hence serves as an ineffective addition to the ­cinema mixer’s palette.19 Wright’s point about Hollywood sound mixers is borne out by his interviews with sound mixers in Hollywood as well as my own with Atmos engineers; however, to focus solely on this is to miss Atmos’s potential as a media platform. Right now, the differing aims of cinema sound mixers, who think in terms of story, and those of Atmos engineers, who think of three-dimensional sound spheres, conflict. Engineers who designed Atmos wish it to provide details that fill out the sound world in a verisimilar manner, as well as placing the listener in it; film directors wish for it to support and fill out the story created by the image. Too much sound from too many directions means that a novel

Leveraging a Long and Tuneful History   215 l­istening experience—rather than narrative support—becomes the effect of the sound mix. This is antithetical to its traditional role in cinema. Atmos has the potential to be a game changer. Leidecker has praise for multiple Atmos mixes done by Skywalker Sound, which he believes understands the creative potential of the platform (he has kind words especially for the mixes of Oblivion, Life of Pi, and Brave). Of the films mixed and released in Atmos while Leidecker was an employee, two pleased him in particular. Unsurprisingly, these were films with very densely constructed, imaginative soundscapes that presented the viewer with absolutely unfamiliar listening experiences: the surfing film Chasing Mavericks (2012) and the space film Gravity (2013). What Leidecker praises these films for, however, are details that would not win them any points with proponents of narrative-centric film sound aesthetics, which view sound’s role primarily as one of narrative support. The much-celebrated creativity of the Gravity mix is cited by Leidecker as a textbook example of the phenomenal feats Atmos is capable of. With regard to the less discussed Chasing Mavericks, he emphasizes the perceptual realism of a conversation scene taking place outdoors in a suburban neighborhood. Leidecker rhapsodizes over the choice that mixers made to put all of the distant sound effects in the heights—above you. He states that this is how distant sound actually reaches a listener in such an environment, as it has to travel over each of the surrounding houses. For this reason, he argues, sound should be coming from above you. Putting the sound of a distant playground or a passing car “up a little bit” made sound, Leidecker claims, significantly more perceptually realistic.20 Atmos’s predisposition to this sort of work strains at the limits of the conventional Hollywood mixing.21 Wright cites this as evidence of the platform’s irrelevance. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Atmos is relevant; just not in the way we predicted.

Going Beyond the Limits of Cinema Surround: The Expansion of Atmos, 2016–2019 Atmos is being asked by Dolby to bridge what have traditionally been differing forms of surround sound mixing practice. Atmos for Music premiered in 2016. The project, Kustka asserts, came out of a fundamental question: “Why don’t people make [and listen to] music in surround?” While cinema was undergoing a resurgence of interest in surround sound formats with Atmos in the 2010s, music for surround had been left back at SACD and DVD-A in the earlier 2000s. Going further back: despite multiple attempts throughout music history, none of the surround music formats designed since the 1800s had struck gold and become an industry dominant, despite their ­continued presence. The successful brand of Atmos for cinema seemed ripe for leveraging.22 Dolby holds a competition for teams with new ideas for maximizing the

216   Meredith C. Ward potential of existing technology, and this provided the industrial impetus. A small, ­self-formed team of Atmos engineers created a plugin that enabled the Atmos experience to be adapted to music; taking up the company’s ongoing desire to apply its designs across as wide an array of options as possible, it competed in a company-wide hackathon to see what the ripest plan for adaptation of an existing technology might be. According to Atmos for Music team member Joel Kustka, the team won the right to develop the technology by winning a Dolby-wide competition, creating a 12 × 20 “virtual nightclub.”23 While music has always been spatialized and three-dimensional (both in the manner in which its sound waves travel and reverberate in space, and how it invites the creation of virtual soundscapes, especially since stereo and other forms of multichannel sound), the intervention Atmos for Music made was to make the act of experiencing music spatial in a novel way: to make one keenly aware of one’s own placement in a 3D musical soundscape. The technique stemmed originally from a need to address the old problem of overcrowding in a track but it became a new mixing approach. In the frequency spectra of a music recording, instruments and voices often crowd one another with too many elements occupying the same frequency. This creates what mixers term a “busy,” or cluttered recording. To craft a clean track in stereo, sound mixers use an equalizer to subordinate sound elements that overlap with vital elements and thereby muddy the signal. The remaining sounds fit neatly together, much like a puzzle. In mixing with Atmos for Music, however, sonic elements are not subordinated—rather, they are separated into different tracks to distinguish the sounds from one another: spatialized as sound objects as the mixer desires so that the mix remains clear. These previously abandoned elements surround the listener in an Atmos remix. This is why Atmos remixes often provoke the comment in reviews by popular press critics that one literally hears every element intended by the pop composers in a track from a remixed album—including those rolled off in a stereo mix. The configuration is the work of the mixer alone, however, and such spatiality is a virtual effect and creative construct. In this way, Atmos creates a virtual soundscape that did not exist in the track previously, which may mimic verisimilar space or may elect to fabricate it fancifully, sculpting musical space with swirls and swoops as a sculptor works with clay. In a review of the 25th anniversary Atmos remix of R.E.M.’s album Automatic for the People, Ars Technica writer Sam Machkovech waxes rhapsodic about the tendency that allows a listener the feeling of proximity and co-presence with the band. Machkovech writes that, “In short, every buzz phrase I’d heard about spatial audio comparing well to ‘being in the room with the band’ started to click.”24 As Automatic for the People recording engineer Clif Norrell puts it, with the ability to place sounds high within a listening space, “you get a better sense of space, like you’re in [the studio]. We now have this ability to lift any sounds up,” including reverb and ambience, to produce the effect of ­co-presence in the studio with the band.25 This effect arises also from literally hearing more in the track: Scott Litt, who produced Automatic for the People, stated that, in mixing the album with Atmos: “Now I could hear low cello parts fighting against higher parts that [orchestral arranger] John Paul Jones wrote. All of a sudden, those low celli, you could hear what those were doing. ‘Oh, I hear that! It’s a counter part!’ ”26 Machkovech writes

Leveraging a Long and Tuneful History   217 that more creative results are powerful in the remix, as well: “Cymbal plinks rose above the right side of my head. Accordion squeezes filled out the lower-right region of sound. The acoustic guitar had more discernable rattles and plinks. Stipe’s echoed voice had an almost ghost-like quality as it reverberated around the few other noises in the scene.” He refers to a moment when an electric guitar line “appears to slash in a diagonal middleto-bottom-right fashion while a brief orchestral blast fills out the entire back of the left side of my head.”

The Atmos Experience: Aural Landscapes Beyond Cinema Atmos constructs the listener’s immediate virtual presence—a sense of a verisimilarly spatialized relationship to virtual soundscapes. It is an invitation to enter into and travel through a spatialized sound world. Dolby’s own language opts for “presence” to describe the effect.27 As Dolby sells it, “Conjuring music’s sounds all around you, Dolby Atmos draws you in and makes you feel like you’re inside the music.”28 Applicable across cinema and music, it offers the listener a means of being involved in, a part of, and a traveler inside of what he or she hears. It is, as Kustka states, “enveloping you.”29 Atmos for Music now enables a 360-degree musical sound space that one can explore more actively and fully. This spatiality tends to be utilized in one of three ways. In the first case, as discussed with Automatic for the People, the mix gives you as the listener the impression to be present in the studio with the band as the band plays the piece. In the second case, you are present at a remarkable venue such as a cathedral, complete with that space’s acoustics. In the third case, you are in an entirely virtual soundscape that is the creative work of the mixer who sculpts a track in three-dimensional space. This is most commonly used in the genre of electronic dance music, which was the first application of Atmos to music and which will be discussed in detail at the end of this piece. However, each of them depend upon the realistic recreation of sound space. Utilizing “sound objects” to place the listener in a significantly more precise location within the text’s virtual space, Atmos creates a more lifelike representation of sound perspective. This happens in cinema as well as music: whereas previous surround sound films may have given one the sense of an aural environment, an Atmos film has the ability to genuinely make a listener stand up, turn around, and say “What was that?” In an account from a screening of Oz the Great and Powerful (2013), theatre owner Rudyard Coltman states: “the characters are walking through a forest, whether it is mythical or real, and you hear birds that sound like they sit on your shoulder. When the wind blows, the leaves rustle all around you.”30 Even more, he states, “during the first week or so that we were playing Dolby Atmos movies, you’d occasionally think someone in the middle of the auditorium stood up and started talking. Before you realize that is actually a character in the movie that is just a little bit off-screen. I found myself laughing, but that’s

218   Meredith C. Ward where that character would actually be standing.” He adds: “If someone throws a chair across the room, it whooshes over your head and crashes in the back.”31

Atmos in the Context of Earlier Models of Surround, and the Historical Aim of “Auditory Perspective” When we look at the history of surround sound, it becomes natural to see Atmos as the newest addition to a long trajectory of technological developments in both cinema and music. The particularity of Dolby’s product is that it tries to crystallize multiple elements of that history into one platform. The manipulation of auditory perspective has been a hallmark of audio engineering for music since its innovation in the late nineteenth century. Perspectival manipulations that prefigure Atmos’s ability to create the illusion of three-dimensional soundscapes with pinpoint specificity actually begin with binaural sound, which was first developed commercially in 1881.32 Sending discrete signals to each ear from which a listener can decode distance and location, binaural sound gives the impression of being heard in psychoacoustically verisimilar three-dimensional space. The earliest commercial instances of musical surround sound transmission to create a sense of the listener’s virtual presence to sound go back to the late nineteenth century, when inventor Clément Ader designed an apparatus by which listeners could virtually listen in on the opera over the telephone. Ader positioned multiple sets of microphones down the stage of the famous Paris Opera and transmitted the music’s signal via two telephone lines (one for each ear of the listener) to remote subscribers who tuned in on their home telephones. The signal’s binaural nature gave a lifelike impression of being present at the front of the stage at the Opera as music swirled around them.33 The technology became the basis of the Théâtrophone, which was available as a subscription service from 1889 until the mid-1930s and had such famous devotees as Marcel Proust (see Figure 10.1).34 Listeners used a stereo headset with one speaker for each ear.35 In the 1920s, radio innovator Franklin Doolittle broadcast from his radio station in binaural sound.36 To fully experience Doolittle’s design, the consumer required two radios: one to receive each signal.37 The single biggest innovator of binaural sound transmission in the early period was Harvey Fletcher, the head of acoustical research at Bell Laboratories.38 Prior to his turn to stereo, he achieved the live transmission of binaural sound via recording in two microphone “ears” of a dummy mannequin head that he named “Oscar.” Premiering it at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1933, Fletcher proved to visitors that they too could hear realistically through Oscar’s microphone ears, at a distance.39 Via telephone lines, listeners could hear sounds circling them as if occurring in real space. Listeners turned around to see who was speaking behind them (see Figure 10.2).40

Leveraging a Long and Tuneful History   219

Figure 10.1  Theatrophone representations: (a) Le Magasin pittoresque edited by M. Edouard Charton (1807–90). Année 60, 1 Sér.2, T.10, Paris, 1892, 1801–81; (10.1b) Image by Jules Chéret, Le Théâtrophone (lithograph) from the Les Maitre de L’Affiches series, 1896.

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Figure 10.2  Harvey Fletcher’s “Oscar” the dummy with the microphone ears. Oscar captured sound in binaural that gave a lifelike impression of reality. The demonstration depicted took place in 1933 at Bell Labs. https://www.bell-labs.com/about/recognition/2016-stereo-sound/ accessed February 8, 2019.

Contemporaneous with Fletcher’s work, British innovator Alan Blumlein began to develop a commercial system of stereo sound that would direct signals to two channels: left and right, and which would prove more of a widespread, long-term commercial success than binaural sound. Based upon the moving-coil loudspeaker, stereo obviated the need for a headphone apparatus which was, at the time, thought cumbersome and limiting.41 Stereo enabled the projection of multichannel sound to audiences, as well, rather than individuals. This would, of course, be more useful in the cinema context where viewing was communal. By 1937, Bell, despite Fletcher’s early interest in binaural sound, was developing a proprietary stereophonic sound recording and reproduction system for music and the mixing of film soundtracks.42 The inventors of surround sound, Fletcher and Blumlein, each worked in telephony, music, and cinema. The nature of surround systems was, from its very origins, hybrid and applicable across contexts. Cinema’s first high-impact application of surround sound came in 1940, with the release of Disney’s Fantasia (see Figure 10.3). Walt Disney was inspired by the idea of a moving bumblebee flying about the auditorium for Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee, though this was never used in the film.43 The multichannel soundtrack was guided by conductor Leopold Stokowski, notable for consulting on multichannel recording for both cinema and music.44 Recording Fantasia in Fantasound took seven weeks, and required 33 microphones and eight optical recording machines. Six channels recorded sections of the orchestra while they were playing and also provided “close-ups” of cellos, basses, violins, violas, brass, woodwinds, and tympani. The seventh channel recorded a mix of the first six, and the eight recorded the sound of the orchestra at a distance, to place the listener.45 Cost prohibited the widespread use of the Fantasound system, however. Later, Cinerama (1952) appeared in seven channel surround with the promotional film, This is

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Figure 10.3  Advertisement by RCA for the Fantasound surround sound system designed for the premiere of Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940).

222   Meredith C. Ward Cinerama (see Figure 10.4).46 The film again emphasized the multimedia nature of surround sound technology, engaging in musical show pieces alongside segments encouraging a sense of virtual presence; it featured a wealth of musical performances mixed in with travelogues and cinematic “attractions” that go back to early cinema’s travelogues such as Hale’s Tours of the World. La Scala opera company’s performance of Aida, a performance by a church choir, a military tattoo being played in Edinburgh, and the Vienna Boys Choir appeared alongside a group of attractions that were designed to make the viewer/listener feel present. These filmic attractions included a roller coaster ride from the Rockaways’ Playland, a trip down the canals of Venice, a bullfight in Spain, and a spectacular water sports show in Florida. The system played in five speakers behind the screen, two on the side walls, and one in the rear of the auditorium. A sound engineer directed the sound live to the various speakers according to a script provided by the distributor.47 The film’s introduction by Lowell Thomas prepared viewers to the nature of the show, explaining that it was an “entirely new form of entertainment:” “The pictures you are now going to see have no plot. They have no stars. This is not a stage play, nor is it a feature picture nor a travelogue nor a symphonic concert or an opera— but it is a combination of all of them.”48 The New York Times published a very positive review that also tied the technology for Cinerama back to that of Bell Labs in the 1930s, making such a connection apparent even to the general public.49 Surround sound was, in each instance, deeply and profoundly multimedial. In the meantime, surround sound technology was being developed in the sphere of avant-garde music. Karlheinz Stockhausen played with multichannel sound in multiple works, including Song of the Youths (1955–56) and Kontakte (1958–60). Song of the Youths, often described as the “first masterpiece of electronic music,” was produced in five-channel surround.50 Kontakte was composed to be played in four channels. Speakers were placed in the four corners of a square that surrounded the audience, creating quadrophonic sound. A rotating loudspeaker interacted with four microphones, and music critic Helmut Kirchmeyer described the effect as, “a musical tennis match, with the players serving and returning balls of sound one to another.”51 The late 1950s saw a boom of creation in surround sound media in the avant-garde; in 1957, filmmaker Jordan Belson explored music and image together via surround sound with sound artist Henry Jacobs in a series that inspired later filmmakers called Vortex: Experiments in Sound and Light. This series of concerts of “visual music” featured “new music,” including Stockhausen’s, at the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco to the backdrop of abstract patterns of light from thirty projectors (see Figure 10.5).52 Jacob’s approach to surround sound has been said to have influenced Walter Murch and George Lucas, the former of whom credits it as the birth of surround as he knows it as well as the birth of the sound-and-lightsshow as it would emerge in the 1970s. Jacobs also provided sound for Lucas’ THX 1138.53 Jacobs was godfather to famed sound designer Ren Klyce, known for his work with David Fincher. 1958 saw Edgar Varese performing his Poeme Electronique at the Brussels World’s Fair, with spatialized audio that moved around the pavilion, playing in 425 speakers. Varese’s sound also ran alongside colored lights as well as a black-and-white

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Figure 10.4  Schematic of the Cinerama projection system for the film This Is Cinerama (1952). The image appeared in a story on the Cinerama system for Popular Mechanics called “Movies on a Curved Screen Wrap You in Action,” by Richard F. Dempewolff. It appeared in the magazine in August 1952. The image is uncredited.

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Figure 10.5  Stage and audience gathered for a performance of the Vortex film/concert series. Image courtesy of the California Academy of Sciences. Image is actually of a 1974 recreation of the Vortex shows by David Porazzo and Douglas McKechnie.

film. It was controlled by projectionists with rotary phone dials; each dial controlled up to five speakers out of a group of twelve at a time.54 Many of the films that were produced with surround sound following this were also music-based pieces. The original release of Tommy (1975) used a sound system that engineer John Mosely named “Quintaphonic Sound,” obviously riffing off of the popularity of quadrophonic four-speaker systems sold for use in American homes.55 The Grateful Dead, for their part, released an eponymous film in 1977, mixing it in quadrophonic sound. The band used the equipment from their famous “Wall of Sound” for the film’s premiere to simulate the experience of being present at a concert.56 Dolby Laboratories entered the field of surround sound by offering up “split surround” for Superman (1978). Their famous 5.1 system would appear in many other locations first, though, including the cabaret the Moulin Rouge. The 5.1 layout was not adopted at Dolby until 1992, with the release of Batman Returns. After then, it became de rigeur to have Dolby 5.1 soundtracks, for both the theatre and the home theatre environment, and 5.1 began to be encoded on DVDs. As Paul Théberge et al. have noted, after this early experimentation with spatiality in sound and music, the music industry has more rarely been inclined to experiment seriously with multichannel recording that extends beyond stereo.57 They write: “Unlike film, the music recording industry has never fully succeeded in convincing listeners that music requires more than two channels for adequate sound reproduction,” noting that

Leveraging a Long and Tuneful History   225 despite attempts to create an industry-standard surround sound music format, including encouraging this effort via the introduction of a new Best Surround Album Grammy in 2005, efforts have failed.58 Quadrophonic sound systems became commercially available in the 1970s. Artists began mixing in “quad” to provide a more immersive listening experience. However, the format never became truly successful commercially due to cost.59 The refusal to shift to surround in music held even as musicians in the 1970s gained new tools for binaural recording: in 1972, Neumann, Sony, JVC, and Sennheiser developed very similar pieces of binaural apparatus.60 Some artists took the bait; in 1978, Lou Reed released Street Hassle: the first pop album to be recorded in binaural.61 Reed would also use binaural recording on his 1978 concert album Live: Take No Prisoners and 1979’s The Bells. Binaural appeared in radio dramas, with BBC4 airing multiple radio specials in binaural sound in the 1970s. A 28-minute radio play by Andrew Sachs entitled The Revenge positioned the listener in the sound perspective of a person being hunted by police, and Stephen King’s The Mist was adapted for radio in binaural.62 Again, spatialized sound performed the act of world-building and placing the listener.63 Two music surround platforms emerged in the early 2000s, with rival formats vying for market dominance: SACD-DVD and DVD-A. However, with expensive proprietary hardware and more expensive disks than traditional CDs, neither gained sufficient market presence to become a major player in the music business.64 Dolby Atmos, then, presents itself as a savior in a long history of failure by both cinema and music. Also created out of a boom of cinema sound technology (this time again, a cinema surround format), it emerges to try to take that format and provide an immersive listening experience for music.65 Surround sound has always been in a place of uncertainty between cinema and music cultures. Added to this is the relative lack of discussion of where it belongs; rather than undertaking a thoroughgoing engagement with that question, we simply repurpose these very similar technologies across the contexts. Now, however, a company that is leveraging a technology is bringing the debate to a head. With Atmos, we are given the opportunity to review what surround sound has been, and, as a result, what it could be if its applications were effectively combined.

An Expanded Notion of “Presence” Presence has become a buzzword in the recent discussion about virtual reality technologies, but it has an extensive and powerful history when it comes to surround sound. Discourse on surround sound for music has long emphasized “being there” in “another scene.”66 Mercury’s famous stereo format in the 1940s was termed “Living Presence” as it was intended to make you feel that you were present to the site of the sound.67 The Binaural Magnecorder was advertised as not only “Giv[ing] music a spatial sense, parallel to the third dimension for vision,” but also adding “living ‘presence’ to recordings” (see Figure 10.6).68

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Figure 10.6  Advertisement for the binaural Magnecorder, from Magnecord.

This discourse prefigures Atmos; in 1955, the magazine Tape Recording referred to binaural recording as “the equivalent in sound of the 3-D motion picture.”69 In the early 1950s, binaural records advertised their product with an ad screaming, “You are there!” The company Audiosphere marketed a form very similar to Atmos in the mid-1950s, claiming to immerse you in a virtual sphere of sound.70 Disney claimed that the soundtrack to Fantasia would place you in the sound perspective of the orchestra’s conductor, indicating that the feeling is one of live presence in a perfected position to the music occurring all around you.71 Early advertisements almost exactly prefigure one of

Leveraging a Long and Tuneful History   227 Atmos’s campaigns, where an empty movie theatre chair is placed in a variety of exciting locations. A Monarch Electronics advertisement from 1961 states: “Astonishingly realistic presence! Close your eyes . . . You are there! . . . Front row center at the Philharmonic. Group-side table at your favorite jazz spot. Section A at the Hollywood Bowl. Wherever there are good sounds to hear . . . you are there . . . through the magic of this remarkable new STA-2100 tuner/amplifier.”72 In one such ad, actor Ralph Bellamy listens to his ster­eo hi-fi in the redwoods of California, transported there by lifelike sound (see Figure 10.7). In another, he sits atop a mountain.73 Earlier advertisements also prefigured Atmos’s aim of putting you in close proximity with the musicians themselves, showing a woman cozying up to a man below the line, “How close can you get to a piccolo player?” asserting that the tapes from RCA Victor bring you into the action when it comes to music (see Figure 10.8).74 And ads for stereophonic sound showcased a family looking out over the Grand Canyon, as they listen to the “Grand Canyon Suite,” asserting that the stereo brought them into the park (see Figure 10.9).75 Atmos partakes in what Tony Grajeda calls the “audio of attractions,” in which a sound system calls attention to itself. Multi-channel sound often advertised its effects

Figure 10.7  Ralph Bellamy advertises the Goodmans Triaxonal Speaker System in stereo. Bellamy appeared in a series of ads for the sound system; he is pictured in another atop a frosted mountain peak similarly listening to his stereo system in a comfortable chair.

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Figure 10.8  RCA Victor advertisement, “How Close Can You Get to a Piccolo Player?” The tapes being advertised began to be sold in 1954.

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Figure 10.9  RCA Victor Grand Canyon Suite Advertisement in Life Magazine, January 1957.

through “demonstration records” or self-advertising films (such as This Is Cinerama) that showcased its possibilities.76 To a large extent, Atmos follows in their footsteps. What can Atmos offer to this history of false starts? To begin with, it offers a way of refocusing the discourse on surround in a manner that might make it more open to twenty-first-century technologies. This is a focus on mobility, both of soundscapes and the manner in which listeners are invited to experience them.

230   Meredith C. Ward The platform encourages mobility on the part of the experiencer: it encourages her to move inside the sphere of sound that it creates. This is the biggest innovation that Atmos offers to the history of surround: it offers us the opportunity to think of surround sound as a space to move through. “Traveling” sound has been an element of surround sound since the 1960s; however, for a long time, it involved a “motionless auditor surrounded by sound in motion.” As Grajeda puts it in his discussion of the “sweet spot” of stereo listening, “sound has been ‘liberated’ precisely at a moment when the listener had been put in his place.”77 While previous models encouraged a listener to experience sound as it moved around her, Atmos also encourages the movement of the listener. It invites us to travel through sound worlds. It offers us actual physical movement along with virtual presence. This is Atmos’s main contribution to the history we have traced. It is also a point of intervention that makes Atmos particularly notable. One of Leidecker’s accounts shows how Atmos for Music encourages a sense of “presence” to sound, as well as a feeling of what I call “traversing” virtual sound space. In the summer of 2018, I conducted interviews with two members of the Dolby Atmos for Music team that developed the plugin. Their stories made the potential newness within the platform clear. One story recounted by Leidecker makes the way that Atmos for Music invites a sense of presence to musical sounds especially cogent. In March 2016, Atmos for Music got its first big break: it was installed in the legendary London music venue, Ministry of Sound. The space installed a myriad of extra speakers to make a full Atmos experience. DJs worked with the Atmos plugin for weeks in advance to execute moves.78 Leidecker and the team are also musicians experienced in work with multichannel systems, and still, says Leidecker: “It was the biggest, loudest, most dynamite room I’d ever heard,” adding “and I’ve been mixing sound for 16-speaker-systems in music since the late ’90s.”79 It was, he states, his “favorite surround sound room that I’d ever heard.” The space, he states, actually encouraged movement in its listeners. He refers to people having a physical response to the sounds around them. He states: “it meant something that it was in a dance music room, instead of an electro-acoustic, chin-strokey, chairs in a circle [sort of thing]. It mattered that it was a room designed for dancing.” And this was because “it encouraged you to walk around and actually even jog or move while you were listening to the sound.” In fact, this is, Leidecker asserts, “precisely what you want to do when you’re in a room with six subwoofers playing stuff under 60 hertz.”80 He describes it as the sound inducing people to move almost through a form of physical overstimulation: “Like, when your throat is vibrating? You actually want to be moving around. So it was automatically better by far, from the outset, than almost any single, university funded” presentation that would generally boast such an experimental setup.81 The physical aspect of the invitation Dolby Atmos makes is, for Leidecker, not to be underestimated. Atmos is a spur to physical movement in his account. He states: You get unbelievable sonic effects. Your nervous system goes into overdrive, trying to figure out what it’s hearing. When you get that much volume, you’re talking about a real kind of physical overload that just becomes abstract. Like it stops being about panning. You can hear the panning, you can hear motion, but you’re mainly just dealing with the overwhelming physical presence of sound. Which is why again it’s

Leveraging a Long and Tuneful History   231 really useful that you’re in a dance club and you’re allowed to move. You’re allowed to walk around so you’ve got a paradigm where you’re allowed to do cardio.

He continues: “It helped people dance.”82 “It was really effective.” Those who experienced the Atmos installation opening night were listeners; they were also travelers. They walked; they jogged; they “did cardio.” The ability to traverse virtual sound space in just this way is what makes Atmos slightly different from everything that has come before. As Leidecker puts it, it “was a room full of twenty to twentyfour-year-old kids, literally tracking panning sounds—pointing at sounds as they were panning—with vodka cranberry drinks in their other hand. You know, just sort of following the sounds.” The result was spectacularly involving. The listeners that night had come without expectations. Says Leidecker: “They’d been told that something special was going on, but I don’t think they understood what Atmos was. They had just heard it was going to be a crazy sound system,” implying that they expected volume, “and when they got in there, everybody understood what was happening. Everybody heard the difference. You could just tell.” When Leidecker speaks about it, he laughs. “It was great,” he says. “It was fantastic. You know, career peak.”83 The absolute and deep emphasis on mobility in these accounts clearly shows that the genealogy of ideas on surround sound is both consistent and slowly evolving. Mobility of the listener is Atmos’s strong addition. But there is much more to do. Atmos still does not capture the largest market share in any of the fields in which it is a player, due in part to the markets’ inertia and the cost of its systems. Its cinema format is expensive and not all cinema houses can afford to become Atmos-equipped. Similarly, not all music venues can afford to become Atmos-ready, as this requires a powerful sound system to do it right. Its virtual reality wing is just taking off. Says Leidecker, who is no longer at Dolby: “The team is still plugging away, and the technology still sounds totally amazing. You just never know.” The question remains open as to whether Atmos will ever become an industry standard across media. But, whatever the fate of the platform itself, it presents us with a model that encompasses the many hybrid and contradictory definitions of surround sound. It stands as a fascinating example of what soundscapes we may traverse—if we choose to—in the future. The model that Dolby brings may offer the industry a new way of implementing surround sound. Indeed, it may be the best chance of creating a popular model of surround sound that enables a future that reflects the subtexts of the past. The ability to minimize outlay to launch new applications for Dolby surround is just one of its multiple virtues as an agitator for such a future. But whether this gamble will pay off for Dolby is still quite uncertain, and the future is far from decided. Only time will tell.

Notes 1. “Dolby Atmos,” Dolby Laboratories, https://www.dolby.com/us/en/brands/dolby-atmos.html, accessed February 7, 2019. 2. “Introduction to Atmos” video, Dolby Laboratories, www.dolby.com, accessed October 15, 2013. Disney Pixar’s Brave was the first film with an Atmos mix. The mix enabled the listener to hear the sounds that populated the protagonist Merida’s world. Sounds occurring in the

232   Meredith C. Ward forest high above the child’s head were heard literally higher in the space to simulate not only her aural experience—literally, what she hears—but also her physical position in space, which was low, as she is a child. 3. Jon Leidecker, May 30, 2018. Telephone interview by Meredith C. Ward. All remaining quotes from Leidecker are taken from this interview. 4. “Dolby Atmos Gains Global Momentum,” Dolby Laboratories, https://www.dolby.com/ us/en/technologies/dolby-atmos/cinema-exhibitor-testimonials.html, accessed February 7, 2019. For slightly older figures, see Box Office Staff, “Dolby Surpasses 4,000 Dolby Atmos Screens Worldwide,” October 4, 2018, https://pro.boxoffice.com/dolby-surpasses4000-dolby-atmos-screens-worldwide/. That number is approximately double the number of screens that existed in 2016. See AudioXPress staff, “Dolby Atmos Now Installed in Over 2,000 Screens,” December 8, 2016, https://www.audioxpress.com/news/dolbyatmos-now-installed-in-over-2-000-screens-and-500-movie-titles-released. 5. “Leveraging technology” is used in the tech industry to describe a scenario in which new tweaks occur within existing technologies with minimal change between applications, thereby maximizing profits. It also enables adaptability with little friction and minimal effort. Corporations such as Dolby have the model of “leveraging” built into their structures, and incentivize innovation that deals in leverage with entities such as their annual hack-athon, which encourages employees to consider existing technologies as jumping off points for new projects. See, for example, Pamela Hawkins Williams, Dotcy Isom III, and Tiffini D. Smith-Peaches, “A Profile of Dolby Laboratories: An Effective Model for Leveraging Intellectual Property,” New Jersey Tech. & Intellectual Property Prop. 2 (2003): 81–98: 81. For more on technology leveraging in general, see Early Adopter Research, “Technology Leverage,” https://earlyadopter.com/2018/03/09/technology-leverage/, accessed May 1, 2019. 6. A platform, for Dolby, means a format in which one larger entity encompasses multiple individual sound “systems.” Atmos as a platform encompasses Atmos for cinema, music, home theatre, and virtual reality. See Dolby.com for more details. 7. See Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 8. Mark Kerins and Gianluca Sergi have written extensively about the role of cinema surround sound in modern-day sonic aesthetics. See Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,  2010); and Gianluca Sergi, “Knocking at the Door of Cinematic Artifice: Dolby Atmos, Challenges and Opportunities,” The New Soundtrack 3, no. 2 (2013): 107–21. 9. Staff Writer, “Sounding Off: Exhibitors Sing the Praises of Dolby Atmos,” Film Journal International, April 12, 2013, http://www.filmjournal.com/content/sounding-exhibitorssing-praises-dolby-atmos. 10. Jon Leidecker, May 30, 2018. Telephone interview by Meredith C. Ward. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Sergi, “Knocking at the Door of Cinematic Artifice,” 114. 15. Ibid., 118. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. See Benjamin Wright, “Atmos Now: Dolby Laboratories, Mixing Ideology and Hollywood Sound Production,” in Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound, ed. Paul Théberge, Kyle Devine, and Tom Everrett (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015), 227–46: 229.

Leveraging a Long and Tuneful History   233 19. Ibid., 243. 20. Jon Leidecker, May 30, 2018. Telephone interview by Meredith C. Ward. 21. See Wright, “Atmos Now,” 208–27. 22. Joel Kustka, December 4, 2017. Telephone interview by Meredith C. Ward. 23. Engineers emphasized that Dolby’s real strength is in its ability to create continuity between mixers’ previous modes of work and the new plugin. See Leidecker, Kustka interviews. Joel Kustka, December 4, 2017. Telephone interview by Meredith C. Ward. 24. Sam Machkovech, “Spatial Audio is the Most Exciting Thing to Happen to Pop Music Since Stereo,” Ars Technica, November 11, 2017. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/11/ spatial-audio-is-the-most-exciting-thing-to-happen-to-pop-music-since-stereo/, accessed February 7, 2019. 25. Sam Machkovech, “Spatial Audio.” This, he states, was true even if only reverberation was placed overhead to give a sense of lifelike sound space. 26. Litt is quoted in Machkovech, “Spatial Audio.” 27. “Dolby Atmos for Virtual Reality,” Dolby Laboratories, https://www.dolby.com/us/en/ professional/content-creation/vr.html, accessed February 8, 2019. 28. Dolby.com, promotional material for Atmos, https://www.dolby.com/us/en/technologies/ music/dolby-atmos.html, accessed July 1, 2017. 29. Joel Kustka, December 4, 2017. Telephone interview by Meredith C. Ward. 30. Rudyard Coltman is quoted in “Sounding Off: Exhibitors Sing the Praises of Dolby Atmos,” Film Journal International 116, no. 5 (2013): 67. 31. Coltman quoted in “Sounding Off,” 67. 32. For a general overview of binaural recording, see Stephan Paul, “Binaural Recording Technology: A Historical Review and Possible Future Developments.” Acta Acustica United with Acustica 95, no. 5 (2009), 767–88. On the history of binaural recording, see Emil Torick, “Highlights in the History of Multichannel Sound,” Journal of the Audio Engineering Society 46, nos. 1–2 (1998), 27–31. See also Torick, “AM Stereophonic Broadcasting-An Historical Review,” Journal of the Audio Engineering Society 23, no. 10 (1975): 802–5. For more on the nature of binaural sound as headphone-based sound, see V. Ralph Algazi and Richard O. Duda, “Headphone-Based Spatial Sound,” IEEE Signal Processing Magazine 28, no. 1 (2011): 33–42. 33. See Meredith C. Ward, Static in the System: Noise and the Soundscape of American Cinema Culture (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 104–7. 34. Melissa Van Drie, “Hearing through the Théâtrophone: Sonically Constructed Spaces and Embodied Listening in the Late Nineteenth-Century French Theatre,” SoundEffects: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience 5, no. 1 (2015): 73–90. 35. Frederick  J.  Ampel, “Multi-Channel Audio as an Immersive Environment.” In Audio Engineering Society Conference: 16th International Conference: Spatial Sound Reproduction. Audio Engineering Society, 1999. 36. Christopher H Sterling and Michael  C.  Keith, Sounds of Change: A History of FM Broadcasting in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 37. Sterling and Keith, Sounds of Change. 38. At Bell, Fletcher headed projects that spanned from investigations into the nature of speech and hearing; acoustics; electrical engineering; music; telephony; and the application of his study of speech to development of sound motion pictures. For more on Harvey Fletcher, see S.  H.  Fletcher, “Harvey Fletcher, September 11, 1884–July 23, 1981,” Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences (US) vol. 1 (1992): 165–93. For a very brief overview, see Bell Labs’ own biography of Fletcher at https://www.bell-labs.com/about/ recognition/2016-stereo-sound/, accessed February 8, 2019.

234   Meredith C. Ward 39. Harvey Fletcher, “Hearing, the Determining Factor for High-Fidelity Transmission,” Proceedings of the IRE 30, no. 6 (1942): 266–77. 40. Agnieszka Roginska Paul Geluso, eds. Immersive Sound: The Art and Science of Binaural and Multi-Channel Audio (Waltham: Focal Press, 2017). 41. Alexander Ray, The Inventor of Stereo: The Life and Works of Alan Dower Blumlein (Waltham, MA: Focal Press, 2013). See also Barry Fox, “Early Stereo Recording,” Studio Sound and Broadcast Engineering (May 1982): 36–42. 42. Originally developed in concert with composer Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, this technology is yet another example of the crossover between film and music culture. For more, see Fox, “Early Stereo Recording,” 37. 43. Tomlinson Holman, Surround Sound: Up and Running (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2008), 3–4. 44. Disney termed this “Fantasound,” and it comprised three audio channels and fifty-four loudspeakers. However, the full effect was expensive to achieve, and it was not used at screenings after the premiere. Charles L. Granata, “Disney, Stokowski, and the Genius of Fantasia,” in The Cartoon Music Book. Chicago, ed. Daniel and Yuval Taylor (Chicago: A Capella Books, 2002), 73–91. 45. Andrew R. Boone, “Mickey Mouse Goes Classical,” Popular Science, January 1941, 65–67: 66. 46. Fred Waller, “The Archeology of Cinerama.” Film History 5, no. 3 (1993): 289–97. See also Hazard Reeves, “This Is Cinerama,” Film History 11, no. 1 (1999): 85–97: 85. See also John Belton, “1950s Magnetic Sound: The Frozen Revolution,” in Sound Theory, Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 154–67. 47. See This is Cinerama, directed by Merian  C.  Cooper (1952, Los Angeles: Flicker Alley, 2011), DVD. See also David Sterritt, “From the Curved Screen to the Flat Screen: Cinerama Adventures Galore!” Cineaste 39, no. 3 (2014): 36–39. 48. Lowell Thomas introduction to the film, This Is Cinerama. 49. Waldemar Kaempffert, “Apparently Solid Motion Pictures Produced by Curved Screen and Peripheral Vision,” The New York Times, October 5, 1952, E9. 50. Bryan R. Simms, Music of the Twentieth Century: Style and Structure (New York: Schirmer Books, 1986), 391. Jerome Kohl, “Guest Editor’s Introduction” to “A Seventieth-Birthday Festschrift for Karlheinz Stockhausen (Part One),” Perspectives of New Music 36, no. 1 (1998): 59–64: 61. The composition was later reduced to four-channel sound for some performances, and to both mono and stereo for recordings later. 51. Robin Maconie, Other Planets: The Work of Karlheinz Stockhausen, 1950–2007 (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). 52. Sandra Naumann, “The Expanded Image: On the Musicalization of the Visual Arts in the Twentieth Century,” in Audiovisuology 2, Essays: Histories and Theories of Audiovisual Media and Art, ed. Dieter Daniels, Sandra Naumann, and Jan Thoben (Kolen: Walther Konig, 2010), 71–88. 53. See David W. Bernstein, ed. The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 21–23. See also Julie Watkins, “Composing Visual Music: Visual Music Practice at the Intersection of Technology, Audio-Visual Rhythms and Human Traces.” Body, Space & Technology 17, no. 1 (2018): 51–75; and Joel Rose, “Remembering Henry Jacobs, the ‘Goof-Off ’ Who Pioneered Surround Sound,” NPR.org October 3, 2015, https://www.npr.org/2015/10/03/445015413/ remembering-henry-jacobs-the-goof-off-who-pioneered-surround-sound, accessed February 8, 2019.

Leveraging a Long and Tuneful History   235 54. See Chou Wen-Chung, “Varèse: A Sketch of the Man and His Music.” Musical Quarterly (1966): 151–70. See also Richard Zvonar, “A History of Spatial Music,” eContact! 7 no. 4 (2005), https://econtact.ca/7_4/zvonar_spatialmusic.html, accessed February 8, 2019. 55. John Mosely, “Quintaphonic Sound.” SMPTE Journal 86, no. 1 (1977): 20–29. See also John Robinson, “Tommy The Movie,” Uncut (2016): 62. 56. Dennis McNally, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2007), 498–502. 57. Théberge et al., “Introduction,” Living Stereo. 12. 58. Ibid. 59. For more on this, see Herbert I Gefvert, “Multi-Dimensional Sound Reproduction System.” U.S. Patent 5,533,129, issued July 2, 1996. See also Steven R. Postrel, “Competing Networks and Proprietary Standards: The Case of Quadraphonic Sound,” The Journal of Industrial Economics (1990): 169–85. 60. Stefan Krebs, “The Failure of Binaural Stereo: German Sound Engineers and the Introduction of Artificial Head Microphones,” Icon 23 (2017): 113–44. 61. Nick Johnstone, Lou Reed (Talking) (London: Omnibus Press, 2010), 60–63. 62. See Andrew Sachs, The Revenge. Broadcast by Radio 3 in 1978. Description can be found here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2016/07/the-revenge, accessed July 1, 2019. 63. See Richard J. Hand, Listen in Terror: British Horror Radio from the Advent of Broadcasting to the Digital Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 64. See Jan Maes and Marc Vercammen, Digital Audio Technology: A Guide to CD, MiniDisc, SACD, DVD (A), MP3 and DAT (New York: Focal Press, 2013). For an evaluation of the failure of these formats to capture a market share, see Steve Guttenberg, “Why did SACD, DVD-A, and Blu-ray fail as music surround formats?” CNET, June 25, 2011, https://www. cnet.com/news/why-did-sacd-dvd-a-and-blu-ray-fail-as-music-surround-formats/. See also Gary Margolis, “Why Super Audio CD Failed,” Audiophile Review, December 30th, 2016, https://audiophilereview.com/cd-dac-digital/why-super-audio-cd-failed.html. For the difference between DVD-A and SACD, see John Atkinson, “DVD-A vs. SACD,” Stereophile.com, September 10, 2005, https://www.stereophile.com/asweseeit/1197dvd/ index.html. 65. In classical film apparatus theory, the “central embracing view” of the camera invites the spectator in to feel him or herself to be the ordering principle, the perspective that forms the world around it. In this way, as Stephen Heath puts it, the spectator might feel herself to be standing at an open window around which narrative space organizes itself. I have elsewhere argued that apparatus theory might be a point of contact for studies of Atmos; if the apparatus has traditionally offered a “gods-eye-view,” then Atmos places you in the position of “God’s ear.” See Ward, Static in the System, 112. For more on apparatus ­theory, see Nick Browne, “The Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 102–19. See also Stephen Heath, “Narrative Space,” and Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinema Apparatus,” in Rosen, 379–420 and 286–98. 66. Tony Grajeda, “The Sweet Spot: The Technology of Stereo and the Field of Auditorship,” in Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound, ed. Paul Théberge, Kyle Devine, and Tom Everrett (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015), 37–63. Grajeda notes that: “Creating ‘presence’ is the great intangible of recording techniques.” Grajeda, “The Sweet Spot,” 57.

236   Meredith C. Ward 67. See Robert Baird, “A Fine Art: The Mercury Living Presence Recordings,” Stereophile. com, July 10, 2012, https://www.stereophile.com/content/fine-art-mercury-livingpresence-recordings. 68. Binaural Magnecorder advertisement, “Binaural or Bust” collection, 3-D Film Archive, http://www.3dfilmarchive.com/binaural-or-bust, accessed July 1, 2019. 69. Archived newspaper clipping, 3-D Film Archive, http://www.3dfilmarchive.com/binauralor-bust, accessed July 1, 2019. 70. Audiosphere advertisement, 3-D Film Archive, http://www.3dfilmarchive.com/binauralor-bust, accessed July 1, 2019. 7 1. Fantasia Fantasound advertisement, 3-D Film Archive, http://www.3dfilmarchive.com/ binaural-or-bust, accessed July 1, 2019. 72. Ad for Monarch Electronics in High Fidelity Magazine (1961) 11(5): 14. Quoted in Grajeda, “The Sweet Spot,” 57. 73. Stereo home sound system advertisement, 1958. 3-D Film Archive, http://www.3dfilmarchive. com/binaural-or-bust, accessed July 1, 2019. 74. RCA Victor advertisement, 3-D Film Archive, http://www.3dfilmarchive.com/binaural-orbust, accessed July 1, 2019. 75. RCA Victor advertisement, January 1957 issue of Life magazine. 3-D Film Archive, http:// www.3dfilmarchive.com/binaural-or-bust, accessed July 1, 2019. 76. Grajeda notes that “the distraction of stereo as spectacle—with its sensational artifice of novelty and demonstration records—would run its course.” Grajeda, “The Sweet Spot,” 59. The task for Atmos is, then, to differ from its predecessors by discovering a way to find staying power. 77. Grajeda, “The Sweet Spot,” 59. Grajeda quotes a critic writing, in 1959, “I wish someone would invent a method of permitting me to move around while listening to stereo opera without losing any of its effect.” See Nathan Broder, “A Second Stereophonic Figaro.” High Fidelity Magazine 9, vol. 4 (1959): 60, quoted in Grajeda (59). 7 8. Hugh Robjohns, “Dolby Atmos at the Ministry of Sound,” Sound on Sound, January 2017, https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/dolby-atmos-ministry-sound, accessed February 7, 2019. 79. Jon Leidecker, May 30, 2018. Telephone interview by Meredith C. Ward. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid.

Select Bibliography Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinema Apparatus.” In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen, 286–98. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Beck, Jay. A Quiet Revolution: Changes in American Film Sound Practices, 1967–1979 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 2002). UMI, 2002. Beck, Jay. Designing Sound: Audiovisual Aesthetics in 1970s American Cinema. New York: Rutgers University Press, 2016. Belton, John. “1950s Magnetic Sound: The Frozen Revolution.” In Sound Theory/Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman, 154–67. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Leveraging a Long and Tuneful History   237 Browne, Nick. “The Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach.” In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen, 102–19. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Dienstfrey, Eric. “The Myth of the Speakers: A Critical Reexamination of Dolby History.” Film History: An International Journal 28, no. 1 (2016): 167–93. Grainge, Paul. “Selling Spectacular Sound: Dolby and the Unheard History of Technical Trademarks.” In Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound, ed. Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda, 251–68. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Granata, Charles L. “Disney, Stokowski, and the Genius of Fantasia.” In The Cartoon Music Book, ed. Daniel Goldmark and Yuval Taylor, 73–91. Chicago: Capella Books, 2002. Holman, Tomlinson. Surround Sound: Up and Running. New York: Routledge, 2012. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Kerins, Mark. “Narration in the Cinema of Digital Sound.” The Velvet Light Trap 58, no. 1 (2006): 41–54. Kerins, Mark. Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Krebs, Stefan. “The Failure of Binaural Stereo: German Sound Engineers and the Introduction of Artificial Head Microphones.” Icon 23 (2017): 113–44. Mosely, John. “Quintaphonic Sound.” SMPTE Journal 86, no. 1 (1977): 20–29. Naumann, Sandra. “The Expanded Image: On the Musicalization of the Visual Arts in the Twentieth Century.” In Audiovisuology 2, Essays: Histories and Theories of Audiovisual Media and Art, ed. Dieter Daniels, Sandra Naumann, and Jan Thoben, 71–88. Kolen: Walther Konig, 2010. Paul, Stephan. “Binaural Recording Technology: A Historical Review and Possible Future Developments.” Acta Acustica United with Acustica 95, no. 5 (2009): 767–88. Postrel, Steven R. “Competing Networks and Proprietary Standards: The case of Quadraphonic Sound,” The Journal of Industrial Economics (1990): 169–85. Ray, Alexander. The Inventor of Stereo: The Life and Works of Alan Dower Blumlein. Waltham, Mass.: Focal Press, 2013. Reeves, Hazard. “This is Cinerama,” Film History 11, no. 1 (1999): 85–97. Roginska, Agnieszka and Paul Geluso, eds. Immersive Sound: The Art and Science of Binaural and Multi-Channel Audio. Waltham: Focal Press, 2017. Sergi, Gianluca. “The Sonic Playground: Hollywood Cinema and Its Listeners.” In Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby, 121–51. London: British Film Institute, 2001. Sergi, Gianluca. The Dolby Era: Film Sound in Contemporary Hollywood. Manchester University Press, 2004. Sergi, Gianluca. “Knocking at the Door of Cinematic Artifice: Dolby Atmos, Challenges and Opportunities.” The New Soundtrack 3, no. 2 (2013): 107–21. Sterling, Christopher H., and Michael C. Keith, Sounds of Change: A History of FM Broadcasting in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Théberge, Paul, Kyle Devine, and Tom Everrett, eds. Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2015. Torick, Emil. “AM Stereophonic Broadcasting: an Historical Review.” Journal of the Audio Engineering Society 23, no. 10 (1975): 802–5. Torick, Emil. “Highlights in the History of Multichannel Sound.” Journal of the Audio Engineering Society 46, nos. 1–2 (1998): 27–31.

238   Meredith C. Ward Waller, Fred. “The Archeology of Cinerama.” Film History 5, no. 3 (1993): 289–97. Ward, Meredith C. Static in the System: Noise and the Soundscape of American Cinema Culture. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. 104–7. Watkins, Julie. “Composing Visual Music: Visual Music Practice at the Intersection of Technology, Audio-Visual Rhythms and Human Traces.” Body, Space & Technology 17, no. 1 (2018): 51–75. Williams, Pamela Hawkins, Dotcy Isom III, and Tiffini D. Smith-Peaches. “A Profile of Dolby Laboratories: An Effective Model for Leveraging Intellectual Property.” New Jersey Tech. & Intellectual Property Prop. 2 (2003): 81–98. Wright, Benjamin. “Atmos Now: Dolby Laboratories, Mixing Ideology and Hollywood Sound Production.” In Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound, ed. Paul Théberge, Kyle Devine, and Tom Everrett, 208–27. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015.

pa rt I I I

R E PR E SE N TAT IONS AND R E-PR E SE N TAT IONS

chapter 11

M a k i ng Sense of Noise a n d Sil ence i n L a Ca pti v e Richard Dyer

Characters in films rarely listen to non-verbal, non-musical sounds (usually hereinafter, “noise”) and silence. When they do it is nearly always to make sense of them in narrative, affective, or symbolic terms. In this they are in accord with the way noise and silence are used more generally in film, where they function largely to hold narrative space and time in place and sometimes to provide an interpretive or affective perspective. They are rarely allowed just to be—they must be made to speak. La Captive (Belgium/France 2000, dir. Chantal Akerman) observes this impulse to interrogate aural opacity and verbal absence, in the context of a male need to probe the female. Here, a woman’s silence becomes a refusal to be known by a man and the clacking of high heels becomes maddeningly erotic and elusive, while verbal interrogation leads nowhere and florid music functions as an excess of expressivity. A celebrated sequence from Cat People (USA 1942, dir. Jacques Tourneur) illustrates the role of showing listening to noise and silence in most cinema.1 Alice and, some ­distance behind, Irena are walking down a twilit street; Irena, who has come to believe she becomes a panther when emotionally disturbed, has learnt that her husband has been confiding these fears in his assistant, Alice, who is also in love with him; is Irena stalking Alice? In a shot of first Alice, then Irena crossing the frame, and then in cross cutting between medium shots of their legs and feet, the sounds of their footsteps are differentiated, Irena’s quicker and sharper, with more echo, Alice’s softer and, while brisk, less hurried. In one shot, Alice walks across the screen, the sound of her footsteps audibly in synch with the sight of them, the camera unobtrusively panning with her but then ­stopping when she leaves the frame. There is no cut back to the shot of Irena’s feet; rather, the distinctive sound of her steps is heard and we may assume the sight of them is about to enter the frame. Instead the sound of the steps suddenly stops, still off screen. Now the

242   Richard Dyer film does cut, back to Alice, initially still walking visibly and audibly at the same speed as before but then slowing down, as if disconcerted by the sudden silence. (Presumably she has been aware of someone walking down the street behind her, although not that it is Irena and that she is—is she?—being followed.) She turns to look back and the street behind her is deserted. Even so, she quickens her pace as she walks on, even scuffing her feet. Her look behind exemplifies the most common consequence of listening to both sound and silence in film. She tries to locate where the sound was coming from and thence to understand the sound by virtue of what was making it;2 and her quickening pace indicates that she has tried to read the silence and, unable to do so, is disturbed. In short, noises and silence must, to a listening character, have identifiable sources, meanings and affects. The attempt to determine these and also failure to do so are building blocks of suspense and fear in the movies. As Alice is hurrying along, there is the sudden “feline growl . . . and hiss”3 of a bus pulling up and opening its doors. Alice, like us, has been told of Irena’s fear that she, Irena, is cursed such that when she is stressed or jealous (as she has reason to be of her husband’s, albeit unconsummated, friendship with Alice), she transforms into a murderous feline. The sound of the bus, before it is seen to be that, suggests momentarily that Irena-as-cat is about to strike. Before Alice gets on the bus, a rustling sound attracts her attention and she turns to look at some bare tree branches. Is their rustling created by the wind or by a cat creature moving beneath them? Once again, listening to the sound, one might add listening by looking for and towards its source, is an act of interrogation; noise must be made to mean—when it cannot be, a sense of unease is generated. In another use of sound much commented upon in film analysis, Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (A Man Escaped; France 1956, dir. Robert Bresson),4 noise and silence function in both narrative and symbolic terms. Detailing the escape from prison of Resistance fighter, Lieutenant Fontaine, the film dwells on both the sounds he makes (which may alert others, and notably the guards, to the scraping, ripping and knocking required to make his means of escape) and the sounds he listens out for (notably the guards’ footsteps and the sound of locking and unlocking nearby cells, which mean he must stop his labors). The final escape, in which Fontaine is accompanied by his cell mate François Jost, involves crossing a rooftop, where they have to keep stopping because of the noise of their feet on gravel and waiting for passing trains to cover the sound. At one point they have to pause because they hear steps and German being spoken. At another, very tense moment, Fontaine is waiting to kill a guard who stands in their way; hiding against wall, it is not clear where the guard is or what he is doing; then the sound of a train passing by fast, loud, is cover for Fontaine to quickly go round the wall and kill the guard, off screen, unheard. In one pause on the rooftop, Fontaine and Jost listen to the chimes of a church clock. It tells them the time but also indicates a sense of a world outside prison while also evoking religion. Throughout the film, sounds—tram squeals, children’s laughter, train ­whistles—register a world beyond the confines of the prison, the world to which Fontaine and Jost seek to return. Noises also relate to the film’s implicit religious dimension. A cranking sound outside his cell which alerts Fontaine to the presence of a skylight that

Making Sense of Noise and Silence in La Captive   243 he can use in his escape, the intermittent sound of passing trains that Fontaine and Jost can use to muffle their footsteps on the gravel, these are entirely explicable in naturalistic terms but they may also be understood as the role of the Holy Spirit in the affairs of humankind. Not only is this a recurrent concern of Bresson’s work, Un condamné à mort s’est échappé has an epigraph from the St. John’s gospel (“Le vent souffle où il veut”/“The wind bloweth where it listeth” (III: 8)), commonly understood to refer to the presence of the Holy Spirit (an aspect of God in Christian theology) in the world; Bresson had originally wanted to use the phrase as the title for the film. A sense of the holiness is also evoked at various points in the film by a non-diegetic use of parts of Mozart’s Mass in C minor, notably the “Kyrie” (“Lord Have Mercy”) over the shots of Fontaine and Jost finally free. Michel Chion suggests a distinction between the sounds of the tram and the train, in that the former are shown in the opening section of the film whereas the latter are never seen, only in any sense visibly present in the steam that is seen billowing up alongside the two men in the final shots.5 Following Chion, we might say that while Fontaine listens to both the tram and the train, the former merely represents the temporal world beyond the prison, whereas the latter, in its help in effecting his escape, signals the presence of the divine. He shows no recognition of that and of course he does not at all hear the Mozart Mass, but this accords with the film’s cosmology in showing (audibly) the inscrutable role of God in the world. In both Cat People and Un condamné à mort s’est échappé, having characters listen to noise and silence has narrative, affective, and (especially in the latter) symbolic purposes. Both use listening to (albeit rather different) ends of fear and suspense and both allow noise and silence to imply something respectively troubling and transcendent beyond the pure fact of them as sounds. They are made to signify, to indicate where and what sounds (and even in effect silence) come from and the implications of this for the characters and the film’s understanding of their world. This urge to make narrative, affective, and intellectual sense of noise and silence, rather than to attend to them as sense impressions, fuels La Captive, the 2000 adaptation of La Prisonnière, the fifth volume of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu.6 La Captive signals its concern with these issues, and their significance for cinema, from its opening shots: it begins in both noise and silence. Behind the credits (in a plain, sans serif, white font, thus as devoid of connotation as possible), there is the sound of surf and a long, extremely dark take of breakers rolling in at night. Although I doubt the sound and image were recorded simultaneously and there seems no attempt to co-ordinate the sonic break of the surf with the sight of it, nonetheless this operates within a standard diegetic assumption of sound in film: what you hear emanates from what you see. The film proper starts with a cut from this to grainy footage of young women running into the sea and a whirring and clinking metallic sound, rhythmically close to the sound of the surf we have just heard. There are a series of sometimes mobile mid-shots and close-ups of the women frolicking in the surf, sitting on the beach or playing ball, sometimes smiling at each other, the whirring sound continuing along with occasional clicks. Eventually the camera slowly tracks in on a woman looking directly into it and then the film (i.e. La Captive) cuts to a shot of a young man standing by a home projector looking

244   Richard Dyer forward (and thus by filmic convention established as looking at what we have just seen). The sound, though it is still a bit like surf, is now revealed to be that of the projector. In effect, the film has thus opened in silence and sound. The film within a film is silent: we do not hear the cries and laughter of the young women, yet the initially ambiguous noise (surf/projector) is prominent. Moreover, what happens next is the young man’s attempt to make the silence speak. He repeatedly stops, rewinds, and starts the projector, with clicks and whirrs strongly registered, and pronounces what he takes to be the words being spoken by, now, the two women in the projected film. Eventually he comes and stands, silhouetted, in front of the film, trying to see what the young woman is saying. This provides a key to the film: a strong awareness of sound set against a determined effort to make silence (and, as we shall see, noise) speak. The man is the protagonist, Simon (Stanislas Merhar), and the woman looking directly into the camera his girlfriend, Ariane (Sylvie Testud), and much of the film concerns his obsessive attempts to make her speak, both literally and also in the sense of knowing what is going on inside her. Even in this opening, the frustration of the attempt is suggested. The projected image is so dark that it’s hard to discern if he is right to think she is saying “Je vous aime bien” (“I really love you”), and if she is, whether she is saying it to camera (and thus, we can assume, him) or to the young woman she is next to, arm in arm; and why in any case the formal “vous” rather than the intimate “tu” form? Almost the whole narrative dynamic of the film is there—does Ariane love him? how much? is she a lesbian? how close is he to her? These are the questions he has to pose of both her verbal reticence and the noises she makes. The narrative drive of La Captive is Simon’s and it is a drive to know Ariane, to make her silence and her noise speak. They live together in his flat, along with his grandmother and the housekeeper, Françoise. Much of the film consists of his attempting to find out how Ariane is away from him, what she is doing when he is not there, what she is thinking and feeling when they are together. He is forever asking her questions about what she has been doing and her inner life. Although she seldom takes the lead in conversation and her face tends to be blank, Ariane is not literally silent in responding to him, but she might as well be for all the satisfaction he gets from her speech. In relation to what she has been doing, her answers seem at odds with what he finds out from her friends she has been doing, while in relation to what she is thinking and feeling, she often says she is thinking and feeling nothing. Yet he can never let this go. He especially wants to know what is going on within her when they make love. On one occasion, after he comes, she cries out “Andrée!,” the name of one of her friends; he seems not to hear, but later asks two of her friends if it’s possible to think of one person while having sex with another (especially in the context of bisexuality, Ariane perhaps thinking of a woman while having sex with him). Later, after again he has come cradling her body, she moans, probably in her sleep, and he starts to interrogate her about what she has said, but she seems not to know she has made a sound and says she has said nothing. He often asks her what she wants to do, to eat, to listen to, and she says (maybe sweetly, maybe wearily, maybe without affect altogether) that whatever he wants is fine, a reply that frustrates him because it tells him nothing

Making Sense of Noise and Silence in La Captive   245 about her desire (although in terms of her sexual pleasure he shows in practice no sign of being interested in it). Repeatedly in the film he quizzes her, time and again she is in effect silent. He also tries to make this silence speak by interrogating her friends, and not only about where she has been and who she has seen. When he bumps into one of them, Hélène (Vanessa Larré), she says she is looking for Ariane and has news of an old friend, but then refuses to say what news or which friend. In a scene with other of Ariane’s friends, Sarah (Bérénice Bejo) and Isabelle (Anna Mouglalis), Simon also wants to know what sex is like “entre femmes,” as if this will tell him about Ariane. Isabelle says that it cannot be explained. Thus, even when questioning her friends, Simon cannot make Ariane’s silence speak. The film plays on the dynamics of listening in order to know, and its frustrations, across the film. The most intimate exchange between Simon and Ariane, in which they discuss such matters as whether he takes pleasure in her vaginal odors, occurs when they are in bathrooms separated by a frosted glass wall. When he wants her to come to bed with him, he telephones her, although she is only in the next room in a not enormous flat. This aural sexual intimacy within spatial separation is of a piece with what seems to be Simon’s preferred sexual practice, rubbing himself against her, both of them clothed, until he orgasms. Eavesdropping, with all its tantalizing incompleteness and suggestiveness, recurs. They hear his grandma coughing in another room, and, despite Ariane’s concern, he does not go to her; another time he calls out to his grandmother to ask if she needs anything and there is no reply and still he does not go to her. He listens to Ariane and Andrée (Olivia Bonamy) chatting sotto voce in another room, including discussing which scarf she, Ariane, should choose to go out with and what they feel about their friend Hélène’s voice, whether it is “sensual.” The scarf chosen, a white one, is significant: when a little later Simon runs into Hélène, she is wearing a white one just like the one we have seen Ariane wear, and then a bit after this Andrée is wearing Ariane’s scarf. When Ariane and Andrée go out together, Simon, left in the flat, hears indistinct, but giggling female voices outside and—unable to settle to work—goes out to try to find Ariane and know what she is up to; the voices seem to suggest a world of fun, fun entre femmes, that Ariane may be implicated in and he excluded from. Eavesdropping appears to be a mode of gaining access to speech and other vocal sounds (coughing, giggling) from which Simon is otherwise excluded, and yet does not in fact yield clarity or understanding. He also listens to footsteps. These are a recurrent fascination in the film. An early sequence opens with a shot of the Place Vendôme, at the heart of Parisian high chic; we hear footsteps before we see their source, Ariane, soon seen walking directly left to right across the screen. She has high heels, that clack on the cobble stones, a sharp staccato sound. She/Sylvie Testud seems really to bang down on the heels, and later to stomp up stairs; in contrast, Simon, who is stalking her, has low heel leather dress shoes, which, when audible at all, are soft and light. In a sequence a little later, in the Rodin museum, shots of him walking very quietly on marble floors or creating a slight creak of wood as he steps cautiously into a room, contrast with what, hidden, he is listening to and

246   Richard Dyer watching, Ariane walking, her heels making a more definite, cleaner, echoing sound on the parquet. High heels, in their hard texture and tubular shape suggest culturally male properties, yet their exclusive wear by women in twentieth-century Western culture evokes femininity, and even specifically female glamour and allure. The sound they make evokes this complex erotic appeal, partly by the fact of emanating from women, but also, in its sharp, stabbing quality, perhaps heightening the masculine associations even, or especially, in the sight, as here, of distinctly female looks (long hair and evident breasts, skirt and handbag).7 Simon listens to Ariane’s footsteps, in this and other sequences in the film, so as to be able to follow her, but it is surely also to plumb the erotic ambiguity in the sound itself, one that might be linked to traditional notions of butch and femme in lesbian lifestyles, or may also echo the ambiguity of the women in Proust’s novel, with their feminized versions of male names (Gilberte, Albertine and, as here, Andrée).8 Bérénice Reynaud emphasizes the dynamics of listening to the heels, even when Ariane is out of view, reassuring as a sign of her presence and yet also discombobulating because so many women in Paris wear heels: When Simon starts following Ariane, the tap-tap-tap is the sign, both alluring and reassuring, of the young woman’s presence. As the narration unfolds, Simon is increasingly confronted [with] the multiplicity of high heels.9

Simon follows the footsteps to know where Ariane is and what she is doing, yet, just as with his probing at her silence, this listening too is bound to frustrate knowing. Simon also listens to music. Yet whereas silence and noise function as sounds that stubbornly refuse to yield full meaning and affect, music offers a plenitude from which, however, Simon is distant. He controls music in his environment (flat and car), favoring Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata.10 He turns on music in the bedroom by remote control; at one point he picks out some notes on the piano (rather than fully playing it); whether it is mechanical reproduction or a musical instrument, his connection to the music is attenuated. Ariane, in contrast, is learning to sing, and although the inadequacies of her voice make this seem improbable, it is her whole-hearted engagement with music that is at stake. She sings to herself, Simon sometimes listening from another room, a hugely popular song of the 1950s, “Tout ça parc’qu’au bois d’Chaville.”11 When she hears a woman at the window of a neighboring flat singing the aria “Ed intanto che diletto, che spassetto io proverò” from Così fan tutte,12 she joins in. What she sings or listens to reinforces his alienation from the joy of music. Both “Tout ça parc’qu’au bois d’Chaville” and “Ed intanto che diletto, che spassetto io proverò” celebrate women having fun. While the former also eventually reminds us of a common consequence of heterosexual fun for women (pregnancy), Ariane never reaches that point but keeps coming back to words about the month of May, when you should do what you like. And while, “Ed intanto che diletto” is, like “Tout ça parc’qu’au bois d’Chaville,” heterosexual in its original context, it is here given a queer overtone by being sung by two women together, the neighbour wearing only a slip, something borne in on Simon as he comes into the block of flats and stands listening to the women’s duet.

Making Sense of Noise and Silence in La Captive   247 Ariane also goes to an opera, Carmen Oui.13 Earlier Andrée has urged Ariane to come to hear Carmen because Léa Landowsky (Aurore Clément) will be there; now Simon starts wondering what the significance of this is and all the more so when he realizes Léa Landowsky is the star of the opera,14 greeted rapturously before and after the performance with cries of “Léa! Léa! Léa!”; he rushes to the theatre to drag Ariane away. Ariane having appeared indifferent to Léa in her conversation with Andrée, Léa now appears, radiant on the steps of the theatre with a bunch of flowers in her arms, calling out to Ariane and hoping to see her that evening. Ariane goes to the opera and seems to know its star; Simon hears some of it on the radio and does not know Léa—he is excluded equally from the charmed circles of music and lesbianism. The snatch we hear of Carmen Oui is the very end, in the style of Bizet but not the end of his Carmen, with both a male voice laughing and then, finally, a female voice cackling—more unfathomable, non-verbal, non-musical vocal sounds. There is one piece of music that is exclusively associated with Simon, the tone poem Isle of the Dead15 by Sergei Rachmaninov. Inspired by the painting of the same name by Arnold Böcklin,16 this is a surging, richly orchestrated work in a minor key, incorporating the “Dies Irae” plainchant melody. It is heard when Simon is stalking Ariane, as described earlier17 and another time later in the film, as well as when he is driving her to her aunt’s (because he has said their relationship must end) and again at the end, after she has gone out swimming. The other music in the film is heard in snatches, unaccompanied, inexpertly sung, aurally diminished by being heard on radio or record player; Isle of the Dead, in contrast, is vibrant and voluptuous in a recording, as full and resonant as a soundtrack allows, by the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy. It is, in all its richness, the once piece of music Simon can by definition not hear, because it is purely non-diegetic, and it associates him ineluctably with death. The announcer for Carmen Oui wonders whether, in this new work, Don José will “cry out as in Bizet’s Carmen, ‘I killed her!’.” It is pertinent to the end of La Captive. Having decided to separate, Simon has driven Ariane to her aunt’s home, but then he changes their minds and they leave, winding up in a hotel by the sea at Biarritz. Although it is already night, Ariane decides to go for a swim. Suddenly—he can’t see her from the balcony of their room—Simon rushes out into the night, quickly strips off and plunges into the sea. There are a series of confusing, indecipherable shots of the pair of them floundering in the water, and then a long single take of a boat carrying Simon to the shore, huddled, shivering, staring ahead. Did she get into trouble, and he tried, and in the event, failed to rescue her? Or did he drown her? Or has she simply got away from and, as in the novel, left him? There is no way to say for sure, but Isle of the Dead plays in full-throttle on the soundtrack—although I do not think he literally drowns her in that moment, I have always felt that he has, through his remorseless need to hear her, to make her speak, to know her, killed her.18 Like the opening sequence, the very final shot of the film also plays upon sound and silence, but here, instead of the limitations of silent, grainy colored, 8 mm film, we have a magnificent long take in subtly gradated colors with not only a richly recorded music track but also a sound design mix in of the putt-putt of the small boat bearing Simon to

248   Richard Dyer shore19 and then, both music and boat stilled, just the lapping of the waves. And still the shot remains opaque—what has Simon done? What is he feeling? In the drive to Biarritz, Simon says to Ariane, “I’d so like to know your thoughts—who you are—what you hide from me.” She replies that she knows there are things about him that she doesn’t know and that she likes that, is intrigued by it and does not feel a need to uncover all that he thinks and feels. The exchange not only suggests a difference of temperament between them but encapsulates central issues in epistemology: the grounds for inference, the notion of a surface and an interior, how to dissect without destroying. The film gives these perennial dilemmas a further feminist inflection. Simon embodies the notion of a male need to control and subjugate the female through knowledge, a notion notably explored in the feminist visual studies concept of the (murderous) male gaze,20 augmented in La Captive by a remorseless male aural interrogation. Ariane’s effective if not literal silence suggests ideas of silence as resistance, most notably expressed in film in another Low Countries film, De stilte rond Christine M. (A Question of Silence; Netherlands 1982, dir. Marleen Gorris), a film that was for many years a mainstay of feminist film debate.21 La Captive, in its pronounced use of noise and silence to present its narrative, and its suggestion at the beginning and end of the limits of the audiovisual apparatus, foregrounds the impulse to know through listening, even to noise and silence, that drives nearly all cinema. It pushes it to an extreme, sketching a lethal and gendered epistemology of the ear. The work of Chantal Akerman (and indeed, that of Eric de Kuyper, her co-scriptwriter for La Captive) is commonly perceived to be part of what is sometimes called “minimalist” or “slow” cinema, for which Marguerite Duras, Yasujirō Ozu, Andrei Tarkovsky, Béla Tarr, Tsai Ming-liang, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, among others, are key reference points.22 Against the sense of what images and, perhaps especially, noise and silence are emanating from, leading to or concealing, such cinema focuses on what is present before us, on screen, from loudspeakers, as sights and sounds to be observed or contemplated.23 La Captive hints at the political implications of such procedures. While, I assume, neither Akerman or de Kuyper (nor I) would advocate abandonment of the interrogative attitude towards noise and silence,24 La Captive does suggest a way of listening to what is there without forcing it to point forwards narratively or inwards to character and symbol. La Captive suggests especially the gender implications of such an orientation of forging ahead, thrusting, uncovering, exposing, but it is easy to see how this may also be extrapolated to imperial and ecological actions and depredations. It suggests this not only as a thematic concern but in its own aesthetic of listening.

Notes 1. For further discussion, see Helen Hanson, “Hearing, Fearing: The Sonic Design of Suspense in Cat People (1942),” in Film Moments, ed. Tom Brown and James Walters (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 94–97. 2. Cf. the discussion of “causal listening” in Michel Chion, Audio-vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 25–28.

Making Sense of Noise and Silence in La Captive   249 3. Hanson, “Hearing, Fearing,” 94. 4. See for example David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 8th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008), 293–300 and Michel Chion, Un Art sonore, le cinema (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2003), 226–31. 5. Michel Chion, “Un condamné à mort s’est échappé: le train et le tramway,” in Un Art sonore, 226–31. 6. La Prisonnière was first published by la Nouvelle Revue française in 1923; the film’s slight change of title indicates that this is not to be a literal transposition of the book. It notably changes the names of the principal characters and also the time period of the novel, making it not so much contemporary with the film’s making but at an indeterminate point between that and the period of the novel’s setting. On La Captive as adaptation, see Christine Geraghty, Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 63–66. 7. On the erotics of high heels, in general and in Akerman’s work, see Bérénice Reynaud, “Alluring Absence: La Captive,” Senses of Cinema 31 (2004), (http://sensesofcinema. com/2004/cteq/la_captive/). 8. Reynaud, “Alluring Absence” points out that the name of the character in the book is Albertine, which might covertly refer to Proust’s driver/companion Alfred Agostinelli, whereas Ariane, which has no male equivalent, shares several letters with the director’s surname: AkERmAN, all of which thickens the erotic ambiguity. 9. Reynaud, “Alluring Absence.” 10. Franz Schubert: Sonata in A minor for Arpeggione and Piano, D. 821, 1824, played here (the first allegro moderato movement only), as is more common, on cello and piano. 11. Pierre Destailles and Claude Rolland 1953; the words tell of wandering in the Bois d’Chaville on the outskirts of Paris, of being seduced by the smell of Lily of the Valley and becoming pregnant. 12. “And meanwhile what sport and fun I shall have”; Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte, 1790, K588. 13. Invented for the film. We only hear the very end of it as Simon listens to it in the car taking him to the Théâtre de l’Odéon where it is being staged. 14. Terry Castle’s discussion of the tradition of lesbian opera diva worship is suggestive in this context. See Castle, “In Praise of Brigitte Fassbaender (A Musical Emanation),” in The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 200–38. 15. Остров мёртвых 1908. 16. Die Toteninsel; there are five versions, painted between 1880 and 1886. 17. At one point, he follows her car through an underpass that looks like the Alma tunnel where Diana Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed were killed in August 1997, three years before the release of La Captive, a potent symbol of death. 18. Babette Mangolte sees the ending differently, stressing the importance of the music ending, followed by silence: “As the boat approaches, the music recedes and stops. In the boat we see Simon wrapped in a blanket and shivering because of the cold. He is still wet. The film ends when the sound coincides with what we see: all is quiet, the ocean is still, and Simon is liberated.” See Mangolte, “The Loudness of the World: Listening to What Is Out There: Sound Strategies in Akerman’s Fiction and Documentary Films,” Senses of Cinema 77 (2015), http://sensesofcinema.com/2015/chantal-akerman/soundstrategies/. On the Artificial Eye DVD, this final section is captioned “Freedom”—but

250   Richard Dyer if Simon is free or liberated now (and he certainly doesn’t look as if that’s how he feels), at what terrible cost? 19. The composition of the shot might even echo that of one of the earliest films ever screened, Barque sortant du port (Boat Leaving Port; France 1895, dir. Louis Lumière), heightening the sense of similarity and distance between these two ends of La Captive and the history of cinema so far. 20. Emma Wilson notably discusses La Captive in these terms. See Wilson, “ ‘Les Rendezvous d’Ariane’: Chantal Akerman’s La Captive,” L’Esprit Créateur, 42 no. 3 (2002): 60–69. 21. Cf. Jeanette Murphy, “A Question of Silence,” in Films for Women, ed. Charlotte Brunsdon (London: British Film Institute, 1986), 99–108. Anneke Smelik, And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998). 22. On concepts and debates of “slow cinema” see, for instance, Matthew Flanagan, “Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema,” 16:9 6, no. 29 (2008) and Tiago De Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge, eds., Slow Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016); for discussion of the wider context, see Lutz Koepnick, On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 23. I take this distinction from Diana Popa’s PhD at the University of St. Andrews (awarded 2017) The Specificity of Aesthetics of Slowness in Contemporary Romanian Cinema. 24. Although this is what Susan Sontag suggests is the implicit of trajectory of the kind of minimalist aesthetic Akerman deploys. See Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” in Styles of Radical Will (London: Secker and Warburg, 1969), 3–34.

Select Bibliography Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction, 8th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2008. Castle, Terry. “In Praise of Brigitte Fassbaender (A Musical Emanation).” In The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture, 200–38. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Chion, Michel. Audio-vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Chion, Michel. Un Art sonore, le cinéma, Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2003. De Luca, Tiago, and Nuno Barradas Jorge, eds. Slow Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). Flanagan, Matthew. “Towards an Aesthetic of Slow in Contemporary Cinema.” 16:9 6, no. 29 (2008). Geraghty, Christine. Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008. Hanson, Helen. “Hearing, Fearing: The Sonic Design of Suspense in Cat People (1942).” In Film Moments, ed. Tom Brown and James Walters, 94–97. London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Koepnick, Lutz. On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Mangolte, Babette. “The Loudness of the World: Listening to What Is Out There: Sound Strategies in Akerman’s Fiction and Documentary Films.” Senses of Cinema 77 (2015). http:// sensesofcinema.com/2015/chantal-akerman/sound-strategies/

Making Sense of Noise and Silence in La Captive   251 McBane, Barbara. “Walking, Talking, Singing, Exploding . . . and Silence: Chantal Akerman’s Soundtracks,” Film Quarterly 70, no. 1 (2016): 39–47. Murphy, Jeanette. “A Question of Silence.” In Films for Women, ed. Charlotte Brunsdon, 99–108. London: British Film Institute, 1986. Reynaud, Bérénice. “Alluring Absence: La Captive,” Senses of Cinema 31 (2004), http:// sensesofcinema.com/2004/cteq/la_captive/. Roberts, Adam. “The Sound World of Akerman’s La Captive by Adam Roberts,” A nos Amours, blog, September 8, 2015, http://anosamoursblog.weebly.com/blog/the-sound-world-ofakermans-la-captive-by-adam-roberts Smelik, Anneke. And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. Sontag, Susan. “The Aesthetics of Silence.” In Styles of Radical Will, 3–34. London: Secker and Warburg, 1969. Wilson, Emma. “ ‘Les Rendez-vous d’Ariane’: Chantal Akerman’s La Captive,” L’Esprit Créateur, 42 no. 3 (2002): 60–69.

chapter 12

Hea r i ng H e a r i ng? R efl ections on the K u br ick i a n Sou n dtr ack DAVID J. CODE

Reflecting again on the much-celebrated “compilation scores” of Stanley Kubrick, I was struck by a seemingly offhand remark in Anthony Lane’s New Yorker review of a couple of more recent films: Larraín, like Jarmusch, hardly delves deep into the creative process, but, where Paterson is tranquil to the point of inertia, Neruda, with its jumpy shifts of scene, its doses of casual surrealism, and its mashing of high politics against low farce, struck me as more of a poem. It reminds us that movies, by their very nature, owe far more to poetry than they ever will to the novel. The story is only the start.1

The certainty Lane expresses here—“by their very nature”—must startle anyone whose closest study of movies begins even partly under the sway of film music scholarship. For one founding text of this relatively young field, Claudia Gorbman’s Unheard Melodies: Music in Narrative Film (1987), enshrines in its subtitle a generic kinship with novels or stories, not poetry.2 We might read Gorbman’s adjective “narrative,” at first, as a taxonomic marker for a study of music in some distinct subset of all films and no others. But of course we soon find that Gorbman includes, alongside reflections on those classical Hollywood products ostensibly most in thrall to novelistic priorities, a chapter on Eisenstein, Eisler/Adorno, Godard, et al.—which is to say, an “art film” lineage whose different generic profile (as David Bordwell once suggested) rests in large part on a more or less programmatic resistance to conventional narrative expectations.3 And even if we read this one chapter as a departure from (or foil to) her primary concerns, we might still ask just how easily Lane’s sense of an essential kinship with poetry fits with the assumptions perennially subsumed under the label “narrative film.”

Hearing Hearing?   253 Any attempt to pursue the implications of this literary distinction for cinematic listening will likely find that it opens, more or less inevitably, onto a muddy patch of the scholarly field, signposted by the “diegetic/nondiegetic” distinction, which has been so worked and worried over the years that a 2009 survey article can only begin by apologizing for how “debased” (galvaudé) the very idea of “diegesis” (diégèse) has become.4 My quote marks and brackets, here, signal a problem of translation that remains unavoidable to the story. As often noted, our inheritance of “diégèse” from the early French filmologue Étienne Souriau, via the younger sémioticien Christian Metz and English-language theorists like Bordwell, Noël Burch, and Gorbman (among many others), brings with it fundamental ambiguities, compounded by linguistic instabilities, that now seem built into the discipline’s foundations.5 Such ambiguities, which touch directly on the possible relations between “diegesis” and “narration,” have carried forward to color a range of film music studies that (implicitly or explicitly) adopt from Metz, in particular, a dogged insistence on the quintessentially narrative nature of the film medium.6 In fact, a re-reading of Metz’s film theory from the 1970s to the early 1990s finds a few scattered glances to alternative, “poetic” forms of linguistic art. But nowhere, it is safe to say, do these glimpses unsettle a fundamental conviction that film is “intrinsically narrative.”7 To sum up a somewhat complicated tradition most simply, I find that this conviction, which has spread widely into the discourse on film music as well, generally rests (separately and together) on two highly questionable assumptions. First, Metz and his ilk have been strangely eager to take the mere fact of temporal succession as evidence for the operation of “narrative”—as if there were no other way to articulate or experience the inevitable passage of time, in film or anywhere else.8 (Several cruder notions often follow, including the idea that “story” is inescapably central to film experience). Second, theorists in this lineage have repeatedly attributed to (all) film, by definition, an “act of narration” straightforwardly equivalent to linguistic enunciation (énoncé)—as if making art, in any medium, must always be understood as robustly similar to speaking, in words.9 It is refreshing to find that astute latter-day readers now recognize the reductive nature of these two assumptions. In the introduction to a 2016 translation of Metz’s last book, Impersonal Enunciation, or The Place of Film (1991), for instance, Cormac Deane suggests that “the insights that [Metz] offers arise as much from the failure of the semiology of language to formulate a film semiology as from his demonstration that such a project ‘works’.”10 No doubt the failure will seem less apparent to anyone still equally invested in language as not only a pre-eminent sign system, but the exemplary system for all modes of human expression—which is to say, that whatever we think we know about nonverbal communication, or experiences sensed or presented through other means, we are obliged to draw all artistic media (and much else) under the model of ­linguistic semiology. But while it may be crucial to credit Deane’s balancing sense of ­partial success in the project Metz pursued in these terms, the oxymoronic title of the book in question—impersonal enunciation?—surely now reads like a half-concession to the limits of his language-centric approach. My titular hiccup—“Hearing Hearing”—signals my central interest, in this chapter, in the possibility and significance, within all other experiences of cinematic listening, of

254   DAVID J. CODE a particular, aural variety of cinematic reflexivity. Such a focus—so far rarely discussed at any length in the literature—may seem, at first blush, much removed from rather more familiar worries over “diegesis” and the like. But in my attempt to think through certain moments of “the hearing of represented acts of hearing” in the films of Stanley Kubrick (to expand the hiccup slightly), I have found myself, again and again, up against the limits of the narrative assumptions film music scholars have so readily adopted from film theory. By evacuating the term “narrative” of any particular, categorical power within the whole spectrum of “ways of world-making,” theory in this mode skates past all potentially useful distinctions even within the narrowest purview of literary criticism (as in Lane’s “novel” and “poetry”; or the post-Classical triad of “lyric,” “epic,” and “dramatic”).11 At the same time, it presumes the validity of any such literary categories to describe artistic materials that may differ quite fundamentally from verbal language in their shaping and expression of represented human experience. Lest it seem strange to take an ostensibly arcane question of sensory reflexivity as the focus for such pursuit of poetic understanding, it may help to note how centrally (if not always explicitly) this question has always featured in accounts of film style. The idea of “seeing seeing,” after all, informs such camera ABCs as the “shot/reverse-shot” or “point of view” shot, which do not just present a world, but invite us to share someone’s seeing of that world (with varying degrees of self-conscious artifice). The parallel, “hearing hearing,” on the other hand, occupies a place just as significant (though perhaps even more implicit) in debates about so-called “diegetic” and “non-diegetic” sound—if we accept that the former can be defined, provisionally, as sound they hear “in the film” and we hear with them. Even so, to recall Michel Chion’s musings on the differences in perspectival focalization between these different “film senses” is likely to discern a valid question as to whether “hearing hearing” can ever attain equally precise self-reflexivity as its visual equivalent.12 Questions of focalization and reflexivity aside, the fact that Kubrick based almost all his films on novels of distinctive form and voice, could render them an odd choice of focus for programmatically “poetic” challenges to the “narrative” reflexes of film theory.13 But precisely because of this distinctive literary source material, many of these films arguably raise into vivid relief the vast gulf that obtains between the critical questions unavoidably central to any work of verbal art and those more appropriate to the different, more multifarious and diffuse experiences on offer in a cinematic adaptation. Consider, for a preliminary contrast, the openings of A Clockwork Orange, book and film. To launch Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel, an unattributed question (opening from the present towards an uncertain future) sits atop the words of a first-person narrator who names himself, in the past tense of conventional narrative, before starting to set the scene: “What’s it going to be then, eh?” There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry. The Korova Milkbar was a milk-plus mesto, and you may, O my brothers, have forgotten what

Hearing Hearing?   255 these mestos were like, things changing so skorry these days and everybody very quick to forget, newspapers not being read much either.14

Along with the mysterious quoted query, and the later address to at least some of us readers (presumably), we receive here a few first tastes of the invented “nadsat” language so crucial to this puzzling reading experience. But to turn to Kubrick’s 1971 adaptation is to find a wholly different order of puzzles. At first, the film brings little visual or verbal information at all: the screen turns red, a portentous underscore begins and then swells beneath the unchanging acid hue for nearly half a minute. A short title sequence—white letters on monochrome—appears, synced to the synthesized phrases of a slow fanfare: “WARNER BROS./A KINNEY COMPANY/Presents” (on red); “A STANLEY KUBRICK PRODUCTION” (on blue); “A CLOCKWORK ORANGE” plus copyright credit (red again). Even if we consider the experience up to this point as a kind of paratext (like a book’s cover), the continuation “into the film” (as it were) hardly simplifies the situation. A cut brings us face to face with a young man, one eye extravagantly mascara-ed, staring out from beneath the brim of a bowler hat. Some time later, as he raises a glass of milk to drink, the camera starts drawing slowly back to show his companions at either side; stylized white-painted words (e.g., “Milk plus”) come into view on black walls; we see several naked female mannequins crouched as tables. As more drinkers emerge amidst arrayed light bulbs and hieratic standing figures, a voiceover begins: There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, and we sat in the Korova milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening. The Korova Milkbar sold Milk Plus, Milk Plus Vellocet, or Synthemesc, or Drencrom, which was what we were drinking. This would sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence.

On reaching the widest view (see Figure 12.1), the scene fades to black. The many changes to the voiceover text—notably including the excision of the ­opening question—may be interesting enough. But the larger point concerns the extreme poverty of information conveyed by that one, truly narrative voice, in contrast with all that is projected, with garish vividness, by audiovisual means. This “Alex” says nothing about (say) eyelashes or hat, or words on walls, or pink-dyed pubic hair—let alone the slowly expanding view or the continuously resounding music from an unseen source. All of these aspects of experience bring to mind another, deeper layer of skepticism about film’s presumed “literary” antecedents—as, for example, in a remark the writer Italo Calvino offered way back in a 1966 Cahiers du Cinéma symposium on “Cinema and the Novel”: Let us say, then, that what the cinema has that is completely cinematographic ought not to be matched against its literary ancestors. From that standpoint cinema and the novel have nothing to teach each other and nothing to learn from each other.15

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Figure 12.1  A Clockwork Orange, final wide-screen view of the Korova milk-bar.

Excessive as this language might seem, we might now note how that slow, deliberate camera-work in Kubrick’s opening scene exemplifies one of Calvino’s more precise claims, about the lack of any literary equivalent to the filmic close-up: “the distance between language and image is always the same.” Perhaps we hesitate to agree fully—but could we imagine how to do that slow backwards tracking in words? After all, even the attempt to describe the scene’s multiple figures and distinctive setting struggles against the requirement to put in grammatical sequence what actually appears simultaneously to the senses, as well as the radical selectivity that can only leave infinite detail unreported (e.g., the false nipples on one droog’s shirt, the various facial features and physical postures, etcetera). In light of these multiple differences, it is hard to understand why anyone would attribute all we see and hear to the enunciation of a “voice” as singular as the one in the book: the scene is presented, with far more richness and precision than would be possible even through the most elaborately overwrought, super-Proustian literary description. To put the point this way opens a critical sidelight from beyond film theory. Perhaps it is time, in thinking about cinematic listening, to make more of the challenges to pervasive narratological assumptions pursued, independently of the film theorists, by latterday musicologists. Within a 1999 attempt to weigh the relevance to music of Aristotle’s distinction between mimesis and diegesis, for instance, Karol Berger writes: Adorno’s claim that “[Mahler’s] music performs itself, has itself for the content, narrates without the narrated” loses its air of paradox when music stops being compared with literature (where we normally expect a voice to present something other than itself in addition to presenting itself) and is compared with painting instead (where we do not expect a “voice” to present anything other than itself). Music’s lack of “referentiality” will stop troubling us when, instead of expecting it to behave like a

Hearing Hearing?   257 language, we notice that in this respect it is more akin to painting. A depicted figure does not “refer” to anything, it simply appears. Like a musical voice, it says something . . . without our being able to distinguish its appearance from what it says.16

Here, literature appears as the exceptional, idiosyncratic medium, whose separation of “voices” admits no close analogue in other arts. Of course, film does not share music’s lack of referentiality. But this fact did not prevent Kubrick, too, from musing in similar terms on the essential disparities between different media—as in this pointed challenge to linguistic models: Film operates on a level much closer to music and to painting than to the printed word, and, of course, movies present the opportunity to convey complex concepts and abstractions without the traditional reliance on words. I think that [film], like music, succeeds in short-circuiting the rigid surface cultural blocks that shackle our consciousness to narrowly limited areas of experience and is able to cut directly through to areas of emotional comprehension.17

If the implicit challenge to “words” as “rigid . . . cultural blocks” can be taken as encouragement (after Berger and Calvino) to “stop comparing films with literature,” that last emphasis on “areas of emotional comprehension” might also prove a goad to re-imagine cinematic listening as a realm of experience that carries temporal, formal, and expressive implications with the potential to escape and even challenge any presumptively “narrative” regime of understanding. To set up a few case studies in “hearing hearing” that conceivably serve such ­re-imagining, I will begin by drawing briefly on a poetic tradition of film practice and criticism long neglected under unexamined assumptions about “narrative film.” This alternative framing of linguistic and literary models will in turn open resonances with a yet broader, phenomenological and sensorial approach (more in line with my nod to Calvino) that also deserves a more central place in film music studies. The point, as I ultimately suggest, is not simply to debunk or dispense with narratological concerns entirely. For to reframe cinematic listening through “hearing hearing” this way might ironically—again, in parallel with key musicological interventions—lead to a finer sense of specific, isolable acts of narration as exemplary of a crucial, self- and other-defining activity, and as subject to pointed interrogation through audiovisual form.

Case Study 1: “Seeing Hearing,” “Hearing Hearing,” and 2001 These days, an attempt to unsettle the narrative regime in film criticism can draw on newly widespread interest in alternative formulations. For one notable instance, in his 2014 book The Cinema of Poetry, P. Adams Sitney divides a study of the “cine-poem”

258   DAVID J. CODE more or less equally between canonical European auteurs (e.g., Ingmar Bergman, Andrey Tarkovsky) and the American avant-garde tradition (e.g., Stan Brakhage, George Makropoulus).18 The latter interest overlaps with a central focus of Lithuanian-American film director, critic, and curator Jonas Mekas, whose extensive polemics for “poetic cinema” in The Village Voice (first collected in 1971, then long out of print) have recently reappeared in a new 2016 edition.19 Although Mekas tended to scorn “establishment” critics for The New Yorker and the like, we might still savor the echo of Lane’s claim for “poetry” in this typical outburst about Jean Renoir’s Picnic in the Grass (1959): “What does it matter what the film is about, its theme, its plot? It is about love, sun, trees, beautiful women, summertime, a picnic in the grass.”20 No doubt, as Richard Brody noted in a recent review, Mekas’s paeans to the “plotless” films of Renoir (among others) inevitably “leave much out.”21 And even a cursory sampling of Sitney’s book is enough to sense a pervasive instability within the theoretical lineage ostensibly behind his “cinema of poetry.” For one notable instance, the promisingly titled article “Il ‘cinema di poesia’ ” by Pier Paolo Pasolini (discussed in his first chapter) actually offers various musings on “free indirect discourse” in film—an odd fulfillment of the titular promise, whose value for the present question becomes all the more ambiguous with the director’s later admission that “speaking of a cinema of poetry, I always meant to speak of narrative poetry.”22 If there could be no better illustration of the elusive nature of all such categories, a simpler theoretical proposal, from another overtly poetic film-maker, can prove more useful as an opening to my case studies. On October 28, 1953, at Cinema 16 in New York, the film director and poet Willard Maas chaired a Symposium on “Poetry and the Film” featuring another experimental film-maker, Maya Deren, along with critic Tyler Parker, playwright Arthur Miller and author Dylan Thomas.23 Amongst the mixed responses to an opening invitation to “outline some of the basic principles of the poetic film,” Deren’s remarks in particular seem most suggestive—in spite of the disagreement they originally spawned—for an attempt to loosen the shackles of narrative preconception. Cautioning against the attempt to define such things too rigidly, Deren proposes a simple schematic model as a first step towards the delineation of various possible combinations: The poetic construct arises from the fact, if you will, that it is a “vertical” investigation of a situation, in that it probes the ramifications of the moment, and is concerned with its qualities and its depth, so that you have poetry concerned, in a sense, not with what is occurring but with what it feels like or what it means. A poem, to my mind, creates visible or auditory forms for something that is invisible, which is the feeling, or the emotion, or the metaphysical content of the movement. Now it also may include action, but its attack is what I would call the “vertical” attack, and this may be a little bit clearer if you will contrast it to what I would call the “horizontal” attack of drama, which is concerned with the development, let’s say, within a very small situation from feeling to feeling.

To clarify the image, Deren first refers to Shakespeare’s plays, in which dramatic action develops “horizontally” but “poems or monologues” regularly emerge to investigate

Hearing Hearing?   259 particular situations “vertically.” She also observes, more trenchantly, that “[y]ou can have operas where the ‘horizontal’ development is virtually unimportant—the plots are very silly, but they serve as an excuse for stringing together a number of arias that are essentially lyric statements.”24 For an essay on cinematic listening, this offhand reference to opera seems a suggestive opening to question reflexive emphases on narrative or (more simply) “plot” in critical approaches to film and its music. No knowledgeable critic—or educated listener—ever has trouble accepting that “the story is only the start” (to echo Lane) in this musico-dramatic relative of film, whatever debts to literary drama or narrative might inform any instance. To be sure, film tends to mark out “vertical” moments—or “areas of emotional ­comprehension”—by less conventional and distinctive (i.e. more fluid and audio-visually diffuse) means than the musical materials that often demarcate arias within traditional “number opera.” But it might nonetheless prove illuminating to attend afresh to a film and its score with an ear for the various combinations of vectors understood in Deren’s poetic sense. As a familiar background foil to my Kubrickian excursions, a first, arch-conventional example can help bring focus to Deren’s suggested distinction. Recall, in Casablanca, the iconic exchange between Sam and Ilsa by the piano in Rick’s bar. When the musician responds to her last, impatient command by launching into the full, sung version of “As Time Goes By,” there is of course no doubt that we hear what she hears. But there is nothing in the sound itself, as recorded, mixed, and projected, to mark it—directionally or materially—as Ilsa’s hearing, as opposed to our own hearing, alongside but more or less independently of hers. What we do get, however, is a lovingly lit instance of a key, cross-sensory filmic trope. We know we are hearing with her because we see her hearing— and we are given to see her hearing, through the cut to close-up framing, and the fine details of her acting: a gently parted mouth, visible hints of inner attention. At risk of unforgiveable disrespect for the radiant Ingrid Bergman, compare the similarly cut scene of a huddled, listening family of apes some way into the first “Dawn of Man” section of 2001: A Space Odyssey. As this scene unfolds, the unfiltered immediacy of the primitive grunts and whimpers that demarcate the position we are to share— compare Ilsa: “Sing it, Sam”—come to stand out starkly against the extravagantly spatialized and distorted resonance of the nocturnal roars from unseen predators who preside physically and psychically over the huddled creatures. The well-wrought sonorous treatment involves us reflexively in a primordial sense of surrounding, enveloping threat; the final cut to another close-up of “seeing hearing” again invites similar affective participation, even through the barrier of a primate mask (see Figure 12.2 and Video 12.1). Perhaps the aural contrast here rests only on a simplistic distinction between sound projected with fidelity to its source, and sound treated with the verisimilar distortion (reflective of an echoing landscape) we would now expect from any self-respecting sound designer. But the value of considering the two cases as exemplary of a common trope (“seeing hearing” as proxy for “hearing hearing”) becomes clearer if we pursue some long-range formal resonances.

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Figure 12.2  2001: A Space Odyssey, “seeing the ape mother hearing,” as nocturnal predators roar.

Video 12.1  2001: A Space Odyssey, a huddled family of apes hears nocturnal roars from unseen predators.

Hard as it may be to say anything new about the main “war/resistance/rough-hewn American nobility” thread of the Casablanca story (i.e., its “horizontal” actions, some— e.g., a dead Nazi—irreversible), the “vertical” counterpoint added with the sectional deployment of “As Time Goes By” brings an exemplary opening to more poetic reflection. Recall that Sam, omitting the verse, starts the song with the chorus—i.e. the fourth strophe: “You must remember this . . .”—before breaking off (after Rick’s entry) at the end of the fifth.25 Later, for the “earlier” flashback scene in “La Belle Aurore,” he picks up right where he left off, and sings on to the end. In other words, as deployed against the grain of the narrative-historical sequence, the song craftily knits together “early” and “late,” “before” and “after,” deepening story-level clichés about noble self-sacrifice and the like with a partly separate, self-reflexive (even metaphysical) layer of meaning. This supra-narrative layer circles around questions of memory (“You must remember this . . .”), loss, and recovery (“We’ll always have Paris. We didn’t have . . . we lost it, until you came to Casablanca. Got it back last night”). By extension, it tests the power of the “lyrical” (in both its poetic and musical sense) to escape the fateful gravity of time and plot. 26 Of course, whatever this interpretation might add to a hearing of the leitmotivic variants sprinkled generously through Casablanca’s final departure scene, at basis it rests on subtextual awareness of the original words (and form) of “As Time Goes By.” In this sense, the distant formal rhyme between the ape scene and a much later scene in

Hearing Hearing?   261

Figure 12.3  2001: A Space Odyssey, “seeing Dave Bowman hearing” in the “hotel room” underscored with Ligeti, Aventures.

Video 12.2  2001: A Space Odyssey, Dave Bowman in the “hotel room,” underscored with Ligeti, Aventures.

2001—which embraces a clear visual echo and a subtle sonorous affinity—offers a purer poetic structuring of “seeing hearing” as an opening to emotional comprehension. Many millennia after the “Dawn of Man,” we see the space-suited Dave Bowman, after his journey through the “Star Gate,” framed within the elegant décor of a “hotel room at the end of the universe.” As the post-linguistic blurts and howls of György Ligeti’s Aventures resound from above or below or all around, a close-up brings us face to face with the helmeted astronaut, wide-eyed with a mixture of emotions finely reminiscent (for all his professional near-impassivity) of the long-ago ape-mother (see Figure 12.3 and Video 12.2).27 This is no straightforward narrative linkage of moments in a coherent plot, but a “vertical” rhyme that invites us to sense, with Dave, how it feels to find ourselves—in disoriented half-comprehension—on a different level of the interstellar food chain than we once believed. For all the clarity with which these two moments exemplify a poetic summons to emotional comprehension, we might still reasonably wonder (returning to my main concern) whether the “seeing hearing” trope ever amounts, even in such cases, to a fully self-reflexive—i.e. fully aural—“hearing of hearing.” In fact, as direct (i.e. non-verbal) in emotional effect as the two scenes may seem, it could be that the finest level of sonorous relationship between them raises further questions of subtextual understanding. As a matter of fact, both the predatory roars and the Ligetian vocal extravagances enter the soundscape through some potentially audible degree of electronic distortion. But in the

262   DAVID J. CODE second case, it seems important to ask how apparent this alteration would be to a ­cinematic listener unfamiliar with the unprocessed Aventures—or indeed, to a listener for whom any of the film’s several Ligeti excerpts, distorted or not, would sound more or less equally alien. This question brings us against a potentially irresolvable concern for cinematic listening. On reflection (and re-listening) we all are likely to hear some degree of sonorous processing in the nocturnal howls. We may, with equally close attention, recognize something similar in the particular processing of Ligeti’s blurts, whether or not we know the original. But perhaps the challenge for scholars of cinematic listening remains to think of (or to try and recapture) a way of hearing these audiovisual aggregates that consciously registers neither as sonorously “distorted,” instead absorbing the technical manipulation as one (unheard?) determinant of a pervasive psychological flavor. It is hard to pin down such a suggestion beyond the vagaries of individual experience. But it thus might inspire further thought about the questions raised by “aural reflexivity through (variously) audible distortion,” across the many films whose loudspeakers, radios, TVs, et al. offer countless shades of similar sensation.

Case Study 2: Eyes Wide Shut and the Hearing of Narration Like A Clockwork Orange, Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 Traumnovelle (Dream Story)— source novella for Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut—begins with quoted speech: “Twenty-four brown slaves rowed the splendid gallery that would bring Prince Amgiad to the Caliph’s palace. But the Prince, wrapped in his purple cloak, lay alone on the deck beneath the deep blue, star-spangled night sky, and his gaze—” Up to this point the little girl had been reading aloud; now, quite suddenly, her eyes closed. Her parents looked at each other with a smile, and Fridolin bent over her, kissed her flaxen hair, and snapped shut the book that was resting on the table, which had not as yet been cleared. The child looked up as if caught out.28

Like Burgess’s shorter query, this longer passage of quoted speech also falls away from Kubrick’s screenplay. But while Alex’s flippant question—which recurs to launch Burgess’s three main sections—leaves no discernible trace in the film, the fact that Traumnovelle begins with an embedded (fictional) story signals a central concern of book and film alike. Schnitzler gives pointed focus, throughout, to the quasi-magical powers of story-telling, notably that in the confessional—and oneiric—mode so recently raised to prominence by his exact contemporary and compatriot, Sigmund Freud. In turn, Kubrick shows acute sensitivity, in the different terms of his own medium, to the power of stories within any attempt to negotiate close relationships between modern, post-Freudian subjects.

Hearing Hearing?   263 Here we encounter the most glaring problem with any presumption of intrinsic filmic narrativity. If every film—and indeed, in the extreme Metzian formulation, every segment of every film—can be considered “narrative” by definition, how is it possible to explore creatively the promises and pitfalls, within film’s multiple ways of world-making, of narrative acts in particular? Given that an argument that Eyes Wide Shut articulates just such an exploration can only be built (with inevitable circularity) on the evidence of the film itself, we might put the question slightly differently. How might our seeing and hearing of Eyes Wide Shut change if we approached it as a thorough-going, ­post-Schnitzlerian and post-Freudian confrontation with narrative methods of ­self-fashioning, as these relate—possibly poetically—to other ways of presenting a world for “emotional comprehension”? In fact, the film opens with a clear signal of this newly oblique, questioning perspective on cinematic story-telling and its audiovisual illusions. At first, the title sequence seems a variant of the familiar procedure Kubrick used to launch every one of his previous films: the titles, projected over a continuous piece of music—in this case, the second Waltz from Dmitri Shostakovich’s Suite for Variety Orchestra—that seems securely placed in the underscore. But in this case, a new twist follows a few minutes of intercutting between words in white capitals and glimpses of Dr. Hartford and his wife dressing for the evening. When Bill reaches over, and casually turns off the on-screen stereo that has (apparently) been playing the waltz all along, a familiar cliché of film openings becomes, for once, a sly joke about deceptive hearing. Simple as the little joke might seem, it proves a poignant signal of the potentially unreliable, or unstable, relationship between “heard” and “seen” that claims a central thematic role in the whole ensuing film. I will trace briefly just one structured strand of audiovisual exploration. It begins with the Hartfords, stripped to their underwear, high on pot in their New York bedroom after attending a party during which both experienced brief sexual flirtations that ended innocently. In response to Bill’s pious affirmation of how “sure” he is of her fidelity, Alice collapses in laughter and asks whether he recalls their holiday in Cape Cod. To his puzzled acknowledgement, she reminds him of a “young naval officer” who stayed in the same hotel, and tells a shocking little story: I first saw him that morning in the lobby. He was checking into the hotel and he was following the bellboy with his luggage to the elevator. He . . . he . . . glanced at me as he walked past, just a glance. Nothing more. But I could hardly move. That afternoon, Helena went to the movies with her friend and you and I made love, and we made plans for our future, and we talked about Helena . . . and yet . . . at no time was he ever out of my mind. And I thought if he wanted me, even if it was only for one night, I  was ready to give up everything—you, Helena, my whole fucking future— everything. And yet it was weird ‘cause at the same time, you were dearer to me than ever. And . . . and at that moment my love for you was both tender and sad. I – I barely slept that night. When I woke up the next morning I panicked—I didn’t know whether I was afraid that he had left, or that he might still be there. But by dinner I realised he was gone . . . and . . . I was . . . relieved. [Phone rings]29

264   DAVID J. CODE As the camera cuts back and forth between close-ups of wife, speaking slowly (in three-quarter profile), and husband (framed more frontally) listening blankly, delicately scored string textures begin to emerge in the background—initially bringing little more than a distant coloration (suggestively akin to the eerie blue background glow from the window); later congealing, unpredictably, into melodic fragments and phrases. The scene raises pointed questions about the unruly, open-ended possibilities of cinematic listening. The string underscoring clearly stands in some oblique relationship to the experience of “hearing hearing”—though in this case, the “hearing” in question is of Alice’s verbal narration, and the periodic cuts to Bill’s face, however blatantly they mark “seeing hearing,” never do much to settle or secure a stable relationship between the string sound and his inner response (see Figure 12.4 and Video 12.3). What could thus be understood as a wholly external authorial intervention—a basic sonorous underlining or framing of the “tale”—might equally be interpreted as a kind of secret sonorous infection, seeping by barely-encompassable narrative implication into a layer beneath Bill’s (and our own) consciousness, undermining any imagined certainty in all of our relationships to Alice-as-“surely”-knowable-wife. Both readings seem important to the

Figure 12.4  Eyes Wide Shut, “seeing Bill Hartford hearing” his wife’s narration.

Video 12.3  Eyes Wide Shut, Bill Hartford hears his wife’s narration.

Hearing Hearing?   265 chain of scenes that ensues, across the whole film, marked by the repeated recurrence of the same string textures. In fact, the next few links in the chain present a striking departure from the initial scenario—in which we might say that Alice delivers in words, with mesmeric concentration, what could have been more efficiently conveyed through the technique of filmic flashback.30 By contrast, in the first few offshoots of the scene, Bill appears the more fully “cinematographic” artist: creator of his own brief, fully envisioned, progressively intensifying, self-tormenting film fantasies of Alice passionately coupling with her lover. Three such carnal vignettes—shot in black and white, accompanied by ever darker string oscillations and portamenti—precede a pivotal variant, and intensification, of the initial confrontation with “Alice as narrator.” At this point, Bill returns from his nocturnal wandering to find Alice laughing in her sleep. Awakened, she reports a dream, again accompanied by a delicate seepage of quasi-independent string textures: We were . . . we were in a deserted city . . . and . . . and our clothes were gone. We were naked. And . . . and [weeps] I was terrified. And I – and I felt ashamed. And . . . and I was angry because I thought it was your fault. And you . . . you rushed away to go and find my clothes for us. As soon as you were gone it was completely different. I felt wonderful. Then I was lying in a beautiful garden, stretched out naked in the sunlight. And a man walked out of the woods. He was . . . he was the man from the hotel, the one I told you about. The naval officer. He stared at me, and he just laughed. He just laughed at me. But that’s not the end, is it? No. Why don’t you tell me the rest of it? Oh . . . it’s too awful. But it’s only a dream. [she embraces him] He . . . he was kissing me. And then . . . then we were making love. Then there were all these other people around us . . . hundreds of them everywhere. Everyone was fucking. And then I . . . I was fucking other men, so many, I – I don’t know how many I was with. And I knew you could see me in the arms of all these men, just – just fucking all these men . . . and I wanted to make fun of you, to laugh in your face . . . and so I laughed as loud as I could. [sighs] That must have been when you woke me up [weeps. Fade to black]

We hardly need underline just how much in this later confession—the anger, the joy at his absence, the sexual extravagance, the vicious laughter—drives home the point about the resistance of the unconscious to “sure” knowledge even of an intimate partner. But perhaps the more subtle, aesthetic questions about telling and filming, seeing and hearing, only find finest focus in the last, culminating scene of the sequence, with conjoins a “­ re-recapitulation” of Alice-as-narrator to a last scene of Bill’s cinematographic self-torment.

266   DAVID J. CODE To start this sequence, too, Bill arrives home to find Alice doing schoolwork with their daughter at the dining room table. A brief glimpse suffices to capture her maternal warmth as she helps with a math problem—but then, an extraordinary shot/reverse-shot, and a meeting of smilingly innocent eyes, brings an echo in Bill’s mind (and our ears) of the most shocking revelation from her dream (“. . . I was fucking other men . . . ”). A cut to Bill’s surgery and a slow pan through the darkened waiting room to find him brooding at his desk sets up the final “inner cinematography,” with string swoops and oscillations accompanying a last scene of Alice naked in the captain’s arms. In short, this sequence— the last, compound link in a widely distributed, loosely continuous chain—juxtaposes prosaic tales of everyday maternal life (in which “stories” are of course key), oneiric narration of sexual abandon, and cinematographic private fantasy to articulate a wordless constellation of questions about modes and media of intersubjective communication, all rooted (by the music) in the visceral grip of sexual obsession and jealousy. How is it possible to engage fully with such questions under any critical regime that assumes every link in the chain equally enmeshed in “intrinsic narrativity,” and subsumes every move and shape of camera and lighting and gaze and grimace under a singular filmic “énoncé”?

Concluding Reflections It could be objected, finally, that Kubrick—whose oeuvre has long sat uneasily astride the notional divide between “mainstream” and “art” film—stands as a problematic model for a pursuit of similar questions through a much broader field of (so-called) “narrative film.” Yet I am not sure it is much harder to make a similar case about many films ostensibly more clearly in thrall to conventional narrative priorities. Consider two recent productions quite far apart on the aesthetic spectrum: Jurassic World (2015), directed by Colin Trevorrow, and Timbuktu (2014), directed by Abderrahmane Sissako. On seeing the former, I doubt anyone really cared (or now cares to remember) how, exactly, the flimsy quasi-“plot” involving Owen Grady (navy veteran and raptor expert) and Claire Dearing (Jurassic World operations manager) develops across the film. Far more central to the experience, surely, are such loosely assembled “moments” as the massive leap of Mososauraus from the aquarium, the mad roller-coaster ride of two kids in an Indominus-bludgeoned plastic sphere, and the sweeping, shrieking final assault of massed pterodactyls. On the other hand, while Timbuktu does give clear prominence to one main plot line (involving a slain fisherman and the resulting sharia-determined punishment), this single thread hardly predominates, either in experience or memory, over the multiple, tangled and multi-hued episodes that seem designed, above all, to flesh out and give texture, sound, and sensation to a fine-grained human existence in cultural crisis. It is worth noting, in conclusion, that Michel Chion anticipated the general thrust of these musings in some recent thoughts on narrative assumptions about film: One could just as easily make the opposing claim (although it would be somewhat excessive): that people tell stories in film merely as a pretext for reconstituting,

Hearing Hearing?   267 r­epresenting, and imitating: to induce dreaming, transport the spectator into a world of pleasure and sensuality.31

Such a claim is only “excessive,” it seems to me, if made with the same categorical intransigence that has characterized the opposite, “narrative” point of view for far too long. For I am not suggesting that film never “narrates,” nor that it does so only as a “pretext” for other effects, but rather, that an enthrallment to narrative models—and indeed to linguistic semiology more widely—forestalls critical thought about the special status of narrative acts and narrative self-consciousness within a medium pervasively assembled from far richer and more varied offers of “pleasure and sensuality.” And in this sense, with this volume’s focus on “listening” in mind, I might well conclude by circling back to musicology, not just to reaffirm Berger’s argument for the significant differences between music (and, I now suggest, film) and literature, but also to note the close kinship of this argument with the influential attempts by Carolyn Abbate, back in the ’90s, to salvage some specificity for our understanding of “narrative” in music—in other words: “to identify when and by what means music [read: film] narrates, and to suggest that such loci are far from being normal or universal.”32 I imagine it unlikely we will ever stop using “narrative film” as a catch-all term for a medium whose aggregate invitations to seeing, listening, and feeling (and everything else) would be better addressed through a more nuanced array of labels—including, say, “funfair cinema” (for Jurassic World), or “tapestry cinema” (for Timbuktu), or “poeticcum-philosophical cinema” (for 2001: A Space Odyssey). But if we were to embrace that more variegated range of possibilities even in part, it could be that we could re-invest the idea of “narrative cinema” with a newly specific critical weight, suitable to embrace in truly cinematographic terms those considered filmic reflections on, and interrogations of, acts and arts of narration like Eyes Wide Shut. And we might thus join Kubrick in his lifelong resistance to language-dominated regimes of experience and critique alike—as when he wrote, at one point, that “Film is not theatre—and until that basic lesson is learned I’m afraid we’re going to be shackled to the past and miss some of the greatest potentialities of the medium.”33

Notes 1. Anthony Lane, “Paterson and Neruda,” The New Yorker, January 2, 2017. http://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/02/paterson-and-neruda. 2. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Music in Narrative Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 3. See David Bordwell, “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice” (1979), as reprinted with an up-to-date “Afterword” in his Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008): 151–69. 4. See Alain Boillat, “La ‘diégèse’ dans son acception filmologique. Origine, postérité et productivité d’un concept,” Cinémas: revue d’études cinématographiques/Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies 19, no. 2–3 (2009): 217–45: 217. 5. See, for example, Giorgio Biancorosso, “Beginning Credits and Beyond: Music and the Cinematic Imagination,” Echo 3, no. 1 (2001), http://www.echo.ucla.edu/Volume3-Issue1/ biancorosso/biancorosso.pdf, where he writes of the “unfortunate graphic coincidence in

268   DAVID J. CODE the English language between the term diegesis as used by Souriau, i.e. meaning ‘story world,’ and Plato’s notion of diegesis as ‘pure narrative,’ i.e. ‘narrative without dialogue’ ” (n8). It is clear from the lasting impatience of Gérard Genette, for one notable instance, that there are more than mere “graphic” considerations at issue in this tangled reception. 6. One prominent recent instance is Guido Heldt, Music and Levels of Narration in Film: Steps Across the Border (Bristol: Intellect, 2013). 7. For more on this conviction—which Metz argues in various ways across his whole oeuvre— see e.g. André Gaudreault, From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema, trans. Timothy Bernard (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). My quoted words are on p. 31; a page later Gaudreault quotes Metz to the effect that film has “narrativity built into it” (32). 8. For one of many instances, see Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 125. 9. See e.g. Gaudreault, From Plato to Lumière, 32 and passim. For previous challenges to the notion of “enunciation” in film, see e.g. David Bordwell, Narration in Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), esp. 16–26. 10. Christian Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or The Place of Film, trans. Cormac Deane (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), ix. 11. On this point, see for example Genette’s weary concession: “Personally I prefer, and more so as time goes on, a narrow definition of narrative: haple diegesis, the exposition of narrative events by a narrator who describes these events in words (whether written or oral). In this sense there is, for me, no such thing as theatrical or film narrative. The theatre does not recount, it reconstitutes a narrative upon the stage, and cinema likewise shows on the screen a reconstituted narrative, which it has created on a set. But it seems clear to me that, in current usage, the broad definition is carrying the day and that we will have to live with this state of affairs.” Quoted (from a personal communication) in Gaudreault, From Plato to Lumière, 170n8. 12. See e.g. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 89–94. A sophisticated challenge to the notion of aural reflexivity in film appears in Steven Connor, “Sounding Out Film,” in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 107–20. 13. The literary sources, of course, included such distinct voices as Vladimir Nabokov, W.  M.  Thackeray, and Gus Hasford, in addition to those discussed in greater detail further on. 14. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (London: Penguin Books, 1996 [1962]), 3. 15. Italo Calvino, “Cinema and the Novel: Problems of Narrative,” in his The Uses of Literature, trans. Patrick Creagh (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 74–80: 77. Originally contributed to a Cahiers du Cinéma symposium on “Cinema and the Novel,” October 1966. 16. Karol Berger, “Poetics I: Diegesis and Mimesis. The Poetic Modes and the Matter of Artistic Presentation,” in his A Theory of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 172. Pushing the point further, I wonder whether it would be best to dispense entirely with the conceit of a notional “voice,” as presumptive stand-in for any number of differently embodied creative acts or events. 17. Joseph Gelmis, “The Film Director as Superstar: Stanley Kubrick,” in Stanley Kubrick: Interviews, ed. Gene  D.  Phillips (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,  2001 [1970]), 80–104: 90.

Hearing Hearing?   269 18. See P. Adams Sitney, The Cinema of Poetry (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014). 19. See Jonas Mekas, Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959–1971, rev. ed., ed. Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 20. Mekas, Movie Journal, 27. From “On Renoir and Beauty,” November 13, 1960. 21. Richard Brody, “Jonas Mekas, Champion of the ‘Poetic’ Cinema,” The New Yorker, April 21, 2016. http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/jonas-mekas-champion-of-thepoetic-cinema. 22. See Sitney, The Cinema of Poetry, 33. 23. See “Poetry and the Film: A Symposium with Maya Deren, Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas, Parker Tyler [etc.],” in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 171–86. 24. The preceding points are all made by Deren in “Poetry and the Film,” 174. 25. As Peter Franklin notes, the song (originally written by Herman Hupfeld for the Broadway musical Everybody’s Welcome) “had never even been particularly successful,” Seeing Through Music: Gender and Modernism in Classical Hollywood Film Score (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 119. My interpretation differs in some ways from his, notably in my sense of the crucial “lyrical” implications of this selection. 26. It is tempting to pose yet more arcane subtextual resonance in light of the fact that the missing strophes include a reference to “Mr. Einstein’s theory.” 27. The scene seems edited to give slight emphasis to the audiovisual trope: the cut to close-up follows immediately from a high, signal-like tone in Ligeti’s French horn. 28. Arthur Schnitzler, Dream Story, trans. J.  M.  Q.  Davies (London: Penguin Books, 1999 [1926]), 3. 29. This and the later excerpt were transcribed from Eyes Wide Shut, directed by Stanley Kubrick (Warner Home Video, 2001). Note that the film differs in many ways, small and large, from the screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael, available at http:// www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0085.html, accessed August 1, 2019. 30. I am grateful to Charlotte Greenspan for this suggestion. 31. Michel Chion, “Sensory Aspects of Contemporary Cinema,” in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 325–31: 327. 32. Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), xii. 33. Gelmis, “The Film Director as Superstar,” 90–91.

Select Bibliography Abbate, Carolyn. Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Berger, Karol. A Theory of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Boillat, Alain. “La ‘diégèse’ dans son acception filmologique. Origine, postérité et productivité d’un concept,” Cinémas: revue d’études cinématographiques/Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies 19, no. 2–3 (2009): 217–45. Bordwell, David. Narration in Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Bordwell, David. Poetics of Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2008. Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, translation by Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

270   DAVID J. CODE Code, David  J. “Real Feelings: Music as Path to Philosophy in 2001: A Space Odyssey,” Twentieth-Century Music 7, no. 2 (2010): 195–218. Code, David J. “Don Juan in Nadsat: Kubrick’s Music for A Clockwork Orange,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 139, no. 2 (2014): 339–86. Gaudreault, André. From Plato to Lumière: Narration and Monstration in Literature and Cinema, trans. Timothy Bernard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Gengaro, Christine Lee. Listening to Stanley Kubrick: The Music in His Films. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2013. Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies: Music in Narrative Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Heldt, Guido. Music and Levels of Narration in Film: Steps Across the Border. Bristol: Intellect, 2013. McQuiston, Kate. We’ll Meet Again: Musical Design in the Films of Stanley Kubrick. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Mekas, Jonas. Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959–1971, rev. ed., ed. Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Metz, Christian. Impersonal Enunciation, or The Place of Film, trans. Cormac Deane. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Phillips, Gene  D. ed. Stanley Kubrick: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Richardson, John, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis, eds. The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Sitney, P. Adams, ed. Film Culture Reader. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. Sitney, P. Adams. The Cinema of Poetry. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014.

chapter 13

Cou n tercu ltu r a l Listen i ng i n M a lick’s Ba dl a n ds ( 1973 ) Julie Hubbert

Terrence Malick’s Badlands has long been prized as among the best and most influential films made during the New Hollywood era of American studio filmmaking. Although Malick’s participation in the period was inconsistent—he made only two films in the 1970s before dropping out of filmmaking for nearly 25 years—in most film histories of the period, the director is consistently praised and positioned alongside Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas, and Altman, as among the most important and adventurous auteurs working in the 1970s.1 In contrast, however, the film’s soundtrack has received comparatively little attention from either film or film music scholars. The latter, in fact, have visibly struggled to find a way to position the film’s soundtrack and its unconventional mix of 1950s popular music and classical music within the assumed mainstream of New Hollywood music practice.2 Some of this neglect may stem from the somewhat limited scope of the existing scholarship on New Hollywood soundtracks. Most film and film music scholars agree that a signature aspect of music in New Hollywood film is the general avoidance and even rejection of classical orchestral underscoring in favor of using compilations of prerecorded music. Beyond this distinction, however, the discussion has been predominantly shaped and segregated by a singular focus on musical style. Iconic New Hollywood films like The Graduate, Easy Rider, and Zabriskie Point, most have argued, replaced orchestral underscoring with compilations of contemporary rock music.3 Nostalgia films from the period, too, like American Graffiti and The Last Picture Show, films that centered on youth culture in the 1950s and featured extensive compilations, likewise made paradigmatic use of rock music.4 This singular focus on music style, albeit not on rock but on classical music, has also been promoted by Kubrick scholars who have likewise rooted their discussion of music practice in the New Hollywood period in Kubrick’s nearly exclusive appropriation of pre-existing classical music.5 The primary framework for

272   Julie Hubbert approaching the New Hollywood soundtrack, in other words, has been something of an either/or occupation, describing the departure from classical underscoring as limited to either all-rock or all-classical compilations. While accounting for many of the most iconic films of the period, this focus has also left some important film soundtracks, like Badlands’ unusual mix of popular and classical music, strangely unaccounted for. By examining Badlands this article challenges the musical stylistic approach to the study of contemporary compilation practice and the binary way in which New Hollywood compilations to date have been approached. It repositions the Badlands soundtrack not as an exception to New Hollywood practice, but an extension of it, and equally important manifestation of the rejection many youth and first-time directors were making to the studios’ outmoded scoring practices. It reassesses the paradigm of the New Hollywood compilation by examining not just the style and lyrics of the preexisting music being used in the soundtrack, but also the radical political, social, and aesthetic changes that were motivating compilation practice in general. New Hollywood filmmakers engaged directly with many of the political aspects of the counterculture movement. Much of their resistance to classical film practice was shaped by a general political resistance to institutional conformity. But it was also affected by the aesthetic non-conformity many in the counterculture movement were pursuing, specifically the challenges progressive pop and rock musicians were making to the received conventions of both music and listening culture. By looking more closely at the counterculture movement in general and how emerging political and aesthetic positions affected the reception of popular music and the listening practices of counterculture youth, this article reexamines existing paradigms of the New Hollywood music and soundtrack construction. The counterculture movement in music, I argue, inspired new sounds in popular music and new listening behaviors from its audience but, as Malick’s compilation for Badlands reveals, it also encouraged unconventional music soundtrack practices in New Hollywood film.

Counterculture and Radical Subjectivity Many New Hollywood scholars have anchored their observations of the upheaval in studio filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s in the rise of the New Left and the anti-establishment and anti-authoritarianism of the counterculture movement. The movement had a broad agenda, but it was galvanized around several key issues—the war in Vietnam and the military industrial complex that was profiting from it, technology’s restrictive effect on public and civic life, and the pernicious control of corporate America. In his examination of the counterculture movement in the United States in the 1960s, historian Theodore Roszak emphasizes the movement’s neo-Marxist roots, distinguishing it not only as a “cultural” revolution but one uniquely rooted in economic affluence. Where Marx’s critique of capitalism had centered on deprivation and oppression, the counterculture

Countercultural Listening in Malick’s Badlands (1973)   273 movement sprang instead from white middle-class youth, a part of the population that enjoyed economic stability. The counterculture movement, he asserts, was a protest “grounded paradoxically not in the failure, but in the success of a highly industrial economy. It arose not out of misery but out of plenty; its role was to explore a new range of issues raised by an unprecedented increase in the standard of living.”6 Technology, especially, was seen as a tool for establishing corporate and cultural he­gem­ony, for promoting inauthenticity and alienation and creating unequal concentrations of wealth and distributions of political and economic power. One of the most respected voices in the counterculture movement was the neo-Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse, a member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory in the 1930s and 1940s, became a prominent advocate for student protesters and the New Left in the 1960s because his philosophical critiques of both Marxists ideology and capitalism aligned with many aspects of the counterculture’s agenda, especially the loss of power and personal agency that post-war capitalism had produced. Marcuse championed the cause of the student protesters, labeling their resistance the “Great Refusal,” because it held the promise of real social change. He saw in the counterculture movement the potential for precisely the kind of revolution he had being theorizing, one that rejected not only the economic justifications for war, but the paradoxically stifling affluence of capitalism. The resistance that countercultural youth were displaying was “great” because it revealed the restrictive and exploitative capitalistic practices that post-war democracies had begun to practice.7 Much of the political rhetoric associated with the counterculture protest of economic systems of inequality was infused with strains of Marcuse’s theory, but their prescriptive action also echoed the philosopher’s belief in the restorative and cultural power of aesthetic thought. The true conditions for revolution, Marcuse theorized, were rooted not only in political protest, but in aesthetic thought and in an intense form of individual expression he termed “radical subjectivity.” Social change, he posited, comes from the flourishing of individual thought nurtured in personal, subjective experiences. The radical subjectivity that art and aesthetic thought encouraged were a corrective to both the orthodoxy of Marxism and the relentless commodification and commercialization of late-capitalist systems. As he observed in a key essay on aesthetics: The subjectivity of individuals, their own consciousness and unconscious tends to be dissolved into class consciousness. Thereby, a major prerequisite of revolution is minimized, namely, the fact that the need for radical change must be rooted in the subjectivity of individuals themselves, in their intelligence, and their passions, their drives and their goals.8

Although the idea of “radical subjectivity” seemed to advocate, as some have argued, a return to the individualism and transcendentalism of nineteenth-century Romanticism, Marcuse used it to critique the failures of Marxism and post-war capitalism.9 As the counterculture movement grew in strength, it also become an essential concept for describing the alignment he found with the student protest movements. The students’

274   Julie Hubbert call for an end to corporate hegemony and affluence should be informed by a “new sensibility,” he argues, a kind of “radical” subjectivity rooted in aesthetic thought. Refusal and radical subjectivity together could aesthetically liberate society by privileging aesthetic thought, by giving priority to personal expression instead of corporate profit. In An Essay on Liberation, Marcuse argues: A universe of human relationships no longer mediated by the market, no longer based on competitive exploitation or terror, demands a sensitivity freed from the repressive satisfactions of the unfree societies; a sensitivity receptive to forms and modes of reality which thus far have been projected only by the aesthetic imagination. For the aesthetic needs have their own social content; they are the claims of the human organism, mind and body, for a dimension of fulfillment which can be created only in the struggle against the institutions which, by their very functioning, deny and violate these claims.10

Within the counterculture movement, the mandate for prescriptive action, for resisting corporate capitalism, was infused with Marcuse’s ideas for social change. But the notion of radical subjectivity also informed the countercultural attitude towards technology. Countercultural youth were particularly critical of media corporations and mass media in general because of the ability of corporations to privilege profits over personal agency and aesthetic expression. They specifically targeted media corporations for their role in manipulating public sentiment and for using the tools of mass communication not to educate but to encourage consumption and entertain. For youth protesters, print media, newspaper outlets in particular, were especially to be resisted, as the rise of many underground newspapers in the late 1960s attests. Newspapers, with their emphasis on circulation, had become one of the agents of corporate interests and were motivated more by advertising profits than moral imperatives. Television was similarly dismissed by countercultural youth as not only old-fashioned, the medium of their parents, but also as a medium most driven exclusively by corporate and commercial interests.11 Radio, AM radio in particular, was also vilified as a platform that served only corporate and profit-seeking interests. For many in the counterculture, media companies were an extension of corporate America and as such required a “refusal” similar to that being mounted against the military industrial complex. This is not to say that counterculture youth resisted all media. In their search for personal and authentic modes of artistic expression, two disciplines in particular not only escaped condemnation but were embraced for their potential for housing new and transformative experiences. Both film and music were championed not as media but as artistic disciplines and as such were seen as the forms of expression most able to resist capitalistic and corporate hegemony. Although by the late 1960s both were highly industrialized arts, popular music and studio filmmaking especially housed significant re­sist­ ance movements that challenged long standing conventions and corporate formulas. By mobilizing the rhetoric of the New Left and the aesthetic posture of non-conformity, the cinema and popular music both, especially as they strained energetically towards the condition of art, became important visible and audible displays of radical subjectivity.

Countercultural Listening in Malick’s Badlands (1973)   275

Radical Subjectivity in Counterculture Music and Listening As many scholars of the period have noted, one of the most prominent expressions of non-conformity and radical subjectivity in the late 1960s happened within popular music. At the same time that the New Left was defining political resistance, many rock musicians began championing a new “progressive” style of composition, one that aimed to liberate music from the strictures of industrial practices and corporate formulas. In alignment with the countercultural desire for greater subjectivity, progressive rock musicians experimented with both the sound and the structure of popular song. For most historians of popular music, the Beatles 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a watershed event, one that triggered among many things the separation of progressive rock from the existing style of rock ’n’ roll conceptually and terminologically. Although the group had experimented with unusual studio-constructed sounds on previous albums, notably the long aleatoric and dissonant crescendo that interrupts “A Day in the Life,” on Revolver (1966), Sgt. Pepper’s experimented with new sonic textures generated by various manipulations of magnetic tape, the new medium of recording. “Tomorrow Never Knows,” for instance, used multiple tape loops, some of which featured sampled sounds run in reverse. It heralded the arrival of a host of recording and editing techniques—splicing, multi-tracking, stereo or binaural effects—into the compositional process of popular music.12 Sgt. Pepper’s also helped codify the movement in progressive rock away from conventional song form. Most rock ’n’ roll songs conformed to an ABA form that typically lasted around three minutes in length, the length of one side of a 45 rpm record, the most popular recording format in the 1940s and 1950s. The “single” formula was also preferred because it facilitated frequent breaks for commercial advertising, the primary source of revenue for most radio stations. While many of the songs on the Sgt. Pepper’s album featured surreal lyrics and unusual tape processes, several also experimented with song structures that extended well beyond the typical three-minute formula. This change was possible because of a radical reprioritization in recording formats: the new privileging of long playing (LP) records and albums over “singles.” Progressive rock made creative use of the unstructured expanse of the LP record, which offered 20 to 30 minutes of recording space per side, an expanse that could be segmented into songs or “tracks” of unspecified length. Although folk singers like Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie had been successful recording long ballad forms, in the late 1960s progressive rock groups like The Rolling Stones, Led Zepplin, Jethro Tull, Yes, The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead all experimented with the longer structures available on the new album format. The most extreme example of this reprioritization was Yes’s 1973 double album Tales from Topographical Oceans which had no tracks, just four sides of two LPs.13 As radical as these alterations to the sound and structure of popular music were, the changes progressive rock required of its listeners were even more dramatic. The new

276   Julie Hubbert priority given to longer and more complex soundscapes challenged listeners to engage in radically new ways of listening. One of the most significant shifts required listeners to acquire new playback equipment to fully appreciate the rich complexity of sounds being constructed by progressive rock musicians. By the late 1960s, this meant component stereos and FM radios that could not only render a greater range of dynamics and timbres but also reproduced directional or “stereo” sound. Even more startling, however, were the demands progressive rock made of its listeners to adopt behaviors and practices that previously had been limited to classical music and jazz, specifically the “attentive” listening practices that had developed in the 1950s in conjunction with the “high-fidelity” movement. A decade earlier, classical music listeners were asked to make similar technical adjustments, to purchase “home stereos” that included high-quality record players, tape players, and FM receivers, amplifiers, and speakers, sensitive equipment that could ­render and reproduce the more complex and directional sound being recorded in studios.14 The new equipment also made the component parts of sound itself, especially volume and signal strength, visible and quantifiable through a display of dials and meters. A wealth of critical discourse sprang up to inform and guide listeners with the acquisition of equipment. Publications like High Fidelity Magazine, Hi-Fi and Stereo Review, and Tape Recording Magazine were full of technological discussions and advertisements, but they also promoted new listening etiquette. Much of this discussion centered on transferring the concert hall experience to the home, specifically the transcendent practices that emerged with concert hall listening in the late nineteenth century, practices that privileged seated, fixed, and immobile listening over distracting hearing. High-fidelity discourse encouraged listeners to treat their homes like concert halls and to give recorded music the same kind of rapt attention previously reserved for live performance of concert music.15 Until the mid-1960s these practices remained confined primarily to classical music enthusiasts and jazz aficionados. With the advent of progressive rock, however, which began to ask its audience not just to hear but to listen, many of these practices became mainstream, especially attentive, eyes closed, “transcendental” listening practices. Although these practices for progressive rock were encouraged in conjunction with live performance, specifically the outdoor communal concert that defined the countercultural movement like “The Summer of Love” concerts in San Francisco in 1967, and Woodstock and Altamont in 1969, as the mass live concert event became problematic (especially with the death of several festival goers at Altamont), countercultural youth increasingly embraced technologically mediated music and technology, from albums, stereos, and FM radios, in their quest for authentic musical experiences.16 Although this listening shift centered around the home stereo, as radio historian Susan Douglas points out, the adoption of attentive listening practices also coincided with the rise of FM radio in the late 1960s. Because FM was able to broadcast in stereo, and AM could not (and wouldn’t be able to until 1981), many progressive rock fans were first introduced to high-fidelity listening practices through the radio. The desire for clarity, complexity, and perspective that “stereo” processes had introduced into the

Countercultural Listening in Malick’s Badlands (1973)   277 recording of classical music and jazz in the 1950s was now invigorating the reception of progressive rock music especially on FM radio, albeit with a few distinctive additions.17 FM DJs, for instance, encouraged listeners to turn up the volume of their radios, to immerse themselves in the music by playing it as loud as possible. As one contemporary critic observed, “stereophonic FM, which surrounds the listener with sound, is purposely raised in volume by the young so that they can physically sense the vibrations of the audio waves.”18 Youthful listeners were instructed, Douglas continues, to absorb the music by closing their eyes, and “lying on the floor between speakers” so that the “emotional and the cerebral could be . . . fused through the act of listening.”19 In his sociological study of popular music listening habits among British youth, rock historian Simon Frith observed similar “attentive” listening patterns among countercultural youth in England in the late 1960s. As progressive rock’s forms of production and consumption “were perfected between 1967–1971,” he observes, “bands and performers aimed their music at an album-buying market of hip, mostly male music freaks . . . Rock music meant lengthy studio workouts, rich and elaborate sounds; it was music made for expensive stereos and FM radio and campus concerts.” The need for new and better audio equipment was being fueled by progressive composing and recording methods which in turn were demanding new listening behaviors. As Frith points out, progressive rock required a more focused mode of listening, one quite different from early rock ’n’ roll which encouraged dancing and a distracted mode of listening. Progressive music, he observes, “didn’t meet the dancing needs of a working-class weekend; it sounded wrong on a cheap transistor radio; it offered few suitable idols for the teeny-bopper’s bedroom wall.”20 Not everything about countercultural listening was an echo of high-fidelity practice. Although drugs were a part of jazz culture in the 1950s, it was not a defining element of the listening practices for either jazz or classical music enthusiasts. For the counterculture and progressive rock listeners, however, drugs became an accepted part of the listening experience. In conjunction with closed eyes, and inert physical positions, drugs were encouraged because they facilitated and heightened transcendent listening. “Getting stoned altered people’s modes of emotional and cognitive processing,” Douglas observes. “It allowed listeners to wipe the sensory slate clean . . . and focus more intensely on a single processing mode, the pure act of listening to music.”21 During the counterculture movement, the formulaic stratification of listening audiences according to style was also challenged. As Frith observes, listening behaviors were being redefined not just by a growing appetite for progressive rock, but by a flourishing interest in a wide variety of musical styles, especially among educated college-bound teenagers. As Frith explains, “top-stream pupils bought albums rather than singles, had “progressive” rather than “commercial” tastes . . . and went to folk clubs and concerts rather than discos or dances. The ideological essence of their culture was individualism . . . Records were listened to, appreciated and criticized in terms of their meaning—lyrics were important . . . and music was praised in terms of its originality, truthfulness and beauty and condemned for its triviality, banality, and repetition.”22 For Frith, the musical counterculture of the late 1960s and 1970s was additionally defined by a growing emphasis on

278   Julie Hubbert personal expression and an embrace of stylistic eclecticism. He observes that, for many youth listeners of the period, what was even more important than listening to the newest music was identifying and championing unique and under-valued music. Countercultural listeners rejected a diet made up only of mainstream “hits” and musical tastes that were dictated by commercial-minded AM radio stations. Instead they sought to cultivate a sense of personal and individual identity by embracing a wide, egalitarian range of music styles. As Frith notes: The records were LPs and chosen carefully and individually and often purchased by saving money after hearing a friend’s copy. People listened to music together and often exchanged albums temporarily . . . The overall result was an eclecticism of taste, with individuals developing their own specialisms—folk, heavy metal, singer/ songwriter, avant-garde . . . They were articulate and self-aware and valued these qualities in music . . . they most valued music that was most apparently “artistic”— technically complex or lyrically poetic—and tastes here went with other interest in the other arts, in politics, in religion.23

What Frith observed of British teenagers was also true, he points out, of counterculture youth in the United States in the late 1960s. Consumption patterns with youth were driven by anti-corporate agenda as much as they were by the aesthetic desire to be unique and individual. In music, subjectivity was inexorably linked to stylistic eclecticism. By refusing to consume carefully prepared and cultivated lists of “hits,” by valuing marginalized, less profitable, or more intellectually-defined styles of recorded music including classical, avant-garde, electronic, folk, and ethnic music, youthful listeners exercised a kind of radical musical subjectivity designed specifically to resist the capitalistic commodification of aesthetic thought. Eclecticism, like progressive rock’s long forms and surreal lyrics, was a form of resistance. This stylistic egalitarianism and anti-corporatism was especially encouraged in the early days of FM radio. Although FM radio had existed since the late 1930s, until the late 1960s it was used primarily for simulcasting AM programs or for broadcasting unprofitable classical music, religious, and foreign language programming. This practice changed in 1967 when the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) forced radio station owners to develop original programming for their FM stations in order to solve overcrowding on AM frequencies. As a result, a wide variety of new programming began to surface on FM radio. Some stations sought to replicate profitable AM formatting and converted their classical stations and religious programming to popular music formats. Other station owners who were uncertain what kind of radio program could compete with AM used the opportunity to experiment with new content and formatting.24 Radio historians have pointed out how the rise of FM broadcasting helped to splinter pop and rock listeners into niche audiences, but initially it also accommodated the opposite—the consumption of wide variety of musical styles and genres.25 The purest expression of this was the creation of a special FM format called “free-form” radio.

Countercultural Listening in Malick’s Badlands (1973)   279 This short-lived style of programming, which began in 1967 and flourished through the  early 1970s, was extremely popular with counterculture youth to a large degree because of its fundamentally anti-corporate stance. “Free-form” radio defined itself as the antithesis to AM radio formatting which played “hit” singles through a carefully crafted rotation of three-minute songs designed around commercial advertisements. Progressive rock’s long, irregularly album “tracks,” were completely incompatible with this commercial formula and as a result were either edited for AM play or given little or no airtime. Popularized by San Francisco disc jockey Tom Donahue, “free-form” sought to liberate radio formatting from the tyranny of “singles” not just by playing album “tracks” and full albums but also by programming an eclectic range of music styles and genres. Free-form DJs were encouraged to counter AM radio’s corporate formulas and restrictions by being stylistically and generically egalitarian. In a manifesto-like article he wrote for Rolling Stone Magazine in 1967, Donahue championed this alternative model that valued variety and personal individuality over corporate playlists determined by market research. Describing the new programming strategies of his own FM station, Donahue observed that, KMPX in San Francisco has been conducting a highly successful experiment in a new kind of contemporary music programming. It is a format that embraces the best of today’s rock and roll, folk traditional and city blues, raga, electronic music, and some jazz and classical selections. I believe that music should not be treated as a group of objects to be sorted out like eggs with each category kept rigidly apart from the others, and it is exciting to discover that there is a large audience that shares that premise.26

Echoing Marcuse’s call for greater subjectivity in aesthetic thought, Donahue encouraged “free-form” DJs to play any style or genre of music and to organize programs however they wished instead of playing a list of songs designed by corporate executives to maximize advertising revenue. Programming was structured to accommodate musical choices instead of advertising and to resist corporate formulas like Billboard’s Top 40 playlists. As radio scholar Jess Walker describes it, the “free-form” program alternatively offered a range of musical styles “that stretched from psychedelic to the baroque, in every sense of both words.” A set could move from a “Buffalo Springfield song to a Mozart sonata . . . and mixed in and out with a Balinese gamelan piece . . . and then resolved with some blues from John Lee Hooker.”27 Sometimes the mandate for eclecticism was achieved between programs over the course of the day’s programming. One DJ might play only progressive pop music, while others concentrated on jazz, classical music, novelty records, country, or folk selections, but the range of programming would all come from a single radio station.28 The mandate for personal expression and subjectivity in listening practices was also underscored in the critical discourse that blossomed around the new progressive and counterculture music. Youth were guided in their resistance to formula and corporate culture by discourse in new print media outlets, by columns in underground newspapers,

280   Julie Hubbert but also in newly formed magazines devoted specifically to the discussion of popular music. Like the magazine discourse that had flourished a decade earlier around the high-fidelity movement, popular music also developed a culture of discourse. Magazines like Crawdaddy in 1966 and Rolling Stone Magazine in 1967, the first of their kind for popular music, sprang up to guide progressive and rock music listeners not only how to listen but also what to listen to. The discourse in these magazines had several purposes, but an important one was to de-center commercial pop music and “hit” song formulas. This was often accomplished by encouraging readers to embrace not just progressive rock but a wide variety of musical styles, especially those neglected or marginalized by corporate patterns of consumption. In early issues of both Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone Magazine, for instance, blues musicians were frequently profiled and their music was idealized for its authenticity and anti-commercial intentions. Because many progressive rock musicians had intentionally studied and adopted blues techniques and styles, the magazines devoted significant space to reversing its “low” artistic status with full length interviews of blues performers. Both publications also devoted space to profiling and promoting profit-resistant styles of music including classical music and avant-garde concert hall music. Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy, for instance, frequently featured ads for recordings of new works by composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, Hans Werner Henze, and Terry Riley. These ads were often literally juxtaposed next to ads for albums by progressive rock groups like Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Led Zepplin, The Rolling Stones, or the Grateful Dead. Progressive rock musicians themselves promoted the crossover, advocating for readers to listen eclectically to avant-garde concert hall music. In the long centerpiece interviews that anchored early issues of Rolling Stone Magazine, for instance, Frank Zappa and Paul McCartney encouraged their listeners to listen to concert hall composers like Edgar Varese and Luciano Berio, the composers that had inspired their progressive elements of their music.29 In some publications, the conceptual overlap between radically different musical genres was even commercialized or monetized. Billboard Magazine, the premiere publication for the music record industry, for instance, exhorted record store owners to promote an eclectic range of recordings including those by modern concert hall composers like Berio, Pierre Boulez, Bruno Maderna, and Earl Browne because these composer’s new “electronic forms” have for the past decade helped to shape not just modern classical music but progressive popular music as well. As one advertisement put it: Berio, Stockhausen, Cage, Maderna, Boulez, Earle Brown, and perhaps two dozen other disciples of change recorded a historic series of explorations and experimentations that have become cornerstones in the libraries of major music schools everywhere. These names and the music are legendary for everyone who studies, follows or just digs modern classical music. This is where electronic sound began. It’s become the framework for the rock, jazz and pop sounds you’re selling today.30

Countercultural Listening in Malick’s Badlands (1973)   281 Accompanying this discourse is a picture of a fully suited baseball player seated playing a cello with the tag line “If someone asks you what Berio played and you say catcher for the Yankees . . . brother you’re losing business.” Although ads like this were intended to exploit commercially the radical subjectivity being practiced by counterculture listeners who were consuming both Berio and the Beatles, the elision assumes a practice of eclecticism among progressive listeners and readers. It is an advertising campaign predicated on the understanding that underground or countercultural listeners could be defined to some degree by musical eclecticism, by the embrace not just of progressive rock music, but a broad and highly sophisticated range of musical genres and styles. This shift in listening culture, from a singular mode of consumption to one that embraced eclecticism, was radical and had a transformative effect on the music industry. Far from suppressing this counterculture critique of its formula, the industry immediately and ironically mobilized to exploit it, to profit and make these new listening practices formulaic. But it had an equally dramatic effect on the other “art” the counterculture held in high esteem: the cinema. As film scholars have already described, filmmakers in the late 1960s moved quickly to incorporate new progressive rock music in their soundtracks. But they incorporated more than that. As the soundtracks of many New Hollywood films reveal, young filmmakers were also allowing the radical shift in listening practices, the emphasis on subjectivity and musical eclecticism, to inform their soundtrack practices.

Countercultural Listening in the New Hollywood Soundtrack: The Case of Badlands New Hollywood’s connection to the counterculture movement and the New Left has been significantly documented by scholars who have tied the challenges young directors issued to film industry conventions in the late 1960s and 1970s to the political upheaval and anti-authoritarianism of the movement.31 It has long been used to explain many of the transgressive elements of New Hollywood film—the rejection of classical narrative conventions in favor of morally compromised antiheroes, disaffected youth, and outsiders, and the embrace of unconventional lighting, camera work, and editing work.32 To date, however, this countercultural context has been only loosely or superficially applied to the New Hollywood soundtrack. Even when these films are shown to be in deep dialogue with the music of the period, the connection seems to go no deeper than observations of musical style and conventional commercial practices. As Cook observes, for instance, many youth-cult film used “a rock-music soundtrack, often tied in to a simultaneous album release.”33 Because it sits so comfortably within many parameters of the New Hollywood film while simultaneously resisting the “rock music” yardstick

282   Julie Hubbert for transgressive music behavior, the soundtrack for Malick’s Badlands is good example of the degree to which a broader scope of countercultural listening practices were reshaping many New Hollywood film soundtracks. When Badlands premiered at the New York Film Festival in 1973, it received enough popular praise to earn Malick funding for a second film, but many influential reviewers were critical of the film’s tone and style. Many found it “empty and alienating,” as influential critic Pauline Kael did in her review of the film’s premiere: Malick’s conception is so cold and formal that I felt as if I were watching a polished Ph.D. thesis that couldn’t help making the professors exclaim “Brilliant!” The film is a succession of art touches. Malick is a gifted student, and Badlands is an art thing, all right, but I didn’t admire it, I didn’t enjoy it, and I don’t like it. It’s all rhetoric . . . an artistically self-conscious counterculture movie like Five Easy Pieces only much more so. It’s a counterculture movie [whose] condescending tone . . . makes it easy for people in the audience to feel superior.34

For Kael, the film’s overtly self-conscious tone was not only disruptive, its unconventional tone was deeply rooted in the countercultural movement. The “art touches” were evidence of a kind of cinematic “refusal” calculated to meet the expectation of counterculture viewers. Like several other films from the period including Bonnie and Clyde, Thieves Like Us, and Sugarland Express (April, 1974), Badlands features an outlaw couple on the run.35 The film is loosely based on the lives of Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate, the reallife couple whose strange and violent cross-country spree mesmerized the country in the 1958. In Badlands, twenty-five-year-old Kit (Martin Sheen) and fifteen-year-old Holly (Sissy Spacek) are a mismatched couple who form a strange attachment. When Kit shoots and kills Holly’s father (after he objects to their relationship), the two flee the small town of Port Dupree, South Dakota, shooting several more people to evade capture before eventually surrendering to authorities in the flatlands of Montana. After he’s caught, Kit, like the real-life Starkweather, is revealed to be disarmingly thoughtful and polite. Still, at the end of the film we are told he was put to death six months later in the electric chair; Holly was released and eventually married the son of her lawyer. Unlike Bonnie and Clyde, which revels in period details including bluegrass banjo music and period songs, Malick views his outlaw couple and their seemingly unprovoked acts of violence from a distance. Although the film is set in the 1950s, Malick actively minimizes the temporal setting of the film. Apart from period cars, scenes featuring period sound technologies, and several references to Kit looking “just like James Dean,” there is little else that ties the film visually to the 1950s. Some of this was by necessity. Because Malick was unknown at the time and had trouble securing financing, he made the film for a mere $300,000 and had little to spend on sets and costumes. But it was also by design. “Purposely re-creating an era didn’t interest me,” Malick states “and having such limited means actually helped me avoid such thinking. Moreover, if you make a successful film about the past there is no way to avoid nostalgia,” he continues,

Countercultural Listening in Malick’s Badlands (1973)   283 “so I tried keeping the references to the fifties to a bare minimum . . . I didn’t want to be too realistic, too precise, since I wanted to create a fairy-tale like quality.”36 The film’s fairy-tale quality is significant and motivates its unusual mise-en-scène, much of which takes place in nature, in the woods and in the flat plains of eastern Colorado where the film was shot. These natural, often empty locations underscore the couple’s remove or detachment from society and reality. The film’s ubiquitous voiceover also participates in this project. Nearly half of the film is narrated by Holly. Her flat unemotional commentary often addresses the actions and images we see on the screen, but just as often, her “inner thoughts” are intentionally oblique. “I wanted Holly to talk,” Malick observes, “like a fourteen-year-old who’s trying to come off in the best possible light.” “It’s not that she’s simple minded; she just thinks this is how she should talk when speaking to other people. She’s not trying to influence the story or to promote herself,” he concludes, “since she’s careful to admit her mistakes.”37 Holly’s disembodied voice, however, does influence the story. When she throws her fish out in the garden to die, when her father shoots her dog, or when she watches Kit’s friend Cato slowly bleed to death, these moments of violence are blunted by her c­hild-like and unemotional narration. Like Kael’s countercultural “coldness,” film scholar Michel Chion also hears Holly’s flat and unemotional narration as a distancing device, one that gives the film a feeling of unreality and isolates the film’s central characters not only from their own violent acts but also from one another. Holly’s thoughts often contribute hidden motivations to Kit’s actions, motivations Kit himself never reveals, a distance which anticipate the film’s end when Holly survives and Kit is executed. By shifting the priority from dialogue to narration, Malick creates a different expressive register, and “under-verbalized” texture, as Chion calls it. Malick uses the narration to mute his characters and to help viewers develop a sense of detachment from them.38 In many respects, the film’s music soundtrack participates in the under-verbalized texture of the film. Although Malick hired composer George Tipton to compose a few orchestral cues primarily for transitions between scenes, the soundtrack is for the most part a compilation of pre-existing music selected by Malick himself. At pivotal movements Malick uses popular music to loosely attach Holly and Kit to reality and to a time period. In keeping with his intention of avoiding strict period recreation, and to depict Holly and Kit as “removed” from contemporary society and isolated within a “fairy-tale” world of their own making, Malick limits the couple’s exposure to contemporary music. When the couple flee into the woods after Kit kills Holly’s father, they listen and dance to a small portable radio playing Mickey and Silvia’s 1956 hit “Love Is Strange” (33:14–33:40). Throughout the film, however, very little describes the two as typical teenagers, including the way both dance separately and awkwardly to the popular song as it plays from the radio (See Video 13.1). Kit and Holly dance again near the end of the film (1:11:45–1:14:07), and here the two seem more at ease with contemporary popular music; they embrace and slowly dance in the headlights of their car as Nat King Cole’s 1954 hit “A Blossom Fell” plays from the car radio. As before, the lyrics are intentionally audible and foreshadow

284   Julie Hubbert

Video 13.1  While hiding in the woods, Kit and Holly listen to the radio as it plays Mickey and Silvia’s 1956 hit “Love Is Strange.”

Video 13.2  The credit sequence is scored with a selection from Carl Orff ’s Schulwerk, or teaching pieces for children, entitled “Gassenhauer.”

Kit’s capture the following day. “The dream has ended,” the singer croons, “for true love died, the night a blossom fell and touch two lips that lied.” In keeping with the aim of depicting his character as “outsiders,” Malick presents neither Kit or Holly as particularly active or invested music listeners. Rather, it is Malick who is the engaged listener, and as the totality of the film soundtrack reveals, a specifically countercultural listener. Malick additionally distances Kit and Holly from reality by eclectically mixing the popular songs they listen to with selections of pre-existing classical music, specifically selections from works by the German composer Carl Orff and French composer Erik Satie. Throughout the film Malick prominently repurposes several selections from Carl Orff ’s Schulwerk, the large collection of teaching pieces Orff and his partner Gunild Keetman composed and published between 1963 and 1969.39 As Jennifer Bleek observes, Malick may have encountered Orff ’s music because Orff ’s educational method and teaching pieces had just recently begun to be imported to the United States, notably in a three year pilot program in the Bellflower Public School District in south Los Angeles.40 Some of the Orff selections, like “Gassenhauer” which plays prominently over the film’s opening credit sequence (3:20–4:00) feature the signature sound of Orff instruments, the collection of easily played “stabspieler” or small two octave marimbas, metallophones, and glockenspiel for which he and Keetman designed and composed the Schulwerk (see Video 13.2). Malick chooses two additional Schulwerk for marimba and glockenspiel to play in the exposition of the film. The “Kleine Stücke für Stabspiele” (Small Piece for Marimba) is heard as Holly describes Kit’s work in the cattle fields and how “little by little we fell in love” (10:11–11:00 and again at 11:21–11:41). A work for glockenspiel entitled “Muzik zu einem Puppenspiel” (Music for a Puppet Show) underscores several short scenes including when Holly dispassionately throws out her dead pet goldfish into the yard (12:06–13:19 and 14:45–15:15), and when Holly’s father discovers her relationship with Kit and punishes her by shooting her dog (15:18–16:10). All three selections underscore Holly’s youth, gender, and naiveté, and like the narration work to mute or mitigate her participation in Kit’s violent murder spree. A final selection for glockenspiel, an arrangement of a sacred German folk song Mariae Geburt (The Birth of the Virgin Mary) (1:17:14–1:17:45) is heard at the end of the film when after Kit surrenders Holly is flown via helicopter back to Port Dupree, reasserting Holly’s innocence and purity.41 Two additional texted, choral works by Orff shape Kit’s and Holly’s world. After Kit murders Holly’s father and douses the house with gasoline and sets it on fire, Malick’s

Countercultural Listening in Malick’s Badlands (1973)   285 scores the scene (29:10–30:52) with a choral Schulwerk entitled “Passion.” The German text, which is a setting of the fifteenth-century “passion” story from the Lutheran bible, describes the plight of Mary as Christ suffers in the Garden of Gesthemane.42 Biblical texts are not the only extra-musical commentary that come with the Orff excerpts. As Kit and Holly make a home in the woods, Malick underscores their Naturidylle, as Bleek describes it, first by repeating the “Gassenhauer” excerpt (31:05–32:59 and 35:06–37:00). It plays again as they construct a home in the trees, observe wildlife, and while Kit hunts and fishes in the river. But as their idyll is threatened by bounty hunters looking for them, Malick introduces a new Orff Schulwerk for chorus and malleted instruments entitled “Die grauen Weiber.” This piece is part of a larger multi-section work by Orff entitled “Aus Goethe’s Faust” and, as the title suggests, the text is from Goethe’s Faust, specifically the “Mitternachtsszene/Midnight Scene” from Part II published in 1832.43 Several phrases of Goethe’s text in German are prominently heard (“Die Tür ist verschlossen, wir können nicht rein” (“The door is closed, we cannot get in”) announcing the arrival of Death (37:20–38:12 and 38:45–39:30). But Malick also layers his own English language text over the Orff recording. We hear Holly whispering, “I am a star and I saw the tree, I feel the brook and I sent the breeze.”44 As the threat of the approaching bounty hunters escalates, Holly’s whispering and German language texts heighten Kit and Holly’s detachment from reality, making their fairy tale existing in the woods, not only visible but audible (see Video 13.3). Malick’s eclectic musical tastes are on display again at the end of the film when he scores Kit’s enigmatic behavior with music by the inscrutable French composer Erik Satie. Satie often used puns in the titles of his works and made parodic or ironic use of musical conventions. Malick uses “En plus,” the sixth piece in Satie’s piano collection entitled Trois morceaux en forme de poire (Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear) to accompany the final segment of Kit’s and Holly’s life on the run. Its simple, sparse texture and odd harmonies, arranged for an odd assortment of Orff instruments, point to the couple’s growing isolation from society and from each other. It plays as Kit watches the sun set over the great plains of South Dakota and Holly observes how they now “lived in solitude and loneliness” (1:05:07–1:07:28). At the end of the film when Kit is loaded on the plane to be taken back to stand trial for his crimes, the Satie work again suppresses diegetic sound and articulates Kits enigmatic behavior. He seems to enjoy his capture more than his outlaw existence (1:29:05–1:30:36). In an interview with film critic Michel Ciment, Malick says he was drawn to the Satie because of its evocative abilities. “Like the

Video 13.3  Orff ’s “Die grauen Weiber,” which features text from Goethe’s Faust, plays when Kit and Holly’s hideout is threatened by bounty hunters.

Video 13.4 Satie’s Trois morceaux en forme de poire plays as Kit and Holly grow more isolated.

286   Julie Hubbert Orff,” he observes, “the Satie piece exudes a melancholic atmosphere.”45 The intentionally over-simplified texture, form, and harmonic style of Satie’s music imbues Kit’s behavior with a sense of melancholy and irony and seems to mirror Kit’s wry, unemotional reaction to his capture and certain execution. The eccentric nature of Satie’s music gives Kit’s behavior an air of cool detachment. (See Video 13.4.) Like the German texted Orff selections, it imposes a barrier between viewer and the narrative action, a layer of commentary that self-consciously reveals the director’s subjectivity and tastes as a listener. Stylistic eclecticism is not the only unusual element that defines the Badlands soundtrack. The soundtrack also strikingly departs from conventional sound hierarchies. As many scholars have noted, the ubiquitous use of voiceover, the privileging of narration over dialogue is a part of Malick’s unconventional sound strategy. But so is the striking way in which he positions music. Although Malick uses Tipton’s newly written music on a few limited occasions as underscore, the idiosyncratic Orff and Satie selections are positioned very differently. These pieces of music are unconventionally foregrounded in a way that emphasizes their lack of connection to the diegesis of the film. While the 1950s pop songs are foregrounded from easily seen radios, the Orff and Satie are privileged not through visible sources but through the suppression of diegetic sound. In most instances the music does not share space with sound as it does in classical Hollywood sound design; it doesn’t follow typical patterns of underscoring, of being negotiated around or “under” dialogue. In a reversal of classical practices, Malick instead often privileges music over diegetic sound and dialogue. At times, music shares space with Holly’s narration, but just as often, Malick plays with a new texture, one of “music only.” He creates a sonic landscape where for extended periods of time all diegetic sound has been removed and only music is heard accompanying the images on screen. These strategies are on prominent display at the pivot moments in the film. Before he sets fire to Holly’s house, Kit positions a recording that he made on a Voice-O-Graph machine at the bus station outside the house, to play while the house burns, to narrate their actions (29:00–31:30). His recorded voice momentarily displaces Holly’s narration, but both give way to music. As we watch the house burn and see various Holly possessions being consumed by flames, we don’t hear any burning sounds. The house quite beautifully burns, but we hear only Orff. Diegetic sound is suppressed in order to privilege Orff ’s music, to make Malick’s presence and his act of listening, audible (see Video 13.5). This construction, the suppression of sound for music, is pursued on several other occasions in the film, often in association with the Orff selections. In some instances, Malick plays with multiple transgressive sound strategies and toggles back and forth between a suppressed and an unsuppressed diegesis in quick succession. This is particularly audible during the couple’s Naturidylle in the woods when Kit and Holly are finally

Video 13.5  Orff ’s “Passion,” a choral Schulwerk piece that features text from the Lutheran passion setting, plays as Kit burns Holly’s house.

Countercultural Listening in Malick’s Badlands (1973)   287 discovered by bounty hunters (37:34–40:28). Malick constructs their idyll in large part through music, through the foregounding of the “Gassenhauer” and “Die grauen Weiber” excerpts, but also with the extended suppression of diegetic sound. When their sanctuary is breached, the Orff abruptly stops and a full range of diegetic sound suddenly returns. We hear Kit’s bird call warning to Holly, his shout to “hide,” the sound of the bounty hunter’s gun being cocked, and finally, gunshots. This alternating privileging and suppression of music seems tailor made for viewers comfortably with sound being privileged over sight, with sound and music being flexibly isolated and dislocated from their sources. In many ways, this unconventional positioning of music contributes significantly to Malick’s intention to create a “fairy tale,” to seal his outlaw couple off from reality. A “music-only” texture disrupts the flow of diegetic time in the film and persistently destabilizes reality. This intentionally reductive sonic texture is also familiar, resembling the reductive use the vérité documentary movement was making of music, and the “diegetic sound-only” texture with which New Hollywood directors were also experimenting. Where that unusual sound strategy avoided musical underscoring as “false,” however, Malick’s sound strategy does the opposite, it revels fully in the limited, non-diegetic world of both Holly’s narration and Orff ’s and Satie’s music. This startlingly reductive texture had recently become a signature part of Kubrick sound design. Significant sections of 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange (1971), for instance, similarly reduced the soundtrack to a “music only” texture and Kubrick may very well have inspired Malick to pursue similar unconventional sound strategies. In the way that the soundtrack in Badlands pursues stylistic disruption and eclecticism, however, and in the way that it suppresses diegetic sound to focus attention on the music, Malick’s soundtrack also evokes the practices of countercultural listening. * * * In his monograph on Malick’s third film, The Thin Red Line (1998) that came some twenty-five years after Badlands, Michel Chion describes the similar use Malick makes in that film of several pre-existing musical works, excerpts from Gabriel Faure Requiem, Annum per Annum by Arvo Part, and The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives. Malick’s use of pre-existing music, Chion concludes, creates a soundtrack that like Ives’s music itself engages in a kind of musical parataxis in that it creates meaning from juxtaposing together different musical styles that have no discernable connection. “Like Charles Ives’ music,” Chion writes, “Malick’s film places diverse elements side by side, without seeking to answer the question posed by their juxtaposition.”46 Considering the similar deployment of a range of musical styles in the Badlands soundtrack and at the very start of his filmmaking career, this parataxical impulse seems to be an essential part of Malick’s musical practice. In Badlands, however, that practice is also firmly countercultural. The experimentation with stylistic eclecticism and with subjective and attentive listening closely follow the practices being articulated by contemporary countercultural listeners. The unconventional use of popular music and

288   Julie Hubbert concert hall music, of Nat King Cole and Carl Orff, of pop songs and Goethe’s Faust, echoes the personal and anti-corporate interests of the counterculture and the programming and the wide ranging and adventurous listening counterculture discourse “freeform” FM radio was advocating. Malick’s refusal to use conventional orchestral scoring, his interest in embracing a wide range of musical styles, his interest in temporarily immersing his listener in music to the exclusion of all other sound, is an expression of a radical subjectivity youth were pursuing not just politically but musically. Malick’s first soundtrack, in other words, outlines the musical implications of Kael’s important observation—that Badlands is a deeply countercultural film. Plumbing the depths of those countercultural connections, expanding the investigative scope to include music, not only enriches the appreciation of this film as an important contribution to early New Hollywood filmmaking, but repositions Malick and the Badlands soundtrack as among the first to make countercultural listening a cinematic experience.

Notes 1. See for instance, Thomas Elsaesser, “American Auteur Cinema: The Last—or First—Picture Show?” in The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, ed. Alexander Horvath, Thomas Elsaesser, and Noel King (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,  2004), 37–72; Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 13–14; David Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 165–66; and Peter Biskind, Easy Riders and Raging Bulls: How the Sex ’n’ Drugs ’n’ Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 248–55. 2. There is little detailed analysis of the Badlands soundtrack, for instance, in James Wierzbicki’s otherwise excellent overview of sound music practices in Malick’s films. See his chapter, “Sound as Music in the Films of Terrence Malick,” in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. Hannah Peterson (New York: Wallflower Press, 2007), 112–24. 3. See for instance Cook, Lost Illusions, 165–66; and Howard Hampton, “Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere: The Uneasy Ride of Hollywood and Rock,” in The Last American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, Noel King, and Alexander Horwath (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 249–66. Film music scholars have also focused on the preponderance of rock music in New Hollywood film and the new marketing strategies it triggered. See Jeff Smith, The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 154–85. 4. Michael Dwyer, in his study of the 1950s nostalgia film, for instance, makes no mention of this film. See Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film, and Popular Music of the Seventies and Eighties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 5. See for instance Kate McQuiston’s We’ll Meet Again: Musical Design in the Films of Stanley Kubrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 6. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture: Reflection on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), xii. 7. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), ix–x. 8. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), 3–4.

Countercultural Listening in Malick’s Badlands (1973)   289 9. Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture, 91. Marcuse continued to develop the notion of subjectivity and pushed it to accommodate a greater range of philosophical considerations including Freudian psychology and aspects of gender. See Douglas Kellner, “Marcuse and the Quest for Radical Subjectivity,” in Social Thought and Research 22, no. 1–2 (1999): 1–24. 10. Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 28. 11. Peter Fornatale and Joshua E. Mills, Radio in the Television Age (Woodstock: Overlook Press), 129–30; and Susan Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (New York: Random House, 1999), 268. 12. Many rock historians have also discussed the influence the Beatles and their use of innovative studio recording techniques had on rock music. See John Covach, “Progressive Rock and the Boundaries of Style,” Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis, ed. John Covach and Graeme M. Boone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1–25. Also, Edward Macan, Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture (Oxford: Oxford University Press,  1997), 30–57; Bill Martin, Listening to the Future: The Time of Progressive Rock (Chicago: Open Court, 1998), 38–54; and Paul Stumpf, The Music’s All That Matters: A History of Progressive Rock (New York: Quartet Books, 1998), 72–82, 157–82. 13. The problem of long album “cuts” versus “singles” was frequently discussed in contemporary articles on FM radio. See Caroline  H.  Meyer, “The New Respectability of Rock, Broadcasting (August 11, 1969): 46A-D; Jack Gould, “Around Country, FM Turns to Rock,” New York Times, May 20, 1970, 33; and Larry Yurdin, “Waves Upon the Ether, Crawdaddy, April 30, 1972, 30–35 and “Waves Upon the Ether, Part II,” Crawdaddy, May 14, 1972, 30–34. Many rock historians have also discussed the unconventional structures and lengths that surfaced in progressive rock. See Timothy Smolka, Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick and Passion Play: Inside Two Long Songs (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2013). 14. Good discussions of high-fidelity listening practices can be found in Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound, ed. Paul Théberge, Kyle Devine, and Tom Everrett (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015); Tim Anderson, Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Eric D. Barry, “High-Fidelity Sound as Spectacle and Sublime, 1950–1961,” in Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ed. David Suisman and Susan Strasser (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 115–40; Alf Bjornberg, “Learning to Listen to Perfect Sound: Hi-fi Culture and Changes in Modes of Listening, 1950–80,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology, ed. Derek B. Scott (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2009), 105–29; and Keir Keightley, “ ‘Turn It Down!’ She Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space, and High Fidelity, 1948–1959,” in Popular Music 15, no. 2 (1996): 149–77; and Axel Volmar, “Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 395–420. 15. See Christian Thorau, “ ‘What Ought to Be Heard,’ Touristic Listening and the Guided Ear,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 207–31; and James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 16. Douglas, Listening In, 278–79; and Jesse Walker, Rebels of the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 122–30. 17. Douglas, Listening In, 263–67.

290   Julie Hubbert 18. As contemporary critic noted, listening volumes was creating “a social schism between the generations.” See Gould, “Around Country, FM Turns to Rock,” 33; and Fornatale and Mills, Radio in the Television Age, 130. 19. Douglas, Listening In, 274–75. 20. Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock ’n’ Roll (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 213. 21. Douglas, Listening In, 273; and Michael Keith, Voices in the Purple Haze: Underground Radio and the Sixties (Westport: Praeger, 1997), 145–48. 22. Frith, Sound Effects, 206. 23. Ibid., 209–10. 24. Before the FM boom in 1967, a handful of stations had developed alternative programming and formatting, like KPFA in Berkeley, CA and KRAB in Seattle, both of which had been airing a mix of eclectic music and leftist political talk since the late 1940s. In New York City on WBAI, DJ Bob Fass had a weekly program called Radio Unnamable that also featured un-categorizable mix of talk, interviews, live performances, sound collages, political speeches, and music of all styles—classical, jazz, folk, country, ethnic, and popular music. See Fisher, Something in the Air, 127–57, and also Walker, Rebels of the Air, 62–92. 25. Many FM stations still played “hits” determined by Billboard Magazine’s market research department, but beginning in the early 1970s, new stations began to specialize in niche repertoires, playing only “easy listening,” “MOR (middle of the road),” “progressive,” “folkrock,” “classic rock,” or “golden oldies” music. The rise of FM radio fractured the reception of popular music into new subcategories or what Frith calls “taste publics.” See Frith, Sound Effects, 214; Douglas, Listening In, 278–83; Fornatale and Mills, Radio in the Television Age, 129–30; and Dwyer, Back to the Fifties, 81–84. 26. Tom Donahue, “A Rotting Corpse Stinking up the Airways,” Rolling Stone Magazine 1, no. 2 (November, 1967), 14. See also, Douglas, Listening In, 268–74; and Walker, Rebels of the Air, 96–97. 27. Walker, Rebels of the Air, 93 and 96. 28. Douglas, Listening In, 270–71. Sometimes, Douglas notes, programming decisions were also motivated by criteria like timbral connections or “auditory matches” between disparate pieces of music. 29. See for example, Jerry Hopkins, “Interview: Frank Zappa” Rolling Stone Magazine, July 20, 1968, 6–9; and Paul Gambaccini, “Interview: Paul McCartney,” Rolling Stone Magazine, January 31, 1974, 3–6, 23–24. 30. Billboard Magazine, February 28, 1970, 41. 31. Elsaesser, “American Auteur Cinema,” 37–38; Peter Biskind, Easy Riders and Raging Bulls, 14–15; Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction, 13–14; and Andrew Schroeder, “The Movement Inside: BBS Films and the Cultural Left in the New Hollywood,” in The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America, ed. Van Gosse and Richard R. Moser (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 121. 32. Elsaesser, “American Auteur Cinema,” 58; and Cook, Lost Illusions, 165–66. 33. Cook, Lost Illusions, 166; and Hampton, “Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere,” 249–66. 34. Pauline Kael, Reeling (London: Calder and Boyers Ltd, 1976), 303–6. 35. Neil Campell, “The Highway Kind: Badlands, Youth, Space and the Road,” in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, 2nd ed., ed. Hannah Patterson (New York: Wallflower Press, 2007), 40–51.

Countercultural Listening in Malick’s Badlands (1973)   291 36. Michael Ciment, “Interview with Terrence Malick,” in Positif (1975); reprinted in Lloyd Michaels, Terrence Malick (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 110. 37. Ciment, “Interview with Terrence Malick,” 108. 38. Michel Chion, The Thin Red Line, trans. Trista Selous (London, UK: BFI Publishing, 2004), 65. 39. For an overview on Orff ’s transition from composer to music educator, see Michael Kater, Composers of the Nazi Period: Eight Portraits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 111–43; and Mary Shamrock, Orff Schulwerk: Brief History, Description, and Issues in Global Dispersal (American Orff-Schulwerk Association, 1995). 40. Jennifer Bleek, “Terrence Malick’s Spielfilmdebüt Badlands und die Musick von Carl Orff: Interferenzen visueller und klanglicher Materialität und ihre signifikative Funktion im Film,” in Kieler Beiträge zur Filmmusikforschung 2 (2008): 27–41: 29. See also Patricia Hughes, “The Evolution of Orff Schulwerk in North America (1955–69),” in The Bulletin of Historical Research in Music Education 14, no. 2 (1993), 73–91. In his interview with Michael Ciment, Malick claims that his mentor, Irwin Kershner, a cinema professor at the University of Southern California at the time, introduced him to the music of Orff. See also Ciment, “Interview with Terrence Malick,” 110. 41. As Bleek points out, Malick has the excerpt start five strophes into the story where Mary’s suffering is described. See her article, “Terrence Malick’s Spielfilmdebüt Badlands,” 32. 42. Bleek, “Terrence Malick’s Spielfilmdebüt Badlands,” 37. The sound of malleted instruments has already been associated with Holly and innocence, but as Bleek points out, Orff is also alluding to the nineteenth-century concert hall tradition of associating the glockenspiel with the representation of “heaven” and “angels.” Here the music’s Marian text allows Holly’s impassive and dispassionate behavior to be read as not only innocent but serene, religious, even angelic. 43. Bleek, “Terrence Malick’s Spielfilmdebüt Badlands,” 35–6. Orff set the beginning of the second part of Faust, the “Midnight Scene” which features four feminine spirits or “witches” that Mefistopheles sends to seduce and corrupt Faust. 44. Bleek, “Terrence Malick’s Spielfilmdebüt Badlands,” 35. 45. See Ciment, “Interview with Terrence Malick,” 110. 46. Chion, The Thin Red Line, 11–13.

Select Bibliography Anderson, Tim. Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders and Raging Bulls: How the Sex ’n’ Drugs ’n’ Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. Bleek, Jennifer. “Terrence Malick’s Spielfilmdebüt Badlands und die Musick von Carl Orff: Interferezen visueller and klangicher Materialität und ihre significative Funktion im Film.” Kieler Beiträge zu Filmmusikforschung 2 (2008): 27–41. Cook, David. Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Donahue, Tom. “A Rotting Corpse Stinking up the Airways.” Rolling Stone Magazine 1, no. 2 (November, 1967): 14. Douglas, Susan. Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination. New York: Random House, 1999.

292   Julie Hubbert Elsaesser, Thomas. “American Auteur Cinema: The Last—or First—Picture Show?” In The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, ed. Alexander Horvath, Thomas Elsaesser, and Noel King, 37–69. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004. Fornatale, Peter and Joshua E. Mills. Radio in the Television Age. Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1980. Frith, Simon. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock ’n’ Roll. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981. King, Geoff. New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Macan, Edward. Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Marcuse, Herbert. An Essay on Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Martin, Bill. Listening to the Future: The Time of Progressive Rock. Chicago: Open Court, 1998. Michaels, Lloyd. Terrence Malick. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Patterson, Hannah, ed. The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, 2nd ed. New York: Wallflower Press, 2007. Schroeder, Andrew. “The Movement Inside: BBS Films and the Cultural Left in the New Hollywood.” In The World the Sixties Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America, ed. Van Gosse and Richard R. Moser. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. Smith, Jeff. The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Théberge, Paul, Kyle Devine, and Tom Everret, eds. Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counterculture: Reflection on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Volmar, Alex. “Experiencing High Fidelity: Sound Reproduction and the Politics of Music Listening in the Twentieth Century.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Christian Thorau and Hansjakob Ziemer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Walker, Jesse. Rebels of the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Wierzbicki, James. “Sound as Music in the Films of Terrence Malick.” In The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. Hannah Peterson, 112–24. New York: Wallflower Press, 2007.

chapter 14

M usic L ov ers. Listen i ng i n ( a n d to ) Composer Biopics Guido Heldt

Composer biopics are by definition concerned with the making of music: with its creation, but also its performance (and not just because the films often cast composition as a performative act). Music is made to be listened to, and listening to music is as important in composer biopics as inventing and performing it. Beyond that basic fact, listening is crucial for two key functions of most composer biopics: veneration and personalization. Diegetic listeners attest to the greatness of the music (and its creators), but also provide proxy access to the (supposed) personal musical meanings many of the films promise. But as important as listening may be, what little scholarship there is on composer biopics has ignored it, perhaps because the genre suggests a focus on creators rather than recipients, and perhaps because much literature has been about the relationship between the films and the lives of the composers. A methodological clarification: composer biopics can interest music historians as well as film musicologists, and to the former it comes naturally to hold them against the historical record—a comparison few films bear well.1 It is a legitimate but limited approach because it easily prioritizes complaint over explanation2 and ignores the “pic” side of biopics: that of films as films that grapple with narrative problems, however doubtful music historians may be about the results.3 This chapter focuses on the “pic” side and explores how films show and motivate listening to music in their storyworlds, and how this intradiegetic listening relates to ours in the cinema; questions of historical accuracy are largely ignored. Given the lack of scholarship, this text is a mapping exercise, a flyover that shows the lay of the land, but leaves the intricacies of its ecosystems for specialized studies. So, who listens in (and to) composer biopics? An ad-hoc set of categories might be this: 1.   The “general listener”: concert audiences and other listeners without a personal relationship with the protagonist

294   Guido Heldt 2 . Listeners with a personal relationship with the composer 3. Other composers/musicians (as expert witnesses) 4. The composers themselves 5. We in the cinema This is merely a broad framework, allowing for overlaps and correspondences. Groups 1 and 2 involve concert settings as well as informal listening; the line between general listeners and characters with a relationship to the composer is fuzzy, and other musicians may also have such a relationship. Tentative as it is, the list already suggests a division of labor with regard to the functions mentioned above: groups 1 and 3 are more suitable for the validation of music; groups 2 and 4 are more suited to unveiling hidden musical meanings. Since we in the cinema are the target of all this listening, one may be tempted to understand composer biopics as a “school for listening,” using diegetic listeners to show us where, how, and why people listen, and what they hear in the music. But that would suggest a coherence few composer biopics achieve or even aspire to. This study shows that listening can have many different biopic uses, and they rarely coalesce into a well-executed lesson. Such untidiness characterizes composer biopics in yet another sense. Listening is just one of many story aspects only loosely connected to historical circumstances. Discrepancies result from multiple pressures that mean that truthful or even just plausible representation of history is rarely the aim: “Hollywood biography is to history what Caesar’s Palace is to architectural history,” as John  F.  Custen sums it up.4 Such factors are • The affordances and limitations of film (which is better at showing us the sight and sound of things than the minds of characters, for example, which a novel can easily do) • The challenges of integrating pre-existing pieces into the scene structures of films • The influence of established genre molds: typically melodrama, sometimes operetta or musical (e.g., Song of Norway, US 1970), romantic comedy (e.g., Impromptu, GB/US 1991) or even whodunit (Immortal Beloved, GB/US 1994, albeit integrated into melodrama)5 • Storytelling in the Hollywood tradition, which tends to break down historical structures into individual psychological motivation6 • The focus on “great” individuals, echoing the star system of commercial cinema7 • What John Tibbetts calls “public constructions of history”: common ideas, myths and anecdotes about composers the films find it hard to resist8 • Audiences the films aim for, and assumptions about their knowledge and preferences, which guides the choice of music for the films • Commercial considerations regarding synergies between cinema and sound recordings

Listening in (and to) Composer Biopics   295 How such factors combine in a film can only be discussed case by case. This chapter aims for breadth rather than depth in order to sketch a large-scale map, as orientation aid or spur to studies of individual examples with closer attention to biographies, reception histories, and the conditions of the genre. The chapter maps typical perspectives of listening in composer biopics (and a few more idiosyncratic examples). It does so in a run-through of 26 scenes from 16 composer biopics, all about “classical” composers, to achieve a prima facie coherent sample of films (many features of the genre also apply to popular musician biopics, however), though ranging across most of sound film history, different countries of production, and different composers. The key question is what narrative purpose scenes of listening serve in their films, how they link up with the film as a whole.

Concert Audiences and Other Listeners without a Personal Relationship with the Protagonist Concert audiences and other “general listeners” without special musical expertise or personal import can simply plausibly furnish musical performances. But given how central musical performances are to the films, most composer biopics make such “general listeners” do more narrative work.9 The following five categories show typical narrative uses of such listeners.

Social Milieu (and Its Personal Implications) Social differentiation is the purpose of the opening of Geliebte Clara (Beloved Clara, DE/FR/HU 2008). Clara Schumann (Martina Gedeck) plays her husband Robert’s (Pascal Greggory) Piano Concerto op. 54 in a Hamburg concert hall, before an attentively listening bourgeois audience. Next, Clara drags Robert into a harbor pub, where young Johannes Brahms (Malik Zidi; voice Manuel Straube) and a fiddler play an arrangement of the scherzo from his Piano Trio op. 8, while the clientele are dancing (the trio of the scherzo is a waltz, after all). The contrast in audience behavior (see Figure 14.1, and notice the shot composition placing the dancers between Clara and Robert) tells us that for Clara, Brahms represents an alternative to her difficult husband, setting up the relationship triangle that the plot, in time-honored melodrama fashion, revolves around. The biographical import of the social distinction is what the film is interested in: individual psychology is its driving force, not historical circumstances.

296   Guido Heldt

Figure 14.1  Beloved Clara: concert audience and harbor folk in the pub.

Audience Endorsement and Historical Validation Historical context becomes relevant if an audience is used to impress a composer’s importance upon us. In Abschiedswalzer (Farewell Waltz, DE 1934), an assistant at Chopin’s (Wolfgang Liebeneiner) first public concert in Paris points out to him who is in the audience: Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Alfred de Musset, Honoré de Balzac, George Sand (Sybille Schmitz)—the crème of literary Paris. This historical detail has an ulterior motive: the illustrious audience transforms the concert into a test that makes its derailment particularly shocking. News of the anti-Russian insurrection back home

Listening in (and to) Composer Biopics   297 Chopin receives before the concert greatly disturb him and make him switch mid-piece from the minuet from Mozart’s Symphony KV 543 to his own Winter Wind etude op. 25:11, before fleeing the concert hall.10 While Chopin leaves everyone bewildered, he also confronts his audience with the contrast between classical measuredness and music born of passion, and they become witnesses to a changing of the musical guard, to history being made. As important as audience identity is their behavior: appreciation of the music confirms its greatness and suggests our own reaction, in a collective version of what TV Tropes calls an “audience surrogate.”11 The effect is even stronger if the music creates its own audience. A scene in The Great Mr Handel (GB 1942) shows Handel (Wilfrid Lawson) rehearsing the aria “He was despised and rejected” from Messiah with Susannah Cibber (Elizabeth Allan). First, creditors come to claim money from Handel are admonished to listen by his servant Phineas (Hay Petrie), and a night watchman is asked to be quiet by a bystander. Then the interruptions cease, and the music casts its spell: more and more passers-by are stopped in their tracks in front of Handel’s house, were they assemble into an audience, listening with rapt attention to music they do not know will become a cornerstone of the national canon. Famous works feature in one of the feedback loops that power composer biopics: they are calling cards of their composers, while audience reactions reinforce this status. In Abel Gance’s Un grand amour de Beethoven (Beethoven’s Great Love, F 1936), Beethoven (Harry Baur) passes the house of a neighbor (Sylvie Gance) whose daughter has died. He hears the mother’s wailing, walks in and plays the “Adagio cantabile” from the Pathétique. The mother calms down and listens with a faraway look, and finally thanks Beethoven. His music, we learn, has almost otherworldly power over human passions. (That magic is confirmed by our hearing not the piano we see, but an orchestra—movie magic shows that of Beethoven’s music.)

Audience Reactions as Musical Pointers Such reactions confirm the quality of the music, but listeners can also attest to more specific qualities. That is often the function of expert listeners, i.e. other musicians, while listeners with a personal relationship to the composer can be used to reveal hidden musical meanings. But general listeners, too, can point out features of the music a film is interested in. In Frühlingssinfonie (Spring Symphony, DE 1983), young Clara Wieck (Nastassja Kinski) chooses for her encore at an aristocratic salon Robert Schumann’s (Herbert Grönemeyer) G minor piano sonata op. 22, and a male listener admires her as a “wonder girl,” while a woman criticizes her as “an unbridled creature” and her female friend wonders how a woman can “let herself go like this” (my translations). The reactions equate the unfettered, furious virtuosity of the music with sexual licentiousness (though they also mean Clara herself: the man’s admiration is aimed at her attractiveness as much as the music, and the reactions of the women are jealousy as much as musical distaste). The nexus of music and sex is crucial for the film. Repeatedly, Robert and Clara

298   Guido Heldt discuss music in sexually loaded language. More importantly, the film reconstructs its relationship triangle as one of sexual jealousy: beyond the attraction between Clara and Robert, it shows Clara’s relationship with her father (Rolf Hoppe) as disturbingly physical. At home or on tours, he cradles, embraces, touches her again and again in ways that invoke the specter of sexual abuse. The focus of the scene from Frühlingssinfonie is Clara’s championing of Robert (and their love); the audience reactions are a sideline to point out an aspect of the music. But a listener re-action can become the main action of a scene. The BBC film Eroica (2003) provides examples, unsurprisingly for a film centered on different ­listeners at the first, private performance of Beethoven’s (Ian Hart) Third Symphony in the house of Prince Lobkowitz (Jack Davenport) on June 9, 1804. The film is an essay on a work rather than a straightforward biopic, but like biopics it uses music to comment on other issues, in this  case politics. One of the listeners is Count Dietrichstein (Tim Pigott-Smith), conservative and keen on social hierarchy. Unconvinced by Beethoven’s claim that he needs “a new path through the woods,” he finds the opening of the first movement “needlessly violent” and a “tasteless intermarriage of the diatonic and the chromatic.” But he, too, cannot escape: during the fugato passage bar 114ff. of the “Marcia funebre,” his face betrays more and more inner movement. When the horns and clarinets play the main motif of the passage (bar 135ff.), he looks straight at the camera, blinking and swallowing rapidly: he may detest the revolution he hears in Beethoven’s music, but he is caught up in its intensity. Only with the diminished seventh chord in bar 150 does the music let him go, and he looks as if embarrassed by his susceptibility (see Video 14.1). His reaction says something about the music—its power and its political implications—but it is also a point of interest in itself, showing one of a range of aesthetic and political perspectives on Beethoven’s music. Video 14.1  Eroica (GB 2003): Count Dietrichstein (Tim Pigott-Smith) dislikes Beethoven’s music but cannot help being captivated by a passage in the “Marcia funebre” of the Eroica.

Audience as Community An audience can be more than a random group of listeners or representatives of a social milieu; it can also be a community in an emphatic sense. The scene around “He was despised” from The Great Mr Handel discussed above is an example. Its spontaneously self-assembling audience is more than just that. A British Handel biopic in 1942 could not but try to take Handel away from the Germans. Part of that is to show him as a musical man of a musical people,12 and part of that is to show the English having a natural appreciation for Handel’s music. The people who gather in front of his house comprise men and women, old and young, fine ladies and palanquin carriers—a cross-section of London society drawn by Handel’s music and transformed into a community. (There is also a religious subtext: The Great Mr Handel was made by the Rank Organization, with

Listening in (and to) Composer Biopics   299 roots in the Methodism of its founder J. Arthur Rank, and the aria from Messiah shapes the listeners into a kind of congregation.)

Anachronistic Audiences and Self-Reflexivity The final examples in this section move beyond audiences located in their time and address historical distance. The most notorious one is Ken Russell’s Lisztomania (GB 1975) and the screaming teenagers attending one of Liszt’s (Roger Daltrey) concerts. Their point is a historical volte-face: viewers in 1975 would have understood Lisztomania as a variation on 1960s Beatlemania; but that term recalled the original “Lisztomania,” coined by Heinrich Heine in 1844 in an article that first pinpointed the nature of fandom in a market-based culture and its star system.13 The scene suggests that a biopic need not provide a historical simulacrum to speak about history, here about the emergence of the pop-star performer with pop-star fans. (It also speaks about the film itself as entertainment, underlined by Roger Daltrey of The Who playing Liszt). Another Handel film, Tony Palmer’s God Rot Tunbridge Wells (1985), uses an audience to address historical distance more disruptively. The film opens with a modern performance of the “Hallelujah” from Messiah. But then we see Handel (Trevor Howard) in historical costume among the listeners, saying unkind things about the “cloud-thundering banality” of a performance of Messiah in his own time, by the Tunbridge Wells Amateur Music Club. The opening illustrates our connection with Handel’s music (and its tradition of amateur performances), but also, in its flagrant anachronism, the historical gulf that separates us from him, accurately dramatizing the relationship of a biopic with its subject matter.14

Listeners with a Personal Relationship to the Composer As George F. Custen has pointed out, composer biopics tend to press their material into the “narrative structures and formulas common to romantic melodramas, musicals”15 and other genres. One consequence of this borrowing of genre templates is that the composers’ lives are often more important than their music, especially their private lives and loves and failures. The music can become a sideshow: the justification for a film, but not its focus. Music can intensify this by underscoring the life with the works, in mutual reinforcement.16 This is especially true of studio-era Hollywood biopics and similar films in other countries,17 broadly before the 1970s, but it is still a feature in what Dennis Bingham has called the “neoclassical biopic”18 of the last generation. The doubling of historical and cinematic stars supports this: stars stand out and are thus suited to embody the protagonists’ individuality, while their “larger-than-life screen presence” fits the “melodramatic combination of excess and intensity.”19

300   Guido Heldt

Singling Out Personally Relevant Listeners As the foundation for subtler aspects of “personal” listening, and at a basic level of visual technique, composer biopics often single out individuals in an audience. Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers (GB 1970) does it with a conspicuousness characteristic for the director at the premiere of Tchaikovsky’s (Richard Chamberlain) First Piano Concerto. The “Andantino semplice” ends with a zoom onto Tchaikovksy’s lover Count Anton Chiluvsky (Christopher Gable), and the finale (in fact just its last two minutes) opens with zooms onto the women in Tchaikovsky’s life: his sister Sasha (Sabina Maydelle), his future wife Antonina Miliukova (Glenda Jackson), and his future patron Nadezhda von Meck (Izabella Telezynska), alternating with close-ups of Tchaikovsky or with both in the same shot, using diagonals and changes of depth of field to make the roll-call visually dramatic (see Figure 14.2).20

Listening as Relationship Metaphor The concert that opens Geliebte Clara (discussed previously as an example of the use of social milieu and its personal implications in a scene of listening) also singles out Robert Schumann and Brahms as the personally relevant listeners: the former alone in his box, the latter standing to the side of the hall, apart from the general audience. Robert is fidgeting with his wedding ring, which falls and is picked up by Brahms, only to be snatched back by Robert, observed by Clara—heavy-handed symbolism of the relationship triangle to come. Here, singling out the protagonists transforms into the use of listening as relationship metaphor, common in composer biopics and just one example for the widespread use of music to represent the composers’ private lives. It is tempting because it helps with a genre problem: going through stations of a life can lead to what Henry M. Taylor calls a “weak narration,” i.e. a “rather episodic, not causally proceeding narration,”21 Mapping music onto life can suggest stronger chains of causality, however factually dubious they may be. Geliebte Clara uses the technique most clearly in a scene that parses its relationship triangle: Clara is trying out Brahms’ Second Piano Sonata. After a while, Robert turns away from the piano with a resigned expression, as if turning away from his failing relationship and from the new rival, whom he hears in Brahms’ confident music. Clara continues to play after Brahms has entered the room and refuses to let himself be dissuaded by Robert from standing next to her. Then Robert asks Brahms to play, and he plays one of Clara’s Romances op. 11, closely watched by her, but also by Robert, who eventually joins in, as if to say that he refuses to give Clara up just yet.

Hearing Private Meanings of Music In such scenes, the act of listening becomes a relationship metaphor. Other scenes focus on listening to private meanings of music. Wen die Götter lieben (Whom the Gods Love,

Listening in (and to) Composer Biopics   301

Figure 14.2  The relationship pentagon in The Music Lovers: (a) Count Chiluvsky; (b) Antonina Miliukova; (c) Sasha; (d) Nadezhda von Meck.

DE 1942) constructs the obvious relationship triangle between Mozart (Hans Holt), his wife Constanze (Winnie Markus), and her sister Aloisia (Irene von Meyendorff) to paint a less than complimentary picture of Mozart, most clearly in a scene of Mozart and Aloisia acting out their love before Constanze. At a party at the Villa Bertramka in Prague, where Mozart has just finished Don Giovanni, Aloisia is asked to sing something

302   Guido Heldt from the new opera. She suggests Zerlina’s Batti, batti, but Mozart proposes Là ci darem la mano, Giovanni’s seduction of Zerlina. When Aloisia points out that she needs a partner, Mozart offers up himself as Don Giovanni (“at least I will try to be one”), while a humiliated Constanze looks (and listens) on, stony-faced (Figure 14.3). Even without going into the reasons for the scene,22 one can say that it derives its effect from the feedback loop between life and work typical for composer biopics. Private meanings are often attached to popular works to create strong links between music and melodrama. Connecting Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata to his relationship to its dedicatee Giulietta Gucciardi is an obvious temptation, one that Un grand amour de Beethoven gives in to in an intricate way. Giulietta—here called Juliette (Jany Holt)—is afraid to tell Beethoven that she will marry another man. So she asks him to improvise in order to make her feel less ashamed, and while he improvises the opening of the Moonlight Sonata, she tells him about Count Robert Gallenberg (Jean Debucourt). Her ploy gives the film underscoring for the pivotal moment and creates a link between the music and Juliette that makes the dedication of the sonata resonate: by preferring another man to Beethoven, she creates the meaning the music (supposedly) has for him.

Falling in Love with the Composer through Music The strongest way to intertwine life and work, music and melodrama is to have a character fall in love with a composer through their music. In Song of Love (USA 1947), Brahms (Robert Walker) presents himself to Robert (Paul Henreid), who asks him to play something. He chooses the Rhapsody op. 79:2 (which he would not write until twenty-six years after his first meeting Schumann in 1853). From upstairs, Clara hears the new sounds and is drawn by them, gliding down the staircase and across the hallway, perfectly coordinated with the falling sequences of neighbor-note triplets in bars 16–19 (see Example 14.1). The film uses a medium tracking shot for Clara’s way, making her seem to glide along without any action of her own—a visual metaphor for the music’s power over her. In a film that constructs the customary relationship triangle, the shot

Figure 14.3  Mozart plays Don Giovanni in Wen die Götter lieben, witnessed by his wife.

Listening in (and to) Composer Biopics   303 Example 14.1  Measures 14–20 of Brahms’ Rhapsody op. 79:2 with Clara’s actions in Song of Love.

shows us not just a musician intrigued by new music, but a woman being drawn towards the third point of that triangle. Impromptu likes the idea of falling in love with the music first and the composer second so much that it uses it twice. George Sand (Judy Davis) is visiting her friend Marie d’Agoult (Bernadette Peters), the mistress of Franz Liszt (Julian Sands), who is in the next room with Chopin (Hugh Grant), thundering away on the piano. Then the music changes, and we hear the Meno mosso section from Chopin’s G minor Ballade in the background. George Sand takes no visible notice, but she turns around when the music stops—something has subconsciously registered. In the next but one scene, she attends a reception at the house of Baroness Laginsky (Elizabeth Spriggs) and has to bear the inane prattling of her host, while in the next room Chopin plays the Ballade. She is leaning against the door with closed eyes. Eventually, she asks the Baroness if she prays, and if so, if she ever gets an answer. When the Baroness says no, she points at the door and says: “There is the answer” and sets her mind on getting to know Chopin. The trope is used to characterize Sand: from the start, which shows us a teenage Sand praying to her invented goddess Corambé to let her know the meaning of life and give her “perfect, perfect love” (accompanied by Chopin’s Ab major Impromptu op. 29, foreshadowing the future object of her wish), she pursues her enthusiasms with boundless determination. The Chopin she falls in love with is as much her creation as Corambé, based on her experience of his music, to which the man is almost incidental.

Not Listening to Music Not listening to music can be a powerful means in a genre centered on the celebration of “great works.” In Leise flehen meine Lieder (Lover Divine, AU/DE 1933), Franz Schubert (Hans Jaray) plays a piano arrangement of his new symphony and is interrupted after

304   Guido Heldt the first bars of the third movement when an oblivious Countess Karoline Esterhazy (Mártha Eggert) enters the room, laughing loudly and making the music into the Unfinished Symphony we know (Schubert breaks off at the point where his draft particell ends). The end of the film confirms its melodramatic nature. After an unhappy love affair between Karoline and Schubert, he again plays the—now supposedly completed—symphony and is again interrupted by Karoline, now racked with pain. Karoline’s earlier laughing failure to listen proclaimed the arrogance of her class (and nature), but the end does not show her having gained more appreciation of Schubert’s music, just of Schubert the man.

Other Composers/Musicians as Expert Witnesses Other composers or musicians as listeners are, in one sense, closer to “ordinary listeners” than to those with a personal relationship with the composer, because their main function is to confirm musical greatness; but they do so as expert witnesses. That is particularly important if at issue is the future greatness of a work. Composer biopics deal with music that for us is “classical,” a thing of a venerated past; to indicate that it was music of the future of that past requires narrative effort. A good example occurs during the rehearsal of the third movement of the Eroica in Eroica. Old Joseph Haydn (Frank Finlay) walks in, and the film constructs him as an aesthetic arbiter. He closes his eyes at the end of the movement, clearly affected by it. His conversation during the interval remains noncommittal, but during the finale, the camera suddenly zooms in on his face—a Russellian manoeuvre so unusual on the more muted palette of Eroica that we understand that it is behind his brow where the crucial judgement is formed (see Figure 14.4). Asked about the symphony, he says that he finds it very long and tiring—but that by putting himself at its center, by giving us a “glimpse

Figure 14.4  Haydn listening with the expert’s ears during the finale of the Eroica.

Listening in (and to) Composer Biopics   305 into his soul,” Beethoven has done something “quite, quite new,” and “[e]verything is different from today”: history has been made, confirmed by the most qualified witness. Essentially the same confirmation of Beethoven’s revolutionary greatness occurs in Wen die Götter lieben: a young Beethoven (René Deltgen) presents himself to Mozart, and, after playing a bit from Haydn’s late Eb major sonata, is asked to play his own music, which he does by “improvising” snippets from the Moonlight Sonata, before saying: “Like this, Herr Mozart, I want to compose one day.” The scene takes its cue from the “Sonata quasi una fantasia” epithet, which it re-translates into an imagined genesis, but the purpose is to show Mozart a glimpse of the future. (Strictly speaking, this is an example of composers listening themselves, because the listening Mozart is the film’s protagonist; but, here, he functions akin to Haydn’s expert witness in Eroica). The prime biopic example of a fellow composer as expert witness is of course Antonio Salieri in Amadeus (USA 1984)—an unwilling witness, whose recognition of Mozart’s greatness means the realization of his own inferiority. Amadeus is not quite a composer biopic: a late descendant of Pushkin’s verse drama Mozart and Salieri (1830), it borrows historical figures for a fantasy about genius, mediocrity, male rivalry, and desire, containing some of the problem of historical falsification by channelling it through Salieri’s guilt-torn memories.23 Salieri witnessing Mozart’s greatness pervades the film, but culminates in the deathbed scene, when Salieri helps Mozart to write out the “Confutatis” from the Requiem. The scene moves from Mozart croaking the music via us hearing what he hears in his mind (or the two combined) to Salieri hearing it in his own mind. Finally, he has found access to the inner sanctum of his art, but in the film’s ultimate irony only through the help of his nemesis Mozart24—not an attempt to convey a historical truth about Mozart and Salieri, but the climax of a costumed thought experiment.

The Composers Themselves Crucial for the deathbed scene in Amadeus is its handling of external and internal focalization: between our hearing music as it would be heard by anyone present, and hearing it as it is heard by a particular character (and of the shift of that lens from Mozart to Salieri); remembering or imagining music are other cases of internal focalization.25 External versus internal focalization is one distinction relevant for scenes of the protagonists of composer biopics listening themselves; the other is that between composers listening to their own music or the music of others (or other sounds). External focalization occurs with both kinds of music, whereas internal focalization is mostly used for composers listening to their own works (with exceptions discussed below).

External Focalization: Other Music/Sounds Most composer biopics focus on their composer’s music; the use of other music needs a reason, often a link to a central story aspect. In The Great Mr Handel, this is the film’s

306   Guido Heldt project to claim Handel for England. The appreciation the English show for Handel’s music is part of that; but Handel does not just give, he also receives. Early on in the film, two street sellers are advertising their primroses with a street cry outside Handel’s house. Handel, with a thoughtful expression, harmonizes the street cry on the harpsichord, and if we recognize it, we get the point: this is what Elviro (disguised as a flower seller) sings at the opening of act II of Serse (1738), hawking his flowers with “Ah! chi voler fiora di bella giardina.” Handel takes music off the street and transforms it into his own (though here only into parody street music); his music and that of the people of his adopted country intertwine. Ken Russell’s Mahler (GB 1974) uses Mahler’s listening to other sounds for characterization: Mahler (Robert Powell) is working in his hut and requests silence, and his wife Alma (Georgina Hale) is rushing about the landscape to quieten distracting sounds: their crying child; cowbells; church bells; bleating sheep and a shepherd’s pipe; a brass band and people dancing a Schuhplattler—all accompanied by a medley from Mahler’s First, Third, and Fourth Symphonies that bears out Alma’s claim that these sounds are all part of his music. Like Handel, Mahler listens and transforms what he has heard into music that gives the sounds back to his audience. (A second, equally important point of the scene is the relationship imbalance: Gustav fails to respond to Alma’s request to look at her songs, and instead demands that she be his helpmeet.)

External Focalization: The Composer’s Music Protagonists of composer biopics both perform their own music and listen to others perform it. Eroica, with Beethoven conducting his own eponymous symphony, intriguingly combines the two, and part of the action consists of him trying to get the orchestra to play the music as drastically as he wants it to sound, against their tasteful resistance. Ken Russell’s Delius film Song of Summer (GB 1968) provides an example that plays with the distinction between internal and external focalization, and between memory and reality. Its Delius (Max Adrian) is an old composer looking back, not least in the eponymous tone poem that he completed, with the help of the film’s narrator Eric Fenby (Christopher Gable), in 1931. Listening to recordings is part of the routine in Delius’s house. One day, Delius wants to listen to “The Walk to the Paradise Garden,” the interlude between acts 5 and 6 of his opera A Village Romeo and Juliet. The scene plays with different listener behavior: Fenby shows no outward reaction (apart from swallowing that may indicate some inner movement behind his impassive exterior); Jelka Delius (Maureen Pryor), after having initially put the wrong side of the record on, struggles to get into the flow of the music; and Frederick Delius, blind and paralyzed, but with a rapturous expression (reinforced by another of Russell’s zooms), slightly swaying and looking ever more ecstatic as the waves of the music rise and break (see Figure 14.5).26 What makes the scene work is the restriction to external focalization: we see that the music affects Delius intensely, but we are not in on his experience (very different from, say, Russell’s Mahler, which uses internally focalized images throughout). Here, we only see outward signs of inner movement, severely restricted by Delius’ paralysis, whose effect

Listening in (and to) Composer Biopics   307

Figure 14.5  Delius listening to his own music.

on him is brought home to us. Scenes of composers listening to recordings of their music offer the potential for such poignancy because the listening composers cannot interact with the music—recordings are frozen mementoes, incongruous with the situations in which they are listened to.

Internal Focalization: Other Music/Sounds Internal focalization is an obvious choice in films that claim to bring us closer to composers, wherefore it is used much more often for the protagonists’ own music than for that of others, or other sounds. Exceptions are films with two composer protagonists one of whom remembers the other: Amadeus, for example, or Tous les matins du monde (FR 1991) with Gérard Depardieu’s Marin Marais remembering his teacher Jean de Sainte-Colombe (JeanPierre Marielle). Internal focalization of non-musical sounds is sometimes used to indicate something going wrong in the listening process. The classic case are Schumann biopics, which all have scenes that let us hear the subjective sounds of Schumann’s tinnitus, indicating his worsening syphilis (or worsening relationship with Clara). And it is used in Beethoven biopics for his incipient deafness. The Heiligenstadt scene in Un grand amour de Beethoven is the ur-version. Only a few years after the breakthrough of sound film, Abel Gance showcases the possibilities of subjective and objective film sound in what Philippe Roger called “the bravura scene of the film: the nightmarish intrusion of deafness, the resulting confusion and victory through creativity that transcends physical and psychological affliction.”27 • At the Heiligenstadt mill, the soundtrack alternates between a roaring noise Beethoven is hearing, and the corresponding silence showing us the aural perspective of his servant Pierrot.

308   Guido Heldt • Sound and silence are flipped when Beethoven is unable to hear the sounds of the piano Pierrot is banging on, while Pierrot hears perfectly well. (At the end of the scene, fate knocks nondiegetically on the door with the opening motif of the Fifth Symphony and Beethoven’s realization of what is happening to him.) • Beethoven leaves the mill, accompanied by the “Lento assai” from the String Quartet no. 16 op. 135, with nothing else on the soundtrack: we see him looking at trees and chirping birds, but their sounds are absent. • When Beethoven walks through the village, the soundtrack alternates between external and internal focalization: we see a fiddler playing, a smith hammering, church bells ringing, water rushing over a mill wheel, women washing clothes. But the fiddle sounds are only audible when Beethoven is far and fade when he comes near, and we hear the washerwomen only when Beethoven asks Pierrot if he can hear them. • Beethoven walks down to the river in despair and instead of his reflection sees in the water what we know will be his death mask: internal focalization through visual metaphor, Beethoven staring his own mortality in the face, again underlined by the opening motif from the Fifth, but now only its first four notes—the motif is left hanging, because something else is about to happen. • Once more, Beethoven sees a montage of silent images: the birds, water, smith, bells, women and fiddler—but then we hear all of those sounds, now without the images, and realize that Beethoven has realized that he can still remember them. • Then the opening motif of the Sixth Symphony rings out, and we see Beethoven walk through a meadow, making conducting movement that show us that he is hearing this music too—not only can he remember the sounds of the world, he can also imagine music: he can still compose. To let a film fall silent again in 1936, even if only for a few seconds at a time, would have made an impression on an audience who remembered silent films, while the careful structure of the sequence shows that Gance tried to educate his audience in the new medium. A modern audience may find it didactic; but the vacillation between objective and subjective sound and the movement from what Edward Branigan calls “internal focalization (surface)” (the representation of subjective sensory perception) to “internal focalization (depth)” (the representation of thoughts, memories, emotions etc.) when Beethoven realizes that his aural imagination is intact, is still effective as a lesson in fundamental conceptual distinctions of film sound.28

Internal Focalization: The Composer’s Music Internal focalization comes into its own when it is applied to composers hearing their own music, which in biopics usually means remembering or inventing it: Beethoven imagining his own future Pastorale in Un grand amour de Beethoven is a classic example. But film is an audio-visual medium and comes into its own when it combines sight and

Listening in (and to) Composer Biopics   309 sound, and scenes using internal focalization have produced interesting examples. In Ken Russell’s Mahler, this is the structural conceit of the film, which consists of a series of Gustav’s and Alma’s flashbacks and fantasies, slotted into the framework of their train journey (a structure Ben Winters has likened to a rondo):29 pervasive subjectivity that gives Russell the license for his own fantasies about Gustav and Alma. But the genre did not have to wait for Russell to come up with intriguing visualizations of a composer’s imagination. As conventional a biopic as The Great Mr Handel contains one of the visually most elegant ones. Handel is working day and night on Messiah, or rather: is receiving it from on high. He is sitting at his desk, music pouring onto the page, when something catches his eye. He rises, holds up his candle and peers at the window. When he sits down again, where the tip of the candle flame had been we see a star in the windowpane, quickly expanding into a scene that looks like something from a biblical film, which from then on accompanies his work on Messiah: Handel is not just writing a new oratorio, but has also invented cinema, the art that has brought us the Handel film we are seeing (see Figure 14.6). It is a scene both ridiculous and finely poised: Is the star in the windowpane given to him from above, like the music? Or does he light the star himself with his candle (and his genius)? In an earlier article, I discussed climactic scenes in composer biopics (the “Confutatis” scene from Amadeus and the Don Giovanni premiere in Wen die Götter lieben) that

Figure 14.6  The invention of cinema in The Great Mr Handel.

310   Guido Heldt “knot up” transitions and ambiguities between levels of narration and between objective and subjective listening.30 Immortal Beloved does the same when Johanna van Beethoven (Johanna ter Steege) explains to Anton Schindler (Jeroen Krabbé) why she forgave Beethoven despite their court battle over the guardianship of her—and, in the film’s suggestion, Beethoven’s—son Karl (Marco Hofschneider). The film moves from the present of Schindler and Johanna into her memory of the premiere of the Ninth Symphony, layering her voiceover with images of that memory. But when Beethoven appears in the concert hall, the lens of internal focalization slips from Johanna to him, in a journey to the center of his soul. First, the film moves from the music as it sounded on that night (in Johanna’s memory) to Beethoven’s not hearing it: Branigan’s “internal focalization (surface).” But then, with the camera still on Beethoven’s face, the music starts again, before the image is replaced by one of a starry sky, and we slip into internal “focalization (depth)”: We see Beethoven’s memories of life with his brutal father, and of fleeing the house into the nocturnal forest and a bath in a lake, where a bird’s-eye shot of his body in the water reflecting the starry sky combines with a long outward zoom to a visual metaphor of Beethoven’s elevation to a star among stars. All of this is accompanied by the “Ode to Joy,” which in genre-typical fashion is re-interpreted as a biographical fantasy of the thing Beethoven did not have under his father. (There is a second aspect: Beethoven dissolving in his music is part of his escape fantasy, but we can also understand it as a metaphor for the reduction of the man to the historical monument.) At its end, the scene moves quickly back up through the levels of subjectivity, first to the deaf Beethoven’s hearing neither music nor applause, to us hearing first the music on its own and then the sounds in the concert hall, and finally on to Johanna and her memory of the night (for an excerpt of the transition from internal to external focalization, see Video 14.2).

Video 14.2  Immortal Beloved (GB/US 1994): The transition from internal focalization through Beethoven’s (non-)hearing via the abstract presentation of the music to external focalization, with us hearing all the sounds in the concert hall during the first performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

We in the Cinema And then there are we in the cinema, listening to all the music in a film, within and without its storyworld. Or do we? For this final section, the focus shifts from examples for intradiegetic listening to a (brief) consideration of the relationship between our listening and that in inside the diegesis, and for that, a few differentiations are required. The first is that between syuzhet and the fabula: between events enacted on screen in their filmic order, and the story we (re-)construct from them. In principle, we hear all the music the syuzhet gives us access to, but there may be music in the fabula we cannot hear:31 what Claudia Gorbman has captured with the distinction between “on-track”

Listening in (and to) Composer Biopics   311 and “off-track” music, that is, music that is or is not audible on the soundtrack.32 ­Off-track diegetic music may mean a performance we see—through a window, say—but cannot hear; or the internally focalized representation of deafness, as in many Beethoven films; or musical performances alluded to in the dialogue. The flip-side is music that is part of the storyworld, but that characters cannot hear, or not as we do, e.g. when internal focalization allows us to hear music as remembered or imagined. When the Great Mr Handel tries out the first idea for Messiah at the harpsichord, we hear it immediately fully orchestrated: we hear, is the implication, what Handel hears in his mind. (On the religious side of the film, we also hear Handel receive rather than compose Messiah.) Much of the music in composer biopics diegetic listeners cannot hear, anyway, because it is nondiegetic. But the concept of nondiegetic music needs clarification for these films. The “Romanze” from the Horn Concerto K.447 that accompanies Wolfgang (Hannes Stelzer) and Constanze’s (Christl Mardayn) journey to Prague in Eine kleine Nachtmusik (DE 1939) is part of their world, because Mozart had written it prior to the journey. It is not part of the storyworld in that scene, though—a distinction for which Jonathan Godsall has suggested the terms “on-scene” and “off-scene” diegetic music, for music that is diegetic in a given scene and music that is part of the storyworld in principle, but not in a given scene.33 In any case, that composer biopics tend to use their protagonist’s music on both sides of the diegetic/nondiegetic borderline drives the feedback loops between life and work so many of the films construct.34 In this sense, composer biopics create a double fiction. They present fictionalized versions of music in a fictionalized account of its historical setting. That music is fictionalized yet further if used nondiegetically, linking works to the filmic version of a life. The relationship is bi-directional: music affects our experience of images, dialogue, and other elements of a film, but is also charged by those filmic elements—it both preand post-exists the film (to borrow another distinction from Godsall), carrying traces of its filmic use into its subsequent reception history.35 That is especially true of music that has a diegetic anchoring point, but transcends that point to become nondiegetic (or off-scene diegetic). The “Confutatis” scene in Amadeus is an example: when Mozart and Salieri are done, the music is spatially displaced and becomes conventionally “dramatic” underscoring for Constanze rushing home in a coach, driven by the fear that something terrible is happening to her husband. Liturgical music about hell and heaven becomes the accompaniment to the private drama. These are basic features of the relationship between narration, diegesis, and extrafictional audience, but they do not exhaust the options and can become the material for creative play with the unstable relationship between history, music, and their fictionalized recreation. There are numerous examples; I can only discuss one as pars pro toto, fittingly from another film by Ken Russell, who has played more with the conventions of the composer biopic than anyone else. Opening scenes are a fruitful arena for such ambiguities, because close to titles and credits, many films have not yet solidified, are still in the process of guiding their audience from extrafictional reality into their tale. The opening of The Music Lovers—showing

312   Guido Heldt Tchaikovsky and other protagonists at a wintry Moscow street fair—is underscored with the “Scherzo burlesque” from Tchaikovsky’s Orchestral Suite No. 2 (1883) (see Video 14.3). For the most part, there is no reason to understand the music as anything but nondiegetic. A few bits of it, though, have diegetic anchoring points: most noticeably the accordions in the score, which we see being played on screen, while other segments of the music fit performances by female dancers and male acrobats. It makes sense to understand these parts of the piece as music we assume people at the fair can hear. For the rest of the music, that assumption makes no sense, though—but nevertheless it is all one piece. We can understand the scene to suggest that the “Scherzo burlesque” pastiches music Tchaikovsky would have heard at such events—movie magic merging putative source and composed result. What is more important for the film as a whole, though, is that its very first scene foregrounds the artifice of filmic narration and shows how its multi-channel nature can be used in biopics to construct complex relationships between history and its fictionalized (re-)construction.

Video 14.3  The Music Lovers (GB 1970): The “Scherzo burlesque” from Tchaikovsky’s Orchestral Suite No. 2 is fitting nondiegetic underscoring of the opening of the film and acquires a diegetic anchoring point in the four accordions, which are in the score and on screen.

Details and Doublings: An Outlook As suggested at the start, this chapter has focused on the “pic” side of composer biopics, on narrative functions of scenes of listening, to sketch a preliminary map of an overlooked but crucial aspect of the genre—a map that is hopefully just the start of the scholarly journey. One way of developing it would be to fill in the details, in close readings of individual films (or scenes) that delve deeper into details and contexts. The other way would be to reconnect the “pic” to the “bio” side, to consider listening (and other matters) in composer biopics in relation to the complex dialectic between history and fiction in these films. The distance between history and its reconstruction is motivation and problem for any kind of historiography, scholarly or popular, factual or fictionalized. The biopic attempt to make the past vicariously present in the immediacy of cinema creates particular problems: we know that things were not (quite) like that, even though in their concreteness, images and sounds cannot but insist that they were. We know that Handel, Mozart, or Brahms did not look and speak like the actors who portray them; we know that events did not occur quite as they do in films informed by the templates of fiction film. Such tensions mean that there are few masterworks among biopics, much mediocrity, and not a little ridiculousness.

Listening in (and to) Composer Biopics   313 But such tensions also are what makes them interesting, despite—or because of—their failures. Biopics are full of “doublings”: the layering of what is related, but also categorically different. That may be especially true of composer biopics, because here such doublings occur on image and sound tracks. There is what Henry M. Taylor calls the “double biographical body” of the biopic subject:36 the relationship between the real person and the symbolic figure filling a role in our imagination of history. There is the doubling of a historical personage in the actor embodying them. There is the doubling of historical events and their causes and consequences in the framework of narrative film with its genre templates and plot patterns, especially the translation of historical circumstances into psychological motivation. There is the doubling of historical music and its filmic recreation, and that of seeing and hearing filmic performances of musical performances. There is the doubling of music in diegesis and narration (and the transitions and ambiguities), and the doubling of music in its original form (whatever that means) and in arrangements. And there is the doubling of diegetic listeners and those in the cinema, for whom all of this is done. It is easy for composer biopics to get lost in this thicket, but what makes them interesting is to see and hear how they try to find their way through.

Notes 1. An extreme example is Donald  F.  Sloane, “A Multiple-choice Quiz on the Historical Accuracy of Bernard Rose’s Immortal Beloved,” Beethoven Journal 10, no. 1 (1995), 30–31. But it is also at work in Jane Perry-Camp’s “Amadeus and Authenticity,” Eighteenth-Century Life 9 (1984): 117, or Lewis Lockwood’s “Film Biography as Travesty: Immortal Beloved and Beethoven,” Musical Quarterly 81, no. 2 (1997): 190–98, while Paul Henry Lang’s “The Film Amadeus,” Opus, October 1985—reprinted in: Musicology and Performance, ed. Alfred Mann and George  J.  Buelow (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 155–62—is concerned with what he sees as false representation of Mozart’s and Salieri’s personalities. Even Joseph Horowitz’s “Mozart as Midcult: Mass Snob Appeal,” Musical Quarterly 76, no. 1 (1992): 1–16 (see esp. 4–5), though primarily discussing Amadeus as an example of Dwight Macdonald’s concept of “midcult,” asserts that “Shaffer’s Mozart resembles no Mozart I can glean” and lists the differences. 2. Joseph Horowitz’s hatchet job on Amadeus in “Mozart as Midcult” is a drastic example. 3. I have pleaded for a less judgmental approach before; see Guido Heldt, “Playing Mozart. Biopics and the Musical (Re)Invention of a Composer,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 3, no. 1 (2009): 21–46. 4. George F. Custen, Bio/Pics. How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 7. 5. Less genre-specific is the hero striving against the odds, e.g., in The Great Mr Handel (GB 1942). 6. See David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1988), 12–23. 7. See John C. Tibbetts: Composers in the Movies: Studies in Musical Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 20–21, on the adaptation of screen lives to filmic patterns. See also Henry M. Taylor, Rolle des Lebens. Die Filmbiographie als narratives System (Marburg: Schüren, 2002), 106–12, regarding the doubling of historical and cinematic star personae.

314   Guido Heldt 8. Tibbetts, Composers in the Movies, 6. 9. Ben Winters’s Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film: Shared Concert Experiences in Screen Fiction (London: Routledge,  2014) addresses concert scenes and audiences in a much wider range of films. He also mentions some of the biopics featuring in this chapter (Eroica, Immortal Beloved, Mahler, Song of Love), though with little overlap regarding scenes and questions. 10. For more on Abschiedswalzer see Guido Heldt, “Hardly Heroes—Composers as a Subject in National Socialist Cinema,” in: Music and Nazism: Art under Tyranny, 1933–1945, ed. Michael H. Kater & Albrecht Riethmüller (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2003), 114–35, esp. 120. Chopin’s first Paris concert took place 15 months after the start of the Polish uprising, which began on November 29, 1830; see Jim Samson, Chopin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 70–84. 11. TV Tropes, “Audience Surrogate,” accessed May 25, 2019, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/ pmwiki.php/Main/AudienceSurrogate. 12. More in Guido Heldt, “Wahlengländer. The Great Mr Handel,” in Geschichte—Musik—Film, ed. Christoph Henzel (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010), 93–115. 13. English translation in O. G. Sonneck & Frederick H. Martens, “Heinrich Heine’s Musical Feuilletons Concluded,” in Musical Quarterly 8, no. 3 (1922): 435–68, esp. 457. 14. See also John C. Tibbetts, All My Loving? The Films of Tony Palmer (Houghton-le-Spring: Chrome Dreams/Voiceprint, 2009), 370. 15. Tibbetts, Composers in the Movies, 20. 16. See also Custen, Bio/Pics, 86. 17. Heldt, “Hardly Heroes,” discusses this for composer biopics in Nazi cinema. 18. Dennis Bingham, Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 18. 19. Taylor, Rolle des Lebens, 110; my translations. 20. See Winters, Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film, 90–91 for more on the scene and its filmic context. 21. See Taylor, Rolle des Lebens, 91–100 for more on biopic narration. Taylor shows that biopics also deal with the challenge by using “stereotypical story schemata”: another reason for composer biopics preferring established generic frameworks. 22. More in Heldt, “Playing Mozart,” 34–36. See also Heldt, “Hardly Heroes,” 125–126. 23. Retrospective homodiegetic narration—i.e., by a character in the story—features in many composer biopics since the late 1960s, e.g., Song of Summer (GB 1968), Mahler (GB 1975), Amadeus (US 1984), God Rot Tunbridge Wells (GB 1985), Testimony (GB 1988), Tous les matins du monde (FR 1991), Beethoven Lives Upstairs (CA 1992), Immortal Beloved (GB/ US 1994), Sibelius (FI 2003), De-Lovely (US 2004), Copying Beethoven (US/DE/HU 2006). 24. See Heldt, “Playing Mozart,” 43–44 for a more detailed analysis of the scene. 25. For the transfer of Gérard Genette’s concept of focalization to film music see Guido Heldt, Music and Levels of Narration in Film. Steps across the Border (Bristol: Intellect, 2013), 119–33. 26. The film only uses part of the interlude, from four bars before 40 to five bars after 51. 27. My translation from Philippe Roger, “Transcrire pour composer: le Beethoven d’Abel Gance,” in 1895. Revue de l’association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma 31 (2000): 251–66; see §9. 28. Edward Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (London: Routledge, 1992), 86–87, 100–107, and Heldt, Music and Levels of Narration in Film, 124–29.

Listening in (and to) Composer Biopics   315 29. Winters, Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film, 121. 30. See Heldt, “Playing Mozart,” 41–44. 31. For the transfer of these terms from Russian formalist literary theory to film see Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978), 19–22, and David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 49–53. 32. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 144–50. 33. Jonathan Godsall, Reeled In: Pre-existing Music in Narrative Film (London: Routledge, 2019), 93–98. 34. For examples, see Heldt, “Playing Mozart.” 35. More in Godsall, Reeled In, 131–61. For a discussion of listening to post-existing music, see Chapter 15 in this Handbook. 36. See Taylor, Rolle des Lebens, 46–58.

Select Bibliography Bingham, Dennis. Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Caron, Alfred, Christian Labrande, and Paul Salmona, eds. Figures du compositeur. Musiciens à l’écran. Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1996. Custen, George  F. Bio/Pics. How Hollywood Constructed Public History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992. Custen, George F.: “Night and Day. Cole Porter, Warner Bros. and the Re-creation of a Life.” Cineaste 19, no. 2–3 (1992): 42–44. Fryer, Paul, ed. The Composer on Screen: Essays on Classical Music Biopics. Jefferson: McFarland, 2018. Gardner, Matthew. “The Great Mr Handel (1942): Handel’s First Biopic, Its Sources and Wartime Allegory.” Musicorum 14 (2013): 99–107. Heldt, Guido. “Hardly Heroes—Composers as a Subject in National Socialist Cinema.” In Music and Nazism: Art under Tyranny, 1933–1945, ed. Michael  H.  Kater and Albrecht Riethmüller, 114–35. Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2003. Heldt, Guido. “Playing Mozart. Biopics and the Musical (Re)Invention of a Composer.” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 3, no. 1 (2009): 21–46. Heldt, Guido. “Wahlengländer. The Great Mr Handel.” In Geschichte—Musik—Film, ed. Christoph Henzel, 93–115. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010. Horowitz, Joseph. “Mozart as Midcult: Mass Snob Appeal.” Musical Quarterly 76, no. 1 (1992): 1–16. Lang, Paul Henry. “The Film Amadeus.” Opus, October 1985 (reprinted in Musicology and Performance, ed. Alfred Mann and George J. Buelow, 155–62. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Lockwood, Lewis. “Film Biography as Travesty: Immortal Beloved and Beethoven.” Musical Quarterly 81, no. 2 (1997): 190–98. Mitchell, Charles  P. The Great Composers Portrayed on Film, 1913 through 2002. Jefferson: McFarland, 2010. Perry-Camp, Jane. “Amadeus and Authenticity.” Eighteenth-Century Life 9 (1984): 117.

316   Guido Heldt Roger, Philippe. “Transcrire pour composer: le Beethoven d’Abel Gance,” 1895. Revue de l’association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma 31 (2000): 251–66. Sloane, Donald  F. “A Multiple-choice Quiz on the Historical Accuracy of Bernard Rose’s Immortal Beloved.” Beethoven Journal 10, no. 1 (1995): 30–31. Taylor, Henry M. Rolle des Lebens. Die Filmbiographie als narratives System. Marburg: Schüren, 2002. Tibbetts, John C. Composers in the Movies: Studies in Musical Biography. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Tibbetts, John  C. All My Loving? The Films of Tony Palmer. Houghton-le-Spring: Chrome Dreams/Voiceprint, 2009. Winters, Ben. Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film: Shared Concert Experiences in Screen Fiction. London: Routledge, 2014.

chapter 15

Hi-Yo, Rossi n i Hearing Pre-existing Music as Post-existing Music Jonathan Godsall

“An intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell overture without thinking of The Lone Ranger.” The ties bonding the Lone Ranger property to the finale of Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell overture (1829) are so well known—in Anglophone countries, at least—that the “intellectual” joke has been attributed to figures as disparate as US news anchor Dan Rather and British comedian Billy Connolly, among others.1 Spread across eras and media, from the original Lone Ranger radio show (1933–54) to the recent bigbudget Disney film (2013), the use of Rossini’s pre-existing piece as the franchise’s musical brand has proved uniquely stable and long lived, but also adaptable to suit each new Lone Ranger iteration. This chapter asks how manners of the music’s quotation and modification within the franchise have reflected prevailing scoring trends and the specific contexts at hand, and explores how those uses might have changed listeners’ conceptions of the finale’s signification and structure. This is therefore a study of Rossini’s piece as both pre-existing and post-existing music: of its uses in the franchise and its continuing life at once independent of and inextricably linked to The Lone Ranger. The use of pre-existing music and its reception through film and other media have ­fascinated both media-music scholars and those interested more generally in music’s places and meanings within modern culture. Discussions of popular appropriations of classical music specifically have often been structured around philosophical questions of “high” versus “low” culture.2 Consistent with my own prior work in this area, though, I wish to focus here on more specific and measurable effects of pre-existing music’s use in media texts, both for those texts and for the music. My book, Reeled In: Pre-existing Music in Narrative Film (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), compares cases from across musical and cinematic genres to draw general conclusions about such effects. In the present chapter, the perspective is at once narrower, in that one substantial case is explored in extended detail, and wider, in that the focus stretches beyond film to consideration of a multimedia franchise. While Rossini’s entanglements with radio, film, television, and video game Lone Rangers are all of interest, though, this wider perspective is partly

318   Jonathan Godsall intended to allow clearer reflection on how the cinematic and cinematic listening are ­distinguished in relation to appropriations of pre-existing music. Particularly in my concluding discussion of the 2013 Lone Ranger film, then, I argue that contemporary notions of the cinematic have shaped the use and reception of Rossini’s piece, in line with broader trends in media-music practice.

Marching Soldiers and Galloping Horses The basic contention in this chapter—and that underpins the forementioned joke—is that many listeners, from the mid-twentieth century onwards and in countries where The Lone Ranger has been common currency (so particularly the United States, the franchise’s home), will understand the finale of Rossini’s William Tell overture in relation to that media property. Semantically, first of all, this means that listeners may think not just of The Lone Ranger in an abstract sense, but also of images, characters, storylines, and other elements from both specific iterations and the broader franchise: “cowboys, bandits, horses, the Wild West,” as Leonard Bernstein summarized his audience’s response to the question “what do you think that music is all about?” in a 1958 New York Philharmonic “Young People’s Concert.”3 Before considering the processes by which such understandings have been developed, we must identify what the finale might have meant to audiences prior to the Lone Ranger’s 1933 radio premiere. The character of William Tell is a Swiss legend, a supposed fourteenth-century hero who inspired a rebellion against foreign rulers. Rossini’s overture, introducing his opera based on the story, is structured in four distinct parts and lasts around twelve minutes in performance. The musical material of the finale, itself approximately three-and-a-half minutes in length, has no direct repetition in the drama, leaving its meaning relatively open to interpretation. The overture had also embarked on a life of its own long before The Lone Ranger. Many would have heard the piece via arrangements of the orchestral original. Ken Hamilton notes that Franz Liszt’s 1838 piano transcription “had become a mainstay of his [own] concert repertoire” by its 1842 publication,4 for example, and David Wondrich points out that the piece was also “a frequent target of plunder by [American] brass bands in the . . . period from right after the Civil War to around World War I.”5 Furthermore, by 1933, the overture had already been established as music for drama unrelated to its original context. In a 1920 manual for silent film accompaniment, William Tell is named as the first of twenty “standard overtures” that “contain brilliant and lively passages which will fit scenes in the Wild West, hurries, chases, fights, and mob scenes, etc.,” to form part of an accompanist’s basic repertoire.6 Whether the finale was commonly used to accompany Wild West scenes prior to The Lone Ranger is unclear, but certainly an intriguing possibility. Other accounts at least attest to the overture’s general prevalence in silent-film theatres. Hugo Riesenfeld, for one, complained in 1925 that it was for some time “played over and over again” as a prelude to screenings.7

Hearing Pre-existing Music as Post-existing Music   319 The music does not offer its listener an entirely blank canvas, of course. The finale’s E-major opening fanfare and Allegro vivace tempo evoke mobilizing military forces, as  is acknowledged in Hector Berlioz’s 1834 account of “warlike instrumentation.”8 Raymond Monelle points out that the fanfare is a “topical gesture” rather than a quotation of an actual military call, though, meaning that “[t]he glorious trumpet calls . . . seem like the signals of an imaginary army; and since it is imaginary, we can freely imagine heroic and honourable soldiers without reflecting on the contemporary scene.”9 From there, a heroic and honourable Texas Ranger is only a small step. Perhaps surprising to modern ears, however, is the manner in which imagined forces have often been heard to move. Having already mentioned “horses” in the aforementioned 1958 Young People’s Concert, Bernstein could not resist referring repeatedly to the “galloping sound” of the violins in the main E-major theme even while trying to convince his audience that “[m]usic is never about anything.”10 A century earlier in 1858, though, critic Durillon d’Engelure heard a “warlike march,”11 while George P. Upton’s 1909 description, attempting to relate the overture to its opera, is similarly of “trumpet calls, summoning the Swiss soldiers, and their march.”12 This description, from a handbook for general audiences, was soon repeated in the program notes of several US orchestras,13 and probably inspired the still-common English subtitle for the finale, “March of the Swiss Soldiers.”14 Monelle identifies the supposed culprit: the finale is a “march . . . often wrongly heard as equestrian because of its use in . . .The Lone Ranger.”15 But this is, ironically, a blinkered view in more than one sense. First, horses are surely implied in the silent-film manual’s mention of “scenes in the Wild West, hurries, chases,” as they certainly are in earlier references to the finale as a galop or galopade, including in arrangements by Johann Strauss I (Wilhelm-Tell-Galoppe, Op. 29b, 1829, a short adaptation for the ballroom incorporating one Strauss melody) and Charles Grobe (“Gallopade, from William Tell,” 1863, a piano arrangement with Grobe’s own variation and coda following the main theme).16 The Lone Ranger, though predominant from today’s perspective, was not the first or only source of equestrian associations. Second, while the common-time finale’s famous short-short-long rhythm does not exemplify the nineteenth-century musical topic of the “noble horse” identified by Monelle (which appears in compound or fast triple meter, in even beats or incorporating a dotted figure),17 it unquestionably resembles the sound of an actual horse galloping. As Philip Tagg and Bob Clarida discuss, it is a sonic anaphone—a kind of onomatopoeia—and one “nearer the extramusical ‘truth’ ” than its compound-time relatives.18 Rossini’s finale can be heard as a march or a gallop; neither interpretation is “wrong.” Much depends on tempo, and it is telling that Monelle claims a rather slow 130 crotchet beats per minute is appropriate (based on the main theme’s resemblance to a contemporary French bugle call notated at that tempo),19 while Tagg and Clarida exaggerate the recording heard on the Lone Ranger radio show to 192bpm (whereas the fastest version I have heard is closer to 184bpm, still relatively quick).20 Nonetheless, it is also telling that the other contender for the theme of the Lone Ranger radio series was Franz von Suppé’s Light Cavalry overture (1866), a piece that supports its title with a conventional ­compound-time theme. This suggests that Jim Jewell, responsible for the choice of music as

320   Jonathan Godsall the program’s first director, heard horses in Rossini’s piece too.21 His interpretation would soon guide others, not only amplifying the equestrian connotations of the finale but also, as Tagg and Clarida put it, “virtually defining the characteristic [short-shortlong] rhythm as the sonic embodiment of speeding horse flesh”;22 in this regard, The Lone Ranger’s influence can surely be heard behind later Western themes such as that for the television series Bonanza (1959–73).23 Situated at the start of every Lone Ranger radio episode from the January 31, 1933 premiere onwards, Rossini’s opening fanfare can be heard as a broad call to arms (and as a loud instruction to the show’s audience to sit down and pay attention) preceding the Lone Ranger’s address of his horse—“Hi-yo Silver, away!”—and gunshot and galloping-horse sound effects. The first bars of the main theme—the “galloping” strings now, crucially, prepared by the galloping horse— then follow or underscore the introductory narration, the words of which vary while always stating the program’s title and making reference to Silver’s speed (listen to Audio 15.1). From its opening seconds, The Lone Ranger offered its mass audience clear associations for the finale that would only be strengthened over the coming years. Audio 15.1  Opening of The Lone Ranger radio episode “Remember the Alamo” (broadcast December 22, 1941).

Branding (with) Music Two particular factors contributed to The Lone Ranger’s success in rebranding Rossini’s finale as its theme tune. The first is the foregrounding of the music, and thus the relative likelihood of audiences consciously attending to it within its new context. As well as opening each Lone Ranger radio episode, at a length that always includes at least some of Rossini’s central C-sharp-minor section before fading out, the finale also closes them, playing from midway through its course so that its final cadence signals the end of the show.24 In these positions the finale can be heard loud and clear, and becomes the pars pro toto theme of the series. The second factor is the repetition of the music, breeding familiarity not only with the piece itself, but also with its connection to the show and the show’s attendant ideas. Repetition within episodes of the radio series additionally includes occasional uses of the finale as dramatic scoring: in the 1941 episode “A New Mission,” for example, a short excerpt of the E-major theme stands in for the Ranger riding to St. Louis, augmented by a concurrent galloping-horse sound effect. More significant for the longterm rebranding of the music, though, is the repetition that occurs across all 2,956 episodes. In the US, new episodes were broadcast three times weekly almost continuously between 1933 and September 3, 1954, with repeats continuing after that date.25 The repetition continues across other elements of the franchise, too: all subsequent official Lone Ranger iterations honor the musical brand established by the radio show. The Lone Ranger’s first departure from radio was for the Republic Pictures film serial of 1938, entitled simply The Lone Ranger (dir. John English, William Witney). A trade

Hearing Pre-existing Music as Post-existing Music   321 advert for this serial highlights the property’s radio pedigree (“the largest listening audience known to broadcasting”), and promises exhibitors that millions of Lone Ranger fans are therefore a “pre-sold certainty.”26 In this context, deviating from the musical formula would already have constituted a risk. Nonetheless, the greater resources of Republic compared to those of radio station WXYZ encouraged a slight update. WXYZ had been limited to tracking (i.e. needle-dropping) excerpts from its record library, both for the theme of its show and for dramatic scoring, the latter using various classical works.27 By contrast, Republic’s music department head Alberto Colombo, while also drawing heavily upon the studio’s own library of public domain compositions and cues from previous productions, was able to arrange and record adaptations of Rossini’s piece. Most notably, therefore, each chapter of both the 1938 serial and its 1939 sequel, The Lone Ranger Rides Again (dir. John English, William Witney), opens and closes with tracked material from a Colombo cue named “The Lone Ranger Main Title.” This orchestral cue combines rearranged motifs from the E-major sections of Rossini’s finale with new Colombo melodies. Parts of it additionally score action within the serials’ chapters, as for instance roughly halfway through the opening 1938 chapter “Hi-yo Silver,” in a montage of the Lone Ranger riding in pursuit of villains and to the aid of innocent bystanders. (A recording of Rossini’s original was also used in this way, as in the climactic Lone-Ranger-to-the-rescue sequence of the first 1939 chapter.) The finale thus continued to serve as the franchise’s theme, and as accompaniment for galloping, but began (or rather, thinking back to Strauss and others, returned to) a career of adaptation that has persisted in many Lone Ranger iterations since. George  W.  Trendle, then owner of the Lone Ranger property, was apparently so unhappy with Republic’s treatment of his main character (not least that he was unmasked in both serials) that he bought and destroyed as many prints of the films as he could.28 One element Trendle admired, however, was the music, to which he secured the rights for use by WXYZ, writing to Republic in 1938 that “I would like our radio music to conform with that used in the [first serial].”29 “The Lone Ranger Main Title,” and other cues composed for the serial or recycled from Republic’s catalogue, quickly found their way into the radio series from late 1938.30 One radio cue that remained firmly in place, though, was Rossini’s original finale, still opening and closing every episode. Rather than conforming precisely to the updated format of the serials, then, Trendle kept his original theme while occasionally using parts of Colombo’s “Main Title”—and, from September 1940, a version of that cue slightly rearranged by Ben Bonnell31—as dramatic scoring. The “Main Title” can be heard bridging the first two scenes of “Remember the Alamo” (broadcast December 22, 1941), for instance, and in a similar but briefer bridging role towards the end of “Marked for Death” (October 27, 1950). In both cases, predictably, it implies the Lone Ranger riding to some destination. The presence of Rossini’s musical material in the radio show was thus expanded and reinforced. The musical formula of the radio show was transferred directly to the Trendle-produced ABC television series that began in 1949. The pilot, “Enter the Lone Ranger” (dir. George B. Seitz, Jr.), opens and closes with the opening and close of the original William Tell finale (only E-major material, though part of the C-sharp-minor section is heard briefly

322   Jonathan Godsall in some other episodes), while the Colombo–Bonnell “Main Title” appears a few minutes from the show’s end, again scoring a horseback sequence. Running until 1957, the television show evolved more obviously than its radio cousin, notably for its fifth and final series, produced after Trendle had sold the Lone Ranger property to Jack Wrather. This was filmed in color rather than black-and-white, and boasts better production values all round, including use of higher-quality musical recordings, presumably from a new library. The “Main Title” and other Republic cues were dropped, but Rossini’s finale remained ever present, as central to The Lone Ranger’s identity as the main character’s mask or his companion Tonto. Just as practical considerations informed the initial choice of William Tell as the theme of The Lone Ranger, and then of which versions of the piece were used in these early iterations of the property, so they are also reflected in how the piece was used. Recordings of the finale and “Main Title” (even in the serials for which it was originally composed) were often crudely tracked: dropped in and out mid-phrase, and otherwise abbreviated in musically unsympathetic ways. The 1939 Looney Tunes parody The Lone Stranger and Porky (dir. Robert Clampett), while still strengthening the music’s association with the real Ranger, provides a telling contrast. Rossini’s motifs are quoted allosonically rather than autosonically (that is, as abstract musical material rather than recorded sound),32 woven throughout a Carl Stalling score that was composed and recorded especially for the cartoon. Heard at its opening and also at times when the Lone Stranger speeds to Porky the Pig’s rescue, William Tell material is molded to the action much more closely than it would be in official Lone Ranger texts for another seventeen years. It was with the cinematic release of The Lone Ranger (1956, dir. Stuart Heisler), a Wrather production starring the same lead actors as the television series (Clayton Moore as the Ranger, and Jay Silverheels as Tonto), that the official franchise began to treat the finale less as a fixed entity to be tracked in (even if via an already adapted version), and more as  a source of musical ideas for allosonic incorporation into original scores. David Buttolph’s score, nonetheless following existing conventions, features renditions of the finale that play over the film’s opening credits and also at its close, as the Ranger and Tonto ride into the distance after their latest success. While these versions of the finale are also like earlier ones in being abridged (here avoiding Rossini’s C-sharp-minor material entirely, and restructuring other parts), the adaptations are clearly the work of a musician rather than an editor, not least given the way they smoothly transition from or into more original Buttolph cues. William Tell material is not used elsewhere in the 1956 film, much as prior Lone Ranger iterations most often used the finale solely as a title theme. Buttolph furnishes the Ranger with an original leitmotif that resembles the Shaker melody “Simple Gifts,” emphasizing the character’s American identity. For the 1958 sequel, The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold (dir. Lesley Selander), composer Les Baxter took the more obvious option implied by previous uses of Rossini’s piece, and deployed the finale’s E-major melodies as the Ranger’s leitmotif. These melodies are consistently associated with appearances of the character, though are adapted in different ways to fit the surrounding music and drama, and often used alongside the chorus melody of “Hi-yo Silver,” the

Hearing Pre-existing Music as Post-existing Music   323 original song that outlines the Ranger’s backstory at the film’s opening (with lyrics by Lenny Adelson). Fairly substantial versions of the finale are heard over the main titles and at the end of the film, as usual, but even here Rossini’s music (once more, E-major material only) is reorchestrated (with extra brass, most notably) and restructured far more extensively than in Buttolph’s score, and at the close paired again with “Hi-yo Silver.” Adaptation transforms the finale more fully into media music: music that responds to the form of its surrounding media context. It is notable that, within the official Lone Ranger franchise at least, the first key moments of this transformation were tied to cinematic iterations: the 1930s serials and 1950s feature films. One factor that has historically differentiated film from other media in terms of production, broadly speaking, is greater financial and institutional resource. In the case of The Lone Ranger, the greater resources available to the creators of the serials and films, compared to those of the radio and television series, undoubtedly facilitated their musical adaptations but might also, in a sense, have demanded them. Hollywood filmmakers and critics have habitually viewed musical “originality” as a signifier of value, particularly prior to the breakdown of the studio system and consequent diversification of scoring away from the orchestral Romanticism it privileged.33 A cinematic release, even of Lone Ranger serials and feature films that were not in themselves “prestige” pictures, would thus ideally be musically different (even if still using pre-existing music), particularly in the case of the feature films given their direct roots in the television series. Here, then, the transformation of Rossini’s finale reflects The Lone Ranger’s growth from no-screen to big-screen media franchise.

Structural Expectations From the 1950s films onwards, adaptation of Rossini is the norm across media, though the more recent history of the Lone Ranger franchise is one of only sporadic activity. Prior to the 2013 Disney film that will be discussed in more detail below, official Lone Ranger screen productions comprised two cartoon series (1966–69 and 1980–82), a 1991 video game, a 2003 television pilot, and a single cinematic release: The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981, dir. William A. Fraker). The video game and television pilot in particular show the finale transformed into media music for reasons other than prestige. The game, The Lone Ranger, developed by Konami for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), incorporates the finale as its title theme in a charming digitized arrangement necessitated by the NES’s limited sound chip.34 Without such technological constraints, the Warner Bros. television pilot, The Lone Ranger (dir. Jack Bender; the potential series was not commissioned), adapts the finale as part of its appeal to a teen audience: the programme closes with a rock version of Rossini’s piece arranged for guitars, bass, and drums. The 1991 and 2003 renditions are, as ever, both abridged to include only E-major material. The Legend of the Lone Ranger, an attempt by Wrather to revive his franchise, was a critical and commercial flop.35 John Barry’s score to that film largely follows Baxter’s

324   Jonathan Godsall strategy in its use of Rossini material, combining abridged (though now not obviously reorchestrated) E-major-only renditions of the finale with use of E-major material as the main character’s leitmotif (albeit using only the rising opening phrase of the main theme, whereas Baxter also employed other fragments). Spending its opening hour outlining the origins of the Lone Ranger, the film saves its first major rendition of the finale for the moment the character first dons his mask. The dual reveal of the Ranger and his musical partner are prepared beforehand by brief soundings of the leitmotif, though, and by the film’s opening-title song: “The Man in the Mask,” composed by Barry with lyrics by Dean Pitchford, and sung by Merle Haggard. The song places the familiar short-short-long rhythm into a bass ostinato (also used to underscore speak-sing narration by Haggard throughout the film), and shares its four opening pitches with the Rossini main-theme motif (though not always in the same key). These connections, binding the music track’s clashing styles, are emphasized when Rossini and song material are combined in some of Barry’s instrumental cues (for an instance of this, see Example 15.1). The audience’s expectations are not manipulated so effectively following the fuller entry of Rossini’s finale. The piece is later heard again in two key sequences depicting the Ranger taking action: first, to save Tonto from being hanged, and then as he chases and fights chief antagonist Butch Cavendish at the film’s climax. The finale had been used for Lone-Ranger-to-the-rescue sequences before, of course, but it is notable that the 1950s films followed the more common strategy of saving substantial renditions of the piece until after the Ranger’s work had been done. Particularly at the climax of The Legend of the Lone Ranger, where it plays for around a minute and a half, the finale robs the Ranger–Cavendish fight of tension as it moves inexorably towards its concluding cadence. The music is abridged here but never derailed, and those familiar with its course (and, perhaps, its combination with the action of previous Lone Ranger productions) will probably expect the victorious blow to land precisely at that cadence, based on what David Huron terms their “veridical expectations”: expectations that arise “from past knowledge of a familiar sequence of events.”36 Relative to those expectations, we are not disappointed, but the perfunctory musical placement here demonstrates that the finale could be both an obligation and a hazard for the franchise.37 Example 15.1  Part of cue heard in The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981, dir. William A. Fraker), as John Reid (later the Lone Ranger) arrives in Del Rio.

Hearing Pre-existing Music as Post-existing Music   325 As knowing Rossini’s finale can affect how we experience the unfolding structure of Lone Ranger productions, might the reverse also be true? Might a listener, to consider the strongest of such effects, come to expect the form of the piece they hear outside of Lone Ranger contexts (in the concert hall, for instance) to correspond to that it took within them? Huron writes also of “veridical surprise,” which “occurs when events do not conform to a musical work (or specific musical pattern) that is familiar to the listener.”38 The key factor cueing veridical surprise for someone listening to Rossini’s original but post-existing finale would be that they are more familiar with an adapted version of the piece, perhaps through having encountered that adapted version first, or if repeated listening to the adaptation had unraveled existing veridical expectations.39 Though the William Tell overture was popular prior to The Lone Ranger, many listeners will have been introduced to its finale by that property (US children growing up with the radio, serial, and/or television iterations, for example, who might simply not have had any opportunity to hear the piece before).40 Specific adaptations of the finale could also have been heard often enough to have an effect: most obviously, exposure to the Colombo–Bonnell “Main Title” cues through radio, serial, and television episodes might have created expectation for the rearranged and/or new material from those cues to occur in the original piece. That musical repetition is present between as well as within Lone Ranger iterations complicates matters, however. At least from today’s perspective, the existence of so many different adaptations across the franchise makes it unlikely that any one will take prominence. True, most listeners will probably not have equal knowledge and experience of all Lone Ranger iterations, and might therefore recall one particular adaptation of the finale most strongly (if they know the franchise at all). But the very repetition of the finale as part of the Lone Ranger brand is designed to encourage audience crossover from one iteration to the next. The music’s consistent use as the franchise theme thus works actively to balance the potential for veridical surprise generated by its adaptation within any individual iteration. General trends apparent across multiple musical adaptations might still lead to subsequent veridical surprise in this cultural context, though. The common absence of Rossini’s C-sharp-minor section is the clearest such trend. Within the franchise, this absence is most obviously explained initially by length—the radio and television series often faded their opening renditions of the finale out during that central section, by which time the music had already been playing for a relatively long period—and then by accrual as each subsequent iteration adopted and solidified the musical formula.41 In any case, though, surprise—such as at the modulation of E-major into C-sharp minor in the concert hall—is only one possible reaction, and might itself also be short-lived, before general experience of practices of musical appropriation and adaptation triggers comprehension of the reasons for apparent inconsistencies. More ordinarily, rather than expecting to hear adaptations in Rossini’s original, we can hear that original in light of those divergences, consciously or unconsciously comparing versions of the finale as we listen. The potential effect of this on our experience of the piece is not necessarily less significant: the E-major themes are the parts we know and enjoy, perhaps, and the C-sharp-minor section something much less familiar that therefore cues a different mode of listening.

326   Jonathan Godsall That we might now hear Rossini’s original in light of many other versions suggests that the finale has taken on a status rather like a folk ballad. David Atkinson suggests that ballads are not completely dissimilar to the “works” of Western classical music in their ontology. An individual performance of a ballad is an exemplification “permitting a reconstitution and repetition—but only one of many conceivable reconstitutions and repetitions—of a work” (the ballad itself, we might say), much like an individual performance of a classical composition; the same applies to the written sources that provide instructions for reconstituting these works.42 The perceived ontological difference lies mostly in the expected degree of variation between exemplifications, and in the (essentially Romantic) tendency to attribute classical works to single composers, whereas authorship of folk ballads is often anonymous and multiple. Appropriations and adaptations deconstruct such easy categorizations, however. The notion of a “correct” exemplification of Rossini’s “original” recedes into the past each time The Lone Ranger offers even a slight restructuring, the constellation of finales ever growing, “the resultant postulated work . . . encompass[ing] an increasing degree of fluidity.”43 The piece no longer belongs only to Rossini, but also to those who have rearranged it, and to the listeners in whose minds it is remade time and again.

The Blockbuster-Cinematic William Tell A reasonable objection to the finale-as-folk-music idea might point to the clearer-cut semantic implications of hearing Rossini’s music repeatedly in association with The Lone Ranger. Used as a means of branding iterations of that property, the finale of the William Tell overture has itself been branded as “the Lone Ranger theme.” In this sense, Rossini’s claim to ownership is still weakened, but the piece belongs to a franchise, not the folk. There have been competing uses of the finale. The most famous is in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), where Wendy Carlos’s synthesized arrangement of the piece scores main character Alex’s fast-motion threesome. The association developed, of Rossini’s music with (fast) sex, reoccurs elsewhere: for a montage in the porn film The Opening of Misty Beethoven (1976, dir. Radley Metzger), for example, and later in Bad Santa (2003, dir. Terry Zwigoff), where the piece scores a car-bound encounter between Santa-costumed main character Willie and barmaid-with-a-Santa-fetish Sue. Even this new semantic direction for the music can be interpreted in relation to The Lone Ranger, though. Discussing Clockwork, Kate McQuiston suggests that those who strongly recall the Lone Ranger on hearing this music and the strict moral code that defined his character—something of which Kubrick was undoubtedly aware—would read Alex’s excesses and the frivolity of the action of this scene as an ironic disavowal.44

Hearing Pre-existing Music as Post-existing Music   327 Of course, some viewers of Clockwork or the other films mentioned will not “strongly recall” The Lone Ranger, or connect Rossini’s piece to it at all, particularly given the waning currency of the franchise from the 1960s onwards. That space exists for other interpretations is evidenced strongly today by the countless YouTube videos that feature novel arrangements of the finale and/or associate it with distinctive imagery.45 In part, these often “homemade” creations represent the unique understandings that individual listeners have always been able to bring to their experiences of the finale (in whatever context). Now, though, those understandings can also be communicated to a further audience (of millions, in some cases), in a manner previously unavailable to those who have conventionally been labelled “consumers.” Today more than ever, the folk may appear to have some control. Set against this digital-media backdrop, the use of the William Tell overture’s finale in the 2013 The Lone Ranger film might appear old fashioned. Indeed, the film as a whole was hardly conceived to break new ground, given that it was financed by a major studio (Disney), based on an existing property, and even realized by the core team of the ongoing Pirates of the Caribbean franchise: director Gore Verbinski, producer Jerry Bruckheimer, screenwriters Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, and star Johnny Depp, among others, all worked on at least the original 2003 Pirates film (The Curse of the Black Pearl).46 The film’s music also follows expected templates, first broadly in being composed by Hans Zimmer (also heavily involved with the Pirates franchise, and numerous other Hollywood blockbusters), and second in its use of Rossini’s finale. As part of the film’s non-linear narrative structure, finale material initially appears in a premature exposition of one event leading chronologically to the climactic runaway-train scenario, and later in a brief recollection of that event before the full scenario unfolds. The film is an origin story like The Legend of the Lone Ranger, though, and so preserves its fullest rendition of the finale for the train sequence itself, when the Ranger finally fulfils his heroic identity. Rossini is also heard in the film’s final moments and end credits, as ever, though it is the finale’s most substantial appearance in the train sequence on which I will focus here. As with earlier Lone Ranger adaptations of the finale, the 2013 version of Rossini’s piece reflects the circumstances and goals of the film’s production. The film is self-consciously cinematic, in a commonly understood modern sense: made on a nine-figure budget, and offering big-screen scale (a two-and-a-half-hour running time, with wide­screen visuals taking in vast landscapes and bigger explosions) in an accessible entertainment form (with star names, gags, heroes and villains, and more explosions). In support of its overall attempt to elevate the Lone Ranger property into a twenty-first-century blockbuster spectacle, then, the film adapts Rossini in the same fashion. There is a conspicuous precedent for this. Nicholas Reyland writes of Zimmer’s adaptation of the Commendatore scene from Mozart’s Don Giovanni for an opera-house sequence in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), noting that “merely dropping Mozart into the mix would have led to a problematic dip in intensity. Mozart, as such, needs to gain some extra musical muscle.”47 The same words could apply to Rossini in Disney’s Lone Ranger. The finale is beefed up to match the action on screen and the rest of Zimmer’s score, which incorporates

328   Jonathan Godsall elements of both American- and Spaghetti-western scoring trends within the composer’s familiar action style.48 Zimmer actually did not adapt the finale himself, though this is not untypical of his credited output (or that of present and former collaborators at his studio, Remote Control Productions).49 Geoff Zanelli was responsible for arranging Rossini’s piece for the train sequence.50 By contrast with all its prior Ranger adaptations, the music here is expanded significantly on both vertical and horizontal axes (listen to Audio 15.2). Vertically, the cue is scored throughout with a thick texture reliant particularly on heavy brass and strings and an augmented bass sound. A sense of mass owes also to a relatively steady tempo, of around 142 beats per minute, though a percussion/noise track provides relentless rhythmic impetus, often using ostinati based on Rossini’s short-short-long pattern (now sounding appropriately locomotive, though Silver still has a central role in the sequence). Horizontally, while the cue starts and ends in the same manner as Rossini’s original, his E-major material is elongated and varied: broadly, for instance, a large amount of the cue deploys it in a minor mode, thereby darkening it to emphasize the dangers facing our hero, and challenging the audience’s expectations, so avoiding the pitfall of The Legend of the Lone Ranger. The original C-sharp-minor material is, again, absent, though the incorporation of Zimmer themes introduced elsewhere in the film provides some additional melodic variety. Still, the cue consists of a limited amount of musical material overall, and yet extends the usually three-and-a-half-minute finale to eleven minutes, close to the length of Rossini’s entire overture.

Audio 15.2  Extract from Geoff Zanelli’s arrangement of the William Tell overture finale for The Lone Ranger (2013, dir. Gore Verbinski).

Zanelli’s version of Rossini’s finale, then, is emphatically cinematic. It conforms to the Zimmer style noted by Reyland for its privileging of “exhilarating” affect over musical argument, and by Frank Lehman relatedly for its “maximal minimalism,” and therefore to the blockbuster mode of filmmaking with which that style is today so aligned in its aims and reception.51 The adaptation asks us merely to sit back and enjoy the ride, serving up its limited material (which is, moreover, likely to be familiar from either earlier in the film or outside of it) in an outwardly spectacular way. Judged on its craftsmanship, the cue is tremendously accomplished, particularly given its synchronization with the train sequence’s elaborate action. Its popular reception has been largely positive. Christian Clemmensen, in a soundtrack review for Filmtracks, called it “one of the most spirited and interesting pieces of film music in years,” for example.52 Particularly in­tri­ guing are a few comments posted on a YouTube upload of the arrangement, which compare Zanelli’s adaptation directly with Rossini’s original.53 “Only Hans Zimmer can take a classic piece of music and make it more epic than it already was!” writes one listener.54 Another, SarahAshBurn62, goes further—“seriously better than the original classic!!!!!”— and initiates the following exchange:

Hearing Pre-existing Music as Post-existing Music   329 wrlord: No, It’s Awful. Just Pure Repetition. It Sucks. Try Listening To The Real William Tell Overture Sometime. SarahAshBurn62: the real William Tell overture is a little on the boring side? It’s putting me to sleep. pfm2001: I heard the original, and to be honest, it wasn’t quite as adrenaline pumping as this. wrlord: It’s not supposed to be ‘adrenaline pumping’. What a damn shame ­people know nothing about music.

Though we should be wary of inferring broader trends of reception from this small and informal sample of comments, the judgments of Zanelli’s arrangement here rest on the same foundations as Reyland’s and Lehman’s observations. Further comments, posted in various online venues, similarly attest to this music’s “maximal” affect, avoiding better/ worse comparisons with Rossini’s original but nonetheless proclaiming Zanelli’s arrangement to be “rousing,”55 or even “the most exhilarating version . . . yet.”56 Others have therefore found it to be “good music for doing housework,”57 or for listening “while at the gym.”58 Michael Long defines “ ‘cinematic’ listening” as “a process of simultaneous audiation and envisioning,” wherein “aural gestures can trigger the construction or recall of particular image registers and the reverse.”59 All media texts combining music and image (including the radio’s implied images) encourage this listening mode, certainly in relation to their specific music–image combinations, and probably more generally too.60 In the case of the Lone Ranger property, that encouragement has been particularly strong and deliberate, because the association of Rossini’s finale with particular imagery (and vice versa) has been so essential to the brand. I have already suggested elsewhere that, in relation to uses of pre-existing music, Long’s definition of cinematic listening might be expanded to include other effects on subsequent musical perception, concerning listeners’ expectations for the material structures of post-existing pieces.61 The Lone Ranger franchise as a whole may likewise have had such effects, as discussed above, but, building on that suggestion, a definition of cinematic listening specific to the modern-blockbuster idea of the cinematic can be offered here. Whereas Long’s cinematic is rather hazily defined in reference to narrative screen media, blockbuster-cinematic reflects form and style (and thereby suggests comparable terms, such as art-cinematic, or live-televisual).62 Blockbuster-cinematic listening, then, is a practice evidenced by the comments reproduced above: one that values the “epic,” “adrenaline pumping” sonic experience common to modern blockbuster films. It may involve Long’s envisioning, but can also take place alongside—and in order to somehow enhance—activities that necessitate sight of the listener’s actual surroundings (“doing housework,” for instance). Blockbuster-cinematic music encourages its associated mode, both in relation to itself and to other music (which can seem “boring” by comparison). It need not be initially experienced in or even composed for screen-media texts, but the 2013 Lone Ranger’s version of Rossini’s finale is a prime example. The notion of prestige reappears here, given primarily the extreme production values of Disney’s Lone Ranger. Just as earlier attempts of cinematic Lone Ranger texts to “elevate” the property were reflected and supported by their music, so Zanelli’s arrangement can

330   Jonathan Godsall be read as an effort to outdo what had come before, fulfilling the blockbuster-cinematic promise to audiences of something bigger and (therefore, arguably) better than is available elsewhere. For both the film and its music, this promise may have been deemed particularly important in a digital-media, consumer-power context, in which The Lone Ranger’s theme tune now lived innumerable competing post-existences. To what extent Zanelli may have succeeded in reasserting the William Tell overture finale’s cultural identity as “the Lone Ranger theme” remains to be seen over the longer term. Certainly, he ensured that the histories of Tell and Ranger remain entangled and, given that it seems inconceivable the latter could ever appear on screen without the former, we may also look forward to observing the franchise reshaping the music and its reception in still further ways.

Notes 1. The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, ed. Gyles Brandreth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), opts for “Anonymous.” See page 167. 2. See, for instance, Dean Duncan, Charms That Soothe: Classical Music and the Narrative Film (New York: Fordham University Press,  2003), and William Gibbons, Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 3. Leonard Bernstein, “Young People’s Concert: What Does Music Mean” [script] (1958), http://www.leonardbernstein.com/ypc_script_what_does_music_mean.htm, accessed January 9, 2018. 4. Ken Hamilton, “Liszt’s Early and Weimar Piano Works,” in The Cambridge Companion to Liszt, ed. Ken Hamilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 57–85: 82. 5. David Wondrich, “I Love to Hear a Minstrel Band: Walt Disney’s The Band Concert,” in The Cartoon Music Book, ed. Daniel Goldmark and Yuval Taylor (Chicago: A Cappella Books, 2002), 67–72: 68. John Philip Sousa’s was one such band. 6. Edith Lang and George West, Musical Accompaniment of Moving Pictures (Boston: Boston Music, 1920), 29. 7. Hugo Riesenfeld, “The Advancement in Motion Picture Music,” The American Hebrew 3 (1925): 632. 8. My translation from the French original: “instrumentation guerrière.” Hector Berlioz, “Guillaume-Tell, de Rossini,” Gazette Musicale de Paris 1, no. 41 (October 12, 1834): 326–27: 327. 9. Raymond Monelle, “Mahler’s Military Gesture: Musical Quotation as Proto-Topic,” in Music and Gesture, ed. Anthony Gritten and Elaine King (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 91–103: 100. 10. Bernstein, “Young People’s Concert.” 11. Durillon d’Engelure, “Rossini’s William Tell,” The Musical World 36, no. 27 (July 3, 1858): 420–22: 421. 12. George  P.  Upton, Standard Concert Repertory and Other Concert Pieces (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1909), 321. 13. See, for example, Anne Faulkner Oberndorfer, “Overture, William Tell” [programme note], Chicago Symphony Orchestra, April 7, 1921. Chicago: Orchestra Hall. 14. The subtitle is of unclear provenance but seems to be a distillation of Upton’s description, the earliest of its kind I have found. Musically, in the opera, the finale actually most closely prefigures Rossini’s third act “Pas de soldats” ballet music for Austrian soldiers, though a

Hearing Pre-existing Music as Post-existing Music   331 Swiss triumph becomes a more obvious reading if we understand the overture to hint towards the opera’s overall narrative arc. 15. Raymond Monelle, The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 167. 16. The galop or galopade dance developed as “[a]n imitation of a horse at full gait.” Mary Ellen Snodgrass, The Encyclopedia of World Folk Dance (London: Roman & Littlefield, 2016), 107. 17. See Raymond Monelle, The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 45–65. 18. Philip Tagg and Bob Clarida, Ten Little Title Tunes (New York: Mass Media Music Scholars’ Press, 2003), 294–95. Monelle also concedes that “the sound of the modern gallop . . . is closer to a quick 4/4 time,” while “[t]he canter . . . sounds closer to compound meter.” Sense of Music, 52. 19. Monelle, Musical Topic, 167. 20. Tagg and Clarida, Title Tunes, 293–95. Printed editions of the overture’s score, the earliest from 1829, add a marking of 152 bpm to Rossini’s autograph Allegro vivace. See Percival R. Kirby, “Rossini’s Overture to William Tell,” Music & Letters 33, no. 2 (1952): 132–40: 139. 21. Jewell recalled “a tossup between the March of the Light Brigade and the William Tell. . . storm scene” (quoted in Reginald M. Jones, The Mystery of the Masked Man’s Music: A Search for the Music Used on The Lone Ranger Radio Program, 1933–1954 (London: Scarecrow Press, 2001), 5). As there is no classical piece known as the March of the Light Brigade, Jones (Masked Man’s Music, 13) suggests that Jewell misremembered the title of Suppé’s piece (which had also been widely used in silent film accompaniment and later scored parts of Lone Ranger episodes), much as he misremembered the Tell selection as the overture’s second movement (“Storm”). 22. Tagg and Clarida, Title Tunes, 293. 23. This rhythmic resemblance is also noted in Timothy E. Wise, Yodelling and Meaning in American Music (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2016), 174. Wise identifies the rhythm as a “horse topic” and discusses its use in the Wilf Carter song “I’m Hittin’ the Trail” (recorded in 1935, and so roughly simultaneous with The Lone Ranger). My thanks to Timothy for discussion by email on this subject. 24. These observations are based on exploration of a sample of episodes dating from 1938 to 1954, none having been recorded prior to 1938. 25. John Dunning, On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 404–5. 26. Reproduced in Hal Erickson, From Radio to the Big Screen: Hollywood Films Featuring Broadcast Personalities and Programs (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2014), 136. 27. The performance of Rossini’s piece in use when recording of the show began in 1938—and so presumably used before that time—was a 1926 Victor Symphony Orchestra/Rosario Bourdon interpretation (Jones, Masked Man’s Music, 37–38). The other classical excerpts included other parts of Rossini’s overture: the “storm” and Ranz des vaches sections both feature in the 1938 episode “The Legend of Silver,” for instance (see Jones, Masked Man’s Music, 190). 28. Erickson, From Radio to the Big Screen, 137–38. 29. Quoted in Jones, Masked Man’s Music, 24. 30. See the guide to music used in selected episodes in Jones, Masked Man’s Music, 190–202.

332   Jonathan Godsall 31. Trendle had this, similar rearrangements of other Republic cues, and various classical selections (including the William Tell finale) newly recorded in Mexico in the face of actual or potential disputes with American musicians’ and composers’ unions, and Republic. See Jones, Masked Man’s Music, 40–104. 32. This distinction originates in Serge Lacasse, “Intertextuality and Hypertextuality in Recorded Popular Music,” in The Musical Work: Reality or Invention?, ed. Michael Talbot (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 35–58. For its application to uses of preexisting music in film, see Jonathan Godsall, Reeled In: Pre-existing Music in Narrative Film (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 10–11. The serial and radio “Main Title” cues present odd cases of allosonic adaptive quotations (of Rossini’s original finale) being tracked into even their original contexts in the manner of autosonic quotations. 33. See Godsall, Reeled In, 31–6, and also Miguel Mera, “Screen Music and the Question of Originality,” in The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound, ed. Miguel Mera, Ronald Sadoff, and Ben Winters (London: Routledge, 2017), 38–49. 34. See Karen Collins, “In the Loop: Creativity and Constraint in 8-bit Video Game Audio,” twentieth-century music 4, no. 2 (2007): 209–27: 212–18. 35. See Erickson, From Radio to the Big Screen, 140–41. 36. David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 422. 37. For further discussion of pre-existing music and narrative expectation, see Godsall, Reeled In, 110–15. 38. Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 237. 39. Ibid., 234. 40. One obvious effect of The Lone Ranger on reception of Rossini’s music has been the promotion of the finale over the overture’s other movements. 41. The aforementioned Strauss I and Grobe arrangements also feature only “A-section” material. 42. David Atkinson, “Where is the ballad, and why do we want so many of them?: An Essay in Ontology,” Lied und populäre Kultur/Song and Popular Culture 54 (2009): 11–32: 28. 43. Atkinson, “An Essay in Ontology,” 29. 44. Kate McQuiston, We’ll Meet Again: Musical Design in the Films of Stanley Kubrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 166. 45. See, for instance, Vadrum, Vadrum meets William Tell, YouTube video, 2:43, 2007, https:// youtu.be/j3vLQ7iCz94, accessed June 9, 2019. This video features drummer Andrea Vadrucci playing along to a recording of Rossini’s finale in an elaborate progressive-rock style. 46. For critics and audiences, this team largely failed to recapture the success of Pirates. The film holds a 30 percent positive rating at the Rotten Tomatoes review aggregation site, and performed poorly at the box office relative to its budget, making around $260 million worldwide after a $215 million production expenditure. See Rotten Tomatoes (n.d.), “The Lone Ranger (2013),” http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_lone_ranger/, accessed June 9, 2019, and Box Office Mojo (n.d.), “The Lone Ranger (2013),” http://www.boxofficemojo. com/movies/?id=loneranger.htm, accessed June 9, 2019. 47. Nicholas Reyland, “Corporate Classicism and the Metaphysical Style: Affects, Effects, and Contexts of Two Recent Trends in Screen Scoring,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 9, no. 2 (2015): 115–30: 116. 48. Outside of twenty-first-century blockbuster filmmaking, these are not the only cases of even operatic pre-existing music transforming into something more “cinematic.” For

Hearing Pre-existing Music as Post-existing Music   333 Humoresque (1946, dir. Jean Negulesco), for instance, Franz Waxman used portions of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, with adaptations including addition of a Romantic-concertoesque piano part. See Marcia J. Citron, “ ‘Soll ich lauschen?’ Love-Death in Humoresque,” in Wagner and Cinema, ed. Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gillman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 167–85. 49. See Reyland, “Corporate Classicism,” 121–22. Credits such as “Music by Hans Zimmer,” as the main music credit in The Lone Ranger reads, are far from revealing, but reflect Zimmer’s own status as a sellable brand. 50. See Film.Music.Media, Composer Interview: Geoff Zanelli, YouTube video, 28:51, 2013, https://youtu.be/xMbYZ0Oq5WA, accessed 9 June, 2019. 51. See Reyland, “Corporate Classicism,” 123–27, and Frank Lehman, “Manufacturing the Epic Score: Hans Zimmer and the Sounds of Significance,” in Music in Epic Film: Listening to Spectacle, ed. Stephen C. Meyer (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 27–55. On other definitions of the cinematic that might be applied to music, see Scott Paulin, “ ‘Cinematic’ Music: Analogies, Fallacies, and the Case of Debussy,” Music and the Moving Image 3, no. 1 (2010): 1–21. 52. Christian Clemmensen, “The Lone Ranger,” Filmtracks, July 27, 2013, http://www.filmtracks.com/titles/lone_ranger.html. 53. ultraOlcho, “The Lone Ranger—Finale (William Tell Overture) Mix,” YouTube video, 2013, https://youtu.be/_EMMH0NBcLU, accessed June 9, 2019. 54. Zimmer’s music is commonly described as “epic” by its listeners, leading Lehman to identify specific aspects of the composer’s “epic style.” See Lehman, “Manufacturing the Epic Score.” 55. Camus, “A ballet of bullets,” Cine Outsider (2013), http://www.cineoutsider.com/reviews/ films/l/lone_ranger.html, accessed June 9, 2019. 56. Paulhickling, Sept 2, 2013, post to discussion thread “The Lone Ranger—My Gawd, Zimmer Wrote a Score!!!,” Film Score Monthly, https://www.filmscoremonthly.com/ board/posts.cfm?threadID=97350&forumID=1Your&archive=0, accessed June 9, 2019. 57. ChattyKathy, January 28, 2014, Amazon Customer review of “Finale (William Tell Overture) by Hans Zimmer,” http://www.amazon.com/review/R3MJ0UR0N5ZFZE/, accessed June 9, 2019. 58. MikeT0816, February 24, 2015, Amazon Customer review of “Finale (William Tell Overture) by Hans Zimmer,” http://www.amazon.com/review/RGX8RWP031CQ2/, accessed June 9, 2019. 59. Michael Long, Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 7. 60. See Ben Winters, Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film: Shared Concert Experiences in Screen Fiction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 119–46. 61. Godsall, Reeled In, 148. Formal aspects of cinematic listening are also discussed, from another perspective, in Frank Lehman, “Film-as-Concert Music and the Formal Implications of ‘Cinematic Listening’, ” Music Analysis 37, no. 1 (2018): 7–46. 62. Equating stylistic and formal qualities with particular screen media can reflect reductive conceptions of each medium’s technology, texts, and reception practices, as well as a hierarchy in which the cinema is placed facilely at the pinnacle. See Brett Mills, “What Does It Mean to Call Television ‘Cinematic’?,” in Television Aesthetics and Style, ed. Jason Jacobs and Steven Peacock (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 57–66. I use the modifier “blockbuster” here to be more precise, while recognizing the continued value of medium-related terms for offering widely understood points of reference.

334   Jonathan Godsall

Select Bibliography Atkinson, David. “Where Is the Ballad, and Why Do We Want so Many of Them? An Essay in Ontology.” Lied und populäre Kultur/Song and Popular Culture 54 (2009): 11–32. Barham, Jeremy. “Plundering Cultural Archives and Transcending Diegetics: Mahler’s Music as ‘Overscore’.” Music and the Moving Image 3, no.1 (2010): 22–47. Barham, Jeremy. “Recurring Dreams and Moving Images: The Cinematic Appropriation of Schumann’s Op. 15, No. 7.” 19th-Century Music 34, no. 3 (2011): 271–301. Cenciarelli, Carlo. “Dr Lecter’s Taste for Goldberg, or: The Horror of Bach in the Hannibal Franchise.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 137, no. 1 (2012): 107–34. Duncan, Dean. Charms That Soothe: Classical Music and the Narrative Film. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003. Erickson, Hal. From Radio to the Big Screen: Hollywood Films Featuring Broadcast Personalities and Programs. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2014. Gibbons, William. Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Godsall, Jonathan. Reeled In: Pre-existing Music in Narrative Film. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. Goldmark, Daniel, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert, eds. Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Howard, Luke. “The Popular Reception of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings,” American Music 25, no. 1 (2007): 50–80. Hubbert, Julie. “The Compilation Soundtrack from the 1960s to the Present.” In The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, ed. David Neumeyer, 291–318. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Huron, David. Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007. Joe, Jeongwon, and Sander  L.  Gillman, eds. Wagner and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Joe, Jeongwon, and Rose Theresa, eds. Between Opera and Cinema. Abingdon: Routledge, 2002. Jones, Reginald M. The Mystery of the Masked Man’s Music: A Search for the Music Used on The Lone Ranger Radio Program, 1933–54. London: Scarecrow Press, 2001. Kramer, Lawrence. Why Classical Music Still Matters. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Lehman, Frank. “Manufacturing the Epic Score: Hans Zimmer and the Sounds of Significance.” In Music in Epic Film: Listening to Spectacle, ed. Stephen  C.  Meyer, 27–55. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Long, Michael. Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. McQuinn, Julie. “Listening Again to Barber’s Adagio for Strings as Film Music.” American Music 27, no. 4 (2009): 461–99. McQuiston, Kate. We’ll Meet Again: Musical Design in the Films of Stanley Kubrick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Mera, Miguel. “Screen Music and the Question of Originality.” In The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound, ed. Miguel Mera, Ronald Sadoff, and Ben Winters, 38–49. London: Routledge, 2017. Monelle, Raymond. The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Hearing Pre-existing Music as Post-existing Music   335 Powrie, Phil, and Robynn Stilwell, eds. Changing Tunes: The Use of Pre-existing Music in Film. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Reyland, Nicholas. “Corporate Classicism and the Metaphysical Style: Affects, Effects, and Contexts of Two Recent Trends in Screen Scoring.” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 9, no. 2 (2015): 115–30. Smith, Jeff. “The Fine Art of Repurposing: A Look at Scores for Hollywood B Films in the 1930s.” In The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound, ed. Miguel Mera, Ronald Sadoff, and Ben Winters, 228–39. London: Routledge, 2017. Tagg, Philip, and Bob Clarida. Ten Little Title Tunes. New York: Mass Media Music Scholars’ Press, 2003. Winters, Ben. Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film: Shared Concert Experiences in Screen Fiction. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. Yang, Mina. “Für Elise, circa 2000: Postmodern Readings of Beethoven in Popular Contexts.” Popular Music and Society 29, no. 1 (2006): 1–15.

chapter 16

“ You Sorta Listen w ith You r Ey e s ” How Audiences Talk about Film Music Martin Barker

The last twenty-five years have seen a major growth of scholarly interest in and attention to film sound and film music.1 Of course there was intermittent attention before 19902 (for instance the important—if troubling—work of Hanns Eisler and Theodor Adorno),3 but there is no question that since then the number and range of scholarly works addressing the history, industrial context, and textual role of all the non-visual elements of film has grown substantially. In this period, Claudia Gorbman (1987), Rick Altman (1992), Michel Chion (1994), Royal Brown (1994), Anahid Kassabian (2001), Kevin Donnelly (2001),4 among others, have laid the groundwork for what is now being continued and applied in for instance the Journal of Film Music (since 2002), Music, Sound, and The Moving Image (since 2007), and The New Soundtrack (since 2011). Interestingly, this growing body of work was also the product of an emerging relationship between sound practitioners and film scholars, embodied in particular in the regular School of Sound conferences, which began in 1998.5 But there is a gap, of strange proportions, in all this important work: the audience. Search the Indexes of just about all these publications, under the words “audience,” “auditor,” “hearer,” “listener,” or “reception,” and what you will tend to find are either references to “the audience” as a generic singularity (“the Hollywood audience,” “the youth audience”),6 and engagements with psychological aspects of “hearing”; or, alternatively, theoretically constructs of spectatorial positions (e.g., inhabitants of “points of audition”).7 In this essay I want to offer some bits of evidence as to how actual audiences receive and respond to musical components of particular films. But I want also to do more than this. I want—more riskily—to ask: what difference might be made to our broader ways of thinking about film music, if we take audience responses into account? Or, what new questions might be generated as a result of looking at film music from the angle of audience research? In doing so, I am positioning myself very consciously within the cultural

How Audiences Talk about Film Music   337 studies-informed tradition of thinking about audiences, which insists on always seeing audiences as located: historically, socially, culturally, and discursively. This tradition has come late to film studies, and—to my knowledge—has yet to be systematically directed at the ways different audiences make sense of, build meanings and evaluations from their experiences of music in particular films.8 So in order to do this, I draw on fragments (albeit substantial ones) of evidence from actual audience research projects, in particular from the enormous international Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2003–4).

The Figure of the Audience in Canonic Film Music Scholarship A great deal of research on film music has been devoted to recovering ignored historical and industrial contexts for the role that music in cinema has played and the forms that it has taken. It has been concerned with shifting technologies of sound creation and recording, with the role played by key individuals and styles, with the interconnections between cinema and music industries (and the cross-promotions between them), and with the difference that attention to music’s role makes to dominant tendencies to emphasize narrative, and visuality. Given these emphases, it might be unsurprising that there has to date been minimal attention to audiences. But as so often, in a number of these writings—starting with the groundbreaking film-music publications of the 1980s and 1990s—we find theorizations of what music does to audiences, and how they might engage with music. Sometimes these claims are explicit and integral to the theory, as in Claudia Gorbman’s psychoanalytic account, under which (classical Hollywood) music is seen as “suturing” audiences into absorbed relations with films (with the corollary argument that if one does not “attend” to the music as a concertgoer might, it is operating on us in disguise).9 Sometimes the claims about audiences are more implicit. We might take as an example Michel Chion’s work on the rise and impact of Dolby sound. Chion makes a compelling case that Dolby sound, albeit prefigured (for those lucky enough to hear it under near-ideal circumstances) by magnetic sound, made possible not just greater richness and breadth of sound but also its greater separation—and with that, the increasing potential of heard silence. Chion illustrates this in relation to a range of films, and drops in the suggestion that Dolby creates a sonic environment in which films “are listening to us listening to them.”10 This kind of account is insightful insofar as it illuminates how changes in film technology can valorize and even call for particular ways of attending to sound, but seems to offer little purchase for empirical research. The figure of the audience continues to play a similar role in (what could be called) a second wave of (now-canonic) film-musicological studies.11 Kassabian’s key work Hearing Film is an argument against a strand of structuralist feminist film theory (that

338   Martin Barker she believes does not sufficiently engage questions of agency) and in favor of a new ­combination of (Althusser-inspired) Marxist and revised psychoanalytic frameworks. Key to her approach is the adoption of the idea of “identification,” as the route through which films influence viewers. Kassabian wants to distinguish at least two types of “identification”: assimilating, and affiliating. The former derives from music which operates through its representational properties (she is critical of those who claim that music is always non-representational);12 the latter derives its force from being borrowed from subcultural groups (e.g., pop, or jazz, or rock) and inviting audiences to relate to films which include them by virtue of already knowing, or at least having the cultural competence to respond to, these tracks. Kassabian argues that assimilating identification is the more dominant form: “we are quite tightly tracked into identification with a single subject position that does not challenge dominant ideologies.”13 Affiliating identification is looser, allowing more movement between response-positions. Hearing Film is critical of approaches that do not face the test of empirical evidence. Yet while the book does acknowledge the risks of deriving audience responses from compositional or ideological analysis and admirably includes empirical research done by Tagg and Clarida, it is fair to say that it still largely adheres to a general psychoanalytic model, under which a person is made persuadable by textual mechanisms that open the road to his or her “unconscious” (“film music conditions identification processes in powerful ways”).14 Kassabian is careful to emphasize the fact that the “identifications” she traces are a range of possibilities with “no guarantee that perceivers will engage in their offers” (143), and she takes into theoretical account the social situatedness of perceivers, a fact that was quite rightly seen as particularly significant at the time. Still, I would argue that the model developed in Hearing Film seems to make audience research secondary to theoretical speculation, and almost irrelevant, except perhaps in respect of how audiences might resist such influences. An audience research approach would have to begin by asking how claims of this kind about the power of “identification” might be made empirically testable. What sorts of evidence from audiences would count for or against them? How would we spot the differences between “identifying” and “resisting” audiences? This was a task I set myself, indirectly, on one occasion following the Lord of the Rings project. I do not regard the topic as in any sense closed—indeed, the point is to open it ever wider. This can be illustrated by reference to another influential example that makes use of a related notion of identification: James Buhler’s chapter contribution to Kevin Donnelly’s Film Music: Critical Approaches. One of the far reaching and wide-ranging analytical sketches in Buhler’s chapter draws on Amistad (Steven Spielberg, 1997). His analysis in particular focuses on the courtroom scene where John Quincey Adams makes a speech against slavery, which opens by challenging some supposed Biblical justifications for the practice. The music moves from discordant, to brightened Copeland-esque positivity. Thus, Buhler argues, “The effect of the music in this scene encourages identification with the second argument; we have faith in Adams’ claims, in their truth even, because the music seemingly has faith in them.”15 But this troubles him, by its implications: that associating

How Audiences Talk about Film Music   339 wrongness with musical dissonance suggests that “intellectual intricacy” is connected to “artificiality, evilness and falseness”: The right and true gain force in this scene through an association with the beautiful . . . Adams’ argument carries the day for us not through the force of reason, as the film wants to imply, but through persuasive (musical) rhetoric. Music thus assures our “proper” identification within the scene, determining in a significant way how we comprehend it.16

The argument is fascinating, and has the merit of sheding light on the way filmmakers often use music to simplify the moral field and promote a relatively narrow range of appropriate intepretations, but (like Gorbman’s) assumes that music works against ra­tion­al­ity. The “we” in here is a vulnerable group (and, I would argue, only rhetorically includes the author, who has seen through the dangers). And “identification” is a significant mobile concept offering to explain how “effects” are achieved. From this example, it seems to me, two issues can and should be lifted out and considered separately: (1) Could there be a way to test this claim, empirically? Do the film’s audiences (whether naturally occurring ones from the time of its release, or gathered for research purposes) build that claimed association between pro- and anti-slavery arguments, and discordant or triumphal music, to the detriment of reasoning about the topic? (2) Is “identification” a clear and satisfactory concept17 for capturing the ways in which audiences are drawn towards, or pushed away from, ideas and arguments in films?18 Peter Larsen’s (2005) book has a different focus. Insistently empirical, he challenges many easy claims that have been made about film music—for instance, the apparently simple claim that “from the outset” films were always accompanied by music (acknowledging Rick Altman’s pioneering work on this, he cites surviving evidence that this may not have been true even at the very earliest screenings).19 His point in doing so is to insist on the frequent muddle and chaos that attended actual screenings—at least until Hollywood was able to codify music’s relations with other elements, through advancing technologies. Larsen takes a series of salient examples—from Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) to Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)—to explore the role of musical contributions in the history of (mainly) Hollywood films. He places a good deal of emphasis on the importance of having adequate descriptive languages for musical forms within films (a  requirement made the more important since he definitely sides with those who understand music as fundamentally non-representational). His descriptive accounts of the processes leading to the part played by music in his various films are fascinating, not least when he critiques Raymond Bellour’s famous close analysis of a scene from the Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946).20 But the test for me comes when, at the close of his book, Larsen steps beyond description to possible explanations. He reviews, neatly, a series of explanations that have been offered as to why music became a standard part of films, and thus what it contributed: assisting continuity across edits; suturing us into films; stopping visible figures appearing like ghosts; establishing emotional tone; importing semantic associations; or

340   Martin Barker enriching aesthetic experiences. Larsen reminds us of the need to go beyond assertion, or personal experience: All the formulations I have quoted derive from the writers’ own, personal experience of the early film. Naturally, it is difficult to make use of such formulations as a basis for functional descriptions of the music of silent films. Subjective experiences are difficult to check empirically.21

But when he moves on to offer his own reflections on concrete cases, this caution leaves him, as in his comments on the role of the “Blue Danube” suite (with its connotations for him of “overblown pompousness and seriocomic tone”) within 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). This can only work, he says, because audiences set aside the music’s established meanings: When we hear the Blue Danube Waltz in Kubrick’s 2001, we de-select the referential connotation [Vienna]—we push it into the background at any rate—because it does not seem to be relevant, because the concrete reference to “Vienna” does not “correspond” to anything in the images. Instead we discover a connection at a far more abstract level. We experience that the movement of the spaceship in the images “corresponds” to something in the music.22

The “we” in these sentences denotes a universal audience archetype. Once again, it works against the possibility of asking actual audiences how they experience this musical component. Again, an audience research approach would have to begin by asking: what happens when audiences bring different strong associations (positive or negative) to the film in relation to: Johann Strauss as a composer; the waltz as a dance-form; the Blue Danube specifically; and Romantic music or even classical music more generally.23 To these might have to be added many other circumstances (the circumstances and purposes of watching/hearing; specific individuals’ histories; simple liking or disliking of the music, irrespective of knowledge, or of the film; and so on). Concretely positioned and formed audiences will have come to the film with a host of established connections, or of course absences and ignorances; and their eventually sedimented responses to the film will come out of complex concatenations of all these. It is notable that Larsen speaks of “we” in this way. This is at variance from a great deal of pessimistic film theoretic work which has worried about “them” (other, putative audiences) who might be drawn into, for instance, voyeuristic relations with films by their visuality. Even so, the challenge that audience research has to lay down is to undo, open up, and problematize that “we”: to be willing to address the huge variety of responses that actual audiences display towards every aspect of a film. Our problem is that, apart from one substantial (psychologically oriented) study—by Tagg and Clarida in 2003—there is a dearth of evidence on which to draw.24 An exception is the work of Lauren Anderson, who has explored in detail the ways different kinds of audience perceived and responded to the song “Both Sides Now” in Love, Actually (Richard

How Audiences Talk about Film Music   341 Curtis, 2003), at a climactic moment in the film.25 Anderson shows how people’s varied responses “encompassed understandings of who they are now, who they have been in the past, and who they would like to be in the future.”26 This aside, there is a real shortage of detailed empirical research. For that reason, I am having to go about things in a strange way, in this essay. In the next section, I review such evidence as I have access to, in order to see what kinds of relations with film music audiences may display—out of which I will try to pose some questions which would have to be addressed by future research. This up-side-down approach—materials and analysis, before questions—is simply a function of where I think we currently are.

Audiences and the Lord of the Rings Music In this section I draw on a scatter of evidence within the database of almost 25,000 responses which were gathered in 14 languages to the films of The Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2001–3). The project’s questionnaire did not ask directly about film music, but there were clear opportunities within various questions for people to talk about it, i­nsofar as it was salient to their responses. And in fact, more than 400 English-language participants in our project spontaneously mentioned the films’ music, in answering just two questions (“What did you think of the films?” and “What is the most memorable moment or aspect of the films?”). These answers are, at some levels, ordinary and obvious. Yet looked at carefully, they reveal a number of striking traits. 1. The first and most evident is that audiences have no difficulties talking about film music, even if they lack any kind of professional or specialist language for describing it. And as far as they are concerned, it appears that they view music as just another component, alongside a range of others, as in these quotations: Beautiful all around in acting, directing, costuming, music and all other aspects. A perfect film and easily the best film to have graced cinemas. [#3592] Amazing effects, great music, design, and acting from all, but I was slightly disappointed in the unfaithfulness of the movie. [#6098] This film is totally amazing. It blew me away with the stunning acting, music, cinematography, and directing. It will be a classic for many years to come. The trilogy is better than Star Wars, The Matrix, or the Harry Potter films. [#16980]

Music is just another ingredient, if (for the great majority of those mentioning it) extraordinary in its achievement here. As the second quote makes clear, it is also possible to take this approach even while arriving at a somewhat critical judgement on the

342   Martin Barker overall adaptation. But for those for whom the film is especially effective, there is already a special sense of mutual intensification, as in this exceptionally clear response: The whole film. The music was perfect, the script was fantastic, the actors were very good, the special effects were great, the landscapes were beautiful. It is the whole happening that is perfect. I can’t pick anything out because for example the decors wouldn’t be so beautiful without the music, the actors wouldn’t be so great without a fantastic director. So I can’t choose. [#7152]

But while music remains for many just one ingredient among many others, for some it could become a metaphor for the experience of the films as a whole: The film was like a great piece of music. It rose and thrilled and then came down to soft and joyful melodies. [#12642] The scene where Aragorn is crowned king through to where everyone bows to Frodo. That was the perfect ending to everything with everyone in their rightful places and Frodo and his friends—who were too humble to think they deserved any kind of attention—receiving the respect they deserved for saving all of Middle-earth. This part of the film was like a crescendo to a fine musical work. [#5841]

Music as metaphor suggests that it is perceived to have its own distinctive qualities, which can helpfully be mobilized to say something about the total filmic experience.27 2. For audiences, it becomes very clear, music is measured in general for its capacity to marry with action, and thus to arouse and accentuate emotions. Again and again, for those who go beyond simple adulation of Howard Shore’s achievement (“wonderful,” “brilliant,” “incredible,” “stunning” are typical words), what gets emphasized is a “fit” between music and scene, and a resulting affective response: I thought the experience of Tolkien’s world was perfected through excellent casting, beautiful scenery, and extraordinary music. [#6669] The landscapes were beautiful and the cities breath-taking. I was hooked with the actions, and the use of the music was excellent with what was happening on the screen. It was like magic to see this movie because I felt immersed into it. [#9918] The ending between Frodo, Sam and Gollum. The scene was almost perfectly matching with the book, and the haunting background music was just perfect as well. [#10127]

The notion of “perfection” hints that what I might call a “transcendent assemblage” has taken place. The music has married so well with the other components as to make something new emerge. What that is, of course, varies somewhat between enthusiastic participants, but our research showed a general tendency towards a kind of spirituality.28 3. Interestingly, out of the 400+ who mention the music, only two make any reference to its generic qualities. Shore’s composition may be strongly in the classical/romantic tradition,

How Audiences Talk about Film Music   343 but this is not what has registered with audiences—or, if it (rarely) has, it is for its ­transcendence of that genre: The music. The music is absolutely amazing. I’ve known Classical music all my life and I’ve never heard such passion in music before. Howard Shore is a genius. He is so good. [#5423] Howard Shore’s music is the most memorable thing about the movie for me. It is classical music/opera for our modern age, and Howard is a gifted composer. [#10294]

Strikingly, more people, embracing the music, hinted at removing it from that genre by welcoming it into their own culture, through words such as “rocked”: I was really impressed with the depth of the characters and the way they were acted out. Likewise for the action scenes, flow of the movie, and special effects. The music rocked. [#9860]

This is just about the equivalent of saying “Grandad is a dude”! It is an affectionate embracing across cultural formations, and a lifting away from origins. 4. This bridges to another component, the “completeness” of the experience for many people, a word that takes on a variety of meanings, some of which are captured in this pair of answers: What did you think of the films? The movie was extremely beautiful. I loved it. Being a huge Tolkien-fan I enjoyed every second of it. When I was a kid I often dreamed that I could fly. This movie gave me the same fantastic feeling. But I also felt grief because 1) this is an imaginary world, it isn’t real. 2) this was the last movie. The adventure is complete. That is a bit sad . . . What was the most memorable moment or aspect? Hm. I must say the music—because of the different themes. The orc-theme, the fellowshiptheme, and so on. When I think of the music from the film, that’s what makes me remember the different scenes and situations. Music is a very big part of my life, and I have good ears/I am musical. Therefore I notice and remember music that moves me. Music is feelings, spirituality. [#10809]

For this person, as for many others, Shore’s music constituted a vital part of the means to raise this film above ordinary cinema, to become that Spiritual Journey. 5. The implications of this are considerable. Although the evidence is patchy (as I indicated, our research was not specifically designed to explore the musical experience of the films), there is a sense that, for many committed viewers of the Lord of the Rings films, the association of themes with sectors of the narrative went beyond the traditional notion of “leitmotivs.” They became a means of locating and being inside the various different magical cultures that make up Middle-earth.29 This showed particularly in relation to a number of people’s choices of Favorite Moment. Sometimes this is quite overt, as here:

344   Martin Barker The music. It tied all the other elements together. It was a character in itself. The first few notes that I hear draw me directly into Middle Earth! [#6652] The first time I saw the Shire. I knew from the setting, the coloring, the people, the music that I was in love for the rest of my life. [#9781]

Sometimes it attaches to favorite moments, as here with people’s recall of Gandalf ’s ride to save the men of Gondor: When Gandalf rides out into the battle field and gets rid of the Nazgul with his white light. The scene is so perfect and it brings back an age-old mysticism. It is harmonious with the music as well as the whole good vs evil idea. Power vs Power. [#5576] Easily, it is when Gandalf rides out of The White City with his staff held high to give cover to the Gondorians in their flight from the Anduin when the Wraiths attack. It was beautifully done with the music, and the way he shot it like a documentary, the camera wasn’t perfectly stable and accurate, it was bumpy and nearly lost sight of Gandalf as he turned to join the riders. It affected the scene in so many ways. [#8663] Easy. When Gandalf rode out on Shadowfax to meet the retreating Gondorians led by Faramir. It’s essentially the only true display of his magic in all three films. Along with the music changing to a boys’ choir, its vision is almost divine and profound. [#14638]

The music here enacts the magic, it is neither diegetic nor non-diegetic. Instead, it appears to establish the status of the scene, by being itself magical. “Magic” is not here some simple other-worldly means of making things happen. It is rather a production of powers and forces adequate to the challenges of facing an ultimate evil. It isn’t ever easy. But in helping audiences experience this, music is more than simply an evocation of emotions. It is participative, and generative. It is immersive, and also part of the very thing in which audiences become immersed. I realize that in saying this I am broaching an ongoing debate in film music research, which was recently set in motion by Ben Winters (2010), and continued by Kassabian (2013),30 and I can only hope that introducing an audiences dimension may prove a useful contribution to the debate. 6. The implications of this show most clearly in relation to one of the most frequently named moments in the entire film trilogy: the moment when the hobbit Pippin is forced to sing, to entertain his new lord, Denethor, Steward of Gondor. Denethor has just sent his son Faramir to almost certain death leading a futile defense of Osgiliath. Labelled “Faramir’s Sacrifice” on the DVD, this scene, which lasts 4.30 secs, comes as the assault on Minas Tirith is reaching its peak. It opens with Faramir leading his cavalry company out along the city’s narrow streets, while women throw farewell flowers under them (well aware, from their expressions, that this is a hopeless sortie). The music is poignant, accented by a single flute, but “brightens” with soft horns to a sense of heroic action as the gates open for them. We are shown the orcs, half-hidden, awaiting them. The (unspecific) orchestral theme completes and resolves as they begin their charge, and music fades right away as attention switches to Pippin, still with Denethor, who is greedily ­eating (each snap and bite of food accentuated to a sound-sting). Pippin, commanded to

How Audiences Talk about Film Music   345 sing, chooses a hobbit song of sadness at the hopelessness of the world. His voice is ­tentative, filled with feeling, and unaccompanied. Under his voice, we hear the sound of the horses’ hooves, and their neighing, then the grunts of the orcs drawing their bows, cutting back to the sight and the sharp sounds of food being bitten and chewed. Pippin’s voice, heard clearly over the horses, takes on increasing echo. As the bows creak back, we hear a shimmer of orchestral accompaniment to his now very resonant voice. His song reaches its last (delayed) word immediately after the orcs release their arrows, the orchestra pauses, we hear (and see) Pippin, his voice flat and unvarnished again; and we see his anguish. After a pause, broken only by the eating noises, the orchestra quietly repeats the last line of Pippin’s melody, bridging to Gandalf seated alone, head down in apparent despair. A bell faintly tolls across and with the music. This scene was picked more than any other (more than 10 percent of all mentions in my sample, in fact) as people’s Most Memorable.31 It proved also to be the scene most chosen by those choosing Pippin as their favorite character, because for them it displays the moment when he has to complete his “growing up,” which these people saw as his distinctive narrative arc. The following comments are symptomatic: When Pippin sings to Denethor as the soldiers of Gondor ride to their deaths. It encapsulates the futility and tragic beauty of the world in a shocking but thoughtful sequence. [#14739] The impressive storytelling. Each scene was done with care and love. The moment when Pippin sings to Denethor juxtaposing that with Faramir’s suicide run was gutwrenching perfection in storytelling. The soundtrack was incredible, taking each moment to new heights. Also playing powerful emotional moments with soft poignant music was quite effective. [#5301] Faramir riding to Osgiliath with Pippin singing, because of the beautiful horses and beautiful music and the despair and love for his father that made Faramir ride. [#6243] Pippin’s song. The song is beautiful and sad, and when put as a background music to the scene of Gondor trying to retake Osgiliath, that just makes it stick out. [#7927] When Pippin sang for Denethor. It was a very emotional moment with the cross-clipping to Faramir’s destiny, the background music and the sorrow in Pippin’s face. It was truly wonderful. [#11215] Pippin’s song to Denethor. The words are beautiful & there’s so little music. And the whole thing of Faramir going to his death for his father’s love was just moving. [#18156]

The really striking thing is the powerful sense of achievement that runs through these descriptions. This scene moved many, overwhelmed some, by its intercutting and ­layering, through which Pippin’s unaccompanied singing becomes for them a terrible commentary on courage, futility, and inhumanity. The sparseness of it hits some (as opposed to the rich orchestral flavor of much else in the films). Odd parallels such as that between “beautiful horses and beautiful music” hit others. Note that it can be “shocking but thoughtful”—there is a management of the separation between emotion and cognition, here. The film’s achievement here and for these people is to have intensified and climaxed emotional impact, via “music,” in a way that makes it pulsate with meanings and issues.

346   Martin Barker

Concluding Questions and Proposals The Lord of the Rings provides just one case-study, and our project provided only an indirect means to tackle these issues. Comparing this with the subsequent database for The Hobbit (where we had over 36,000 responses), the rate of references to music in the equivalent two questions falls by more than 50 percent (and a number of those are uncharitable back-comparisons to The Lord of the Rings), which in turn hints that talk about music is likely to be associated with those films in which it is p ­ erceived to be particularly powerful—where audiences care about it. Although of course there were plenty of exceptions, by and large audiences cared a lot less about The Hobbit trilogy. And the reputation of Shore’s original music since the Rings films is a thing in itself, remaining overwhelmingly popular and becoming a symphonic performance piece in its own right.32 That only introduces a further set of complexities. Early in this essay I said that I wanted, through my analysis, to indicate at least some of the ways that audience research is not just an addition, but a transformation of the whole (rather like music’s relations to film!): making us rethink existing approaches, and ask new questions. I want to close by proposing what some of those questions might be, which would have to be addressed by future research specifically alert to audiences’ relations with music (and other sound-forms) within films.

1. What purposes, in relation to characters, narrative events or progression, and world-shape, is music perceived to play by different audiences? Options here will include at least the following: independent enjoyment; commentary on events; insight into characters and situations; mood enhancement; alerts and warnings; and culture- and world-creations. 2. How do audiences perceive and respond to shifts and interactions between music and other elements of a film’s soundtrack (dialogue, and other audible voices; ambient sound and sound effects; SFX “noises”; specialist tracks, e.g., costume), within the overall construction of a film? 3. How and when do audiences see themselves as gaining insight or knowledge (of characters, situations, or contexts), reliable or otherwise, from attendant film music? What results from this? 4. How do people’s knowledges, competences, skills, and affiliations with particular traditions and genres of music “play” into their capacity and willingness to appreciate different kinds of musical scoring? Or alternatively, what can novelty and surprise accomplish? 5. Given the ineffectiveness (for analytic purposes) of the distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic music, what alternative distinctions and relations between different “presences” of film music are displayed by audiences? What new “languages of description” might we derive from this? 6. What prompts disappointment, dislike, or rejection of music’s contribution to particular films? When and how does this invade and steer people’s overall judgements of them?

How Audiences Talk about Film Music   347 These are of course very general questions. They would need to be supplemented by more specific ones relating to responses to particular genres, styles, and periods of filmmaking—and of course also to individual films, as Lauren Anderson’s work (2011, 2012, 2016) has so productively demonstrated. The common features in these questions, however, are two starting postulates from this audience research tradition: that there is no such thing as “the audience,” rather there are multiple variable audiences displaying a host of relationships with music; and that the variations are a function of a host of personal, cultural, discursive, and historical conditions. These postulates are of course what set this tradition at an awkward angle to the tradition of psychological research (well exemplified in Tan et al., 2013) which sees the function of research to be the identification of general laws and associations, without reference to such contextualizing conditions. If a dialogue between these two traditions ever becomes possible, then it would be fascinating to see how it might be possible to develop Nick Cook’s (2001) provocative ideas about the metaphorical qualities of music, and its emergent properties in musical multimedia, in research on particular audiences for specific materials at distinct moments.

Notes 1. The quote in the title is taken from the second chapter of an early—and still powerful— book by Bob Hodge and David Tripp, Children and Television: A Semiotic Approach (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). Combining a subtle semiotic analysis of a series of Australian TV cartoons with a set of focus group studies of how young children relate to, and indeed learn through, such program, they write: “Many adults suppose that television viewing is a simple, passive, mindless process. One 9-year-old child we interviewed, however, had a much more powerful and subtle account of the viewing process, which he encapsulated in the graphic phrase: ‘you sorta listen with your eyes’ ” (41). I have long thought this a wonderfully evocative phrase, and it connects with my overall argument in this essay, that—among many other things—music may not be heard as music by some audience members. Take as one example this quotation from a respondent to our research about people’s memories of watching Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979): “The music really had an impact there, much like getting punched. The other scene that stands out to me was a little bit later, where Ripley was inside the spacesuit shooting steam at the alien that had stowed away. In particular, it was Ripley’s quiet singing, and her panicked swivel away from the alien that was very suspenseful to me.” [#369] For this research, see Martin Barker et al., Alien Audiences: Remembering and Evaluating a Classic Movie (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015). 2. The first issue of the Journal of Film Music carried a helpful historical review of work, building up from 1980 to its launch date. See Robynn Stilwell, “Music in Films: A Critical Review of Literature, 1980–1996,” Journal of Film Music 1, no. 1 (2002): 19–61. 3. Hanns Eisler and Theodor Adorno, Composing for the Films (London: Athlone Press, 1947). 4. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,  1987); Rick Altman (ed.), Sound Theory, Sound Practice (London: Routledge, 1992); Michel Chion, Audio/Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Royal Brown S. Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music (Berkeley: University of California Press,  1994); Anahid Kassabian,

348   Martin Barker Hearing Film: Tracking Identification in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (London: Routledge, 2001), 6–9; Kevin Donnelly (ed.), Film Music: Critical Approaches (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001). 5. See the review of the first of these by John Ellis, “School of Sound 1998,” Framework: Journal of Cinema & Media 40 (1999): 101–3. 6. See for instance the passing mention of “the audience” in Ben Winters’s otherwise fascinating and sophisticated article, “Musical Wallpaper? Towards an Appreciation of Non-narrating Music in Film,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 6, no. 1 (2012): 39–54. Winters writes that “opening and closing musical gestures . . .help to shape audience expectation.” The claim is reasonable, but can we use audience research to move beyond this level of generality and start addressing questions such as “Which audiences?” “What Expectations?” and “Shaped in what way?” 7. I should note, at least in passing, the existence of a body of work within the field of psychomusicology. The premises of this work can be fairly judged by the issue of the journal Psychomusicology devoted to the topic, with a helpful introduction by Annabel Cohen. See Annabel Cohen, “Introduction to the Special Volume on the Psychology of Film Music,” Psychomusicology 13 (1994): 2–8. Broadly, it can be said that this kind of work insistently works by gathering experimental groups, detaching people from their ordinary and lived practices and engagements. People are thus treated as history-less, and culturally detached abstract experimental subjects. This marks the clearest fault-line between this kind of work and cultural studies-oriented research. 8. The most obvious example of a direct application is in the work of Lauren Anderson, whose PhD I co-supervised with Kevin Donnelly some years ago. Anderson explored the different ways audiences responded to and evaluated the place of music within the romantic comedy Love, Actually (Curtis, 2003). See (most especially) “Beyond Figures of the Audience: Towards a Cultural Understanding of the Film Music Audience,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 10, no. 1 (2016): 25–51. 9. Gorbman, Unheard Melodies. 10. Chion, Michel. “Silence in the Loudspeakers: or—Why, with Dolby Sound in Films, It Is the Film which Is Listening to Us,” Framework: Journal of Film & Media 40 (1999): 106–10: 108. 11. Once could argue that this “second wave” is marked by the publication of the earliest critical reviews of film music literature, including the previously referenced Stilwell, “Music in Films.” 12. Kassabian, Hearing Film, 6–9. 13. Ibid., 138. 14. Ibid., 60. 15. James Buhler, “Analytical and Interpretive Approaches to Film Music,” in Film Music: Critical Approaches, ed. Kevin Donnelly (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), 39–61: 50. 16. Ibid. 17. I have to draw attention to something small yet surely significant. The idea of “identification” is found to be used repeatedly in another book about film sound, Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda, eds., Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008). Yet the term is not indexed—perhaps suggesting that to the authors, “identification” has not yet been recognized as being a concept at all. 18. I have attempted to unpack the claims and implications, as well as the history, of the concept of “identification” in a number of places. See in particular Martin Barker, “The Lord of the Rings and ‘Identification’: A Critical Encounter,” European Journal of Communication 20, no. 3 (2005): 353–78.

How Audiences Talk about Film Music   349 19. See Rick Altman, “The Silence of the Silents,” Musical Quarterly 80, no. 4 (1996): 648–718. 20. Raymond Bellour, “The Obvious and the Code” (originally published as “L’Évidence et le Code,” in Cinema: Theories, Lectures, ed. Dominique Noguez (Paris: Klincksieck, 1973)), translated in Screen 15 (1974–75): 7–17. 21. Peter Larsen, Film Music (London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 189. 22. Ibid., 203–4. 23. Kubrick himself was aware of this, as evidenced in this quotation: “ ‘Don’t underestimate the charm of “The Blue Danube” . . . Most people under 35 can think of it in an objective way, as a beautiful composition. Older people somehow associate it with a Palm Court orchestra or have another unfortunate association, and generally, therefore, criticize its use in the film’ ” Kubrick, quoted in Jerome Agel, ed., The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 (New York: New American Library, 1970): 88. 24. Philip Tagg and Bob Clarida, Ten Little Title Tunes: Towards a Musicology of the Mass Media (New York: Mass Media Musicologists’ Press, 2003). 25. Lauren Anderson, “ ‘That’s How It’s Supposed to Make You Feel’: Talking with Audiences about ‘Both Sides Now’ and Love Actually,” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 9, no. 2 (2012): 206–38. 26. Ibid., 235. 27. It is somewhat beyond the remit of this essay, but I note here the possible connections with Nick Cook’s Analysing Musical Multimedia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) on musical multimedia, in which he elaborates a theory of music as metaphorical. 28. By “spirituality,” I mean that for many of the most passionate audiences, The Lord of the Rings appears to have offered an experience with the intensity and importance of religion but without its theological requirements. On this, see Martin Barker, “Changing Lives, Challenging Concepts: Some Findings and Lessons from the Lord of the Rings Project,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 12, no. 4 (2009): 375–94. 29. A passing comment in one essay in Siu-Lan Tan et al.’s The Psychology of Music and Multimedia takes on relevance here. See Lars Kuchinke et al., “Emotion and Music in Narrative Films: A Neuroscientific Perspective,” in Siu-Lan Tan et al., The Psychology of Music in Multimedia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 118–38. Notice the curious “focus on empathic processes” (133) that has dominated thinking about music’s influence—a focus leaving little room for the quality I point to here, which comes closer to Anahid Kassabian’s argument that music can help “form the diegesis,” rather than being a device for capturing audiences’ attention. See Kassabian, “The End of Diegesis as We Know It?” in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 89–106. 30. See Ben Winters, “The Non-diegetic Fallacy: Film, Music, and Narrative Space,” Music & Letters 91, no. 2 (2010): 224–44, and Anahid Kassabian, “The End of Diegesis as We Know It.” 31. This scene also became the focus of a long discussion in one of a series of follow-up telephone interviews conducted in the United Kingdom, as part of the Lord of the Rings project. The interview is remarkable for the way in which our interviewee acknowledged a contradiction between her intellectual and narrative-emotional responses. On the one hand, she disapproved greatly of the change between books and films in Denethor’s character (from brave but overwhelmed, to cruel and “bonkers”); on the other hand, she loved and was deeply moved by this “genius scene”—which she was able to retell in incredible detail. Her retelling, interestingly, attributed a kind of implied “knowledge” in Pippin of

350   Martin Barker what was happening to Faramir, which she derived from the scene’s construction. The interview is discussed in detail in Barker, “Changing Lives, Challenging Concepts.” 32. See for instance Daniel Ross, “Howard Shore’s Lord of the Rings Tops Movie Music Hall of Fame 2014,” Classic FM website, 2014 (found at: http://www.classicfm.com/composers/ shore/news/movie-music-hall-fame-2014/#TfOQFpdDtpoItkJ1.97 accessed August 7, 2019): “Howard Shore‘s soundtrack for the Lord of the Rings films has topped the Classic Movie Music Hall of Fame for the fifth year in a row.”

Select Bibliography Altman, Rick, ed. Sound Theory/Sound Practice. London: Routledge, 1992. Altman, Rick. “The Silence of the Silents,” Musical Quarterly 80, no. 4 (1996): 648–718. Anderson, Lauren. “Dancing about Architecture? Talking around Popular Music in Film Soundtracks.” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 8, no. 1 (2011): 188–215. Anderson, Lauren. “ ‘That’s How It’s Supposed to Make You Feel’: Talking with Audiences about ‘Both Sides Now’ and Love Actually.” Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 9, no. 2 (2012): 206–38. Anderson, Lauren. “Beyond Figures of the Audience: Towards a Cultural Understanding of the Film Music Audience.” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 10, no. 1 (2016): 25–51. Barker, Martin. Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989. Barker, Martin. “The Lord of the Rings and ‘Identification’: A Critical Encounter,” European Journal of Communication 20, no. 3 (2005): 353–78. Barker, Martin. “Changing Lives, Challenging Concepts: Some Findings and Lessons from the Lord of the Rings Project.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 12, no. 4 (2009): 375–94. Barker, Martin, Kate Egan, Tom Phillips, and Sarah Ralph. Alien Audiences: Remembering and Evaluating a Classic Movie. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015. Beck, Jay, and Tony Grajeda, eds. Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Bellour, Raymond. “The Obvious and the Code” (originally published as “L’Évidence et le Code.” In Cinema: Theories, Lectures, ed. Dominique Noguez (Paris: Klincksieck, 1973)), translated in Screen 15 (1974–75): 7–17. Brown, Royal  S. Overtones and Undertones: Reading Film Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Buhler, James. “Analytical and Interpretive Approaches to Film Music,” in Film Music: Critical Approaches, ed. Kevin Donnelly, 39–61. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001. Chion, Michel. Audio/Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Chion, Michel. “Silence in the Loudspeakers: or—Why, with Dolby Sound in Films, It Is the Film which Is Listening to Us.” Framework: Journal of Film & Media 40 (1999): 106–10. Cohen, Annabel J. “Introduction to the Special Volume on the Psychology of Film Music.” Psychomusicology 13 (1994): 2–8. Cook, Nicholas. Analysing Musical Multimedia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Donnelly, K.  J., ed. Film Music: Critical Approaches. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001.

How Audiences Talk about Film Music   351 Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington: Illinois University Press, 1987. Kassabian, Anahid. Hearing Film: Tracking Identification in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music. London: Routledge, 2001. Kassabian, Anahid. “The End of Diegesis as We Know It?” In The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis, 89–106. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Kuchinke, Lars, Hermann Kappelhoff, and Stefan Koelsch. “Emotion and Music in Narrative Films: A Neuroscientific Perspective.” In The Psychology of Music in Multimedia, ed. Tan, Siu-Lan, Annabel J. Cohen, and Scott D Lipscomb, 118–38. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Larsen, Peter. Film Music. London: Reaktion Books, 2005. Smith, Murray. Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Stilwell, Robynn J. “Music in Films: A Critical Review of Literature, 1980–1996.” Journal of Film Music 1, no. 1 (1996): 19–61. Tagg, Philip, and Bob Clarida. Ten Little Title Tunes: Towards a Musicology of the Mass Media. New York: Mass Media Musicologists’ Press, 2003. Winters, Ben. “The Non-diegetic Fallacy: Film, Music, and Narrative Space.” Music & Letters 91, no. 2 (2010): 224–44. Winters, Ben. “Music Wallpaper? Towards an Appreciation of Non-narrating Music in Film.” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 6, no. 1 (2012): 39–54.

pa rt I V

T H E L IST E N I NG BODY

chapter 17

Fist to Face Corporeal Listening and the Cinematic Punch Lisa Coulthard

In Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise, Michel Chion coins the term “corporeal covibrations” to describe the much-discussed but imprecisely defined phenomena of sound’s corporeal impact.1 Asserting sound’s bisensory nature, Chion uses covibration to describe “everything about a sound that impinges on the body.”2 As he comments, sound is a wave that “touches that which we call the ear, where it gives rise to auditory sensations, and not without also touching . . . other parts of the body, where it sets off shocks, covibrations, and so forth.”3 From low and high frequencies, to intense loudness, to percussive beats, sound has direct vibratory impact on the body. We do not have to listen or even hear to experience the rhythm and reverberation of sonic movement—vibrations can bypass the “auditory window” of an acoustic sensation in the ear, they are “everything in sound that affects the body beyond the ‘auditory window’ properly speaking.”4 Chion adopts the neologism covibration to describe this dual nature of sound that is felt as much as heard: the term recognizes sound as a matter of “sensory doubling,” that draws on and awakens bodily response, conditioned reflexes, and corporeal memory; it stresses the interplay between sound and corporeal vibration in a way that eschews the “myth of synesthesia” and highlights tactility and hapticity.5 Chion is certainly not the first to stress this haptic nature of sound—theorists, historians, and philosophers of sound routinely discuss its unique status as vibration. They also comment on human hearing as a sense that foregrounds this tactility through the unique openness of the ear: in The Audible Past Jonathan Sterne details the importance of the ear’s anatomy in early experiments with sound; Peter Szendy theorizes about the “topmology of listening” by expanding on the secretive and hidden nature of the “otographic groove of the ear”;6 Jacques Derrida states outright that the “ear is uncanny”7 because it is the “most tendered and most open organ, the one that, as Freud reminds us, the infant cannot close.”8 Beyond the ear itself is the uncanniness of sound’s ability to access and mobilize the body’s surface and interior spaces: Barry Truax notes the body has “many enclosed spaces,” “cavities that can resonate”;9 Sean Cubitt comments that

356   Lisa Coulthard sound has “no sacrosanctity of the epidermis”;10 Frances Dyson claims that “to hear is also to be touched”;11 R. Murray Schafer characterizes hearing as “touching at a distance”;12 sound designer Randy Thom notes that the “body is an instrument, a resonator”;13 J. Martin Daughtry reflects on sound’s ability to “rub up against the body, punch the chest cavity, pierce the eardrum.”14 As this brief review suggests, thinking about listening and hearing seems to necessitate a consideration of the haptic, of the potentialities for sound to touch listeners and for listeners to feel sound. Considering this hapticity, this chapter focuses on what might be seen as a rather specific example—the cinematic fist-to-face punch in the fight sequence. The cinematic punch is an uncanny and iconic sonic object that supplements a structural absence. The sound of the punch roots an imaginary corporeal impact: the fist-to-face imaginary of the cinematic punch draws on fight choreography, digital effects, actor performance, and spatial and temporal distension and extension to create a privileged moment of violent spectacle and trans-sensorial affect. With the cinematic punch, violence becomes an instance of seeing with one’s ears, to extend Slavoj Žižek’s “I hear you with my eyes” metaphor. This metaphor is used by Žižek to expand on the trans-sensorialism we experience when faced with an aesthetic object like Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893)—the painting is silent but we hear the scream with our eyes. The filmic punch arguably reverses this relationship—we see and feel the absent impact with our ears.15 As a haptic audiovisual sleight of hand, the filmic punch is, as Chion notes, cinema’s most important object: it brings together human bodies in a point of dramatic impact—it is the “audiovisual point toward which everything converges and out from which all radiates.”16 Like a Lacanian quilting point, the punch structures narration, time, meaning, and affect: “beforehand, it is thought about, it is announced, it is dreaded; afterward, we feel its shock waves, we confront its reverberations”; its sound is etched “directly into consciousness, where it can repeat as an echo.”17 Emblematic of cinema itself, the punch iconically points to the fundamental lie of the audiovisual object as index and its echoing reverberations radiate across and through the filmic text. Although a seemingly minor element, a brief moment of violent contact, usually occupying only minutes or seconds of screen time, the cinematic punch is an exceptional event marking the collision and comingling of cinematic and spectatorial bodies. It is difficult to watch a close-up of a fist-to-face punch (often filmed in slow motion with amplified sonic effects) without registering in one’s own body a trace, echo, imitation, or imagined sense of what that action might feel like. Add to this the resonant sound effects of high volume, rumbling low frequencies, and percussive intensities, and the fist-to-face punch is rich with covibratory power. Moreover, there is a familiar strangeness in the punch’s hyperreality as a cinematic object; we are so accustomed to its iconicity that we do not question its sonic distance from actual punches in real life. And although we might not buy into the sonic suturing of fist to face, filmic punches can resonate as verisimilitudinous (even though some are of course explicitly and blatantly presented as artifice). In short, the cinematic punch—because of its sonic imagining, its hyperreality, its deeply bodily nature, its encouragement of a felt empathy, and its acoustic resonance—is distinctly haptic.

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From Library Effect to Digital Invention: Listening to the Cinematic Punch in American Cinema And yet, for all its theoretical centrality, the cinematic punch’s history, qualities, and ­significance are neither well developed nor easy to ascertain. For instance, if we isolate the sonic history of the fist-to-face punch, we note that in American cinema in the studio era, studios had characteristic punches in their sound libraries, but beyond that detail little is known. As sound editor Jerry Ross says in 1987 “There’s only been one sound used for punches for the past 30 years and we tend to call it the ‘John Wayne chin sock’ . . . I don’t know how that sound was made, but I think they used a bowling pin or a bowling ball.”18 Tracing the “evolution” of the punch, Ben Burtt notes that if you know what you are listening for, there are in fact distinct studio styles for punches in the classical era. He comments that both Warner and Paramount had good face punches that they developed in the 1930s that were still being used in the early 1980s—“You’d recognize it,” he says, “it’s a thwack . . . probably done live at proper speed and involving a leathery kind of wallop, likely produced by hitting two baseball gloves together.”19 However, Burtt goes on to mention that despite his best archival efforts, isolating this sonic history is almost impossible: “It’s very, very hard to determine who made that first face punch, who recorded that sound, or what person made the selection to put something in an actual track.”20 Despite the lack of archival material, it is clear that for the cinematic punch the period from 1930 to 1970 was one of sound library effects. More than just suggesting a sonic interchangeability of punches—what Mack Hagood refers to as a kind of “stockpiled violence”21—sound library effects were instrumental in shaping the idea of what a punch should sound like. As Kevin  J.  Donnelly notes, sounds like the cinematic punch are learned and trained—even “Pavlovian”—audience associations: as he comments, they render “the sound of wood blocks clashing together” an acceptable and conventional sound of someone being punched.22 Of course, punches in everyday life, particularly bare fisted punches where hand meets face, do not have a strong sonic presence. Burtt comments that “an actual face punch, if you’ve ever had one or delivered one, is not very loud. It’s usually the person going ‘Ugh!’ or “Ouch!’ or whatever.”23 The “chin sock” and the sound library punches that followed tended to be wooden, thwacky, and percussive— they were sharp sonic blasts that stressed a sense of controlled artifice. And yet, these “chin sock” sounds became accepted as what a fist-to-face punch sounds like in the cinema. Taking the Pavlovian aspect of sonic artifice further, Chion argues that these kinds of accepted sonic tropes work to create audience memories, memories that spectators then rely on when they judge a sound to be realistic or truthful.24 Burtt reinforces this perspective when he notes that, “Most people’s association with what [a face punch] should sound like is not because they’ve received a face punch, but because they’ve heard

358   Lisa Coulthard it hundreds of times in film.”25 The artifice and illusion of the audiovisual cinematic punch comes to define a punch itself, which in turn confirms its sonic rendering as authentic. These “John Wayne chin socks” discussed by Burtt and others are of course primarily associated with the classical era of American cinema, an era during which screen violence was heavily regulated by the Production Code. In the hundreds of Motion Picture Association of America Production Code (MPPC) files I have consulted, sound is rarely brought up as an object of censorship. There are, however, complaints directed at vocality such as violent language, grunts, moans, and screams (the latter seem particularly troubling when related to female screams during labor). For example, Stephen Prince notes that the Production Code Administration required Murders in the Rue Morgue to pursue “additional audio editing to tone down the violence before the picture could qualify for a seal”26 because of a female character’s screams. This is notable when considering the cinematic punch, as it is almost never accompanied by the grunts, groans, or expressions of pain that one associates with fighting. As Burtt notes, the voice might be what we hear first with a real-life blow; however, in American films of the classical era, vocality associated with violent physicality tended to be muted and thwacky punch sounds amplified. Apart from voice though, sound effects are in fact rarely mentioned as a problem in the files I have consulted. Moreover, it is noteworthy that the MPPC files do not seem to strongly suppress fist-to-face punches. Directors are instructed to not be “gruesome” or “brutal” in their treatment of fights, to avoid depictions of blood, and weaponized violence is intensely regulated. Gouging or unfair fighting, hits with gun butts or beatings are sometimes given warnings to cut, cover or subdue brutality, but evenly paired brawls tend not to be criticized in these terms. This lack of mention of fights or fight sounds is perhaps surprising as fight scenes were definitely within the purview of the Code: in the standardized rubric for determining the “sociological factors” of a film’s sex or violence, the MPPC lists forms of violence, including the categories of “Punch” and “Fist fight,” which a large number of films have ticked off. There is also a place for “Other,” under which films like RKO’s The Lusty Men (1952, dir. Nicholas Ray and Robert Parrish) list “Kicks, pushes, bites, etc.” But in the letters and comments circulated by MPPC, these physical conflicts are rarely detailed, and their sonic presence is entirely sidestepped. It is conceivable that the punch was such a routine element, its choreography and sonicity so standardized, that it almost always fit with the decorum and self-censorship advanced by the MPPC.27 If the same library sound effect was used across films and genres, then there was no need to question its presence, character, or loudness. Moreover, the library “chin sock” most frequently used arguably lacks the gruesome brutality on which the Code focused its censure of violence—the “chin sock” was a crisp, wooden, and definitively non-corporeal sound. It should also be noted that even this conventionalized library punch effect appears to be absent in scenes of female fighting in this era. For example, the fight between Frenchy (Marlene Dietrich) and Lily Belle (Una Merkel) in Destry Rides Again (Universal Pictures, 1939, dir. George Marshall) lacks strong punch, slap, or hit sounds: hit-related

Corporeal Listening and the Cinematic Punch   359 sound effects for the scene are primarily grappling cloth sounds played rather low. Similarly, if we look at the fight between Judy O’Brien (Maureen O’Hara) and Bubbles (Lucille Ball) in Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance (RKO, 1940)—about which the MPPC recommended avoiding undue brutality—we hear the first two slaps as quick, loud, but not particularly rich sounding contacts;28 but after this initial slap contact, their actual grappling is almost without sound effects. Although both of these fight scenes had deletions required for international distribution, none of the letters and files distributed mentions sound or its absence. Perhaps it was considered too brutal to have a scene where women were punching even though fighting; therefore the sonic quality of hits became something other than a punch effect—a more decorous grappling or pushing sound. These examples point to the fact that although it was an era of standardized punch sounds, there were slight variations in library effects—in addition to studio styles, there are differences in genre, tone, and gender. There are also distinctions in terms of fight styles: for instance, if we listen to films like MGM’s Bad Day at Black Rock (1955, dir. John Sturges) or United Artist’s Blood on the Sun (1945, dir. Frank Lloyd), the karate- and judo-inflected fights lack the higher frequency (thwack) elements of the “chin sock” effect, instead offering a duller, quieter, and more wooden (thuddy) sound.29 Regardless, even taking into consideration minor variances, it is evident that the sonic punch in American cinema in the classical era was a fairly uniform stock library effect that lacked meaty corporeality—whether a thud or a thwack, it was a controlled, restrained, and dry sound of moderate amplification. As its name suggests, the “John Wayne chin sock” is illustrative of a library punch sound era that foregrounded a certain kind of tough masculinity and a controlled sense of violence and its sonic qualities reflected that.

Listening to Haptic Action: The Post-1980s Cinematic Punch It was not until the late 1970s that these library effects were replaced with unique, individualized, and highly differentiated punch sounds. David Sonnenschein notes that fights in films like Rocky (United Artists, 1976, dir. John G. Avildsen) created “new levels of impressionism by using different combinations of sounds to compose a music-like score of pounding rhythms and timbres.”30 Although John Kreng contends that The Octagon (American Cinema Releasing, 1980, dir. Eric Karson) was the first American film to eschew canned hits,31 it is evident that the move away from library punches was a gradual one. What we know is that in the 1980s punches in American films became increasingly customized sound objects that changed according to importance, character, or type of fight. In its intensified complexity and divorcement from the sonic library, the punch transforms from a sound effect into a sound event—it becomes an acoustic moment of spectacle that isolates a special moment, rather than merely a heightened

360   Lisa Coulthard impact masking a visual absence. Raging Bull (United Artists, 1980, dir. Martin Scorsese) is a key text in this trajectory. Although I have been primarily discussing fist fights and not boxing, the punches in Raging Bull stand out in a way that was transformative for fight scenes that followed. Breathing sounds, animal roars, beef hits, water splatters, airplane engine sounds: the sonic layers of Raging Bull’s fight scenes transform the “chin sock” into an expressionistic moment. The hits are more than thwacks—they are acoustically rich, emotionally resonant, and metaphorical events. It is essential to note as well that Raging Bull’s fights stand out not only in terms of sound but because of the slow-motion effects that draw out the punch, mutating an “ultrabrief ” moment into a more impactful and extended sequence. The slowing down of the punch is ­crucial to the distension of its sonic effects and it is a technique that continues today—fist-to-face punches are frequently in slow motion, which opens up space for non-realistic sonic techniques and amplifies the affective and emotional capacity of the scene. As Chion notes, Raging Bull “used punches to bestow a maximum degree of temporal elasticity,”32 a technique available because of the strength of the hit as an impactful synch point. Raging Bull represents not only a move away from library effects, but also a recalibration of the punch as a significant affective moment, one more focused on corporeality and feeling than on the conventionalized masculine hardness of a John Wayne brawl. These factors rather than the sound effects themselves are what tie Raging Bull’s boxing to later fight scenes that open up a space for the affective, emotional, and corporeal: the cinematic punch post-1980s has the potential to be more than an interchangeable effect in a stock bar brawl scene. As Hagood implies regarding “Angel’s face beating” in Fight Club (20th Century Fox, 1999, dir. David Fincher), the fight sounds of this sequence suspend rather than propel narrative, turning the moment into one of affective intensity rather than kinetic action.33 More than just a shift in narrational significance, this affective intensity highlights the corporeal and emotional, and cues the audience’s psychological and neurological responses to sonic vibrations, frequencies, and uncanny resonances. But this is not only a feature of this scene or Fight Club ­specifically; rather it is a post-1980s digital era move away from interchangeable and identifiable thwacks to more individualized, complexly layered, and vibrationally corporeal punch sounds. As these examples indicate, there is an increasing tactility to the sonic punch. Sound designer Dane Davis notes this tactility when he describes the cinematic punch as a subjective corporeal rendering with a “tight low-end component”: “like when you hit yourself you can hear, not much of the reverberation, but defining the depth of penetration into the other person’s body.”34 Although library punch sounds are still occasionally used (sometimes for nostalgic effect), it is common now for each sound team to construct new punches from scratch. What becomes notable in the singular, individualized punches post-1980 is their layered complexity, sometimes involving dozens of tracks for seconds of screen time. Having worked at a Foley studio, I can attest to the fact that even the most mundane of low-budget punches involved creating several tracks in the studio (skin touches, body thumps, cloth movements, wet paper towel slapped on cement,

Corporeal Listening and the Cinematic Punch   361 duct-taped phone books dropped on the floor, uncooked pasta cracked under foot, kitty litter wrapped in denim hit with mallets, mouth sounds). These sounds then went on to be manipulated, layered, and reworked by sound editors, who might alter pitch, speed, or cut in some library effects to be mixed with the Foley; the scene could then involve additional actor ADR focused on breath, spit, vocality, and mouth sounds. Higher ­budget films with sophisticated sound teams take these basic ingredients even further. Streets of Fire (Universal Pictures, 1984, dir. Walter Hill) used a pig carcass “which was hit on the Foley stage with everything imaginable—fists, rubber-gloved hands, two-byfours, hammers, a sledge hammer”: these sounds “were added to sounds of crushed watermelons, green peppers, wood.”35 Lon Bender notes for a jaw punch he might use beef, a fraction of a second of a gunshot, a seashell crack, a wrench on cement, a hook pulled from a fish mouth and the sounds of cloth being ripped. And big budget films such as Michael Bay’s Transformers (DreamWorks Pictures, 2007) might use hundreds of tracks like these to create a single sound event like a punch. As this last example suggests, fights scenes in big budget American action films in the last two decades are illustrative of the sonic punch’s increasing complexity and it is not uncommon for a single punch to consist of dozens of tracks. With films like Kill Bill Vol. 1 (Miramax, 2003, dir. Quentin Tarantino), The Bourne Identity (Universal Pictures, 2002, dir. Doug Liman), and The Transporter (20th Century Fox, 2002, dir. Louis Leterrier and Corey Yuen), the turn of the century can be seen to mark a new digital era of the fight scene characterized by advances in sound technology (both production and playback) and an increasing use of special effects, exaggerated style and impact aesthetics. Although the spectacle of post-millennial American action cinema is usually associated with explosions, car chases, or other pyrotechnics, unarmed physical fight scenes (and the punches they involve) have proliferated and expanded. From the raw corporeality of Eastern Promises’ (Focus Features, 2007, dir. David Cronenberg) bathroom brawl, to the hyperreal authenticity of Atomic Blonde’s (Focus Features, 2017, dir. David Leitch) extended fist fight, to the brutalism of Warrior’s (Lionsgate, 2011, dir. Gavin O’Connor) final fraternal showdown, the fight is a central feature of big budget Hollywood cinema and its sounds are crucial to its spectacular affects and effects. A key ingredient of this digital fight era, the post-millennial punch highlights the abilities of sound to mobilize “sensorial capacities”36 and enhance “the visceral experience of cinema.”37 Bringing the body to the fore, the punch partakes of what Steven Connor terms the “sonoro-tactile pathos of cinema,” which is marked by the “violent sound tactations” of “the kiss, the punch, the cut, the shot, the crash and the explosion.”38 Placing corporeal acts (kissing and punching) alongside film compositional elements (the cut, the shot) and putting both in conversation with sonic set pieces of performative and staged destruction (the crash, the explosion), Connor sets up a kind of itemized list of contemporary action cinema acoustics. Like the film kiss, the film punch is distinct from its counterpart in everyday life, but is emphatic in its presence as a corporeal cinematic object. And like the kiss, the contemporary punch in action cinema is not always a standalone object but one enmeshed in a sonic sequence that blends music, Foley, and effects.

362   Lisa Coulthard As an article from Screen Crush suggests, there is a trend toward fight sounds replacing or working alongside music as percussive elements, particularly in trailers.39 This is borne out in the research I have done on the contemporary fight sequence. As part of a large scale research project on sound and violence I have been pursuing in recent years, I  have noted five dominant sonic moves in scoring and sounding of cinematic fight scenes: (1) a sonic performance of realism that stresses the sounds of a fight or other act of violence without noticeable music and without obviously overdone sonic effects (i.e., punches land with moderately amplified thuds, not the flamboyant thunderous cracks of cut-in effects) as in the extended fist-fight sequence in Eastern Promises (2) the use of vocal plesiochrony to score fight scenes with vocal yelling, shouting, and screaming serving as score as in the epic prison fight scene in The Raid 2 (Sony and Stage 6 films, 2014, dir. Gareth Evans); (3) the use of anempathetic or at the very least contrastive scoring that plays upbeat, romantic, or “at odds” music in brutal scenes (e.g., the use of Enya to score the torture sequence of David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Columbia Pictures, 2011); (4) an elevated sense of impact associated with intensive kineticism but without music or enhanced sound effects beyond fight sounds, such as in Atomic Blonde’s stairway fight scene; (5) an exaggerated soundscape that offers pronounced cracks, whips, and thuds not only for physical impacts but for camera and editing moves as well (as in the introductory fight scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Volume 1). It is worth noting that the use of empathetic music to stress affective and emotional resonance in the fight scene is not a common trope—music of this type is used for the build-up of fist fights or for filmic deaths from gun shots, swords, or other weapons. Emotional investment encouraged through empathetic scoring is rare in actual scenes of fist-fighting. While there is some use of music in many fight sequences, fighting itself is rarely fully scored—instead, music if it appears is mixed, mashed, interwoven, or placed in the background. For instance, although Tarantino is known as a musically minded director, in Kill Bill: Volume 1’s fight scenes, music is prevalent primarily in transitional and anticipatory scoring; when actual fighting starts, noises take the foreground. In place of music, footsteps, sword tings, whooshes, body blows, broken glass, and spurting blood create rhythm, tempo, and tone. This lack of score opens up a sonic space for sounds of bodily impact and movement. Not surprisingly, the post-production sound team for the film at Todd A-O notes that the fight scenes in Kill Bill: Volume 1 were Foley-heavy, with a great deal of time and energy devoted to giving body blows, footsteps, movements, and sword hits accuracy, realistic weight, and substance.40 At the same time, these scenes are layered with numerous sonic effects stressing more fantastic and unrealistic aspects (the whooshing of legs as they leap over a fallen coffee table, or the spray whistle of the fountain spurt of blood from a severed artery). Actions that would be noiseless in life are given weight, speed, and a kinetic presence as swords, bodies, edits, camera movements, and even intertitles thwack, boing, and whoosh. Noises take on a musicality, providing rhythm, vectorizing attention, guiding audience response, and intensifying action and affect. And the punch becomes a central feature of this noisy, sonic digital landscape focused on bodies and action.

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The Meat of the Punch: Listening to a Covibratory “Digital Visceral” But more than just an amplified emphasis or escalated complexity, the digital era punch is marked by a corporeality wrought through a pronounced focus on flesh sounds in the last two decades. This increasing organicism and meatiness of the sonic punch has not been lost on audiences. A Wall Street Journal article on “The Sweet Science of Punch Sound Effects” reports on a new realism that uses actual recordings of boxers or martial artists hitting each other, frozen turkeys, or fruit and vegetables to get more realistic sounds than the John Wayne chin sock, which sound designer Leslie Shatz describes as “a wet towel slapping on a wall, sometimes with a pencil breaking added in there.”41 But rather than pointing to an increasing realism, we could position this fleshy shift in the sonic punch as an extension of what Lisa Purse identifies as the “digital visceral”—that “flamboyant gesture in digital screen violence,” characterized by “extreme aestheticization,” “overt stylization,” and “ostentatious design.”42 Aimed at heightened affective intensities and exaggeration, this trend increasingly frames violence as artifice and “is persistently marked by a play between haptic imagery and geometric abstraction.”43 The result is screen violence that celebrates rather than hides “outlandish, overtly composited, artifice.”44 The flamboyance of the violent gesture in the digital era is the point, and realism falls by the wayside as extreme viscerality is blended with overt artifice. Although Purse’s argument is focused on the visual register of digital media, there is an equivalent sonic trend evident in the fleshy sonic punches I have discussed. The dig­ ital visceral of the punch can be seen as akin to the sprayed blood Purse analyzes—a reminder of artifice that delights in corporeal destruction while framing cinematic violence as eminently and emphatically artificial, staged, something to be enjoyed and consumed. And yet, I contend that there is also a sonic uncanniness that complexifies the digital artifice of the punch. In an essay on acoustic disgust published in the Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media, I focused on squish sounds in scenes of violence to argue for acoustic disgust as a sonically charged affect.45 That analysis drew on Chion’s discussion of a film scene that features a tank running over a child—Chion describes the sound of this violence as “a ghastly noise that sounds like a watermelon being crushed,” a sound which for Chion renders the scene more traumatic by the recognition that it may have been produced “precisely by crushing a melon.”46 Chion is probably correct in making this assumption, as disturbing as it might be as an audiovisual experience: as sound editor Rick Wessler says, “no one really knows what an eyeball sounds like when it drops on the floor,” which gives sound editors freedom to invent.47 As a sound event, these moments can be extremely unsettling as listeners potentially recognize the sound: there is a strange, unfamiliar familiarity to a moment of violence that brings together a battered melon and destroyed human flesh in a disturbing sonic simile—“his head was crushed as if it were a melon.” That Chion attests to the trauma of this sound suggests that the squishiness of bodily dismemberment

364   Lisa Coulthard rendered through food sounds is both affectively accurate to our sense of what this violent act might sound like and acoustically jarring as it announces its artifice and sonic origin. This fleshy example of Chion’s, which would have been rare in the era he is discussing but is now prevalent in the post-millennial digital visceral, is found throughout contemporary punches that replace the old standbys for the cracking and thwacking sounds of pre-1980s “chin socks”—billiard balls, wet towels, and phone books—with squishier, lower frequency, and viscous sounds rendered from food and other squashy or corporeal materials. Drawing on substances like pig or chicken carcasses and steak, this new pulpous, tactile, and malleable organicism of the sonic punch is both affectively charged and eminently artificial. To return to Chion’s melon example, these sonic objects of violence are acoustically haunted by the sounds that forms them, which in turn creates the potential for disorienting similized listening: the human face being hit is metaphorically transformed through sound into dead meat. And yet, this meatiness is simultaneously characterized by a highly aestheticized, exaggerated, self-reflexive, and overtly artificial digitality. In a doubling gesture akin to Chion’s covibratory, the digital punch is simultaneously heard and felt as both a fleshy event and an illusory, non-corporeal digital object. Mobilizing this viscerality and sensory doubling through reflexive reaction, ­cinematic “Pavlovian” memory, and corporeal response, the digital punch’s percussive high-frequency cracks, low-frequency thuds, and emphatically increased volume create an illusion of violent physical contact that draws on sound’s vibratory potential and invites affective engagements that range from delight to disgust. As someone who has spent significant time listening to hundreds of contemporary fist-fight sequences back to back, even the most restrained, sonically limited punch still has resonance—listening to ten, twenty, ninety minutes of non-stop punch sounds at high volume, can induce acoustic exhaustion or nausea. Whether through Dolby Atmos in the cinema, headphones, or TV or computer speakers, listening to the sonic surfeit of covibratory cinematic punches is physically taxing. In an era of extreme sound amplification in movie theatres and lengthy fight scenes in big-budget films, some degree of these haptic responses is likely in even the most tuned-out audioviewer. This violent hapticity of the digital era punch plays in multiple ways: it invites corporeal engagement through techniques aimed at drawing parallels between onscreen violence and the spectator’s own bodily responses; it transforms a sound effect into a resonant and affectively charged event; it frames the punch as hyperreal, exaggerated artifice totally divorced from real bodies so that it can be offered up for unproblematic consumption and enjoyment; and finally through the use of meat and other organic objects, it facilitates a visceral disgust through wet sounds of violated dead flesh. Transformed from interchangeable, stock library effect to a viscerally felt affect, the digital era’s sonic punch exposes and exploits the affective intensities of screen violence and corporeal listening as it highlights fist-to-face contact as both a haptic, meaty, “felt” impact and an effects-driven ­cinematic trick.

Corporeal Listening and the Cinematic Punch   365

Notes 1. This chapter draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 2. Michel Chion, Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise, trans. James A. Steintrager (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 266. 3. Chion, Sound, 16. 4. Ibid., 204. 5. Ibid., 209. 6. Peter Szendy, All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 121. 7. Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 33. 8. Ibid. 9. Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication, 2nd ed. (Westport: Ablex Publishing, 2001), 98. 10. Sean Cubitt, Digital Aesthetics (London: Sage Publications, 1998), 95. 11. Frances Dyson, Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 4. 12. R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1994), 11. 13. Steven Winn, “It Was All Sound and a Little Fury,” Bay Area Radio Drama, September 10, 1989, http://www.bardradio.com/design_winn.html. 14. J. Martin Daughtry, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 163. 15. Slavoj Žižek, “ ‘I Hear You with My Eyes’; or, The Invisible Master,” in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 94. 16. Chion, Audio-Vision, 61. 17. Ibid. 18. Although the sound quality is variable and not pristine, consider the following compilation of “John Wayne chin socks”—there is a variation from thuds to thwacks, but the characteristic library effects are in evidence throughout: Drane, John Wayne (Fight Scenes), video, 8:01, June 23, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWxMWCb60jk, accessed August 24, 2020. 19. Ben Burtt, “Ben Burtt,” in Sound-on-Film: Interviews with Creators of Film Sound by Vincent Lobrutto (Westport: Praeger, 1994), 140. 20. Burtt, Sound-on-Film, 139. 21. Mack Hagood, “Unpacking a Punch: Transduction and the Sound of Combat Foley in Fight Club,” Cinema Journal 53, no. 4 (2014): 98–120: 110. 22. Kevin  J.  Donnelly, Occult Aesthetics: Synchronization in Sound Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), ix. 23. William Bibbiani, “Ben Burtt and Dennis Muren on Indiana Jones,” Mandatory, September 20, 2012, http://www.mandatory.com/fun/196395-ben-burtt-and-dennis-murenon-indiana-jones. 24. Chion, Audio-Vision, 108.

366   Lisa Coulthard 25. Burtt, Sound-on-Film, 140. 26. Stephen Prince, Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1968 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 70. 27. In Prince’s Classical Film Violence, there is no section on the punch or fist fight, which indicates the extent to which it was not a significant problem for the era. 28. SueSnellLives!, Lucille Ball and Maureen O’Hara Catfight!, video, 1:00, April 8, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD63ulkYHs8, accessed August 24, 2020. 29. 191MOVIES, Bad Day at Black Rock Scene, video, 4:42, September 29, 2010, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=A2o3QWwwQLI, accessed August 24, 2020; Superseven/Sandra West & More!, Blood on the Sun—James Cagney—Judo Fight, video, 3:30, September 13, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlejMy9zLdI, accessed August 24, 2020. 30. David Sonnenschein, Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice, and Sound Effects in Cinema (Studio City: Michael Wiese Productions, 2001), 190–91. 31. John Kreng, Fight Choreography: The Art of Non-Verbal Dialogue (Boston: Course Technology PTR, 2007), 65. 32. Chion, Audio-Vision, 62. 33. Hagood, “Unpacking a Punch,” 118. To see a clip of the sequence: Andre Dellamorte, Fight Club—Angel Face’s Beating—Uncensored Version, video, 1:39, 2014, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=ca20DgfA1WM, accessed August 24, 2020. 34. Dane Davis quoted in Sonnenschein, Sound Design, 191. 35. Sonnenschein, Sound Design, 191. 36. Michel Chion, Film, A Sound Art, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 133. 37. Smith, Audiovisual Aesthetics, 337. 38. Steven Connor, “Edison’s Teeth: Touching Hearing,” in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2004), 153–72: 167. 39. Matt Singer, “The New Movie Trailer Trend: Percussion Sound Effects,” ScreenCrush, June 26, 2018, https://screencrush.com/movie-trailers-with-percussion-sound-effects/. 40. Personal conversations with Mike Minkler, Wylie Stateman, and Tony Lamberti, February 18, 2010. 41. Leslie Shatz as quoted in Don Steinberg, “The Sweet Science of Punch Sound Effects,” The Wall Street Journal, January 2, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-sweet-science-ofpunch-sound-effects-1,388,686,810. 42. Lisa Purse, “Digital Visceral: Textural Play and the Flamboyant Gesture in Digital Screen Violence,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 45, no. 1 (2017): 16–25: 16–17. 43. Ibid., 16. 44. Ibid., 24. 45. Lisa Coulthard, “Acoustic Disgust: Sound, Affect, and Cinematic Disgust,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media, ed. Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 183–93. 46. Chion, Audio-Vision, 22. 47. Brendan Bernhard, “FILM; The Tinkling of Ice in a Glass, the Rustling of Skirts,” The New York Times, July 10, 1994, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/10/movies/film-the-tinklingof-ice-in-a-glass-the-rustling-of-skirts.html.

Corporeal Listening and the Cinematic Punch   367

Select Bibliography Buhler, James, and Alex Newton. “Outside the Law of Action: Music and Sound in the Bourne Trilogy.” In The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, ed. Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, John Richardson, 325–45. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Chion, Michel. Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise, trans. James  A.  Steintrager. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Chion, Michel. Film, A Sound Art, trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Cubitt, Sean. Digital Aesthetics. London: Sage Publications, 1998. Daughtry, J. Martin. Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. Donnelly, Kevin J. Occult Aesthetics: Synchronization in Sound Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Dyson, Frances. Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Hagood, Mack. “Unpacking a Punch: Transduction and the Sound of Combat Foley in Fight Club.” Cinema Journal 53, no. 4 (2014): 98–120. Kreng, John. Fight Choreography: The Art of Non-Verbal Dialogue. Boston: Course Technology PTR, 2007. Purse, Lisa. “Digital Visceral: Textural Play and the Flamboyant Gesture in Digital Screen Violence.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 45, no. 1 (2017): 16–25. Schafer, R.  Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1994). Sergi, Gianluca. 2004. The Dolby Era: Film Sound in Contemporary Hollywood. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Szendy, Peter. All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage. New York: Fordham University Press,2017. Truax, Barry. Acoustic Communication, 2nd ed. Westport: Ablex Publishing, 2001. Žižek, Slavoj. “ ‘I Hear You with My Eyes’; or, The Invisible Master.” In Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek, 91–126. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

chapter 18

The Erotics of Ci n em atic Listen i ng Danijela Kulezic-Wilson

The most dramatic transformations in the landscape of post-war art music can be explained by changing attitudes to listening. Reduced, deep, reflective, dialectical, diffused, aesthetic—these are just some of the types of listening proposed and theorized by composers, sound artists, and scholars who have tried to understand the nature of our engagement with sound and how the latter affects us.1 The ideas of listening as a process, a concept, and as a reflective way of engaging with sound have forever altered the way we understand music. However, during those transformative years, while John Cage was inviting the world to listen to silence and hear the music of the environment, film composers lived by the rule that the best music in a film is that you cannot hear. And if one was determined to actually hear the “unheard melodies,” instead of mirroring the sounds of the new musical universe pulsating outside cinema, what films offered was the “utopian promise” of the past.2 Around the time when the World Soundscape Project, concerned about noise pollution, proposed the concept of acoustic ecology, cinema was getting ready to welcome the “boom aesthetics” of Dolby technology.3 Once so-called post-classical cinema discarded the old rules of transparency and embraced stylistic excesses, giving way to stimulation of the senses and what would become known as “intensified” or “impact” aesthetics, the “unheard melodies” of classical cinema were replaced with digitally programmed concertos of timpani or taiko drumming, rock and techno beats, and elaborately orchestrated explosions.4 The new cinema of the senses makes it clear that it wants to be heard, but is it being listened to? And what does listening to the cinema of the senses entail? In this chapter, I intend to examine the notion of cinematic listening from a position that is informed by the concept of listening as a way of “discovering” music in sound. If, after Cage and Pierre Schaeffer, all sounds can be heard as music, then I suggest that cinematic listening too can be considered as a form of “musicalized” or, we could simply say, musical listening: a process of hearing the entire soundtrack musically. I argue that this process has been facilitated by the integrated approach to the soundtrack and

The Erotics of Cinematic Listening   369 the recent practice of blurring the boundaries between music and soundtrack’s other elements. I see this process as being intimately connected to the emergence of a trend that emphasizes the sensuousness of film form—its sonic and visual textures, composition, rhythm, movement, and flow—without confusing it with sensory overload. This does not mean, however, that musical listening encourages a single mode of engagement with film, oblivious to all other qualities and features of the soundtrack apart from musical ones. On the contrary, just as the idea of listening in contemporary music is associated with multifaceted levels of engagement, so does a musical mode of cinematic listening encourage attention to the aesthetic and reflexive, as well as to the sensuous aspects of the soundtrack. Drawing on the work of Vivian Sobchack and Laura Marks in the area of sensory cinema and on the concept of erotics in art promoted by the feminist discourse in the 1960s and 1970s, I will argue that the pleasures of a musical mode of cinematic listening are more complex and potentially more rewarding than those shaped by the principles of classical soundtrack practice or stimulated by “intensified” aesthetics.5

Listening and Sensuousness The sensual allure of cinema is different from that of other arts because cinema uses “modes of embodied existence to make itself seen, heard, reflexively felt and understood.”6 Vivian Sobchack describes film’s body as a form of mediation necessary for communication between audioviewer and film maker but emphasizes that film’s body is also a “means of perceptually engaging and expressing a world.”7 Although film’s material existence is indeed evident in celluloid, emulsion, and the mechanisms of cinematography and projection, its materiality transcends its technological origins and comes into being by expressing an embodied vision of the world. The dual nature of film’s materiality and the relationship between the sensuousness of cinema on one hand and embodied spectatorship on the other is also observed in Laura Marks’ exploration of the tactile nature of vision in her books Skin of the Film and Touch. Elaborating on Sobchack’s argument that cinema viewing is an exchange between two bodies—that of the viewer and that of the film—Marks states that “the oscillation between the two creates an erotic relationship,”8 since embodied perception is about “the viewer responding to the video as to another body and to the screen as another skin.”9 According to Marks, the eroticism of this relationship is enabled by the haptic visuality of cinema, an embodied perception that draws on senses other than the visual. The erotic nature of video haptics is not dependent on the content of the images but on the relationship between the beholder and the image that encourages the viewer “to dissolve his or her subjectivity in the close and bodily contact with the image.”10 Marks, however, does not address the role of sound in this sensuous exchange, which—in the light of the historical visual bias of film scholarship—is not too surprising but is nevertheless problematic, considering the speed and intensity with which sound affects the audioviewer in both corporeal and affective terms. Joining those scholars

370   Danijela Kulezic-Wilson who have begun to amend this oversight by investigating the impact of sound and music on embodied spectatorship,11 I intend to explore the relationship between the erotics of film sensuousness and the idea of cinematic listening as a process of recognizing the musicality of film soundtracks. My main inspiration for considering the erotic as key to our engagement with art comes from the feminist discourse of the 1960s and ’70s. In her 1964 essay “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag argues that hermeneutic approaches to art take the sensory experience of art “for granted” and that instead of interpretation “we need an erotics of art.”12 Her proclamation can be understood simply as a call to embrace the sensory experience of art but she also notes that our senses have become dull after being bombarded daily by cultural overproduction, excess, and the overall business of an urban environment. We need to “recover our senses,” Sontag asserts, not by “squeezing” more content out of the work than is already there but by learning “to see more, to hear more, to feel more.”13 Sontag’s essay captures astutely the dialectics of the sensory experience within contemporary art and culture, illuminating the tension between the overlooked “erotics” of art, on the one hand, and the numbing aggressiveness of sensory overload, on the other. Adding another dimension to the idea of the erotics of art is Audre Lorde’s 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic,” where she argues that the erotic is “that power which rises from our deepest and non-rational knowledge,” and a nurturer of understanding.14 Determined to reclaim the word “erotic” from the patriarchal culture which associates it specifically with corporeal love and pleasure, Lorde invokes instead its wider meaning as used in philosophy and psychology, alluding to Plato’s idealistic concept of eros as the personification of “creative power and harmony.”15 What has particular relevance in this context is Lorde’s criticism of the way the erotic is misrepresented and misused in our culture. Instead of being explored as a source of empowerment, the erotic is confused with its opposite, the pornographic, which is “direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling.” Misnamed by men and used against women, the erotic “has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation.”16 Although written decades ago, both Sontag’s and Lorde’s comments about the relationship between sensory experiences and sensuality are now more relevant than ever, illuminating broader tendencies in our culture—cinema included—to stimulate the senses through spectacle devoid of substance and to “emphasize sensation without feeling.”17 In cinema, the sensory impact of the soundtrack has been notably augmented since the 1970s by the introduction of Dolby technology and surround sound.18 I argue, however, that the “erotic” power of a film soundtrack—the intimate and transformative aspect of its sensuousness—lies not in the decibel level, the complexity of the texture, or the expanded frequency range, but in its musicality and the ability to recognize it, which concerns both those who create soundtracks and those who experience them. I insist here on distinguishing between “sensory” and “sensuous” in order to emphasize the difference between what is on one hand the purely physical sensation of hearing sound, and on the other an audiovisual experience rooted in a “consensual” engagement with film that is pleasurable on different levels, depending on the extent of that engagement. In a way, this distinction mirrors the one between “hearing” and “listening” as established by proponents

The Erotics of Cinematic Listening   371 of “deep listening”: the former indicates an involuntary response to stimuli while the latter implies the voluntary and selective nature of engaging with sound.19 In this context, the erotics of cinematic listening refers to an inherently musical, sensuous, intimate encounter with film that engages the listener intellectually, emotionally, and viscerally. Although the recognition of the musical potential of the soundtrack is not a recent phenomenon,20 what has brought this potential into focus more recently is the integrated approach to the soundtrack that appreciates the interconnectedness of all its elements. For the sake of clarity, it is worth emphasizing that in this context “integrated” primarily refers to how a soundtrack is or may be approached in practice, rather than analytically, although it is only natural that such a practice will be reflected in its theorization and analysis. In the context of a compartmentalized approach to postproduction, where the value of the soundtrack is measured purely by its narrative functionality, its musical properties are limited to the score alone. But when the film soundtrack is considered in its totality as a composition of speech, music, and sound effects, it is easier to recognize its musicality and the different ways in which it can be generated. The crucial aspect of soundtrack musicalization is the act of listening because sound can be heard as musical only if there is someone to perceive it as such. According to Paul Hegarty, musicality is “about our attentiveness to the sounds of the world.”21 Thus, in order to hear the musicality of a soundtrack, one has to approach it as a potentially musical entity, which applies to both those who create it and those who listen to it. In recent years, the sensuous nature of the soundtrack and its musicality have been directly connected to soundtrack practices that encourage the erosion of boundaries between score and sound design and between speech, music, and sound effects, challenging the structure of classical soundtrack hierarchy. Almost universally, these soundtracks are facilitated by postproduction conditions that are significantly different from those in the mainstream, which means they count on the composer’s early involvement in the process, long postproduction, active collaboration between members of the sound design team on one hand and between the composer and the sound team on the other, and no use of temp tracks. These conditions and an integrated approach to the soundtrack do not, however, produce results that are uniform in any sense. Integrated practices encompass a broad spectrum of narrative concerns and aesthetic styles, resulting in different levels of soundtrack integration, from those in which scores are carefully integrated into the sound design to those in which the line between score and sound design is so blurred that one can be mistaken for the other. I start by exploring the erotic charge of integrated soundtracks that foreground the materiality of the music.

The Sensuousness of Haptic Music In the previous section I referred to Sobchack’s observation about the duality of film’s materiality, which is on one hand apparent in the existence of its own body and on the other in an embodied vision of the world. This duality is at the core of film’s seductive

372   Danijela Kulezic-Wilson power and draws the audioviewer into a complex relationship charged with a concoction of desire and projective impulse that is both carefully designed and deeply individual. The  multidirectional, multi-layered nature of this exchange becomes even more complicated if we bring music into the equation. According to Lawrence Kramer, “the cinematic body is primarily or originarily erotic,”22 but what supplies the cinematic body with corporeal sensuousness is music: To make them living images, as opposed to the disturbingly undead, music must supply its sensorial dimension to the bodily image as form or figure. It must do so as both supplement and contradiction, something that has typically proved most seductive, in every sense, when rooted in the erotics of spectatorship.23

Kramer concludes that “the corporeality of the cinematic body is defined by the erotic potential of the marriage of music and gaze,” proclaiming classical music as the paradigm of cinematic embodiment.24 While Kramer admits that a “love story” between music and cinema can involve any type of music,25 he insists that classical music deserves to be considered as a model precisely because of its carefully cultivated “identity beyond embodiment.”26 Idealized as a form that can never be fully captured by performance or in the score, it was classical music that was the original partner to moving images, giving them body and defining their form in the era of “mute” cinema. But this tells only one side of that love story that in the meantime evolved, spawning various other types of audiovisual relationships. One of them features music that deliberately subverts the cultural ideal of classical music as “bodiless,” foregrounding the materiality of sound and the noises associated with performance, recording, and reproduction, as argued by Miguel Mera. Extending Laura Marks’ concept of visual hapticity with the notion of haptic music, and through an illuminating analysis of Jonny Greenwood’s scores for Paul Thomas Anderson’s films There Will Be Blood (2007) and The Master (2012), Mera demonstrates how the sensuousness of the relationship between film and audioviewer is intensified through instrumental music that approximates noise and avails of haptic “dirtiness” resulting from the use of microtones, clusters, and extended performing techniques.27 A more recent and similarly striking example of a “haptic” compositional style supported creatively by an integrated approach to soundtracks can be found in the collaboration between Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson and Canadian director Denis Villeneuve. Jóhannsson’s interest in creating scores that are an integral part of the sound design, and his taste for timbral and textural coloring rather than melodically oriented material, found particularly effective outlets in Villeneuve’s films Sicario (2015) and Arrival (2016). A significant aspect of the appeal of Jóhannsson’s film music is his harmonic language founded in spectral music and the textural complexity of his orchestral sound enriched with harsh, abrasive noises typical of 1980s industrial music. What particularly brings the materiality of his scores to the fore is his imaginative employment of instruments at the low end of the orchestral register—basses, contrabasses, low woodwinds, contrabassoons, contrabass clarinets, and contrabass saxophones—enhanced by the use of extended techniques.28 An additional component contributing to the

The Erotics of Cinematic Listening   373 c­ reation of his signature sound is the subtle processing of various acoustic instruments to create a hybrid sound that blurs the line between orchestral and electronic. Jóhannsson explains what this involves citing the example of manipulating instrumental recordings for the Arrival score: A low note, for example, recorded at high speed and then played back at the lowest speed becomes this subsonic rumble. We did this with several instruments: cello, trumpet, the human voice. On each channel we were doing sound-on-sound recording, recording over the sound while keeping the previous sound so we had this ghostly remains of the previous loop.29

Among the reasons for the visceral appeal of Jóhannsson’s scores is his natural affinity for shaping his music with references to nature. One of the most memorable tracks in  Sicario is called “The Beast,” its guttural sounds and menacing cello glissandos in extremely low registers evoking the idea of the drug trade as a monstrous organism. This aspect of his style found a perfect match in the main idea behind Arrival’s original visual and sound design, that the representation of an alien world should be organic-based, from the pebble-like shape of the alien ship to the visual representation of the Heptapods as giant octopus-like creatures to the sound design drawing on sounds of sea, wind, and rock, and the alien “voices” created by combining the sounds of camels, pigs, birds, processed human voice, and different instruments including didgeridoo and Māori flute.30 Jóhannsson’s score mirrors the organic feel of the sonic design by relying on orchestral instruments, piano, and voices processed with the help of analogue tapes. His sonic brew of low-register growls, subsonic droning, and piercing timbral combinations evokes both the idea of giant sea-like creatures and the gut-reaction to their imposing presence. Both the Sicario and Arrival scores were developed in a collaborative environment that enabled the composer to be involved in the early stages of preproduction and without the dictate of a temp track so typical of many productions.31 An important part of Jóhannsson’s style is writing “around the sound design,” trying to anticipate what the sound team will do and incorporating that into the score so it “doesn’t feel like the music is a layer that’s tacked on.”32 Conversely, the sound design team working with Villeneuve relishes the challenge of creating sound design for scenes where the music is already locked, as was the case in some scenes in Arrival.33 The compelling results of this type of collaboration are evident, for instance, in the scene in which Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) visits the alien spaceship for the first time. Her ascent from earth into the low-gravity zone of the alien ship is accompanied by rhythmic thumps in 4/4 meter punctuated by the characters’ heavy breathing and rumbling glissando motifs in a low register separated by long pauses. In accordance with the principles of spectral music, the harmonies of Jóhannsson’s score are not complicated, revolving around intervals such as 3rds and 4ths. But in the context of an approach ruled by timbre and its dynamic nuances, the foghorn-like chords preceding the appearance of the alien Heptapods based on clustering of semitone and whole tone intervals gain a powerful otherworldly presence (See Video 18.1). The reappearances of these motifs are interspersed with the Foley sounds associated with the creatures’

374   Danijela Kulezic-Wilson

Video 18.1  Arrival (2016): approaching the Heptapods.

Video 18.2  Under the Skin (2013): lured by the alien.

movements, their whooshes and groans evocative of massive organisms moving under water. And although it is possible to distinguish between the sounds of the score—as they are clearly derived from the material heard at the beginning of the scene—and Foley sounds, their combined timbres, dynamic, and rhythmic pacing constitute a whole, a sound design composition that reverberates through the audioviewer’s body, placing it on the same wavelength as the film’s resonating body. The only note of aesthetic dissonance in Arrival’s soundtrack is the use of Max Richter’s theme “On the Nature of Daylight” to bookend the film. Either a nod to the mainstream market or an ingrained response to emotionally charged scenes, its romantic character can be experienced as a betrayal of the visceral sound established by Jóhannsson’s score in favor of a traditional response to the theme of loss with a language of musical sentimentality.34 In comparison to the instinctual, uncomplicated sensuousness of the sound design and scoring in Villeneuve’s films, the soundtrack in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) is positively unusual, born from dialectical tensions on both narrative and aesthetic levels. Also a sci-fi but with more sinister allegorical resonances, Under the Skin takes place in present-day Glasgow where an alien creature disguised in a female human body (Scarlett Johansson) preys on men so that their flesh can be harvested by her fellow aliens for unknown purposes. The film is based on the eponymous novel by Michel Faber, but it departs from the original in many plot points while retaining some of its themes, particularly those concerning questions of identity, gender relationships, and the nature of humanity. First-time film composer Mica Levi scored Glazer’s film enjoying the same advantages of prolonged postproduction process and collaborative support of the sound team as Jóhannsson did in Villeneuve’s films.35 The result was described as “eerie,” “weird,” and “gorgeously freaky,”36 but universally greeted as the emergence of a strikingly fresh and imaginative compositional voice in film. One of the most memorable themes from Under the Skin is a viola solo accompanying the scenes in which the alien (named only as “the Female” in the credits) lures her victims into a mysterious thick black liquid, which traps their bodies until their insides are to be sucked out of their skin (see Video 18.2). Its two-step, semitone-tritone leap, the repetition of which almost mimetically evokes the idea of teasing and enticing, is simultaneously seductive and discomforting, being distorted through the use of microtones and processing, reflecting the fact that—as the composer puts it—the music is “not something coming from the character . . . it’s fake in a sense that it is something she’s putting on like make-up.”37 Being an experienced violist, Levi explored the instrument trying to find “something identifiably human in it” and then, like Jóhannsson did in Arrival, manipulated that material by slowing it down or changing the pitch “to make it feel uncomfortable.”38 Intriguingly, the same theme is

The Erotics of Cinematic Listening   375 used later when the alien is attacked by a logger who tries to rape her, which seems to comment on the fact that in both situations, when the alien is tasked to lure human men to their death as well as when being attacked, she is reduced to her corporeal shell, perceived and treated as a “piece of meat.” Levi’s score delights in the full range of idiomatic writing for strings including ­glissandos, rhythmic use of tremolos, microtonal screeches in the highest register, and harmonic clustering combined with electronics. While the musical language itself foregrounds the materiality of the music, it is paired with an unusually frugal production design in the scenes that take us inside the alien world. Instead of relying on flashy special effects, these scenes are reduced to uniformly black or white backgrounds featuring symbolic images that sometimes transition into the abstract. This contrast between the stark sparseness of the visual design, the effect of which is comparable to the original shock of Kazimir Malevich’s suprematist paintings, and the highly sensual score, captures the seductive allure of this film in a nutshell. Its dialectic charge spills into almost every other aspect of the film’s narrative and aesthetic content, illuminating the tensions between the abstract and the corporeal, the Eros and Thanatos,39 human and Other. Most provocative is the film’s juxtaposition of a femme fatale stereotype as a culturally ingrained representation of female sexuality with the exposure of exploitation and assault as common ways in which men respond to it. On the narrative surface, the sensuousness of Under the Skin seems to be in direct opposition to the idea of erotics as explained by Lorde, presenting female sensuality not as a source of inner power but either as a resource for exploitation or as a lethal weapon. However, by laying bare the culture of mistreatment perpetrated both by alien and human men against women, the film makes the same point as Lorde in her essay where she bemoans the misrepresentation and misuse of erotics. And in the midst of its silently observed cycle of exploitation, seduction, and murder, what makes the film’s sensuous heart beat is Levi’s haunting music. Reflecting the film’s underlying opposing forces, her score embodies both sensuality and danger. The grittiness of extended techniques with noises of scraping and grinding and the beehive of tremolos and microtonal clusters accentuate the corporeal forces that drive the narrative as well as the medium’s materiality. But there is also something deeply melancholic and forgiving about the score’s glissando moans and distorted melodies that allow the music to elevate the film above the harshness of the story, its spirit rising like the smoke from the alien’s remains in the film’s closing shot, disappearing into the sky.

The Musical Sensuousness of Sound Design The previous examples demonstrate how music that foregrounds its materiality intensifies both the sensuousness of the film body and its relationship with the audioviewer. But the potential for providing this erotic charge in “the marriage of music and gaze” stretches

376   Danijela Kulezic-Wilson well beyond any traditional notions of film scoring or indeed traditional notions of what constitutes music. Following on from my proposal that the erotics of cinematic listening is derived from a mode of listening as a process of “discovering” music in sound, I argue that in the last two decades the sensuousness of this relationship has been particularly nurtured by the practice in which the boundary between score and sound design is even more explicitly blurred than in the aforementioned examples, disrupting the hierarchy between speech, music, and sound effects. Music-based and music-inspired, this practice shows a notable disregard for principles of the classical tradition and the conventional roles ascribed to soundtrack elements. Its many forms include the musicalization of speech and/or sound effects, blurring the line between score and ambient sound, merging pre-existing musique concrète or electroacoustic music with diegetic sound, and treating diegetic sound as musique concrète. One of the most provocative and pioneering examples of this approach can be found in Gus Van Sant’s films Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003), and Last Days (2005), also known as his Death Trilogy. Despite the fact that all three films are loosely based on real-life events, they are all shot in an observational style, eschewing devices typical of plot- or character-driven cinema, focusing instead on elements of cinematic form and style. They explore the sensuousness of film form through aspects of composition, the rhythmic effects of temporal verticality and circularity, the photogénie of cinematic movement, and the musicality of the films’ visual and sonic rhythms. And yet, even though predominantly preoccupied with aesthetic concerns evocative of “pure cinema,” the films’ unconventional use of pre-existing tracks of electroacoustic music and musique concrète in the sound design also encourage audioviewers’ reflexive engagement, especially in Elephant. The dominant ethos of the Death Trilogy films evokes principles of musicality typical of the twentieth-century fascination with found sounds, their musical manipulation and a musical engagement with the environment. In Gerry and Elephant, the scenes that constitute the backbone of the audiovisual action and exploration of film musicality show characters just walking. In Gerry the sound of two friends walking through the desert is predominantly diegetic, a sort of found sound which, because of the length of the walking scenes and the sound’s repetitiveness, allows the intimate and inherently musical engagement with image and sound that is essential to the erotics of cinematic listening. In contrast to manipulative devices typical of the musicalized approach to image and sound editing inspired by MTV culture and digital technology, such as in the intensified aesthetics as described by Carol Vernallis or Darren Aronofsky’s hip hop editing,40 and by focusing simply on observation of a movement and the sound it produces, Gerry epitomizes the principles of a musical mode of listening that is all about attentiveness to the sounds of the world. Elephant’s audiovisual style is even more intimate, based on an observational approach that gives the film an almost documentary feel. The soundtrack, however, frequently traverses the diegetic boundary, mixing diegetic ambient sounds with pre-existing soundscape and musique concrète compositions by Hildegard Westerkamp and Francis White, which prompted Randolph Jordan to suggest contemplating the film’s sound design as a type of soundscape composition.41 In the first half of the film, which shows

The Erotics of Cinematic Listening   377

Video 18.3  Elephant (2003): lost “Beneath the Forrest Floor.”

an ordinary day in an ordinary American high school, it is almost impossible to identify the presence of pre-existing tracks in the diegetic mix. While this approach undermines the habitual division between diegetic and non-diegetic, it also promotes sound above its traditionally supportive role, foregrounding sensuous aspects of the cinematic experience while also facilitating space for reflexivity. Like in a soundscape composition, which invites both the exploration of the acoustic space and the listener’s engagement with it, so does the soundtrack encourage us to recognize its musicality but also its relationship to the narrative, establishing the sound design as a core site of interrogation in a seemingly non-committal and purely observational narrative. The allegorical aspects of the sound design’s musical content become especially clear in the film’s final tragic moments during which sounds from Hildegard Westerkamp’s “Beneath the Forrest Floor,” a composition which celebrates the peaceful and rejuvenating spirit of nature, merge with diegetic sounds of a massacre. A seemingly odd juxtaposition, it subtly contrasts the idea of inner strength, purity, “a sense of balance and focus” transmitted by nature, with a technologically advanced culture which seems to have lost its “inner forest.” 42 (See Video 18.3). The most striking example of how recent changes in soundtrack practice influenced by the “sensuous turn” have affected our way of listening to film is evident in the treatment of speech. In a sensuous approach to film, speech—once the undisputed sovereign of the film soundtrack and a vital source of narrative information and therefore essential for securing a pleasurable and passive audio viewing experience—is musicalized in direct opposition to the vococentric laws of intelligibility. In films constructed upon musical principles like, for instance, Darren Aronofsky’s Pi (1998), Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1999), and Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina (2012), words and sentences are incorporated into a musical structure, used in a rhythmical manner and as punctuation. In more drastic examples of musicalization, even the denotative function of language is downplayed, undermining the very foundations of soundtrack hierarchy in order to achieve a musical sense of rhythm or flow. Commenting on the “speech aestheticization” in Sally Potter’s Yes (2004), John Richardson observes that what sustains the musicality of the film’s audiovisual flow is the erosion of the distinction between the characters’ inner and external voices and other sounds of the diegetic world.43 This description also captures quite accurately the soundtrack approach behind the sensuous style in Terrence Malick’s films such as The Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012), Knight of Cups (2015), and Song to Song (2017). All of these films suspend the classical rules of narration, relying on non-chronological editing and the language of mise-en-scène rather than traditional storytelling devices. In an attempt to provide an insight into his protagonists’ inner states of mind by cinematic means, Malick presents the characters’ experiences and memories through disjointed audiovisual fragments in which diegetic sound effects and speech are often

378   Danijela Kulezic-Wilson layered with non-diegetic music and poetic voiceovers. All these films also draw on the sensuousness of haptic visuality by highlighting tactile actions such as erotic encounters, musical performances, and repeated images of hands touching their surroundings or protagonists touching each other. The mannerisms of Malick’s visual style, such as characters wandering through fields or on beaches, twirling impulsively, and touching everything around them, have been described as exasperating and mesmeric in equal measure.44 Yet no other filmmaker has managed to match the sensuousness of visual style with the same level of sonic intimacy as Malick does with his use of voiceover. Often intertwined with the score or diegetic speech, the voiceovers in Malick’s films are delivered in a subdued or whispered manner, as if we are overhearing characters’ private ruminations. As Daniel Falck points out,45 this is the type of delivery that Chion calls “emanation speech,” as it is “a sort of emanation of the characters, not essential for understanding significant action or meaning.”46 The meaning of the words is of less importance than the timbre of the voice and its affective quality, which inevitably contributes to the decentering of speech47 in the au­di­o­vis­ual context. The musical use of emanation speech is even more pronounced in Malick’s later films such as The Tree of Life, To the Wonder, and Song to Song, as Malick moves from questions concerning specific characters to broader questions of existence and the relationship of humans to nature and God, so that voiceovers become not only emanations of a character but also of a particular state of mind, or even collective consciousness. This type of speech relativization, as Chion calls it,48 not only challenges the supremacy of dialogue as the main conveyer of meaning but it also allows new possibilities for integrating it into an audiovisual context where the fusion of soundtrack elements is much greater and more fluid.49 Malick takes advantage of that by treating a continuous stream of characters’ inner monologues in the same way as he treats atmospheric nondiegetic music and vice versa. In his cinematic universe the information gained from a scene accompanied only by music is as relevant as that received from a voiceover, and the latter is framed as musically as the former. Speech and music are either interchangeable or fused in such a way that, thanks to the voiceovers’ soft, whispery, intimate delivery, the words can be heard as being part of the music (see Video 18.4). A particularly intriguing aspect of Malick’s films is that the essence of their au­di­o­vis­ ual style lies in a unique combination of sensuousness and spirituality. In her article “Eros and Contemplation,” Kathleen E. Urda explains how the erotic relationships in Malick’s films are often intertwined with allegorical contemplations on divine love, cinematic explorations of the former often overlapping with the latter, either in subtext or explicitly, as in Fr. Quintana’s (Javier Bardem) voiceovers in To the Wonder, for instance.50 I would argue, though, that the audiovisual erotics in the most sensuous of all Malick’s films, The Tree of Life, are entirely spiritual, driven by universal questions about the meaning of life and a search for the ekstasis of surrender. The combination of spirituality

Video 18.4  Tree of Life (2011): whispered voiceovers.

The Erotics of Cinematic Listening   379 and sensuous audiovisual style is not exceptional in itself—one only has to remember Tarkovsky’s films—but what distinguishes Malick’s approach is the “rhapsodic” narrative style and the prevalence of internal monologues in the soundtrack often presented as emanation speech. Intertwining fragments of a story about family, love, and loss with images that celebrate the physical world in all its glory, from a microscopic view of a cell to the wonders of the universe, The Tree of Life is primarily interested in the nature of our relationship with God. After the opening abstract image that could be interpreted as a visual representation of a divine spark, a voiceover belonging to Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain), the mother of the main character Jack (Sean Penn), talks about two ways of life: the way of nature and the way of grace. In the former the accent is on pleasing oneself and others but one nevertheless often finds reasons to be unhappy even “when all the world is shining around it.” The way of grace is about acceptance, patience, and humility—the way of God. The Tree of Life seems to strive towards achieving its own way of grace by expressing the admiration and gratitude for “all the world that is shining around us” not only by capturing the images of nature in its full force and breath-taking beauty but also by using all available audiovisual means to make the medium of film a reflection of that beauty. In that sense The Tree of Life is an exquisitely sensual and sensuous celebration of the physical life as well as a form of worship.

Conclusion Similar to how Malick’s films embody different types of eroticism, so the erotic relationship between film and audioviewer inevitably conflates different notions of the erotic and can be established through different experiential modes. Although the sensuousness of the film body is directly related to its audiovisual content, the erotic potential of film should not be confused with its subject matter, even though on a basic level it can include responses to explicitly sensual content and the way it is represented on screen and in the soundtrack. The erotics of film is certainly forged by an integrated soundtrack that is conceived musically and experienced through a musical mode of listening. In the broadest sense, the notion of erotics of film is also a metaphor for the depth and complexity of the intimate relationship between film and audioviewer, which is cerebral and embodied, intellectually stimulating and sensual, and can be a “turn-on” aesthetically, physically, and spiritually. As the scoring styles discussed in this chapter show, the sensuousness of film form is intensely emphasized through the use of film music that foregrounds its materiality and, as Mera says, encourages and even demands an embodied relationship with the audioviewer.51 This is a type of music that emphasizes “haptic dirtiness” both in the texture of the score and its performance, that is oriented towards timbre rather than melody, that uses technology to blur the line between acoustic and electronic and between sound and noise. On the other hand, as demonstrated by examples from Van Sant’s and Malick’s

380   Danijela Kulezic-Wilson films, film does not need an actual, traditional score52 to draw on the erotic charge of musical sensuality but simply a musical mode of listening. This is listening conceived as a process, as attentiveness, as an engagement with one’s surroundings, and as a way of “discovering” music in sound. While the musical mode of listening can be encouraged through different means, most, as this chapter shows, include a disruption of previously established borders and hierarchical relationships that include blurring the lines between diegetic and nondiegetic, acoustic and electronic, score and sound design, music and sound effects, speech and music, and so on. In that sense, the musical mode of listening in cinema leans heavily on the tendency of contemporary music and sound practice to obliterate traditional boundaries and explore the sonic world beyond them. As I argued earlier, the very notion of soundtrack musicality is not bound to recent developments in practice and has been championed by practitioners and scholars such as Dziga Vertov and Noël Burch respectively at different moments in cinema history. It is undeniable, however, that in the recent two decades the way we listen to film has been increasingly shaped by integrated and musical approaches to the soundtrack evident in practice. By catching up with the widely inclusive sonic world of contemporary music both in practical and aesthetic/philosophical terms, the musical approach to the integrated soundtrack has also released the deeply sensuous potential of film that used to be constrained by the requirements of narrative functionality. Going beyond those constraints and beyond the intensified aesthetics of sensory overload, this approach allows the soundtrack to reveal its “hidden” musicality and the seductive power intrinsic to film. Activating the musical mode of listening does not, however, mean that music has to forfeit its more conventional narrative roles. In all the aforementioned films music illuminates certain aspects of the narrative and provides space for reflection. Whether the films explore the mysteries of existence by conjuring an alien world, as in Arrival and Under the Skin, or by observing and exploring life on Earth, as in Malick’s and Van Sant’s films, their soundtracks open portals into a different perceptual dimension in which an intensely sensuous experience facilitates a deeper way of knowing, to paraphrase Lorde. After all, sensuousness is not (only) in and about the body, and in order to experience the erotics of cinema in full, one has to discover its inner music.

Notes 1. Some useful sources documenting and commenting on how developments in the music scene after the Second World War affected our engagement with sound and approach to listening include Joanna Demers, Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), which discusses Pierre Schaeffer’s concept of “reduced listening” and introduces the concept of “aesthetic listening,” and The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts, ed. David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001). For more about “deep listening,” see Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice (Lincoln,

The Erotics of Cinematic Listening   381 NE: iUniverse, 2005); for more about “reflective listening,” see Katharine Norman, “RealWorld Music as Composed Listening,” Contemporary Music Review 15, no. 1 (1996): 1–27, and Randolph Jordan, “The Ecology of Listening while Looking in the Cinema: Reflective Audioviewing in Gus Van Sant’s Elephant,” Organised Sound 17, no. 3 (Special Issue, “Sound, Listening and Place II”) (2012): 248–56. For more about “dialectical listening,” see Vieira de Carvalho, “Towards Dialectic Listening: Quotation and Montage in the Work of Luigi Nono,” Contemporary Music Review 18, no. 2 (1999): 37–85. See also Journal of Sonic Studies 2, no. 1 (2012) dedicated to exploring different modes of listening: http://journal. sonicstudies.org/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=sonic;sid=41c0763be36fe470672af7659a46018d; tpl=browse-toc-02.tpl. 2. See Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Caryl Flinn, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 3. See, for instance, Jay Beck, “The Sounds of ‘Silence’: Dolby Stereo, Sound Design and The Silence of the Lambs,” in Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound, ed. Jay Beck and Tony Grayeda (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 70–71; Mark Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); Gianluca Sergi, The Dolby Era: Film Sound in Contemporary Hollywood (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004). 4. Post-classical cinema’s emphasis on sensory stimulation facilitated by modern technology, including Dolby and surround sound, has been described as “intensified,” “impact,” and “boom” aesthetics. Referring to David Bordwell’s concept of “intensified continuity,” Carol Vernallis uses the expression “intensified aesthetics” in Unruly Media: You Tube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); commenting on the influence of modern sound technology on the narrative style of post-classical cinema, both Jay Beck and Anahid Kassabian talk about “boom aesthetics,” in “The Sounds of Silence” and Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity (Berkeley: California University Press, 2013) respectively; while Jeff Smith uses the term “impact aesthetics” in “The Sound of Intensified Continuity,” in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 331–56. 5. A broader examination of the relationship between sensuousness and the integrated soundtrack can be found in my monograph Sound Design is the New Score: Theory, Aesthetics, and Erotics of the Integrated Soundtrack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 6. Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 3–4. 7. Ibid., 168. 8. Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 13. 9. Ibid., 4. 10. Ibid., 13. 11. See Lisa Coulthard in Chapter 17 in this volume. See also Lisa Coulthard, “Dirty Sound: Haptic Noise in New Extremism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, ed. Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 115–26; Lisa Coulthard, “Acoustic Disgust: Sound, Affect, and Cinematic Violence,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated

382   Danijela Kulezic-Wilson Soundtracks, ed. Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 183–93; Miguel Mera, “Towards 3-D Sound: Spatial Presence and the Space Vacuum,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks, ed. Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 91–111; Miguel Mera, “Materializing Film Music,” in The Cambridge Companion to Film Music, ed. Mervin Cooke and Fiona Ford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 157–72; Caitriona Walsh, “Obscene Sounds: Sex, Death, and the Body On-Screen,” Music and the Moving Image 10, no. 3 (2017): 36–54; Ben Winters, “Corporeality, Musical Heartbeats, and Cinematic Emotion,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 2, no. 1 (2008): 3–25. 12. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (London: Vintage, 2001 [1967]), 13–14. 13. Ibid., 14. 14. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007 [1984]), 53. 15. Ibid., 55. 16. Ibid., 54. 17. Ibid. 18. For an insightful analysis of the visceral effects sound brings to the “impact” aesthetics of contemporary cinema see Smith, “The Sound of Intensified Continuity.” 19. See Oliveros, Deep Listening, xxi–xxiii. 20. The origin of the idea that the soundtrack in its totality can have musical qualities and can be treated in a musical way coincides with the introduction of recorded sound in cinema. From Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbas (1930), which emphasizes the musicality of diegetic sounds recorded in factories and mines, to Gus Van Sant’s films such as Elephant (2003) and Paranoid Park (2007), which use pre-existing pieces of musique concrète as diegetic sound, filmmakers such as Robert Bresson, Sergio Leone, David Lynch, Darren Aronofsky, and many others have explored the musical potential of the soundtrack. Sources discussing this phenomenon include Noël Burch, Theory of Film Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, The Musicality of Narrative Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); James Wierzbicki, “Sound as Music in the Films of Terrence Malick,” in The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, ed. Hannah Patterson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 112–24. 21. Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 6. 22. Lawrence Kramer, “Classical Music, Virtual Bodies, Narrative Film,” in The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies, ed. David Neumeyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 351–65: 354. 23. Kramer, “Classical Music, Virtual Bodies, Narrative Film,” 356. 24. Ibid., 354. 25. Ibid., 352, 26. Ibid., 357. 27. Mera, “Materializing Film Music,” 160. 28. Sinister vibrations and dark, low rumbling timbres are so naturally associated with Jóhannsson’s style that one could be forgiven for thinking that it was after all he who provided the tracks of this description for Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and not Benjamin Wallfisch and Hans Zimmer, who were hired to replace Jóhannsson’s score in Villeneuve’s sequel to the original 1982 sci-fi classic.

The Erotics of Cinematic Listening   383 29. Hrishikesh Hirway, “Song Exploder: Jóhann Jóhannsson on the Secrets of Arrival’s Score,” Vulture, posted on November 17, 2016, http://www.vulture.com/2016/11/arrival-scorejohann-johannsson-song-exploder.html. 30. For a detailed account of creating the sound design for Arrival see Asbjoern Andersen, “Creating the Poetic Sci-Fi Sound Of ‘Arrival’, ” A Sound Effect, posted November 18, 2016, https://www.asoundeffect.com/arrival-sound/. 31. Jóhannsson accounts for his imaginative solutions by noting that the director and editor who worked on Sicario and Arrival don’t use temp tracks. Instead of being straight-jacketed with a temp track and a request to shape his score on some previously successful model, Jóhannsson was challenged by Villeneuve to produce “something he hasn’t heard in the cinema before.” Matt Grobar, “ ‘Sicario’ Composer Jóhann Jóhannsson On Creating Propulsive Sound Of Drug War Drama—AwardsLine,” Deadline, posted on December 23, 2015, http://deadline.com/2015/12/johann-johannsson-sicario-composer-oscars-bestscore-1,201,664,692/. For more insight on damaging effect of temp tracks on scoring, see Miguel Mera and Ron Sadoff, “Shaping the Soundtrack? Hollywood Preview Audiences,” in The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound, ed. Miguel Mera, Ron Sadoff, and Ben Winters (London: Routledge, 2017), 299–301. 32. Grobar, “Sicario’ Composer Jóhann Jóhannsson on Creating Propulsive Sound of Drug War Drama.” 33. See, for instance, how supervising sound editor Sylvain Bellemare, sound mixer Claude La Haye, and re-recording mixer Bernard Gariépy Strobl explain the process of creating sound design and adjusting sound effects so that they integrate with the score in the scene in which a helicopter brings Louise Banks (Amy Adams) to the military base: “The making of Arrival's BAFTA-winning sound mix,” BAFTA Guru, published on April 1, 2017, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvW1dSWNEqQ, accessed October 22, 2018. 34. For a contrasting reading of the use of Max Richter to convey a particular sense of time and space, see John Richardson et al. in Chapter 19 of this Handbook. 35. For more details about the sound postproduction and the collaboration between Levi and Under the Skin’s sound designer Johnnie Burn, see John Hough, “Under the Skin of Film Sound—An Interview with Johnnie Burn,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks, ed. Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 377–84. 36. Ryan Lattanzio, “Mica Levi on Why Composing ‘Under the Skin’ Was ‘Really Mental’, ” IndieWire, November 10, 2014, http://www.indiewire.com/2014/11/mica-levi-on-whycomposing-under-the-skin-was-really-mental-190,232/. 37. Mica Levi, DVD Extras—Behind-the-Scenes Interviews, Under the Skin, directed by Jonathan Glazer (Studiocanal, 2014), DVD. 38. Mica Levi, “How Mica Levi Got Under the Skin of Her First Film Soundtrack,” The Guardian, March 15, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/mar/15/micalevi-under-the-skin-soundtrack. 39. For more on the tension between these two forces in Under the Skin, see Caitriona Walsh’s illuminating analysis in “Obscene Sounds: Sex, Death, and the Body On-Screen,” Music and the Moving Image 10, no. 3 (2017): 36–54. 40. See, for instance, Vernallis, Unruly Media; and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, “A Musical Approach to Filmmaking: Hip Hop and Techno Composing Techniques and Models of Structuring in Darren Aronofsky’s Pi,” Music and the Moving Image 1, no. 1 (2008): 19–34, http://mmi.press.uiuc.edu/1.1/wilson.html.

384   Danijela Kulezic-Wilson 41. Jordan, “The Ecology of Listening while Looking in the Cinema.” 42. In her program note to “Beneath the Forest Floor,” Hildegard Westerkamp says that the composition, recorded in the Carmanah Valley on Vancouver Island, “is attempting to provide a space in time for the experience of [inner] peace.” It is also meant to encourage listeners to visit this place to experience “real knowledge of what is lost if these forests disappear—not only the trees but also the inner strength they transmit to us, a sense of balance and focus, new energy and life. The inner forest, the forest in us.” Quoted in The Book of Music & Nature, ed. David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 239. 43. John Richardson, “Between Speech, Music, and Sound: The Voice, Flow, and the Aestheticizing Impulse in Audiovisual Media,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Western Art, ed. Yael Kaduri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 479–501. 44. Peter Bradshaw, “Song to Song Review—Terrence Malick’s Latest Is Sometimes Exasperating, Sometimes Mesmeric,” The Guardian, July 6, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/ jul/06/song-to-song-review-terrence-malick-rooney-mara-michael-fassbender-ryan-gosling. 45. Referenced in Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening, 34. 46. Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 222. 47. Another term of Chion’s, it indicates that filmic elements such as movement, framing, and editing “are not centered around speech,” which allows visual and sonic content to be independent from each other, creating a type of cinematic polyphony (Audio-Vision, 182–83.) 48. Chion, Audio-Vision, 178. 49. Ibid., 182. 50. Kathleen E. Urda, “Eros and Contemplation: The Catholic Vision of Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 19, no. 1 (2016): 130–47. 51. Mera, “Materializing Film Music,” 160. 52. I deliberately use the term “score” instead of “music” here, allowing the possibility that sound design itself can be perceived as music.

Chapter 19

Sensi ng Ti m e a n d Space through the Sou n dtr acks of I n terstell a r a n d A r r i va l John Richardson, Anna-Elena Pääkkölä, and Sanna Qvick

In this chapter we consider two recent science-fiction films as benchmarks for new ways of configuring the listening body in time and space. Interstellar (2014, dir. Christopher Nolan; music by Hans Zimmer) and Arrival (2016, dir. Denis Villeneuve; music by Jóhann Jóhannsson) are both characterized by multisensory involvement and employ extended expressive means which imply a new relationship between the screen, the soundtrack, and audience engagement, in which the immersiveness of new cinema disorientates and re-orientates audioviewers towards visceral experiences.1 In this sense, Interstellar and Arrival are emblematic of how, in science fiction cinema, music and sound design play a vital role in transporting audioviewers from familiar experiential domains.2 As Robynn Stilwell has commented, sci-fi “requires the kind of leaps of imagination that sound is particularly adept at suggesting and shaping, not just creatures, objects and ideas, but space and time.”3 Our investigation will attempt to unravel how these two films combine existing—even traditional—means with more innovative approaches to sonic and multisensory expression in ways that are redefining what it means to listen cinematically. A central claim of this chapter will be that the new sci-fi cinema exemplifies an approach that erodes the boundaries between the cinemagoer as a corporeal, experiencing being and the sounds and images this being encounters in films. While we would defend calling this new cinema “immersive,” this does not invariably require the sort of

386   john richardson, anna-elena pääkkölä, and sanna qvick audience involvement that spectatorship theory was concerned with in classic cinema— where the audioviewer was stitched into the film narrative through primary identification with the film’s protagonists on the level of plot and projected subjecthood—but rather a mode of attachment through the senses where the very space and time audioviewers occupy is understood as transformed and continuous with the cinematic world. As John Richardson and Claudia Gorbman wrote in the Introduction to The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, “[w]e always meet films, or any audiovisual event, halfway as we respond internally with embodied actions and built-in empathetic mechanisms to the sounds and images we encounter.”4 This is, indeed, invariably the case, but the technologies and expressive strategies of the new cinema— especially, we would argue, the sci-fi new cinema—push us to the edge of the sensible and into the realm of the sensory as never before. Often stigmatized as a pulp genre, sci-fi has long offered a vehicle for addressing farreaching philosophical and sociocultural questions in the guises of speculative and allegorical story worlds. Arguably, the very difference of these story worlds from everyday experiences makes them more impactful.5 Nowhere is this more apparent than in the auteurist works of directors like Jean-Luc Godard (Alphaville, 1965), Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968), Andrei Tarkovsky (Solaris, 1971), and Nicolas Roeg (The Man Who Fell to Earth, 1976). These arthouse classics have significantly influenced a recent spate of sci-fi movies that, however, are also close in style to the audiovisual mainstream. Farah Mendlesohn proposes that sci-fi’s main affective constituent is a sense of wonder and awe towards new possibilities and towards exploring the unknown, futuristic technologies, and scientific breakthroughs; in short, wonder at the universe as both a physical and a technological sphere.6 This orientation is not, however, without complications. Resembling the concept of “the sublime” in Romantic aesthetics, this awe is closely attached to feelings of melancholy and ennui arising from the fact that the desired goal can never be attained;7 you cannot reach or pin down the universe. Unsurprisingly for a genre that draws extensively on tropes of the Kantian and Burkean sublime (the unexplored, the uninhabitable, the unfathomably large), sci-fi music often adopts a Romantic aesthetic, including musical features such as epic scale and volume in arrangements, chromaticism, and uses of unresolved dissonance. Fear, we would argue, is more corporeally present if listeners are made to tremble in their seats; unfathomable scale more easily achieved if sounds encircle listeners. All of which coalesces in the new cinema’s allegiance to the corporeal. Besides Romantic aesthetics, several additional sonic modalities are entangled in the examples discussed here. Experimental and extended compositional techniques have long featured prominently in sci-fi aesthetics, unsurprisingly perhaps given that a goal of directors and their soundtrack collaborators has often been to portray unfamiliar and extreme experiences.8 The fact that so much of this sonic expression comes close to sound design, Foley work, or even sound art is not exceptional to this genre, since much of the recent cinema works in this way. As Vivian Sobchack and William Whittington have argued, greater license is given to composers and sound designers in sci-fi than in other expressive domains due to the

Sensing Time and Space   387 apparently limitless potential of the experiences portrayed.9 In the soundtracks we will discuss, this includes techniques germane to atonal, post-serial, spectral and microtonal, electronic, and postminimalist composition. As David Huckvale has noted, the context of film music permits a comfortable alliance between the avant-garde and the accessibility of popular styles. This is accentuated in soundtracks incorporating postminimalism, which has more successfully traversed cultural divides than most avant-garde styles.10 We are not concerned merely with the ability of music in film to arouse the body through uses of rhythm and volume, which K. J. Donnelly emphasizes in his discussion of cinematic corporeality.11 For us, the process bears also on issues of time, space, and multimodal interaction. Namely, techniques of postminimalist music, including additive and other cellular techniques; processual and evolving structures in timbre, pitch, and harmony; stylized counterpoint; and audiovisual anempathy or non-synchronicity, offer unique potential for challenging conventional ideas of time and space. An additional factor in postminimalism is the use of historical reference, including Baroque and Romantic tropes, which run in parallel to the visual narrative of the film, syncing up closely with dramatic actions only occasionally.12 Whereas the primary modality in the examples discussed in this earlier work could be described as one of “disaffection,”13 we place more of an emphasis on sonic atmospheres or “sound architectures.”14 These give voice to the experiences of characters (be they human or otherwise) and delineate the mentality of sci-fi as unabashedly “affective,” which corresponds with our earlier observation concerning the relevance of Romantic music.15 The salience of minimalism is most apparent when it comes to configurations of time, where sequential or linear time is replaced by cyclical and non-linear formations that imply both corporeality and technology. It is this combination of the organic and non-organic and the elision of subjective human agency which brings about an uncanny impression of presence in absence, and communicates the films’ dominant themes of extreme experience, non-linguistic encounters with the unknown or alien, spatiotemporal elision, and corporeal involvement. The changes we are outlining here, comprising minimalism and other experimental and extended techniques, music and sound design, suggest an emerging aesthetic of scifi soundtracks that extends earlier theorizations, including that of Philip Hayward.16 This aesthetic and the various forms it takes revolve around three primary facets: embodied experience; an altered sense of space; and an altered sense of time. Michel Chion was among the first to contend that the audiovisual is never confined solely to vision and sound, but extends to tactile, kinetic, temporal, dynamic, and other domains of sensory experience.17 Here we go further by arguing that soundtracks in new science fiction cinema afford a distinct sense of immersion that narrows the gap between cinematic action and audience experiences. This understanding of multisensory film music theory extends Laura Marks’s discussions of embodiment; more specifically, her work on “haptic visuality.”18 Contrary to much of existing theory on multimodality, we take music, sound effects and voices as the starting point of our discussion, building on earlier writing (such as that of Antunes)19 but arguing for an approach that extends beyond the “five senses” to include also:

388   john richardson, anna-elena pääkkölä, and sanna qvick • Balance, gravity, and space (including sensory abilities that have been classed kinesthetic, proprioceptive, and equilibrioceptive) • Time (including an impression of altered time) • Embodied immersion (extending to vibration or mechanoreception; temperature or thermoception; pain or nociception; and other domains of human experiences) Since a priority in sci-fi films is to convince audiences of the existence of credible nonTerran spaces or alternative realities, integrated multisensory music and sounds play a specific role in encouraging immersion. For us, this immersion goes beyond psychological identification to the very situations where films are encountered. In The Visible and the Invisible, Maurice Merleau-Ponty has argued that when discussing tactile contact, the act of perception implies an intermingling of subject and object, their mutual enfolding— something that is true not only experientially but on a molecular and “fleshy” level, in terms of how we interact with the physical environment.20 Touching, in this view, necessitates also being touched, whether the object in question is itself sensate or inanimate, which in turn repositions the experiencing subject as object to another subject. Extending this principle to vision, an element of distance is introduced. Nevertheless, the seer has the potential to become the seen in much the same way; the scene of a painting (for example, a landscape), becomes a vista from which the perceiving subject might equally be observed.21 This notion challenges the Romantic solitary subject, replacing it with an embodied or “fleshy” subject whose boundaries are continuous with the surrounding environment. This has implications not only in terms of classic cinematic theory, including the positioning of the gaze and its attendant aural and sonic mechanisms, but also gender theory and ecological questions. The implication is that sound permeates not only the cinematic subject but extends the boundaries of that subject into cinematic space and time.

Interstellar Overdrive: A Tale of Gravity and Awe Interstellar is one of several films by Christopher Nolan that deal with expanded notions of time (especially Memento, 2000; and Inception 2010). Its soundtrack, in the words of YouTube’s Honest Trailers,22 features “emotional swells that sound like Hans Zimmer fell asleep at his organ”—one of several factors that led audiences to complain that the music usurps auditive space ordinarily reserved for dialogue.23 There is undeniably a preponderance of crescendos and pedal tones in the soundtrack, which could create that impression. In fact, the organ swells serve a specific audiovisual purpose, functioning as extending stingers chords, drawing attention to dramatically significant moments, and calling out for affective responses.24 Furthermore, it could be argued that the purpose

Sensing Time and Space   389 Example 19.1  The Baroque minimalism of Cooper and his daughter Murph’s music, reflecting both characters’ scientific rationality and their separation in time and space. Hans Zimmer: Interstellar, “Day One” (2014). All transcription are by the authors.

Video 19.1  Interstellar, Launch scene.

of mixing the sound and music differently was, indeed, a push towards a new kind of aestheticism in which sound is purposely prioritized over dialogue.25 In our view, Interstellar and Arrival stand out as representing a new approach where musical “meaning” is not the main point, and music becomes a vehicle for conveying visceral intensity facilitated by changes in cinema sound systems and home hi-fi setups. This is not to say, of course, that the films are without precursors. Philip Glass’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982) is a clear point of reference for Interstellar, along with many cap tips in the direction of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). This is recognizable also in the palette of borrowed music Kubrick used in his soundtrack, including Ligeti’s high modernism and Strauss’s late Romantic extended tonality, combined in Nolan’s film with a distinctly Wagnerian approach to tonal materials and chromaticism, all of which places the score in a powerful affective register. The score of Interstellar comprises an ensemble combining thirty-four string instruments, twenty-four woodwinds, four pianos, sixty choir singers, and, additionally, a church organ, which becomes the most persuasive instrument when it comes to the sort of powerful embodied involvement we are discussing here. The expressive range of the organ combined with the rhythmic and dynamic qualities of the music and how it is mixed in the soundtrack make it impossible to ignore. One of the more prominent musical themes in Interstellar appears for the first time in the cornfield chase early on in the film and is reprised in grander forms as it progresses (see 0:05:26-0:09:14).26 Referred to in the soundtrack album as “Day One,” this cue is heard whenever reference is made to the relationship between the films’ main protagonist, Cooper (played by an inaudibly mumbling Matthew McConaughey) and his daughter, Murph (three different actors). The chord movement in the initial statement is Fmaj7, Em/G, Am, G6 (see Example 19.1). Its first instance is classically leitmotivic, occurring initially during a conversation between the two where they discuss the origins of Murph’s name. Aside from the Morse code-like mechanical quality of the music, perhaps its most recognizable feature is the open fifth sonority between the tones a1 and e2 and stepwise rising and falling movement between these tones. The soundtrack has much of the mood of a baroque chaconne ground à la Glass (e.g., Satyagraha 1981; Akhnaten 1984).27

390   john richardson, anna-elena pääkkölä, and sanna qvick Example 19.2  Baroque minimalism transformed into the melancholia and sublime thrill of Romanticism as Cooper is separated from humanity. Hans Zimmer: Interstellar, “Stay” (2014).

Philip Glass’s trademark arpeggiation is there in abundance, as are mechanically repeated polyrhythmic figures, and, importantly, the organ sound. In the case of Glass’s minimalist musical output, this is usually electronic; in Interstellar, it is played on the 1926 four-manual Harrison & Harrison organ of Temple Church in London, but employing what sounds like mechanically looping, additive, and occasionally polyphonic figures. A similar Romanticism is found in other sections of the score, not least the culmination of the cue “Stay” (Example 19.2). It is initially heard during Cooper’s farewell to Murph, where the combination of a somber drone in low strings and occasional high organ phrases leaves space for the actors’ voices, their touching dialogue and eventual bickering (0:36:20). Murph wants her father to stay on Earth and the music provides a suitable combination of melancholia (the low drone entering when Cooper speaks of parents becoming the “ghosts of their children’s futures”) and excitement, to suggest separation juxtaposed with anticipation of the adventure ahead. Strings introduce the main melody, alternating Liebestod-like between minor and major scales.28 The cue gathers emotional—and visceral—force through an incremental increase in instrumentation, volume, and gradually ascending phrases. As Cooper’s rocket launches with Wagnerian excess, the music continues to swell in volume and pitch, rising chromatically towards an ear-piercing pinnacle of strings and trombones, which provide emotive answering phrases. The combination of orchestration, a rising chromaticism sequence, dynamic range (a forceful crescendo), and pitch range (highs and lows), mark this music clearly as Wagnerian.29 The scene is poignant, indeed, sublime, because of Murph’s despair over the loss of her father and Cooper’s anguish about his imminent departure. In the final moments of the cue, the count-down to the rocket’s take off and the visceral rumbling of the rocket’s engines leave little doubt as to the existential affective power of the moment, which becomes loaded with consequence, tear-jerkingly tragic, physically moving, and irreversible. Eventually the ascending rocket drowns out the music and dialogue altogether (0:40:35). (See Video 19.1.) Concerning the narrative function of “Stay,” Nolan describes this theme as portraying the bond between the films’ main protagonist Cooper and his daughter, Murph.30 In the initial stages of composition, Nolan was keen to eschew normative gender coding in Murph’s music, drawing attention to the seriousness of the character as well as the two protagonists’ grappling with profound existential questions. While the music depicts the strength and gravity of the relationship, it also embodies how it is depicted as transcending

Sensing Time and Space   391 time, moving into a mythical or eternal zone through the use of repetition and looping, which forms the basis of their attempts to save mankind from impending destruction. It is possible, therefore, to understand this timeless or eternal music, which is simultaneously of the present and the past, as referring outwards to a more expansive ecological or universal (in the word’s literal sense) frame of reference. Nolan speaks of technology in his justification of the use of the organ, arguing that it was among the most advanced technologies of its time.31 Moreover, his use of mechanical looped figures, additive structures, and superimposed Glassian cycles suggests a mechanical sensibility. He similarly refers to the visual appearance of organ pipes, which resemble rocket launchers, while the release of energy from the organ has an organic quality that Nolan compares to the exhalation of breath (the organ in the biological as well as more prosaic sense). The diatonic rising ground might suggest skyward ascent (rather than lament) while intertextually referencing the Baroque and postminimalist chaconne, which implies transformation and cyclical movement (essential to the film’s narrative coming full circle as father meets daughter in the past). The dynamic qualities of the organ make it an effective vehicle for conveying rising intensity—as wells as physical and allegorical embodiment communicated by means of the volume and power of sound waves in a contemporary cinematic setting. One account that is heavily cited across the popular media tells of the soundtrack blowing a cinema’s IMAX sound system during an early screening in San Francisco.32 Although this claim has been disputed, the veracity of the anecdote is perhaps secondary to its value in communicating a subjective sense that Interstellar was an unusually loud film. While the film is, indeed, characterized by a visceral sound field and by fluid boundaries between the score and sound effects that are typically of new cinema, some of the most striking scenes occur when the music hijacks the action, providing a powerfully felt sense of displacement from everyday time, again pushing the film away from ordinary narrative linearity towards an epic and eternal frame of reference. The silence of space, a scientific fact that directors are becoming ever more likely to respect in their cinematic approximations (as in Gravity, 2013),33 could also be interpreted as articulating a more sophisticated environmentally aware sensibility which takes questions of the environmental beyond the global.

Bending Time/Lines and Gentle Singularities: Rethinking the Laws of Physics The influence of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) on Interstellar was mentioned briefly previously. William Whittington notes that Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz brings order and logic to the perception of space in parts of the film where there is no dialogue:

392   john richardson, anna-elena pääkkölä, and sanna qvick “In the synchronization of the images to the music, the physics of the universe adhere to an underlined structure of musical mathematics in perfect time.”34 In extended shots where the spaceship seems to float in perfect synchronization with musical time, Whittington argues that the music makes physical laws more apprehensible. The music in Interstellar, however, conveys a sense of what it would feel like to bend or transgress the known laws of gravity, space, and time. Zimmer achieves this by means of cyclical procedures, also based on waltz time, in which suspensions (note that suspension is also a physical state) and the dissonances they engender resolve only momentarily before a further turn of the wheel leaves them adrift once more, in search of resolution. In a third core theme, the weightless suspension of Zimmer’s music coincides with human’s scientific manipulation of gravity, although the agency in question has a haunted, uncanny quality resulting from the fact that it is transferred from humans to mechanical and natural processes. The theme is based on an ethereally drifting violin theme that circles around the fifth, the tritone, and the major sixth while lolling atop cyclically undulating chords. This theme, which is reminiscent both of Kubrick’s borrowing of Strauss and (again) Wagner’s non-resolving melodies, is found in scenes that depict altered gravity: early in the film, where Cooper and Murph discover a gravitational anomaly in Murph’s bedroom (0:18:49–0:20:53; see excerpt in Video 19.2); in the first spaceship scene and establishing shots of it in cyclical motion, where Cooper and other crew members are introduced to artificial gravity for the first time, in much the same way as 2001: A Space Odyssey (0:44:31–0:44:57); again, when discussing “gentle singularities” on an icy planet and juxtaposed with an adult Murph approaching the room in which she was raised, where gravitational anomalies have been witnessed (1:42:20–1:45:17); finally, when Cooper is inside the singularity and figures out how to reconfigure gravity in Murph’s bedroom (superimposed here over the Day One cue; 2:20:55–2:22:40; see excerpt in Video 19.3). The theme has a quality of optimism, suggested by gradually resolving voice leading, combined with a sense of uncanny displacement and wonder, as both the laws of gravity and of musical resolution are suspended. Since the first instance coincides with shots of falling dust, this music is called Dust on the soundtrack album (Zimmer 2014). It is static, only barely suggesting motion: the root of the chord does not change; the melody only implies tonal movement. It is a stationary tonic, lost in its own sound world; an eternity of sound.35 It is embodied through the presence of gently pulsating cycles and melodic implications, but not forcefully or assertively. Through these gravitational distortions, we learn later in the film that not only space and movement in space are affected, but also time. This impression of infinite openness (also a notable characteristic of Burke’s sublime), with fields of presence extending outward from each passing

Video 19.2  Interstellar, Decoding the Message.

Video 19.3  Interstellar, Bridge.

Sensing Time and Space   393 moment, is brought poignantly home in the scenes where Cooper is caught in a parallel dimension, unable to communicate with his daughter by any means other than gravity itself. A grandiose reprise of the rocket launch music (“Stay”) is heard when Cooper and his budding love interest, the younger Professor Brand (Anne Hathaway), are tragically separated as Cooper selflessly hurls himself into a singularity in order to save humanity (2:14:49–2:25:44). Here Wagnerian suspensions, chromaticism, and blaring trombones pile the pressure up to breaking point. In shots reminiscent of the final scenes of 2001, Cooper’s shuttle disintegrates and the character is ejected into the heart of a black hole. Time-space within the singularity has been manipulated by them (who turn out to be us: human descendants) into the form of a bookshelf, which exists beyond linear time and space: it is everywhere and every-time. Cooper’s breathing sounds are cut up in a stutter effect,36 while industrial noises and organ chords accentuate his fall (see Interstellar 2:11:54–2:15:06). The singularity is formed musically of themes introduced earlier in the film (S.T.A.Y.; Zimmer 2014). The “Day One” organ cue joins images of both the young and the older Murph, as Cooper observes her through the bookshelf (2:18:46–2:20:55). The connection between the two characters is accentuated by the compressed space-time of the singularity, but also though the leitmotivic use of similar musical materials. As TARS contacts Cooper with a reminder of his present time, the “Day One” organ cue is superimposed over the “Dust” (gravity) cue (2:20:56–2:23:48, Example 19.3); a reminder of father and daughter’s experiments with gravity. When Cooper decides to send binary information to Murph using gravity and dust as his means of communication, and when Murphy realizes that it is her father who is sending the messages, the music changes to polyrhythmic material; and finally, as Cooper realizes that it is only Murph who can save the world, the “S.T.A.Y.” cue points towards her increased significance as an agent of change, bringing hope to an environmentally doomed world, while at the same time implying that father and daughter will eventually be reunited and reconciled (See Video 19.4). Example 19.3  Weightlessness, uncanny displacement, and wonder coalesce in music depicting gravitational anomalies. Hans Zimmer: Interstellar, “Dust” (2014).

Video 19.4  Interstellar, It Was Him.

394   john richardson, anna-elena pääkkölä, and sanna qvick The past, the present, and a sense of the future are blended together in this extended montage scene comprising snippets of various motives, all of them interconnected in variations that express the changing tone of the narrative. Zimmer here deploys tone color, musical texture, and density in order to suggest a growing sense of momentum, and evolution from a contemplative mood to a more animated, optimistic one. When the cue ends it does so abruptly (2:27:04–2:28:50), with Cooper suspended Major Tomlike in his space suit, floating within a multidimensional singularity—a singular moment, a single variation resolving onto the eternal, in the shape of a gradually transforming organ pedal point. With the realization that they are us, the virtual world in which Cooper was suspended is disassembled and we are left only with mechanically repeating organ arpeggios in a high register.

Arrival: Human and Organic Sounds; Alien Bodies While the principal means of conveying experiences like kinaesthetic involvement, weightlessness (equilibrioception), rumbling vibration (mechanoreception), and suspended temporality in Interstellar are those of Baroque and Romantic postminimalism integrated with visceral sound design, Arrival’s soundtrack employs similar and yet markedly different means to evoke equally immersive and sensory-rich experiences. The main premise of Arrival is familiar in a science fiction context: first contact. The protagonist, linguistics professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams), is lecturing at her university when the class is interrupted by social media news coming from multiple sources. Aliens have arrived and humans around the world are scared and confused. Instead of conforming to the familiar plotline of hostile invasion à la War of the Worlds (1953), the aliens do not attack but hover above the ground in oval shaped vessels. Louise is asked to join a team of scientists and soldiers whose goal is to communicate with the visitors, and she embarks upon the time-consuming task not only of teaching the aliens to read English, but also of learning their unfamiliar form of communication, which happens principally through the medium of circular ink blotches. It soon becomes apparent (through the work of physicist, and Banks’s eventual love interest, Ian Donnelly [Jeremy Renner]), that the aliens’ laws of physics work differently to those known to humans. Their understanding of gravity, mass, and especially time also diverges dramatically from what has previously been known on Earth. The Icelandic composer and sound designer Jóhann Jóhannsson (1969–2018) approached the film’s music by combining classical techniques with more avant-garde ones and composing music that, in sections of the film, borders on sound design. More generally, the integrated approach to the soundtrack makes it difficult to tell where music ends and sound effects begin. An especially striking feature is the intricate work that was put into producing the aliens’ sounds,37 which are derived entirely from organic

Sensing Time and Space   395 sources. In the film’s opening scenes electronic diegetic sounds are mixed so high in the soundtrack as to be intrusive; indeed, these sounds seem to pose an existential threat to characters’ due to their omnipresence. The impression of a panic-stricken world is conveyed with diegetic sounds like sirens, military aircraft, helicopters, and the fragmentary and piercing electronically mediated sounds of communication media (news broadcasts, “stock footage” of panicked, violent people on the streets, and Skype calls). Overall, the sound design communicates a central message of the film: the soundscape of humanity is one of confusion, intrusion, and disarray; alien sounds interrupt this human noise with something more primal, while offering glimpses of calm and repose in terms of the visions they offer the protagonist of her future life. Both films present audioviewers with beings that do not qualify as human. In Interstellar, the lively and quick-witted robots have human voices, although obvious markers of corporeality, such as breathing, glottal noises, and the like are absent,38 and their physical form is not anthropomorphic. The robot TARS does not become a dystopic agent, but instead is a helpful and competent adjunct to the human crew, and occasionally provides comic relief as if to prove its fundamentally benign character. Arrival’s aliens are similarly well-meaning; they possess crucial information which they wish to share with humanity. These creatures differ from standard sci-fi monsters in so far as they are characters who actively, yet benignly, drive the plot forwards.39 According to Vivian Sobchack, more traditional hostile sci-fi monsters “lack a psyche”; moreover, “[o]ur sympathy is never evoked by a [sci-fi] creature; it remains, always, a thing.”40 Even when alien beings are apparently anthropomorphic in form, conspicuous differences dehumanize them, and these have a tendency to block audience identification. The sound designers Olivier Calbert, Michelle Child, and Dave Whitehead deliberately sought to envoice the aliens as living, agentic creatures by creating their sound effects from natural materials. In some ways they are the complete opposite of the talking robots of Interstellar, as their sounds are little more than breathing and guttural noises.41 In a sense, their voices are reduced to nothing but “grain.” This brings to the fore commonalities between the aliens and humans, instead of creating an uncanny, ­phenomenological rift between the two, as Sobchack argued is the case in conventional imaginings of aliens. Whereas in a film like Blade Runner (1982) the mechanized music and ambiguity of music and sound effects convey a pervasive atmosphere of tension between humans and replicants,42 in Arrival no sonic tension is implied between aliens and humans; at least this can be said of the film’s two scientist protagonists. Instead, dissonance is created between the (mechanized and mediatized) outside world and the interior of the alien vessel, where scientific investigation happens, and which is a relative sanctuary from the chaos and diegetic disorder that exists outside. A cross (perhaps) between elephants and squids, the heptapods loom imperiously over their human counterparts. Initially they are depicted as awe-inspiring and physically threatening, due to their sheer size and alien-ness. Gradually, however, they reveal themselves to be intellectual beings with a wisdom exceeding that of humans, and a willingness to share knowledge in order to save their own species in the future. What is remarkable about the initial sequences of the aliens is how seamlessly their bodily

396   john richardson, anna-elena pääkkölä, and sanna qvick sounds seem to overlap with the music that immediately preceded their onscreen appearance. The heptapods emit low-frequency sounds produced mostly by slowing down or stretching recorded animal vocalizations (including birdsong and camel snorts) and various other sounds produced by means of breathing (including a didgeridoo and glued, wet rice paper).43 But the aliens are also depicted through more traditional musical means. Mostly, a sound resembling the manipulated animal sounds is created in the cue named “Arrival” using looped low piano drones (constructed by omitting the onset and looping only the long tail-off signal). These sounds are juxtaposed with the voice of Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, who adopts extended vocal techniques treated with an expansive reverb effect. These sounds coincide with the first image of the spaceship (0:17:44–0:20:12). Other significant sounds associated with the aliens include their movements, which are emphasized with gurgling noises, suggesting the aliens exist in a non-Terran environment (made up of gas or liquid), as well as the general ambience inside their ship. The first instance of sound generated inside the alien ship is found when Louise and Ian, along with the rest of the crew, make their initial approach to the alien vessel (00:25:58–00:31:43.) An intricate relationship between auditive, kinaesthetic, and proprioceptive senses is imparted in this scene to suggest a multisensory experience of “alien” space. The scene begins with the intrusive industrial sounds of a lift, which propels the characters skywards into the corridor that traverses the ship, while the unstable, wavering notes of the looped piano follow their actions. The sounds of the ship, like those of the aliens themselves, were created by natural means: the sounds of moving ice and wind which were used in the construction of the sound design identify the alien ship as an ecological, perhaps even an organic, more than a technological space.44 Meanwhile, Louise’s subjective sounds, mainly her heavy breathing, heard through (the filter of) her radiation suit’s microphone, create an intimate point of audition.45 As this character struggles to hold her breathing in check, tension is created through the medium of the sounding body onscreen: we perceive her nervousness. In what follows, kinaesthetic and proprioceptive senses46 are toyed with as the crew embarks and are required to take an embodied “leap of faith” inside the vessel, where gravity changes from Earth’s vertical orientation to the vessel’s horizontal one (see Video 19.5). As other crew members leap forwards, we hear throat-singing and bowed double-bass glissandos which “modulate” slowly upwards, together with low strings treated with reverb. In this way, the floating sensation of changing gravitational planes is rendered musically. An embodied, multisensory version of this ensues as Louise herself is helped aboard: Louise’s frightened gasp is accentuated by a similar disorientating glissando as her perception of gravity changes. As she floats across the screen, the sound of her oxygen ventilator is panned along with movement from left to right; the audience can experience both a sense of her body in motion and also what it might feel like inside her radiation suit. The audience is thereby elevated with Louise to a new sensory level, her reactions affording empathic responses.

Video 19.5  Arrival, Leap of Faith.

Sensing Time and Space   397 A general impression of suspense is then evoked through the presence of a nondiegetic pizzicato string pulse, which asserts the tonic twice, before descending by an octave. This is paired up with a number of Hitchcock dolly zooms where the subjectivity of the crew is heightened and the magnitude of the alien corridor is brought home. This technique is an iconic example of cinematography prioritizing experience over literal reality, as what was initially distant in the shot is suddenly made to appear close, but with perceptible distortion in the visual frame. Here, though, the zoom might do more than this; in conjunction with the music, it can convey a sudden transition through weightlessness to a different kind of gravity—being swept off your feet and then back onto them, in an Escherian impossible world of coexisting divergent gravitational fields. The crew moves forwards hesitantly inside the ship, pizzicato strings conveying a sense of their restlessness as well as evoking heartbeats; a subtle embodied link is thus created.47 The slow pulse of the ostinato is interrupted by shots of the window dividing human and non-human environments, emphasized in each case by a strident orchestral signal that includes brazen brass instruments (probably a Nepalese karnal horn), reed, and electronic instruments. This is sonically shocking because of the dynamic contrast, but also because the low rumblings reach our bodies: we are literally shaken by the signal. This loud instrumental signal, a type of reveille, functions in a similar way to stinger chords in horror films, communicating an embodied sensation that approximates the crew’s nervousness.48 It might also be a sonic allusion to the 2005 remake of War of the Worlds, where a similar sound warns of the threatening presence of alien tripods. Since the ostinato establishes a tonic of sorts, the orchestral signal destabilizes it by moving to the flat second and flat seventh, again resulting in an atmosphere of uncertainty and dread, especially when it is combined with Louise’s microphone, which picks up her unsettled breathing patterns. Here we might also think of the ambient music and sounds of the alien vessel as disorientating; as William Whittington argues, the sense of hesitation and questioning in sci-fi ambient sound design can encourage both ontological and metaphorical questioning, making the auditive more central than is usual in the hierarchy of the audiovisual contract: “Sounds and sounds in the surrounds offer access into areas the image is not willing or is unable to go. In these instances, the sound design has not just achieved an equal status with the image. It has in fact surpassed it.”49 In Arrival, however, it is the seamless combination of sounds in the alien environment and avantgarde music that contributes to creating rich and complex “sonic geographies”50 that surpass the visuals in their order of sensory prominence (see Video 19.6). Prior to the first appearance of the aliens, their nature as either hostile or benign has not been established. Whittington’s sense of hesitation still pertains.51 As the crew awaits the aliens, the string ostinato continues, and suddenly low frequency alien noises are audible which match the tonic of the string ostinato, before overriding it with growling, acoustically stretched animal noises that seem somehow to settle on the tonic of the orchestral pizzicato cue. In effect, the alien sounds are musicalized: before we even see

Video 19.6  Arrival, Inside the Spaceship.

398   john richardson, anna-elena pääkkölä, and sanna qvick the aliens, they are made awe-inspiring or—in the words of sound designer David Whitehead—“sacred” by means of some subtle sound design work.52 An additional clamorous instrumental signal leads directly to the first visual contact with the creatures, again bringing to mind War of the Worlds, but the auditive musicalization of the aliens has already achieved its effect. The sounds and music that are associated with the aliens may on first hearing seem odd and disconcerting, but the gradual move towards tonality, combined with the use of organic materials that are reminiscent of breathing sounds, all strive towards a single goal: to familiarize the audioviewer with this new life form, and to do so in an embodied way. As our bodies start to resonate with the sounds of the aliens, we understand them viscerally. This in turn contributes to an audiovisual argument for peaceful interactions, implying readiness to communicate with the aliens through embodied understanding.

Non-linear Time, Non-spatial Space Both Arrival and Interstellar raise questions about the laws of physics, including theories of time as a flexible, even malleable entity which can be made to benefit humanity (and extra-terrestrials). Not only is this an optimistic—even quasi-religious—view of the natural sciences, where the technological sublime and the seemingly boundless power of the universe and infinity coalesce;53 it can additionally be understood as tacit commentary on the “post-truth society,” where the laws of physics and expert knowledge about issues like climate change are with growing frequency questioned by politicians and the popular press.54 Both films take a stand for science, nature, and environmental issues, particularly Interstellar. Time is running out in both films, until scientific breakthroughs connected to apparently non-human knowledge create new spaces where these very human problems (war, famine, and ecological disasters) can be eradicated. Although seriously tested, sci-fi optimism ultimately wins the day and humanity is saved. The notion of linear time in Arrival is toyed with in the timeline of the film itself. While the main plot of Louise meeting the alien heptapods and learning their language is told in a conventional linear way, Louise’s own story is related in a non-linear way. Of course, the audience initially assumes that the scenes involving Louise’s daughter, either growing up or dying in early adulthood, are flashbacks, but it is eventually revealed that they are, indeed, flashes forwards, or examples of non-linear thinking, towards the later stages of Louise’s life-cycle. Cyclical time is represented in the heptapods’ written language (comprising ink circles featuring assorted blotches around their circumferences), but also in Jóhann Jóhannsson’s postminimalist music and Max Richter’s composition, On the Nature of Daylight (2004). Cyclical time is present also in the film’s narrative construction, as it begins with the birth of Louise’s child, Hannah, and ends with Louise and her future husband deciding to have a baby. Minimalist music has often been described as altering our subjective sense of time due the various ways in which composers extend musical materials over long periods of

Sensing Time and Space   399 time, or play with listeners’ expectations by expanding, compressing, or juxtaposing materials using techniques of repetition and gradual transformation.55 Because of Jóhannsson’s use of repeated musical cells in Arrival, which shift subtly from one moment to the next, an altered sense of time is implied in contrast to mathematical or clock-time. This is time without the usual hierarchy of expectations and fulfilment of desires, forward or backward motion; a spatial notion of time where repeated musical passages become a state of mind that exists beyond rationalization. Arrival begins with the slow pulse of Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight, which accompanies Louise’s account of what happened to her daughter (see Video 19.7). The music consists of two slowly alternating chords performed by two cellos and a viola, which make up a lament-like ostinato, a chaconne of sorts, over which a series of variations comprising overlapping melodic figures is played on two violins—Baroque minimalism in the Glassian idiom once again. Each pattern coincides with a different memory of the child. In this way, each variation changes in tone: one is connected to a happy memory, another to images of the daughter dying. Louise’s voiceover narration recalls events in tandem with the music; the screen action is audio-visually temporalized56 as the voiceover and music swim into each other. The emotional impact of Louise’s story is heightened as the melodic lines of the violins interweave with cyclically organized postminimalist refrains—here the everyday temporality of the images is animated by the divergent temporality of the music.57 To recall past events is arguably to create divergent temporalities, just as the music itself dips into contemporary and historical styles; the twist is that the stories Louise relates to us are not strictly speaking “memories.” Another key moment that features an altered sense of time/space is found in a montage sequence where Louise teaches the heptapods human language, but at the same time she also learns heptapod writing and thinking (see Video 19.8). Jóhannsson recalls one of his influences as being Stockhausen’s Stimmung, a composition for six voices and microphones, alongside other works based on spectral techniques.58 Stimmung (1968) features long, sustained notes and chords without much harmonic progression, and finds its textural richness in different avant-garde vocal techniques, such as uses of glissandos, spoken word, inward breathing speech, whistling, and syllables derived from the words of different languages (English, German, Arabic, and Latin), transformed vowel sounds (a-e-i-e-a), and the percussive qualities of consonants, such as various L, F, R sounds (rolling and non-rolling) and sibilants (s, sh, z). This music exemplifies the “process of unfolding” that Richard Taruskin perceives more generally in Stockhausen’s music: “What is predetermined is not just how things are, but what they seem to do, and what they will become.”59 In this way, the temporal progression of the piece becomes blurred, as attention is directed towards what happens in the voices, not the harmonic Video 19.7  Arrival, Opening Scene.

Video 19.8  Arrival, Heptapod.

400   john richardson, anna-elena pääkkölä, and sanna qvick progression. The mood is both static and organic—despite the systemic procedures of gradual addition and subtraction that derive from minimalism—which suggests a mode of subjectivity that seems to transcend willful human agency. Stockhausen’s influence on Jóhannsson is evident in the music written for the montage sequence (“Heptapod B” in the soundtrack album). Short syllables (na-na-nannan-na) are repeated with two female voices a fifth apart, articulated in a bright, girlish soprano voice (an extract from a composition by experimental vocalist Joan La Barbara’s Erin) repeating the first riff (wo-do-no-ta-no), with three repeated notes on the tonic (wo-do-no), a jump upwards by a fifth (ta), and occasional completion of the phrase with a final “no” on the leading note.60 The rhythms of the looped singing are quick, staccato, and only slightly off-beat in relation to Jóhannsson’s music; the phrase repeats itself in dialogue with the other singers. Interestingly, Jóhannsson leaves the spatial design of the Erin loop intact, even while tuning it up a few steps, thereby contributing an the effect of “girlishness” in Joan La Barbara’s ordinarily deeper, mature-sounding voice.61 The voice is situated center-right in the mix, with the leading note located more to the right than the other syllables, and the high fifth mostly in the center, slightly to the left. This reflects the spatial design of the original recording, where La Barbara plays with multiple directions in the syllables in order to create a “sound painting” (the album’s name). (The spatialization of time in La Barbara’s composition can easily be compared to the heptapod’s non-linear mode of writing and their broader conception of time.) A constant drone of lower female voices (from the vocal ensemble Theatre of Sounds) is heard throughout the piece, on the tonic and fifth, repeating similar syllables to the high solo looped voice, but rarely stopping. In the background, a female choir sings, repeating nonsense syllables at a slower pace, forming chord sequences in the track’s otherwise sparse sonority. The human voices are answered, first, by swells from the brass section, then by means of an increase in volume in the percussion, and finally, the lower strings. All of the orchestral swells start out first as a rhythmic pulse, growing then to suspended chords and forming a crescendo; percussive swells happen sometimes together with brass or strings instruments, but often without the support of a crescendo in these instruments. A brisk cembalo is also heard on each of the quarter-note beats. A gradual accumulation of intensity results. Jóhansson describes the process of composing this piece as follows: “I avoided long notes. I wanted to work with this stuttering, random rhythm pattern of female voices. I wanted something that was a cloud of staccato rhythms, unpredictable and out of time.”62 These aims are apt in light of the corresponding imagery and central themes of the film pertaining to altered temporality and the task of discerning order within apparently chaotic communication. Montage scenes like “Heptapod B” are, of course, a traditional cinematic means of compressing narrative time. In traditional montage sequences, however, time (and Louise’s learning process) would progress in a linear way from before to after (00:50:21–00:53:41). This is not the case here. The music here depicts a process of unfolding: of time, musical materials, and, symbolically, also Louise’s understanding. It is not, however, entirely a given that time should progress “forwards.” Even while Louise begins to react to her new perceptions of time-that-has-yet-to-come (the concept of “future” is

Sensing Time and Space   401 irrelevant if time is circular), or memories she hasn’t yet experienced, Ian’s voiceover begins to flow into the soundtrack, along with the music representing the heptapods (“Heptapod B”), becoming part of that music while commenting on the process of learning the heptapod language. In this way, it could be said that the narration represents the scientists learning and interiorizing the aliens’ concept of time and space: First, there is no correlation between what a heptapod says and what a heptapod writes. Unlike all written human languages, their writing is semi-siographic. It conveys meaning; it doesn’t represent sound . . . We have our friends in Pakistan to thank for their study of how heptapods write, because unlike speech, a logogram is free of time. Like their ship or their bodies, their written language has no forward or backward direction. Linguists call this “non-linear orthography,” which raises the question: is this how they think?63

In keeping with this idea of non-linear writing and thinking, combined with the notion of time and space as “non-linear,” the cycles of repetitive music do not dispense with the linearity of everyday or clock time but, rather, they play with our “expectations” of time. The music folds into itself and unfolds outwards from itself, creating a sense of nonlinearity, circularity, and transformation in stasis (a musical logogram, if you will). In this way, space is also reconstructed as untethered from linear time: as malleable, immaterial in the sense of being liquid more than solid, yet bound to actions and movement, omnispatial; auditive, and non-linear space-time. As the music unfolds in this way, a greater sense of immersion is implied. In a similar way to “losing time” when focusing intently on a task, a kind of flow experience, everyday time disappears and the experiencing sensory body is brought to the fore. This altered notion of time and space is made credible because the music instructs our bodies to feel it happening.

Full Circle: Embodying the Monumental, the Melancholic, and the Sublime In Arrival and Interstellar, time is spatialized through the use of music and works directly on the body. Taking full advantage of the expressive reach of contemporary surround sound systems,64 both films utilize low frequencies as pedal points in key cues in soundtracks that resonate with viewer-listeners’ bodies, permitting malleable timespace to be experienced not only as an intellectual concept but also physically. In other words, the frequencies that most directly bring the body into play also contribute to an immersive sensibility that makes constructions of altered space-time something that is more felt than understood. Music and sound production combine to make the concept of time futuristic and extra-human, which in turn permits the optimism of the films’ messages

402   john richardson, anna-elena pääkkölä, and sanna qvick to be experienced both viscerally and intellectually; as well as the turbulent and (physically) moving paths that are taken in order to make these futures real. Both films, however, employ the sheer volume and dynamic intensity of music to these ends, with sub-bass sounds that would ordinarily be carried exclusively by the subwoofer being spread across the primary surround-sound tracks, where dialogue is ordinarily heard. Whether one considers Zimmer’s “falling asleep on his organ” sublimity, conveyed through extended stinger chords, or Jóhannsson’s loud orchestral reveilles when introducing the aliens, the audience is meant to feel the impact of the sound directly on their bodies. Both films address issues of yearning for loved ones across space and time, whether it is the past in Interstellar or the future in Arrival. And by bridging the time-space divide, it is argued, it is possible also to solve some of the burning questions facing humanity. This combination of science with romantic yearning resembles what Farah Mendlesohn calls “cold romanticism.”65 Sci-fi, in her view, often juxtaposes Romanticism with alienation.66 In Interstellar, Cooper and his daughter Murph, Cooper and his love interest at the end of the film, Brand, Louise, and her daughter Hannah, are all divided in space and time in a manner that can only be bridged by science. In much the same way, science holds the key to uniting humanity and overcoming environmental catastrophes, whether the catastrophes in question are those of humans or aliens in the distant future. Scientific optimism is tainted, however, with tragedy, since Cooper is reunited with Murph only at her deathbed, and the promise of a romantic attachment with Brand remains only a promise, indicated by a spectral handshake across dimensions inside a wormhole and Cooper’s intent to join Brand on her lonely planet at the end of the film. The optimism of Arrival is similarly saturated with tragedy, all of which is reflected in the soundtrack: Louise comes to realize through information she has gleaned from her close encounter that her as yet unborn daughter will die tragically in childhood, and her marriage is similarly destined to fail, but she embarks upon this course of action regardless of this knowledge (unfortunately, as well, she withholds this information from her partner). Musically, both films rely on the dichotomy of mechanically cool and overwhelmingly romantic forces; Interstellar with a mixture of minimalist depersonalization and post-Wagnerian chromaticism; Arrival with Jóhannsson’s exploration of avant-garde techniques juxtaposed with Richter’s more elegiac minimalism in the composition On the Nature of Daylight. Melancholia and mechanical coolness are, in both films, a poign­ant mixture. In both Arrival and Interstellar, a quasi-religious sublime is seldom far away: Interstellar due to the conspicuous presence of a church organ; Arrival through Richter’s original music and sound design for the aliens. This extends to the plots as well; while science, natural or linguistic, is elevated as instrumental in solving the apocalyptic problems encountered in the films, a sense of awe is ever-present in the music and corresponding imagery. Thus, while both soundtracks evoke a sense of monumentalism reminiscent of long-stranding tropes of the sublime and the heroic, at the same time they convey sensory glimpses of a future where political conflicts and ecological shortsightedness give way to imaginary solutions that the viewer-listener can only grasp on an intuitive and visceral level.

Sensing Time and Space   403

Notes 1. For more on these new audiovisual means, see John Richardson and Claudia Gorbman, “Introduction,” in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 1–35. 2. See K. J. Donnelly, The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television (London: BFI, 2005), 93–4. 3. Robynn  J.  Stilwell, “The Sonic Realm in The Quartermass Experiment: Medium and Genre and Sound,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks, ed. Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016),” 213–28: 227, emphasis added. 4. Richardson and Gorbman, “Introduction,” 6. 5. See Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (London: Rutgers University Press, 2001 [1980]), 19, 25. 6. Farah Mendlesohn, “Introduction: Reading Science Fiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1–14: 3–4. 7. See Philip Shaw, The Sublime (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1. 8. See, for example, Rebecca Leydon, “Forbidden Planet: Effects and Affects in the Electro Avant-garde,” in Off the Planet: Music, Sound and Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Philip Hayward (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 61–76: 64. 9. Sobchack, Screening Space, 216; William Whittington, Sound Design and Science Fiction (Texas: University of Texas Press, 2007), 5. 10. David Huckvale, Hammer Film Scores and the Musical Avant-Garde (London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2008), 3. 11. Donnelly, The Spectre of Sound, 95. 12. John Richardson and Susanna Välimäki, “Disaffected Sounds, Temporalized Visions: Philip Glass and the Audiovisual Impulse in Postminimalist Music,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, ed. Keith Potter, Kyle Gann and Pwyll Ap Siôn (Farnham: Ashgate,  2013), 219–37: 220; see also Tristian Evans, Shared Meanings in the Film Music of Philip Glass (New York: Routledge, 2015). On historical reference in postminimalism, see John Richardson, Singing Archaeology: Philip Glass’s Akhnaten (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1999); and Susan McClary, “Minima Romantica,” in Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press), 48–65. 13. Richardson and Välimäki, “Disaffected Sounds,” 222–23. 14. Donnelly, The Spectre of Sound, 93–94. 15. The primary purpose of this chapter is not to theorize the concept of “affect,” on which there are several competing definitions. For the present purposes we would simply state that we do not posit affect as essentially separate or somehow superior to discursive experiences. The two in our view are experientially continuous and largely interdependent. In this respect, we consider our work as aligned with that of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). On the controversy surrounding “affect,” see John Richardson, An Eye for Music: Popular Music and The Audiovisual Surreal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 260. 16. According to Hayward, the five stages of sci-fi film music history are (1) 1902–27, the pre synch-sound period; (2) 1927–45, exploration of various Western orchestral styles;

404   john richardson, anna-elena pääkkölä, and sanna qvick (3) 1945–60, discordant and/or unusual orchestration/instrumentation to convey futuristic themes; (4) 1960–77, the continuation of futuristic styles alongside a variety of musical approaches; (5) 1977 onwards, Classic Hollywood-derived orchestral scores (John Williams and Star Wars) together with futuristic styles and rock, disco and techno; rise of integrated music/sound scores. We would like to argue that Hayward’s fifth period ends in 2014, and the sixth period, Integrated and multisensory music and sound design with postminimalist allusions, is on the rise from 2014 (and Interstellar) onwards. See Philip Hayward, “Sci-Fidelity: Music, Sound and Genre History,” in Off the Planet: Music, Sound and Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Philip Hayward (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 1–29: 2. 17. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, translation by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 152. 18. Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 2. The concept has greatly influenced multisensory audiovisual studies despite its almost exclusive focus on the link between the visual and the haptic; see Michel Chion, “Sensory Aspects of Contemporary Cinema,” in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson; Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (Oxford: Oxford University Press,  2013), 325–30; Richardson, An Eye for Music; and Anna-Elena Pääkkölä, Sound Kinks: Sadomasochistic Erotica in Audiovisual Music Performances, PhD Thesis (Turku: University of Turku, 2016). 19. Luis Rocha Antunes, The Multisensory Film Experience: A Cognitive Model of Experiential Film Aesthetics (Bristol: Intellect, 2016), 3. 20. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Invisible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). 21. Ibid. 22. Honest Trailers: Interstellar, YouTube video, 4:59, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=lZMzf-SDWP8, accessed July 28, 2018. 23. See Katie Kilkenny, “Why Interstellar’s Organ Needs to Be So Loud,” The Guardian, November 11, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/11/whyinterstellars-organ-needs-to-be-so-loud/382619/. 24. Compare to Donnelly, The Spectre of Sound, 97. 25. See Whittington, Sound Design and Science Fiction, 7. 26. Most of the cue titles listed here are derived from the DVD soundtrack. 27. See John Richardson, Singing Archaeology. Philip Glass’s Akhnaten (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999). 28. For more on configurations of desire and longing in Wagner’s music, see Lawrence Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 14 and 101. 29. Zimmer is far from being the first to accomplish this in a film soundtrack. The love scene in Bernard Herrmann’s music for Vertigo is a well-known example of indebtedness to Wagner’s Liebestod. Interstellar works in much the same way, only with a contemporary spin brought by influences from contemporary music alongside noisy sound design. 30. Hans Zimmer—Making of Interstellar Soundtrack, YouTube video, 4:53, 2014, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=L_8t2VlwK4w, accessed July 28, 2018. 31. Hans Zimmer: Making of Interstellar Soundtrack. 32. Vince Mancini, “The Trouble with 70mm . . .” UPPROX, April 11, 2014. https://uproxx. com/filmdrunk/the-trouble-with-70-mm/, accessed July 28, 2018.

Sensing Time and Space   405 33. See Miguel Mera, “Towards 3-D Sound: Spatial Presence and the Space Vacuum,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks, ed. Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 91–112. 34. Whittington, Sound Design and Science Fiction, 51. 35. On the relationship of eternal time to perceptions of physical presence, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 492. 36. “Objective-internal sound”; see Michel Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, trans. Claudia Gorbman (London: British Film Institute, 2001 [1999]), 99. 37. Alien sound design by David Whitehead and Michelle Child. See also Acoustic Signatures: The Sound Design of “Arrival,” produced by Keith Clark (Invisible Machine, 2016), video. 38. See, for example Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, 102. 39. Compare this to Sobchack, Screening Space, 32. 40. Sobchack, Screening Space, 32. 41. Compare to Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, 102. 42. See Michael Hannan and Melissa Carey, “Ambient Soundscapes in Blade Runner,” in Off the Planet: Music, Sound and Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Philip Hayward (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 149–64: 160. 43. See Acoustic Signatures. 44. Acoustic Signatures. 45. “Objective-internal sounds”; see Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, 99; see also Mera, “Towards 3D Sound,” 96. 46. Marks, Touch, 2 and 7. 47. For more on this subject, see Ben Winters, “Corporeality, Musical Heartbeats, and Cinematic Emotion,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 2, no. 1 (2008): 3–26. 48. Donnelly, Spectre of Sound, 97. 49. Whittington, Sound Design and Science Fiction, 126. 50. Beth Carroll, Feeling Film: A Spatial Approach (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 49. 51. Whittington, Sound Design and Science Fiction, 126. 52. Acoustic Signatures. 53. See David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1994). 54. Steve Fuller makes the valuable point that the status of knowledge is largely dependent on corresponding power structures and the exploitation by those who aspire to power of debates about the positionality of science from Plato and Pareto to Kuhn. See Steve Fuller, Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 55. See Richardson, Singing Archaeology, 54–7; Kyle Gann, Keith Potter, and Pwyll ap Siôn, “Introduction: Experimental, Minimalist, Postminimalist? Origins, Definitions, Communities,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, ed. Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll Ap Siôn (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 1–18: 4–5; Richardson and Välimäki, “Disaffected Sounds,” 220; see also Pääkkölä, Sound Kinks, 170. 56. Chion, Audio-Vision, 13–14. 57. See also Richardson and Välimäki, “Disaffected Sounds,” 224. 58. See Sharon O’Connell, “Arrival Composer Jóhann Jóhannsson: People are Hungry for New Sounds,” The Guardian, November 26, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/ music/2016/nov/26/arrival-johann-johannsson-soundtrack-oscar-nominated.

406   john richardson, anna-elena pääkkölä, and sanna qvick 59. Richard Taruskin, Music in the Late Twentieth Century: The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 45. Emphasis in the original. 60. Hrishikesh Hirway, “Song Exploder: Jóhann Jóhannsson on the Secrets of Arrival’s Score,” Vulture, November 17, 2016, http://www.vulture.com/2016/11/arrival-score-johann-johannssonsong-exploder.html. 61. A technique also used by The Beatles in “Strawberry Fields Forever” (1967, in the album Magical Mystery Tour) and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (1967, in the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band) for the same rejuvenating effect. 62. See Hirway, “Song Exploder;” emphasis ours. 63. Arrival, montage scene voiceover. 64. See, e.g. Carroll, Feeling Film, 18. 65. Mendlesohn, “Introduction,” 10. 66. Ibid.

Select Bibliography Carroll, Beth. Feeling Film: A Spatial Approach. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Chion, Michel. Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, trans. Claudia Gorbman. London: British Film Institute, 2001 [1999]. Chion, Michel. “Sensory Aspects of Contemporary Cinema.” In The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis, 325– 30. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Donnelly, K. J. The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television. London: BFI, 2005. Kassabian, Anahid. “The Sound of a New Film Form.” In Popular Music and Film, ed. Ian Inglis, 91–101. London: Wallflower, 2003. Leydon, Rebecca. “Forbidden Planet: Effects and Affects in the Electro Avant-garde.” In Off the Planet: Music, Sound and Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Philip Hayward, 61–76. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Mera, Miguel. “Towards 3-D Sound: Spatial Presence and the Space Vacuum.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks, ed. Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, 91–112. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Richardson, John. Singing Archaeology: Philip Glass’s Akhnaten. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999. Richardson, John. An Eye for Music: Popular Music and The Audiovisual Surreal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Richardson, John and Susanna Välimäki. “Disaffected Sounds, Temporalized Visions: Philip Glass and the Audiovisual Impulse in Postminimalist Music.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music, ed. Keith Potter, Kyle Gann, and Pwyll Ap Siôn, 219–37. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. London: Rutgers University Press, 2001 [1980]. Stilwell, Robynn J. “The Sonic Realm in The Quartermass Experiment: Medium and Genre and Sound.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks, ed. Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, 213–28. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Whittington, William. Sound Design and Science Fiction. Texas: University of Texas Press, 2007.

chapter 20

Listen i ng –Feeli ng – Becomi ng Cinema Surveillance Miguel Mera

Beyond the Panopticon Surveillance, according to Lyon, Haggerty, and Ball, is the dominant organizing practice of late modernity.1 The gathering and processing of personal data for the purposes of influencing or managing those whose data has been collected raises fears about control, state and corporate powers, civil liberties, the maintenance of democracy, and the place of citizens. In this chapter, I will highlight some of the central concerns within surveillance studies and outline how these have been extended and challenged by cinematic representations of surveillance with a particular focus on the role of sound in developing sensory and embodied modes of engagement. Surveillance has predominantly been studied within three scholarly frameworks. The first strand is based on the writing of Michel Foucault who invoked Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a prison where inmates are controlled by the knowledge that they are always being watched by guards in a central tower.2 In Discipline and Punish Foucault argued that surveillance is a form of institutionally driven social control that is achieved through self-regulating subjects.3 If we know we are being watched, we alter our behavior. It is a centralized, architectural, and spatial form of control that Foucault called discipline.4 The second stream derives from Gilles Deleuze’s Postscript on the Societies of Control where he argued that the regime of institutional discipline is collapsing but the ubiquitous spread of data by and about us is a constant form of social control.5 It is not regulated by a central agency but by the proliferation of digital technologies and the structures working across society. This is a networked and infrastructural theory of surveillance.6 Deleuze described the development of an absolute surveillance culture as a transfer from molds to modulation, a slippery environment “like a self-deforming cast that will

408   Miguel Mera continuously change from one moment to the other.”7 The third wave combines or filters these earlier conceptual frameworks and then radiates into areas such as social sorting, participation and resistance, and “sousveillance,” a form of monitoring in which citizens watch governments from below, as a counter-concept to surveillance.8 Just as these theoretical perspectives have characterized the role of surveillance in society, cinema has engaged with the same thorny conceptual, ethical, technological, and societal issues. Narratives about surveillance and their recurrent tropes have increasingly appeared in feature films from the end of the Second World War onwards. Several scholars have, of course, argued that the relationship between cinema and surveillance has a much longer and more complicated heritage.9 Indeed, the idea that the cinematic medium is inherently voyeuristic propelled the first wave of psychoanalytic film theory.10 Christian Metz, for example, suggested that the basic condition for vo­yeur­ism was distance between the spectator and the object, “distance of the look, distance of listening,” with both sight and hearing equally considered “senses at a distance.”11 Yet I argue that in terms of proximity cinematic representations of eavesdropping are not the same as those of visual surveillance, the former frequently highlighting intimacy, the latter frequently emphasizing distance. In fact, surveillant cinematic sound often attempts to fuse subject and object. It is aurally here but visually there.12 This conceptual and physical gap between sight and sound in cinematic representations of surveillance has often resulted in sound playing a fundamental role in negotiating bodily significance. Recent surveillance narratives, I suggest, have tried to close this gap by moving towards more intense sensory and embodied modes of representation and spectatorship. These changing modes also reflect broader shifts in technological listening conditions and modes of production. For Thomas Levin, there has been an historical recasting of the cinematic medium reflecting a shift from spatial to temporal indexicality which has been made evident through increasing real-time surveillance representations. Levin described this as a proliferation of the “rhetorics of surveillance.”13 He carefully demonstrated how the functions of surveillance and the structures of cinematic narrative have mutually shaped each other over time. This aligns with Dietmar Kamerer’s notion of the “surveillant imaginary,” which describes how culture influences, and is influenced by, social and technological change through the presentation of surveillance to itself.14 What is largely missing from these various theoretical perspectives, however, is both sound and the body. What role, then, does listening play in the changing representational practices of cinematic surveillance? How is the body implicated in the rhetorics of surveillant listening? The central claim I hope to advance is that screen representations of surveillance initially used sound to make “real” their sensational, affective impact. While this has, to some extent, been a recurrent quality in the surveillance film, the progressively commonplace use of surveillance throughout society has led to a corresponding focus on sensory representation. This evolves from cinematic modes of surveillance that act on the body to become bodies that are, literally, embedded within the surveillant structures and apparatus. At the same time, the intensifying modes of embodied surveillance

Listening–Feeling–Becoming   409 representation diminish the importance of discrete listening, which becomes subsumed within that same audiovisual/body amalgam. The differing representations of surveillant listening in film, therefore, have experimented with and increasingly moved beyond notions of the Panopticon, discipline, and modulation. Through these increasingly affective strategies, film makes “real” the corporeal (the corpo-“real,” or perhaps the corporeel). I will trace some of the ways in which surveillance—from Watergate to post-9/11 ubiquitous dataveillance—has shifted its attention from the audible (The Conversation, Francis Ford Coppola, 1974; Blow Out, Brian de Palma, 1981), and the sensory (Strange Days, Kathryn Bigelow, 1995; Enemy of the State, Tony Scott, 1998), to the embodied (Minority Report, Steven Spielberg, 2002; Déjà vu, Tony Scott, 2006; Source Code, Duncan Jones, 2011). As surveillance in society has expanded and intensified, film has attempted to grapple with challenging questions of interiority and exteriority through a journey from listening through feeling to becoming. This tells us about perceptions of surveillance in society as well as the values ascribed to cinematic notions of subjectivity and the relationship between sound and sight.

Listening It is unsurprising that the American cultural climate of the 1970s and early 1980s resulted in films that centralized sound to create what are now considered canonical surveillance movies. The widespread perception of an increased threat to civil liberties found its apoth­e­o­sis in the Watergate scandal and the shocking revelation of political surveillance audio recordings. Paul Cobley explained that establishment conspiracy became a feature of American cinema of the 1970s, because “paranoia was an understandable mindset with regard to the vicissitudes of governments and corporations.”15 Two influential films from this period centralize the importance of sound, The Conversation and Blow Out. As Elizabeth Weis explained, both films question whether it is possible to trust the objective reliability of sound recordings, and, by extension, anything we hear.16 The Conversation features a professional surveillance recordist, Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), who is especially skilled at covert dialogue recording. He is hired by an unnamed company to listen to the conversation of a couple (Ann and Mark), which he records in San Francisco’s Union Square. Caul gathers, filters, and clarifies the audio evidence to present to his client and, though he claims not to care what the couple are talking about (“All I want is a nice fat recording”), he becomes increasingly fixated on trying to understand the true meaning of their dialogue. Levin considers this dramatic foregrounding to be a concrete example of a move away from thematic to structural engagement with surveillance, but it is also a move away from thematic to structural engagement with listening.17 Indeed, both Caul and the audience do not simply hear, they are compelled to listen. The constant re-evaluation of the recorded conversation, which returns eight times during the film, replaces narrative exposition with repetitive, obsessive aural loops. Repetition is, therefore, the fundamental mode of investigation

410   Miguel Mera with new information contextualizing each iteration of audio analysis. At the start of the film, Caul is something of a dehumanized incarnation of the recording apparatus, but as he listens more deeply to understand what the characters are talking about and what the consequences might be if the recording is presented to the client, he becomes more personally engaged. The intimacy of listening has a moral consequence and the act of listening humanizes Caul. The audioviewer is caught up in this increasing paranoia, trying to listen closely even when the film deliberately obscures some of its dialogue and sound. The ultimate revelation hinges on correctly identifying and interpreting a single phrase, especially the meaning of one word, in order to determine whether the couple are potential victims or plotters: “He’d kill us if he got the chance.” It is a fruitful narrative device, to be sure, in that it highlights the subjectivity of sound recording, but it also challenges one of the fundamental tenets of psychoanalytic cinema scholarship. As I have been implying, surveillant listening has a primary and vital connection with the body. Yet for Christian Metz, distance is fundamental to the condition of voyeurism, which he argued was central to the scopic regime of cinema. The voyeur must maintain “a gulf, an empty space, between the object and the eye, the object and his own body.”18 The voyeur, therefore, represents the very “fracture” which necessarily separates them from the object. “To fill in this distance would threaten to overwhelm the subject, to lead him to consume the object . . . mobilizing the sense of contact and putting an end to the scopic arrangement.”19 But scopic distance is not the same in the modalities of sound and sight. Sound moves through our deepest cavity when we breathe. It courses through our muscles, lungs, palate, tongue, teeth, and lips when we speak. Its embodied nature is foregrounded. Writing from an equally psychoanalytic perspective, Kaja Silverman tacitly acknowledged this and argued that The Conversation reveals the illusion of auditory control while simultaneously problematizing what I call the corpo-“real”: “Far from being in a position of secure exteriority to the sounds he [Caul] manipulates, his subjectivity is complexly imbricated with them—so much so that it is often impossible to determine which originate from ‘outside’ of him, and which from ‘inside’.”20 The play between interiority and exteriority persists throughout the film and is primarily articulated through sound. Although Caul is emotionally and socially cocooned, he finds some kind of satisfaction and release in playing the saxophone. He does not, however, play with other people, rather he plays along with his collection of Jazz LPs in a form of performance imitation and simulation. But Caul is not a very good saxophonist. In a scene where he improvises over a 12-bar blues, Juan Chattah outlined how the entry of the solo is late and how the chord changes are not well articulated. This “serves to elucidate one of Caul’s flaws, namely, his incapacity to decode and interpret a recording.”21 He is undoubtedly listening, but his embodied performance falls some way short. At the end of the film, it is revealed that Caul is himself being spied on. A recording of his saxophone performance is played back to him as a threat: “We know that you know, Mr. Caul, for your own sake don’t get involved any further. We’ll be listening to you.” Caul tears apart his apartment trying to find the bug but cannot locate it. At this point, David Shire’s solo piano score is routed through an ARP 2400 synthesizer creating increasingly “distorted” ring-modulation effects. We then see a long-distance surveillance

Listening–Feeling–Becoming   411 camera shot and Caul retreats to his saxophone which is heard alongside an untreated “pure” piano recording. Chattah notes that the “non-diegetic piano and diegetic saxophone overlap but resist to fuse.”22 There are a series of unresolved oppositions at play here, then, the acoustic and electronically modified, diegetic and non-diegetic, subjective and objective, freedom and control. The body is implicated through listening, but the gap between listening and the body remains. If The Conversation maintains parallel aspects of interiority and exteriority through its use of sound, linking but not resolving the embodied relationships between surveillance and listening, Blow Out (1981) takes a different approach through a focus on audiovisual synchronization and apparatus festishization. The neo-noir political thriller is an homage to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (1966) but replaces photography with audio recording. Jack (John Travolta) is a sound-recordist for low-budget exploitation movies and, late one night, while capturing sound effects for a film, he witnesses a car career off the road and into a nearby river. Jack dives into the water to save the passenger, Sally (Nancy Allen), and later discovers that the drowned driver of the car was a leading presidential candidate. Jack listens to the audio tape he recorded and thinks he hears a gunshot before the tire blow out that caused the crash. Seemingly by coincidence, a photographer, Manny Karp (Dennis Franz), has also captured the incident, and when the images are sold to a magazine, Jack splices them together into a makeshift movie that he synchronizes with the recorded sound, becoming convinced that the accident was an assassination. As the movie progresses we learn that Jack was formerly a police officer who quit after one of his wiretap operations led to the death of an undercover cop. The increasingly complicated plot involves a series of murders designed to misdirect the police and hide the political conspiracy. In the belief that she is handing over evidence of the assassination to a journalist, Sally is tricked into encountering the murderer Burke (John Lithgow). Shadowing Sally from a distance while listening to her wiretap Jack is unable to reach her in time to prevent her murder. He records her struggle with Burke and her dying scream and then takes Burke by surprise stabbing him with his own knife. In an unexpectedly shocking final scene, Jack overdubs Sally’s death scream into the shower scene of a sleazy slasher movie on which he has been working. Throughout the film, numerous scenes depict the way in which sound and images are combined, how they are reedited and remixed to reveal the objective truth. In this sense, Blow Out arguably attempts to restore faith in the apparatus that The Conversation sought to undermine, and this focus could be understood as an act of rehabilitation following the legacy of mistrust that surrounded recording technology after Watergate. This restorative move would certainly align with Jay Beck’s and Gianluca Sergi’s 1970s crisis historiography where they highlight a period of sound experimentation in which “the film industry underwent a massive change in industrial, technical, and aesthetic practices that were in keeping with a growing sense of discomfort in the public sphere.”23 The subsequent widespread adoption of Dolby Stereo reasserts industrial confidence as well as a series of standardized practices with a classically focused hierarchy of mixing practices that are, according to Sergi, “nothing less than a comprehensive, industrywide transformation.”24 It is certainly clear that Blow Out fixates on the apparatus. In one

412   Miguel Mera extraordinary sequence the camera performs six 360-degree spins around Jack’s sound studio as he realizes that the conspiring forces have erased all his recordings. We see a multitude of tape machines and we hear increasing white noise, regular unexplained beeping, a phone that will not stop ringing, and the multiple rotating mechanisms of “silenced” reel-to-reel recorders, simultaneously resonant and empty. It is not simply the apparatus that is fetishized, though, as much as the act of synchronization itself. Only by bringing together audio and visual streams is Jack able to identify a visual flash and its synchronous gunshot sound in order to prove what he only suspected beforehand. This preoccupation with the veracity of synchrony recalls Kevin Donnelly’s discussion in Occult Aesthetics, where he characterized a lack of synchrony as potentially disturbing for the audioviewer, with points of synchronization between sound and image acting like moments of comfort in otherwise messy audiovisual environments.25 In Blow Out sound receives “retrospective motivation”26 when we are allowed to see its origin. It is the synchrony between sound and vision that is key to establishing the truth and making the ambiguous comprehensible. Blow Out frequently attempts to bring sight and sound together but, as I have already suggested, there is also significant physical distance in the film’s climactic sequence, which constitutes part of its extraordinary affect. Sally’s wiretap allows Jack to hear every aspect of the unfolding events in his earpiece. The sound is filtered through his body but he does not know the physical location of Sally and Burke. In a race against time, he desperately tries to find them in the midst of a Liberty Day parade, the intimacy of the clandestine listening contrasted with the bombast and commotion of the parade. It is at the precise moment of Sally’s scream and her murder that Jack is finally able to locate her, a sequence of physical asynchrony leading to synchrony. The carnality of the scream generates an horrific embodied shock, a sensory overload, that is paired with a distressing inability to act (see Video 20.1). According to Michel Chion this is a classic example of a structural device that he referred to as “the screaming point.”27 Highlighting the gendered issues relating to mastery and control and the structural placement of what is, disappointingly, always a female scream, Chion argued that it “must fall at an appointed spot, explode at a precise moment, at the crossroads of converging plot lines, at the end of an often convoluted trajectory, but calculated to give this point a maximum impact.”28 For Chion this is a significant structural moment rather than a particular embodied phenomenon, but it seems to me that different aspects of scopic distance in this scene powerfully highlight both the gaps and connections between listening and feeling. It simultaneously heightens and denies the corpo-“real.” Jay Beck observed that the primary problem of both The Conversation and Blow Out “is how audio sensations are rendered in a primarily visual medium.”29 Both films struggle with the problem of sensory representation, addressing the conceptual and physical

Video 20.1  Blow Out (1981); the screaming point.

Listening–Feeling–Becoming   413 gaps in different ways. Both demonstrate a clear preoccupation with surveillant listening and productively and problematically attempt to grapple with the resulting embodied distance. The Conversation’s use of sound supports parallel layers of interiority and exteriority and Blow Out actively plays with notions of audiovisual synchrony and asynchrony. Jumping forward fifteen years, however, there are increasing cinematic attempts to bridge these kinds of gaps.

Feeling From the early-1990s onwards the phenomenological turn in screen studies began to challenge boundaries of externality and internality, to examine the “immersive” audiovisual connection to the human body, and to describe the modes of perception through which the body is enacted.30 The focus of this research has primarily been visual rather than aural, let alone truly audiovisual, but there has been an increasing shift towards the scholarly disintegration of the margins between listening and feeling. This is noteworthy because it parallels the trajectory in both surveillance studies and cinematic output. As Levin observed, the surveillance cinema of the 1990s marked a period of transition between analog and digital modes and it is where cinematic narration became increasingly interleaved with surveillant narration. Kerins also highlights the transition from analog to digital exhibition technologies as a period of standardization of multichannel surround-sound practices. By 1995, for example, the Major studios had adopted an all-digital release policy.31 Surveillance studies, more generally, realized that the Foucauldian notion of panopticism could not account for the myriad forms of surveillance that were developed in the 1990s,32 and cinema in turn imagined a variety of representational possibilities. Thus, there is a beguiling conflation of technological, aesthetic, cinematic, theoretical, and practical concerns during this period. It is in this context that Kathryn Bigelow’s tech-noir thriller Strange Days (1995) provides a fascinating example of an attempt to highlight the movement from listening to feeling. Set on the eve of the year 2000 and bristling with pre-millennial tension, the film’s central conceit is that outlawed FBI surveillance technology which reproduces exact first-person audiovisual-sensory experience forms the basis of an illicit and perverted underground trade. The Super-conducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID) consists of a lightweight, flexible mesh of electrodes and a portable recorder, and it captures an individual’s perceptual experience direct from the cerebral cortex. These experiences can then be replayed with the same technology, allowing users to experiment with multiple forms of subjectivity and identity. Former cop and black-marketeer, Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes), explains: “This is not like TV only better. This is life. It is a piece of somebody’s life . . . I mean, you are there, you’re doing it, you’re seeing it, you’re hearing it, you’re feeling it.” The plot features three murders, each with broad social implications, that coalesce around Nero.

414   Miguel Mera Several scholars have noted the clear references to the Rodney King incident of 1991, and Kakoudaki suggests that the film creates an “allegory out of what most would consider a tragedy or disaster.”33 Indeed, the film’s contradictory exploration of both racial and gender issues have made it a popular case study in screen studies.34 However, the importance of sound to the film’s sensory strategy has been routinely ignored. Zimmer, for example, argued that the film “proposes both the SQUID and its embodied users as mechanisms of surveillance,”35 and though she highlights the role of the body while examining aspects of subjectivity in relation to the first-person Steadicam sequences, there is no discussion of the role of sound. This is an important omission, because the sonic portrayal forcefully enacts the sensory; sound-design actively works to develop feeling. In an early scene, for example, Nero gives his friend and double-amputee, Tex Arcana (Todd Graff), a custom-made SQUID clip of somebody running along a beach. The enhanced sound of the splash and squelch of each footstep in the surf provide an exquisite sense of materiality, a sensual representation of wetness and texture. This is a mode of aural expression through which the body is enacted. Arcana is thus able to feel what it is to run with legs that he no longer has. The audience is invited to experience this as if they are him. The expanded and enriched soundscape, including dynamic and directional birdsong, is presented as if it is heard from the first-person perspective of the Steadicam, a simultaneous association of hearing the sound and the sound being heard by both of the first-person character(s), Arcana and his “avatar.” This is a strategy that could be described as hyper-corpo-“real,” a dramatically enhanced sensuous experience articulated primarily through the textural qualities of the sound. The film was mixed for 1990s digital surround formats (including Dolby Digital and SDDS) and Kerins highlights the extensive use of 360-degree panning as part of the film’s “immersive” method.36 The play on audiovisual subjectivity is taken to an absolute extreme in one of the film’s most disturbing scenes. Nero receives and reviews an anonymous “blackjack” clip (the SQUID equivalent of snuff) showing a rapist and murderer breaking into an apartment. In an horrific development, the assailant places a second SQUID on his victim, blindfolds her, and then patches her directly into his SQUID experience while he attacks her. In addition to the appalling assault itself, there is the sickening destruction of subjectivity where the victim is forced to feel what the attacker feels at the same time as she is being raped and murdered. As Bolter and Grusin put it: “She perceives herself not only as being attacked by a male but also as the object of her own attack as a male subject.”37 She is, therefore, forcefully made complicit in her own violation and eventually dies from the sensory overload. It is an ultimate exploitation of power through technology. Once she is dead, the murderer removes her blindfold, opens her eyes, and frames the “shot” with his hands as if to admire his workmanship. In this sequence of disturbingly blurred subjectivities (Nero, murderer, victim), it is striking that the sound-design consistently enhances the first-person perspective of the attacker. Furthermore, the Foley sounds, those most clearly associated with touch and the body, are foregrounded and enhanced. Lucy Fife Donaldson observed that Foley usually involves producing a range of subtle sounds and is the “layer of the soundtrack that announces itself the least.”38 But in this sequence the practice is reversed and the

Listening–Feeling–Becoming   415 Foley sounds are unnaturally close and foregrounded as a means of emphasizing a proprioceptive and kinaesthetic perspective. The sound of picking locks, the electric arcing of a stun gun, the slash of a T-Shirt with a retractable-blade knife, footsteps, clothes rustles, grunts, and especially the breathing of the attacker are prominent. This heightened reversal seems like a practical attempt to reconcile Michel Chion’s problematization of the point-of-audition. He argued that the omni-directional nature of sound means that spatial point-of-audition is not really a point at all, but more of a zone.39 It is striking that the sound-design in this scene reduces the digital-spatial potential that is exploited elsewhere in the film and which, according to Whittington, is emblematic of filmmaking in this era.40 The Foley specifically aims to narrow the spatial, subjective, and tactile perspective. Though multiple bodies are implicated, only the murderer’s experience is seen and heard. The audience is, thus, equally forced into feeling an uncomfortable and restricted audiovisual position that emphasizes their embodied complicity. Strange Days consistently heightens feeling through the use of sound in its representation and recreation of an advanced surveillant technology. This takes the form of first-person point-of-view Steadicam imagery and enhanced Foley sound, generating heightened sensational affect as well as clearly focused spatial and subjective aural perspectives. Bolter and Grusin argued that the film highlights contradictory pre-millennial societal drives, where contemporary culture seeks to erase all signs of mediation in the very act of multiplying them. If this is true, the immediacy in this paradoxical desire, which they described as the double logic of remediation, is insistently articulated through the use of sound as a device for evoking tactile sensations.41 Enemy of the State is in many ways a much more conventional example than Strange Days. Nonetheless, there are still ways in which sensation is centralized compared to earlier surveillant cinema paradigms, indicating a general shift within the mainstream. The film is also especially interesting in this context because it is clearly an homage to The Conversation. Enemy of the State features a Harry Caul-like figure (who is even played by Gene Hackman) as a former surveillance expert who has been forced off-grid, and there are numerous scenes that directly reference the earlier film. However, the surveillant environment has changed so drastically between these two films that the Foucauldian notion of panoptic discipline (or at least the threat of it), as well as an efficiently networked surveillance infrastructure, has now firmly taken hold. The film features lawyer Robert Clayton Dean (Will Smith), who inadvertently comes into possession of a video depicting the murder of a Congressman by a director at the National Security Agency. The narrative background noise is a new piece of counterterrorism legislation that aims to expand the surveillance powers of intelligence agencies, and the film demonstrates the full and disturbing extent of these powers. Dean is constantly observed, overheard, analyzed, and tracked, his digital data is manipulated, his reputation is deliberately tarnished, and he is continually chased by a rogue NSA unit who are seemingly able to reshape and destroy his life at will. Dean attempts to escape the machinery of control with the help of Brill, a reclusive ex-NSA operative. The sense of paranoia at the constant and immediate surveillance is palpable. Levin identifies this film, along with numerous others in this period, as representing a shift from the spatial to the temporal, where the “truth” is confirmed by “real-time” representation

416   Miguel Mera which is supposedly not susceptible to post-production manipulation. “The fundamentally indexical rhetoric of cinema’s pre-digital photo-chemical past thus survives in the digital age, albeit now re-cast in the form of the temporal indexicality of the realtime surveillant image.”42 It is not only the image that is significant here, of course, the sound is fundamental to the sense of oppression and omniscience. The opening titles feature a sharply edited collection of grainy surveillance images. There are numerous aerial shots, CCTV images, footage of violent crimes, and chase scenes. The music, by Trevor Rabin and Harry Gregson-Williams, features extensive use of digital glitch. Indeed, the surveillance glitch (arguably heard for the first time as a recording artefact in The Conversation) is here taken to an aesthetic extreme far beyond its traditional function as a technical marker of fragmented audio recording. The glitch is, in fact, the fundamental structural musical ingredient, not simply a disruptive element, and it governs metrical dissonance first by establishing regular repetitive patterns and then dislocating them. This draws attention to the materiality of the sound, its grain, and challenges the simple aestheticization of failure that is the recurrent trope in scholarly discussions of glitch music.43 Here ubiquitous digital data is made tangible through the use of sound. The oppressive sense of personal data being scoured and manipulated as a powerful tool of control is given an aural, material quality. The “invisible” 1s and 0s are made “real.” This representational approach is further enhanced through other data-sonification strategies. For example, there are recurrent digitally engraved sonic intertitles, which subsequently became a cliché of the genre. A phrase such as “Silverberg & Blake. Attorneys at Law. 11:30 hrs” is not presented simply as a visual description of geographical location and time, each letter is aurally imprinted with its own digital, single-tone, high-pitched “bleep.” A Morse-code-like sonic inscription that is made physical and real. Simultaneously an earcon and a marker, it is materially etched in time and space. The audience experiences numerous other audiovisual instances of data travelling. In one scene, where Dean foolishly telephones a colleague and gives away his location, we see a glorious tunnel of light inside a fiber-optic cable and hear the glitched flow and fizz of the digital sound. This is a process that demonstrates the transformation of Dean’s voice into digital information, the body becoming data (see Video 20.2). In this film, even the satellites have their own sounds. As Zimmer observed, the recurrent shots of satellites in an omniscient perspective over the Earth are used as a strategy to “visually establish an individual subject from a great distance, and to find a technological means within the narrative for motivating crosscutting between shots that construct elaborate plot connections between spaces, peoples, events, and actions.”44 The shots of locative satellite technology, however, always have a hyperactive and multilayered sonic characteristic: bleeps, scratches, digital glitches, fast-forward scrubs, and so on. The satellites and the data flows are presented as a living organism. The whole world of information

Video 20.2  Enemy of the State (1998); body becoming data.

Listening–Feeling–Becoming   417 is available and the controlled data stream is enacted by the sound. The intangible image-sign of the object is given a tactile character, so that its surface can be sensed and its materiality described. What does this approach to tactility tell us about cinema’s representational strategies in relation to surveillance? The central idea of Foucault’s panopticism concerns the systematic control of human populations through subtle and often unseen forces: “the object of information, never a subject in communication.”45 The threat of being observed is the guarantee of order. In the representational strategies of the cinema throughout the 1990s the threat in those unseen forces is often heard in order to be directly felt.

Becoming If Strange Days suggested the potential for a more embodied surveillant experience and Enemy of State demonstrated the aural-tactile promise of data, in the 2000s a series of films moved even further towards the surveillant corpo-“real.” This was an attempt to satisfy a societal and technological drive towards posthuman subjectivity. The body is no longer distant, implicated, or even partially engaged. In the age of dataveillance, postDeleuzian notions of modulation, and societies of control, it is no longer sufficient simply to feel the cinematic representation through sound, the body must now become the central feature of the surveillant mechanism. This recalls Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson’s influential notion of “the surveillant assemblage.”46 In their post-panoptic and posthuman line of argumentation, Haggerty and Ericson suggest that there is greater convergence of formerly discrete surveillance systems, an exponential increase in surveillance for the purposes of control, governance, security, profit, and voyeuristic entertainment by both the state and non-state organizations, and, importantly, that human bodies are abstracted from their territorial settings and reassembled into a series of discrete data flows as virtual data doubles. They consider this a form of becoming which “transcends human corporeality and reduces the body to pure information.”47 Traditional notions of the body are challenged, the body is inscribed with technology, rupturing formerly impenetrable boundaries. It is unsurprising, then, that we encounter a number of films, typically in the science fiction genre, that focus on sophisticated surveillant technologies and which blur the boundaries between data and the body. An effective representation of the surveillant assemblage can be found in Minority Report (2002) which depicts a dystopian world of ubiquitous surveillance. The film follows the narrative trope of the individual who believes in the purity of a system until they inevitably become its victim. The Pre-Crime Unit extends the Orwellian concept of thought crime, where the intention to commit future murder can be predicted by three Pre-Cogs (Pre-Cognitives), whose psychic “gift” is the result of a botched series of scientific experiments. Crimes can be foreseen but this is also a society in which no crime can be concealed. Detective John Anderton (Tom Cruise) becomes a target of the system

418   Miguel Mera that he directs when the Pre-Cogs predict he will murder a man he does not yet know. Furthermore, in this society, corporations appear to have significant unregulated power to understand the movement of citizens and to control consumer habits. Omnipresent retinal scans identify, track, and validate individuals. Retailers analyze buying habits in order to tailor their real-time digital marketing. At one point a “smart” billboard, that has biometrically scanned Anderton, tells him, “you look like you could use a Guinness.” This is a society that promotes the illusion of individuality but in which it is impossible to be anonymous, a society where the docile population that Foucault predicted blithely acquiesces to police authority and to marketing control. The film superficially explores philosophical questions about whether it is possible to punish somebody for a crime they have not yet committed, but it raises more challenging issues in relation to the displacement of the individual in favor of surveillance data. The Pre-Cogs are an embodied psychic-surveillance mechanism, their mental premonitions are captured and made available for audiovisual interpretation. Using wearabletechnology gloves, Anderton gesturally controls the data flows on a giant user-interface display and he scans, disaggregates, scrubs, and reassembles the material. Indeed, he becomes the embodied owner and performer of the surveillance data, it fits him like a glove. Anderton also listens to extracts of classical music, such as Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony or the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, while he undertakes his interpretative tasks. The classical music here, unimaginatively, seems to be designed to evoke the humanistic values that ultimately prevail over the authoritarian systems in such films. But it is surely no coincidence that Anderton’s gestures resemble those of an orchestra conductor as he controls the holographic audio-images through his prosthetic gloves. In one of the film’s most powerful sequences, he reviews the PreCogs premonition of the death of Leo Crow, but is confronted by a digital version of his future self as the murderer. Anderton hears himself utter the words, “Goodbye Crow,” just before he sees himself firing the gun. This is a striking representation of Haggerty and Ericson’s data double, the corporeal confronting the future corpo-“real,” but here enfolded into a single flesh-information amalgam (see Video 20.3). Clearly, Metz’s idea of scopic separation collapses in a scene like this. Not only are time and space brought together, but the data double is also more trusted than the physically present real person. We can no longer speak of the “distance of the look, distance of listening,” because all has been subsumed within the data-body amalgam. At the same time, however, the practice of listening also appears to have been subsumed. Classical music is used purely as “background” music for relaxation while Anderton works, and his interpretative acts do not focus on listening or acknowledge sound as material for analysis. For all of its visual brilliance the use of sound and the aural representation of surveillance in Minority Report remains relatively conventional. The heightened point of becoming, however, structurally and forcefully emphasizes intimacy between the subject and the object, the organic and the digital, and the past and the present.

Video 20.3  Minority Report (2002); corporeal meets corpo-“real.”

Listening–Feeling–Becoming   419 Issues of surveillant embodiment are further taken up in the time-travel thrillers Déjà vu (2006) and Source Code (2011), both focusing on the use of experimental digital methods to intercept terrorist attacks. In Déjà vu the individual dead are reborn through surveillant time travel which ultimately creates an alternate version of the present reality. In Source Code, conversely, the human avatar chooses to die in the “real world” in order to be reborn into a surveillant simulation, thus fully completing and simultaneously denying data’s journey towards bodily becoming. As Garrett Stewart puts it, “the virtuality of image concerns the once-human body not just mediated but mediatized, made sheer means of electronic transfer.”48 These films, therefore, further entwine surveillance and the body, through the conflation and genre manipulation of science-fiction and surveillance narratives. Following a terrorist explosion on a ferry in New Orleans, Déjà vu features a freshly formed government unit whose first case is to investigate the bombing. Special Agent Douglas Carlin (Denzel Washington) is invited to join the unit and is introduced to the Snow White system, which he is told triangulates multiple satellites and surveillance streams to create a 360-degree audiovisual simulation that always runs 4 days, 6 hours, 3 minutes, and 45 seconds behind the present time. Pointing to the obvious anomaly in the explanation he has been given Carlin asks, “but which one of the seven dwarves can explain to me how you get the audio?” It is gradually revealed, through pseudo-scientific gibberish, that the team has inadvertently worked out (sharp intake of breath) how to fold space-time creating an Einstein-Rosen bridge (or a wormhole) and that they can, theoretically, send objects into the past. The important point for our analysis is to note the shift in terms of the cinematic representation of the surveillant assemblage. Time travel has not only become synonymous with surveillance, but the technological and aesthetic possibilities command so much faith that we are not only able to see, listen, and feel, but also to transform the past in cathartic wish-fulfilment. The surveillant body and “reality” are blurred to the point that they are indistinguishable. It is possible, in fact, to send a human being back through time to prevent a terrorist explosion. We can even bring the dead back to life. The ethos of re-vivification is most clearly represented in the character of Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton) who first appears in the film as a corpse that Carlin encounters at an autopsy. She is subsequently shown in photographs, then temporally re-animated as a kind-of pastsurveillant hologram within the Snow White system, and finally she is born again from her erstwhile corpo-“real” becoming. At the end of the film Carlin also appears to be re-born in an unexplained parallel time strand, obviously to allow for the romantic coupling that the narrative has forcefully been pushing towards. It is hard to take this, given that Carlin’s connection with Kuchever has primarily been as a digital voyeur. The film tries to present it as love across time, but it really seems more like hyperreal stalking. In terms of the cinematic representational strategy, the data double, it seems, is no longer doubled at all. The surveilled is real and the real can also be transformed into the ­surveilled, they are one and the same. Data and flesh can be transferred, re-animated, or duplicated across time and space. Déjà vu may not be a great film but it does centralize some important questions about embodiment that are central to post-Deleuzian surveillance studies. Garett Stewart noted that the film shows how the “continuous optical

420   Miguel Mera becoming of cinema has found its full ontological correlative in the time-warp miracle of this screened past.”49 But what has happened to the act of listening? Stewart argued that “Déjà vu has closed the distance between surveillance and spectacle, document and immersive environment.”50 This is true, but in doing so, it has also closed the gap between discrete listening and scopic visual distance. In the age of dataveillance sound has become less central. Although there are numerous parallels with Déjà vu, Source Code goes even further into the blurred territories of the surveillant corpo-“real.” Sean Cubitt classifies it within a subgenre that he calls “irreality films,” where characters no longer find themselves in a virtual reality but discover that the world is a data construct and that reality itself is unreal.51 The film features injured U.S.  Army pilot Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) who is kept alive on a life-support system so that his cerebral cortex can be activated from the residual neural traces of a man who died in a commuter-train explosion. The “Source Code” allows Stevens to re-experience the eight minutes before the blast as the victim, Sean Fentress, and Stevens-as-Fentress is sent to learn the identity of the bomber in order to prevent a further disaster. Stewart argues that the film sets “the audio-optic sensorium of the human body itself as rewired transmission device.”52 But whose body? The film’s constructed layers feature the comatose real Stevens, the avatar of the real Stevens, and the avatar of Stevens’ avatar, Fentress, who is technically dead but has been re-embodied as Stevens. These digital palimpsests exploit the liminal spaces between life and death, real and unreal, subjective and objective, and past and present. The repeated eight-minute simulations are obviously supposed to be slippery, but the digital layers are not a representation of the data double as much as a post-surveillant invasion of the dead-body snatchers. The influence of open-world video games is also evident in the film’s recurrent exploration of the train environment in order to identify the bomber.53 This allows the same sequence to be re-played with different conversations and interactions as new information is discovered and revealed. The biggest reveal, however, which could be described as an act of aural dematerialization, is what Stewart calls the “duped track.”54 Towards the end of the film we see Stevens’ bodily remains in a tank with electrodes attached to his dismembered torso and decimated brain. Throughout the film we have heard him speaking to his handlers, but suddenly we are made to realize that his “voice” has been transmitted, all along, purely as scrolling text on a computer screen. We have been manipulated into believing what we hear, an embodied vocal performance that never really existed. This is one of the film’s many ghostly strategies to generate deliberately blurred boundaries that fuse and confuse the surveilled simulation(s) with representations of reality. At the end of Source Code, Stevens identifies the bomber who is then captured in the real world before he is able to detonate a second dirty bomb in Chicago. Stevens then persuades his handler, Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga), to send him back into the “Source Code” and in this final attempt he saves the passengers on the train by disarming the first bomb and capturing the bomber, remaining in that supposedly virtual world. This means, in one bodysnatching reading, that Stevens deliberately overwrites Fentress with his own consciousness. Indeed, not only is Fentress killed, but his murderer carries

Listening–Feeling–Becoming   421 on impersonating him in order to steal his girlfriend. She unknowingly seems to prefer her new man: “I always knew he was a keeper.” Colter Stevens’ fairy tale ending is Sean Fentress’ unhappy premature synaptic death. As this all appears to be a simulation, the moral and ethical consequences are perhaps somewhat less marked, but at the same time Stevens does seem to prevent the original train bombing in the real world. Or is that also a simulation? At the very end the disemboweled “real” Stevens appears to be alive, or at least not totally brain dead, even though Goodwin has switched off his life support, and a voiceover from Stevens in the “real” post-simulation world (but this cannot be an actual embodied voice, can it?) tells her to look after the “real” Stevens. There are so many blurred levels working and networking here that it is impossible to determine what is virtual and what is real, and we cannot be sure whether it is simultaneously none or all of these things. At every level, however, surveillant data and the body are thoroughly imbricated. The issues raised by these more recent film examples are challenging and engaging ones. Minority Report, Déjà vu and Source Code imagine new forms of surveillance and their associated moral problems, but they also frequently assemble and disassemble the body, intermingling various forms of data with a state of digital becoming. Going beyond Thomas Levin’s notion of the shift from spatial to temporal indexicality within surveillant cinematic representation, therefore, we have moved steadily towards bodily indexicality. These corpo-“real” aesthetics demonstrate the fluidity of surveillant data within and beyond our current societal structures. It is also clear that listening is no ­longer highlighted as a distinct sense. In earlier manifestations of the surveillance film the body was clearly implicated through the act of listening, but there was always a gap between listening and the body. As the surveillant assemblage has increasingly taken hold, the body has been rebuilt in a series of virtual data doubles in which the act of listening has been subsumed.

Conclusions This chapter began by invoking Jeremy Bentham’s notion of the Panopticon. The ubiquity of surveillance mechanisms and their increasing convergence goes far beyond what Bentham could have imagined and raises numerous important questions about how we understand freedom and control. The 2013 exposure by Edward Snowden of clandestine global surveillance programs involving governments and telecommunications companies revealed several strands of secret surveillant activity, but we also see increasing evidence of meddling in national elections, hashtag poisoning, and the use of twitterbots to accentuate polarized identities and organize people into like-minded groups. These kinds of unseen and unheard practices can be made more evident through cinema’s surveillant imaginary, not only as an anxious reflection on abuses of power but also as a remediation process that helps construct the world in which we live.

422   Miguel Mera This chapter has attempted to rehabilitate the importance of both sound and the body within cinematic surveillance studies, and it has shown how representations of surveillant listening have changed over time. This has allowed us to reconsider some of the traditions and trajectories of both film and surveillance studies, as well as the practical and technical application of surveillance in culture and within cinematic representations of society. I  have argued that there is distinct embodied intimacy ­generated through the act of listening within surveillance narratives which attempts to heighten affect and sensation and also challenges some of the notions of distance exemplified by classic psychoanalytic cinema theory. As if to wrestle with the inconsistencies of supposed interiority and exteriority, as well as the conceptual and physical gap between sight and sound, cinematic representations of surveillance have shifted from tactile uses of sound acting on the body to eventually become bodies that are established within the digital apparatus of surveillance. As part of this progression discrete listening dissolves. The gaps between listening and feeling are closed in a ­process of becoming where digital surveillance and the body are indistinguishable. Surveillant sound and image are incorporated into the body and have become definitively corpo-“real.”

Notes 1. Kirstie Ball, Kevin  D.  Haggerty, and David Lyon, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies (New York: Routledge, 2012). 2. Jeremy Bentham, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: Correspondence Volume 4: October 1788 to December 1793, ed. Alexander Taylor Milne (London: Athlone Press, 1981). 3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 1995). 4. For further detail, see e.g. Philip Schofield, Bentham: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2009); Miran Božovič, (2010). “Introduction: An Utterly Dark Spot,” in The Panopticon Writings, ed. Miran Božovič (London: Verso Books), 1–28; David Lyon, “The Search for Surveillance Theories,” in Theorising Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond, ed. David Lyon (Portland: Willan Publishing, 2006), 3–20; Thomas Mathiesen, “The Viewer Society: Michel Foucault’s ‘Panopticon’ Revisited,” reprinted in Crime and Media: A Reader, ed. Chris Greer (London: Routledge 2010), 506–20. 5. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 3–7. 6. See also Kevin D. Haggerty, and Richard V. Ericson, “The Surveillant Assemblage,” British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 4 (2000): 605–22; Shoshana Zuboff “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” Journal of Information Technology 30, (2015): 75–89; Roger Clarke, “Information Technology and Dataveillance,” Communications of the ACM 31, no. 5 (1988), 498–512; Murakami Wood. “Beyond the Panopticon? Foucault and Surveillance Studies,” in Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, ed. Jeremy  W.  Crampton and Stuart Elden (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 245–63. 7. Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 4.

Listening–Feeling–Becoming   423 8. Steve Mann, “Sousveillance: Inverse Surveillance in Multimedia Imaging,” International Multimedia Conference: Proceedings of the 12th annual ACM International Conference on Multimedia (New York: ACM Press, 2004): 620–27. 9. Sébastian Lefait, Surveillance on Screen (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press,  2013); Garett Stewart, Closed Circuits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Catherine Zimmer Surveillance Cinema (New York: New York University Press, 2015). 10. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 833–44; Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 345–55. 11. Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, 59. 12. For example, as a function of the recording process and the modes of cinematic representation, eavesdropping is always heard “close up,” whereas visual surveillance is frequently associated with low-quality CCTV footage filmed from extreme angles to emphasize the disturbance caused by spying on and being spied upon. I am also mindful, here, of JeanLuc Nancy’s writing. In Listening he argued that, “To be listening is to be at the same time outside and inside, to be open from without and from within, hence from one to the other and from one in the other.” (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 14. 13. Thomas Y. Levin, “Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of ‘Real Time’,” in CTRL [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ed. Thomas Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 578–93. 14. Dietmar Kammerer, “Surveillance in Literature, Film, and Television,” in The Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, ed. Kirstie Ball, Kevin  D.  Haggerty, and David Lyon (New York: Routledge, 2012), 99–106: 99. 15. Paul Cobley, “ ‘Justifiable Paranoia’: The Politics of Conspiracy in 1970s American Film,” in Shocking Cinema of the Seventies, ed. Xavier Mendik (Hereford: NDIR Publishing, 2002), 85. 16. Elizabeth Weis, “Eavesdropping: An Aural Analogue of Voyeurism?” in Cinesonic: The World of Sound in Film, ed. Philip Brophy (AFTRS, 1999), 79–107. 17. Levin, “Rhetoric of the Temporal Index,” 582. 18. Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, 60. 19. Ibid., 60. 20. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 96. 21. Juan Chattah, David Shire’s The Conversation: A Film Score Guide (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 133. 22. Chattah, David Shire’s The Conversation, 159–60. 23. Jay Beck, Designing Sound: Audiovisual Aesthetics in 1970s American Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 4 24. Gianluca Sergi, The Dolby Era: Film Sound in Contemporary Hollywood (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 11. 25. Kevin Donnelly, Occult Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 26. Donnelly, Occult Aesthetics, 196. 27. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 76.

424   Miguel Mera 28. Ibid., 76–7. 29. Jay Beck, “Citing the Sound,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 29, 4 (2004): 156–63: 158. 30. There are numerous examples but some foundational texts include: Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); Ivone Margulies, ed., Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); and Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001). 31. Mark Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 32. See, for example, Roy Boyne, “Post-Panopticism,” Economy and Society 29, no. 2 (2000), 285–307; William Bogard, The Simulation of Surveillance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  1996); Roger Clarke, “Information Technology and Dataveillance,” Communications of the ACM 31, no. 5 (1998): 498–512; David Lyon, Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond (Collumpton: Willan Publishing,  2006); and Thomas Mathieson “The Viewer Society: Michel Foucault’s ‘Panopticon’ Revisited,” Theoretical Criminology 1, no. 2 (1997): 215–34. 33. Despina Kakoudaki, “Spectacles of History: Race Relations, Melodrama, and the Science Fiction/Disaster Film,” Camera Obscura 17, no. 2 (2002): 109–53: 124. Rodney King became known as the victim of Los Angeles Police Department brutality after a videotape was released of several police officers beating him during his arrest in March 1991. Outrage at the acquittal of the officers involved in the incident was subsequently a primary motivating factor in the Los Angeles riots of 1992. 34. See, e.g., Mark Berrettini, “Can ‘We All’ Get Along? Social Difference, the Future, and Strange Days,” Camera Obscura 17, no. 2 (2002): 155–88; Brian Carr, “Strange Days and the Subject of Mobility,” Camera Obscura 17, no. 2 (2002): 191–217. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). 35. Zimmer, Surveillance Cinema, 185. 36. Mark Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo), 77. 37. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 166. 38. Lucy Fife Donaldson, “The Work of an Invisible Body: The Contribution of Foley Artists to On-Screen Effort,” Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media 7, (2014): 1–15. 39. Michel Chion, Audiovision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 90. 40. William Whittington, “Lost in Sensation: Reevaluating the Role of Cinematic Sound in the Digital Age,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, ed. Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 61–77. 41. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, 1999. 42. Levin, “Rhetoric of the Temporal Index,” 592. 43. Caleb Kelly, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009); Kim Cascone “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music,” Computer Music Journal 24, no. 4 (2000): 12–18; Torben Sangild,

Listening–Feeling–Becoming   425 “Glitch—The Beauty of Malfunction,” in Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate, ed. Christopher Washburne and Maiken Derno (New York: Routledge, 2004), 257–74. 44. Catherine Zimmer, Surveillance Cinema, 120. 45. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200. 46. Haggerty and Ericson, “The Surveillant Assemblage,” 605–22. 47. Ibid., 613. 48. Stewart, Closed Circuits, 245. 49. Ibid., 202. 50. Ibid., 201. 51. Sean Cubitt, “Source Code: Eco-Criticism and Subjectivity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman and Carol Vernallis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 483–501: 485. 52. Garrett Stewart, “Sound Thinking: Looped Time, Duped Track,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman and Carol Vernallis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 465–82: 466. 53. See Warren Buckland’s “Source Code’s Videogame Logic,” in Hollywood Puzzle Films, ed. Warren Buckland (New York: Routledge, 2014), 185–97. 54. Stewart, “Sound Thinking: Looped Time, Duped Track.”

Select Bibliography Ball, Kirstie, David Lyon, and Kevin  D.  Haggerty. The Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies. New York: Routledge, 2012. Beck, Jay. Designing Sound: Audiovisual Aesthetics in 1970s American Cinema. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2014. Bentham, Jeremy, The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham: Correspondence Volume 4: October 1788 to December 1793, ed. Alexander Taylor Milne. London: The Athlone Press, 1981. Bogard, William. The Simulation of Surveillance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Boyne, Roy. “Post-Panopticism,” Economy and Society 29, no. 2 (2000): 285–307. Buckland, Warren. Hollywood Puzzle Films. New York: Routledge, 2014. Chattah, Juan. David Shire’s The Conversation: A Film Score Guide. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015. Clarke, Roger A. “Information Technology and Dataveillance,” Communications of the ACM 31, no. 5 (1998), 498–512. Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992): 3–7. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 1995. Haggerty, Kevin D., and Ericson, Richard V. “The Surveillant Assemblage,” British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 4 (2000): 605–22. Kammerer, Dietmar. “Surveillance in Literature, Film, and Television.” In Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, ed. Kirstie Ball, David Lyon, and Kevin D. Haggerty, 99–106. New York: Routledge, 2012. Kerins, Mark. Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Lefait, Sébastian. Surveillance on Screen. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2013.

426   Miguel Mera Levin, Thomas Y. “Rhetoric of the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of ‘Real Time’.” In CTRL [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ed. Thomas Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel, 578–93. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. Lyon, David, ed. Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond. Collumpton: Willan Publishing, 2006. Mathieson, Thomas. “The Viewer Society: Michel Foucault’s ‘Panopticon’ Revisited,” Theoretical Criminology 1, no. 2 (1997): 215–34. Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Listening. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Stewart, Garrett. Closed Circuits. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Weis, Elizabeth. “Eavesdropping: An Aural Analogue of Voyeurism?” In Cinesonic: The World of Sound in Film, ed. Philip Brophy, 79–107. Sydney: AFTRS, 1999. Whittington, William. “Lost in Sensation: Reevaluating the Role of Cinematic Sound in the Digital Age.” In The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, ed. Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson, 61–77. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Zimmer, Catherine. Surveillance Cinema. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

chapter 21

Son ic El ongation a n d Son ic A por i a Two Modes of Disrupted Listening in Film Holly Rogers

Sound and music have always enjoyed a creative fluidity in film. But when the fluidity results in a morphological change that complicates the audiovisual relationship, sounds can take on an aesthetically challenging role able to disrupt traditional processes of cinematic listening. When a sound breaks from its original audiovisual affiliation to form a de-synchronized musical texture, our familiar modes of aural attentiveness—the ways in which we hear and process a soundscape—are troubled; when these sounds arise from beyond the visual world altogether, audiovisual perception can become fractured and unstable. Here, I suggest that the dismantling of traditional audiovisual textures through soundscape composition can happen in one of two ways and the result can be either a strong form of engagement, or a complicated form of distanciation. The first mode I call sonic elongation; the second sonic aporia.1 Sonic elongation arises when noise from within the film’s world is broadened until it becomes unfamiliar: when source sounds abstract from their visual referents to take on musical form and texture. Such moments are related to—yet significantly develop—common sound design proc­ esses. Although environmental sounds have traditionally been used to substantiate the image in fiction film, William Whittington draws our attention to their artificiality: “sound is often one of the most highly constructed aspects of cinema . . . it is understood that sound design does not simply capture reality, but rather constructs an entirely new ‘cinematic reality’, augmenting it through attentiveness to considerations such as sound perspective, localization, pyschoacoustics, and spectacle.”2 Along similar lines, Michel Chion acknowledges that “Sound that rings true for the spectator and sound that is true are two very different things. In order to assess the truth of a sound, we refer much more to codes established by cinema itself, by television, and narrative-representational arts in general, than to our hypothetical lived experience.”3 Such augmented sound design, built on endlessly deferred semiotic codes, is highly mediated, and sonic “realism” as we have come to understand it in a cinematic context is highly fabricated.

428   Holly Rogers So established are these cinematic codes that transient intensifications to their au­di­o­ vis­ual textures can be comfortably negotiated. In some cases, drawing attention to onscreen sounds can help to secure the sound-to-sound coherence of the film without jarring an audience from their suspended disbelief. For instance, James Wierzbicki has referred to moments when a real-world sound or sound-effect is heightened to provide an emotional resonance as “affect sound,” something he describes as an auditory instant that, while working seamlessly with the image to ensure against any audiovisual rupture, nevertheless draws attention to itself in order “to trigger in its listeners emotional responses, or affects, at least as deep as those stirred by a film’s extra-diegetic music.”4 By contrast, Jeff Smith argues that technological developments have enabled the au­di­o­vis­ ual “fidelity” sought in classical forms of storytelling to expand in creative ways, paving the way for a more sustained augmentation of the sonic palette. Mapping the sonic resonances of postclassical film onto David Bordwell’s “impact aesthetic” of intensified visual continuity, Smith identifies “increased volume; low frequency effects; expanded frequency range; the spatialization of sound; the ‘hyperdetail’ of contemporary Foley work, and the use of nondiegetic sound effects as stylistic punctuation” as new forms of sonic mediation. At the same time, however, such “intensified sonic continuity” can express in a highly self-reflexive way: speaking of the use of “whooshing” sounds to underscore camera movements and so on, for instance, Smith suggests that such ambiguously situated sounds “not only serve to heighten the expressive quality of particular effects by increasing their sense of speed and pace, but also increase the selfconsciousness of the film’s narration.”5 Both the sporadic heightening of affect sound and the more persistent augmentations of intensified aural continuity demonstrate our fluency with cinematic vocabulary and the strength not only of the “irresistible weld” between sound and image that Chion attributes to the lure of “synchresis”—that “spontaneous and irresistible weld produced between a particular auditory phenomenon and visual phenomenon when they occur at the same time”—but also to the “emergent meaning” that Nicholas Cook finds arising from most audiovisual combinations.6 These processes of production and perception enable the absorption of unusual— even challenging—audiovisual relationships by which new and stretched configurations can easily be resolved. But when attention is drawn to sounds beyond their relationship with a visual source, or when synchresis is significantly challenged, audiovisual gaps can arise that block an easily navigable passage through the filmic texture. This can be unnerving. While moments of sonic elongation share the hyperreal affect and self-consciousness of a film’s audiovisual intensification, they also press further to embrace the unsettling qualities of sustained sensory fissure. If affect sounds operate as a temporary harbinger for semiotic excess—“Whereas well-executed sound effects help make a story seem credible, sound affect helps tell a story,” argues Wierzbicki—sonically elongated ones trouble both the credibility and smoothness of filmic narratology.7 Although beginning with the vertical augmentation of synchronicity, elongated sounds gradually pull away and abstract from their referent images until they become barely recognizable. During this process, environmental sound is heightened and enlarged until it gathers together into a musical

Sonic Elongation and Sonic Aporia   429 flow. The term elongation is useful here as it does not suggest the dilution of sonic material that “stretching” might suggest, but rather a textural and aesthetic accumulation. For the process to be successful, audiovisual synchronicity needs first to be established, then maintained, even if the sounds undergo significant transformation. Like affect sound and intensified continuity, then, sonic elongation can lead us deep into the heart of the fiction, generating moments of intense interiority through the gradual dislocation of sound from image. Sonic aporia is different. While sonic elongation is built on the memory of a strong auditory landmark (or “soundmark” as R. Murray Schafer referred to such events in the context of soundscape composition),8 aporetic audiovisuality arises when real-world sounds (or sound-effects) from beyond the film’s world are used to form a poetic or allegorical soundscape that does not assimilate with the images but sits alongside them. Like sonically elongated soundscapes, these often recognizable sounds undergo compositional transformation and yet their lack of a visual anchor, or, in some cases, their active opposition to what we see, leads our attention beyond the screen. The first step in the process is similar to the early soviet experiments in what Kristin Thompson has called “non-fidelity” sound, whereby the noises we expect to accompany an image are replaced by symbolically infused alternatives. Through an analysis of eleven sound films from early Soviet practice, Thompson concludes that “abrupt sound cutting” is a defining audiovisual principle of the period and can be found in films such as Lev Kuleshov’s 1933 film The Great Consoler, “when a prisoner in a jail cell hurls a stool across the room; the sound synchronized with its impact is a cymbal clash”: this, she says, “roughens perception.”9 It can also function conceptually: at one stage in Dziga Vertov’s first synchronous sound film, Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbas (1931), which is awash with symbolic sound that frequently comments ironically on the image, workers are seen mounting a church spire armed with tools, accompanied by Nikolai Timofeev’s jolly wind ensemble. After attaching wires to the spire, they begin to pull until it becomes unstable; as it starts to wobble, drums and cymbals gradually dominate the music with insistent rhythms that seem to fragment the image into shuddering juxtapositions (see Figure 21.1). Finally, a brass call accompanies the spire as it falls, but when it hits the floor the music is silenced and we don’t hear a crash, but the sound of a gunshot. Here, a realworld noise, derived from a clearly discernable source, is misplaced, juxtaposed with an incongruent image in tight synchronicity. In both films, the audiovisual dissonance results in heightened audibility, whereby the texture, timbre, and style of the soundscape temporarily commands our attention and initiates a brief re-arrangement of our mode of perception. Yet these moments are fleeting and easily resolvable, as the nonfidelity sounds point towards parallel messages already manifesting within each film. As a result, the cognitive dissonance of the juxtapositions is dispersed through convergence; the significance of both sound and image is retained, but rather than vibrating against each other, rational interpretation enables the dissonant elements to reach an easy reconciliation without changing their contradictory identities, or reducing the resonant affect of the other. Although sharing many of its traits, aporetic sound differs from non-fidelity effects in two significant ways: first, it rarely delivers moments of direct synchronicity with an

430   Holly Rogers

Figure 21.1 The image begins to fragment with the aporetic sound in Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbas (1931).

image; and second, it develops horizontally on its own terms, as though referring to an alternative, or parallel, world to the one we see. The resultant disconnect between what we see and what we hear encourages a jarring navigation between levels of audiovisual attentiveness. The borrowing of the Latin term aporia from philosophical theory provides a useful context for this investigation, as it describes a logical disjunction or contradiction within an argument or a text more generally. In rhetorics, the literal meaning

Sonic Elongation and Sonic Aporia   431 of the term—a state of being at a loss—is used to describe a perplexing internal conflict that casts doubt on the best way to proceed. Fraught with paradox, an aporia, which Nicholas Rescher describes as “any cognitive situation in which the threat of in­con­sist­ ency confronts us,” suggests a logical incompatibility that nevertheless seems credible as evidence exists that both proves and disproves the argument: it is, he writes, “a group of individually plausible but collectively incompatible theses.”10 The most famous aporia is the story in which a Cretan declares that all Cretans are liars. Any attempt to synthesize the two, individually plausible sides of this statement results in a paradox and an intellectual impasse; if they are all liars, and the speaker is one, then she too must be a liar— but if she’s a liar, does that mean that what she says is untrue? That Cretans never lie? In which case, we must believe her statement and we are back where we began. The two halves of the declaration repel and contradict each other and it is impossible to ratify the information in a logical way, without taking a risk, or enacting a large interpretative jump in logic in order to draw together the illogical and incongruent juxtapositions. When mapped onto the densely multi-voiced texture of audiovisual work, the concept is extremely useful. With resonances of both fissure and connection, it suggests that the components make sense in and of themselves, yet when combined there arises a contradiction that promotes a sense of irresolvable doubt. Building on previous scholarly investigations into creative soundscapes, the following investigates moments when sound is used affectively, but doesn’t simmer back down into the synchronous texture we would expect to be upheld to maintain “cinematic reality,” moments when its creative treatment is either sustained and pulls away from its corresponding image becoming loud, arresting, musical, or arises from another space altogether. In both instances several things happen: as the roles of sound and music become ambiguous and disjointed, soundscape begins to exceed image; and, as au­di­o­ vis­ual gaps begin to open, they engender new processes of auditory attention that complicate traditional modes of audiovisual consumption.

Audiovisual Rupture Audiovisual rupture, dissonance, counterpoint, and incongruence has, until recently, been quite rare in narrative film traditions (in experimental and avant-garde films they are relatively common) as it can call into question the coherence of what we are being offered. Continuity editing, shot/reverse-shot, crossfades, and overlaps—even in their “intensified” form—are visual tools to help blend the gaps inherent in a film’s construction so that, writes Kaja Silverman, the individual components “seem to constitute a  perfect whole” in order that the viewer’s “gaze suffers under no constraints.”11 Synchronous sound and congruent music can embody these visual traits along a vertical axis, as sound designer Walter Murch famously argued: for him, the re-association of image and sound during post-production is the “fundamental pillar upon which the creative use of sound rests, and without which it would collapse.”12 In order to construct

432   Holly Rogers the “fundamental pillar” of creative sound design, a clear sense of causation between what we see and hear needs to be present. Chion takes this idea further: “The sound film . . .  is dualistic,” he writes; “[i]ts dualism is hidden or disavowed to varying extents; sometimes cinema’s split is even on display. The physical nature of film necessarily makes an incision or cut between the body and the voice. Then the cinema does its best to restitch the two together again at the seam.”13 Such a notion underpins Chion’s assertion that “there is no soundtrack,” an idea predicated on the belief that each sound is locatable in an image, and thus films are constructed—and received—according to constantly flexing vertical audiovisual relationships that constructs a tightly knit mesh of audiovisuality.14 Many others agree. For Mary Ann Doane, this synchronous re-stitching of audio and visual elements gives us a feeling of a whole and unified body; a return to the prelinguistic Chora, as Caryl Flinn would have it.15 The bodily metaphors that underpin discussions of the “irresistible weld” accord with the more recent sensory turn in cultural studies, which describes the desire to reconnect divergent audiovisuality as a perceptual, sensorial process that happens before any cultural or aesthetic conditioning can take effect. In his work on multisensory, audio-tactile environments and virtual reality, for instance, Pontus Larsson argues that sensory synergy is achieved when sound and image are perceived as matching.16 And as we saw in the two examples of non-fidelity sound, we are able to forge connections even when the two senses seem to point in different directions or speak from different symbolic dimensions. Free from the constraints of synchronous sound, music is able to push the fissures of a symbolic and aesthetic relationship even further. It can work rhythmically with the image; but be inappropriate or unexpected emotionally, stylistically, historically, texturally; or in terms of mood or affect. This can happen in several different ways that all work through a disparity between what is expected as a result of our learnt behavior and what is delivered. And yet, most often, this does not result in a fragmented work but rather one with a complex accumulation of layered interactions that opens up previous theorizations of the sensory nature of cinema and the positioning of a viewer’s listening body. The oft-used term “counterpoint” for moments of audiovisual dissonance thus makes sense as within this musical form, as Dean Duncan argues, “musical lines do not . . . collide—they flow.”17 The preference for this musical term counterpoint over dissonance suggests that both music and image tracks have an independence, yet remain tightly connected, working through tension and resolution, question, answer and elaboration to reach a common understanding, a process that Pudovkin referred to as “intellectual synthesis.”18 Cross-modal processing would seem to suggest that many types of au­di­o­vis­ual clash in fiction film are easy to resolve, as they can be subsumed within the overall texture without threatening the greater narrative cohesion of the film. Moments of audiovisual rupture in film have received only scant scholarly attention, perhaps because in the mainstream tradition they are relatively uncommon, even in post-classical and contemporary cinematic culture, in which traditional audiovisual bonds have been significantly “intensified.” This is no doubt due to the specificities of a learnt vocabulary that has developed through film’s audiovisual history and our re­sult­ant

Sonic Elongation and Sonic Aporia   433 expectations about how we might navigate through a film’s texture in a meaningful and emotionally compelling way.19 In the examinations that do exist—Nicholas Cook’s model of similarity/difference and Chion’s theory of “dissonant harmony” and “true free counterpoint” are the most notable examples—music, rather than sound, forms the basis for much of the discussion.20 Focusing on classical narrative film, for instance, Steven Willemsen and Miklós Kiss evoke multimodal theory to explore the ways in which an audience, even when given contrasting sensory information, “attempts to bridge the gap of multimodal information in order to create a single, clear, cognitively consonant meaning.”21 What they call “incongruent film music” disturbs this process and arises at the moment of perception rather than as a result of “intellectual synthesis”: “We propose that the particular affect produced in the emotional collision of music and visuals results from a distinct cognitive interplay. This interplay, as we argue, results from our (evolutionary) propensity to perceive and process cross-modally, combining sensory data from different senses preconsciously . . . incongruent film music . . . precedes any culturally influenced interpretation.” If an easy, or coherent reconnection is difficult to formulate, however, “some vague uneasiness, an unsettling feeling” can arise. Willemsen and Kiss note that when faced with such a disjunction, there is a tendency to interpret the fissure as ironic or comedic in order to diffuse the “unsettling feeling.” Manifesting directly from sound, moments of sonic elongation and sonic aporia complicate both the pre-conscious process of cross-modal fusion and subsequent forms of “intellectual synthesis.” In fact, both forms openly promote the “unsettling feeling” that arises when film’s illusory unity is threatened. While sonic elongation gradually unstitches film along its audiovisual seam until the text gapes open, aporetic moments begin with rupture and toy with its implications for sensory fragmentation. Such fragmentation encourages us to think in new ways about the productive expansion into non-visual modes of understanding and embodiment encouraged by the various manifestations of the sensory turn. This unsuturing of both the text and the forms of engagement it engenders has implications for the ways in which we can theorize a coherent listener. Or rather, it complicates the idea of a single mode of listening, with its implication of physical normativity, and the limits of multimodal fusion altogether. Larsson argues that, if a mismatch arises, the resultant ambiguity can encourage the receiver to focus on one sense over the other: most often, he maintains, attention will be grabbed by the visual information. Here, I want to suggest that in film the opposite happens: that, in densely woven cinematic audiovisuality, attention is nearly always drawn to the film’s aural components when they break from their traditionally conceived role. And yet the physical and aesthetic gap between sound and image requires the receiver to work in ways different from the pre-cultural processing of multimodal fusion identified by Willemsen and Kiss. And when interpretation begins with sound, it is not enough to refer to the result simply as engendering an “unsettling feeling.” This leads to several questions. When the cross-modal and syncretic forms of cinematic listening are troubled, are traditional forms of audiovisual engagement abandoned or extended? Can visuality be refocused to include not only different sensory experiences, but also new forms of sonic comprehension? Does the disruption of familiar multimodal patterns

434   Holly Rogers engender new modes of listening? And if so, what do these new modes suggest for the ways in which we can theorize cinematic listening?

Sonic Elongation Occurring when sounds are closely and unambiguously substantiated by a visual ­referent—either through audiovisual synchronicity or environmental plausibility—before dislocating into musical textures, sonic elongation embraces its passage to incongruence. A variant of this process—by which location sounds or sound-effects are heightened, often through a process of “hyperorchestration” (Sergi Casanelles) until it blends with the instruments of the dramatic score—can be found throughout film history.22 Coming to the attention of mainstream culture with Murch’s creative sound design and Carmine Coppola’s electronic score for Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), this sonic morphing has become a popular technique in the unification of a film’s sound. Whittington identifies this process at work in Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993), for instance, where the low-frequency sounds that precede the visual arrival of the T-Rex morph fluently into John Williams’ score, which “picks up this pattern of panic and mayhem by engaging an orchestration of high-pitched and high-frequency stringed instruments in a frenetic arrangement.”23 Other examples abound, from the sound of the typewriter that underpins Dario Marinelli’s opening score for Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007), the tapping of a pencil on a table that becomes the percussive propulsion for Hans Zimmer’s sonic wash in The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008), the churns of the propeller planes that fuse with Zimmer’s score in Dunkirk (Nolan, 2017), or the sound of Baby’s tinnitus (Ansel Elgort) that blends into The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion’s “Bellbottoms” on his iPod that opens Baby Driver (Edgar Wright, 2017). All use source sound as a rhythmic or textural foundation for the dramatic music. This form of sonic convergence serves not only to stitch together the film’s different layers of aurality, but also to deeply entangle the music with the images; in turn, this encourages a thorough immersion in the film’s unified textures. The morphing of realworld sounds into the rhythmic drive for imagined sonic spectacle by Per Streit for Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000) takes this process to an extreme and is an example of sonic fusion that invites the audience in. Björk’s character Selma is stricken with a progressive and devastating eye condition. As her vision recedes, she moves into an increasingly aural realm, where the sounds of machinery and passing trains become progressively rhythmicized, until they are converted into the foundation for a full blown musical number that, she imagines, mobilizes all those around her. Here, affect sound initiates a process of acoustic lengthening that moves way beyond its original sonic container and corresponding image to fluidly merge with orchestral instruments. In these moments, we are drawn into the protagonist’s anguished internal turmoil and, as the soundscape pulls image away from its realistic aesthetic and mobilizes it in tribute to the Hollywood musical, we are given a glimpse of Selma’s desire to escape her tormented

Sonic Elongation and Sonic Aporia   435 mind through music. Although von Trier’s move into pure musicality is arresting, it is not jarring; the synchronicity of the original audiovisual moment is so clearly established that the subsequent shift into music is coherent, flowing. What I’m interested in here, however, is a form of hyper-soundscape by which a found sound or sound-effect is stretched beyond its practical application, even at its most aesthetically, or affectively heightened, and is not absorbed into an existing musical texture, but rather forms it via a creative stretching of its own original materials. Sound, in other words, that not only outstrips audiovisual viability and disturbs synchronicity, but eventually also foregoes its vertical relationships altogether in favor of a strong musical, horizontal coherence. Like the earlier examples, such moments can stretch the connection between source sound and image to its limit while staying within the diegesis. The slippage between sound and music is not, of course, unique to film. In fact, it has informed the most significant expansions in compositional strategy since the turn of the twentieth century, running through the early century experiments with location sound and noise of Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo, Pierre Schaeffer’s experimentation with musique concrète in the 1940s and 1950s, John Cage’s engagement with the “organization of sound” in the 1950s, the use of everyday objects in the mid-century work of Xenakis and others, through to the rise of noise music acts that include the industrial soundworlds of Throbbing Gristle and This Heat, the DIY improvisation of the Los Angeles Free Music Society, the power electronics of projects like SPK and Whitehouse, the wall noise of Japanese acts like Hijokaidan and Merzbow, and, more recently, the sound art of figures like Florian Hecker.24 As Paul Hegarty notes, noise and music are no longer distinct categories, but rather occupy the two ends of a single continuum; “[n]oise is not an objective fact. It occurs in relation to perception—both direct (sensory) and according to presumptions made by an individual. These are going to vary according to historical, geographical and cultural location.”25 Chion voices a similar sentiment to Hegarty’s sonic continuum when constructing his framework for analyzing film sound: the distinction between music and noise is, he points out, “completely relative, and has to do with what we are listening for”; the way in which we listen “depends on the listener’s cultural references.”26 Sonic elongation moves smoothly along Hegarty’s spectrum and plays with the idea that noise is “relative” by de-stabilizing established audiovisual connections. Although this can test the boundaries of the audience’s “cultural references,” however, the sonic fluidity rarely threatens a harmonious and convergent audiovisual reading as it augments, rather than shatters, the parameters of a common cinematic vocabulary. At its most simple, sounds from different locations can slip into sync with one another, as happens in the noisy bed scene from Delicatessen (directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, music by Carlos d’Alessio, 1991): here, the regular beat of bouncing bed springs spreads throughout an apartment block, uniting with the brushstrokes of a painter, the labored notes of a cello scale, a metronome, a lady beating a mat, a boy pumping his bike tires and so on. Unlike the emergent musicality of Dancer in the Dark, acoustic or electronic instruments alien to the environment are not added to the texture. However, the creative intervention between the different sounds is limited; the beat remains con­sist­ent,

436   Holly Rogers and, although the texture varies, it doesn’t mature beyond its original audiovisual synchronicity. More adventurous sonically elongated textures allow the process of transformation to eventually dislocate this synchronicity in order to challenge what it is we are “listening for.” In his analysis of Michelangelo Antonioni’s sound worlds, for instance, Roberto Calabretto has noted that the director’s “soundscape often assumes the semblance of an actual musical score—which was exactly his intention—in which the sounds are woven into melodic phrasings which reflect the rhythm of the visual images.”27 Calabretto shows how advanced Antonioni’s methods of concrete and electro-acoustic scores were, not only in Italian film culture of the 1960s, but in the history of film music more generally. The director’s meticulous manipulation and abstraction of real-world sounds and their reconfigured appearance against the image track drives films such as L’avventura (music by Giovanni Fusco, 1961), in which the sonic link with the visual information is at once established and stretched to form a simultaneity that vibrates between the vertical function of sound effects and the horizontal flow of music. This process can be mapped onto Barry Truax’s first understanding of soundscape composition, in which “Listener recognizability of the source material is maintained, even if it subsequently undergoes transformation.”28 In soundscape terminology, this can be referred to as an elongated form of phonography, a type of found-sound manipulation identified by Truax as “recorded soundscapes with minimal or no alteration that can be listened to as if they were music, in the sense of an organized sound structure with differing levels of meaning.”29 In sonically elongated film sound, synchronous audiovisual textures gradually disintegrate as the found-sound composition undergoes transformation—or heightening—to provide the audience with differing, yet related, “levels of meaning.” This type of morphology creates a complicated form of audiovisual reception that asks us to navigate distinct aural planes, while ensuring a maintained and strong immersion in the text. This coexistence between “listener recognizability” and “differing levels of meaning” drives Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 post-apocalyptic sci-fi. Edward Artemiev’s electro-acoustic score, with its cutting-edge manipulation of electronic and natural sounds, moves fluidly along Hegarty’s continuum to a point of audiovisual rupture, as the director explains: “As soon as the sounds of the visible world, reflected by the screen, are removed from it, or that world is filled, for the sake of the image, with extraneous sounds that don’t exist literally, or if the real sounds are distorted so that they no longer correspond with the image—then the film acquires a resonance.”30 In Stalker, real-world sounds are consistently heightened, blending and repelling each other before undergoing electronic manipulation that chips away at the causal bonds and troubles points of audition. The process of sonic elongation is most clear during the four-minute scene that sees the protagonists journey towards the Zone on a small draisine. As in Dancer in the Dark, this scene arises from railway sounds, and yet their treatment is significantly different. Here, train sounds have already infused the film’s soundscape, emerging from the acousmêtre in the opening shot of Stalker’s room and persisting amongst the intense,

Sonic Elongation and Sonic Aporia   437 disembodied industrial sounds that accompany the protagonist as he leaves his house. When the draisine enters our visual realm, however, its motorized splutters refuse audiovisual confluence, sounding instead like an electronically processed diesel engine. Although the sound disappears beneath the lurching rhythms of a traveling train as soon as the vehicle moves outside, sonic clarity is rapidly muddled, phasing in and out across the screen and becoming more industrial, opaque, and reverberant with each iteration. Three minutes in and the sounds are almost entirely abstracted by electronic distortion and “resonance.” Apart from a brief spoken exchange at the start, we hear nothing else. During this sonic elongation, the cinematography is dominated by close views of the backs and sides of the three protagonists—Stalker, the Writer, and the Professor—as they look at their surrounding which are, for most of the time, blurred (see Figure 21.2). Together with the disassociating sound, the images seem to suggest an internalization; a move into physical and emotional interiorization. Speaking of such “magic moments,” Slavoj Žižek praises: the ambiguous way in which Tarkovsky uses the natural sounds of the environs: their status is ontologically undecidable, it is as if they were still part of the “spontaneous” texture of non-intentional natural sounds, and simultaneously already somehow “musical,” displaying a deeper spiritual structuring principle. It seems as if Nature itself miraculously starts to speak, the confused and chaotic symphony of its murmurs imperceptibly passing over into Music proper.31

Here, the “cinematic reality” is stretched to the limits of sonic coherence, and yet we go with it willingly because its base connection—its synchresis—has been securely established. As the audiovisual gap develops, in other words, we can undertake the journey from real-world sound to interiority because the elongation is gradual; the route clearly laid out.

Sonic Aporia Sonic aporia refuses such stability. Formed from sounds that, while instantly recognizable, have no obvious connection with the image, aporetic moments question the plausibility of the film space. Without an initial moment of audiovisual synchronicity, sound and image begin and remain in a dislocated and discordant state, not only physically but also aesthetically. This can initiate a troubled and disquieting audiovisual experience that resists multimodal fusion. To return to the etymological root of aporia; one thought does not logically stem from the other and points of contact are difficult to find. As a result, the filmic elements remain unstitched and the materiality of the film is pushed into our perceptual foreground. Sonic aporia occurs less frequently than elongated soundscapes and most examples arise within experimental or art film, whose structures are malleable and conventions

438   Holly Rogers

Figure 21.2  The three protagonists journey to the zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). Are they listening?

volatile. The slow works of Béla Tarr provide a particularly fertile space for aporetic sound structures to manifest. The opening of Damnation (Kárhozat; 1988; music by Mihály Víg), for instance, offers a static black and white shot of pylons marching across a black and white wasteland before eventually drawing back to reveal a closed window and the back of a man’s head resting in a completive posture; alongside this visual scene jostles a highly treated, reverberant aural track formed from an array of industrial sounds that fracture the point of audition. These noises could be generated by the moving pulley travelling alongside the pylons, and yet the point of view is located inside, with

Sonic Elongation and Sonic Aporia   439

Figure 21.3  The opening aporetic ambiguity of Béla Tarr’s Damnation (1988).

the man; either this is an audiovisual rupture from within the filmed space, or these sounds emanate from beyond it altogether (see Figure 21.3). Either way, the audiovisual relationship remains unclear. Such aporetic ambiguity has become a hallmark of David Lynch’s soundscapes. Whereas in normal practice, presence, or room tone, is a unifying form of “silence” used during dialogue editing to suggest a realistic ambience or acoustic architecture, Lynch’s atmospheres throb, hum, click, and wheeze with rarely identifiable sounds that are loud, often continuous, and always noticeable. What Chion describes as a “constant rush of boiler sounds, whirlpools, electronic organ chords, and the like” vibrates through The Elephant Man (1980), for instance, while unresolved acousmêtre dominates the soundscape of Twin Peaks (1990–1991, 2017) and Fire Walk with Me (1992), phases in and out of Blue Velvet (2001), and rises to prominence when thresholds are crossed in Inland Empire (2006).32 To some extent, Lynch’s sonic aporia stems from his close, almost obsessive, involvement with all aspects of his sound worlds: “there are sound effects, there are abstract sound effects,” then “music turns into sounds, and sounds turn into music,” he explains.33 Elsewhere he articulates this transition even more clearly: “The borderline between sound effects and music is the most beautiful area.”34 Exploration of this “beautiful area” was undertaken in collaboration with Alan Splet until his death (The Grandmother, 1970; Eraserhead, 1977; The Elephant Man; Dune, 1984; Blue Velvet, 1986), when, after a less-successful partnership with Randy Thom (Lost Highway, 1997), Lynch assumed control of the sound design himself. From the outset, the collaborative process between Spelt and Lynch, which often began before principle photography, emerged through analogue musique concrète methods, which abstract real-world noises from their sources and reconfigure them as autonomous sound objects. Speaking about gathering the sound for the short film The Grandmother, for instance, Splet recalls that “we’d start scouring the company for things to make sounds with—you know, like crushing a plastic box, or in one case we used a pencil sharpener, and in another case we used a staple gun.”35 Forged from everyday objects, the soundscapes of Lynch’s world quickly become mysterious. In his analysis of Lost Highway, Philip Brophy fashions an uncanny link between the “thick, pregnant, alive” rumbling drones and “deeper neurological states:

440   Holly Rogers headaches, migraines, hang-overs, stress, etc.”36 This is a common device in film; it explicitly pulses through several of Clint Mansell’s collaborations with Darren Aronofsky, for instance, including Pi (1998), in which the concrete score renders the protagonist’s mathematically induced migraines audible for the audience, while the manipulation of disembodied hisses, rattles, and clicks into musical textures and motives that punctuate Black Swan (2010) signify the moments when Natalie Portman’s character Nina is particularly troubled. Neither soundscape is explicitly located in the image, yet both signify in emotionally resonant ways, as though emanating from within a character’s mind. By contrast, Lynch’s continuous—even disinterested—“room tones” rarely point towards a clearly identifiable source or emotional state within the visual space; instead, they constantly signify away from themselves, deflecting attention from onscreen action and suggesting another, peripheral space that is monstrous, unattainable, beyond conscious thought. If we think about these acoustic atmospheres in terms of sonic aporia, we can understand the sounds as taking us not deeper into interior states, but beyond them. Lynch’s room tone opens up an audiovisual aporia, whereby the sounds reveal the presence of an absence so strong that we are compelled to search for a source; yet the source is constantly withheld. This process is clearly laid out in his first feature, Eraserhead, which follows the puzzling and gloomy world of Henry (John Nance). The film is dominated by Splet’s almost continuous wash of warped industrial sounds, roars, barks, and whooshes which, unlike Artemiev’s extended sounds that remain within Stalker’s universe, float free, untethered to the visual space. And unlike Mansell’s anguished sonic manifestations, Lynch and Splet’s arresting, almost deafening soundscape rarely garners acknowledgement from the characters, whether or not they are aware of its presence. The only points of au­di­o­ vis­ual confluence occur at scene changes; the texture of the sonic wash seems to react to a move between visual spaces, simmering down from a hectic roar into a hum when Henry first enters his girlfriend’s house, for instance. Specific points of reference, however, are hard to find. In his reading of the film, Chion identifies a process of inverted sonic elongation, when the sound of an electronic organ dissolves into the drone of a boiler, although elsewhere he finds an “absence of any separation between the music and its overall atmosphere.”37 This entanglement leads to uncertainty. Unlike sonically elongated sounds, Lynch’s aporetic noise-music is formed from, or intended to resemble, source sounds that remain not only untethered to the visual world, but also form an implausibly noisy environmental wash. They remain unsubstantiated, lacking auditory landmarks, audiovisual synchronicity, and semantic stability. However, we are so attuned to conventional points of audition that we cannot help but seek a connection despite the film’s refusal to provide one. This is certainly true for K. J. Donnelly, who refers to the noises “as acousmatic sound effects: seemingly the sounds emanating from some dreadful but indistinct industrial machines somewhere in the distance.”38 The result is an emphasis on liminal spaces; on the places where connections should be but have been dissolved. What are these musicalized sounds stretching away from? And if the sounds have been creatively manipulated, how can we even begin to trace them back to an implied image? Where is this acoustic information leading us? And why is it

Sonic Elongation and Sonic Aporia   441 so hard to let go to resist the lure of a representational anchor for film sound, even when the detachment is so obvious? Although for Donnelly the noise manifests from “acousmatic sound effects,” their horizontal development troubles the very idea of both offscreen and sound effect, both of which suggest a strong visual connection. Such temporarily un-synchronized—or unseen—sound can be extraordinarily powerful. Most often, acousmatic film sound is used to substantiate the film’s world by spreading the confined screen-space into a multidimensional acoustic universe in several well-theorized ways. First—and what Chion refers to as “visualized sound”—a coordinated sound and image event cements the audiovisual relationship before the sound becomes “acousmatized,” taking with it its associations but spreading out the sonic space in multiple directions. Often these sounds operate in a “passive” (Chion) way as environmental and atmospheric texture. Second, a sound can initially be heard on its own, only matching up with a visual source later on. In certain instances it is used as a tool to withhold knowledge entirely, assuming the traits of om­nis­cience, ubiquity, and, as a result, a certain form of power; the unseen monster, the disembodied scream. Where are these sounds coming from and what do they mean? These questions induce, suggests Chion, an active mode of reception that compels us actively to seek their audiovisual substantiation.39 In such instances, an acousmatic sound draws attention to auditory perception and highlights the process of listening itself. The process of “de-acousmaticization” can often diffuse the power of the disembodied utterance as the sound becomes “embodied”; “identified with an image, demythologized, classified,” a process famously illustrated by Toto’s tug of the curtain to reveal the small “man behind the curtain” in The Wizard of Oz (directed by Victor Fleming, music by Harold Arlen and Herbert Stothart, 1939). Chion states that “the opposition between visualized and acousmatic provides a basis for the fundamental audiovisual notion of offscreen space.”40 In many ways, sonic aporia shares the attributes of acousmatic sound: it roams through our perceptual awareness, adrift from clear visual or semantic anchors. Yet while there exist examples of acousmatic sound that remain disembodied, an aporetic moment sees a fundamental transformation of the original sonic material, as we have seen; there is a sense of linear progress and growth that makes indexical listening more difficult. In Damnation, sounds move quickly away from their original utterance, developing rhythms, textures, and form that is creative in and of itself. In Eraserhead, this process radiates through the entire film. While at first we speculate feasible sources for these atmospheric sounds, as the film progresses, they undergo a process of such abstraction that the “organised sound structure,” configured from layers of drones and internal beats, confounds identification entirely. In fact, there is a sonic consistency and development clearly discernible in the 38 minutes of the 89 minutes of the film’s sound that was released as a soundtrack album (1982 by I.R.S Records; reissued on vinyl in 2012 by Sacred Bones). Unlike the acousmêtre, then, these soundworlds do not simply extend the dimensionality of the visual world, but rather vibrate in dissonance against it. As the visual and aural tracks rub alongside each other, an aporetic shift occurs; rather than a coherent world fleshed out by acousmatic sound, we are presented

442   Holly Rogers with two “individually plausible but collectively incompatible” voices that confound cross-modal re-association. The process of extraction from an expected moment of de-acousmaticization to an understanding of the soundscape as a parallel track that thwarts vertical connection reads similarly to the acoustic reduction that underpins the processes of soundscape composition. Speaking of the musical object within the context of his explorations into soundscape composition, Pierre Schaeffer explained that “Often surprised, often uncertain, we discover that much of what we thought we were hearing was in reality only seen, and explained, by the context.”41 According to his early thinking, once the visual context is removed, a sound object arises that no longer relies on another medium for clarification; the process of listening is redirected, as the sounds condense down to an autonomous entity. As a result, musique concrète produces an acousmêtre—“a sound that one hears without seeing what causes it” (Schaeffer)—which, when recorded to ensure repeatability and transmission to make it concrete, encourages a process of “reduced listening.”42 Following from this, Randolph Jordan makes a useful designation: between acousmatic music and acousmatic sound; the former is about an intentional removal of causal and semantic elements within a composition, while the latter simply designates a sound which has been separated from its source . . . When we hear a well-designed piece of acousmatic music, we don’t attach a sense of the sources to the sounds. We just hear them as they are.43

But to “just hear them as they are” is a complicated process that undermines our common cognitive and perceptual sensibilities. As Brian Kane writes, the “sound object” in de-visualized listening “is never quite autonomous.” Speaking of soundscape composition, Kane identifies an unease that arises when a source is withheld and a persistent desire to seek an originating and embodied gesture; “one central, replicated feature of acousmatic listening appears to be that under-determination of the sonic source encourages imaginative supplementation.”44 Along similar lines, Rolfe Inge Godøy predicates the supplementation in terms of an implied form of visual motion, an irresistible connection that re-unites reduced listening with visuality through a process of “embodied cognition, meaning that virtually all domains of human perception and thinking, even seemingly abstract domains, are related to images of movement.”45 Within the theorization of cinematic listening and multimodal synergy, this process becomes unstable and extremely fraught. In this medium, the fracture of sound from image, and the “imaginative supplementation” that this can encourage can collide with an actualized visualization that vies for a synergistic union. When the source of a “soundmark” is persistently withheld in an audiovisual medium such as film, where our patterns of consumption adhere to clear codes of “cinematic reality” and synchresis, the process of “imaginative supplementation” is troubled further: acousmatic music has already been re-visualized, but the “supplementation” doesn’t fit, at least not in the way we would expect it to. We are compelled to find a connection between what we hear and what we see, but sonic aporia rebuffs an easy re-integration. As we have seen, multimodal

Sonic Elongation and Sonic Aporia   443 theorists suggest that we are biologically compelled to reunite ruptured sensory inputs; to blend them together to make an informed and cross-referenced interpretation. The nature of audiovisuality as a multimodal experience leads us to seek a resolution and further impedes reduced listening, even when the sounds seem, at least initially, to suggest clear visual sources that are not part of the film’s world. And yet to do so requires intense interpretative leaps that can threaten the tightly stitched cinematic body. However, we can take this further. If sounds keep travelling away not only from image, but also from their first concrete utterance, our attention can become divided between the senses. If this process goes so far that even an audiovisual Kuleshov effect becomes strained, then the acousmatic music may draw attention to itself to enable a form of “imaginative supplementation” to arise between the lines. Whereas Cook suggests that an “emergent meaning” arises when any sound and image combination is created, our multimodal drive, along with the power of synchresis, seeks a more concrete connection. In other words, we may begin to fabricate audiovisual objects that are not really there, creating a secondary, “imaginary” visual narrative that coexists—even contradicts—the one we are given. This can lead to a proliferation of visuality. Not only does sonic aporia make us question what we see and how we process visual information, it also forces us to fabricate around the edges, laying down a re-visualization on top of the film’s images according to the increasingly strange trajectory of the sonic material. We can see this at play in the acousmatic music of Eraserhead, which provides moments when it is as though we witnessing two worlds at once: one we see; one we hear. As a result, we are prompted to hold together in our minds the two worlds simultaneously. The fissure of sonic aporia, then, enacts a type of “schizophonia” (Schafer) that leaves the sounds adrift within the audiovisuality.46 The appropriateness of the term aporia, with its connotations of impasse, contradiction, and interpretative rupture, for this au­di­o­vis­ ual situation not only now becomes clear, but also points to a distinction between the physical body of the receiver, and the potentially schizophonic version reconfigured by the cinematic experience. If the physical and affective gap between sound and image is truly aporetic, the pre-cultural processing identified by Willemsen and Kiss struggles to reach an audiovisual resolution. Thwarted by two modes of information too distinct for effective multimodal cross-checking, the effect is not simply “unsettling”; it presses interpretation into the conscious, active, socially conditioned mind into cognition. If we here recall Hegarty’s assertion that noise is relative, when presented with the untethered wash of aporetic sound, the receiver, lacking the guidance of audiovisual (aesthetic or rhythmic) synchronicity, must activate what Chion refers to earlier as her “cultural references.” Audiovisually dislocated, these sounds can never be “passive” (Chion). With multiple variability in their reception, they are not only catalysts for imaginative play but also activate strong modes of cognitive dissonance in the audience; they are both active and activating. It is here that sonic aporia differs from both sonic elongation and the acousmêtre. Sonically elongated sounds begin with synchronicity and undergo creative manipulation until they outstrip their visual sources. Once musically adrift, however, such soundscape retains the grain of recognition and even if sound and image subsequently diverge,

444   Holly Rogers the memory of fusion encourages an enduring semantic compatibility. Acousmatic sounds, while undeniably—even intentionally—encouraging rich imaginative extensions, nevertheless imply “offscreen space”; that is, space that lurks beyond the frame but within the diegesis. Again, they may be disquieting, but there is also unity, spatial coherence, semantic extension. Aporetic sound, however, arises from a different space and remains there. At first we are compelled to seek a possible source, but when the audiovisual synchronicity is consistently withheld and the sounds take on a compositional life of their own, “imaginative supplementation” encourages “surplus meaning” to arise.47 When the same sounds undergo prolonged and profound creative treatment, sound and image refuse to re-embody each other and instead begin to embrace their autonomy. The deconstructed properties of an aporetic soundscape, then, hover between the traditional functions of environmental sounds and dramatic music; yet reject the unifying tendencies of both. Its dualism avowed, aporetic scenes tear the audiovisual fabric, expose the materiality of the phantasmic body and repel our ability to intellectually synthesize the flow of contrasting lines. But although such ruptures do draw attention to the images, they also emphasize sound as sound, encouraging us to question how we hear film and what it is we are listening for.

Listening Across the Edges If we return to Hegarty’s assertion that an understanding of noise is variable, and Chion’s that it is relative to a “listener’s cultural references,” combined with the history of sound design that has led to particular readings of sound’s synchronous or acousmatic role in film, it can be suggested that aural attentiveness undergoes a significant reconfiguration during moments of sonic aporia. Brandon LaBelle speaks of something similar when he locates the “expanded sonic palette” of experimental music within “an intensification of listening experience—in volume, in location, and in procedure.”48 Such intensification has had a profound impact on the relationship between the attentive, interpretative strategies of listening and the “less reflective” mobilization of hearing, which Hegarty understands as “a physical process we can do nothing about.”49 Within this spectrum, Schafer proposed various punctuating points that influence our levels of audition, identifying “keynote,” consistent sounds (such as the continuous ebb and flow of waves) that “may not always be heard consciously,” and yet “the fact that they are ubiquitously there suggests the possibility of a deep and pervasive influence on our behavior and moods.” Standing out from the hum of keynote sounds are “signals,” that draw attention to themselves as isolated events: “Signals are foreground sounds and are listened to consciously,” such as “acoustic warning devices: bells, whistles, horns and sirens.”50 The disordering and re-activating of sonic focus can lead to what Joanna Demers calls “Aesthetic Listening,” which sees participants slip between various kinds of attention and consider individual sonorities instead of large-scale forms;

Sonic Elongation and Sonic Aporia   445 a  sort of reordering similar to Chion’s audiovisual theory of vertical synchresis ­mentioned previously.51 These different modes of listening open up almost limitless levels of possible perception that are fluid and subject to continual reordering according to their relationships not only with each other, but also to other sensory inputs, and it is here that these ideas become useful for cinematic forms. Unlike the activated listening strategies of experimental music and sound art, film consumption requires an audiovisual mode of engagement, something that initially appears at odds with the very notion of reduced listening. In films like Dancer in the Dark, the sonically elongated noise music is not concrete as the visual references remain, albeit moving closer and further away at different points: sound extends from the fictional image, but does not become abstracted from it. The peripheral attention required to process keynote sounds is confounded as our attention is suddenly drawn to them in their newly elongated state. Chion’s three modes of listening are helpful here, as they address auditive attention within an audiovisual, rather than purely sonic, context. These modes are very simple. Causal listening occurs when we try to locate a source: “in cinema, causal listening is constantly manipulated by the audiovisual contract itself, especially through the phenomenon of synchresis. Most of the time we are dealing not with the real initial cause of the sounds, but causes that the film makes us believe in.” Semantic listening, on the other hand, is “that which refers to a code of a language to interpret a message.” Finally, reduced listening is similar to Schaeffer’s understanding outlined earlier.52 If we map Chion’s various levels of listening onto sonic elongation and sonic aporia, we can see that each deconstructs our patterns of audiovisual consumption in different ways. Sonically elongated sound moves fluidly—sometimes imperceptibly—between Chion’s three modes, at first safely channeling keynote and signal sounds through causal listening to a clear visual source, as we saw in Delicatessen, before it gradually abstracts, initiating a process of semantic reception that flows through L’avventura and Stalker. Sonic aporia, on the other hand, begins with reduced listening and thwarts attempts to move into causal listening, or hearing. Whereas sonic elongation abstracts and complicates cinematic listening, then, it does not evoke a ruptured experience as the various layers of simultaneous aural attentiveness it requires embolden each other. Sonic elongation, then, augments a film’s soundscape by encouraging “an intensification of listening experience” (LaBelle), freeing itself from the image while remaining firmly enmeshed within its semantic textures. Sonic aporia does the opposite. The acousmatic music during these moments distorts traditional forms of sound design entirely and encourages new forms not only of cinematic listening, but also of cinematic seeing. By denying causal listening, disrupted audiovisuality can contradict what we are seeing and encourage visual fabrication that diverts our attention not to the acousmatic space, but to the aporetic one. These aporetic spaces are extremely significant. At the start of this chapter, I mentioned “traditional processes of cinematic listening,” and implied that these processes operated through the syncretic nature of the “irresistible weld” in audiovisual ­cinema, and the apparent inevitability of some kind of relatively stable—or at least

446   Holly Rogers contained—emergence of meaning. During instances of aporetic incongruence, the pre-conscious synergizing drive behind multimodal perception becomes fraught. As Willemsen and Kiss argue, audiovisual discontinuity can make us feel uncomfortable as it threatens the (seemingly) natural biological impulse to use one sense to validate information received by another. Faced with gaping holes in the audiovisual fabric—with “two individually plausible but collectively incompatible” statements—film goers are required to hold together multiple spaces and possibilities in their mind at once. To navigate through these moments of impasse requires imaginative, cognitive play. Disrupted audiovisual listening and the attentive audition it requires, in other words, would seem to resist cross-modal and syncretic forms of listening and forces our attention into conscious, cognitive modes of interpretation. These moments are significant for a theorization of cinematic listening, as they not only resist a single logical or universal model for analysis, but also complicate the very idea of a normative listening behavior in the first place. But perhaps it is even more than this. Perhaps the discomfort of audiovisual aporia arises first from the troubling of sensory integration and the resultant cognitive dissonance it engenders, but also from the move from subconscious process to a conscious recognition of the work required to navigate the audiovisual space. To put this another way, rupture challenges expectations and forces our processes of engagement, consumption, and multimodal meaning-making into the foreground: we become aware of the process of interpretation.

Notes 1. I use this term in the context of documentary film in “Sonic Elongation: Creative Audition in Documentary Film,” Cinema Journal 55, no. 2 (2020): 88–113. 2. William Whittington, “Lost in Sensation: Re-Evaluating the Role of Cinematic Sound in the Digital Age,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Sound in Digital Media, ed. Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press,  2013), 61–74: 64. 3. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 107. 4. James Wierzbicki, “Sound Effects/Sound Affects: ‘Meaningful’ Noise in the Cinema,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks, ed. Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 153–68: 156. 5. Jeff Smith, “The Sound of Intensified Continuity,” in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (Oxford: Oxford University Press,  2013), 331–56: 337, 338. See also David Bordwell, “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary Hollywood Film,” Film Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2002): 16–28. 6. Chion, Audio-Vision, 5, 63; Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 97. 7. Wierzbicki, “Sound Effects/Sound Affects,” 157. 8. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1994 [1977]), 10.

Sonic Elongation and Sonic Aporia   447 9. Kristin Thompson, “Early Sound Counterpoint,” Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 115–40: 127, 122, 123. 10. Nicholas Rescher, Aporetics: Rational Deliberation in the Face of Inconsistency (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 1. 11. Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 12. 12. Walter Murch, “Stretching Sound to Help the Mind See,” in New York Times (October 1,  2000), at https://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/01/arts/film-stretching-sound-to-helpthe-mind-see.html (accessed August 25, 2020). 13. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 125. 14. Chion, Audio-Vision, 3 (italics his). 15. Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” in Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 33–50; Flinn, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 16. Pontus Larsson, Daniel Västfjäll, Pierre Olsson, and Mendel Kleiner, “When What You Hear Is What You See: Presence and Auditory-Visual Integration in Virtual Environments,” in Proceedings of the 10th Annual International Workshop on Presence (2007), at https:// ispr.info/p2007-larsson-vastfjall-olsson-kleiner/ (accessed August 25, 2020). 17. Dean Duncan, Charms That Soothe: Classical Music and the Narrative Film (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 81. 18. Pudovkin quoted in Duncan, Charms That Soothe, 85. 19. For more on the development of a cinematic music vocabulary, see Anahid Kassabian, Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (New York: Routledge, 2001). 20. Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia, 98–106; Chion, Audio-Vision, 38–9, italics in the original. See also Kay Dickinson, Off Key: When Film and Music Don’t Work Together (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 21. Steven Willemsen and Kiss Miklós, “Unsettling Melodies: A Cognitive Approach to Incongruent Film Music,” in The Cinema of Sensations, ed.  Ágnes Pethő (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2005), 169–83: 113. See also Lawrence Marks, The Unity of the Senses: Interrelations Among the Modalities (New York: Academic Press, 1978). 22. Sergi Casanelles describes a “hyperorchestra, a virtual music ensemble that inhabits hyperreality” as “a product of the combination of virtual instruments (sampled and synthetic), real live recording sessions and sound processing” able to embody the “full sound spectrum”; “Mixing as a Hyperorchestration Tool,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media, ed. Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 57–72: 62. 23. Whittington, “Lost in Sensation,” 62. 24. John Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo,” in Silence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970), 3. 25. Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History (New York: Continuum, 2009), 3. 26. Chion, Audio-Vision, 205–6. 27. Roberto Calabretto, “The Soundscape in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Cinema,” in The New Soundtrack 8, no. 1 (2018): 1–19: 2. 28. Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication (West Port, Connecticut: Ablex Publishing, 2001), 240. 29. Barry Truax, “Soundscape Composition as Global Music: Electroacoustic Music as Soundscape,” in Organised Sound 13, no. 1 (2008): 103–9: 106.

448   Holly Rogers 30. Tarkovsky quoted in Sculpting in Time: Andrey Tarkovsky, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003 [1986]), 162. 31. Slavoj Žižek, “The Thing from Inner Space,” in Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 255. 32. Michel Chion, David Lynch, trans. Robert Julian (London: BFI Publishing, 1995), 38. 33. Lynch quoted in Tom Kenny, Sound for Picture: Film Sound Through the 1990s (Vallejo, California: MixBooks, 2000), 133. 34. Lynch quoted in Lynch on Lynch, ed. Chris Rodley (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 242. 35. Splet quoted in “Interview: Alan Splet,” at Cagey Films (December 17, 1981), https://web. archive.org/web/20121201060512/http://www.cageyfilms.com/links/eraserhead/interviews/other-eraserhead-crew/alan-splet/ (accessed August 25, 2020). 36. Philip Brophy, “Booms, Drones and Other Dark Waves,” at http://www.philipbrophy.com/ projects/cinesonics/02.html (accessed August 25, 2020). 37. Chion, Lynch, 43–44. 38. K. J. Donnelly, “Saw Heard: Musical Sound Design in Contemporary Cinema,” in Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies, ed. by Warren Buckland (London: Routledge, 2009), 103–23: 111. 39. Chion, Audio-Vision, 33. 40. Ibid., 73. 41. Pierre Schaeffer, Traité des objets musicaux (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), 93. 42. Schaeffer quoted in Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 3. 43. Randolph Jordan, “Film Sound, Acoustic Ecology, and Performance in Electroacoustic Music,” in  Music, Sound and Multi-Media, ed. Jamie Sexton (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2007), 121–42: 124. 44. Kane, Sound Unseen, 148 and 149. 45. Godøy, “Gestural-Sonorons Objects: Embodied Extensions of Schaeffer’s Conceptual Apparatus,” in Organised Sound 2, no. 2 (2006): 149–57: 150. 46. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (Toronto: McLeland and Stewart, 1977), 90. 47. Kane, Sound Unseen, 209. 48. Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (New York: Continuum, 2006), 9. 49. Hegarty, Noise/Music, 4. 50. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1997), 9. 51. Joanna Demers, Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 164. 52. Michel Chion, “The Three Listening Modes,” in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (New York: Routledge, 2012), 49, 50.

Select Bibliography Bordwell, David. “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary Hollywood Film.” Film Quarterly 55, no. 3 (2002): 16–28. Calabretto, Roberto. “The Soundscape in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Cinema.” The New Soundtrack 8, no. 1 (2018): 1–19.

Sonic Elongation and Sonic Aporia   449 Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Cook, Nicholas. Analysing Musical Multimedia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Jordan, Randolph. “Film Sound, Acoustic Ecology, and Performance in Electroacoustic Music.” In Music, Sound and Multi-Media, ed. Jamie Sexton, 121–42. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2007. Kane, Brian. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. LaBelle, Brandon. Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. New York: Continuum, 2006. Larsson, Pontus, and Daniel Västfjäll, Pierre Olsson, and Mendel Kleiner. “When What You Hear Is What You See: Presence and Auditory-Visual Integration in Virtual Environments.” In Proceedings of the 10th Annual International Workshop on Presence (2007), at https://ispr. info/p2007-larsson-vastfjall-olsson-kleiner/ (accessed August 25, 2020). Murch, Walter. “Stretching Sound to Help the Mind See.” In New York Times (October 1, 2000), at https://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/01/arts/film-stretching-sound-to-help-themind-see.html (accessed August 25, 2020). Rescher, Nicholas. Aporetics: Rational Deliberation in the Face of Inconsistency. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. Rogers, Holly. “Sonic Elongation: Creative Audition in Documentary Film.” In Cinema Journal 55, no. 2 (2020): 88–113. Schaeffer, Pierre. Traité des objets musicaux. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966. Schafer, R.  Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1997 [1977]. Smith, Jeff. “The Sound of Intensified Continuity.” In The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis, 331–56. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Thompson, Kristin. “Early Sound Counterpoint.” Yale French Studies 60 (1980): 115–40. Truax, Barry. “Soundscape Composition as Global Music: Electroacoustic Music as Soundscape.” Organised Sound 13, no.1 (2008): 103–9. Whittington, William. “Lost in Sensation: Re-Evaluating the Role of Cinematic Sound in the Digital Age.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Sound in Digital Media, ed. Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson, 61–74. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Wierzbicki, James. “Sound Effects/Sound Affects: ‘Meaningful’ Noise in the Cinema.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks, ed. Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, 153–68. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Willemsen, Steven, and Miklós Kiss. “Unsettling Melodies: A Cognitive Approach to Incongruent Film Music.” Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies  7, no. 1 (2013): 169–83.

chapter 22

The Tr a il er E a r Constructions of Loudness in Cinematic Previews James Deaville

How many times have audience members experienced discomfort, physical or ­psychological, over the perceived loudness of the trailer sequence in our local cinema? And how often have we come to accept that perceived heightened dynamic level as an unavoidable aspect of the pre-film ritual? We might call the normalization and reluctant acceptance of sonic excess in the theatre the “trailer ear,” whereby movie audiences have come to expect aural overplenitude from the theatrical trailer soundtrack. Though such amplitude would be anticipated for the trailer and film genre commonly known as “epic,” it can also apply to trailers for other film categories, including comedy, where over-determined comic gestures and dialogue require sonic “hitting.”1 What I term “trailer ear” is a discursively constituted, experience-based physiological response to trailers as audiovisual texts that exploit sound’s materiality while engaging the listener’s subjectivity.2 It is a pre-cognitive, affect-laden form of cinematic hearing that focuses on the “immediacy of the sonic,”3 seemingly bypassing some of the more complex cognitive operations of listening. Yet it also presupposes a type of contract between industry and public, whereby audience members expect an extreme (genre determined) auditory experience that trailer houses and studios traditionally aim to achieve. Typically trailer producers lay out a sonic tapestry of predictable underscoring and—often—pre-existing music or, more specifically, cover songs that appeal to the trailer ear through the ironic congruence of visceral sonic excess with cognitive narrative lack. In response to this understanding, moviegoers seem to fall into two categories: those who revel in the unbridled sonorousness of the trailer, thereby giving up control over the listening experience, and those for whom the pre-movie ritual of the trailer serves as a site of contestation, even a place for sonic violence inflicted upon them by the industry. Consciously or not, audience members develop practices of aural perception for trailers from early in their lives, carried over from the historical practice of amplitude boosting in television advertising.4 The exploitation of loudness in both television commercials and theatrical trailers makes sense, since both are forms of marketing that rely

The Trailer Ear   451 in part upon the impression of volume to have a memorable impact upon consumers.5 That advertisers can enhance the perception of loudness without exceeding the peak levels established by broadcasting regulators is a critical technological factor behind the experience of trailers and the debate on the “trailer ear,” where we often find that audiences and commentators confuse the intensity of sound with its amplitude or loudness. For trailers in genres like action/adventure (including disaster, war, and science fiction), the experienced moviegoer expects sensory over-stimulation through amplitude and from over-determined sonic gestures. However, trailer consumers not only anticipate such practices in traditionally “loud” genres that normalize heightened audio practices of saturation, density, and volume (sonic over-determination as a style feature), but they have also developed a sense for other aspects of theatrical previews, which include (a) compressing and minimizing traditional thematic/structural devices like leitmotif and rounded musical forms; (b) elevating sound to the level of a formal element; (c) relying upon aural montage as a constitutive feature of trailer narrative; and (d) intensifying the experience of temporalization through synchresis between sound and image. In other words, we could identify the experience of the trailer ear as excessively sonorous, musically constricted, sequentially constructed, and audiovisually compressed.6 I posit that the moviegoer tends to subsume all of these audio characteristics under the aspect of loudness, which has come to identify the auditory experience of the cinematic trailer and thus to define the debate over the trailer ear. While similar heightened levels of amplitude may be sustained throughout exceptional feature film scenes like the battles in Dunkirk (2018) and Saving Private Ryan (1998), quieter moments also occur in those movies. The two-minute, twenty-second action-film trailer does not have the time to afford extended dynamic contrasts (the obligatory silence preceding the button or turn line at the end is too short to provide relief)—as a result, as we shall see, cinematic previews are often perceived by audiences as (overly) loud. At stake are two primary considerations behind this chapter: (1) The trailer precipitated a debate over theatrical loudness between the source (trailer studios and their sound mixers), the dissemination (acoustic designers, theatre owners, projectionists), and the reception (audience and—indirectly—medical professionals); (2) These debates in turn focus our attention on the related issue of sound control and limits in the theatre, i.e. what are acceptable and safe levels for listening in cinemas, who possesses the power to regulate theatrical loudness, and what happens to trailer sound when the public accesses it outside the cinema, through mobile devices and/or headphones. In the following pages, we shall explore the history behind perceived trailer loudness and how studios and exhibitors have attempted to address and exploit it.

Trailer Loudness and TASA In his study Coming Soon, Film Trailers and the Selling of Hollywood Technology, Keith Johnston established how the trailer has served as the site for the promotion of innovative “visual techniques.”7 The same observation applies to sound in trailers, where

452   James Deaville t­echnological advances first and foremost served the purpose of more effectively ­marketing the cinematic product. However, since the introduction of the sound trailer in the late 1920s, one potential limitation and source of conflict for the trailer has resided in its reliance upon the same equipment for exhibition as that for the feature film it accompanies. For audio this means that the conditions for playback are the same (auditorium acoustics, speaker quality and configuration), yet the practices behind theatrical sound can vary between preview(s) and the feature movie. At the same time, developments in film sound would impact trailer audio. Every successive improvement in the sound quality of 35 mm film raised its peak level capability on each channel of the film’s (or trailer’s) soundtrack. As well, advances in cinematic sound mixing practices led to an increase in the number of channels, which, as Ioan Allen notes, had the effect of “raising the potential maximum sound pressure level in the cinema.”8 Unlike radio, television, or personal playback devices, cinema of course does not afford its consumers control over audio playback level. What’s more, the projectionist/theatre manager can always override the reference settings for sound level established by the studio. While audiences ideally hear a film at the same level as the director and sound editor did in the mixing studio (fader 7 on the Dolby box or 85 dB), theatre faders can be turned up or—more likely—down, which can introduce intelligibility problems for dialogue if the projectionist sets a lower value for the trailers and fails to reset the audio for the feature film. Moreover, trailers fall outside the sonic economy of film production and projection, not least because they are not created by the studio but by a boutique trailer house. These considerations provided fertile ground for the emergence of the trailer ear, which relies on cinema audio and received a significant boost through digital technology. The theatrical introduction of digital audio on 35 mm film in 1992 opened the floodgates for the increase of volume in cinemas, resulting in the so-called “loudness war.” Once digital stereo became the sound standard for trailers in 1996,9 studios began to compete with each other for the audience’s attention under the guise that “louder is better.” Among others, Barry Blesser has attempted to explain why trailer loudness sells: in the theatre, “You cannot focus on any other sonic event. You cannot escape physically or perceptually.”10 Audience members could plan to take their seats after the previews, but then run the risk of missing out on an experience. Indeed, as Blesser remarks, An aural space with loud music is often experienced as “exciting” because loudness represents intense activity . . . a dynamic event . . . We respond to the implied physicality of loudness . . . From an evolutionary perspective, we still respond to loudness as if it represented a big event that was relevant to our survival. Loudness gets our attention.11

Blesser’s passage appears in the context of what the author identifies as the three motivations for loudness: “social rewards, biological stimulation, and selective aural focus.”12 Although they are primarily interested in identifying “the social, emotional, and

The Trailer Ear   453 ­ sychological rewards for listening to loud music,” these same motivational parameters p can be applied to attending to loudness in the cinematic trailer experience. It explains some of the reasons for why trailer makers and audiences are willing to enter into the understanding of sonic excess, in a literature—both scholarly and popular—that seems intent on demonizing the trailer ear. Trailer producers naturally try to fit every (available) highlight from a two-hour film into the two minutes and twenty seconds of the standard trailer, with those scenes typically the loudest points in the film.13 The resulting dense fabric of climactic moments could easily lead the moviegoer to believe that the trailer is louder than the feature film, which was the case in reality in trailers for films like Twister (1996), Men in Black (1997), and the Star Wars re-release (1997).14 The public and theatre owners alike complained that the threshold of tolerance had been reached at that point in time; expectations of sonic overplenitude were being pushed to the limit. It was not uncommon that an audience member would ask the projectionist to turn down the volume for the trailers only to find—in the absence of a restoration of the original loudness setting—that the feature film suffered from unintelligibility.15 This was especially the case in multiplex sites with ten to twenty screens, where no projectionist was available to adjust fader settings. In response to audience complaints, the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) asked Ioan Allen of Dolby Laboratories to address the problem, and he arrived at a measuring technique known as “Leqm,” with its meter demonstrated in August, 1997.16 Two years were required by the newly coined Trailer Audio Standards Association—trailer finishers and industry representatives—to refine the standard,17 which all of the studios and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) adopted by April of 1999. Already in May 1999, TASA was issuing certificates, the first being for the trailer to the Wild, Wild West of Warner Brothers. The initial level for trailers was set at 87 dB Leqm in 1999, 86 dB Leqm in 2000, and 85 dB Leqm in 2001, which remains the standard for maximum upper volume level at the time of writing. Those figures compare with trailers at 92 and 93 dB Leqm in 1996 and 1997, eight decibels louder before the TASA standard was established. According to conventional wisdom, perceived loudness doubles every ten decibels,18 so it is no surprise that audiences would have complained about the excessive volume of pre-TASA digital trailers (1996–1997). For the sake of orientation, it should be noted that the National Institutes of Health established in 2017 60 dB as the level of normal conversation, 80 dB as that of traffic sound, and 100 dB as that of industrial noise.19 The Leqm measurement of loudness is ongoing throughout the trailer, and in keeping with TASA requirements, it assesses the trailer section “between the 1st audio heard, plus or minus 3 seconds, and the final audio heard, plus or minus 3 seconds.” It does not measure the MPAA green card or any other silent visual footage, but also “does not stop during any silences within the body of the trailer.”20 Thus it behooves the trailer-maker to include quieter passages in order to balance out the inevitable extra loudness at the end; that said, most trailers in action/adventure and related genres are consistently at the upper limit of permissible loudness.

454   James Deaville Leqm measures loudness not just based on decibel levels; it also “quantifies sound with an emphasis on the sound frequencies that are the most annoying to audiences.” According to TASA, “the standard seeks to measure ‘annoying volume’ . . . For example. breaking glass at 85 decibels is far more irritating to an audience than a foghorn at 85 decibels.”21 In other words, the Leqm figure is supposed to take timbre into account when calculating maximal trailer audio levels that would be acceptable to a cinema audience, but as will become apparent below, the tone colors of non-abrasive sounds vary among themselves in terms of evident loudness: trailer sound engineers will exploit those differences to boost the audience perception of higher amplitude. As a follow-up to the introduction of TASA into theatres, Disney and Dolby commissioned Nielsen in 2004 to survey audiences regarding their perception of trailer loudness. Allen provided the public with the results framed in a historical report from 2009 in Film Journal International.22 They received almost 3,000 responses, with 75 percent reporting satisfaction over the level of trailers, 4 percent feeling they were too soft, and 21 percent thinking they were too loud. Moreover, “over the first few years of implementation of the TASA program, the number of complaints about trailer sound levels received by NATO (the National Association of Theatre Owners) dwindled to virtually none.” Based upon these two “metrics,” the sound engineers from Dolby and filmmakers from Disney felt that the trailer loudness problem had been resolved, which left the field open for the surreptitious boosting of loudness, since studios could not afford to undermine the public understanding that governs the viscerally (over-)stimulating experience of the trailer ear. Allen estimated that as of 2015, over 6000 trailers for American releases had been subjected to the TASA approval regime.23 However, as we shall observe, the assurance of sonic limits has not been adequate to convince a sizeable portion of the cinematic audience—the 21 percent in the Nielsen survey—that when they entered the cinema, their hearing safety might not be compromised by the pre-feature trailers. Indeed, it seems unlikely that moviegoers would have even been aware that TASA was regulating exhibition volume, since the MPAA green band approval at the beginning of a trailer makes no reference to the appropriateness of its loudness. Trailers encourage a mode of hearing moving images that consists in accepting and even reveling in the sonic excess of pre-feature entertainment programs. But there are limits.

Trailer Loudness and Hearing Damage As already suggested, a trailer perfectly mixed to deliver 85 decibels of loudness in the professional studio is at the mercy of factors beyond the control of the film studio and trailer house when theatrically presented. The projectionist or manager may turn down the Dolby setting of 7 for the trailers.24 The theatre speakers may be inadequate to handle the levels set in the studio without distortion, or the cinematic space may be too large (or too small) for appropriate reproduction of the audio as conceived by the filmmaker

The Trailer Ear   455 and sound engineer(s). And from the perspective of the mixers working in the dubbing studio, 85 dB Leqm itself is a quite (= too) loud maximum level for audience and sound engineers alike, despite the normalization of trailer dynamic excess.25 This means that the theatrical audience for a feature film must be prepared to make adjustments to their mode of listening as part of the cinematic experience. The progression from multiple excessive soundscapes in “loud” trailer genres like action/adventure and science fiction/fantasy to the comparatively stable sound design of a two-hour film can be jarring,26 if not for the audience member’s acquired familiarity with the industrydetermined distinctive modes of sonic address between the trailer (the trailer ear and cinematic hearing) and feature film (cinematic listening). Here we should remember that the trailer is produced and presented as a form of advertising intended to “hook” the audience through the visceral impact of sound, which however does not preclude the activity of cognition during film previews. In fact, trailer makers also provide cognitive substance to their products through the introduction of a fragmentary plot and characters in order to create a desire for the eventual cinematic experience of the film. Affect requires the trailer’s sensory “overload” to attach to a framework of meaning, which the trailer’s conventional two-part structure of orientation and complication helps to anchor.27 Real or imagined, the issue of hearing damage from excessive loudness seems to have pursued the cinematic trailer well beyond the establishment of TASA regulations. While the actual volume of exhibition is ultimately a matter of the projectionist and/or theatre owner, there is little evidence that the TASA level of 85 dB has not been upheld in trailer production or presentation. Still, complaints of injury to hearing from the theatrical experience of trailers (and films) have continued to arise. Audiologists have long argued that the volume of cinematic presentation is too high, a position summarized by hearing specialist Wayne Staab in the Canadian Audiologist from 2014: “Numerous accounts, anecdotal and measured, indicate that the sound volume of movies is often too loud, especially for advertisements and upcoming attractions.”28 In a recent blog posting (2017), Staab had revised that position by appending the following qualifying sentence: “This had been especially true for advertisements and upcoming attractions, but now the general levels encountered during the film itself have been questioned.”29 His statement implies that TASA has been effective in restricting volume during theatrical trailers and ads, suggesting that the real problem resides in the soundtrack of the feature film itself. There can be no doubt that the pre-TASA loudness levels for trailers were harmful at their peaks. According to noise specialists, even attending a single rock concert can cause permanent damage to the hearing, “and some movies produce comparable levels. Levels above 115 dB SPL are considered never safe, even for short durations, and sustained noise above 90 dB SPL can potentially damage one’s hearing.”30 A study from 2010 in the Ear, Nose and Throat Journal applied empirical measurement to sound in twenty-five films of various genres and ratings and found damaging volume levels in most of them, with Transformers ranking loudest, with a peak loudness of 133.9 dBA and a sustained level of 90 dBA for 126 minutes.31

456   James Deaville In keeping with their expectations from prior cinematic trailer experiences, audience members can bear with two minutes and twenty seconds of an excessively loud trailer, but the sound professionals may spend hours mixing it, often at high levels. According to Creative Planet Network, “clients ask mixers . . . to take full advantage of this capability and expose them to dangerous decibel levels for several hours each working day.”32 Speaking to an interviewer during the time of the trailer loudness debates, Bill Varney, former vice president for sound operations at Universal, admits to knowing “mixers who have suffered ear damage.”33 To avoid excessive loudness for either the mixer or the audience, the TASA guide recommends that “Trailers shall be mixed at volume levels that are comfortable to the ear on the dub stage.”34 The potential health hazards of loudness for industry professional and theatrical audience alike prompted one state to take action against theatre owners. In the February 2014 session of the General Assembly of Connecticut, Bill No. 287 was introduced under the title “An Act Concerning the Maximum Decibel Level at Movie Theaters.” Effective October 1, 2014, “No person holding a license under the provisions of section 29-117 of the general statutes shall exhibit or show any moving picture film or preview film that exceeds eighty-five decibels. The Commissioner of Administrative Services shall establish the procedure for checking maximum decibel levels to determine compliance with this section.”35 A 2013 editorial in the Stanford Advocate by Drs. Arnold Gordon and William Young had argued that such regulation was necessary—they had “measured the decibel levels in a theatre using a calibrated sound meter [and found] previews were consistently between 75 and 100 dB with sustained bursts as high as 100 to 110 dB.”36 They argued that “these absurd levels are not only extremely uncomfortable but are associated with hearing loss.” Nevertheless, there is no evidence that the bill ever came to a vote, undoubtedly in light of a strongly disapproving response from the Connecticut Association of Theatre Owners (CATO). In their comments, the owners adopted a multi-faceted approach to the question of sound volume in theatres, after placing in doubt the scientific basis for the proposed maximum level. They argue that acceptable sound levels are subjective and establishing a maximum level in decibels “would not account for the difference between short outbursts like a bell or whistle and sustained loud or annoying noise.” Moreover, managers are capable of regulating volume control themselves, depending on the type of movie and “as appropriate for patron comfort”; CATO voluntarily established a standard for sound levels in theatres; and the resulting maximum measurement of trailer loudness is “consistent, reasonable, and safe” and is “50% of the level of the loudest trailers in 1996.”37 The owners appended Ioan Allen’s 2009 “A Short Primer on the Levels of Features, Trailers and Commercials as Heard in the Cinema,”38 which—like their comments— does not address any possible problem with the sound levels of current films other than the technical difficulty of maintaining comparable dynamic ranges between trailer and feature film.39 In their eyes (and ears), the normalization of the (stealthily boosted) 85 Leqm dB standard satisfied the need for occasional excesses of loudness in keeping with the trailer-ear expectations created by industry. However, in an Appendix to his report from November, 2017, the president of NATO John Fithian published an essay under the title “Is the Cinema Sound Reference Dead?

The Trailer Ear   457 Do Trailer Sound Levels Need to be Evaluated?”40 Much of the report rehearses the history of sound control in cinemas, but Fithian proceeds to elaborate on a relevant, current problem raised by a panel on cinema sound hosted by the Audio Engineering Society at their convention in New York City on October 18, 2017: “A substantial disconnect [prevails] between existing technology standards and references, movie patron responses, and cinema operators’ response to their patrons.”41 In a section entitled “Trailer Loudness Levels Lead to Lower Fader Settings Once Again,” Fithian disclosed that “NATO’s members have reported increasing guest complaints about trailer sound levels,” and in response wonders whether mixes have become louder, theatrical sound systems have improved, and/or “patrons simply want less sound?”42 As a result of the complaints, individual exhibitors have set lower fader levels than the standard 7.0—an informal poll of cinema company fader settings revealed that only 6 percent of projectionists set the level for trailers at 7.0 or higher, 40 percent place it between 5.0 and 6.9, and 54 percent use a setting below 4.9. For features, 18 percent are at 7.0 or higher, 56 percent between 5.0 and 6.9, and 26 percent below 5.0. Fithian does not explain the discrepancies between trailer and feature levels, but it is clear that operators reduce loudness for trailers in theatres (and potentially boost it for the features). If these figures reflect widespread practices, it means that “the current standard for sound levels of trailers may need to be changed.”43

The Trailer Ear: Expectations and Impressions of Loudness Granted that the trailer ear has conditioned audiences to expect and accept aural excess as normal for certain trailer genres and that the TASA regulations for controlling maximum trailer loudness have been in place for two decades, the question arises, why do some members of the public still perceive trailers to be too loud? As already discussed, filmmakers and studios apparently still believe that for certain cinematic genres,44 louder is better in the promotion of their products, so sound engineers at trailer houses rely upon the “trailer ear” to compensate for decibel limitations; as we shall observe, they have developed mechanisms and strategies to maintain the impression of loudness. Since the trailer ear is an affect-based mode of listening where the overall sound of the trailer normally outweighs the salience of its individual components, audience members will assess its effect by virtue of the most evident sonic feature of the mix, its loudness. In other words, audience members are probably unaware of the specific component(s) of sound that are behind the trailer’s sonic excess, attributing its “over-the-topness” to the quality of amplitude. Trailer houses are well-versed in editing techniques that convey the sense of excessively high decibel levels without exceeding 85 dB Leqm. Even as cinematographers can exploit optical illusions, so can sound engineers develop means of tricking the susceptible

458   James Deaville ear into believing that trailer sound is louder than it actually is, for the purposes ­outlined by Blesser: social rewards, biological stimulation, and selective aural focus (social, emotional, and psychological rewards). Thus, as Mary Florentine explains in the anthology Loudness, “a loudness maximizer has been developed to increase loudness of media broadcasts and commercials to grab the attention of potential customers, while staying within legal sound-level limits.”45 Most of the time it acts “like an amplifier, producing higher critical band levels and, therefore, greater total loudness.”46 Related to the maximizer is the dynamic range compressor, which reduces the dynamic range of sound in the audio of the trailer and, through that compression, increases the perceived loudness.47 And they can deploy the equalizer, which “boosts the perceived loudness by emphasizing certain frequencies, utilizing the Fletcher-Munson curve” that “describes how a human ear perceives loudness.”48 According to that measure, low volume causes us to hear middle-range sounds more prominently than low and high frequencies, while high volume renders the low and high frequencies more noticeable. Nevertheless, low frequency in and of itself can lend increased force to sound, in recognition of which Dolby created the Low Frequency Effect (LFE) channel for audio. The subwoofer is the primary vehicle for LFEs, delivering “impact . . . body and weight” without an effect on the TASA meters, according to trailer sound designer Bryan Jerden.49 Drawing upon these various technological resources, the professional mixer can make a trailer feel louder than it actually is as measured by decibels, because our ears associate high and low frequencies with higher loudness levels. As physicists and acousticians M.N. Avadhanulu and D.D. Mulajkar argue, “Saying that two sounds have equal intensity is not the same thing as saying that they have equal loudness.”50 As a result, they maintain that “two different 60 decibel sounds will not in general have the same loudness.”51 The following list examines in greater detail those elements beyond decibel level and frequency that contribute to the trailer ear’s perception of a trailer as (excessively) loud. 1) Brevity. Various commentators point out that because of their short duration, trailers lack feature films’ sonic attenuation that enables the ear to make adjustments over time to heightened levels of aural intensity.52 Studies of other short-form audiovisual media, especially television commercials, have established that the advertisements during commercial breaks are perceived as louder than the surrounding program even when the show’s sound “had [a] higher sound pressure level than the commercial break.”53 It seems likely that audiences enter the brief commercial or trailer experience with expectations of high(er) volume levels, regardless of whether the media producer has actually boosted the loudness. 2) Density. As already established, a densely packed trailer with high volume throughout will have a higher Leqm than a slower paced trailer with more quiet spaces between the high volume sections. Abrupt silences between acts of the trailer—often at its midpoint—will help to satisfy the TASA limits, while not significantly affecting the public’s perception of excessive loudness.54 The sonic density of a trailer need not exclusively refer to peaks of amplitude in quick succession, however: aggregates of sound created by merging sound effects and music can also give rise to the impression of loudness, of

The Trailer Ear   459 amounting to more than the sum of its individual components.55 In tandem with the urgency of an unfolding visual narrative and the rapid pace of a montage of action clips, the accompanying trailer sound can subjectively strike the ear as louder.56 3) Timbre. Several studies in the field of perception have determined that the timbre of sounds can influence the listener’s discernment of relative dynamic level. As Melara and Marks established through synthesized sounds in 1990, bright tones are perceived as louder,57 a hypothesis that Fabiani and Friberg tested and confirmed in 2011 using actual instruments (clarinet, flute, piano, trumpet, and violin).58 The eminent digital sound specialist John Chowning also posited that “the perception of loudness can be affected by the ‘chorus effect’,”59 which involves the convergence of closely pitched sounds collectively producing the impression of a larger ensemble. Trailer sound engineers deploy an awareness of the tonal qualities of instrumental and vocal resources to maximize their cinematic impact, to enhance the audience member’s perception of loudness.

Consuming the Trailer: From Studio to Exhibition Of course the actual experience of hearing trailers is conditional upon the quality of the sound system in the theatres where they are screened, which sets the limits and defines the sound.60 Whether for a trailer or a feature film, the goal of theatrical audio is to immerse the audience within the sonic world of the screen narrative. Since the introduction of Dolby Atmos in 2012, select theatres have offered movie audiences an audio experience that emphasizes realism and impact, with up to 64 speakers positioned not only on the sides but also above the auditorium. Through the object-based audio of Atmos, filmmakers can place and move sounds throughout a theatre, with “more powerful bass & higher quality subwoofers,” as one cinema chain advertises.61 Despite the potential of Atmos for enhancing the theatrical trailer ear-experience, “none of the big studios like Universal or Fox have really been doing any Dolby Atmos for film trailers,” at least as of May, 2018.62 One leading reason for this is the considerable cost of recording and exhibiting in Atmos, which is passed on to the audience in upscale cinemas.63 5.1 Dolby and Dolby Atmos sound is available for both high-end home theatres and mobile devices. While the home-theatre experience is intended to reproduce the theatrical sound on a physically more intimate scale,64 thereby remaining capable of capturing the sonic excess associated with the trailer ear,65 the same cannot be said for tablets, cell phones, and other mobile devices, which were not created first and foremost for media playback. The typically subpar, low-end speakers built into this technology are as a rule inadequate to access the visceral materiality of the theatrical trailer sequence. From such devices the public can glean information about film narrative and cast, however the sensory impact of the trailer is constrained.

460   James Deaville Nevertheless, personal listening systems—headphones or ear buds attached to iPods, tablets, or cell phones—afford the potential of cinematic trailer sound, depending on the quality and specifications of the devices and the editing of the trailer’s audio. Their capacity may not deliver the same theatrical Leqm level of loudness, but over-ear headphones and even ear buds can produce moving-image sound in Dolby 5.1, surroundsound like quality.66 Moreover, as already established, trailer houses and studios possess editing resources and procedures to enhance the experience of loudness in the cinema independently from decibel levels. As the technological capabilities of personal listening devices advance, it is quite possible that some trailer consumers may opt for (nostalgically) reproducing the somatic cinematic experience of the trailer ear. For example, a wide-screen home theatre can be configured with Dolby Atmos sound to approximate if not replicate the cinematic experience of hearing trailers. Whether they access trailer sound through some type of headphones or a home theatre, film audiences outside the theatre are able to control loudness themselves by means of adjusting settings on playback devices, which means that within the spectrum of loudness, they can choose to replicate extreme, potentially damaging cinematic levels or can turn down the volume setting to suit preferred alternate listening practices. In contrast, “cinema is a closed loop system,” whereby theatre owners and projectionists attempt to present sound at the level envisioned and established by directors and their sound teams.67 Personal control of volume levels notwithstanding, some audience members may still prefer how the sight and sound of trailers operationalize the “full body” sensorium in the immersive environment of cinemas. A recent study used trailers to test subjects’ preference for personal control of media—as the authors noted, granted that for trailer consumption “the potential of interactive interfaces abound, movie trailers can be an interesting study object to investigate the psychological impact of user control on viewers’ enjoyment.”68 Contrary to expectations, they discovered that “the higher the user control, the less the enjoyment [of the trailers] . . . Immersion was a strong, positive predictor of enjoyment of movie trailers.”69 As the authors elucidate, “the journey to the mediated world can be either obstructed by a higher level of user control that constantly requires interactions with the medium, or it can be enhanced in a way that [makes] users feel more deeply involved in the mediated content.”70 It is important to consider how we as moviegoers might find pleasure in the immersive visceral excess of the trailer soundtrack, reveling in the evocation of the trailer ear. This brings us back to the notion of the film trailer as a site of contrasting and conflicting responses to loudness. While bloggers, podcasters, YouTube commenters, and other contributors to social media persist in complaining about the theatrical trailer as “noisy,” “overloud,” and “jarring,” other cultural commentators may appeal to fans of the cinematic trailer experience, reminding us that the theatrical experience of the excessively loud movie trailer is a marketing tool that can also accomplish important social and psychological work.71 Blesser notes how loud music transports us to another space; the visceral power of music and image accomplishes something similar when they operate according to the contract of the trailer ear, which we willingly enter into for the excitement and energy it generates. The resultant sensory immersion in the trailer’s narrative

The Trailer Ear   461 world creates visceral and cognitive hooks, tangible desire for completion in the coming attraction. The global film industry has relied on theatrical trailers as a mainstay of movie marketing for over 100 years, and the noise over trailers’ physical impact is unlikely to abate with cinema’s turn to ever increasing sensory stimulation.

Notes 1. For a discussion of music and sound practices in comedy trailers, see James Deaville and Agnes Malkinson, “A Laugh a Second? Music and Sound in Comedy Trailers,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 8, no. 2 (2014): 121–40. 2. A certain tension exists between the sensorial and semiotic modes of listening that underlie affect and the experience of the trailer ear. Anahid Kassabian, in line with Brian Massumi, describes the two components thus: “Affect is the circuit of bodily responses to stimuli that take place before conscious apprehension. Once apprehended, the responses pass into thoughts and feelings, though they always leave behind a residue. This residue accretes in our bodies, becoming the stuff of future affective responses.” Anahid Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), xiii. The trailer ear relies upon audiences drawing upon that lifetime of learned responses. 3. James Batcho, “New Understandings in Hearing,” The New Soundtrack 7, no. 1 (2017): 1–14. 4. Gianluigi Guido. The Salience of Marketing Stimuli: An Incongruity-Salience Hypothesis on Consumer Awareness (Boston: Springe, 2001), 28. 5. Mary Florentine, Arthur N Popper, and Richard R Fay, eds.  Loudness (New York: Springer, 2011), 3. 6. For a general discussion of the history of trailer music, see James Deaville, “Trailer or Leader? The Role of Music and Sound in Cinematic Previews,” in The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound, ed. Miguel Mera, Ron Sadoff, and Ben Winters (New York: Routledge, 2017), 240–54. 7. Keith Johnston, Coming Soon: Film Trailers and the Selling of Hollywood Technology (Jefferson: McFarland, 2009), 71. 8. Ioan Allen, “How Loud Is a Movie?—A New Measurement Procedure,” SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal 125, no. 4 (2016): 57. 9. TASA, “TASA History,” http://tasatrailers.org/history.html. 10. Barry Blesser, “The Seductive (Yet Destructive) Appeal of Loud Music,” eContact! 9, no. 4 (2017), https://econtact.ca/9_4/blesser.html. For a closer consideration of how we experience space through listening or spatial acoustics, see above all Barry Blesser and LindaRuth Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007). 11. Blesser, “The Seductive (Yet Destructive) Appeal of Loud Music.” 12. Ibid. 13. This principle customarily does not apply to the initial teaser trailer, which because of the dearth of footage at that point in time attempts to capture attention through other means. A recent example of this is Marvel’s teaser for Avengers: Endgame (released in December 17, 2018), which is noteworthy for its understated action and restrained sound, undoubtedly due to the characters’ mourning for the comrades they lost at the end of Avengers: Infinity War. See “Avengers: Endgame Trailer #1 (2019),” 2:35, 2018 https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=ee1172yeqyE&t=7s, accessed September 25, 2019.

462   James Deaville 14. Allen, “How Loud is a Movie?—A New Measurement Procedure.” 15. These practices are clearly outlined in a document produced by the Connecticut Association of Theatre Owners (CATO) in response to a state General Assembly act from 2014 that sought to limit the decibel level of theatrical projection. For details, see the CATO document by Doug Murdoch, “Written Testimony of Doug Murdoch, Executive Director, CATO, in Opposition to Raised Bill No. 5458: An Act Concerning the Maximum Decibel Levels, before The Committee on Public Health, March 2, 2016,” https://www.cga. ct.gov/2016/phdata/tmy/2016HB-05458-R000302-Doug%20Murdoch,%20Executive%20 Director,%20CATO-TMY.PDF. 16. As documents of TASA explain, Leqm “defines trailer volume as a decibel average over time, using a specific filter that emphasizes the mid and upper-range sound frequencies.” TASA, “What Is Leqm,” https://www.tasatrailers.org/leqm.html, accessed September 25, 2019. Because it is a numerical average over the full length of a trailer, quiet trailers can afford to feature occasional louder outbursts than the trailer that consistently uses a higher volume. 17. TASA, “TASA History,” tasatrailers.org/history.html, accessed September 25, 2019. 18. Andrew Elliott, Is That a Big Number? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 182. 19. Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care National, “Hearing Loss and Deafness: Normal Hearing and Impaired Hearing,” November 30, 2017, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih. gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0089568/. 20. Dolby Laboratories, “The TASA Standard: Recommendations from the TASA Ad Hoc Committee for Regulating Motion Picture Trailer Audio Volume” (2015), 9, https://www. tasatrailers.org/TASAStandard.pdf, accessed September 25, 2019. 21. TASA. “What Is TASA?,” http://tasatrailers.org/whatis.html, accessed September 25, 2019. 22. Ioan Allen, “Level Best: Setting Audio Volume Standards for Features, Trailers and Commercials in Cinemas,” Film Journal International 112, no. 4 (2009): 40. The article includes a postscript: “Ioan Allen of Dolby Laboratories prepared this short article on theatre sound levels for a non-technical audience; we thought his summary could be useful even for an industry audience, so FJI is pleased to reproduce it here” (40). 23. Allen, “How Loud Is a Movie?—A New Measurement Procedure,” 58. 24. Manny Knowles, Answer to “Why do they play the previews so loud at movie theaters?” Quora, July 11, 2017, https://www.quora.com/Why-do-they-play-the-previews-so-loud-atmovie-theaters. 25. See e.g. Mike Thornton, “Loudness and Dynamics in Cinema Sound—Part 1,” Pro Tools Expert, July 5, 2017, https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2017/6/21/loudnessand-dynamics-in-cinema-sound, accessed September 25, 2019. 26. Complaints of excessive loudness are less frequent for movies than trailers, given the more expansive spacing and pacing of the “loud parts” within narrative cinema. 27. For more about the structure and function of trailer narrative, see Deaville, “Trailer or Leader?” To date, in the absence of empirical research, evidence on hearing damage in the cinema remains largely anecdotal and word-of-mouth. In 2011, for example, the French Commission Supérieure Technique de l’Image et du Son issued a statement in 2011 about the problem of cinematic loudness: “with the arrival of digital audio, we are more often faced with encodings to absurd levels . . . It is imperative that all professionals involved in the different stages in the audio chain of a cinema work together so that audio levels in film theaters do not become a problem of public health.” Sleepless, “The Loudness War— Part 9: Play It by the Rules,” AudioFanzine, August 4, 2015, at https://en.audiofanzine.com/ mastering/editorial/articles/play-it-by-the-rules.html. A 2017 inquiry to the Movies & TV

The Trailer Ear   463 community of the Stack Exchange Network bore the title “What’s with the Loud Trailers?” and featured the following comment: “It seems like previews/trailers are crazy loud. I was just at a movie and had to step outside into the foyer and wait for these to end so that I would not damage my hearing. The movie itself was a normal volume.” https://movies. stackexchange.com/questions/76473/whats-with-the-loud-trailers, accessed September 25, 2019. 28. Wayne J. Staab. “Movies—Too Loud?” Canadian Audiologist 1, no. 6. (2014), http://www. canadianaudiologist.ca/movies-too-loud/. 29. Wayne  J.  Staab. “Movies‑Too Loud? Still?” Hearing Health & Technology Matters, December 6, 2017, https://hearinghealthmatters.org/waynesworld/2017/movies-loud-still. 30. Ibid. 31. Anna Warszawa and Robert T. Sataloff, “Noise Exposure in Movie Theaters: A Preliminary Study of Sound Levels During the Showing of 25 Films,” Ear, Nose, &Throat Journal 89, no. 9 (2010): 444–50. 32. CPN Administration. “A Loud Irony Enters the Mix: The Film Volume Issue.” Creative Planet Network, February 15, 2012, https://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/news/newsfeatures/loud-irony-enters-mix-film-volume-issue-373999. 33. Bill Desowitz, “The Loud Debate over Trailers,” Los Angeles Times, July 6, 1997, http:// articles.latimes.com/1997/jul/06/entertainment/ca-10016/2. 34. Dolby Laboratories, “The TASA Standard,” 14. 35. “An Act Concerning the Maximum Decibel Level at Movie Theatres,” October 1, 2014. https://www.cga.ct.gov/2014/TOB/S/2014SB-00287-R00-SB.htm. 36. Arnold J. Gordon and William R. Young, “Movie Trailers Are Teasers to Hearing Loss,” Stamford Advocate, October 22, 2013, https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/opinion/article/Movie-trailers-are-teasers-to-hearing-loss-4917543.php. 37. Murdoch, “Written Testimony.” 38. This primer is a literal reproduction of Allen’s 2009 one-page article in the Film Journal International, with the date January 30, 2009. 39. This bill does not appear to have become law. 40. John Fithian, “The President’s Report: Is the Cinema Sound Reference Dead? Do Trailer Sound Levels Need to Be Evaluated?” NATO: The President’s Report (November, 2017), 24–25, http://www.natoonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Presidents-ReportNovember-2017.pdf. 41. Ibid., 24. 42. Ibid., 25. 43. Ibid. 44. The exception in terms of genre would be comedy, where dialogue—punch lines—figures prominently in the sound mix. 45. Mary Florentine, “Loudness,” in Loudness, ed. Mary Florentine, Arthur Popper, and Richard Fay (New York: Springer,  2011), 3. The term “maximizer” is synonymous with “limiter.” 46. Hugo Fastl and Mary Florentine, “Loudness in Daily Environments,” in Loudness, ed. Mary Florentine, Arthur Popper, and Richard Fay (New York: Springer, 2011), 199–222: 207. 47. Anssi Tenhunen, “Effects and Justification of Loudness War in Commercial Music” (MA Thesis, University of Jyväskylä, 2016), 5. 48. Miika Elmgren, “Loudness War: Introduction and Aftermath of Hypercompression in Modern Music” (MA Thesis, Arcada University of Applied Sciences, 2016), 13.

464   James Deaville 49. Peter Albrechtsen, “Exclusive Interview: Bryan Jerden on Trailer Sound Design,” Designing Sound, July 19, 2012, http://designingsound.org/2012/07/19/exclusive-interview-bryanjerden-on-trailer-sound-design. 50. Sound or acoustic intensity reflects the flow of sound of a given pressure within an area, whereas sound pressure establishes an absolute value for the decibel level of a sound. 51. M.  N.  Avadhanulu and D.  D.  Mulajkar, S.  Chand’s Engineering Physics (New Delhi: S. Chand, 2010), 132. 52. TASA itself argues that “the irritability of sounds to an audience is frequency and duration specific.” TASA, “What Is TASA?”. 53. Åsa Skagerstrand, Perception of Disturbing Sounds, Studies from the Swedish Institute for Disability Research 89 (Örebro, SE: Örebro University, 2018), 44. 54. See Michael Goldman, “A Loud Irony Enters the Mix: The Film Volume Issue,” Karasinek, January 27, 2010, http://kkarasinekk.blogspot.com/2010/01/loud-irony-enters-mix-filmvolume-issue.html. 55. Regarding audience perception of sonic density in theatrical trailers, see Deaville and Malkinson, “A Laugh a Second?” 56. Jonna K. Vuoskoski, Marc R. Thompson, Charles Spence, and Eric F. Clarke, “Interaction of Sight and Sound in the Perception and Experience of Musical Performance,” Music Perception 33, no. 4 (2016): 457–71. Among other findings, the authors determined that “visual kinematic cues . . . affected ratings of loudness variability” (457). 57. Robert  D.  Melara and Lawrence  E.  Marks, “Interaction Among Auditory Dimensions: Timbre, Pitch, and Loudness,” Perception & Psychophysics 48, no. 2 (1990), 169–78. Much of the literature about loudness and timbre includes a reference to the pioneering acoustic research of Harvey Fletcher at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in the 1930s and 1940s. 58. Marco Fabiani and Anders Friberg, “Influence of Pitch, Loudness, and Timbre on the Perception of Instrument Dynamics,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 130, no. 4 (2011): 193–99. 59. John  M.  Chowning, “Digital Sound Synthesis, Acoustics, and Perception: A Rich Intersection,” Proceedings of the COST G-6 Conference on Digital Audio Effects (DAFX-00), Verona, Italy, December 7–9, 2000, at http://ant-s4.unibw-hamburg.de/dafx/paperarchive/2000/pdf/Chowning.pdf. See also Daniel Kahlin and Sten Ternström, “The Chorus Effect Revisited—Experiments in Frequency-Domain Analysis and Simulation of Ensemble Sounds,” in Proceedings of Euromicro ‘99, Milan, Italy (Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society, 1999), 75–80. 60. About theatrical speakers in the digital era, see Mark Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 61. “Dolby Atmos,” Cineplex, https://www.cineplex.com/Theatres/DolbyAtmos, accessed February 25, 2019. 62. Colby Ramsey, “Sounds of the Future at London's Grand Central Recording Studios,” ProSound News, May 2, 2018, https://www.prosoundnetwork.com/post-and-broadcast/ sounds-of-the-future-at-londons-grand-central-recording-studios. 63. Mike Blakesley, “Topic: How Long Will Dolby Atmos Last?” Film-Tech Forum: Film Tech Cinema Systems, April 12, 2015, http://www.film-tech.com/ubb/f16/t002271.html. 64. Mark Kerins, “Home Theater(s): Technology, Culture, and Style,” in The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound, ed. Miguel Mera, Ron Sadoff, and Ben Winters (New York: Routledge, 2017), 388–99.

The Trailer Ear   465 65. Nevertheless, the home theatre possesses the potential for the personal adjustment of loudness. 66. Oomo Earbuds uses “5-channel acoustic structure to separate sound frequencies to provide clarity and 3D Virtual 5.1 Surround Sound,” https://oomosound.com/. 67. Ioan Allen, “A Short Primer on the Levels of Features, Trailers and Commercials as Heard in the Cinema,” January 30, 2009, https://isdcf.com/loudness201406/Loudness3.pdf. 68. Jeeyun Oh, Mun-Young Chung, and Sangyong Han, “The More Control, the Better? The Effects of User Control on Movie Trailer Immersion and Enjoyment,” Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications 26, no. 2 (2014): 81–82. 69. Oh et al., “The More Control, the Better?” 87. 70. Ibid., 82. 7 1. For example, in a panel from February, 2018, BuzzFeed cartoonist Pinks and Roses illustrates how a moviegoer excitedly purchases and consumes popcorn, enthusiastically participates in the trailers, and falls asleep during the feature film. https://www.instagram. com/pinks_and_roses/p/Be9lMavBeWH/, accessed February 25, 2019.

Select Bibliography Allen, Ioan. “How Loud Is a Movie?—A New Measurement Procedure.” SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal 125, no. 4 (2016): 57–62. Blesser, Barry, and Linda-Ruth Salter. Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007. Deaville, James. (with Agnes Malkinson). “A Laugh a Second? Music and Sound in Comedy Trailers.” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 8, no. 2 (2014): 121–40. Deaville, James. “Trailer or Leader? The Role of Music and Sound in Cinematic Previews.” In Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound, ed. Miguel Mera, Ron Sadoff, and Ben Winters, 240–54. New York: Routledge, 2017. Florentine, Mary, Arthur N. Popper, and Richard R. Fay, eds. Loudness. New York: Springer, 2011. Johnston, Keith. Coming Soon: Film Trailers and the Selling of Hollywood Technology. Jefferson: McFarland, 2009. Oh, Jeeyun, Mun-Young Chung, and Sangyong Han. “The More Control, the Better? The Effects of User Control on Movie Trailer Immersion and Enjoyment,” Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications 26, no. 2 (2014): 81–91. Rumsey, Francis. “Loudness Revisited.” Journal of the Audio Engineering Society 62, no. 12 (2014): 906–10. Skagerstrand, Åsa. Perception of Disturbing Sounds. In Studies from The Swedish Institute for Disability Research, Vol. 89. Örebro, SE: Örebro University, 2018. Staab, Wayne. “Movies too Loud?” Canadian Audiologist 1, no. 6 (2014): http://www.canadianaudiologist.ca/movies-too-loud. Warszawa, Anna, and Robert T. Sataloff. “Noise Exposure in Movie Theaters: A Preliminary Study of Sound Levels During the Showing of 25 Films.” Ear, Nose and Throat Journal 89, no. 9 (2010): 444–50.

pa rt V

L IST E N I NG AGA I N

chapter 23

Pop M usic, Processi ng Flu ency, a n d Pl e asu r e Film Songs as Both Hype and Memento Jeff Smith

Over the past fifteen years, processing fluency has emerged as an important topic in experimental research on aesthetic judgments and consumer preference. Put simply, processing fluency refers to the ease with which our minds assimilate new information. As Joseph Nunes, Andrea Ordanini, and Francis Valsesia note, processing fluency is not a process per se, but a metacognitive mechanism that describes how easy a process feels.1 As much of this research shows, processing fluency is hedonically marked insofar as it predisposes subjects toward a positive evaluation of an object based on the apparent ease with which we understand its basic features. Processing fluency produces a sense of pleasure or enjoyment, and as such, it plays a potentially significant role in explaining the widespread popularity of mass culture. Indeed, drawing upon a substantial body of research, psychologists Rolf Reber, Norbert Schwartz, and Piotr Wienkelman argue that aesthetic judgments are less about the pleasing features of an art object itself and more about the dynamic interaction between objective properties of the stimulus and the processing experiences of perceivers. For Reber, Schwartz, and Wienkelman, the basic principle entailed in this relationship is rather straightforward: the more fluently perceivers can process an object, the more positive their aesthetic response.2 It is important to note, however, that these psychological studies do not seek to supplant the idea of beauty as it is usually understood by philosophers and aestheticians. Rather, they simply seek to underline the transactional nature of beauty as an aesthetic concept. In visual compositions, attributes like balance, proportion, symmetry, clarity, and figure/ground contrast all continue to play an important role in our aesthetic response to an art object. But they do so less as intrinsically beautiful attributes of the object and more as stimulus features that facilitate our perceptual uptake of sense data.

470   Jeff Smith Further, Reber, Schwartz, and Wienkelman also note that more recent studies of processing fluency are based on longstanding research on “good figures” that dates back to the prior work of the Gestalt school.3 The authors’ hypothesis that many of the attributes of “good figures” correlate with stimuli containing less information, thereby enhancing recognition speed. Take, for example, the preference for symmetry that some psychological researchers posit as innate. A 1974 study by W. R. Garner supports the theory that symmetrical figures have less information and therefore are perceived more quickly. Similarly, two studies conducted in 1994 concluded that a computer modeling system designed to recognize objects from different viewpoints processes symmetrical patterns more efficiently than other patterns.4 These more recent findings support Reber, Schwartz, and Wienkelman’s premise that the well-documented preference for symmetry is rooted more in its ease of information uptake rather than an innate perceptual bias.5 Having given a “quick and dirty” summary of what processing fluency is and how it basically functions, let me outline a few other aspects of the phenomenon that will prove important in its application to popular music in films. First and foremost, processing fluency is associated with an array of different mental processes, including sensory perception, memory retrieval, motor skills, and cognitive behaviors. Second, processing fluency is enhanced by repeat exposure—that is, up to a point. The link between fluency and exposure was first documented by Robert Zajonc in 1968.6 Dubbing this the “exposure effect,” Zajonc came to this conclusion after he noticed that research subjects often demonstrated an unconscious preference for one thing over another based on their familiarity with it. Subsequent tests, though, indicate the relationship between enjoyment and repeat exposures can be plotted as an inverted “U”-shape, which psychologist Daniel Berlyne calls the Wundt curve.7 The Wundt curve was inspired by the pioneering work of experimental psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, who argued that the pleasantness of a stimulus varied with the intensity of the stimulus. Berlyne noted a similar correlation at work between stimulus and exposure. The more familiar something becomes, the more easily it is processed, and the greater our enjoyment of it. As we gain additional exposures, however, the correlation between familiarity and pleasure begins to take on a negative valence. In one experiment, research subjects’ liking of a brief musical excerpt started to diminish after the eighth time they heard it within a forty-minute span.8 Additional exposures reinforced these negative feelings, eventually reaching the point where overfamiliarity produced active displeasure. This finding is anecdotally corroborated by the military’s use of music as an aspect of psychological torture. As one unnamed operative told the BBC News, “In training, they forced me to listen to the Barney “I Love You” song for 45 minutes. I never want to go through that again.”9 Research, however, suggests that such consciously articulated displeasure depends on awareness of the repetition.10 In cases where the repetition occurs subliminally or is presented in conjunction with a distraction task, processing fluency continues to increase with each iteration, even as the amount of increase gets progressively smaller. As this research suggests, processing fluency still occurs even when auditors’ attention is directed elsewhere. This proves especially relevant to the

Pop Music, Processing Fluency, and Pleasure   471 perception of film music that functions as underscore, which many scholars argue is heard unconsciously.11 Third, there is ample evidence that the hedonic marking associated with the ease of fluent processing gets misattributed to the object itself. That is, the experience of positive affect transfers over to the object believed to elicit it. As Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis notes, “Pleased by their own processing fluency and the sense of acumen and power it confers, but unaware of the origins of this sensation, they assume that the stimulus itself (rather than repeated presentation of it) possesses some special pleasing quality.”12 Lastly, because processing fluency operates on the fringes of consciousness, its priming of positive affect can be easily overridden by higher-order cognitive attitudes. If you dislike the taste of cilantro, then repeat exposures will do nothing to change the awareness of displeasure produced by that initial encounter. Although processing fluency has been demonstrated across a range of different types of experiments, two scholars working within a more humanistic framework offer insights that bear most directly on the placement of popular music in films: Todd Berliner and David Huron. In Hollywood Aesthetic, Berliner asks the question, “What is it about the Hollywood movies that people enjoy that makes people enjoy them?”13 Berliner’s answer takes its point of departure from an epigram by E. H. Gombrich: “We must ultimately be able to account for the most basic fact of aesthetic experience, the fact that delight lies somewhere between boredom and confusion.”14 For Berliner, these two poles of aesthetic experience—boredom and confusion—roughly correlate with two types of psychological experience that have amply demonstrated their hedonic value in research studies: processing fluency, on the one hand, and cognitive challenge, on the other. In Berliner’s view, the formal properties of Hollywood cinema, at the level of both narrative and of style, developed in ways that enhanced viewers’ processing fluency. Consider, for example: • The redundancy of narrative information • The emphasis on goal-oriented protagonists • The centering of subjects within the frame • The continuity system • The use of figure movement and analytic editing to create attentional synchrony All of these attributes of the Hollywood style aim to enhance the viewer’s ability to easily assimilate information about the story. Yet habituation and overfamiliarity can also produce boredom. For this reason, Hollywood filmmakers strive to produce a balance of conventionality and novelty in order to optimize the potential for a pleasurable aesthetic experience. The use of new or innovative storytelling and stylistic techniques creates what Berliner calls “cognitive challenge,” which in turn helps to stimulate and arouse our interest. Drawing on the work of Daniel Berlyne, Berliner argues that the aesthetic experience of filmic pleasure resembles the inverted “U” shape of the Wundt curve. But in this case the x-axis plots

472   Jeff Smith relative measures of novelty and complexity. For Berliner, the combination of novelty and complexity create a sense of interest and curiosity that negates the potential boredom of a stimulus that is too simple or too conventional. Films, though, that experiment with narrative form or style risk going too far on the axis of novelty and complexity to the extent that the takeaway is confusion instead of enjoyment. Of course, it almost goes without saying that judgments about what constitutes novelty and complexity depend upon a number of contextual factors, including culture and taste. This aspect of aesthetic judgment can be illustrated through a very simple musical example. Classical music connoisseurs will find little that is original or intricate in the simple blues harmony and 4/4 rhythm that structures “You Really Got Me” whereas heavy metal fans will be wowed by Eddie Van Halen’s virtuosic solo in the band’s cover of the Kinks’ classic. Berliner’s scholarship is usefully supplemented by a recent article on popular music by David Huron that similarly suggests ways in which musical form is structured around elements of repetition and variation that function as correlates to Gombrich’s zone between boredom and confusion.15 As both Huron and Hellmuth Margulis point out, no art form is structured as much by internal repetition as music is. More importantly, the most conventional aspects of Western musical form—such as rhythm, melodic contour, phrase structure, and chord patterns—all work to facilitate an immediate familiarity that then translates into implicit learning and the positive hedonic marking associated with processing fluency. Admittedly, the research on habituation in music proves to be complex. As Huron points out, habituation in animal studies often use the startle response to determine the different factors that influence the speed of habituation. One variable is the frequency of the stimulus. If a loud tone is repeated every ten seconds, a mouse can be inured to it in as few as eight iterations. If the repetitions are more widely spaced, though, habituation may not occur until the twelfth iteration. A second variable has to do with the predictability of the stimulus. Not surprisingly, lab animals adjust more readily to regular repetitions of stimuli than they do to the same stimuli presented in more random fashion. Put simply, the more we anticipate something, the easier its habituation. Yet another factor contributing to the effects of habituation is a phenomenon that psychologists describe as spontaneous recovery. That is, once habituation has been established, an animal can be re-sensitized to the stimulus by simply removing it for a certain amount of time. After the elapsed time, the stimulus returns and produces the same effects that occurred the first time it was experienced.16 Although the specific psychological mechanisms that habituate music listeners remain a matter of debate, Huron is less concerned with the mental processes that undergird its effects than he is with the fact that it occurs at all. Instead, his model of musical repetition focuses more intently on the techniques composers created intuitively to achieve a balance between the effects of hedonic marking produced by repeat exposures and the dangers of overfamiliarity that result from habituation. Indeed, echoing Gombrich’s language, Percy Scholes characterizes musical form as “a series of strategies designed to find a successful mean between the opposite extremes of unrelieved repetition and unrelieved alteration.”17 Consider the role of the “bridge” in the 32-bar

Pop Music, Processing Fluency, and Pleasure   473 song form favored by Tin Pan Alley composers, the juxtaposition of ritornellos and new material in a rondo, the “theme and variations” approach that governs the relationship between a “head” and the trading of solos in a jazz combo performance, changes in instruments and dynamics in the arrangements of many rock and roll recordings. These particular strategies prove effective thanks to the ease with which the effects of habituation evaporate when subjects are introduced to a single novel stimulus. The new information re-orients the listener to the original stimulus, causing us to return to it anew as though the earlier habituation effect had not occurred. (It is important to note, though, that the effectiveness of dishabituating stimuli itself diminishes with repetition over time.) According to Huron, the need to balance the psychological effects of fluency and habituation is one reason why musical forms typically develop as nested hierarchies of smaller-scale patterns of repetition and variation. What does all of this have to do with the placement of popular music in film? Space allows me to only explore a few of these different avenues of inquiry. In what follows I will highlight the importance of processing fluency as an aspect of cinematic listening in three ways: first, as a hedonically marked effect of film and music cross-promotion; second, as a means of eliciting pleasure via the nostalgic reception of classic songs; and lastly, as a prompt for efficient recall of narrative elements while listening to soundtrack albums. In exploring these different dimensions of processing fluency, I aim to highlight the myriad ways in the exposure effect enhances the pleasures of popular music in films.

Invisible Airwaves Crackle with Life: The Exposure Effect in Film and on Radio For the vast majority of Hollywood’s history, radio functioned as the primary way studios exposed audiences to their musical wares. Keep in mind that a positive disposition to the artifact can be achieved merely through the exposure effect. Moreover, radio programming is intuitively structured so as to regulate the psychological effects of fluency and habituation. The two factors that create dishabituation for Huron are novel stimuli and the passage of time. Radio programming relies on both, and thereby can maximize processing fluency when hierarchizing its playlists into different levels of “rotation.” Depending on the station, “heavy” rotation can denote the replaying of a recording every four hours in a “current hits” format or every eight hours in a “classics” format. In either case, the re-hearing of the song will increase processing fluency (up to a point) without the negative affect that accrues through unvarying, sequential repetitions that are tantamount to torture. Radio programming further strives to minimize the effects of habituation by replaying songs at relatively random intervals. A Top 40 station’s regular listeners may anticipate that they’ll hear a current hit sometime in the next four hours.

474   Jeff Smith But they cannot predict exactly when it will be replayed nor what will be heard just before it or after it. With this in mind, we can see why studios believed it was advantageous to release a music tie-in some four to six weeks in advance of a film’s premiere. The exposure given to the song in radio playlists would enhance the effects of processing fluency even before audiences have entered the cinema. And then when the song is finally heard in a cinematic context, perhaps under the opening credits or as a performed number, the pleas­ure associated with processing fluency gets transferred to the artifact as a whole. Although a four to six-week advance was the norm, other films, such as Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Footloose (1984), stretched this time frame in more carefully orchestrated campaigns that involved the release of multiple recordings in advance of its premiere. Al Coury, head of the RSO record label, is often credited as the architect of this type of cross-promotion, even though he admits to borrowing its central idea from a previous campaign for the Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson version of A Star is Born (1976).18 Coury released the album’s four flagship singles—“How Deep Is Your Love,” “Stayin’ Alive,” “If I Can’t Have You,” and “Night Fever”—over the course of a four-month period that bracketed both the release of the soundtrack album and the premiere of the film. The timing of these releases was staggered to maximize exposure for the soundtrack; as one single completed its chart run, another debuted to replace it. In addition to radio airplay, these songs also garnered significant exposure in the film’s trailer. In September of 1977, Coury released a 30-second teaser for the film that featured John Travolta’s inimitable strut to the strains of “Stayin’ Alive.” In November, a longer trailer appeared that featured excerpts of all four singles, simultaneously serving as an ad for the film, the soundtrack album, and the other three singles that would succeed “How Deep is Your Love,” which by then was already a massive hit. A December trailer added a handful of other titles to those already featured, including the Bee Gees earlier hit “You Should Be Dancing” and the Trampp’s “Disco Inferno.” As a strategy intended to build interest in both the film and the album, Coury took full advantage of the exposure effect as an element that facilitates aesthetic pleasure. For anyone within earshot of a radio in the latter months of 1977, the familiarity of “Stayin’ Alive” and “How Deep is Your Love” prior to the film’s release would already predispose listeners to enjoy the sequences where these songs were placed, namely the opening scene and the late scene where Tony rides the subway aimlessly, eventually turning to Stephanie for solace after the death of his friend, Bobby. The positive affect that accompanies processing fluency would easily transfer to the cinematic moments that elicited such a response. When Tony Manero plays “Night Fever” as part of his grooming ritual, however, the effects of processing fluency would run in the reverse direction, at least for some of the film’s first audiences. Having heard it in the film, the exposure effect would kick in for these viewers every time “Night Fever” played on the radio following its February 1978 release. The song would soar to number #1, reaching the pinnacle of Billboard’s Hot 100, a little over five weeks after its debut as a single. The song’s success

Pop Music, Processing Fluency, and Pleasure   475 was no doubt aided by the ease of recall expedited by its placement within one of the major dance scenes in the film.19 This type of cross-marketing strategy runs the risk of overexposure for certain pieces of music prior to the film’s opening. But I contend that the film and record companies devising these campaigns assumed that the normal rise and fall of a charting single would still facilitate the re-sensitization to the stimulus when the song is reheard in a new cinematic context. To use a more recent example, audiences for Trolls (2016) likely had at least a dozen or more exposures to Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling,” which was released six months in advance of the film. Yet, in theory, that prior exposure would only enhance the pleasures of processing fluency when the song appears in the film’s climax. All of these examples also underscore the importance of music’s placement within a film. Producers looking for a payoff to their cross-promotional campaigns will not see much benefit if a song is stuck in a dialogue scene and mixed as background or ambient sound in relation to the actor’s voices. With our attention directed at the semantic content of the dialogue, the music is unlikely to engender the kinds of pleasure that normally accompanies processing fluency. One can certainly find instances of film songs that charted as hits with only minimal exposure in films. Yet my surmise is that these songs succeed despite their offhand treatment not because of it. More importantly, as the examples from Saturday Night Fever and Trolls show, the placement of the song near the film’s climax can add an affective charge at an especially key point in the film’s narrative. Indeed, some of the most wildly successful examples of film and music cross-promotion drew on the power of the exposure effect in exactly this way. Consider the films and songs listed in Table 23.1. The last column indicates the song’s chart position at the time of the film’s debut, a measure that indicates its popularity both in terms of sales and airplay. In each of these four instances, the singles were released as film tie-ins anywhere from two to four weeks before the film’s opening. And in each case, the single had cracked either the top 40 or the top ten at the time of the film’s release. We can surmise that many of the viewers seeing these films for the first time had already heard the music in advance of the film and even may have anticipated its appearance within its narrative context. By introducing each song in the film’s climax, the narrative’s resolution gains an additional affective charge as the result of the audience’s prior familiarity with the music that accompanies it. Table 23.1  The placement of film songs and the exposure effect in major examples of cross promotion. Song title

Release date

Film title

Opening

Chart

“You’re the One That I Want” “Flashdance (What a Feeling)” “Footloose” “I Will Always Love You”

5/17/78 4/3/83 1/28/84 11/3/92

Grease Flashdance Footloose The Bodyguard

6/16/78 4/15/83 2/17/84 11/25/92

#2 #38 #32 #1

476   Jeff Smith Such hedonic marking is not the only source of pleasure here, to be sure. Narrative closure, in and of itself, furnishes a sense of satisfaction irrespective of our awareness or familiarity with the film’s music. Still, by delaying the appearance of these rising chart successes until the climax, the film’s endings gain an additional affective boost at a point of the story that functions as a kind of hedonic peak.20 The scenes of Sandy and Danny’s duet (Grease), Alex’s successful audition (Flashdance), Ren’s spirited gambol at the school dance (Footloose), and Frank and Rachel’s bittersweet goodbye at the airport (The Bodyguard) are emotionally rich moments all by themselves. The extra enjoyment derived from processing fluency enable the film’s music to goose the emotional impact just a little bit more. Other songs employed during film climaxes utilize the exposure effect in the opposite direction. In films like An Officer and A Gentleman (1982) and Dirty Dancing (1987), the hedonic peak provided in the films’ climaxes appears to have encouraged audiences to seek out the songs featured in these scenes as a memento of their cinematic experience. In the former, Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes’ “Up Where We Belong” plays under the scene where Zack takes Paula into his arms and carries her away from the factory where she works. The recording eventually entered the charts about a week after the film’s debut and hit #1 on Billboard’s charts nearly three months into the film’s six month run. A similar phenomenon occurred as a result of the sleeper success of Dirty Dancing. In the film’s iconic ending, Baby and Johnny dance together to the strains of Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes’ “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life.” Dirty Dancing opened on August 21st, earning just under $4 million in its first weekend. Its featured song, however, entered the charts more than a month after the film’s debut and did not reach #1 until November 28th, some fifteen weeks into the film’s 19-week run. Given the lag between the film’s initial box office success and its later chart run, it seems reasonable to infer that the warm and fuzzy feelings engendered by Baby and Johnny’s pas de deux led thousands of viewers to either purchase the single or request it from local radio stations. In both cases, the desire to hear these recordings again, after a single exposure, was nurtured by the emotional significance of these scenes themselves. As paradigmatic instances of the “Hollywood happy ending,” these hedonic peaks facilitated their efficient storage in long-term memory, allowing audiences to re-experience the pleasure associated with the film upon subsequent auditions of the song.21

Misty Water-Colored Memories: Nostalgia and Processing Fluency Processing fluency can also explain why interest in older musical material can be reinvigorated by its placement within a cinematic context. Some psychological studies, for example, suggest that what we customarily think of nostalgia is, in fact, simply the positive affect produced by the ease of recall that occurs when the stimulus is accessed in

Pop Music, Processing Fluency, and Pleasure   477 long-term memory. More importantly, as was the case with other processing fluency studies, pleasure is mistakenly attributed to the stimulus that elicited it. As Jason P. Leboe and Tamara L. Ansons put it, “To provide a real world analogy, consider when that classic song on the radio sponsors the generation of a flood of detail about the past. We propose that the reverential feelings one experiences for the stage of life associated with that music might actually originate from an affective response to the act of remembering itself.”22 Thus, when popular older recordings are resituated in films, the combination of familiarity and novelty fits perfectly within the inverted “U” described by Berlyne and Berliner. When “Unchained Melody” appears as accompaniment to the famous love scene in Ghost (1990), there is little doubt that viewers experience pleasure in watching two extremely attractive actors engaging in a romantic display of physical affection. Yet, the nostalgia associated in rehearing the Righteous Brothers’ recording carries its own affective charge, not the least reason being that the imagery functions as a novel aspect of the audiovisual stimulus as a whole. The fluency engendered by familiar music helps to explain why golden oldies are such a potent source of both meaning and pleasure. In a detailed analysis of the crosspromotional campaign for American Graffiti (1974), I noted that the film caught a wave of nostalgia for fifties pop music that reverberated throughout the culture.23 The film’s posters even capitalized on this nostalgia through its tagline, which asked, “Where were you in ’62?” In Back to the Fifties, Michael D. Dwyer offers his own incisive analysis of the political implications of George Lucas’ disengagement with contemporaneous issues. Yet Dwyer’s more thoroughgoing account of fifties nostalgia considers the way it is activated in both cinematic and popular music contexts in a wide range of examples that includes Grease, Back to the Future (1985), Blue Velvet (1986), Hairspray (1988), Michael Jackson’s video for “Smooth Criminal,” and Morrisey’s video for “Suedehead.”24 Dwyer’s examples focus mostly on texts produced during the Nixon and Reagan eras. Yet, as he points out in his conclusion, the cinematic exploitation of pop music as nostalgia has maintained its currency well into the new millennium. Dwyer, for example, cites Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) as an especially pertinent example.25 The John Cusack vehicle combines the time travel conceit of Back to the Future with the multiple protagonist structure of American Graffiti. Like Lucas’ film, Hot Tub Time Machine also centers on four friends with mismatched personalities, moving back and forth between each of the characters’ individual plotlines. Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) offers an even more robust example of the way pop music nostalgia functions both as a marker of the film’s comic, yet bittersweet tone and as a source of ancillary revenue for the studio. Beginning in media res, Guardians of the Galaxy plunges us into the auditory perspective of young Peter Quill, who listens to 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love” as it plays on his Walkman. Peter is then brought to his mother’s bedside as she lay dying of cancer. She offers him a gift, but Peter is so distraught that he runs out of the hospital, only to get scooped up by Yondu’s spaceship. The dolorous mood created by Kevin Godley and Lol Crème’s complex vocal arrangements beautifully underscore the trauma of Peter’s emotional separation from his

478   Jeff Smith mother. Moreover, although it isn’t heard in the film, knowledgeable viewers might well recall one of the other track’s key features: a whispered female voice incanting, “Big boys don’t cry.” Were they to actually appear in the scene, the lyrics would seem too pointedly “on the nose.” However, both the ease of recall afforded by processing fluency and the recognition of the music’s dramatic salience furnish an additional frisson for the spectator. The opening of James Gunn’s film provides a perfect demonstration of popular music’s multi-functionality. The recording not only works as an important dangling cause in the story, introducing us to Peter’s “awesome mix” tape, but it also establishes the link between characterization and personal memory that fosters the viewer’s perceptual, epistemic, affective, and motivational identification with the hero.26 Yet Guardians of the Galaxy is hardly a tearjerker, even if it does contain several scenes that involve grief and loss. This is most clearly signaled in the credit sequence which shows Peter, now an adult, preparing to steal a mysterious orb on the planet Morag. As he approaches the orb’s laser defense system, he listens to Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love.” Peter dances and sings along with the tune, even grabbing an intergalactic rodent and holding it as if it were a microphone. Unlike the dour mood of the first scene, the tone here is light and humorous, with actor Chris Pratt appearing to do a riff on Andy Dwyer, the goofball character he played on the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation. The placement of the Redbone track neatly reflects the film’s tonal shift, establishing the mixture of comedy and pathos that characterizes the film as a whole. As with other cases of pop music nostalgia, though, “Come and Get Your Love” is a source of pleasure all on its own. Thanks to the effects of mirror neuron activity and efficient recall, many viewers will follow the song’s unfolding patterns of melody and harmony in their heads, mentally simulating Peter’s obvious enjoyment of the music.27 The remaining scenes of Guardians of the Galaxy exploit processing fluency and nostalgia in a similar fashion, whether it be the use of Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” for Peter and Gamora’s near kiss or the Runaways’ “Cherry Bomb” for the montage sequence of the Guardians preparing for battle. The use of music to reflect tonal shifts also continues right up to the film’s end. As the group prepares to leave Xandar in Peter’s Milano, Marvin Gaye, and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” underscores brief vignettes of familial unity (Yondu smiling at the troll doll concealed in the duplicate orb, Corpsman Dey returning home to his wife and child). The music is upbeat, but the tone remains bittersweet, colored by the grief Peter displayed after finally opening the gift his mother gave him in the prologue. Although our facility in following Gaye and Terrell’s duet is hedonically marked, the associative priming created by its narrative context adds a poignancy derived from the knowledge that, like Peter’s mother, the two singers both died much too young—Gaye at age 44, Terrell at 24. This example demonstrates how processing fluency, which operates at an unconscious level, complements the sorts of pleasures associated with intertextual and extratextual referentiality that have become commonplace in postmodernist culture. After “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” Guardians of the Galaxy swings its emotional pendulum back again in the film’s first post-credit teaser, which shows Baby Groot dancing to the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back.” Shot in a long take, the scene is structured

Pop Music, Processing Fluency, and Pleasure   479 as a series of small sight gags in which the sapling strives to hide its gyrations from Drax, intently sharpening his knife in the right near background plane. The combination of Baby Groot’s comical starts and stops, the song’s funky beats, and Michael Jackson’s soaring, youthful voice closes the film with a vivid image of unabashed joy. Dave Jordan’s careful curation of these seventies classics, their shrewd placement, and the “Awesome Mix” tape’s function as a metonym between Peter and his mother all contributed to the success of the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack in ancillary markets. The album topped Billboard’s Top 200 chart in 2014, and went on to become only the second soundtrack to sell more than a million digital downloads.28 The recording artists featured in the film also benefited directly from the sale of individual tracks as digital downloads. For example, Blue Swede’s “Hooked on a Feeling” was prominently featured in the film’s first trailer, which was viewed nearly 23 million times in the first 24 hours after it was posted online. The next day, sales of “Hooked on a Feeling” rose a whopping 700 percent.29 As the Blue Swede example indicates, processing fluency also proves a valuable tool for studio marketing departments. Classic pop music deployed in a trailer can sometimes establish a positive orientation to the film it advertises. For instance, the use of Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” in the trailer for School of Rock (2004) is not only appropriate to its elementary school setting, but also will evoke nostalgia among Gen-Xers who remember the song from their own childhoods. Similarly, the music of Paul Simon and the Ramones helps to both underline the period setting of The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and to confirm Wes Anderson’s status as an important pop music auteur.30 Not surprisingly, considering the importance of pop music nostalgia in the appeal of the original film, the marketing campaign for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) was developed around a couple of recordings featured in Peter’s “Awesome Mix” Vol. 2. The World Premiere trailer featured Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.” A follow-up threw a spotlight on the Sweet’s pop metal classic, “Fox on the Run.” Lastly, a “teaser” trailer posted online in October of 2016 rather boldly recycles “Hooked on a Feeling” from the first Guardians. In each case, the misattribution of pleasure derived from the song devolves to the movie’s benefit. As we’ve seen, the hedonic marking of the music is a consequence of the ease of recall rather than any objective feature of the music. The positive affect transfers to the song, which, in turn, gets transferred to the film. The good vibes elicited via pop music nostalgia occurs even in cases where the filmmakers engage in “bait and switch” tactics, placing a song in the trailer that doesn’t actually appear in the film. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 did just that when it featured David Bowie’s “Suffragette City” in a 30-second TV spot. The track was culled from Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, an album that spotlighted the artist’s “spaceman” persona, an association that undoubtedly resonates with Guardians’ sci-fi ethos. The fact that it doesn’t actually appear in the film proves insubstantial insofar as most fans are unlikely to remember its appearance in the trailer in the first place. That being said, the selection of music remains extremely important for “brand management” especially in an era when franchises remain the “bread and butter” of studios’ release schedules. Top-down resistance to processing fluency’s effects are evident in

480   Jeff Smith cases where an artist or piece of music runs counter to the ethos of an established film property. Some fans, for example, strongly objected to the use of the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” in a trailer for Star Trek: Beyond, taking it as a sign that director Justin Lin was moving the franchise in the direction of the Fast & Furious series.31 Processing fluency is potentially advantageous as a response elicited by popular music. But even it has its limits.

Memories are Made of This: The Soundtrack Album as Souvenir In their exploitation of pop music nostalgia, filmmakers bank on their intuitions about which recordings can be easily recalled. A song’s chart success, its inclusion in classic hits radio formats, and its popularity among streaming services are usually pretty good indicators. All of this assumes, of course, that a song’s popularity precedes its use in a film. But what about recordings that were popularized by movies rather than the other way around? Or songs that were once popular and then rediscovered after their appearance in a film? One can readily think of dozens of songs that were either written specifically for the screen, were relatively little known prior to being licensed for film, or experienced a resurgence of popularity after “landing a synch.” The Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” is a paradigmatic instance of the second category. Although the song first appeared in 1988 on the Scottish duo’s album, Sunshine on Leith, it did not reach Billboard’s charts until it was included in the 1993 Johnny Depp film, Benny and Joon. Featured in the film’s opening and closing credits, “I’m Gonna Be” was certified gold and reached #3 on Billboard’s “Hot 100” charts nearly five years after its initial release. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” is an exemplar of the last category. After being featured in Wayne’s World, the track rose to #2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 some sixteen years after its first chart appearance. In such cases, the placement of a song is absolutely key. One can hardly expect the audience to remember the music in a scene if the scene itself is not particularly memorable. Moreover, it will be hard for music to capture the attention of a viewer if it is mixed beneath other elements of a soundtrack, such as dialogue or effects. When music is well placed, however, the associational link established between music and visuals is so strong that you cannot think of one without the other. As Quentin Tarantino observes, effective placement enables the filmmaker to take ownership of the song.32 Tarantino himself has furnished several instances of this phenomenon. For example, many people who hear Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” or Dick Dale’s “Miserlou” will immediately associate them with Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994) respectively. In this way, soundtrack albums can function as mementos of the cinematic experience, engendering pleasure by eliciting the efficient recall and flood of detail about one’s past experience of a specific scene.

Pop Music, Processing Fluency, and Pleasure   481 Here again, soundtrack albums benefit from the mere exposure effect such that there is pleasure in rehearing a song or score cue after having seen its accompanying film in theatres. Up until now, I have focused on particularly salient examples of music eliciting memories of a film. But the exposure effect applies to all the music in a film insofar as such hedonic marking does not depend upon conscious awareness of the stimulus. I may not remember Kendrick Lamar and The Weeknd’s “Pray for Me” while seeing Black Panther. But I’ve been primed to like it more if I hear it on the radio while driving home from the movie theatre. Still, the function of soundtrack albums as souvenirs of the film experience are not entirely comparable to the kinds of pop music nostalgia and film discussed earlier. For one thing, a habituated response to a two-hour film is obviously much more difficult to achieve than it is for a four-minute pop song. The fact that most viewers only see a film once is an obvious difference from the multiple exposures garnered by even a middling chart success. Moviegoers also exercise a stronger degree of consumer choice than many music listeners. Although we consume some screen media playing on monitors in public spaces or if our television is on while doing other things, more often than not, film viewers consciously decide what to see in theatres, on Netflix, on VOD, or on cable television. This is not the case with many radio listeners or streaming service subscribers where at least some control over what they hear is ceded to station programmers or the interface’s algorithms. Netflix, of course, uses their own proprietary algorithms to predict what its subscribers will like based on what they’ve previously watched. But viewers still need to click on Netflix’s recommendations to complete the transaction, which still endows users with some measure of choice. By contrast, if radio listeners don’t like what they hear, their only options are to change the station or turn off the receiver. Third, whereas the experience of a film is relatively unique, the use of the same recording in different cinematic contexts can complicate the effects of processing fluency when it is heard anew elsewhere. If I hear the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” tomorrow, will I think of Boogie Nights (1997), Love Actually (2003), Love & Mercy (2014), or the HBO series, Big Love? When I hear the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” do I think of the Maysles brothers’ documentary of the same name? Or Martin Scorsese’s use of the song in both Goodfellas (1990) and The Departed (2006)? Lastly, because of its narrative complexity and its general lack of the kinds of nested repetition found in musical structures, our memories of specific details of a film tend to be much fuzzier than they are for a well-known piece of music. Because of this, my surmise is that even the best cinematic placements of songs work at the scenic level rather than prompting recall of an entire film. All of this means that the associational links established by the way films utilize music are much more unruly than they are for the kinds of pop music nostalgia discussed earlier. To overcome these challenges, soundtrack producers have developed a couple of techniques to make the relationship between films and music much more concrete. Soundtrack albums that feature cues from a film’s score often contain track listings that serve to remind listeners of the scenes they accompany. The success of the first Star Wars

482   Jeff Smith soundtrack is a case in point. There seems little doubt that at least some of its popularity derived from the fact that titles like “Imperial Attack,” “The Desert and the Robot Auction,” “Rescue of the Princess,” and “The Walls Converge” provide fairly precise hints as to where these cues appear in the film. This aspect of the soundtrack album’s packaging undeniably aids its function as a souvenir of the film experience insofar as the track titles provide a kind of roadmap for the story as a whole. As an aid to recall, these brief descriptors help listeners relive the movie through the direct experience of the music. Although less common, other soundtracks contain dialogue samples that in and of themselves prompt our recollection of specific scenes. We tend to associate this technique with films by current directors, such as Oliver Stone, Steven Soderbergh, and, of course, Tarantino. Yet, as Paul N. Reinsch observes, this type of soundtrack album has a long history, dating back at least to the mid-sixties.33 Examples include such widely divergent titles as Becket (1964), Bonnie and Clyde (1968), Patton (1970), Apocalypse Now (1979), and Strange Brew (1983). Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) spawned two soundtrack releases. The first was a conventional score album while the second was billed as having “actual dialogue, music, and sound effects.” The term “actual” here should be taken with a grain of salt. According to Daniel Cook Johnson, sound designer Ben Burtt later admitted that he recorded new sound effects for the album and recreated some dialogue scenes in the manner of an old radio show.34 Perhaps the limit case of film music as memento involves the use of “audio drop-in” techniques that add snatches of dialogue to a single song that’s been featured in a film. Although comparatively rare, the late nineties saw two notable instances of this type of remix with Bruce Springsteen’s “Secret Garden” and Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.” In 1997, the two-year old Springsteen track became an unlikely hit when KKRZ program director Ken Benson added dialogue snippets from Jerry Maguire to the instrumental sections of the recording.35 Although the song appeared only briefly in Cameron Crowe’s film, the combination proved irresistible, peaking at #12 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart several months after the film’s release. Benson’s enterprising remix also proved popular enough to generate its own parody. At the Minneapolis station, KSTP, the staff did their own mischievous remix of “Secret Garden,” this time adding dialogue excerpts from the Coen Brothers’ Fargo (1996).36 Does it work? You betcha! As KSTP morning host Rob Carson noted, “Frances McDormand is the most powerful character in the movie, and Springsteen is singing about a woman. If you listen to the words with the McDormand character (Marge), the two make sense together.”37 Although the associations suggested by Carson make “Fargo Garden” a textbook case of Michel Chion’s “forced marriage” experiments, the specific extracts used—Marge’s “Ya,” the reference to Brainerd as home of the Babe the Blue Ox, even the sound of the wood chipper—also prompt efficient recall of characters, imagery, or narrative situation in which the sound was first heard. The prototype of audio drop-in techniques might well be a remix of Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” that spliced in four separate dialogue extracts from Titanic. Unlike the

Pop Music, Processing Fluency, and Pleasure   483 “Secret Garden” example, this version of the recording was conceived as part of a larger strategy to promote the film’s theme song. This was one among several recordings of “My Heart Will Go On” distributed by Sony in support of the film, the others being an instrumental version by Kenny G and a dance mix by Déjà Vu.38 The dialogue remix also was featured on Back to Titanic, a companion volume that rounded up some score and source cues that did not make the cut in assembling the first soundtrack package. As Billboard noted, these sound bites encapsulated the entire dramatic arc of Jack and Rose’s relationship in the film. Among the scenes referenced in the track are Rose’s near suicide attempt, Rose posing nude for Jack’s sketch, and Jack urging Rose to get in a lifeboat. It thereby enabled listeners to relive the entire three-hour film in a tidy 4:42 music track. Our initial exposure to both the music and the dialogue enhances the effects of processing fluency when we hear them again as a track on Back to Titanic. And the dialogue remix, in turn, strengthens those effects every time we repeat the experience.

Conclusion Titanic proves to be a propitious example to end my paper in more ways than one. Coming at a moment that proved to be the acme of film and music cross-promotion, “My Heart Will Go On” furnishes an especially robust example of the way processing fluency abets a theme song’s function as both hype and memento. Yet it also highlights some of fluency’s limitations as an explanatory model for the pleasures afforded by popular music in film. Although the effects of processing fluency have been amply demonstrated in experimental research, one needs to be mindful about the weight we assign to it. For one thing, the effect is correlational rather than causal. Processing fluency will predispose us to like something when we encounter it again, but it does not trigger an automatic increase in hedonic value. For another, even though processing fluency is a factor in our enjoyment of both films and popular music, it is one among many. A viewer’s or listener’s tastes, preferences, and previous experiences also shape our aesthetic responses in ways that are perhaps more fundamental than fluency is. Lastly, because fluency is a bottom up process, its effects can be superseded by top-down management of that sense data. That is, if you hate Celine Dion as much as I do, then repeat exposures to “My Heart Will Go On,” even after many years’ time, will not make her music—or her enormous commercial success—any more palatable to you. Still, despite preaching the need for caution, I also believe the evidence showing the importance of fluency in aesthetic judgments is too strong to simply dismiss. By recognizing its power in priming our eventual response, processing fluency can be a useful guide toward both textual features and contextual factors when applied in individual cases of pop music’s placement in films. Up until now, film music analysts have focused their attention mostly on stimulus features, offering vague, impressionistic pronouncements of their effect on spectators. Yet, if my intuition about the importance of processing

484   Jeff Smith fluency is correct, our understanding of film music audition will likely need to take account of things like the exposure effect, habituation, memory, implicit learning, and unconscious listening. My focus throughout this essay has been on processing fluency as an aspect of film and music cross-promotion, a phenomenon that depends crucially on the interplay of exposure and long-term memory. But, as I mentioned in my introduction, processing fluency covers a number of different mental processes, including perceptual fluency. Because stimulus features can affect fluency, further research might specify the particular kinds of audiovisual coordination that facilitates the spectator’s efficient uptake of sensory information in bottom-up processing. For example, does the metric cutting found in the credit sequence of Reservoir Dogs enable more efficient storage of superimposed text in long-term memory and thus make for easier recall of the actors featured in the film’s cast? Does the coordination of music and figure movement that patterns the opening scenes of René Clair’s Le Million enhance perceptual fluency in a manner that translates to a more positive hedonic marking among viewers? Does Baby Driver’s systematic coordination of music and sound effects create a richer understanding of the narrative situations in which these elements of the soundtrack are heard? These kinds of questions are but a small part of the myriad implications of film music’s role as an element that might enhance perceptual fluency. Similar types of inquiry could be conducted about other axes of film music’s role in processing fluency, such as its effects on attentional synchrony or the part it plays in the kineaesthetic experience of embodied simulation. I have sketched out these avenues for further research to indicate the utility that processing fluency might have as a component of audiovisual analysis, particularly in understanding the ways in which the flow of perceptual information is structured. Charting the dynamic give and take of these elements will not only give scholars a better grasp of the aesthetic pleasures occasioned by film music, but may also yield a model of viewer engagement that is as rich and deep as the phenomena we study.

Notes 1. Joseph Nunes, Andrea Ordanini, and Francesca Valsesia, “The Power of Repetition— Repetitive Lyrics in a Song Increase Processing Fluency and Drives Market Success,” SSRN e-Library, March 25, 2017, 8 (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2938838.) 2. Rolf Reber, Norbert Schwartz, and Piotr Wienkelman, “Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver’s Processing Experience?” Personality and Social Psychology Review 8, no. 4 (2004): 364–82. 3. Ibid., 371. 4. Magnus Enquist, and Anthony Arak, “Symmetry, Beauty, and Evolution,” Nature 372 (1994): 169–72; Rufus A. Johnstone, “Female Preference for Symmetrical Males as a By-product of Selection for Mate Recognition,” Nature 372 (1994): 172–75. 5. Reber, Schwartz, and Wienkelman, “Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure,” 371; Rolf Reber, “Reasons for the Preference for Symmetry,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2002): 415–16.

Pop Music, Processing Fluency, and Pleasure   485 6. Robert Zajonc, “Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Monograph Supplement 9 (1968): 1–27. 7. Daniel E. Berlyne, “The New Experimental Aesthetics,” in Studies in the New Experimental Aesthetics: Steps Toward an Objective Psychology of Aesthetic Appreciation, ed. Daniel E. Berlyne (Washington: Hemisphere, 1974), 8–12. 8. Karl  K.  Szpunar, E.  Glenn Schellenberg, and Patricia Pliner, “Liking and Memory for Musical Stimuli as a Function of Exposure,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory, and Cognition 30, no. 4 (2004): 370–81. 9. “Sesame Street Breaks Iraqi POWs,” BBC News, May 20, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ middle_east/3042907.stm; Suzanne Cusick provides an overview of the US military’s use of music as a weapon or form of psychological torture in the post-Cold War era. Cusick focuses more on the debilitating effects of extreme volume and acoustic bombardment, suggesting that the use of music as torture has many vectors and does not depend solely on repetition. Ironically, Barney’s “I Love You” was used for this type of sonic assault, played loudly for Iraqi prisoners detained inside of shipping containers. See Suzanne Cusick, “Music as Torture/Music as Weapon,” Trans: Revista Transcultural de Música 10 (2006). https://www.sibetrans.com/trans/articulo/152/music-as-torture-music-as-weapon. 10. See Szpunar, Schellenberg, and Pliner, 374–6. 11. This line of argument was initially established in the pioneering work of Claudia Gorbman and Caryl Flinn. For more on the notion of unconscious listening, see Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987), and Flinn, Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Annabel J. Cohen offers an alternative model of unconscious listening in her Congruence-Association Model. See Cohen, “CongruenceAssociation Model of Music and Multimedia: Origin and Evolution,” in The Psychology of Music in Multimedia, ed. Siu-Lan Tan, Annabel  J.  Cohen, Scott  D.  Lipscomb, and Roger A. Kendall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 28–31. My own thinking on the matter has evolved and is now more in line with the model of film apprehension explicated by Cohen. See Jeff Smith, “Music,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (New York: Routledge, 2009), 190–94. 12. Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 96–97. 13. Todd Berliner, Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 26. 14. Berliner, Hollywood Aesthetic, 13. 15. David Huron, “A Psychological Approach to Musical Form: The Habituation–Fluency Theory of Repetition,” Current Musicology 96 (2013): 7–35. 16. Ibid., 9–10. 17. Percy Scholes, “Form,” in The Oxford Companion to Music, 10th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 289. 18. For more on Al Coury’s work on Saturday Night Fever, see Jeff Smith, The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 198–201; and R. Serge Denisoff and William Romanowski, Risky Business: Rock in Film (New York: Routledge, 2017), 229–33. 19. Of course, certain stimulus features play an important role in facilitating processing fluency that enhance the likelihood of successful chart performance. The Nunes, Ordanini,

486   Jeff Smith and Valesia study highlighted at the start of this chapter demonstrates the value of linguistic redundancy as an element that drives market success for popular songs. Their systematic study of Billboard’s Hot 100 charts 1958 and 2012 indicates that lexical repetition enhanced the probability of a song entering the charts in the top 40 and further that it decreased the amount of time for it to reach #1. Such repetition is unquestionably a feature of “Night Fever,” which uses the title phrase four times in each of the song’s choruses. The lexical repetition of titles was also a significant feature in the choruses of other chart hits from Saturday Night Fever, such as “Staying Alive,” “How Deep Is Your Love,” “More than a Woman,” and “If I Can’t Have You.” This empirical research validates David Huron’s notion that the nested internal repetitions in music enhance fluency and habituation. 20. For an account of the relationship between memory and hedonic peaks in the film viewing experience, see Jeff Smith, “Filmmakers as Folk Psychologists: How Filmmakers Exploit Cognitive Biases as an Aspect of Cinematic Narration, Characterization, and Spectatorship,” in The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 483–502. 21. Daniel Kahneman notes that the last thing one experiences of an event colors our later recall of the event as a whole. If a date ends badly, the negativity associated with that moment causes the whole evening to be cast in a bad light. One tends to forget the buzz of initial flirtatiousness and to focus instead on the awkward kiss shared just before saying good night. Kahneman’s research highlights these differences between the affective states of the experiencing self and those of the remembering self. See Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), 377–85. 22. Jason P. Leboe and Tamara L. Ansons, “On Misattributing Good Remembering to a Happy Past: An Investigation into the Cognitive Roots of Nostalgia,” Emotion 6, no. 4 (2006): 608. 23. See Jeff Smith, The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 173–74. 24. Michael Dwyer, Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film, and Popular Music of the Seventies and Eighties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 25. Dwyer, Back to the Fifties, 180–82. 26. For an account of this type of aspectual identification, see Berys Gaut, “Identification and Emotion in Narrative Film,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 200–16. 27. For more on the role of mirror neurons in the cinema spectatorship, see Vittorio Gallese and Michelle Guerra, “Embodying Movies: Embodied Simulation and Film Studies,” Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image 3 (2012): 183–210. The actual function of mirror neurons in aesthetic experience is a topic of considerable debate. In proposing a place for mirror neurons in film music audition, I am following the lead taken by Annabel Cohen in the most recent iteration of her Congruence-Association Model (CAM) as a framework for understanding the perception of music in films. In this fourth version of CAM, Cohen adds a kineaesthetic channel to the other five physical/sensory domains she previously had identified: text, speech, visuals, music, and sound effects. See Cohen, 37–40. 28. Keith Caulfield, “Billboard 200 Chart Moves: ‘Guardians of the Galaxy: Awesome Mix Vol. 1’ Becomes Only Second Soundtrack to Sell a Million Digital Albums,” Billboard, May 19, 2017. https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/7800968/billboard-200chart-moves-guardians-of-the-galaxy-awesome-mix. 29. Keith Caulfield, “ ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ Trailer Sends ‘Hooked on a Feeling’ Sales Through the Roof,” Billboard, February 20, 2014. https://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/ news/5915509/guardians-of-the-galaxy-trailer-sends-hooked-on-a-feeling-sales-through.

Pop Music, Processing Fluency, and Pleasure   487 30. For more on the master of twee, see Arved Ashby, “Wes Anderson, Ironist and Auteur,” in Popular Music and the New Auteur: Visionary Filmmakers after MTV, ed. Arved Ashby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 180–201. 31. See Tim Summers, “From ‘Sabotage’ to ‘Sledgehammer’: Trailers, Songs, and the Musical Marketing of Star Trek Beyond (2016),” Music and the Moving Image 11, no. 1 (2018): 40–65. 32. “Interviews,” Celluloid Jukebox: Popular Music and the Movies Since the 50s, ed. Jonathan Romney and Adrian Wootton (London: BFI Publishing, 1995), 131. 33. Paul  M.  Reinsch, “Theorizing the ‘Unified Soundtrack Album’,” Paper presented at the Music and Moving Image Conference, New York University, May 26, 2018. See also Chapter 24 in this Handbook. 34. See Daniel Cook Johnson, “10 Movie Soundtracks That Think Outside of the Box Office,” Film Babble Blog, September 1, 2009. http://filmbabble.blogspot.com/2009/09/10-moviesoundtracks-that-think-outside.html. 35. See David Hinckley, “Popularity of Boss ‘Garden’ Continues to Grow,” New York Daily News, April 26, 1997. http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/entertainment/popularityboss-garden-continues-grow-article-1.759025. 36. See Chuck Taylor, “Has KKRZ’s ‘Secret Garden’ Met Its Match in KSTP’s New Mix? Well, Ya!” Billboard, April 12, 1997, 74. Taylor notes that KSTP’s team relied on a special promotional disc Polygram sent to radio stations around the country to coincide with Fargo’s release on home video. The CD not only contained “cool scenes, lines, and audio” from the film, but also interviews with the Coens and various cast members. 37. Taylor, “Has KKRZ’s ‘Secret Garden’ Met Its Match in KSTP’s New Mix?” 38. See Jeff Smith, “Selling My Heart: Music and Cross-Promotion in Titanic,” in Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster, ed. Kevin Sandler and Gaylyn Studlar (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 50–55.

Select Bibliography Ashby, Arved, ed. Popular Music and the New Auteur: Visionary Filmmakers after MTV. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Berliner, Todd. Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Berlyne, Daniel E., ed. Studies in the New Experimental Aesthetics: Steps Toward an Objective Psychology of Aesthetic Appreciation. Washington: Hemisphere, 1974. Denisoff, R.  Serge, and William Romanowski. Risky Business: Rock in Film. New York: Routledge, 2017. Dwyer, Michael. Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film, and Popular Music of the Seventies and Eighties. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Hellmuth Margulis, Elizabeth. On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Huron, David. “A Psychological Approach to Musical Form: The Habituation–Fluency Theory of Repetition.” Current Musicology 96 (2013): 7–35. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011. Nunes, Joseph, Andrea Ordanini, and Francesca Valsesia. “The Power of Repetition— Repetitive Lyrics in a Song Increase Processing Fluency and Drives Market Success.” SSRN e-Library, March 25, 2017, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2938838.

488   Jeff Smith Plantinga, Carl, and Greg Smith. Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Reber, Rolf, Norbert Schwartz, and Piotr Wienkelman. “Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver’s Processing Experience?” Personality and Social Psychology Review 8, no. 4 (2004): 364–82. Romney, Jonathan, and Adrian Wootton, eds. Celluloid Jukebox: Popular Music and the Movies Since the 50s. London: British Film Institute, 1995. Smith, Jeff. The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Summers, Tim. “From ‘Sabotage’ to ‘Sledgehammer’: Trailers, Songs, and the Musical Marketing of Star Trek Beyond (2016).” Music and the Moving Image 11, no. 1 (2018): 40–65. Szpunar, Karl K., E. Glenn Schellenberg, and Patricia Pliner. “Liking and Memory for Musical Stimuli as a Function of Exposure.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory, and Cognition 30, no. 4 (2004): 370–81. Zajonc, Robert. “Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Monograph Supplement 9 (1968): 1–27. Zunshine, Lisa, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

chapter 24

A Mov ie for Spe a k ers Queen’s Flash Gordon and the Unified Soundtrack Album Paul N. Reinsch

In February 1981, once it was clear the film Flash Gordon (1980) was underperforming in the United States,1 Queen guitarist and songwriter Brian May told the Los Angeles Times, “When the film’s been long forgotten, you’ll still be able to put the album on and have a glass of wine and get the feeling of what the whole thing was about.”2 May mourns the film’s financial prospects, and likely expresses anxiety that the album’s sales would be negatively impacted. But his claims for Queen’s Flash Gordon are interesting beyond financial concerns. May’s comments appeared at the dawn of the home video era, when it was becoming clear that movies tied to major companies were in little danger of being completely forgotten. Yet owners of the Flash Gordon album may not need to rent or purchase the film. May argues the soundtrack album can not only outlive the film but provide the “feeling” of the film without accessing the film itself. By providing “the whole thing,” the album may function effectively as the film’s substitute. In his defense of Queen’s Flash Gordon, May raises important questions for the study of cinematic listening: What is the relationship between a soundtrack album and the film it, ostensibly, accompanies? And, even more generally, why do audiences purchase, or listen to, film soundtrack albums? The Queen album Flash Gordon provides a valuable case study of how soundtrack albums can extend cinematic listening beyond the cinema. The album is an example of what I call a “unified soundtrack album”—a text that offers audiences not just music, but also dialogue and/or sound effects associated with a film.3 As an audio adaptation, the album arranges and mixes the original audio material to provide a sonic version of the film. Furthermore, the album not only provides the full range of the film’s sounds, but—as a distinct cultural object—also has several advantages over the film: its tonal consistency, its brevity (a 111-minute film becomes a 35-minute album), its portability (particularly compared to how movies circulated at the time of the film’s release), and also, I suggest, its strikingly disembodied protagonist. This chapter argues that the Flash

490   Paul N. Reinsch Gordon album not only provides “the feeling of what the whole thing was about,” but also allows music, lyrics, dialogue, and sound effects to respond to one another in new ways.

Listening to Movies without a Screen: Soundtrack Albums More than forty years before May’s defense of the Flash Gordon album, Disney released what is commonly regarded as the first soundtrack album in the U.S.  market: three 78rpm discs of songs from Snow White and the Dwarfs (1937).4 That Disney spearheaded the market for soundtrack albums now seems overdetermined, after decades of the company’s innovative, highly profitable, and widely imitated synergistic practices. Today most mainstream releases for film, television, and streaming services (such as Netflix’s Bright (2017)) are accompanied, and typically heralded by, the release of albums and singles. Disney pioneered the productions of audio texts tied to a film with Snow White, and, as Jon Burlingame notes, their release of discs connected to Pinocchio (1940) was the first appearance of the claim “original sound track.” The album’s packaging promises that its audio material is identical to that featured within the film: “Recorded from the original sound track of the Walt Disney Production.”5 Burlingame’s own conservative definition of the form is “movie music drawn directly from the film’s soundtrack for a commercially released phonograph record.”6 Yet as he acknowledges, since the 1930s the industry has offered “soundtrack” albums featuring music similar to that featured in the film, or music admittedly only “inspired by” the film, and these variations are not always clearly signaled or explained by marketing or packaging materials. Soundtrack albums can and do feature new orchestral music, pre-existing (even famous) popular music, new popular music, pre-existing orchestral music, and all possible combinations of these forms. There are multiple releases across the spectrum of narrative cinema, including two albums tied to MGM’s high-brow 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), both of which offer performances and songs not included in the film,7 and two albums for AIP’s slightly less high-brow The Wild Angels (1966). To dismiss such work as not “true” soundtracks, or as mere cash-grabs, simply avoids reckoning with meaning-producing practices of soundtrack albums and the intertwined economics of cinema and music.8 The work of scholars such as Katherine Spring and Jeff Smith reveal the complex interactions and negotiations between mainstream film and music industries in the United States and usefully supplement and complicate historical work such as Burlingame’s. Spring’s Saying It with Songs explores the early sound era and the ways songs were associated with specific performers (stars), tied to films which featured their performance, and marketed via “sheet music, newspapers, phonograph records, radio broadcasts, music retail shops, music halls, department stores, and theater lobbies.”9

A Movie for Speakers   491 These materials explicitly linked the music (sheet music or recordings) to associated films, encouraging users, arguably, to “hear” films outside movie theatres. This “early” sound era established the push and pull between film and music industries that decisively shaped, and continues to shape, how mainstream films incorporate, or do not incorporate, musical performance. Smith’s The Sounds of Commerce addresses the second half of the twentieth century and the incursion of popular music into mainstream cinema. Many histories of the “New Hollywood” mention the use of popular music in The Graduate (1967) and Easy Rider (1969), but Smith’s history explores the rise of “compilation” and “pop” soundtracks more than a decade before and after these films. As he argues, such texts are even more likely to be actively neglected than orchestral music for 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.”10 Smith’s work reveals the importance of soundtrack albums in twentieth-century film culture, and his volume expertly fills in the temporal gap between the Classical era and the late-twentieth-century mediascape. Yet scholars typically use soundtrack albums as evidence in the study of other topics (business strategies, for example) rather than as media in their own right. Soundtrack albums remain adjunct texts to the real main attraction: the films. Even fan-studies scholarship on topics such “transmedia” and “paratexts” remains strangely silent on soundtrack albums.11 This work does provide examples of the need to analyze materials beyond albums’ musical contents such as marketing materials and packaging. The album sleeves for the aforementioned The Wild Angels albums advertise not just music but “the sounds of the roaring cycles of The Wild Angels!” The promise alone serves as a reminder that soundtrack albums are never neutral containers for music. Soundtrack albums regularly provide more than music.

More Than Music: The “Unified Soundtrack Album” In 1986, music critic Tom Popson offered possible answers to the question of why audiences buy soundtrack albums: “Having gone to a movie theater and seen a film you enjoyed, it is always a pleasure to later encounter a soundtrack album from the film.”12 He continues: “the record summons up once again the memorable scenes from the movie and sometimes even stirs the same emotions you felt in the theater.” Popson lauds the ability of a soundtrack album to accomplish the goals of a film without using a screen. His examples are the Rocky (1976) and Chariots of Fire (1981) albums—two of the most famous and instrumental film scores of the era, and whose dominant themes each made it to number one on the Billboard chart. Yet Queen’s Flash Gordon, as a unified soundtrack album, does not only offer its audience opportunities to re-experience scenes and emotions; Queen’s album provides the

492   Paul N. Reinsch film’s story, music, dialogue, and sound effects. It fulfills the promise of advertising ­slogans such as Polygram’s “Take the Movie Home with You” for soundtrack albums in 1983,13 and GraphicAudio’s “A Movie in Your Head” for audiobooks around thirty years later.14 In 1980 the album cost about one-tenth as much as a home video release of the film, while also providing the full range of cinematic sounds much like “filmic audiobooks” in the twenty-first century.15 Flash Gordon is perhaps something between a movie for the home and an intricately produced audiobook. Queen’s album, and other “unified” releases, foreground the need to bring the complete range of tools and discourses of audio culture to bear on soundtrack albums. The work exposes the always present connections between soundtrack albums and instrumental music, popular music, (original) cast albums, concept albums, “best of ” albums, and surveys of music genres and decades. But soundtrack albums can also share attributes with audio books and radio drama in working to provide story content. Dialogue allows a recall of film scenes, in Popson’s sense, but albums also sonically present these scenes in their own right. Queen’s Flash Gordon, as an adaptation, organizes their own compositions, music by Howard Blake, voice acting, and sound effects to create a unified soundtrack album that is not wholly reliant on the film. The phrase “unified soundtrack album” looks to recent work in media sound studies to account for texts that resist the separation of audio material, most commonly sound effects and music. K. J. Donnelly discusses unified soundtracks as partially arising from digital technologies and processes that do not ontologically distinguish between music and sound effects. As he writes, “film soundtracks can constitute an aesthetic unity, with music incorporating sound effects and the whole having something of a ‘musical’ sense to it.”16 His examples range between film, television and video games, and, while his focus is on recent media, Donnelly sees precedents in avant-garde music and television scoring as far back as the 1950s. He continues, “soundtracks are able, to a degree, to become autonomous without explicit moving images but through the implication of accompanying visuals.”17 “Unified soundtrack albums” is also a response to Michel Chion’s repeated provocation (first presented in Audio-Vision) that “there is no soundtrack”: “the sounds of a film, taken separately from the image, do not form an internally coherent entity on equal footing with the image track.”18 Chion argues that the film image is framed but film sounds are unfixed. In Film: A Sound Art, he writes: “The absence of an auditory frame is one of the many reasons why there is no soundtrack—that is, no place where sounds gather and make a unified front.”19 The term “unified soundtrack album” functions as a positive declaration of the work these audio texts undertake and the experiences they provide. And in The Voice in Cinema, Chion even provides an opening: “Just listening, without the images, ‘acousmatizes’ all the sounds, if they retain no trace of their initial relation to the image. (And in this case, the aggregate of sounds heard becomes a true ‘sound track,’ a whole).”20 Works such as Flash Gordon can be experienced after seeing/ hearing the film, but that is not required. The sounds of Queen’s Flash Gordon may never have an “initial relation to the images.” The unified soundtrack album presents an internally and sonically coherent entity. These sounds offer a unified front and are contained in a “place” (digital or analog).

A Movie for Speakers   493 Music, speech, sound effects, and silence unite in the absence of a screen. Many unified soundtrack albums provide listeners with the narrative and emotional experience of the film. Or perhaps a superior narrative or emotional experience. In a sense, the unified soundtrack album therefore gives the “soundtrack” an ontological status that it supposedly lacks within the context of the film. These soundtrack albums transform films into sonic form and also achieve the autonomy that Donnelly identifies as a potential, Chion provocatively denies, and May explicitly desires. Unified soundtrack albums underscore that soundtrack albums are not simply a music delivery system. Albums released decades prior to Flash Gordon include dialogue and/or sound effects. Unlike Flash Gordon, some advertise their status as unified albums, such as 1951’s awkwardly, yet accurately, titled Dramatic Highlights from the MGM Technicolor Picture Quo Vadis. This work includes significant dialogue from the film and music. Others offer a direct transfer of film sound—the entire film’s soundfield—without promoting this fact. This practice has the advantage of expediency, though some composers, including Italians in the 1960s, objected to this presentation of their work.21 Some releases, like the two-LP set of The Hobbit (1977), offer “The complete original soundtrack including dialogue, music, and songs.” This recording provides the full range of audio material from the animated adaptation of Tolkien’s novel and actively conflates the two primary uses of the term “soundtrack”: a film’s audio material, and a collection of the music from a film’s soundtrack. But Flash Gordon, and other unified soundtrack albums, are often closer aesthetically to the 7-inch vinyl (and cassette) release of The Hobbit that offers a selection of audio material from the film along with John Huston’s newly recorded instructions to turn pages in the provided book. This release and others like it, often from Disney, echo what is arguably the first unified soundtrack album: Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book in 1942. The three 78rpm discs contain Miklós Rózsa’s score as heard in the film (“the original soundtrack”) but also represent the first effort toward a unified soundtrack album by featuring Sabu speaking as Mowgli. Sabu’s newly recorded acting is more than just added value: his performance transforms the release from a container for music into a unified soundtrack album that integrates music and narration. The cover notes that the album is “narrated by Sabu” and tellingly adds “As Adapted by the Alexander Korda Production of ‘Kipling’s Jungle Book’.” These cover credits are not simply responses to legal matters: they signal directly that the unified soundtrack album, while often the work of a primary author, are always also multi-authored and combine the labor of multiple parties. Unified soundtrack albums offer newly recorded material, re-organized audio material, dialogue and/or sound effects alongside, and often integrated with, instrumental and/or popular music. These works cross decades and genres from The Jungle Book, Quo Vadis, Zorba the Greek (1964), Young Frankenstein (1974), On Golden Pond (1981), The Thin Blue Line (1989), Beverly Hills Ninja (1997), Jackass: The Movie (2002), The Muppets (2011), and A Star is Born (2018). That most unified soundtrack albums are not as ­conscientious as Flash Gordon in unifying this heterogeneous audio material—often cordoning dialogue off into separate album tracks or simply transferring the film’s ­presentation of dialogue/sound effects—is a testimony to Queen’s efforts. Yet Flash Gordon

494   Paul N. Reinsch is not alone, and we can productively consider albums that only attempt a sonic unity of expression as participating in this form. Incorporating even a line or two of dialogue, or a single sound effect, with music from or for a film challenges the integrity of the common definition, and supposed use, of the soundtrack album.

To Listen Is to Watch: Queen’s Authorship and Adaptation Speaking about their work, May provocatively argues, “We wanted the soundtrack album to make you feel like you’d watched the film.”22 Unfortunately, critics and scholars have not worked to reckon with the paradoxical goal of having an audience “watch” a film by listening to an album. Even those wishing to praise the album do not acknowledge its status as a unified soundtrack album. For example, Daniel Ross’s 2009 essay promises to analyze the album and he states, “The Flash OST is a bizarre and hypnotic work when considered in isolation, well worthy of stoner devotion reserved for the likes of Piper at the Gates of Dawn or the cool, modern appreciation of Morricone.” Yet two sentences later, he turns to discussing Queen’s music as accompanying film score: “married to the images that Mike Hodges provides, the work becomes an accomplished, slick and instinctive whole.”23 Ross even uses the film’s timecode to draw attention to particular unions of image and sound. But if Queen accomplished their goals, the album should be no more “married to the images” than Dale Arden is to Ming the Merciless. The album, as an album, can be experienced without the film. This is true even if it might never be heard in isolation from the film, given its title, track titles, album cover, and other overt ties to the film. The film and the album present the story of Flash Gordon, Dale Arden, and professor Zarkov leaving Earth to stop the attack of Ming the Merciless. Though Ming, and others, repeatedly attempt to kill Flash, he refuses to be defeated. Flash eventually convinces the Hawk Men and the Tree Men of Arboria to support his efforts to overthrow Ming. As Ming attempts to marry Dale to the sounds of Queen playing Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus,” Flash crashes war rocket Ajax into the palace. This action results in Ming’s (apparent) death and the film concludes with Prince Barin’s ascension to the throne and the promise of peace for “every breed of Mongol.” Queen’s album presents this same story with judicious use of dialogue. The dialogue offerings favor statements with character names which immediately identify the (next) speaker. The album also privileges exchanges of dialogue over single phrases or sentences. These exchanges allow the story to move forward as in any narrative film, but here their labor is especially evident. Dialogue is part of the album’s unified address and never stands apart as a separate album track. The album contains some of the film’s most memorable exchanges. For example, at the execution of Flash, Aura is surprised by Dale’s crying and says to Ming: “Look: water is leaking from her eyes.” Her father immediately explains, “It’s what they call ‘tears.’ It’s a sign of their

A Movie for Speakers   495 weakness” (lines that are as absurdly funny on the album as in the film). Additionally, song titles locate the audience in terms of the narrative (“Marriage of Dale and Ming”24), the film’s spaces (“In the Space Capsule”) and sometimes both (“Crash Dive on Mingo City”). It is not uncommon for track/cue titles to be named after characters and narrative events, but most soundtrack albums do not provide this level of detail. To label Queen’s album an adaptation of the film would not diminish its accomplishments if we see an adaptation as, in Linda Hutcheon’s words, “a derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second without begin secondary.”25 As May notes, the band had access to the film’s existing audio material, so their work is “second” temporally. But the goal of “watching” a film by listening to an album is certainly not “derivative.” The album effectively transforms the film’s sonic material into a particular form of audio drama: one where music has priority over speech, and sonically-created mood is more important than verbal drama. The Flash Gordon album has a great deal more music than the 1935 radio serial. If Queen makes Flash Gordon into something like home video or an audio book, we should acknowledge that the album also turns the film into something like a rock opera. Pauline Kael memorably wrote that the film is “like a fairy tale set in a discotheque in the clouds.”26 The Queen version is less fairy tale and more disco. Queen’s Flash Gordon operates for the most part as an audio abridgement of the film and respects the film’s chronological arrangement and content. But there are changes. The album was released by Elektra/Asylum in December of 1980 on LP, audio cassette, and 8-track. All three releases feature 18 tracks in the same order, but the LP and cassette split the album between tracks 8, “The Kiss” and 9, “Arboria,” and the 8-track splits “Arboria” between sides B and C. Queen’s album and the film each begin with “Flash’s Theme” and end with “The Hero.” Not coincidentally, these are the only tracks that feature full lyrics. Queen’s album does not simply transfer the film’s audio material: the material has been transformed. In some instances, the narrative is presented more economically. When Aura presents the resurrected Flash to Barin in track 9, “Arboria,” Barin scolds her, saying, “You are playing with fire Aura,” and after her response says, “Harboring a fugitive from Ming is treason.” This reverses the film’s order of Barin’s lines. The track then skips over a few minutes of the film’s contents, including an update on Zarkov and Dale, to get to Flash’s entreaty that they join forces: “Prince Barin, I’m not your enemy. Ming is.” The confrontation between duplicitous Aura and Barin, and Barin’s decision to “lower [Flash] into the swamp” after Aura’s departure is conveyed in the film and on album, but the latter does so more efficiently. For comparison, see and hear Audio 24.1 and Video 24.1. The album also uses a different line from, and voice for, the floating globe to prove Flash’s (apparent) victory. For this comparison, see and hear Audio 24.2 and Video 24.2.27 The film’s lines are lighter in tone but also signal that Flash’s work is not done: he has merely saved Earth. Before “The Hero,” both album and film have the sounds of Ming’s ring and the suggestion that evil has not been fully vanquished, but the film dialogue does more to promise a sequel.

Audio 24.1  Queen’s adaptation rearranges and condenses the film’s audio material.

496   Paul N. Reinsch

Video 24.1  The film reveals Aura’s machinations with less efficiency than the album.

Audio 24.2  On the album, the floating globe offers a “hail” to Gordon with an uncredited voice.

Video 24.2  The film’s floating globe is voiced by von Sydow and suggests that Flash needs a sequel.

Whose Flash? Queen’s Music for Album and Screen Queen’s album, and their music more generally, are also part of a larger array of products (most of which were not profitable). The film Flash Gordon was released alongside the Queen album, a single for “Flash,” and a music video for the song (that shows the band at a hilariously unconvincing film scoring session).28 There were also attempts at cross promotion such as a pinball machine from Bally that actively promoted the Queen album through a deal with Elektra/Asylum alongside contests to win film tickets, the album, and t-shirts.29 Yet the synergy was also delayed or incomplete in other areas. The home video game, for example, was not released until 1983. There are also a novelization and a (story)book, which, like the single for “Flash” and Queen’s album, offer a version of the film’s story. But neither of the books include any reference to Queen. Instead, the novelization reveals that in his youth Flash responds to the blues music in Alabama and as an adult he listens to outlaw country in a perfect example of failed synergy.30 The film’s financial and critical failure are often explained by the film’s inconsistent tone. The absurdity of a quarterback who saves the universe was not shared by all involved, with producer Dino De Laurentiis endeavoring to create a more serious action film for teens and others actively (if gently) mocking the space opera and hailing an older audience. According to director Mike Hodges, “The whole basis of the film was [creator Alex] Raymond’s strip . . . It trod exactly the same sexual tightrope as we adopted in the film.”31 In another interview Hodges states: “I hoped I’d be able to run two parallel films—one for children, the other for their parents.”32 The talented international cast (favoring English and Italian performers), production designer Danilo Donati, and screenwriter Lorenzo Simple, Jr. (best known for his work on the 1960s TV Batman) were also clearly in on the joke. Mark Blake argues that Queen are clearly on one side of this divide and were almost dismissed: “De Laurentiis’s doubts stemmed from his desire to make a heavyweight sci-fi epic and Hodges’ intention to create something more

A Movie for Speakers   497 kitsch. Queen’s demos were tailored with Mike Hodges’ vision in mind.”33 All four members of Queen contributed, but May and drummer Roger Taylor were purportedly fans of Flash Gordon and most directly involved. May says that the film had a “tonguein-cheek element” that the band “felt the music should reflect.”34 Taylor likewise, if more cynically, remarks: “I thought our music suited the film in all its camp awfulness.”35 Queen’s album lacks this clearly signaled dual-address, and is more tonally unified than the film. On the album there are no awkward line readings, stilted movement, or performers (almost) rolling their eyes at the work they are being asked to undertake. But the album and music do have several, potentially conflicting goals: to assist the film’s story, circulate as a Queen album, and operate as soundtrack album. Elsewhere Taylor argues that the work does not meet the second goal, stating that it “was merely a soundtrack album . . . It wasn’t really the next Queen studio album, it was the soundtrack album to Flash Gordon, which was very much a film of its time.”36 Here Taylor continues to express disdain for the film while also stating that album is more soundtrack album than Queen album. His “merely” also ignore the album’s work as a unified soundtrack album and downplays their efforts to support the work of Hodges and others. His comments leave no room to aknowledge the album as an intermedial adaptation. The band worked consciously to create music appropriate for cinema, including precisely differentiated themes for hero Flash, eventual sidekick Prince Vultan, villain Ming (which mercifully ignores the film’s visual orientalism37), and, like many films, for “love.” As J. Drew Stephen argues, “Queen’s awareness of cinematic conventions can be seen in their frequent use of leitmotifs to delineate character and establish setting as well as to convey concepts such as love, death and resurrection.”38 While noting Queen’s deviations from the norms of blockbuster fantasy scoring in Flash Gordon and Highlander (1986), he argues that their work also meets expectations: “The main titles convey heroic power, the end credits are exuberantly triumphant and the music in between conveys a sense of spectacle in the ways it evokes and supports depictions of strange places, extraordinary beings and epic battles.”39 In these terms, Queen provides film scoring that serves the film’s narrative and diegesis. And the film and music industries were in the late 70s and early 80s coming to see their shared goals. Queen’s embrace of film scoring practices productively blurs distinctions between heard and unheard melodies, and openly straddles the supposedly discrete categories of “score” and “pop” soundtrack album. Yet a rock band composing for film was not common in 1980, as Joe Smith, the chairman of the board for Elektra/Asylum notes: “Film companies have rarely exploited the obvious—the record company division of the company and its list of artists.” Smith’s comment appears in a trade press notice of a deal between his company and De Laurentiis to package artists with four films. In the same piece, he adds: “It’s a natural for contemporary artists to do film music. Very, very often, you are dealing with the same audience.”40 The union of film and music—and album— potentially generates revenue in two areas, and Smith notes that both areas target a youth audience. For his part, Taylor claims that the band recognized this as a unique opportunity: “We wanted to write the first rock ’n’ roll musical soundtrack. No one had

498   Paul N. Reinsch ever used rock music in a film unless it was something like The Girl Can’t Help It, where it was a movie about music.”41 While this claim demonstrates an inadequate grasp of the history of popular music scoring,42 Taylor, like Smith, is generally correct that popular musicians were not often commissioned to compose for feature films beyond songs in the opening or closing credits or films with musician protagonists. Without noting the business arrangement that made this particular union of band and film possible (or necessary), Hodges claims that Queen’s involvement was the suggestion of De Laurentiis and he “went along with it.”43 Members of Queen, on the other hand, have consistently credited Hodges with the invitation to score the film. In this account, when Hodges suggested the band to De Laurentiis, he purportedly responded, “But who are the queens?”44 He was seemingly unaware of their string of successful albums and songs, and their efforts to visualize their music such as “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Taylor’s concerns about the status of the Flash Gordon album are reasonable. The album favors dialogue and sound effects over Mercury (and Taylor and May) singing and stores likely filed the album both in sections for Queen and for the film. The album cover permits both choices, though the film’s logo is much more prominent (see Figure 24.1).

Figure 24.1  “FG Cover”: The Freddie Mercury-designed album cover gives Queen both too much and not enough credit for the album’s contents—it inaccurately credits the band for all of the album’s music and misleadingly suggests the album contains only music.

A Movie for Speakers   499

More than Queen: Howard Blake, Sound Effects, and Performers The album cover for Flash Gordon is not as descriptive as those for unified soundtrack albums such as The Jungle Book; Queen’s album cover is dominated by the “Flash Gordon” logo which branded all texts associated with the film, and near the bottom, in type less than one-fifth the size of the album title, is “Original Soundtrack Music by Queen.” This labels Queen the author of the album, and as the author specifically of the music, which gives them too much credit for the album’s contents. More specifically, the album does not adequately credit composer Howard Blake, the creators of sound effects, or the film’s performers who appear on the album. Even the “Wedding March” only credits May, as though Wagner was not involved.45 Later CD releases note in small print, “Additional orchestral arrangements by Howard Blake; conducted by Howard Blake,” but this credit does not appear on the albums’ initial releases, and it says nothing about the National Philharmonic Orchestra. English composer Blake was brought in very late in the process to contribute to the film’s score as a replacement for Paul Buckmaster, who was originally commissioned to convert Queen’s compositions to orchestral scoring.46 Blake arranged and conducted around 90 minutes of music in 10 days and was instructed “to include various guitar phrases and the song ‘Flash’ within [the] large-scale score for 80-piece orchestra.”47 He met these requests, despite the punishing schedule, and the film features around 25 minutes of his music.48 The Queen album includes less of his work, but its appearances are important. For example, “The Hero” summarizes the album’s forms: it offers Mercury’s voice (and May’s lyrics) creating a variation on “Battle Theme,” a May guitar solo variation on “Flash’s Theme,” and echoes of “Ming’s Theme.” And roughly 30 seconds of the 3 minutes and 35 second song are Blake’s work, likely material from his cue “Duel on the Sky Platform.” Additionally, strings from the “Firefight-Finale” cue appear in Queen’s “Crash Dive on Mingo City,” and his cue “Bell and Coffin” forms a significant portion of Queen’s “The Kiss.”49 The film’s and the album’s music is a mixture of Queen and Blake. May explains that in making the album they “shipped in all the dialogue and effects and wove it into a tapestry.”50 While nicely revealing the work involved in creating a unified soundtrack album, May perhaps purposefully does not mention Blake’s music. Queen’s album does not simply include Blake’s work, it integrates his work with their own.51 As Blake writes, “Dubbing sessions began and I later discovered that much of my score had been replaced with synthesized music, myself having demonstrated how to handle it. A disappointment.”52 Listening to the Queen album and film reveals that Blake’s music was not simply “replaced”; Blake’s music has been absorbed within Queen’s music. Gary Arnold’s negative review of the film states, “Even the music pulls in separate directions, with a strident rock theme by Queen competing for prominence with a fleeting orchestral score by Howard Blake.”53 This review, and others, sees a split purpose in the film’s fabric rather than productive tensions. Yet the film and album each benefit

500   Paul N. Reinsch from the joining of Queen and Blake’s work. To ignore Blake’s contributions to this “tapestry” is to fail to consider the full address of this unified soundtrack album, as well as to erase Blake as author. Unsurprisingly, Arnold’s review of the film is one of the very few to mention Blake, and Blake’s name is almost wholly absent from reviews of the album. Reviews also do not mention Theatre 3 Productions, and more importantly neither does the album, but their work is a significant part of the album’s address. The film credits acknowledge Theatre 3 Productions for “Electronic Sound Effects” and their work is featured prominently on Queen’s album. Queen’s music at times embraces the “Mickey Mousing” that structures many animated films. Cymbal crashes stand in for explosions and musical stingers represent sword thrusts. The band activates the ability of synthesizers54 (in this case an Oberheim OBX) to create sounds whose origins are slippery.55 In addition to music behaving like sound effects, the album includes explosions, the sound of Hawk Men’s wings, laser blasts, explosions, thunder, and a range of sound effects which the band had “shipped in.” Their presence on the album allows a greater appreciation of these sounds because they are not subject to synchresis and the pull of the film’s production design. Like Blake’s music, these sounds are woven by Queen into a sonic, and musical, fabric. But the album is not only music and sound effects. Arnold’s review of the film notes that, “The supporting cast is amply reinforced by adroit, rich-voiced actors.”56 Queen’s album wisely uses these voices to present the film’s plot but also to strike a balance between the lyrics of popular music and the typical absence of voices on soundtrack albums. One review of the album argues, “The majority of the music is instrumental, with dialogue from the movie in place of Freddie Mercury’s singing.”57 The LP release also includes a sheet listing the film’s major credits without explicitly noting that these actors—and more—appear sonically. Album listeners are informed that Max Von [sic] Sydow plays Ming the Merciless and Peter Wyngarde portrays Klytus, but are not told that these characters, and actors, open the album just as they begin the film. When Klytus expresses excitement at the prospect of destroying Earth, Ming responds: “Later. I like to play with things a while, before annihilation.” Then thunder and Ming’s menacing laughter dissolve into the thudding, near-disco start of “Flash’s Theme.”58 The film’s offscreen presentation of Ming is matched by the album’s sonic introduction of the villain’s attack on Earth. Ming (and Klytus) is an acousmêtre in the film’s opening, before we see his hands and ring (his final appearance in the film reverses this with his hand and ring first and finally his laugh). His audio-only presence, voiced by von Sydow, demonstrates his power and creates considerable suspense for his full onscreen appearance. Ming’s “later” creates the narrative space for Flash’s inevitable triumph, which is promised by Queen’s theme song.

The Voice(s) of Flash On Queen’s album, the delay in providing the voice of Flash creates suspense. The band’s singing and music also speak for him and suggests a uniquely sonic hero. “Flash’s Theme”

A Movie for Speakers   501 is structured around the famous proclamations of “Flash, ah-ah!” and the in­sist­ent beat. Freddie Mercury and May share vocal duties in revealing that Flash can, and will, “save everyone of us.” “Flash’s Theme” speaks about, and for, the titular hero. Elsewhere in the film, the “Flash” proclamation serves as a retort. For example, when Dale says “I’m lost, Aura. Nothing can save me now” as she is about to wed Ming, the film cuts to Flash and we hear “Flash!” In the film, Queen’s music directly rejects Dale’s despair, but it does so even more persuasively when this same exchange is only sonic. Given his titular presence, it is surprising that Flash does not speak for himself until near the end of track three, or more than 8 minutes into the 35-minute album. Listeners hear from Ming, Klytus, Dale, Zarkov, one of Ming’s minions, Ming’s floating servant globe (also voiced by von Sydow in the film), and Prince Thun of Ardential before getting to hear the titular hero speak. When Klytus disdainfully asks, “Who are you?” the all-American Flash guilelessly and anticlimactically replies: “Flash Gordon. Quarterback, New York Jets.” Gordon’s lack of sonic aggressiveness in this statement (and the banality of his self-professed identity) highlights and even potentially undermines how powerfully Queen introduced him earlier. But who speaks in this moment as Flash? His lips noticeably do not quite match the sound. Audio 24.3 and Video 24.3 allow a comparison of this statement.

Audio 24.3  Flash’s first statement on the album is free from imprecise lip sync, though lacks the authority of Queen’s earlier introduction.

Video 24.3  Flash, speaking most likely with a voice that is not Sam J. Jones’s, identifies himself to Ming.

Along with the music of Queen, the film’s most often discussed aspect is the fact that Sam J. Jones is not the film’s only voice for Flash. Jones fell out with De Laurentiis over a contract dispute, and as he explains: “I didn’t go back for looping and dubbing so they ended up using another actor to loop—I think about half the film was actually not my voice.”59 The dispute between actor and producer leaked to the press and was reported in November 1980 prior to the film’s release.60 One article mentions two other films with dubbing issues and begins: “Not since Marni Nixon provided the vocal backups for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady has Hollywood relied so heavily on behind-the-scenes voices to bolster on-screen performance.”61 Nixon is Hollywood’s most famous singing double, and her work for Hepburn was one of her more public performances.62 In this case the second actor is employed not to “bolster” the performance through enhancement, but instead to improve the existing vocal performance. And while Jones and Flash do not sing in the film, Flash speaks with two voices and Queen sings for the character. A recent public reading of the script is described as “the first time an audience heard him perform the role” which exaggerates the lack of Jones’s voice in the film.63 The film

502   Paul N. Reinsch does feature his voice, and the album probably does too. But the album also allows an audience to experience a Flash whose self is more stable than the film’s, a Flash whose voice matches, or creates, his unseen body. Jones was reportedly cast in the role because De Laurentiis’s mother-in-law saw him on Hollywood Squares.64 The contract dispute may harm the film yet benefit the album. Though the voice double remains unknown, he likely improved some line readings. Audio 24.4 and Video 24.4 allow a comparison of Flash’s final line. Most importantly, the album’s audio-only presentation of Flash is arguably more persuasive since the voices of Jones and the unnamed ADR actor create a hero free from imprecise lip sync and free from the joining of sound and image that film narration works so hard to render as “natural.”65

Audio 24.4  The album’s final moment where Flash speaks for himself is free from imprecise lip sync.

Video 24.4  Imprecise lip sync provides an appropriate send-off for the film’s Flash Gordon.

On the album Flash is pure sound: two voices speak for Flash, two voices sing about Flash, and the full arsenal of Queen’s music creates an audio hero who (repeatedly) refuses to die though (sonically) threatened by all manner of Ming’s evil. Queen proclaims “Flash” almost as many times on the album (14) as Flash has utterances (15), and this count includes short interjections such as “yeah” twice, a “right” and “Hut, hut!” For these reasons, Queen’s Flash Gordon is perhaps more cinematic than the character in the film. They laud Flash most obviously in “Flash’s Theme” and “The Hero,” and their music (and lyrics) present a character of such power that perhaps no actor, with or without Hollywood Squares experience, could sonically (or visually) measure up. This is a Flash made of playful and bombastic music, and a handful of utterances; a Flash more everyone/anyone than the Flash with the body of Sam J. Jones. The unified soundtrack album of Flash Gordon offers the only truly unified Flash.

Conclusion: Flash in Space(s) Queen’s Flash Gordon has, in many ways, outlived the film even if the film is not quite “long forgotten.” The music continues to circulate in popular culture outside the confines of the film and the band’s album. For example, the 1981 Vanguard space battle video game—in coin-operated and later home format for the Atari 2600 and 5200—uses an uncredited version of “Vultan’s Theme.” The Seth McFarlane films Ted (2012) and Ted 2 (2015) include Sam J. Jones as a comic version of himself wearing the Flash t-shirt66 and regular doses of Queen’s music. The soundtrack album for the first film includes a

A Movie for Speakers   503 v­ ersion of “Flash’s Theme.” The specter of Queen’s music is sometimes less direct. In Wreck-It Ralph (2012) a flashback reveals that on Calhoun’s wedding day a Cy-Bug crashed through the window just behind the ceremony and this looks very much like Flash’s disruption of Ming’s wedding with the similarly-shaped War Rocket Ajax. More importantly, Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus,” initially played on electric guitar, accompanies the scene. And the influence can exist most clearly as desire. Director Taika Waititi, while promoting Thor: Ragnarok (2017), a comic and visually baroque space adventure, remarked: “I’ve often said if Freddie Mercury were alive, I would have asked Queen to do the soundtrack. The movie just has that feel: It’s a cool, bold, colorful cosmic adventure.”67 Waititi has not indicated if the soundtrack album for his Queen-scored film would also be a unified offering. That Queen’s music “for” Flash Gordon has been, and continues to be, heard is indisputable. The album suggests that rather than closing down potential meanings when associated (officially or not) with a film, music of both instrumental and lyricbased varieties may have its potential meanings and associations expand exponentially. Since the first presentations of recorded film sound, the cinema has not required a screen for audiences to listen. Soundtrack albums train audiences to listen again, to listen cinematically, and to (re)experience movies through speakers. Queen’s Flash Gordon, and other unified soundtrack albums, adapt movies into audio texts, and unite “film” sounds (and even new sounds) into a cohesive whole. In this sense, unified soundtrack albums are sonically heterogeneous, but only compared to  soundtrack albums that exclusively feature music. These albums highlight the ­complexities of the sonic address of audiovisual media and contrast openly with the more straightforward address of most (music-only) soundtrack albums. Within unified soundtrack albums, a range of sounds collaborate to create a story, a world, and a series of moods, while also adaptating a film text that is both ever-present and always somewhere else.

Notes 1. Thanks to Karl W. Reinsch, Christopher Speck, and John Vernon Jones for access to texts and ideas that were essential to this study. And thanks to Laurel Westrup and Carlo Cenciarelli for editorial input that clearly improved this chapter. 2. For May’s quote, see Paul Grein, “Queen Goes to the Movies,” Los Angeles Times, February 15, 1981. 3. For more on this subgenre of soundtrack album, see Paul N. Reinsch, “A Brief Hearing for the Unified Soundtrack Album,” in The Soundtrack Album: Listening to Media, ed. Paul N. Reinsch and Laurel Westrup (New York: Routledge, 2020), 229–47. 4. Music for Things to Come (1936) was issued on three separate releases that year in the U.K., and is perhaps the first set of texts which should be called soundtrack albums. 5. Jon Burlingame, Sound and Vision: 60 Years of Motion Picture Soundtracks (New York: Billboard, 2000), 3. 6. Burlingame, Sound and Vision, 2. 7. Ibid., 11.

504   Paul N. Reinsch 8. For more on the challenges of defining the soundtrack album, see Paul N. Reinsch, “What is a Soundtrack Album? or, Spot the Soundtrack Album,” Flow, June 2018, https://www. flowjournal.org/2018/03/what-is-soundtrack-album/. 9. Katherine Spring, Saying It With Songs: Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 80. 10. Jeff Smith, The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) 3. 11. See Paul  N.  Reinsch, “Soundtrack Album Fandom and Unofficial Releases,” Flow, May 2018, https://www.flowjournal.org/2018/05/unofficial-soundtrack-albums/, and Laurel Westrup, “Merchandising Gen X: The Singles Soundtrack Album (1992/2017),” Film Criticism 42 no. 2 (2018), http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/fc.13761232.0042.204. 12. Tom Popson, “At Last, A Soundtrack Album for People Who Enjoy Bad Movies,” Chicago Tribune, January 10, 1986. 13. Smith, Sounds of Commerce, 202. 14. Matthew Rubery, The Untold Story of the Talking Book (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016), 267. 15. Justin St. Clair, “Soundtracking the Novel: Willy Vlautin’s Northline as Filmic Audiobook,” in Audiobooks, Literature and Sound Studies, ed. Matthew Rubery (New York: Routledge, 2011), 92–106. 16. K.  J.  Donnelly, “Extending Film Aesthetics: Audio Beyond Visuals,” in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman and Carol Vernallis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 357–71: 358. 17. Donnelly, “Extending Film Aesthetics,” 358. 18. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 39. 19. Michael Chion, Film, A Sound Art, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 227. 20. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 19. 21. Smith, Sounds of Commerce, 134. 22. Mark Blake, Is This the Real Life?: The Untold Story of Queen (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo, 2020), 247. 23. Daniel Ross, “Flash Gordon, Queen and the Art of the Rock OST,” The Quietus, April 27, 2009, http://thequietus.com/articles/01561-flash-gordon-queen-and-the-art-of-the-rock-ost. 24. Queen Official, Marriage of Dale and Ming (And Flash Approaching) (Official Montage Video), YouTube video, 2:23, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsXdgDmmbuY, accessed June 22, 2018. 25. Linda Hutcheon with Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 9. 26. Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), 250. 27. The novelization has the globe proclaiming “Hail, Flash Gordon, conqueror of Mongo!” Arthur Byron Cover, Flash Gordon: A Novel (New York: Jove 1980), 218. 28. Queen Official, Flash (Official Video), YouTube video, 2:52, 2008, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=LfmrHTdXgK4, accessed June 24, 2018. There is also a “lyric” variation: Queen Official, Flash (Official Lyric Video), YouTube video, 2:42, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=jXZDJwoYloI, accessed June 24, 2018. 29. “Bally Pinball Units Push ‘Gordon’,” Billboard, December 20, 1980.

A Movie for Speakers   505 30. Cover, Flash Gordon, 16, 27. 31. Bould, “Soufflés and Sexual Tightropes,” 27. Drawings from Raymond’s comic strip appear throughout the opening credits. 32. Greg Jameson, “Mike Hodges interview,” Entertainment Focus, August 19, 2010. https:// www.entertainment-focus.com/film-section/film-interviews/mike-hodges-interview/. 33. Blake, Is This the Real Life?, 247. 34. Mark Blake, “Born Again,” Mojo 179 (October 2008), 90. 35. Blake, Is This the Real Life?, 248. 36. Mike Ragogna, “Neil Young’s Bridge School Exclusive : Dave Matthews’ ‘Too Much,’ Plus Chatting With Johnny Winter, Queen’s Roger Taylor and Yes’ Steve Howe,” Huffington Post, October 5, 2011, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-ragogna/emneil-youngsbridge-scho_b_995372.html. 37. See Brian Locke, Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen from World War II to the Present (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 75–9. 38. J. Drew Stephen, “Who Wants to Live Forever: Glam Rock, Queen and Fantasy Film,” in The Music of Fantasy Cinema, ed. Janet Halfyard (Bristol: Equinox, 2012), 64. 39. Stephen, “Who Wants to Live Forever,” 76. 40. Ruth Robinson, “Queen leads E/A to victory, with 18 more on charts,” Hollywood Reporter, October 20, 1980, 1 and 13. 41. Blake, Is This the Real Life?, 246. 42. See Smith and especially K.  J.  Donnelly, Magical Musical Tour: Rock and Pop in Film Soundtracks (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). 43. Mark Bould, “Soufflés and Sexual Tightropes: An Interview with Mike Hodges,” Film International 5, no. 2 (2007): 27–9: 28. 44. Mark Blake, Is This the Real Life?, 246. 45. The “official montage video” does, finally, admit that Wagner has something to do with the song. Queen Official, The Wedding March (Official Montage Video), YouTube video, 1:15, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbGo8TxsrQw, accessed June 24, 2018. 46. Gergely Hubai, Torn Music: Rejected Film Scores: A Selected History (Los Angeles: SilmanJames, 2012), 156–7. 47. Blake’s personal webpage recounts his experiences working on the film. http://www.howardblake.com/music/Film-TV-Scores/524/FLASH-GORDON.htm. 48. Blake’s orchestral music (there are no guitars) can be heard on Howard Blake, Flash Gordon/Amityville 3D (2001). 49. The Wikipedia page for the album, as of this writing, credits Blake as co-writer for both “The Kiss” and “The Hero.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Gordon_(soundtrack). 50. Blake, Is This the Real Life?, 247. 51. Yet Blake describes conducting the orchestra “around” a May guitar solo, suggesting his music was never meant to be wholly separate from Queen’s. http://www.howardblake.com/ music/Verse-Prose/662/WALKING-IN-THE-AIR-CAN-BE-DANGEROUS.htm#bio_40. 52. http://www.howardblake.com/music/Film-TV-Scores/524/FLASH-GORDON.htm. 53. Gary Arnold, “The slapdash ‘Flash’; De Laurentiis’ Space Shot Misses,” Washington Post, December 5, 1980, F1. 54. Prior to 1980’s The Game, Queen boasted in album liner notes that their music was created without using synthesizers. 55. See Katherine Spring, “From Analogue to Digital: Synthesizers and Discourses of Film Sound in the 1980s,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen

506   Paul N. Reinsch Media: Integrated Soundtracks, ed. Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (London: Palgrave, 2016), 273–88. 56. Arnold, “The slapdash ‘Flash’,” F1. 57. Greg Prato, Review of Flash Gordon, AllMusic, https://www.allmusic.com/album/flashgordon-original-motion-picture-soundtrack-mw0000650661, accessed June 24, 2018. 58. The single version of the “Theme” acts as a trailer, with the last vocal material being Dale’s “Flash, I love you, but we only have fourteen hours to save the Earth!” Those more familiar with the film may be surprised that the album does not include Vultan’s wonderfully incredulous “Gordon’s alive?!,” that Brian Blessed is reportedly always asked by fans to perform. This version of the theme includes it, and even adds an extra echo on “alive.” 59. Nick Leftley, “Flash Gordon Speaks!,” Maxim, December 11, 2012, https://www.maxim. com/entertainment/flash-gordon-speaks. 60. Yet Timothy Dalton, at a 2007 screening of the film hosted by Edgar Wright at the New Beverly theatre, said he only learned of the dispute that evening. 61. “Box Office: Whose Voice is it Anyway?”, L. A. Herald-Examiner, November 10, 1980. 62. Tim J. Anderson, Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 51–6. 63. Clark Collis, “Watch an exclusive clip from Flash Gordon script reading with star Sam Jones,” April 11, 2018, https://ew.com/movies/2018/04/11/flash-gordon-script-reading-sam-jones/. 64. Adam Smith, “Gordon’s Alive! The Untold Story of Flash Gordon,” Empire, December 27, 2015, https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/gordon-alive-untold-story-flashgordon/. 65. The back cover features an extreme wide-angle shot of Flash’s triumphant leap at the ­climax of the film. This slyly mimics the shape of both LP (and CD). This Flash is seen, but his lips are still. 66. Annie Zaleski, “The story of Freddie Mercury getting a piggyback ride from Darth Vader,” AV Club.com, May 9, 2015, https://music.avclub.com/the-story-of-freddie-mercurygetting-a-piggyback-ride-f-1,798,284,060. 67. Tim Stack, “Thor: Ragnarok Director  Wishes Freddie Mercury Could Have Scored the Film,” Entertainment Weekly, August 14, 2017, http://ew.com/movies/2017/08/14/thorragnarok-taika-waititi-freddie-mercury-score/. The film is scored by Mark Mothersbaugh who began his career making music and films as a member of the art-pop group Devo.

Select Bibliography Blake, Mark. Is This the Real Life?: The Untold Story of Queen. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo, 2010. Bould, Mark. “Oh My God, This Film’s Really Turning Me On!: Adapting Flash Gordon,” Film International 5, no. 2 (2007): 18–26. Burlingame, Jon. Sound and Vision: 60 Years of Motion Picture Soundtracks. New York: Billboard, 2000. Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Chion, Michel Film, A Sound Art, trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

A Movie for Speakers   507 Donnelly, K. J. “Extending Film Aesthetics: Audio Beyond Visuals.” In The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis, 357–71. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Smith, Jeff. The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Spring, Katherine. Saying It With Songs: Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Stephen, J. Drew. “Who Wants to Live Forever: Glam Rock, Queen and Fantasy Film.” In The Music of Fantasy Cinema, ed. Janet Halfyard, 58–78. Bristol: Equinox, 2012.

chapter 25

“ If You K now A r a bic, I n di a n Songs A r e Easy for You ” Hindi Film Songs in Tamale, Northern Ghana Katie Young

In Tamale, northern Ghana, cinema halls arrived with Independence in 1957. Ghana’s cinema halls were built by Lebanese and Sindhi businessmen, who imported and distributed Hollywood and India’s latest films to a diverse, multi-religious, and multi-lingual population. Within the cinema hall, audiences of varying socioeconomic and religious backgrounds patronized different kinds of films. Ghana’s southern Christian communities gravitated towards so-called “Christian” English language films, while Hindi films remained a popular choice among Ghana’s majority Muslim northerners. In this chapter, I explore how modes of listening developed in mission and Islamic schools shaped audience engagement in the cinema hall. In mission schools, English literacy was a tool through which students learned to read biblical text and Christian literature. Reading centered around one’s ability to understand the meaning of text, and to glean the overarching moral of a story. In contrast, Ghana’s Islamic schools taught Qur’anic recitation through aural and oral transmission. Students did not learn the Arabic language, but rather learned to recite the Qur’an by listening to and mirroring the melodic contour and vocal quality of their teacher’s voice.1 As Ola Stockfelt suggests, a listener’s experience of sound depends on the “mode of listening” they use. Listeners may possess a variety of listening modes that they can employ in either existing or new sonic situations.2 While the act of listening may feel part of one’s bodily, instinctual knowledge, Deborah Kapchan notes that listening is often a learned practice that is both culturally informed and socially enacted.3 This chapter focuses on the ways in which new modes of listening were taught to students of mission and Islamic schools. I argue that the modes of listening taught in these very different pedagogical environments fed into Ghanaian youth’s experiences at the cinema

Hindi Film Songs in Tamale, Northern Ghana   509 hall, where listening was a crucial component in the experience of postcolonial West African cinema. In Ghana, students of mission and Islamic schools developed different modes of listening that they took with them into the cinema halls. There, English language films gelled with mission students’ prior English education, while Hindi films, with highly ornamented and melismatic melodies in a foreign language, mirrored the pedagogical experiences of Islamic school students in Ghana. I explore the synergies of religious and cinematic listening at three crucial moments in the lives of Muslim and Christian youth. First, I focus on different sonic experiences of Christian and Muslim pedagogies in mission and Islamic schools, drawing on a variety of archival evidence found in various Ghanaian newspapers at the British Library as well as late colonial archival documents housed at Ghana’s national and regional archives in Accra and Tamale. In the second section, I detail the movement of these respective sonic pedagogies into the cinema halls, and tease out the ways in which contrasting Christian and Muslim views on learning, literacy, and sound correlated to Hollywood and Hindi films on screen. Finally, based on ethnographic research in Tamale during 2016 and 2017, I trace the movement of Hindi film songs from the cinema hall back to Islamic schools, where Hindi film song melodies were introduced and integrated into the mawlid, an annual celebration of the Prophet’s birth. There, Hindi film melodies were set to Arabic text, helping Muslim youth to learn foreign Arabic poetry and praise for Allah and the Prophet.

Learning to Listen in Ghana’s Christian Missions and Islamic Schools Pedagogical methods for learning the Bible and the Qur’an in late colonial and early postcolonial Ghana differed greatly: Christian missions, such as the Basel, Presbyterian, Wesleyan, Bremen, and Catholic missions pursued the development of English literacy in the Gold Coast.4 As Stephanie Newell suggests, missions believed that reading the Bible was the most effective way to ensure “communion between God and the soul.”5 For mission teachers, reading was not merely running one’s finger across the page, but rather about critical, contextual engagement. Students were instructed to seek, find, and relay key moral lessons from the Bible and circulating Christian literature to their teachers. As Newell puts it, students learned “a set of Christian literary expectations and Christian interpretative conventions, adapted by their African and European teachers to suit local classrooms.”6 To teach youth the meanings of English words and phrases, school teachers relied on visual cues to relate text to concept. Take, for example, the colonial film reel I Will Speak English (1954)—a film related to a broader mass education campaign focusing on English literacy in the Gold Coast. In the film, schoolteachers are instructed by a British voiceover to teach new English words and phrases to students by drawing

510   Katie Young illustrations of English words on the blackboard, while also making referential gestures towards related objects in the classroom.7 Such pedagogical methods are heavily centered on the visual, but also around relaying the semantic meaning of text on the page. In contrast to mission schools, Islamic schools in northern Ghana championed recitation and audition of the Qur’an as the foundation of Islamic learning. The main task was to learn to recite the Qur’an and the hadith (a history of the Prophet Muhammad) in their entirety through aural/oral transmission and recitation. Youth who attended Islamic schools in colonial Ghana moved away from their family home to board in Islamic schools for the entirety of the learning process. One of my interviewees who attended Islamic school in the 1930s recalled living in a home with his religious scholar for years, phonetically learning the Qur’an verse by verse. There, a religious leader would first recite verses from either the Qur’an or the hadith on a pupil’s slate. Students would then listen to the religious leader’s recitation of this script. Those who could recite their given verse successfully would be entitled to wash their slates and have new verses. Youth only returned home once they could recite the entire Qur’an.8 Rather than learning the semantic meaning of Arabic text, youth learned to associate sound patterns with Arabic script on the blackboard. This practice continues in present day Tamale, where Muslim youth learn to recite verses from the Qur’an and the hadith through oral transmission, associating Arabic text in books or on the board with corresponding sounds.9 As an interviewee who attended Islamic school in Tamale during the 1980s put it: “when you are a kid, you don’t understand the meaning of Arabic words or phrases, so you sing the melody the way the mallam (religious scholar) does—you learn the style but not the meaning.”10 While in regions where Arabic is a known language the meaning of the Qur’an is central to the practice of Islam, the aesthetics of the sounded Qur’an are incredibly important for non-Arabic speaking societies.11 For example, in his anthropological research in Mayotte, East Africa, Michael Lambek notes how children move away from home for basic Qur’anic education in larger centers of learning, where the significance of the recitation is indexical, as they learn to recite texts by “sound[ing] them out and repeat[ing] them.”12 Rachel Harris similarly finds that for non-Arabic speaking Uyghur village women in China, it is the “experience of the sound of the recited Qur’an” that takes precedence over semantic meaning.13 Anne Rasmussen observes that in Indonesia, the “musical aspects of recitation,” such as vocal techniques and timbres, are significant tools for Qur’anic learning, as new students learn through aural and oral means during their daily practice.14 In his study of nineteenth-century encounters between Europeans and Muslims in the Middle East, Charles Hirschkind famously writes of European anxieties over Islamic pedagogy with concern to the privileging of aesthetic qualities of the voice.15 He notes how European travelers valued written text over the spoken word. Written text allowed continual re-reading for analysis, in search of an argument’s logical organization, validity, and coherence. Europeans viewed practices of recitation, audition, and memorization as mechanical, shallow, surface level, and irrational. Similar sentiments are littered in writing on British colonial encounters with Qur’anic schools in Africa. For example, in his exploration of Islamic education in colonial Zanzibar, Roman Loimeier notes how

Hindi Film Songs in Tamale, Northern Ghana   511 British colonial administration referred to Qur’anic school learning as “parrot talk,” highlighting the students’ lack of understanding of Arabic text.16 In Zanzibar, one colonial administrator wrote how “every. . . village has its mosque . . . [where] every child attends, to learn and become efficient in the parrot-like repetition of the Koran in a foreign tongue, which even the teacher does not understand.”17 In colonial Ghana, colonial officials’ reports reveal their anxieties over the ineffectiveness of Qur’anic schools in educating colonial citizens. While evaluating an Islamic school in Accra in 1937, one administrator described the school as: inefficient [and] gravely defective. The equipment, for example, was very inadequate, and in general, unsuitable. The walls were bare except for a picture of a dark-coloured car . . . none of the infant classes had any individual boards. Moreover, no syllabuses or notes of lessons existed, with the result that the teachers relied only on their memory with regard to what they should teach during each lesson.18

As the main goal of Islamic schools was to prepare youth for participation in Islamic life in Ghana, Islamic school teachers did not require lesson notes or visual aids to teach Arabic text. Rather, teachers focused on one’s indexical experience of the sounded and resounded voice during recitation. Just as mission schools leveraged English literacy as a tool for propagating the Christian faith, British colonial officers drew links between English literacy and the growth of the colonial economy through business and trade.19 For example, in the official speech for the opening of Tamale town in 1908, the district administrator proclaimed that: “When European traders come here they will want men who can talk English and Dagomba, English and Mamprussi, English and Wala, English and Gonja and those youngmen [sic] who can do this will get work and get good wages at once.”20 In late colonial Ghana, English literacy was regarded as “a vehicle of modernity, progress . . . and intellectual enlightenment” among aspiring urban youth.21 For many students, English literacy was thought to improve chances of employment in a growing colonial economy, as it was a prerequisite for modern, salaried jobs in the civil service, such as clerks or schoolteacher positions.22 Despite its promise of English literacy, many Muslim parents were wary of sending their children to English language schools, because of the heavily Christian nature of colonial schooling. In her historical study of Cape Coast (a small southwestern town in Ghana), Emily Williamson reveals how as early as the eighteenth century, Muslim parents (who lived in majority Muslim migrant neighborhoods known as “Zongos”) refused to send their children to schools steeped in “Missionary Zeal” for fear they would convert to Christianity.23 While some Muslim parents refused to send their children to mission schools, others saw the economic benefits of English literacy as outweighing the benefits of their faith. In one Ghanaian schoolteacher’s memoir, he recalls growing up in Bogoso (a mining town in central Ghana) with his father, an “illiterate Islamic follower.” His father forced him to go to a Roman Catholic school, and though he pleaded with his father to attend the local Islamic school, preferring to be with other

512   Katie Young Muslim youth who “chant[ed] their passages” in front of the teacher, his father insisted he attend Catholic school.24 Eventually converting to Christianity and gaining a salaried position as a schoolteacher, this man reflected on “the wisdom of [his] father” in encouraging his English literacy. For him, English was the “lingua franca of Ghana for government and official business,” that opened doors to the civil service and his subsequent economic viability.25 By Independence, Christian education was synonymous with “modern” education, and attendance in English language school prepared youth for gainful employment in the formal sector. At the same time, literacy in Arabic was difficult to access, especially as the postcolonial government rejected offers from the Egyptian government to support, build, and assist with Arabic language schools in Ghana.26 In an increasingly English-centered postcolonial educational system, Muslim parents faced stark decisions in terms of educating their children, as faith, education, and employment intertwined. As Emily Williamson’s informant succinctly summarized, many Muslims had to “live in poverty because of religion.”27

Listening Patterns among Ghana’s Christian and Muslim Cinema Audiences By the mid-1950s, Tamale was home to two cinema halls, the Victory cinema and the Rivoli cinema, both owned by Lebanese families in the area. Following Independence, Ghana’s first president rushed through the building of the Rivoli cinema in Tamale, for cinemas were thought to “modernize” underdeveloped areas. By 1962, UNESCO wrote of media access as a human right, encouraging every country to have “two cinema seats per one hundred people.”28 In a letter from October 1956, engineer consultants in Ghana relayed to the Captan cinema business how Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah was “anxious that a first-rate cinema be established in Tamale before [Independence].”29 The Rivoli cinema hall was built soon after, a weather proof hall with mezzanine seating. Tamale’s Victory cinema was built around the same time by the Ghanem family, a Lebanese business who built an open-air cinema hall (exposed to the elements), that accommodated up to fifteen hundred guests at a time.30 The cinemas were on opposite sides of Tamale’s main market. (See Figures 25.1 and 25.2). Because of the relatively small size of Tamale, films screened at the Rivoli and Victory cinemas rotated between Hollywood and Indian films based on the varied schedules of audiences. According to the Rivoli cinema’s former manager, the newest Hindi films were screened on Fridays, after Friday prayer (jummah), the day of rest for Muslim communities, as well as on Sunday afternoons, when the majority of cinema lovers were free from work and school. The Victory cinema also played new Hindi films on market days, which occurred every five days and drew hundreds of traders from the surrounding

Hindi Film Songs in Tamale, Northern Ghana   513

Figure 25.1  Map of Tamale in 1982. Note the Victory cinema on the bottom left-hand corner, and the Rivoli cinema on the top right, both circled by the author for reference. Map reproduced by kind permission of the Town and Country Planning Department, Northern Region, Ghana.

areas into Tamale’s central market. The cinema was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, when both Christian and Muslim communities would be at work and school. Though the rates for attendance are unclear for Tamale’s cinema halls, based on Accra and Kumasi cinemas during the same period, a cinema show cost on average six pence to a shilling, with varying rates depending on the quality of seats. Reports of cinema attendees in Accra during the late colonial period range from migrant laborers attending “at least once a week” to civil servants who recall going nearly every day.31 Like most cinema businesses in Ghana, Tamale’s cinema halls closed to the public in the early

514   Katie Young

Figure 25.2  Rivoli and Victory cinemas in Tamale: (a) Image of Rivoli cinema in Tamale, reproduced by kind permission of Mr Robert Quarshie; (b)A view from inside Tamale’s Victory open-air cinema (facing the screen) in 2015. Photograph by author.

Hindi Film Songs in Tamale, Northern Ghana   515 1990s, following the late-night curfews during J. J. Rawling’s coup that crippled the cinema business, as well as the rise of television technologies and video centers in the city. In Ghana’s southern, larger urban centers, cinema owners curated cinema listings to meet the needs of specific neighborhood demographics. Unlike the majority Muslim city of Tamale, which had a relatively small number of southern Christian civil servants stationed in the city, Ghana’s larger urban centers featured neighborhoods more clearly segmented along class and religious lines. One former cinema owner explained to me how he curated cinema listings at Kumasi’s Rivoli and Royal cinemas: At that time, we had cinemas in Kumasi. The Rivoli cinema was for the elite, and we played films like The 10 Commandments, Moses, and Samson and Delilah. The Royal was nearer Muslims in the Zongo, that’s where we played more Indian films.32

Through my analysis of cinema listings advertised in Kumasi’s Ashanti Pioneer newspaper between 1956 and 1961, one gets a sense of the frequency that Hindi films were screened at the “elite” Rivoli cinema, and the Zongo Royal cinema (Table 25.1): Kumasi’s “elite” Rivoli cinema, which showed more Hollywood and English language films, was located in North Suntreso, a neighborhood built in the late 1940s to house communities of business owners and civil servants working for the colonial government.33 To the east of town, the Royal cinema was located in the Aboabo market Zongo, a majority Muslim African migrant community. These cinema listings reveal a pattern of viewership, in which majority Muslim communities attended more Hindi films, while so-called “Christian” English language films were screened in the “elite” neighborhoods where civil servants lived. Archival newspapers and notes illuminate the ways in which Christian and Muslim viewers read Hollywood and Hindi films in a religious light. Though early Hollywood films in Ghana’s cinemas told stories of Cowboys and gamblers, these films were soon replaced with “Christian films” following protests from alarmed viewers. A 1971 newspaper letter to the editor reveals concerns from Ghana’s Christian cinemagoers:

Table 25.1  Number of Hindi films screened at Rivoli and Royal Cinemas, Kumasi, 1956–1961

1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961

Rivoli

Royal

– – 27 27 15 38

41 106 105 93 63 97

516   Katie Young I developed an interest in films in the early forties. In those days the popular films were “Black Coin” (1936) . . . [and films featuring] Buster Crabb, and Old Fuzzy. These films had one thing in common: Violence. There was killing in cold blood, raping of women, burglary and arson. Suddenly in the fifties I realised it was wrong to spend money watching such unchristian films that only serve to corrupt us. I have since been pondering over why up to date Ghana still allows such films into the country. In the pre-independence era none dared to raise his voice against the government. So none could speak against these films. But what is the justification for these films coming into the country now? Are our national rulers not aware of the demoralising effect of the bad films on our society—especially on our young generation?34 

By the late 1960s, cinema owners had swapped “unchristian” films for biblical epics. In nearby Ouagadougou, an audience member reported in 1962 how “Christian films” like Ten Commandments (1956) and Golgotha (1935) became a religious experience among Christian communities, where it was “almost as if after seeing Moses, they come back from the cinema as ecstatic as if they had actually witnessed that miracle!”35 Hindi films were popular among Muslim communities in Ghana partly for their Islamicate iconography, or what Mashall Hodgson calls the “social and cultural complex historically associated with Islam and the Muslims, both among Muslims themselves and even when found among non-Muslims.”36 While North African Arabic language films like Lastu Malakan (1947), Yasmine (1950), and Ismail Yasin Fe Al Fueish (1955) were screened in early 1950s Ghana, colonial censorship of Arabic language films in French West Africa resulted in a void of North African films in the region.37 In their place, Hindi films passed censorship board reviews while also reflecting the lives of Muslim viewers.38 These films featured Arabic loan words throughout, Muslim characters with Muslim names, and Islamicate iconography, such as mosques and modest dress. As well as imagery, the content of Hindi films resonated with Muslim viewers. Most Hindi films circulating in Ghana were “socials,” like Albela (1951) and Mother India (1957), that featured diegetic songs and melodramatic themes, typically championing community over individualism, justice within a defined moral universe of good and evil, and the sanctity of the family unit explored through tensions between rural and urban life. Such stories appealed to northern Ghanaians, who lived in the poorest region of Ghana, and experienced the adversity of urban life in the postcolonial north. As discussed earlier in this chapter, students trained in mission and Islamic schools had very different pedagogical experiences of learning a foreign language. With the arrival of English language films from Hollywood, and Hindi language films from India, Ghana’s cinemagoers brought modes of listening developed through language learning in mission and Islamic schools to the cinema halls. Various ethnographic anecdotes reveal the connection between one’s religion, education, class, and behavior inside the cinema hall. One former Swiss banker who worked in Sekondi (a smaller coastal Ghanaian town) in the 1960s recalled that more Hollywood films played in the Venice weatherproof cinema in town center, while the Gyandu cinema on the outskirts of town played more Indian films. As is clear from the 1931 map pictured in Figure 25.3, the

Hindi Film Songs in Tamale, Northern Ghana   517

Figure 25.3  Map of Sekondi, 1931; the Gyandu cinema is located on the upper left hand corner of this map, while the Venice cinema is situated on the bottom right hand corner, both circled by  the author for reference. Map retrieved from the British Library Maps Reading Room, shelfmark Y.592.

open-air Gyandu cinema was situated in the majority Muslim diasporic neighborhood (known throughout Ghana as “Zongos”) near the swamp and rubbish dumps on the outskirts of town (circled on the left), while the weather proof Venice cinema was nearer Christian communities living in the center of town, nearer the Catholic and Wesleyan Churches (circled in middle of the map). Interestingly, the Swiss banker notes how “African” communities (referring to African migrant communities who commonly resided in Ghana’s Zongo neighborhoods) adored undubbed Hindi films, making clear that they engaged in Hindi films despite not understanding the meanings of song lyrics within the film: The Venice Cinema in Sekondi was Syrian owned and as well as being inside a hall and therefore weatherproof, showed fewer Indian films, more Hollywood productions and doubled as a dance hall when required . . . The Venice was slightly up-market compared to the Gyandu Palace. For a start, it was weatherproof, [with] fewer smells than at the Indian Owned Gyandu Palace which emanated from the nearby dark, viscous and often seething Sekondi Lagoon . . . The African audiences adored Indian films, often un-dubbed or untitled into any local language—but lavish with color, music, and dancing.39

The same banker further explores the sonic experience of Indian films in Ghana’s ­cinema halls in Tamale: while attending “some immensely popular Indian film” at

518   Katie Young Tamale’s Rivoli cinema, he recalls how two British men arrived with a large brass hand bell and wooden rattle, shaking both the bell and rattle during the film as a practical joke to disturb and disrupt the audience. The audience instead took “not one blind bit of notice,” continuing to sing along to the songs on screen.40 As most cinemagoers in Tamale attended the same Hindi film many times, audiences gradually memorized and sang along to Hindi film songs in the Rivoli and Victory cinemas for weeks on end, a practice that again parallels experiences of recitation and audition in Tamale’s Islamic schools. Unlike the experience of English language films, where outside noise disrupted the filmgoer’s attention to the English text and thus the meaning of the story, this failed practical joke reveals how Hindi film viewers engaged with an altogether different mode of listening, one centered around continual phonetic memorization and audition. In contrast, noise disruption in the cinema hall was of utmost concern to patrons of Hollywood films, who made public complaints in Ghana’s major newspapers beginning in the early 1960s. For example, in June 1962, after several complaint letters to the Ashanti Pioneer, Kwasi Attah from Kumasi writes: After a month of careful watch, I feel very proud to report that the rowdy mess into which Odeon Cinema Palace was about to plunge itself has been checked timely. No more do we hear the rouges intruding talk and the shrill whistling of untutored admirers. Everything goes very well and makes Odeon again the most gentle of the Cinema Houses.41

Attah draws parallels between noise and education, where those who verbally interact with others as well as with characters on screen, or who sing or whistle along to the sounds of the film, are “untutored.” Similarly, in a letter to the Ashanti Pioneer from January 1962, Sylvester Tamakloe of Kumasi writes with his concern for singing, whistling, and talking in his local cinema hall. He threatens to appeal to the Social Welfare Department to check “this contagious disease,” echoing colonial discourses of hygiene, once used to police boundaries of “civilized” and “uncivilized.”42 Just as Ghana’s mission school readers teased out moral lessons and imperatives from literary texts, English ­language films in the cinemas were texts to be read and analyzed silently.

Hindi Film Song Melodies as Educational Tools in Tamale’s Islamic Schools During November 2016, and November and December 2017, I attended classes in Tamale’s Tijaniyya (Sufi) Islamic schools, where youth learned praises and the life history of the Prophet for the mawlid, an annual event that celebrates the Prophet’s birth. Starting in the third month of the Islamic calendar, Islamic school teachers compose

Hindi Film Songs in Tamale, Northern Ghana   519 and rehearse praise songs for the Prophet Muhammad. In each class, youth engage in a call-and-response process of learning religious praises between the scholar and students, with many of these praises set to older Hindi film song melodies. Without aids of blackboards or written text, youth learned to recite Arabic texts set to popular film tunes, listening closely to the melody as well as the phonetic sounds of the words. In Tamale, most Islamic school teachers base their lyrical texts from books that circulate in the region called littafin (the word for “book” in Hausa, a northern Nigerian language commonly used by Muslims in Ghana).43 These are religious books, written in Arabic, that include a variety of nasheed (Islamic chants or acapella vocal music). For example, some scholars use text from Tala’ al Badru ‘Alayna for their mawlid praise, an Islamic poem that residents of Madina sang for Muhammad upon his arrival after the Battle of Tabuk. Others draw on books written by Sheikh Ibrahim Niasse, a popular Senegalese religious leader who wrote books about the birth and life history of the Prophet. At practices in Islamic schools, children aged three up to sixteen gather in empty classrooms for two hours, learning these praises set to Hindi film melodies and accompanied by choreography. At the end of the month, they perform in front of their community in an all-night affair. Both the practices and performance form part of Tijani youth’s religious education, as they learn to sing praises and to recite the hadith. During my time in Tamale’s Islamic schools, I became curious as to why Hindi film song melodies were used in the mawlid. What made Hindi film songs—but not other secular, popular music—suitable for Islamic school practice and study? Other scholars have explored Hindi film songs in West African musical contexts, such as their use in film music and Hausa bandiri music in northern Nigeria.44 However, scholarship to date has not critically engaged with the ways in which Muslim West African filmgoers listened to Hindi films. What sonic resonances were there between Hindi film songs and the sounds of Tamale’s Islamic schools? When Hindi film songs arrived in northern Ghana, they were the first example of a widely accessible non-African musical style that originated from somewhere outside of the Western world. Although Islam has had a long-standing presence in West Africa, mediated music from the Arab world did not reach many towns and cities in northern Ghana until the latter half of the twentieth century, and were not widely accessible until very recently, with the advent of high speed internet.45 The first available songs from Egypt, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia arrived in Tamale in the 1960s and 1970s, with Muslim teachers who had studied abroad in these countries. Upon return home, they brought with them cassettes from their travels, and melodies from these cassettes were directly integrated into Islamic praises taught in schools. In one conversation with the leader of an Islamic school in Tamale, he detailed the use of foreign cassettes in the mawlid: katie:  What other songs or melodies would you incorporate in the mawlid? afa:  There were Hindi songs, but also songs from Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Some people travelled abroad during this time to study in these areas, and when they came back they brought cassettes with them. When they came to the mawlid, they would offer up songs to go with the mawlid.46

520   Katie Young By setting Islamic praises to melodies from Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, teachers brought their Islamic schools into close dialogue with the broader Islamic world. Hindi films performed a similar sonic labor: the melismatic, ornamented, and nasal vocal qualities of early Hindi film song melodies sounded similar to the recitation style taught in Tamale’s Islamic schools, especially when compared to other foreign circulating musics, such as Christian gospel hymns or American jazz records. Many of Tamale’s former cinemagoers relate the sounds of Hindi films in the cinema hall to the nasality and quality of the voice used to recite the Qur’an: in both instances, Hindi film singers and Muslim scholars “twist,” “bend,” and “shake” the voice. For example, in a conversation with one former Islamic student, he explained how the “Indian sound” was similar to “reading the Holy Qur’an,” as both require the performer to place his or her tongue to the roof of the mouth in order to “shake your voice.”47 In his recent work on music and imagination in Africa, Kofi Agawu notes that singing styles influenced or modelled upon Arabic styles in Africa focus on nasalized sounds and the strategic constriction of the vocal chords.48  Likewise, Rachel Harris writes that bahha (hoarseness) and ghunna (nasality) indicate emotion within the sphere of Arab classical song, and this carries over Qur’anic recitation as well, where the use of nasality is prescribed by the rules of tajwid.49 Ghanaian Muslim listeners heard similar vocal qualities in early Hindi film songs, that have been described by Alison Arnold as “loud, openthroated, sometimes coarse vocal [style] sometimes typical of the traditional mahfil gathering or of the devotional Hindu kirtan or Muslim qawwālī.”50 As one of Tamale’s Islamic school leaders explained: “We find Indian songs very easy as we learn Arabic. If you know Arabic, to get Indian songs is very easy for you, to get them into your ears.”51 In this context, knowing Arabic is not about the semantic understanding of the language, but rather one’s ability to aurally and orally recite the Qur’an, by listening to the melodic contour and melismatic quality of the recited line. This teacher highlights sonic resonances between Hindi film songs and Qur’anic recitation in his school, where knowledge of recitation makes it easy to quickly learn Hindi film song melodies, too. Along with the quality of the voice, Islamic scholars discussed Hindi film songs in terms of their highly melismatic melodies, where one word or syllable is extended across complex melodic lines. As one religious scholar explained to me: “when Indians sing, they make sounds which just look the same as when we do call for prayers . . . we take a syllable and put it on different notes. Indian songs, they do the same thing.”52 Elsewhere on the continent, melismatic and gliding melodies are significant in Islamic performance traditions. As Janet Topp Fargion notes of Zanzibari maulidi, performance traditions “include long vocal melismas performed by the Sheikh.”53 Muslim bandiri music of northern Nigeria also features “musical phrasing not dissimilar to some of the glides of Indian songs.”54 What kinds of songs were Islamic school teachers using in their mawlid in the early postcolonial period? While visiting an older friend in her home one evening in Tamale, she discussed her time studying at the Islamic school in the early 1960s. While singing some of songs she used to sing in the mawlid at that time, I heard a familiar Hindi film song melody: “Raat Suhani,” from the 1957 film Rani Rupmati. This Hindi film was played often in Ghana’s major cinema halls of the early 1960s, appearing

Hindi Film Songs in Tamale, Northern Ghana   521 frequently in the 1960 and 1961 cinema listings for Kumasi’s Ashanti Pioneer newspaper.55 The vocal qualities heard in “Raat Suhani” align with the recitation styles taught in Tamale’s Islamic schools: the film song voice is constricted, and the vocal quality f­ eatures a nasal timbre throughout.56 As well as vocal quality, “Raat Suhani” has a highly melismatic melody.57 Beginning in the 1960s, religious scholars attended Hindi films in the cinema in search of melodies for the mawlid.58 As one man recalled, his Islamic school teachers would “go to the cinema, take songs and make mawlid songs out of them to teach us students.”59 Others found inspiration from songs they heard around town: When you heard a person in the neighborhood listening to an Indian film song on cassette, you could borrow the cassette to listen, in order to make the song a mawlid song, or, you could hear a Hindi film song on the radio that you could use in your composition.60

Another man, now in his late twenties, recalled how his Islamic school teachers would “teach us a lot of Indian songs,” by playing VHS tapes of Hindi films on a small television in the school room. He further detailed how when a mawlid was coming, they learned to “sing Indian film songs in Arabic” by continually listening to film songs on the school’s cassette player and television. Around town, Sufi teachers listened out for new Hindi melodies they could use in their mawlid. Though songs from Egypt and Saudi Arabia were out of reach, Hindi film songs were readily available. In the 1970s and 1980s, Hindi films songs were heard nearly everywhere in Tamale, in the cinema halls, on streets via radio, and in homes via gramophones and later cassette players. In this sense, we could say that Hindi film songs in postcolonial Tamale were part of one’s “ubiquitous mode of listening,” a term introduced by Anahid Kassabian to denote listening that takes place alongside or simultaneously with other activities in one’s daily life.61 Regardless of the song’s context within the film, religious leaders usually choose Hindi film song melodies based on their sonic qualities. As such, the original film song context can be entirely inappropriate for the religious nature of the Islamic school praise song. For example, “Prem Ka Rog Bada Bura” (The Disease of Love is Bad) from the 1976 film Dus Numbri is commonly used in mawlid songs in Tamale, despite the film song being performed by a bar maid, who provocatively sings about the dangers of love to a bar full of men (compare Audio 25.1 and Audio 25.2). In the Islamic school rendition, the melody remains unchanged, while lyrics are drastically altered to reflect one’s love for God (see Table 25.2):

Audio 25.1  “Prem Ka Rog Bada Bura” (The Disease of Love Is Bad) from the 1976 film Dus Numbri. Notice the introductory “yo yo” melody and the main chorus (beginning with “Prem Ka Rog Bada Bura”), which are then borrowed by Tamale’s Islamic school teachers for use in their mawlid. Compare melodies and nasal quality with the mawlid example in Audio 25.2.

522   Katie Young

Audio 25.2  Excerpt from mawlid evening practice inside of an Islamic school in Tamale using the Hindi film song “Prem Ka Rog Bada Bura” (compare with Audio 25.1). Students were learning this song for the first time. Recorded by the author.

Table 25.2  Transliterated lyrics for part of the original 1976 Hindi film song “Prem Ka Rog Bada Bura,” with English translation, followed by transliterated text of the Arabic language mawlid praise based on the same film melody, also with English translation. Hindi film song lyrics

English translation of Hindi film song

Transliterated Arabic Praise, Tamale, Ghana

English Translation of Tamale version

Prem kaa rog bada bura Makanaka, aga bai makanaka yo yo yo yo yo yo yo yo yo yo

Love’s disease is bad I don’t want it, hey! I don’t want it yo yo yo yo yo yo yo yo yo yo

Yaa Rabbanaa Igfir Lanaa Zunu Banaa Anta Mawlaanaa Allaah Allaah Yaa Rabbi Yaa Allaah

Oh my Lord Forgive us Our sins You are our Sustainer Allah, Allah Oh my Lord, Allah

While some Hindi film songs used in the mawlid are less savory, others have roots in the Islamic faith. Take, for example, the song “Qurbani” from the homonymous 1980 Hindi film. During my time spent at one Islamic school in Tamale, “Qurbani” was performed to praise God during mawlid celebrations and at wedding ceremonies. “Qurbani” is an example of a Hindi film qawwālī, recognizable for its group singing, hand clapping, and Hindi-Urdu lyrics written by Urdu poet and film lyricist Faruk Kaiser. Traditional qawwālī is a sacred genre of Sufi music best classified as North Indian light classical song, and its main purpose is to “guide the Sufi toward mystical knowledge and to arouse mystical emotion to the state of spiritual ecstasy.”62 Though originally a sacred genre, qawwālī developed its secular identity and entertainment function when it was recorded as a popular song genre on gramophone records, beginning in the 1930s.63 During these years, popular qawwālī songs broadened in subject matter to include devotionals relevant to non-Sufi Muslim communities as well as secular subject matter. Hindi film directors used popular qawwālī songs during scenes with Muslim subjects and characters, to invoke an Islamicate atmosphere.64 The film scene for the song “Qurbani” centers around the practice of qurbani, an Arabic term meaning sacrifice. In the scene, a group of male characters engage in a choreographed dance with swords, and some characters mime pulling a knife against their throat, referencing the sacrifice that takes place during the Islamic celebration of Eid alAdha (Festival of Sacrifice) when an animal is sacrificed to commemorate Moses’ sacrifice of his son before God. The film song scene parallels the overarching plot of the film, in which the lead character sacrifices himself to the villain in order to save his best friend’s life. (See Audio 25.3). In the film song, key Urdu and Persian words such as Allah,

Hindi Film Songs in Tamale, Northern Ghana   523

Audio 25.3  The film song “Qurbani” (Sacrifice) from the 1980 film “Qurbani” is another example of a Hindi film qawwālī that has been taken for use in Tamale’s mawlid school performances. Listen for nasal timbre and melismatic melodies that are borrowed by Tamale’s Islamic school teachers in the mawlid example in Audio 25.4.

Table 25.3  Transliterated lyrics for part of the original 1980 Hindi film song “Qurbani”, with English translation. Transliterated Hindi lyrics for “Qurbani”

English Translation 

O wai wai tujh pe qurban meri jaan Mera dil mera imaan Tujhpe qurban meri jaan Mera dil mera imaan Yaari meri kehti hai Yaar pe karde sab qurban Qurbani, Qurbani, Qurbani Allah ko pyari hai qurbani Qurbani, Qurbani, Qurbani Allah ko pyari hai qurbani

I’ll give my life for you My heart and my faith I’ll give my life for you My heart and my faith My friendship says that Sacrifice is everything for your friend Sacrifice, Sacrifice, Sacrifice God loves sacrifice Sacrifice, Sacrifice, Sacrifice God loves sacrifice

qurbani (sacrifice), and imaan (faith) feature throughout, and like other Hindi film qawwālī songs, “Qurbani” features hand clapping as part of the choreography. The key Urdu and Persian words are familiar to Tamale’s Islamic school teachers, who hear in the lyrics a sonic relationship between Hindi film songs and the Arab world (Table 25.3): When used as a mawlid song, the lyrics shift from a song about sacrifice for God to a song of love and devotion for God. Regardless of the religious nature and borrowed Arabic text embedded in the original Hindi film song lyrics, Tamale’s Islamic teachers rewrite Hindi film lyrics to their own Arabic praises, underlining the value of the way the Hindi film song melody sounds over and above the text in the original film song (Table 25.4). In the mawlid, this song is performed as an entrance song, when dancers come out in a line of pairs, extending one leg out at a time in alternation to the beat, while the song is sung in a call and response format between the religious leader and the lead dancer (see Audio 25.4). In Tamale, Hindi film songs have been integrated into the mawlid for decades, brought by Islamic teachers who continually listen out for suitable songs in the cinema hall, on cassettes, and on the radio. These songs reference a broader Islamic soundscape for Muslim schoolteachers, who easily memorized Hindi film songs in the cinema halls through methods of learning Arabic taught in Islamic schools. Hindi film song melodies featured vocal qualities and melismatic lines that suited the Islamic soundscape of the schools in the area, and, as such, the modes of listening learned in Islamic schools and employed in the cinema halls came full circle, as Hindi film songs first gleaned from the cinema halls are now used within Islamic schools to teach Islamic praise.

524   Katie Young Table 25.4  Transliterated Arabic text for a mawlid praise based on the 1980 “Qurbani” film song melody, with English translation. Transliterated Arabic text for a mawlid praise based on “Qurbani” melody

English Translation

Verse: Solluu Alaa habiibinaa huwa khairul mukhtari Solluu Alaa nabiyi naa huwa khairul anaami Solluu Alaa nabiyi naa huwa khairul anaam Refrain: Yaa Rabbi Yaa Rabbi Yaa Allah Anta Mawlānā Yaa Allah Yaa Rabbi Yaa Rabbi Yaa Allah Anta Mawlānā Yaa Allah

Verse: Let’s seek mercy for our lover, He is the best selected one Let’s seek mercy for our messenger, He is the best of man kind Let’s seek mercy for our messenger, He is the best of man kind Refrain: Oh Lord, Oh Lord, Oh Allah You are our Leader, Oh Allah Oh Lord, Oh Lord, Oh Allah You are our Leader, Oh Allah

Audio 25.4  1980 film song “Qurbani” sung at a wedding in Tamale, in November 2016 (compare with Audio 25.3). The song was sung between teacher and lead dancer while the student performers enter onto the stage. Recorded by the author.

Conclusion In his article on the influence of Indian cinema in the late colonial Gold Coast and early postcolonial Ghana, cinema lover Kofi Akumanyi recalls how the majority of patronage of Indian cinema in the 1960s came from Zongo and northern Ghanaian communities, especially Dagbamba and Hausa cinemagoers. He muses about how these communities— for some reason he “could never unravel”—believed that they had “a special cultural affinity with India.”65 The role of listening in the cinema offers one lens through which to read the continued popularity of Hindi film songs within Ghana’s majority Muslim communities, and in larger majority Muslim cities like Tamale. In turn, the focus on the circulation and uses of Hindi film songs in Tamale offers a powerful case study of how cinematic listening extends beyond the cinema, entering into religious and pedagogical contexts, and providing links across aural practices. Muslim cinemagoers entered the cinema halls of early postcolonial Ghana with a mode of listening honed in Islamic schools, centered not around the text and word, but rather around the melodic contour and quality of the sounded voice. Here, a similar process of learning foreign language was shared between both cinematic and religious contexts. Muslim audiences listened to Hindi film songs in the cinema through this embodied practice of listening, experiencing

Hindi Film Songs in Tamale, Northern Ghana   525 Hindi film songs through “culturally and historically honed sensory modalities,” associating sound patterns and vocal styles heard in Hindi films with daily practices of religious recitation.66 Such associations between vocal style and listening practice in turn moved Hindi film song melodies from the cinema back into Islamic pedagogy itself, as every year Hindi film song melodies continue to be set to Arabic praises for the Prophet’s birth during the mawlid festival.

Notes 1. There is an extensive history and distinction between Qur’anic schools and newer “modern” Islamic schools. Qur’anic schools are built by scholars themselves and are usually unaffiliated with the state, while Islamic schools more recently are subsidized schools informed by the curriculums of the state. In order to make my argument clear, I have used the term “Islamic school” to refer to early colonial and postcolonial Qur’anic schools broadly speaking. The Islamic schools I spent time in are more clearly aligned with the “Qur’anic” schools in the sense that they are built by religious scholars without government subsidies, although some have recently applied for funding. All schools referenced in this chapter were Tijani Sufi schools in Tamale. 2. Ola Stockfelt, “Adequate Modes of Listening,”  in Keeping Score: Music Disciplinarity, Culture, ed. David Schwarz, Anahid Kassabian, and Lawrence Siegel (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997): 139–46: 132–33. 3. Deborah Kapchan, “Listening Acts: Witnessing the Pain (and Praise) of Others,” in Theorizing Sound Writing, ed. Deborah Kapchan (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2017), 280. 4. David Owusu-Ansah and Abdulai Idrissu, “The Philosophy of the Revolution: Thoughts on Modernizing Islamic Schools in Ghana,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 42, no. 2 (2008): 446–66. 5. Stephanie Newell, Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana: How to Play the Game of Life. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 83. 6. Ibid., 87, emphasis her own. 7. African Historical Archive/British Colonial Archives, I Will Speak English (1954). At the time of writing, the full video is available on YouTube. Video, 14:26, 2013, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=oZkSKV2onnU, accessed August 25, 2020. 8. Conversation with former Islamic school student in Tamale, Ghana, on September 7, 2016. 9. Personal observations. See also Owusu-Ansah and Idrissu, “The Philosophy of the Revolution,” 448. 10. Informal interview with former Islamic school student on November 2, 2016. 11. Anne K. Rasmussen, “The Qur'ân in Indonesian Daily Life: The Public Project of Musical Oratory,” Ethnomusicology 45, no. 1 (2001): 30–57: 42. 12. Michael Lambek, Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery and Spirit Possession (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993): 141–42. 13. Rachel Harris, “ ‘The Oil Is Sizzling in the Pot’: Sound and Emotion in Uyghur Qur'anic Recitation,” Ethnomusicology Forum 23, no. 3 (2014): 331–59: 332. 14. Rasmussen, “The Qur'ân in Indonesian Daily Life,” 41. 15. Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 15–16.

526   Katie Young 16. Roman Loimeier, Between Social Skills and Marketable Skills: The Politics of Islamic Education in 20th Century Zanzibar (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 247. 17. Harold Ingrams, Zanzibar: Its History and its People (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2012), 433. 18. “Arabic-Hausa School.” Public Records and Archives Department, Accra, 1933–1937. RG3/5/271. 19. Loimeier, Between Social Skills and Marketable Skills, 248. 20. “Northern Territories: Tamale New Headquarters, Opening Of.” Public Records and Archives Department, Accra, 1908. ADM56/1/73. 21. Newell, Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana, 43–44, 60, and 71. 22. Ibid., 68. 23. Emily Anne Williamson, “Understanding the Zongo: Processes of Socio-Spatial Margin­ alization in Ghana” (Master’s Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014), 129. 24. Zakariah Ali, Walk with the Devil: My Endless Struggle Against the Cunning and Traps of the Devil (Bloomington: Xlibris, 2012), 63. 25. Ali, Walk with the Devil, 64. 26. Xerxes Malki, “Transnational Politics of the Lebanese In Ghana 1948–1963,” in Politics, Culture and the Lebanese Diaspora, ed. Paul Tabar (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 245–62. 27. Williamson, “Understanding the Zongo,” 143. 28. Tor Gjesdal, “Statement by Tor Gjesdal, Director of the Department of Mass Communication, UNESCO, to the 18th Session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, March 15–April 14, 1962”; William Benton Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago, Box 393, Folder 11. 29. “Commercial Area,” Public Records and Archive Department (Tamale, Ghana), Shelfmark NRG8/1/136, File 109. 30. Dean & Pearl Exhibition Rates for Ghana: A Leaflet of Cinema Statistics (1961). Shelfmark 85/Cup.600.b.2. 31. Jean Rouch, Notes on Migrations into the Gold Coast. First Report of the Mission Carried Out in the Gold Coast from March to December (1954), 54. 32. Conversation with former cinema owner in Accra, Ghana, October 1, 2016. 33. Graham Tipple, Extending Themselves: User-Initiated Transformation of Government Built Housing in Developing Countries (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000) 14. 34. Article in The Mirror (Accra, Ghana, August 14, 1971). 35. Gilbert Ilboudo, “Le Public Africain et le Cinéma,” Afrique 12 (1962): 68–73. 36. Mukul Kesavan, “Urdu, Awadh and the tawaif: the Islamicate Roots of Hindi Cinema,” in Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and the State in India, ed. Zoya Hasan (Boulder: Westview, 1994), 244–57. 37. James Eskridge Genova, Cinema and Development in West Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 67. 38. For an example of Ghana’s film censorship patterns, see “Board of Control for Censorship of Cinematography Films, 1955–1957,” Public Records and Archive Department, Accra, Ghana. Shelfmark RG3/5/62. 39. Paul Adamson, Still None the Wiser: A Mid-Century Passage, 1952–1967 (Bloomington: Author House, 2007), 87. 40. Ibid., 86. 41. Kwasi Attah, “Letter: Odeon Cinema,” Ashanti Pioneer Newspaper (Kumasi, Ghana, June 11, 1962).

Hindi Film Songs in Tamale, Northern Ghana   527 42. Sylvester Tamakloe, “Letter: Bad Habit,” Ashanti Pioneer Newspaper (Kumasi, Ghana, January 9, 1962). 43. The main language in Tamale is Dagbani, however Hausa (a language from northern Nigeria) is more or less the lingua franca of Muslim communities in Ghana. Both Dagbani and Hausa have borrowed Arabic loan words embedded in the language. 44. Brian Larkin, “Bandiri Music, Globalization, and Urban Experience in Nigeria,” Social Text 22 (2004): 91–112; Abdalla Uba Adamu, “The Influence of Hindi Film Music on Hausa Videofilm Soundtrack Music,” in Global Soundtracks: Worlds of Cinema, ed. Mark Slobin (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 152–76. 45. Eric Charry, “Music and Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa,” in The History of Islam in Africa, ed. Nehemia Levtzion and Randall  L.  Pouwels (Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 2000): 545–73. 46. Conversation with Islamic school teacher in Tamale, Ghana, on December 12, 2017. 47. Conversation with former Islamic school student in Tamale, Ghana, on November 11, 2015. 48. Kofi Agawu, The African Imagination in Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 88. 49. Harris, “ ‘The Oil Is Sizzling in the Pot’, ” 350–51. 50. Alison Arnold, Hindi filmī gīt: On the History of Commercial Indian popular Music (PhD Thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1991), 144. 51. Conversation with religious leader in Tamale, Ghana on November 10, 2016. 52. Conversation with religious leader in Tamale, Ghana on November 5, 2016. 53. Janet Topp Fargion, Poetry and Languid Charm: Swahili Music from Tanzania and Kenya from the 1920s to the 1950s (Topic Records, 2007): TSCD936 CD. 54. Malami Buba and Graham Furniss, “Youth Culture, Bandiri, and the Continuing Legitimacy Debate in Sokoto Town,” Journal of African Culture Studies 12, no. 1 (1999): 27–46. 55. In the cinema listings of the Ashanti Pioneer, Rani Rupmati is advertised as playing at the Royal cinema in Kumasi on July 30, 1960; May 24, 1960; January 17, 1961; and January 20, 1961. Rani Rupmati played at the Rex cinema in Kumasi on May 23, 1960; July 29, 1960; and January 21, 1961. It played at the Roxy cinema on May 25, 1960; July 28, 1960; and January 16 1961. And it played also at the Rivoli cinema in Kumasi on January 18, 1961. As film reels rotated between cinemas and cities during this time, it is highly likely that these film reels moved on to Tamale following their screening in Kumasi; however, there is no empirical evidence, as film screenings for Tamale were never published in newspapers. 56. This song was popular elsewhere on the subcontinent: As Abdalla Adamu details, in 1960s Nigeria, musician Abdu Yaron Goge also played “Raat Suhani” on his goje, a Hausa twostring fiddle, with vocals and kalangu (talking drum). See Adamu, “The Influence of Hindi Film Music on Hausa Videofilm Soundtrack music.” 57. “Raat Suhani Jhoome Jawani” (1956). At the time of writing, the film song “Raat Suhani” is available on YouTube. Video, 3:04, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9za5NUvoKk, accessed August 25, 2020. 58. Conversation with former Islamic school student in Tamale, Ghana, on September 13, 2016; Conversation with former Islamic school student in Tamale, Ghana, on January 14, 2018; Interview with former Islamic school leader in Tamale, Ghana on October 17, 2016. 59. Conversation with former Islamic school student on September 13, 2016. 60. Conversation with Islamic school teacher in Tamale, Ghana, on October 17, 2016. 61. See Anahid Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013): 9.

528   Katie Young 62. Regula Qureshi, “Exploring Time Cross-Culturally: Ideology and Performance of Time in the Sufi Qawwālī,” Journal of Musicology 12, no. 3 (1994): 491–528: 505. 63. Regula Qureshi, “His Master’s Voice?: Exploring Qawwali and “Gramophone Culture” in South Asia,” Popular Music 18 (1999): 63–98. 64. Ibid., 69–73. 65. Kofi Akumanyi, “Hello Ali Baba, Long Live Arabella.” Talking Drums 3 (1986): 19. 66. For more on histories of sensory modalities, see Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape, 101.

Select Bibliography Bloom, Peter J., Stephan F. Miescher, and Takyiwaa Manuh, eds. Modernization as Spectacle in Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Bouchard, Vincent. “Commentary and Orality in African Film Reception.” In Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-first Century: Art Films and the Nollywood Video Revolution, ed. Mahir Saul and Ralph A. Austen, 95–107. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010. Danielson, Virginia. “The Voice of Egypt”: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Harris, Rachel. “The Oil Is Sizzling in the Pot”: Sound and Emotion in Uyghur Qur’anic Recitation,” Ethnomusicology Forum 23, no. 3 (2014): 331–59. Hirschkind, Charles. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Kapchan, Deborah, ed. Theorizing Sound Writing. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2017. Kesavan, Mukul. “Urdu, Awadh and the Tawaif: the Islamicate Roots of Hindi Cinema.” In Forging Identities: Gender, Communities and the State in India, ed. Zoya Hasan, 244–57. Boulder: Westview, 1994. Lambek, Michael. Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery and Spirit Possession. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Larkin, Brian. 2008. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham: Duke University Press. Rasmussen, Anne  K. “The Qur'ân in Indonesian Daily Life: The Public Project of Musical Oratory,” Ethnomusicology 45, no. 1 (2001): 3–57.

chapter 26

Hea r i ng a n d Te achi ng Sou n dtr acks as a Mother a n d a Daughter A Personal, Feminist, Pedagogical Approach to Flux Elsie Walker

This is a story from new life to death, from hearing babies born to re-hearing the way a person dies.1 This chapter is about how an internal dialogue can positively shape an external dialogue, with a bodily emphasis on listening and speaking differently. I choose myself as a representative example because I can speak to my own experience with most certainty, but everything that follows could resonate with any filmgoer’s experience of hearing cinema and any professor’s experience of how they lead conversations. I challenge certain scholarly norms about how to conceptualize and teach film soundtracks in the classroom. More specifically, I reflect on my pedagogical practice as a mother of two children and as a daughter whose mother died. There is a well-established tradition of studying embodied spectatorship from various perspectives, and especially in visual and tactile terms. In The Address of the Eye, Vivian Sobchack analyzes The Piano (1993) for its images of such strong physical impact that she lives the story through sensations in union with the protagonist.2 In The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses, David MacDougall makes a more general case for how we absorb, make meaning, and ultimately inhabit what we see through cinema. Mary Ann Doane is among the first to focus on deep-seated sonic impact: she psychoanalyzes the cinematic voice that takes the place of a mother enfolding and enclosing her infant.3 Others dwell on the more literal physical impact of film sound, as in Paul Elliott’s examination of the sound waves of Hitchcock’s cinema: for

530   Elsie Walker instance, the screeching violins in the shower scene of Psycho that we will feel “in the back of our necks and the top of our heads,” so that we may sensationally “experience the twinge of recognition in this area just as Marion Crane feels the knife in hers.”4 Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener explore the power of sound waves that connect us to cinematic reality by entering our body, anchoring the meaning of what we see and also pulling us into the space via immersive technologies like Dolby surround sound. Andrea Rassell et al. provide an empirical analysis of sonic impact based on eye-tracking movements that change when different soundtracks are used for the same visual scenes from Saving Private Ryan and Monster’s Inc.: they draw conclusions about how much sound anchors the gaze and causes audiences to fixate on particular visual subjects.5 These sound-based studies revolve around the emotive and/or physical impact of cinema on the anonymous and abstracted audience member, even when based on actual encounters with a given film. My own emphasis is unusual: along with analyzing embodied listening over and above visual content or visible reactions, I write from a personal point-of-view. In the examples that follow, I interpret specific classroom experiences in terms of my being a mother who hears her young children with a heightened level of aural alertness, and my having been in the presence of my mother’s silent body in remembrance of the voice she once had. Here, I make a conscious break from a tradition of Oxford University Press by writing in the first person. As Richard Dyer says, it is important to acknowledge “the place of the writer in relation to what s/he is writing about.”6 Dyer reminds us that all utterances are subjective, and he makes such reality a meaningful point of departure rather than a disrespectful disparagement of the writer whose subject position is manifest. Similarly, Stuart Hall emphasizes that the “I” who writes must be understood as writing from “a particular place and time”: what we say is always “ ‘in context,’ positioned.”7 I present this work as feminist, and without downplaying my subjective agency, because I believe in the maxim made famous by Carol Hanisch: “the personal is political.”8 Decades after Hanisch was first writing about the subversive possibilities of our interconnected personal and political, internal and external identities, more female scholars are speaking out about their need to find newly assertive voices. I join a chorus of women who are discovering new ways to speak, along with defining the stakes of doing so.9 I am especially inspired by a recent article by Kristi McKim that combines feminism with cinephilia, and which draws most specifically from her experiences as a young mother. McKim connects her sensuous experiences of loving her infant son with her heightened pedagogical perceptions.10 Her work will surely inspire other female scholars who downplay their knowledge as mothers in relation to the more acknowledged work of academia.11 McKim’s transgressive emphasis is on the “personal mise-en-scène of [her] college and home.” Through detailing specific experiences of her students, such as their collective bodily reactions to the traumatic impact of The Act of Killing (2012), she focuses on the physical circumstances of film reception. Her emphasis is therein more visual than aural, as her figurative turns of phrase indicate: she writes of film as a “record of sight that invites us to see,” and she writes of cinematic analysis as “personal projection.” In relation to her course titled “Cinematic Lives,” she parallels her students’

Hearing and Teaching Soundtracks   531 engagement with onscreen characters learning about themselves with her compulsion to take and view photographs of her son. She movingly relays how her students candidly shared compassionate responses to films like Sherman’s March (1985) and The Beaches of Agnes (2008). Her unconventionally loving descriptions pave the way for us all to connect pedagogical practice with humanitarian values, emotional articulation, and personal experience. For another example, she describes how her students responded to Silverlake Life: The View From Here (1993), a heart-rending diary film about two filmmakers’ “love, illness, and death from AIDS—with some of the most mature, reflective, careful, and well-written undergraduate film writing that I’ve ever encountered.” As she taught this film, she aimed for a “professional and humane” balance that was “neither weepy nor cold but feeling and meaningful.” One student connected the visual details of the film with what it was like for her to witness her own mother die of cancer. With the same courageous spirit, McKim reflects on her increased sensitivity to any films showing children who are ill “or worse” since becoming a mother. Her article is implicitly about making a narrative out of the confluence of different experiences within one life—new motherhood, teaching specific films, and engaging with particular students’ responses within ephemeral moments in time. She gives us a rare example of a women foregrounding her parental agency that “talks back” to lasting prejudices within academia on a national scale.12 In foregrounding my specific subject position, I am in tune with women like McKim. This writing also reflects my new process of self-definition as a mother/daughter/ scholar, and the stories I tell within this chapter are propelled by my poststructuralist belief that every human identity is always in flux.13 Any act of embodied listening is contingent upon a person’s ability to hear and becomes richer through her/his/their openness to the value of hearing the sonic material that may resonate differently over time. I am not applying a standard psychological approach to the emotive possibilities of sound or how we can respond to hearing the same sonic stimulus over time.14 I am also sidestepping more physical and tangible situational factors, like what we are capable of hearing at different times of the day, or in variable temperatures, or in changing physical surroundings.15 Instead of environmental and physical contexts, I am dwelling on the personal backstory for my teaching that is always changing, and which need not be “visible” or manifest like the physical properties of a space but which informs everything that happens in a class that I lead.16 My focus on the personal history of the listener expands upon the dominant writing about film sound, which typically focuses on what happens and changes within a film’s sonic world as opposed to considering how a given perceiver’s experiences may shape their particular hearing of that cinematic world. Michel Chion is an emblematic case. While his work on film is groundbreaking in that he conceptualizes and defines numerous cinematic experiences of sound that had previously escaped notice or naming, his writing is mostly restricted to the intrinsic meanings of soundtracks as opposed to the extrinsic meanings that the auditor brings to bear on them. For example, he conceptualizes the “spatiotemporal turntable” as the strategy by which a film replays some music or particular sonic motif that invites the perceiver to make connections across a film that

532   Elsie Walker transcend time and space, a phenomenon most familiar to us all through leitmotifs.17 But what about cinema as a spatiotemporal turntable that takes the perceiver back into, or allows them to “rehear,” parts of their own life as they encounter the film? Equally, while the first part of Chion’s Audio-Vision is devoted to the “audiovisual contract”—the interdependency of visuals and sonic elements that “add value” to each other—what about the contract we make with a film by listening to it, and the inevitability of our subject positions affecting everything or “adding value” to what we can conceivably take in? Similarly, Chion defines spatial and subjective points of audition in terms of the physical position from which the audience member hears (spatial) and the position from which the character is hearing as the audience member does (subjective).18 But what about the figurative position from which an audience member listens to a film and registers its sonic details as meaningful? Might we shift the emphasis from the internal world of the film’s sonic logic to pay more attention to the perceiver’s unique and changing self that allows them to hear a film differently over time?

Hearing New Life My pedagogical practice parallels Kristi McKim’s work because I revel in teaching the resonances of films from my own changing subject position. The point is not to make my teaching a matter of self-indulgence, but to demonstrate the value of embodied listening to those films that invite wholehearted engagement. Since 2016, I have begun my undergraduate course titled “International Cinema” with a documentary designed to elicit strong emotional and physical responses: Thomas Balmès’ Babies (2010). The film focuses on four babies who are born around the world at about the same time, and it dwells on each baby’s developmental milestones until they take their first steps in diverse places: Mongolia, Namibia, Tokyo, and San Francisco. For students who have never studied cinema before, as is typically the case in “International Cinema,” this film is a strong starting point for exploring the medium’s global power. Babies uses a range of unpredictable, and quietly subversive, techniques for providing access to new cultures, dissolving as well as asserting national boundaries, and discouraging presumption as well as encouraging curiosity about other peoples.19 The film’s sonic structures clearly invite its audiences to hear as parents and as babies of the world: the ambitious duality of its perspective makes many demands on an audience to understand the non-verbal, international power of film “language.” There is minimal text or narrative in the traditional or generic sense, which immediately frees a class to dwell on the film’s distinctive stylistic strategies. On a more personal level, I teach the film as one who has witnessed her infant daughters rely on hearing before they are able to see more than an arm’s length away. Babies shows its infant subjects’ embodied listening as they respond to every piece of sonic stimulus with new ears. The film requires that its audience engage in a parallel experience of aural alertness to every sound. Balmès’ camera frequently zeroes in on

Hearing and Teaching Soundtracks   533 each infant through medium close-ups or close-ups that remind us of their limited vision upon being born. The visuals thus lead us to comprehend the film’s unusually marked emphasis on ambient sounds that establish the environments around the babies (whether domestic, retail, suburban, or urban). For example, we see baby Hattie from San Francisco, California, as she toys with a mobile and its small bells jingle against her hands. The medium close-up shows that she is mesmerized by the sound that comes with each touch of her hand as opposed to being able to understand the visual shapes. Because the camera limits our visual perspective and context, it aligns us with her focus on one detail of her domestic space, making the sonic detail atypically prominent (see Figure 26.1 and Video 26.1). Babies includes the voices of adults as other sonic details within each distinct environment. These voices are typically “muffled,” or low in the aural hierarchy, so we cannot make the words out, just as the babies cannot yet register linguistic meaning. Since none of the adults’ speech from the four disparate locations is subtitled, the film makes it impossible for us to assume much more knowledge than the babies have—like each baby, we attend to the specific tone of each speech act, and the intonations of every voice are virtually amplified in the absence of clearly discernible vowels and consonants. In short, each voice registers more like an instrument for communicating the feel of a parent-child relationship than a linguistic frame around any scene. Since all the human voices are mixed with environmental noises, Balmès encourages us to hear all babies’ sounds on the same level as adult speech. The film thus avoids placing the sounds of the babies in a hierarchy under the voices of adults. This means the film implicitly invites us to imagine what every baby is “saying” by perceiving the nuances of every sound they make, much like an attentive parent will do for her/his pre-linguistic child. And even

Figure 26.1  Babies (2010): Baby Hattie from San Francisco, California, as she toys with a mobile with small bells.

Video 26.1  Babies (2010): Baby Hattie from San Francisco, California, as she toys with a mobile with small bells.

534   Elsie Walker when a baby becomes quiet while an adult is speaking, the film places emphasis on how that child reacts to the speech they hear. For example, we see a close-up of baby Bayar from Bayanchandmani, Mongolia, in distress after his elder brother has been teasing him. We see almost nothing but his face as cries while hearing the sound of his mother scolding his brother offscreen. He gradually calms down, which suggests that her voice is enough to reassure him even when his vision (and ours) is restricted. His face registers distress but its eventual stillness as he listens to her voice relays that he has slowed down because of her vocal assertion of authority (see Figure 26.2 and Video 26.2). Babies therefore positions us to hear the world in a way that is physiologically and psychologically regressive (reminiscent of babyhood), politically progressive (allowing us to hear the lives of the most vulnerable, youngest people differently), and unusually feminist (positioning us to see and hear as parents do, whether male or female, and with supreme focus on the child, whether male or female). The film’s emphasis on our being able to hear the world much like the babies is especially profound in two ways: it ­disallows us from presuming too much through what we understand better than they can, and it also avoids downplaying the significance of the babies’ lives. In addition, Balmès avoids the voiceover commentaries that are frequent components of documentaries: his choice to avoid taking vocal control of the action in this way makes the film unconventionally exploratory, encouraging the audience’s curiosity in alignment with the babies. The absence of commentary also means that Babies avoids any overt judgment of how each child is being raised by her/his parents. This has led my students to understand that international cinema can offer us sonically immersive experiences of different cultures

Figure 26.2  Babies (2010): Baby Bayar from Bayanchandmani, Mongolia, as he hears his mother’s voice offscreen.

Video 26.2  Babies (2010): Baby Bayar from Bayanchandmani, Mongolia, as he hears his mother’s voice offscreen.

Hearing and Teaching Soundtracks   535 and peoples from insiders’ spatial and subjective points of audition: films like Babies implicitly “talk back” to those prejudices that my students and I hear much more often in our day-to-day lives. By allowing us to hear the world with babies, and without any obvious bias, Balmès offers us an experience of comparative innocence, playfulness, and exploration. Moreover, it is clearly made for a global audience that will most likely not know all the languages within it, and who will be thus aligned with the babies in learning a new range of human sounds. Within my course context, this paves the way for us to hear every subsequent film with heightened and open-minded attention to non-linguistic as well as linguistic sounds from around the world, and along with diverse minority peoples. Babies is not just an eye-opener, but an ear-opener to the realities of infant life, the nuances of infants’ sonic perspectives, and the diversity of child-rearing practices around the world that “sound” different. As a mother, I am particularly moved by how seriously the film attends to its infant subjects as well as the work involved in caring for them, without much need for speech or explanation. If the film is like a parent teaching its audiences with great care, I respond and teach it in kind. Babies also adopts a position of intimate caring that blurs the boundaries between subject and object of child and parent. I parallel the film’s duality: I am attuned to the unusual sonic strategies of the film as a scholar of film sound, but also as a mother who has observed her children’s listening. Everything I lead my students to understand about the film’s authenticity, realism, and progressive politics is informed by this personal angle.

Re-hearing a Death Dance I start my “International Cinema” course with new life and Babies at the beginning, but work up to a confrontation with death in Ten Canoes (2006) near the end. This film is a critical landmark in Australian filmmaking as the first one entirely in Aboriginal languages. Before the film screening in class, my students read a foundational article by Robert Stam and Louise Spence about race and representation, including arguments about the importance of showing indigenous cultures from multidimensional perspectives and addressing the “structured absences” of minority peoples in most mainstream Western cinema. Ten Canoes gives us access to a new culture without positioning us like “armchair conquistadors” to borrow a term coined by Stam and Spence.20 Instead, as I have discussed elsewhere, the film positions us to learn about Aboriginal culture, especially via a narrator who repeatedly instructs us on how to perceive what we see and hear throughout the story.21 Ten Canoes is a kind of cautionary tale that focuses on the consequences of characters giving into selfish impulses that do not serve their tribes. It is a lesson in the ancient “law” of being in an Aboriginal tribe. Since it features an old man telling a story of the past to his much younger descendent, as well as an offscreen/voiceover narrator, the film has a built-in pedagogical structure for an audience new to Aboriginal culture.

536   Elsie Walker Moreover, the film teaches us to rethink the binaries that historically underpin colonial writings and which have “justified” the wrongful subordination of Other peoples: • • • • • • • • • • • • •

white/black colonial/colonized subject/object active/passive understandable/unfathomable superior/inferior heroic/brutal sophisticated/primitive society/nature controlled/wild civilization/barbarism informed/unthinking positive/negative

Every binary is blurred or ironically handled through Ten Canoes. For example, the people of the film are very much aligned with the remote bushlands and swampland of Ramingining, Australia, though they are not represented as wild but as self-controlled according to ancient tribal law. The narrator’s authority in relaying this reflects the oral traditions of the Aborigines, and reminds us that intergenerational storytelling is crucial for the survival of Aboriginal cultural traditions as well as a matter of pride. Because the film sonically foregrounds a narrator explaining so much of its action, it also implicitly “others” the film’s primarily white audience. His voiceover positions the audience to learn what they cannot presume to know, so the film inverts the typical colonial hierarchy of white and black peoples (or non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal peoples). In addition, the narrator’s explanations of what happens to characters of the deep past pays respect to the long history of Aboriginal history, and rebukes the British failure to regard Aborigines as having human significance until quite recently: Aborigines were not constitutionally counted as part of the Australian population until a referendum of 1967, and many Aborigines before that time were managed by government agencies also in charge of flora, fauna, and wildlife.22 After our preliminary discussion of the narrator’s significance for the film’s pre-colonial story and in our own post-colonial moment, I have my class join me in a collective close reading of a scene. For example, in a recent version of the course, we discussed the ­climactic scene where a main character named Ridjimiraril dies. He has been speared by another tribe in a traditional payback ceremony following his having murdered a member of that same tribe. Ridjimiraril killed another man after giving into a “bad spirit” that made him believe his wife had been abducted by a stranger. His death is the result of a  ritualistic sacrifice that has sacred cultural status. There is no suspense built into Ridjimiraril’s death since the film shows us a witch doctor telling him he will die, and the narrator has already informed us of his death as a necessity and certainty before it

Hearing and Teaching Soundtracks   537 happens. So, the familiar, or more mainstream, cinematic emphasis on creating suspense leading up to the death of a main character is markedly absent in Ten Canoes. Before he lies down to die, Ridjimiraril performs a death dance that is explained as such to us by the narrator. Before I put the scene on for class, it never occurred to me that I would draw upon my experience of my mother’s death, but the conversation took a turn that allowed me to draw upon this personal history in a meaningful, though covert, way. The result was my not only understanding the film from a new and personally appreciative perspective, but also running a class discussion of greater depth: my internal/external dialogue was more ambitious as I carried the experience of my mother’s silent body into the discussion. Before replaying the death dance scene in class, I asked my students to notice everything related to film style that might resonate with the binaries we had discussed: they observed the heroism of Ridjimiraril deciding to dance despite his physical weakness, for example, along with observing that his death was positively portrayed as an active choice. In short, my students perceived ways in which the film honors Aboriginal peoples, and “talks back” to earlier, more limited representations of them. The class discussion of Ten Canoes, and this scene in particular, was most strongly influenced by another landmark of Australian cinema: Walkabout (1971), a film we studied the previous week. The narrative climax of Walkabout is the suicide of its lead Aboriginal character, an adolescent played by David Gulpilil, the same actor who speaks the voiceover narration of Ten Canoes. Where Walkabout shows the Aborigine’s death from a distance, without any verbal explanation, and in the presence of a young white boy in distress and confusion, the death of Ridjimiraril in Ten Canoes is presented as a matter of ritualistic obligation that the narrator understands. The film thus positions us “closer” to the subject, allowing us access to the character through the voice of someone who understands him, instead of making him the unfathomable Other. Moreover, where the Aboriginal character of Walkabout speaks in his own language but is never subtitled, and spends much more screen time moving about in silence, the characters of Ten Canoes speak through most of the film in dialogue that was improvised by the Aboriginal actors themselves, and in animated voices that are always subtitled. In addition, these voices are located within soundscapes of the real environments as recorded by sound designer John Currie. So, there is a strong sense of authentic, sonically-enforced linguistic and environmental access to the characters of Ten Canoes, even though its visual action is set in some of the most remote and inaccessible swampland in Australia: the visual action is from far away, but the sound track brings us closer to everything that happens. Along with the aurally authoritative sounds of a place and its people, Ten Canoes shows respect for its Aboriginal characters through the narrator’s emotional engagement with their changing lives. Gulpilil’s voice is often light-hearted, giggly, and energetic through the film. He excitedly introduces us to its main characters: just before several lead characters first walk into the film, he says “shhh . . . I can hear them coming . . . my ancestors,” as if his introduction and his address to us might be overheard within a fantastic game of hide-and-seek across time. However, when he describes Ridjimiraril’s death dance, his voice is comparatively ponderous and low. The different

538   Elsie Walker tenor of his voice demands we have a new comprehension of the people he playfully responds to or gently satirizes elsewhere. His slowed rhythm helps us understand everything we see with a new level of intensity, along with demanding our observance of how much the action has changed. For the first few moments of this climactic scene, we need the narrator in order to understand that we are witnessing Ridjimiraril’s death dance. Then the narrator stresses the presence of the clapsticks, didjeridu, and voices that will soon accompany the action diegetically. Offscreen, we can hear that Ridjimiraril people are already in mourning. Though they wail and the music gathers in urgency, the narrator’s tone does not become agitated. Instead, he relays an acceptance of what is happening. In addition, his voice has the quiet authority of coming from a different time looking back on when the film’s subjects lived. His perspective is also weighted heavily because it is Gulpilil speaking. As the most well-known Aboriginal actor to date, and the one who has achieved uncommon global fame through acclaimed performances in Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) and Australia (2008), as well as Walkabout and Ten Canoes, Gulpilil has special authority in being our primary means of access to and understanding the culture of Ten Canoes. That said, while much of the action in Ten Canoes requires some explanation for those without an insider’s knowledge of Aboriginal culture, this particular scene does not require much beyond identifying that Ridjimiraril is doing a death dance. The narrator’s words match what is manifestly, visually shown: “slowly he gets up,” the narrator says (as we see Ridjimiraril rise), “slowly he walks to the middle of the space in the camp” (as we see Ridjimiraril do just that), “Ridijimaril begins to dance, his own death dance, soon the clapsticks will join, and then the didgeridoo, and then singing” (and all this happens momentarily). Just after the clapsticks begin, the narration re-enters, again seemingly without necessity: “hear the clapsticks start, and now the didgeridu as Ridjimiraril advances his own death dance.” Then the narrator instructs as well as tells us, “see how he keeps dancing until all his strength will be gone,” and “now he’s getting tired, now his strength is finishing as he lies down on the ground” (see Figure 26.3 and Video 26.3). Since we repeatedly see Ridjimiraril move as the narrator tells us, I asked my class to consider why the narration is there at all. “Could there be more than redundancy in this pleonastic relationship between the narration and the visual action?,” I suggested. This was the point at which I drew upon my own experience of death so I could better understand the power of the film. Though I did not make this personal angle known to my class, it gave everything that followed new strength of purpose. My students looked blankly confused for a moment. “Why do we have this narration at all?” I asked them again. “After all, we can already observe everything the narrator is saying.” One student then suggested that the narration provides a calming influence. She noticed that the narrator’s tone was relatively placid, in contrast with the poignancy of confronting death. Another student said he found it moving because the scene did not delay revealing that Ridijimaril would die, so it was asking us to accept the death and begin mourning with his tribe. I then stressed the importance of how the film takes time to show the ritual leading to death. Internally, I was comparing how suddenly my mother died with how Ten Canoes shows a death that is fast approaching but over which

Hearing and Teaching Soundtracks   539

Figure 26.3  Ten Canoes (2006): The narrator tells us that Ridjimiraril “is getting tired” during his death dance, which we can plainly see by his body beginning to bend forward, but this has more than merely descriptive significance.

Video 26.3  Ten Canoes (2006): The narrator tells us that Ridjimiraril “is getting tired” during his death dance, which we can plainly see by his body beginning to bend forward, but this has more than merely descriptive significance.

the tribal members nevertheless find ways to take control. I realized the film was teaching me about how a death could be prepared for, no matter how limited the time might be, and from a very specific cultural perspective. Where death has felt like the ultimate chaos to me, especially given my mother died within a few days from diagnosis to the final stages of her life, I suddenly saw the compassion in Ten Canoes. The rhythm of the film affords us plenty of time to absorb the fact of Ridjimiraril’s death coming, along with educating us as people who need to learn about ways of handling death that are unique to the Aboriginal people. Another student raised her hand to talk about the benefit of the voiceover because it left her free to simply be in the scene, knowing that the narrator was there to anchor and make sense of the experience for her. In response to this, I suggested that the voiceover contains the sadness of the scene by stressing its self-evident structure. It is as if the narrator’s words form a safety net around the images: they cannot easily signify anything happening in excess of what he says, and the big reality of death is thus defined within limits. This resonates with innumerable psychological writings on the value of storytelling as a way of handling and shaping traumatic experience.23 Thinking back on when my mother died, but still without mentioning that story, I  said to my students, “imagine you were at someone’s deathbed and there was a voiceover telling you how to make sense of it, honoring your perceptions by confirming them through every line of speech, and containing your experience by giving a narrative shape to the whole experience rather than reacting to the death as a sudden shock. We

540   Elsie Walker will all have to face death at some point, and this film not only tells us about Aboriginal ways of handling this reality, but also allows us the time to observe the significance of representing and understanding death differently. This is a radical move in itself: for the film is not about the tired trope of the martyred or sacrificial Aborigine, but the Aborigine who knows he will die and who makes that act a meaningful collaborative ritual with his tribe.”24 Our conversation thus turned into a meditation on the significance of a film as another piece of global cinema that walks the fine line between connecting with all its audiences on a fundamental experiential level (we will all have to face death, just as we were all once babies) while also respecting difference through honoring an Aboriginal narrative voice, and an Aboriginal way of creating a meaningful story from a man dying young. Studying Ten Canoes this way, in collaboration with my students, prompted me to discover more about Aboriginal community experiences of mourning, sharing grief, and performing rituals around death that can last for days.25 The film surely prompts all non-Aboriginal audiences to understand more about Aborigines than any cinema before it. Paul Byrnes argues that Australian films about Aboriginal life are have always been about “the “problem” of black Australia, rather than the more basic questions of who people are. Aborigines can never really just “be” in our (white) films. They’re always a threat, an accusation, a regret or an ideal.” He therefore dubs Ten Canoes “the first film to deal with Aborigines as other than an ‘issue’ ”26 For my students and me, the film goes even further than this rescue action: it educates us as non-Aboriginal peoples about Aboriginal rituals with verifiable authority while also prompting us to rethink our own ways of coming to terms with the mortality. The film thus potentially opens up a cross-cultural dialogue without universalizing experience through down-playing cultural specificity. The experience of living my mother’s death and then teaching Ten Canoes has helped me appreciate how much the film can help us all hear death anew. The sound track has an incrementally expansive significance, as if the film knows its own capacity to be bigger than itself too. The dance of death begins with entirely diegetic music and sounds (along with the acousmatic narrator) but becomes more texturally dense as heavy, nondiegetic drums mark the climax of the dance. The scene thus creates an impression of becoming bigger and more significant through sound: it also becomes louder in our ears because it implicitly tells about the significance of more than one man’s body, or one tribe’s sonically-driven participation in his death. After Ridjimiraril dances for a while alone, he grimaces with pain and has to finally lie down. At this point, two of the other men of his tribe join him, dancing next to his body and punctuating each part of the dance with a choreographed jump. Every one of their jumps is punctuated by the drum beats that come from beyond the diegetic space, implicitly opening up the story to envelop a world that is even bigger than that of the Aboriginal Australians. Arguably, these drums beats cross over into the audience’s world, inviting us to be in tune with the men making the jumps. Given just how often the narrator addresses us as the film’s audience with instructions on what to see, observe, understand, and know, it is not such a big “jump” to claim that the film invites us to let the world of its characters become part of our own. This metacinematic invitation is significant from a postcolonial perspective,

Hearing and Teaching Soundtracks   541 for it dissolves barriers between “us” and “them,” between the intended, mostly white audiences that will see the film and the Aborigines within it.

Hearing the Same Conversation Differently, as a Mother and a Daughter So, living through my mother’s death has helped me hear the films that confront mortality differently, just as my having children has enabled me to hear the youngest characters of cinema with greater alertness. By consciously mediating between my internal dialogue and my external conversations with students on the significance of soundtracks, I find a new pedagogical voice. Welcoming the inevitable interplay between my own life and what I am able to help students perceive makes for a different kind of embodied listening and teaching. I close this chapter with one more example of such self-aware praxis that brings hearing death and life together. As part of my advanced undergraduate course on film theory, titled “Film Politics,” I use a videoed conversation between queer theorist Judith Butler and the artist and activist Sunaura Taylor. Though I have played this video before to myself, I hear it anew after having used it in the classroom. The impact is something like hearing again a piece of music that stirs up previously-formed associations, but which also sounds different because I am noticing different resonances. I recognize that I experience anything audiovisual with my students in variable circumstances, so that even the same film “changes” from year to year, just as I understand myself from a poststructuralist pointof-view: again, I acknowledge that my subjectivity and my listening body are always in flux, and I teach students who are themselves ever-changing. Our conversation about the video by Butler and Taylor lays the groundwork for our watching the documentary Paris Is Burning (1990) in relation to queer theory. The class begins with a discussion of Butler’s work, with emphasis on her groundbreaking approach to deconstructing the concept of gender. I use “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” along with Gender Trouble, as a way of encouraging students to consider the distinction between sexuality and gender, before I explain the positive, subversive and progressive connotations of “queering” a concept, an experience, a truth, or a film. Having laid this groundwork, I share the video of Butler and Taylor with the class. The video is from a documentary titled An Examined Life (2008), and it shows Taylor in her wheelchair, “taking a walk” with Butler (see Figure 26.4). Among other things, Butler and Taylor discuss what it means to “take a walk” and the many ways people read the body according to heteronormative and ableist assumptions of normalcy. Butler tells a story she has repeatedly shared: a young man who walked with a distinctive “swish,” a signifier of gayness to some heterosexual male pedestrians, was violently attacked by them until he died. As Butler says, just “taking a walk can [therefore] be a dangerous

542   Elsie Walker

Figure 26.4  Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor “take a walk” and, among other things, they talk about what that expression means.

thing.” In parallel to this, Taylor explains the anxiety she has about doing ordinary things like getting a coffee, or going out in public, especially because people often perceive her being “like a monkey” due to her visible physical limitations. Having arthrogryposis means that Taylor has severe muscle weakness and joint contractures, so she moves differently from most people. Ironically, as Taylor points out, we are surely all “disabled” in certain ways, just some more visibly than others. Every one of us requires some forms of assistance, even if we live in “normal” bodies. The conversation between Butler and Taylor brings queer studies and disability studies together in a surprising way: in the end, both women implicitly stress a distinction between personhood and the body. The video is a moving, albeit low-key, meeting of minds. They are talking in an unaffected way, seemingly without preplanned directions, and down streets without any obvious destination. However, the video is carefully put together to maintain the clarity of their voices and the emphasis on what they say over anything else around them on the streets of San Francisco. When I first encountered this conversation two years ago, I was grateful for the humanity and grace of it. I was inspired by the idea that we all need and deserve the understanding that every human being may need help from time to time, and the lack of shame in Butler and Taylor’s talk about that. I engaged with their conversation as a teacher-scholar, cognizant of how well it might play for my students. I shared the video YouTube URL with them, but did not make time to discuss it: I saw it as tangential material to our primary focus on Paris Is Burning.27 In 2017, however, after a couple of weeks discussing feminism with my students, and with a greater sense of my obligation to reach my students in this newly heightened, galvanizing context of the Women’s March and the #MeToo movements, both of which underline the important of enduring inequalities along with the value of speaking out in solidarity, I decided to show the video in class. My students responded to it with warmth and genuine interest: the room was extremely quiet throughout, and the silence was full in the sense of signifying their complete attention. After we discussed Butler’s and Taylor’s most salient points about

Hearing and Teaching Soundtracks   543 gender, sexuality, bodily limits and physical expressivity, imaginative compassion, and the stakes of queer and disability studies, a student used our conversation as the opportunity to “come out” to the class. Her voice did not tremble, but she knew the significance of what she was doing: she prefaced her coming out by saying that she wanted to share something personal. She talked about the pressure that had been instilled in her since she was a small child to conform to a heteronormative lifestyle: specifically, she mentioned how her grandmother repeatedly asks her whether she has a boyfriend and when she will be getting married. Though she has repeatedly tried to explain her queerness, her grandmother has made herself deaf to it: instead, like a record on a loop, the same conversation happens every year, and my student has to hear the same pressure. After this student’s breathtaking moment of self-disclosure, I found myself hearing the stakes in the Butler/Taylor conversation on a newly-charged level. Every word of the video resonated more strongly and differently. I was registering their conversation from an unpredictably destabilized position, in the sense of re-interpreting all their “messages.” In moments such as these, I am reminded that film sound theorists typically use tools that sidestep addressing how real perceivers experience a film, and also how a given perceiver will hear one film differently over time or upon multiple rehearings. Something more than merely “semantic listening” can take place when the words become unfixed from one context of reception. Again, I think of how Chion writes on stable positions of reception: he writes about “semantic listening” (that is, perceiving words or “linguistic listening”) without considering how the same words might register differently over time.28 My re-hearing the Butler/Taylor conversation anew caused me to play the video in class, and the ensuing discussion prompted a student to make a statement that caused me to re-hear the words yet again. This student changed the atmosphere of the room because she made her identity a topic: the space became safer, softer, and more charged to match her investment in the goodwill of the class. In this new and unforeseen context, I found myself speaking in a way I had never spoken before about my own mother’s death. My student had led the way for me to apply what Butler/ Taylor said to my own experience: more specifically I reheard everything they had to say about reading the body, about separating personhood from the visible appearance of what a body can or cannot do, and about understanding the body as only a means of moving in the world and not as the sole definition of a person’s significance. My mother lived with a disability after an accident when she was 18 months old. Though her physical impairment was comparatively mild—a limp that meant she wore calipers for many months as a child and special shoes as an adult with a very distinctive walk—this marked her as “lesser-than” in the conservative environment of growing up in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in the 1940s and 1950s. She created new lives for herself in Scotland and then New Zealand, so she made herself unusually mobile, and despite the upheavals of her life remained buoyant and incredibly warm. She had a remarkable sonic presence too: a strong Southern drawl throughout her life, despite spending most of her adult life outside America, and an extremely raucous laugh. When I spent time with her dead body laid in state, I was shocked by its quiet and its coldness. Although I have heard many people say dead bodies are cold, it is something else to physically

544   Elsie Walker experience that fact. I put my hand on her stomach, over the place where I had first grown, and held her cold hand off and on for three hours, trying to warm it up. I talked to her the whole time, as if I expected her to respond. Eventually, I realized I understood something else I have heard many times before anew—that the body is but a vessel for the person. I told my class all about this, and in connection with Butler’s insistence on distinguishing between the inner and outer self (which of course includes the distinction between gender and sexuality). This idea suddenly felt less radical and more obviously sensical than I had perceived it before the class: I considered the essence of my mother, and the voice I remembered she had, was bigger than anything her body could or could not do, and that her essential legacy was irreducible to her gendered or disabled identity. In An Examined Life, Butler and Taylor talk about the visible disabilities that are often connected with social prejudice, but in the end they emphasize the invisible disabilities that everyone has along with the benefits of a culture that recognizes the importance of supporting all peoples whatever their challenges might be. My experience of re-hearing everything they say in the presence of my class has helped me move forward through a grief that has disabled me up until now. During the class, I felt the impact without becoming tearful, melodramatic, or self-indulgent. With a steady new voice, I was calmly re-understanding the exterior presence versus the deeper internal presence, the limits of the physical self, and the possibilities of memory that are bigger than physical limitations or endings.29 All these ideas resonate strongly with Paris Is Burning as it dwells on transgendered and transsexual people who are determined to present themselves differently and speak out about their struggles to the world, despite the physical limitations with which they were visibly and biologically born. In short, this process of replaying and rehearing Butler’s and Taylor’s words took me and my class somewhere new, in anticipation of where we were going. The conversation had become much bigger than I could have anticipated. All the stories I share here reveal a pattern: I assign coursework and elicit responses from my students to particular films that inspire me to draw upon my personal experiences, and I am newly invested in taking risks through emotionally candid analysis. Instead of suppressing how soundtracks move me in particular ways, I am speaking to my students with a greater level of sonic alertness. This is a pedagogical awakening for me, and I hear my students responding in kind through their own perceptiveness and personal engagement. We are listening together with more care. We are having conversations that go further.

Notes 1. This article is dedicated to my mother, Varvara Ann Richards. She was a great storyteller and she knew how to listen. I thank Carlo Cenciarelli for asking me to submit work to this volume and for his timely, kind, and detailed editorial advice. And I thank the students who participated in the conversations I have described here, and who have made me hear so many things differently. 2. The chapter from Sobchack’s The Address of the Eye that deals with The Piano (“What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh”) is freely accessible via

Hearing and Teaching Soundtracks   545 Senses of Cinema: http://sensesofcinema.com/2000/conference-special-effects-specialaffects/fingers/. For another representative example, in The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), Laura Marks writes of “haptic, or tactile, visuality” (2) as a way of conceptualizing the kind of experiential and embodied union that a film audience might feel with the onscreen characters. 3. This description echoes Elsaesser and Hagener’s summary of Doane’s work in “The Voice in Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” Yale French Studies 60 (1980, “Cinema/ Sound”), 33–50. See Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2015). 4. Paul Elliott, Hitchcock and the Cinema of Sensations (London: L. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2011), 151. 5. Andrea Rassell, Jenny Robinson, Darrin Verhagen, Sarah Pink, Sean Redmond, and Jane Stadler, “Seeing, Sensing Sound: Eye-Tracking Soundscapes in Saving Private Ryan and Monsters, Inc,” in Making Sense of Cinema, ed. CarrieLynn D. Reinhard and Christopher J. Olson, 139–164 (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). 6. Richard Dyer, “White,” Screen 29, no. 4 (1988): 44–65. Rpt. in Film and Theory: An Anthology, ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller (Malden: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 2000), 733–51: 733. 7. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation,” Framework 36 (1989): 68–81. Rpt. in Film and Theory: An Anthology, ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller. (Malden: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 2000), 704–14: 704 (original emphasis). 8. Hanisch’s original essay (1969) has been made available online by Hanisch herself, and as edited from the memo for the 1970 anthology, Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation, ed. Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt. 9. For a parallel example of fusing the personal with the professional, see Ara Osterweil, “Between Her Body and the Stain,” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 27, 2017, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/between-her-body-and-the-stain. 10. Kristi McKim, “Teaching Film Nonfictionally: The Reciprocity of Pedagogy, Cinephilia, and Maternity,” in For the Love of Cinema: Teaching Our Passion In and Outside the Classroom, ed. Rashna Wadia Richards and David  T.  Johnson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 125–42. In this paragraph, the quotations from McKim’s article are from pages 126 to 134. 11. McKim is one among others who stress the interconnectedness between the personal and the professional from a feminist perspective: the work of literary scholar Jane Tompkins is a decisive influence on her. Tompkins speaks out against the “police action that academic intellectuals wage ceaselessly against feeling, against women, against what is personal” (McKim, “Teaching Film Nonfictionally,” 128). See also Jane Tompkins, “Me and My Shadow,” New Literary History 19 (1987): 169–78. 12. One need only glance at the April, 2018 series of articles for the Chronicle of Higher Education for supporting evidence of women in American academia being silenced, unheard, or verbally marginalized. The series (titled “The Awakening”) was created in response to the controversy about a conference at Stanford University that featured a line-up of only white male speakers, and contains numerous testimonies from women who feel oppressed despite working within supposedly progressive places of learning. For example, Anne McClintock (Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Princeton University) writes about a senior male professor saying he would not support her for tenure unless she censored her own critique of Freud. (Ironically, McKintock’s work became a classic book

546   Elsie Walker titled Imperial Leather that is internationally cited and translated.) This taught her that “freedom of speech is not universally bestowed, but a privilege guarded by the anointed (still mostly white and male) gatekeepers of cultural power, who decide whose voices are heard.” Similarly, Patricia McGuire (President, Trinity Washington University) claims “I have been accused of talking too much at gatherings with other college presidents where the men dominated the conversation.” So, she argues that “solidarity for justice means that we must step out of the self-protective silence . . . Women with power must do more than keep our own positions safe; we must dare to take risks for the sake of others.” This chapter is written to honor other women in academia, and especially those who refuse to downplay those personal experiences that positively affect their teaching. (The Chronicle of Higher Education, “The Awakening: Women and Power in the Academy,” April 1, 2018. https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/the-awakening.) 13. As I have discussed elsewhere in relation to the work of Judith Butler (whose influence is a focal point later in this chapter), poststructuralism is “concerned with deconstructing those taken-as-a-given truths that produce the illusion of fixed meaning, understanding, reality, or identity. More specifically, the poststructuralism critic deconstructs perceptions the ‘self ’ as a fixed and coherent entity, exposing it as a fictional construct. Equally, the meaning of the text cannot be reduced to a single purpose or meaning attachable to an originating author or creator: instead, every individual reader is a creator of meaning which they identify within a given text. Moreover, the post-structuralist analysis frequently entails that the writer be self-aware about their own subject position in relation to that which they interpret, thus further acknowledging the contingency of how those truths they identify may be perceived.” Elsie Walker, Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 326. 14. For a summary of psychological responses to affective sonic stimulus, see Patrick N. Juslin, “Seven Ways in which the Brain Can Evoke Emotions from Sounds,” in Sound, Mind and Emotion, ed. Frans Mossberg (Media-Trick, Lund University: 2008), 9–37. Among other possibilities, Lund summarizes particular “psychological mechanisms” as follows (13–14): the “brain stem reflex,” which is caused by music that has built-in acoustical characteristics (such as dissonance) with immediate emotive impact; “evaluative conditioning” which happens through music associated with specific kinds of repeated stimuli (like the music associated with meeting a particular friend, and which creates stimulates emotional reactions in accordance with this connection even when that friend is absent); “emotional contagion,” which refers to how the auditor will “imitate” the emotion they perceive in the music; “visual imagery,” which refers to the visual images that are conjured up by music (as in innumerable examples of programmatic composition); “episodic memory,” which refers to music associated with a very particular experience of relative intensity (like a death, or falling in love); and “music expectancy,” which refers to how music creates emotional responses by playing out or against the expectations of the auditor as it is in progress (as with a familiar or jarring chordal progression). 15. I am not considering such physical considerations as how the size of a room can affect our emotional reactions to the same sounds: for example, I first watched the Butler/Taylor conversation separately from my students, with headphones at a laptop (having sent them the URL to watch it individually as well), and more recently with them in a large lecture theatre with 5.1 surround sound. For more on “spatial determinants” as they affect emotional responses to sound, see Fredrik Hagman, “Emotional Response to Sound Influence of Spatial Determinants,” MA Thesis (Göteborg: Chalmers University of Technology, 2010),

Hearing and Teaching Soundtracks   547 http://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/133873.pdf. For an introduction to how weather affects sonic perceptions, visit the ABD Engineering and Design company website (Grand Rapids, MI): https://www.abdengineering.com/blog/weather-affects-noise-study/. 16. For a very brief introduction to standard emotional responses to particular kinds of sonic stimulus, visit the Amplifon company website for hearing loss and hearing aids, http:// www.amplifon.ie/resources/impact-of-sound-on-the-brain/ accessed May 18, 2018. 17. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 81. 18. Ibid., 90. 19. I draw from Martha Nochimson’s introductory section to World on Film in making these assertions about cinema as a global medium (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2019), 1–19. 20. Robert Stam and Louise Spence, “Colonialism, Racism, and Representation: An Introduction,”Screen 24, no. 2 (1983). Rpt. in Film Theory and Criticism, 6th ed., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 877–91: 880. 21. Walker, Understanding Sound Tracks, 137–70. 22. Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, “Anthropocentrism,” in Critical Terms for Animal Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 47–63: 55. 23. For example, Jacqueline Genovese writes about storytelling as a means of managing PTSD: “narrative can help soldiers tell their stories through the words and experiences of others, and provide tools to give shape and meaning to their own experiences.” Similarly, Laurel J. Kiser, Barbara Baumgardner, and Joyce Dorado present a therapeutic approach to the narratives that families pass down through generations: “Families share stories that illuminate and combine their separate experiences into a meaningful whole.” See Jacqueline Genovese, “Post Traumatic Story Disorder: Using the Power of Narrative to Heal the Invisible Wounds of War.” MA Thesis (The University of Texas, 2013): https://tdl-ir.tdl.org/ handle/2152.3/534?show=full; L. J. Kiser, B. Baumgardner, and & J. Dorado, “Who Are We, But for the Stories We Tell: Family Stories and Healing, Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy 2, no. 3 (2010): 243–49. 24. Cfr. Paul Byrnes, “Ten Canoes,” The Sydney Morning Herald, July 1, 2006. http://www.smh. com.au/news/film-reviews/tencanoes/2006/06/30/1151174381066.html. 25. For a brief introduction to Aboriginal community experiences of mourning and sharing grief, see Jens Korff, “Mourning an Aboriginal Death,” Creative Spirits (National Library of Australia), December 18, 2017. https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/people/mourning-an-aboriginal-death. For a summary of Aboriginal expectations of hand­ ling death, as explained to non-Aboriginal medical practitioners working in Australia today, see a handbook by the Northern Sydney Local Health District, “Death and Dying in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Culture: A Framework for Supporting Aboriginal and Torress Strait Islander Peoples through Sad News and Sorry Business” (NSW Government: Northern Sydney Local Health District), August 2015, https://www.nslhd. health.nsw.gov.au/Services/Directory/Documents/Death%20and%20Dying%20in%20 Aboriginal%20and%20Torres%20Strait%20Islander%20Culture_Sorry%20Business.pdf. 26. Byrnes, “Ten Canoes,” np. 27. I use sources that are openly accessible to my students whenever possible. At the time of writing, the Butler/Taylor video is one of several extracts from the documentary An Examined Life available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo7o2LYATDc, accessed May 18, 2018. 28. Chion, Audio-Vision, 90.

548   Elsie Walker 29. For those that know Paris Is Burning well, all this resonates: the climax of the film is the tragic death of a transgendered Escort named Venus who was found murdered, presumably by one of her clients who was appalled by her body. In Venus’s end, the film stresses the perilous limits of life for those who are living against the heteronormative status quo: she is a representative reminder of physical vulnerability even as her story, image, and voice are memorialized on film. That she wanted to live as a woman is indisputable, just as she was born with male body parts. This conversation I had in class led to our reflecting on the arbitrariness of Venus’s body as the home for who she was.

Select Bibliography Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Insubordination.” In Inside Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss, 13–31. New York: Routledge, 1991. Reprinted in The Judith Butler Reader, ed. Sarah Salih, 120–37. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Crabb, Annabel. The Wife Drought. North Sydney: Random House Australia, 2015. Elliott, Paul. Hitchcock and the Cinema of Sensations. London: L. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2011. Elsaesser, Thomas and Malte Hagener. Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2015. Hanisch, Carol. “ ‘The Personal Is Political (1969):’ The Women’s Liberation Movement Classic with a New Explanatory Introduction.” January 2006. http://www.carolhanisch.org/ CHwritings/PIP.html. MacDougall, Douglas. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Marks, Laura U. The Skin of Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Marquez, Loren. “Narrating Our Lives: Retelling Mothering and Professional Work in Composition Studies.” Composition Studies 39, no.1 (2011): 73–85. Nochimson, Martha. World on Film: An Introduction. Walden: Wiley-Blackwell. 2010. Osterweil, Ara. “Between Her Body and the Stain.” Los Angeles Review of Books. July 27, 2017, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/between-her-body-and-the-stain. Schlehofer, Michelle. “Practicing What We Teach?: An Autobiographical Reflection on Navigating Academic as a Single Mother.” Journal of Community Psychology 40, no.1 (2012): 112–28. Stam, Robert, and Louise Spence. “Colonialism, Racism, and Representation: An Introduction.” Screen 24, no. 2 (1983). Reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism, 6th ed., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 877–91. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Walker, Elsie. Understanding Sound Tracks Through Film Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

chapter 27

H ea r i ng Fil m M usic Topics ou tside th e Mov ie Th e atr e Listening Cinematically to Pastorals Janet Bourne

When a modern listener goes to a concert and hears Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony, what images come to mind? While some scholars, such as Wye J. Allanbrook, seem to assume that listeners hear and recognize eighteenth-century topics, others, such as Eric Clarke, wonder: “What kinds of topics—if any—might a modern-day listener be aware of?”1 According to Clarke, twenty-first-century listeners live in a different topical world than eighteenth- or nineteenth-century listeners.2 This chapter approaches this question from a cognitive perspective, exploring one of the aspects that mediate a ­modern-day listener’s understanding of historical musical topics. In line with some of the recent scholarship on cinematic listening, I argue that contemporary listeners might use associations learned from film music to make sense of Western art music topics, despite anachronistic “inappropriateness.” The pastoral topic serves as a case study and these hypotheses are empirically tested in a laboratory experiment.

A Cognitive Framework for Cinematic Listening According to Michael Long’s formulation, cinematic listening involves a “process of simultaneous audiation and envisioning,” where music compels listeners to “engage in acts of ‘envisioning’ some accompanying diegesis” because of the ways “aural gestures can trigger the construction or recall” of images.3 In this sense, to listen cinematically

550   Janet Bourne means to adopt an associational, narrative, and visual mode of listening—for example, envisioning a series of images or characters. Of course, as countless examples from the “Moonlight” Sonata to Wagner’s program for visualizing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony demonstrate, “associational listening” is hardly a cinematic invention.4 Arguably, the history of Western art music provides us with abundant indirect evidence of editors, performers, and audiences “envisioning diegesis” while listening.5 A difference between nineteenth-century associational listening and contemporary cinematic listening might lie in how listeners envision images. Ben Winters notes that Although a nineteenth-century audience’s reactions to symphonic narrativity were perhaps more likely shaped by the dominant narrative forms of painting, novel, and play, a symphonic audience in the 1950s, and perhaps even more so today, might well find themselves visualizing symphonic narrative in cinematic terms—invoking jump cuts, close-ups, and other cinematographic devices to aid their enjoyment and understanding of a symphony.6

Historical and contemporary listening practices might also differ in what listeners ­envision. When audiences watch films, they learn to associate conventional music with specific images. Film scoring guides, such as Music Scoring for TV & Motion Pictures by Marlin Skiles, exploit this assumption: “The only real guide to the music approach is a broad formula that relies on use of set patterns that have become familiar to the audience in association with normal or routine scenes or situations.”7 These images haunt similar sounding orchestral music, even when audiences sit in a concert hall, meaning listeners might remember specific films when creating their imaginative story, whether consciously or not. Simon Frith writes that narrative or associational listening is an “effect of years going to the cinema” and ultimately informs “all our music listening.”8 The cognitive process of analogy may explain why people listen “cinematically,” and specifically how aural gestures might “trigger” the recall of images. For cognitive scientists, analogy is a fundamental process by which people understand their surroundings.9 Indeed, according to Douglas Hofstadter, analogy is the “core of cognition.”10 This goes well beyond verbal analogies. People use analogy to make sense of unfamiliar concepts; for example, what is known about the solar system’s structure is borrowed to model the atom’s structure in the analogy “an atom is like a solar system.”11 One domain or situation—called the source—is more familiar or better understood than the other domain or situation—called the target.12 People retrieve, or remember, relational information concerning a source and transfer that information to understand a target. In this example, solar system is the better understood concept and atom is less understood. Because of analogy, people infer atoms “behavior” similarly to solar systems.13 Cognitively speaking, a person reasons analogically in three steps: (1) retrieval, (2) mapping, and (3) evaluation or transfer (see Figure 27.1).14 In retrieval, a person is reminded of a prior analogous situation from memory. In mapping—defined as a “systematic set of correspondences” between elements of source and target15—they align situations based on their relations and transfer inferences from source to target.16 In

Listening Cinematically to Pastorals   551 Retrieval

Mapping TARGET SOURCE INFERENCES

Transfer

Figure 27.1 Major components of analogical reasoning. (Graphic adapted from Holyoak, “Analogy and Relational Reasoning,” 236.)

transfer, they judge inferences and the analogy as a whole, using it to glean new information. Consider the analogy “an atom is like the solar system.” In the first step, retrieval, they retrieve their knowledge about solar systems and atoms. In the second step, ­mapping, they use comparison to align this knowledge so to highlight and map over relationships; in this course, one possible relation is smaller objects revolve around a larger one. Finally, during the third step of transfer, listeners judge inferences from this mapping; for example, “if smaller objects revolve around a larger one faster in solar systems, then they probably revolve faster in atoms as well.” If analogy shapes our cognition in everyday life, then it may shape our cognition in understanding music as well. Based on analogy, I create a framework for cinematic listening that allows me to ­theorize the listening process from the perspective of cognitive psychology.17 Listeners may use analogy to retrieve previous experiences with music (source) to map and transfer to music heard in the moment (target). When sitting in the concert hall, for example, modern listeners might make sense of unfamiliar nineteenth-century Western art music by making analogies to familiar film music. Or, in the case of pastorals, they might learn associations by watching films and then recall these associations later when hearing pastorals sans scene.

The Pastoral Topic Musical topics are one type of pattern—or collection of aural gestures—that audiences might become familiar with by watching films. According to Raymond Monelle, they are expressive, rhetorical musical gestures with a “conventional [often extra-musical] meaning, understood by all hearers.”18 A topic has two components: features (or musical attributes, surface phenomena) and socio-cultural associations. Topics are easily ­perceived in part because their multitude of features lie on the surface, which means

552   Janet Bourne they are close to Long’s concept of aural gestures. They facilitate analogy-making since listeners can often retrieve similar sounding music from previous experience (source) to map onto the target. Therefore, they could play an important role in the process of cinematic listening; specifically, in how listeners map musical features and transfer a ­topic’s network of associations from film music to WAM. Topic theory originated with Leonard Ratner and his study of eighteenth-century Western art music.19 While musicology has continued to focus on eighteenth- and ­nineteenth-century topics in their historical contexts, the study of film composers’ ­reliance on topics (old and new) needs greater attention, and is starting to gain some traction.20 In film, topics communicate locale, time period, character’s ethnicity or socio-cultural backgrounds, among other information.21 For example, Gorbman has demonstrated how topics have been used to represent the Indian “Other” in westerns from 1930s through the 1950s and how this otherness has varied with political history.22 Film composers of symphonic scores not only created new topics (e.g., western, Native American topic), but also relied on older eighteenth-century ones, such as the march and the pastoral. Heard as early as the Baroque period, the pastoral topic reflects a literary genre of “pastoral.”23 In attempting to define pastoral literature, William Empson identifies an underlying thread of “putting the complex into the simple.”24 By analogy to literature, as Robert Hatten has shown, musical features of the pastoral adhere to a principle of “simplicity as opposed to complexity.”25 According to Raymond Monelle, features of the Western art music (WAM) pastoral include flute and oboe timbre, 6/8 or 12/8 meter, drone bass or pedal points, and simple harmonies.26 Hatten adds a few others such as “idyllic, untroubled music,” “major mode,” “slow harmonic rhythm,” parallel thirds, subdominant emphasis, and “simple lyricism in a slow tempo.”27 Like its Western art predecessor, features of the film music pastoral include slow tempo, drone bass (pedal point), major mode, simple lyricism (lyrical, triadic or pentatonic melodies), slow harmonic rhythms, and simple harmonies. Features that seem more common in film pastorals over Western art ones include grace notes or quick embellishments, and a tendency for one of two accompaniment styles: a solo instrument with a homophonic, sustained background (often strings) or a solo instrument with an arpeggiating accompaniment. Timbre also contributes to the sound of film pastorals, with frequent reliance on flute and strings. These instruments, along with clarinet, English horn, and a few others, appear on a list of timbres for creating a scenic (or Pastoral) mood according to Skiles’s 1975 book Music Scoring for TV and Motion Pictures.28 Like with all musical topics, networks of associations change with time. In the ­eighteenth-century, as Monelle shows, the pastoral tended to signify “sunlit tranquility,” courtly, innocent shepherds and shepherdesses, “peaceful landscapes,” the “lyric spirit,” “amorous play,” as well as peacefulness of Christmas and the Christian heaven.29 To speak broadly, in nineteenth-century musical iconography, Arcadian shepherds and shepherdesses were mostly replaced by a Romantic idea of contemporary peasants and the innocent “spirit of unlettered country people.”30 The landscape took center stage, bringing romanticized associations of woods and brooks, fields, mountains, sunshine,

Listening Cinematically to Pastorals   553 PASTORAL TOPIC SIMPLICITY

Shepherds

Glorification of Landscape

INNOCENCE

Lyric Spirit

Christmas/ Christian Heaven

Country Folk

Figure 27.2  Historically contextualized associations of WAM pastoral.

and beautiful vistas.31 Performances of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony that included scenery and action provide a peek into some of its later associations. In the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, Otto Jahn published a critique of an 1863 performance in Düsseldorf, summarizing the paired action on stage: The first picture shows a serene countryside in summer bathed in the light of morning, on the left a distant perspective, on the right a copse with a grazing flock and attendant shepherds. Harvesters approach and begin their work, the parish priest appears, a visiting family from the town strolls around and moves towards the ­village . . . For the third movement we find ourselves in the middle of the village in front of the inn, where the peasants are dancing merrily.32

Once we account for these historical variations in the topic’s cultural associations, the pastoral at its core embodies two essential threads: simplicity and innocence (see Figure 27.2). In 1739, Johann Mattheson wrote that pastorals (or shepherd plays) “find its truest, most important characteristic not in jubilation rejoicing, nor grand parades; but in a pure, modest love, in an unadorned, innate and pleasant simplicity.”33 Current scholars in literature and music also allude to these two threads. Peter Marinelli recognizes that the pastoral involves a “search for simplicity,” where “the refuge is in a rural retreat to Arcadia; or from a specific period of human existence.”34 Monelle notes that Shepherdliness was “an allegory of innocence,” and a finding of innocence in pure love, lacking an understanding of what was “real.”35 Underlying various images of the pastoral are these ideals of simplicity and innocence.

The Corpus Study: Determining Cinematic Associations Yet what about film music pastorals? To trace cinematic associations, I start by analyzing how composers use pastorals in a small corpus of 21 Oscar-nominated film scores released between 1985 and 2014 (see Figure  27.3). Researchers who complete corpus

554   Janet Bourne Film

Year

Composer

Out of Africa

1985

Barry

Hoosters

1986

Goldsmith

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

1986

Rosenman

The Untouchables

1987

Morricone

Field of Dreams

1989

Horner

Dances with Wolves

1990

Barry

The Lion King

1994

Zimmer

Little Women

1994

Newman

Forrest Gump

1994

Silvestri

Sense and Sensibility

1995

Doyle

Emma

1996

Portman

Cider House Rules

1999

Portman

The Patriot

2000

Williams

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

2001

Williams

Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

2001

Shore

Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

2003

Shore

Pride & Prejudice

2005

Marianelli

The Queen

2006

Desplat

How to Train Your Dragon

2010

Powell

Lincoln

2012

Williams

Saving Mr. Banks

2013

Newman

Figure 27.3  Film corpus.

studies analyze naturally occurring musical data, or musical data assembled from “real life” as opposed to constructed.36 If statistical regularities determine listeners’ expectations and responses, then identifying musical patterns that repeatedly occur uncovers processes by which listeners learn and perceive music.37 In general, topics in Hollywood-

Listening Cinematically to Pastorals   555 PASTORAL TOPIC

Historical or Literary Past

SIMPLICITY

INNOCENCE

Nostalgia

Nature & Country

Home & Family

Figure 27.4  Associations of film pastoral based on corpus.

style film scores regularly occur with conventionalized images and scenes. The corpus provides a way to analyze imagery, character emotions, and narrative contexts in which the pastoral topic appears. Based on this corpus, the pastoral topic has four dominant associational themes: a HISTORICAL OR LITERARY PAST, NATURE AND COUNTRY (often tranquil or peaceful scenes), NOSTALGIA (real or imagined past), and HOME AND FAMILY (see Figure  27.4). Like its WAM predecessor, all four themes seem to rely on a common thread of simplicity and innocence. Pastorals used for the HISTORICAL OR LITERARY PAST often communicate that this film takes place in a historical time period; for example, the opening to Cider House Rules (1999). Also, the HISTORICAL OR LITERARY pastoral occurs in film adaptations of literature, such as Pride & Prejudice (2005) and Emma (1996). The NOSTALGIA association has different forms: an individualistic or personal remembering (often bittersweet), remembering an idyllic home or utopian space, or remembering a distant past that never existed. When the pastoral represents NOSTALGIA, a character saying “remember” or “past” often triggers its appearance. In the emblematic example of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003), Howard Shore uses a pastoral topic to represent The Shire, the idyllic home of the hobbits. Near the end of the film, when all hope seems lost, this pastoral topic is heard, as an overt marker of nostalgia, just as Samwise Gamgee asks, “Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo? It’ll be spring soon. The orchids will be in blossom and the birds will be nesting in the Hazel thicket. They’ll be sowing the summer barley in the north fields.” Often, the pastoral topic accompanies scenes of peaceful nature; rolling hills, sunshine, flowers, implying the NATURE AND COUNTRY theme. In addition to accompanying scenes of tranquil nature, the pastoral accompanies scenes that take place in a private sphere as part of the HOME AND FAMILY associational theme. These scenes are not only set in homes, but also include scenes related to the home such as child-rearing and shelter.38 Although representing familial love in general, the pastoral seems particularly connected to feminine domesticity and to other ideals—such as tranquility, that mainstream cinematic plots tend to associate with female characters.39 These themes represent themselves in film through set, dialogue, characters, affect, and narrative context, to name a few.

556   Janet Bourne Example 27.1 Pastoral topic, beginning of “Celtic Soul” cue, Saving Mr. Banks (2013), ­transcription by the author.

VIdeo 27.1  Excerpt featuring the pastoral topic in Saving Mr. Banks (2013).

In many films, the pastoral topic is heard in connection with multiple associational themes. In the same scene, dialogue might imply one associational theme, while setting points to another. In Saving Mr. Banks (2013), for example, the pastoral is heard only during flashbacks the main character has of her childhood (PAST and HOME AND FAMILY theme represented by filmic form). In one scene, she sits in a sun-kissed field by a river (NATURE AND COUNTRY represented by setting) while her father (Colin Farrell) (HOME AND FAMILY represented by character) explains how the world is an illusion (NOSTALGIA represented by dialogue) (for a transcription of cue see Example 27.1, for a clip of this scene see Video 27.1). TRAVERS GOFF (FATHER): We share a Celtic soul, you and I. This world, it’s just an illusion, Ginty, old girl. As long as we hold that thought, they can’t break us. They can’t make us endure their reality, bleak and bloody as it is.

In their study of television title tunes, Philip Tagg and Bob Clarida establish that listeners link pastoral to “nostalgia” and see it in contrast to “modern urban phenomena,” including “industry” and “technology.”40 My preliminary analysis of film music pastorals, in addition to confirming the link to nostalgia, also finds “industry” or “technology” imagery to be conspicuous by its absence. Tagg and Clarida’s listeners also associated pastoral with “long ago” and “what has always been.”41 According to the corpus, the film music pastoral represents a nostalgic striving for something that used to be—an idyllic home or a tranquil countryside—even if that something never truly existed.

Analysis of Listening “Cinematically” As an example of analogy and the cognitive framework for cinematic listening, consider how a modern moviegoer might listen “cinematically” to Sibelius’s sixth movement

Listening Cinematically to Pastorals   557 Example 27.2 Sibelius, Pelléas et Mélisande suite, op. 46, mvt. VI, “Pastorale” (mm. 1–4).

from his Pelléas et Mélisande suite, op. 46 composed in 1905, titled “Pastorale” (Example 27.2). This excerpt is a prototypical pastoral, fitting most of the features outlined by Monelle, Hatten, and others. The piece is slow, labeled Andantino pastorale. The melody, played by two clarinets, is in parallel thirds and the clarinets play the simple and lyrical melody dolce, or sweet. A drone hums underneath on the tonic note in the horns, bass, and violas. The harmonic rhythm is slow and uses simple harmonies, rarely straying from the tonic chord, while the cellos underneath play a simple repetitive ostinato. Overall, the piece creates an idyllic or untroubled feel, the embodiment of simple lyricism. Consider a contemporary listener who has built a personal repertoire of audiovisual associations through exposure to the mainstream corpus outlined earlier. She hears the pastoral features: drone bass, parallel thirds, simple harmonies, major mode, simple lyricism, slow tempo, and simple melodic contour. She retrieves pastorals from films (see Figure  27.5). The constellations of associations between WAM and film pastorals differ despite some similarity. While threads of “innocence” and “simplicity” stay consistent, she envisions these ideas differently. With her mapping, she transfers over associations of innocent children walking through forests. Perhaps she pictures calm and peaceful waterfalls, lakes, or fields. These images come to her as if filmed by a camera, with aerial shots or panning across children playing in a field. Would (and could) an experiment prove that people listen cinematically in this way?

558   Janet Bourne Retrieval Sibelius Mvmt Drone, parallel thirds, major, slow, lyrical Calm and peaceful fields, idyllic and innocent home

Film Pastoral Topic Mapping

Transfer

Drone, parallel thirds, major, slow, lyrical Calm and peaceful fields, idyllic and innocent home

Figure 27.5  Visual representation of the possible analogical reasoning adopted by a contemporary listener when listening to the Sibelius movement from a cinematic perspective; the listener retrieves knowledge of film pastoral topic.

Designing an Experiment to Test Cinematic Listening So far, few experiments have tested the recognition and interpretation of topics or the relationships between filmic literacy and musical meaning. In one important experiment, Carol Krumhansl demonstrates that participants relate topics to judgements of memorability, openness, and emotionality.42 In two separate experiments on musical meaning and narrative, Elizabeth Margulis as well as Ruth Herbert and Nicola Dibben find that participants rely on previous knowledge of film and multimedia when asked to create meanings and narratives when listening to music.43 Herbert and Dibben, in particular, asked 10- to 18-year-olds to describe what meanings they forged while listening to various pieces of music. Their participants responded with filmic descriptions either related to perception of a narrative structure or visualization. While these findings are extremely relevant, neither experiment intentionally tested topics or cinematic listening. The experiment I report here was explicitly designed to test both, assessing if and how listeners use associations from film music when making sense of the pastoral topic.

Participants 15 students at a University in the Pacific Southwest of the United States took part in the study. Ages ranged from 18 to 33 years old (M = 20.6) with 5 who self-identified as men and 10 as women. They reported an average of 3.8 years of instrumental training

Listening Cinematically to Pastorals   559 (0-10 years) and 1.47 years of training in music theory (0-6 years). With few exceptions, participants completed the study in less than an hour.

Materials Participants listened to eight 40-second long orchestral excerpts of pastoral music: four WAM pastorals and four film pastorals (see Figure 27.6 for list). Participants did not know whether they were listening to WAM or film music. To eliminate potential order effects, excerpts were presented randomly, and so everyone heard all excerpts in a different order. These pieces represent the pastoral topic in part because they fit many musical features of the topic. Additional measures also verified these excerpts. All film music excerpts were extracted from soundtracks to films in the previously discussed corpus. For the WAM excerpts, pieces were chosen that either (1) have been discussed in the topic theory or program music literature, or (2) have pastoral-implied programmatic titles (and in some cases, both, like the Schubert excerpt). In addition, a music theorist not involved in the experiment confirmed these as examples based on the previously defined collection of musical features. Pieces were also chosen with two other considerations in mind: unfamiliarity and breadth. The choice to use unfamiliar excerpts was made to better control participants’ responses and compensate for possible biases participants may have from previous exposure to the music. A question in the experiment confirmed that these excerpts were unfamiliar to participants. Pastorals were also ­chosen for breadth both in time period and composer. The aim was to reflect a holistic understanding of the pastoral topic. Despite these precautions, the choice of music in WAM Pastorals Piece

Composer

Film Music Pastorals Year

Film

Composer

Year

Symphony No, 6, D. 589, II, “Pastoral”

Schubert

1817–1818

Out of Africa

John Barry

1985

Pelléas et Mélisande Suite, op. 46, VI, “Pastorale”

Sibelius

1905

Little Women

Thomas Newman

1994

English Idylls for Orchestra

Butterworth

1911

Emma

Rachel Portman

1996

The Lark Ascending

Vaughan Williams

1921

The Queen

Alexandre Desplat

2006

Figure 27.6  List of excerpts used in experiment.

560   Janet Bourne e­ xperiments is never flawless, and the specific music that participants heard is a potential limitation for generalization of the findings.

Procedure After listening to each excerpt, participants were asked: “Write down the stories, pictures, moods, feelings, thoughts, or impressions that went through your head while listening. Include as much detail as possible.” I hypothesized that listeners would engage in cinematic listening and this would manifest itself in two ways. First, themes in the participants’ qualitative data would more closely match network of associations determined by the corpus rather than the historically-derived associations. Second, participants would mention specific movies and use cinematic terms, both in describing components of the picture (e.g., film, scene) and camera movements (e.g., close-up, zoom, etc.).

Data Analysis: The Meaning Extraction Method The meaning extraction method (MEM) was used to analyze what participants wrote.44 This technique for psychological language analysis identifies the most frequently used words across a collection of texts—here, participants’ responses to pastoral excerpts—as well as which of these words are statistically likely to co-occur. These co-occurring words imply a psychologically meaningful theme. For example, if several participants frequently use words “evil,” “dark,” and “villain” together, then this would imply a broader theme of “antagonist.” Similarly, if they use “class,” “parents,” and “people” together, then that indicates a broader “social” theme. Researchers have found that these themes reveal information about communication strategies and psychological states during social interactions.45 Essentially, as Ryan Boyd puts it, this technique determines what words “naturally clump into ‘themes’ using some basic statistical techniques . . . The procedure begins with a collection of texts and results in psychologically meaningful word clusters.”46 The method consists of three steps: 1. Identify relatively common words in a corpus of texts (such as participant responses). See Figure 27.7 for a list of the twenty words participants used most frequently when responding to pastorals. 2. Create a table that shows which responses use which common words. These first two steps were automatized by a software called the Meaning Extraction Helper.47 In a spreadsheet, frequent words are assigned a binary score (0 or 1). This binary score reports whether or not that text includes a word from the frequent word list. For example, if 100 frequent words are identified, each word will be assigned a “0” or “1” to show whether the word was used for each text (assigned a “1”) or not (assigned a “0”).

Listening Cinematically to Pastorals   561 Word

Frequency

Music

37

Piece

37

Sound

26

Calm

23

Play

19

Happy

17

Dance

15

Sense

14

Soft

14

Picture

14

Time

13

Song

13

Peaceful

13

Scene

11

Movie

10

Give

10

Slow

9

Day

9

Image

8

Sad

8

Figure 27.7  Step 1 of the meaning extraction method, Top 20 most frequent words used in experiment responses.

3. Identify words that frequently co-occur by using principal component analysis (PCA) with varimax rotation, a statistical method for finding groups of correlations or connections.48 In this case, statistical software SPSS was used. All words that received a binary score (“0” or “1”) were included in the PCA, with a few exceptions. The words “music,” “piece,” and “sound” were excluded from the analysis, since these frequent words did not contribute to associations of the pastoral and instead reflected how participants often began sentences (e.g., “The music sounds like . . . ” “This piece reminds me of . . . ”). The PCA identified which words occurred often enough together to create meaningful patterns or themes. The results can be seen in Figure  27.8, which displays five ­columns, each column representing a factor.49 These five factors accounted for 31.66

562   Janet Bourne Film & Multimedia Points of Reference 1

Historical Social Dance

Innocence & Nature

2

3

Love & Family

4

5

movie

.765

character

.592

scene

.547

sense

.517

–.344

give

.403

–.354

play peaceful

.331 –.311

dance

.744

ballroom

.706

imagine

.555

people

.447

time

.303

child

.744

forest

.526

young

.486

love

.429

field

.422

walk

.376

calm

–.356

.421

.333

disney

.678

warm

.670

happy

.537 .557

picture

–.492

soft

.446

nature nice

Calmness & Nature

.368

–.412

slow

–.370

song

.355

listen

–.310

sleep

–.306

Figure 27.8  Step 3 of the meaning extraction method, a principal component analysis done in SPSS of word clusters which identified five themes.

Listening Cinematically to Pastorals   563 percent of the variance, which is very high for natural language use, according to Chung and Pennebaker.50 If a word on the left has a number underneath a column (a correlation coefficient), then the statistical program found an association between that word and that column or factor. Then, words all clustered under the same factor are connected to each other, and they create a theme of associations. These numbers indicate the degree of relationship between that word and that theme. If the number is positive, then the word relates to that theme and represents that theme. The higher the number, the stronger the relationship. For example, the word “movie” correlates highly with the first factor; it is not only a positive number, but a high positive number. If the number is negative, then there is still a relationship, but a negative one. The more another word is associated with that factor, the less it is associated with the word with the negative number. If participants were likely to use the positively correlated words for that theme, they were unlikely to use the negatively correlated words. Because of this, I do not include words negatively correlated in the thematic group. Any words with a correlation coefficient of less than 0.3 were considered too weak to be meaningful and eliminated. A number between 0.3 and 0.6 would be a moderate correlation and anything above 0.6 would be strong.

Results The statistical analysis identified five themes based on saturation, or frequent groups of words occurring together, distinguishing psychologically meaningful and coherent patterns. In labeling each theme, I attempted to encompass all words grouped under that theme (Figure 27.8). While this is a subjective process, much effort was given to label themes as representatively as possible. The first theme, FILM AND MULTIMEDIA POINTS OF REFERENCE, clusters together words “movie,” “character,” “scene,” “sense,” “give,” and “play.” The label FILM AND MULTIMEDIA points of reference was adopted since “movie” had the strongest correlation to that theme and while “play” was sometimes used to refer to a stage play (e.g., “movie or play”), participants more often used it as a verb (e.g., “this music would be played,” “children were playing”). The statistical program places the strongest factor in the first column, communicating that this theme was the strongest of the five. This means participants relied most on referencing multimedia when writing their responses, without any prompting and without any visuals. 80 percent of participants used at least one film-related word (“movie,” “character,” scene,” film,” “media,” “multimedia,” “Disney,” or “camera”) when responding to at least one excerpt. This implies that participants consciously used a cinematic mode of listening since they explicitly referenced it. Participants referred to film and multimedia in their responses regardless of whether they were listening to original film music or not. An average of 21.63 percent of participants referenced the FILM AND MULTIMEDIA points of reference theme in their responses to film music excerpts. Similarly, 17 percent of participants also referenced this theme in their responses to WAM excerpts. Participants evoked this theme more often

564   Janet Bourne Excerpt

Percentage of Participants who used at least one word from the FILM & MULTIMEDIA theme in their response to excerpt

The Queen

26.6%

Little Women

26.6%

Emma

20%

Out of Africa

13.3%

Vaughan Williams

20%

Schubert

26.6%

Sibelius

6.60%

Butterworth

13.3%

Figure 27.9  Percentage of participants who used at least one word from the FILM AND ­MULTIMEDIA theme in their response to each excerpt.

for some excerpts than others, with The Queen (2006) and Schubert prompting the highest responses and Out of Africa (1985), Butterworth and Sibelius the lowest (see Figure 27.9). In their responses, listeners would refer to either a hypothetical film they envisioned or an actual film. For example, here are select responses listeners gave when imagining a hypothetical film. This one made me feel sad, like in a play or movie when something bad happens and the characters have to focus on what to do next. [Participant 6, Film Music: The Queen] The music was somewhat bittersweet, but altogether gentle and conclusive, like the closing scene of a happy movie where the hero ultimately triumphs but recognizes what was lost in the process. [Participant 15, WAM: Vaughan Williams] This music made me think that it would fit in a scene of a movie where they show a really beautiful landscape. [Participant 2, Film Music: Out of Africa]

When referencing a specific film, participants relied on their memories of that film while listening. This sounded like the soundtrack to a family-friendly drama. Also, I could not shake the image of Robin Williams from Good Will Hunting from my mind. [Participant 9, Film Music: Emma] This music gave me a sense of a ballroom or dinner party that’s very fancy. This made me think of people dancing at a party like one in Pride and Prejudice. [Participant 2, WAM: Butterworth]

Some participants also described images as if filmed by a camera. They used action and descriptive words such as “scan,” “bird’s eye view,” “closing scene,” “background music”

Listening Cinematically to Pastorals   565 and described excerpts as if the music matched the image (bold added for emphasis to select responses). I thought of a couple of children playing in an open field as I scan over the entire setting in my head [Participant 13, Film Music: Little Women] I had two different images in my head . . . the other a birds eye view of a golf course, like the masters and it is the final day of competition [Participant 5, Film Music: Emma] Background music as someone is walking through an enchanted forest [Participant 10, Film Music: Emma] The music was somewhat bittersweet, but altogether gentle and conclusive, like the closing scene of a happy movie where the hero ultimately triumphs but recognizes what was lost in the process. [Participant 15, WAM: Vaughan Williams] Camera zooms in on many many people playing violin then further in on their hands moving back and forth [Participant 7, WAM: Butterworth]

When envisioning a scene to match the music, they sometimes saw this image as if it was a movie played in their head: the camera zooms, they see the scene as if from above, background music plays. These results could provide evidence that some twenty-first-century listeners use associations learned from film music pastorals to negotiate musical meaning when listening to orchestral pastorals in general, despite presence or absence of visuals. While these are responses that explicitly mention film and multimedia, other participants could have adopted a cinematic mode of listening without being consciously aware of their reliance on previous associations with film. One way to address these implicit associations is to compare themes derived from the MEM to associational themes that emerged from the film corpus. The other four themes the MEM identified— HISTORICAL SOCIAL DANCE, INNOCENCE AND NATURE, CALMNESS AND NATURE, AND LOVE AND ­FAMILY—correspond with the corpus’s themes. The second theme was HISTORICAL SOCIAL DANCE, with clusters of words “dance,” “ballroom,” “imagine,” “people,” and “time.” “Dance” was used to describe film music excerpts, but “ballroom” only appeared in response to WAM excerpts. This implies that participants recognized that WAM excerpts were an older style, echoing previous findings that people can classify musical styles by time period even with no formal training.51 After examining individual responses, it becomes clear that people imagined WAM pastorals underscoring a historical scene, with “ballroom” having a sense of “old” or “old-fashioned.” In addition, people often described a high class or royal scene: Right away this music made me imagine a very fancy ballroom dinner party. I can see this music being played with people dressed in their best and dancing together. [Participant 2, WAM: Schubert] It feels like something in the old European tea parties would sound like. I can imagine a small quartet playing this piece to aristocratic noble family while they nibble on their crumpets. [Participant 3, WAM: Schubert]

566   Janet Bourne This piece makes me think of a formal dance, something like a masquerade ball in 18th century France. [Participant 5, WAM: Schubert]

The theme of HISTORICAL SOCIAL DANCE corresponds to theme HISTORICAL OR LITERARY PAST as determined by the corpus. Several participants independently mentioned that the WAM Butterworth excerpt reminded them of Jane Austen and the WAM Schubert excerpt reminded them of high class dancing. In terms of the Butterworth, this makes sense considering how composers often score filmic adaptations of Jane Austen books. According to Andy Trudeau of the National Public Radio in the United States, “most ‘[Jane] Austen scores’ have three elements: a taste of the English countryside, music of classical elegance, and a dramatic sequence. [Dario] Marianelli [in his score for Pride & Prejudice (2005)] touches on all three. The composer says he had the sound of Beethoven’s early piano sonatas in his ear when he came to write some of the character scenes for the movie.”52 The “taste of the English countryside” relies on a pastoral topic.53 The Butterworth clip, excerpted from a piece titled “English Idylls,” seems to touch on most, if not all, components of an “Austen” score. In terms of the Schubert excerpt, people seemed to assume that this pastoral, which had vaguely dance-like rhythms, underscored a historical film with high-class dancing. Regarding this assumption, film composers often use historical-sounding music to accompany period films and dance music accompanies dance scenes. I labeled the third theme INNOCENCE AND NATURE, due to frequent co-occurrence of words “child,” “forest,” “young,” “love,” “field,” and “walk.” This theme implies that the pastoral represents a nostalgic and innocent, utopian space. However, instead of imagining “innocence” in the form of fauns or Virgilian shepherds, contemporary listeners imagine children and young people, particularly young girls. In their descriptions, people wrote about children in peaceful nature scenes such as a “forest” and “field,” like these select responses: I thought of a couple of children playing in an open field as I scan over the entire setting in my head, moving from one end of the fields to another. It was very peaceful, childlike, and innocent. [Participant 13, Film Music: Little Women] The music felt soft and wondrous, like a young girl exploring a mysterious, magical forest. [Participant 15, Film Music: Little Women] This music is beautifully serene, background music as someone is walking through an enchanted forest or a child discovering something for the first time. [Participant 10, Film Music: Emma] I sensed a sort of innocence with this piece, as if I was watching a film and this music was playing over the scene of two children playing in a forest. [Participant 9, WAM: Schubert] It was very innocent and playful. It was like a little kid is on a mission to deliver ­something for his or her parents out in the farmland. [Participant 13, WAM: Sibelius]

Listening Cinematically to Pastorals   567 As they described nostalgic scenes, people seemed to link innocence to a nostalgic yearning for an ideal. Two different people described a scene where characters leave a childhood home. The opening strains of the music were sad, uneasy, and nostalgic, like someone leaving their childhood home. [Participant 15, Film Music: The Queen] The music was calm, bittersweet, and reflective, like someone leaving their childhood home. [Participant 15, Film Music: Out of Africa]

The associational theme of INNOCENCE AND NATURE corresponds to the associational theme of NOSTALGIA from the corpus. Both themes relate to a hope for an ideal, a nostalgic striving for innocence. With words such as “calm,” “picture,” “nature,” and “song,” I labeled the fourth theme CALMNESS AND NATURE. While the third theme uses images of nature in conjunction with feelings of innocence, this theme uses images of nature in connection with feelings of peacefulness and tranquility. The song made me picture animals living peacefully in nature. It was very calming and quiet. [Participant 8, Film Music: Little Women] This music made me think of the morning time. It gave me a sense of a fresh new day. Also, it made me think of a beautiful land and the sun slowly rising over it in the morning. [Participant 2, Film Music: Emma] I picture a waterfall and a lake. The graceful movement of the water. No human influences, just nature. Relaxing, but still moving. [Participant 14, Film Music: Out of Africa] This piece made me imagine the rolling hills of Ireland and wild horses running through the lush green earth, free and peaceful. I felt at peace and wanting more. [Participant 9, WAM: Vaughan Williams]

Many participants imagined scenes that were at the beginning or resolution of action, often relying on metaphors to a natural process such as “sunrise” (a new beginning) or the return of spring (resolution or rebirth). I pictured a sunrise or a new beginning, it felt calm yet hopeful. [Participant 6, Film Music: Emma] This made me think of a rising sun, or a clearing storm. It made me feel like it was the end of a long arduous process and it left you feeling exhausted but relieved. [Participant 5, Film Music: Out of Africa] After the dead winter cold, things are coming back alive, but very slowly in a sleepy manner, does not invoke the exciting part of spring but peace instead. [Participant 10, Film Music: Out of Africa]

568   Janet Bourne Therefore, pastorals may have a temporal or formal function, occurring more often at beginnings or endings of narratives, although more analysis would be needed to confirm. CALMNESS AND NATURE correlate to the corpus associational theme of NATURE AND COUNTRY, where many of these scenes represent a tranquil or peaceful affect. The last theme was LOVE AND FAMILY and included frequent words “love,” “Disney,” “warm,” “happy,” and “nice.” The words “love” and “Disney” together imply romantic love; however, “Disney” could also mean “family friendly.” Overall, words like “happy,” “warm,” and “nice” suggest comfort, togetherness, and security. This was affirmed by examining individual responses, a select few here. Disney scene of lovers, not overly happy and easy but deep love, making it through  hard times, heart warm but not naïve. [Participant 7, Film Music: Out of Africa] Mothers in the 70’s [sic.] with big hair, preparing breakfast for her family in a blissful Saturday morning with pancakes. Feels happy and positive. [Participant 14, WAM: Schubert] I sensed a bit of familial bonding and maybe the introducing of a concept or ­character like if this music were a soundtrack in a movie. [Participant 9, WAM: Sibelius]

LOVE AND FAMILY connects to HOME AND FAMILY theme from the corpus. While people in the experiment leaned more toward romantic love, analysis of the corpus implies more a familial love. However, at the core was a joint understanding of family and togetherness (See Figure 27.10).

PASTORAL TOPIC

Corpus Themes

Historical or Literary Past

Experiment Themes

INNOCENCE

SIMPLICITY

Nostalgia

Nature & Country

Historical Social Dance

Words for Each Theme

Innocence & Nature

dance, ballroom, imagine, people, time

Home & Family

Calmness & Nature

child, forest, young, love, field, walk

Love & Family

calm, picture, nature, song

love, Disney, warm, happy, nice

Figure 27.10  Associations of film pastoral based on corpus and experiment.

Listening Cinematically to Pastorals   569

Discussion The participants’ responses seem to provide some empirical basis for the hypothesis that contemporary listeners use cinematically informed networks of associations when listening to orchestral pastorals. The analysis shows this in two ways. First, participants relied on cinematic terms to describe their images and narratives, implying that how they visualized the narrative took a distinctly cinematic shape. Listeners would create a hypothetical film and communicate it using words such as “character,” “camera zooms,” and “closing scene.” Alternatively, they mentioned specific movies, such as Good Will Hunting (1997). One participant noted that the music sounded like a fancy historical dance, immediately citing a similarity to Pride & Prejudice (2005). Second, even when participants were not explicitly describing associations in cinematic terms, what they imagined suggests that they might have been listening cinematically. The themes derived from participant responses, as determined by statistical analysis, include HISTORICAL SOCIAL DANCE, INNOCENCE AND NATURE, CALMNESS AND NATURE, AND LOVE AND FAMILY. Overall, these themes map more closely onto the themes determined by the film corpus (including HISTORICAL OR LITERARY PAST, NOSTALGIA, NATURE AND COUNTRY, and HOME AND FAMILY) than on common historical associations for the pastoral derived from musicological research (including GLORIFICATION OF LANDSCAPE, LYRIC SPIRIT, CHRISTMAS, CHRISTIAN HEAVEN, SHEPHERDS, and COUNTRY FOLK.) This does not mean that historical and cinematic themes are mutually exclusive, of course. There are constellations of similarities between the data’s themes and historical ones. Particularly, overarching ideals of “similarities” and “innocence” were a common thread through much of the historical and cinematic imagery. For example, several points of similarity exist between INNOCENCE AND NATURE and COUNTRY FOLK as well as SHEPHERDS—COUNTRY FOLK abide in nature and often represent qualities such as simplicity and naivety while Arcadian Shepherds were a symbol of innocence during the ­eighteenth-century. And both CALMNESS AND NATURE and glorification of landscape acknowledge how serene mountain lakes and relaxing fields instill good feelings in one who gazes upon them. It makes sense that some nodes of associations would stay consistent from the eighteenth-century to today, considering for example that sheet music books for silent movies drew on Western art music. Yet how contemporary listeners realize these themes of innocence, simplicity, and beautiful landscape seems to be influenced by the iconography and situational tropes of mainstream narrative cinema.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have argued that the cognitive process of analogy can provide a framework for understanding the kind of “simultaneous audiation and envisioning”

570   Janet Bourne described by scholars such as Michael Long in recent musicological work on cinematic listening. Long describes aural gestures triggering the construction of particular images, and I suggest that musical topics may play an important role in this process. When the same topic crosses boundaries across various musical and media contexts, it provides a path our minds can take to make an analogy, to transfer inferences from one type of music to another. Because we use analogy to retrieve what is most familiar, and because film is one of the dominant contexts where listeners today encounter orchestral music, film music thus becomes a “source” for understanding a less familiar “target.” The experiment provides a small step to testing this claim. Without prompting, participants seemed to adopt a cinematic mode of listening, using a cinematic “source” to understand a given orchestral “target.” Both their language and themes provide some evidence for this process. The meaning extraction method as a technique for analyzing qualitative data has much potential for studying listener responses. While no method for interpreting qualitative data is completely clear of subjectivity and bias, tracking frequent words and statistically considering which words co-occur can illuminate what linguistic turns of phrases people use to describe music and visuals they imagine when hearing music. This experiment has limitations, of course. Future experiments would need to test more participants as well as participants with different levels of musical training and film experience. Researchers should repeat the experiment with topics other than the pastoral. Would participants create cinematically-informed images for most topics, or is the result obtained specific to pastorals? What about historical topics used infrequently in film music, such as the minuet topic? Would these topics also prompt listeners to adopt a cinematic mode of listening? A cognitive framework for cinematic listening could be empirically tested in other ways. One could isolate specific stages of analogy—retrieval, mapping, and transfer— and test the effects of manipulating these stages. In addition, an experiment could explicitly ask participants to adopt a cinematic mode of listening and see if that influences how they categorize musical patterns or their affective response. Finally, more music scholars could adopt methods used in the analogical processing literature to test perception of musical material. In this way, through a combination of theorization and empirical testing, we might start to understand if, how, and to what extent viewers take the cinematic experience of music with them outside the movie theatre.

Notes 1. Wye  J.  Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 329 n 4; Eric Clarke, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 170. 2. Clarke, Ways of Listening, 171. 3. Michael Long, Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 7 and 246. Frank Lehman identifies two approaches

Listening Cinematically to Pastorals   571 scholars have for studying cinematic listening; the first, how film trains its audience to perceive music (e.g., tune out external sounds, interpret style topics, etc.) and, second, a general stance toward listening to music. See Frank Lehman, “Film-as-Concert Music and the Formal Implications of ‘Cinematic Listening’,” Music Analysis 37, no. 1 (2018): 4–5. 4. Richard Will, The Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 9; Timothy Jones, Beethoven: The “Moonlight” and Other Sonatas, Op. 27 and Op. 31 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 44, Ben Winters, Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film: Shared Concert Experiences in Screen Fiction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 126; Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 5. As Nicholas Cook notes, musical meaning is always multimedial. Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia. 6. Winters, Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film, 126. 7. Marlin Skiles, Music Scoring for TV and Motion Pictures (New York: McGraw Hill, 1975), 79. 8. Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 122. 9. Dedre Gentner, Keith Holyoak, and Boicho Kokinov, eds., The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science (Cambridge: MIT Press,  2001); Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard, Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). 10. Douglas Hofstadter, “Epilogue: Analogy as the Core of Cognition,” in The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science, ed. Dedre Gentner, Keith Holyoak, and Boicho Kokinov (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 499–538. 11. Jerry Fodor, Modularity of Mind: An Essay on Faculty Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 107. 12. Dedre Gentner and Linsey Smith, “Analogical Reasoning,” in Encyclopedia of Human Behavior, 2nd ed, ed. Vilayanur Ramachandran, (Oxford: Elsevier, 2012), 2–3. 13. Since analogy seems to be the cognitive process at the root of metaphor as argued by Brian Bowdle and Dedre Gentner, and since I am drawing on the major components of analogy as described by Gentner and Holyoak rather than Conceptual Metaphor theory by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, I have chosen to speak of “analogy” rather than “metaphor.” Brian Bowdle and Dedre Gentner, “The Career of Metaphor,” Psychological Review 112, no. 1 (2005): 193–216, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.112.1.193; Gentner and Smith, “Analogical Reasoning”; Keith Holyoak, “Analogy and Relational Reasoning,” in The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, ed. Keith Holyoak and Robert Morrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press,  2012), 234–59; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 14. Gentner and Smith, “Analogical Reasoning”; Keith Holyoak, “Analogy and Relational Reasoning,” in The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, ed. Keith Holyoak and Robert Morrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 234–59. 15. Holyoak and Thagard, Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought, 4. 16. Robert Goldstone and Douglas Medin, “Time Course of Comparison,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 20, no. 1 (1994): 29–50, https:// doi.org/10.1037/0278–7393.20.1.29; Dedre Gentner, “Structure-Mapping: A Theoretical

572   Janet Bourne Framework for Analogy,” Cognitive Science 7 (1983): 155–70; Dedre Gentner and Arthur Markman, “Structure Mapping in Analogy and Similarity,” American Psychologist 52, no. 1 (1997): 45–56. 17. This is based, in part, on previous ways I have considered analogical processes in connection to music. Janet Bourne, “Perceiving Irony in Music: The Problem in Beethoven’s String Quartets,” Music Theory Online 22, no. 3 (2016); Janet Bourne, A Theory of Analogy for Musical Sense-Making and Categorization: Understanding Musical Jabberwocky (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2015); Larson, Musical Forces; Lawrence Zbikowski, Foundations of Musical Grammar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 18. Raymond Monelle, The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 3. 19. Leonard Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York: Schirmer Books, 1980). 20. James Buhler, Theories of the Soundtrack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 21. Juan Chattah, David Shire’s The Conversation: A Film Score Guide (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015), 114. 22. Claudia Gorbman, “Scoring the Indian: Music in the Liberal Western,” in Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 234–53. 23. Monelle, The Musical Topic. 24. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto & Windus, 1935), 23. 25. Robert Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 56. 26. Monelle, The Musical Topic, 5, 208, and 244. 27. Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, 58. 28. Skiles, Music Scoring for TV and Motion Pictures, 70. 29. Monelle, The Musical Topic, 5. 30. Ibid., 226 and 242. 31. Ibid., 202. 32. Quoted in David Wyn Jones, Beethoven: Pastoral Symphony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 85. 33. Quoted in Andrew Haringer, “Hunt, Military, and Pastoral Topics,” in Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, ed. Danuta Mirka (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 194–213: 206. 34. Peter Marinelli, Pastoral (London: Methuen, 1971), 11. 35. Monelle, The Musical Topic, 197. 36. David Temperley and Leigh VanHandel, “Introduction to the Special Issues on Corpus Methods,” Music Perception 31, no. 1 (2013): 1–3: 1. 37. Temperley and VanHandel, “Introduction to the Special Issues on Corpus Methods,” 1. 38. Anahid Kassabian, Hearing Film: Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (London: Routledge, 2001), 34. 39. Ibid., 30. 40. Philip Tagg, and Bob Clarida, Ten Little Title Tunes (New York: Mass Media Music Scholars’ Press, 2003), 518. 41. Ibid., 517–18. 42. Carol Krumhansl, “Topic in Music: An Empirical Study of Memorability, Openness, and Emotion in Mozart’s String Quintet in C Major and Beethoven’s String Quartet in A Minor,” Music Perception 16, no. 1 (1998): 119–34, https://doi.org/10.2307/40285781.

Listening Cinematically to Pastorals   573 43. Elizabeth Margulis, “An Exploratory Study of Narrative Experiences of Music,” Music Perception 35, no. 2 (2017): 235–48; Ruth Herbert and Nicola Dibben, “Making Sense of Music: Meanings 10- to 18-Year-Olds Attach to Experimenter-Selected Musical Materials,” Psychology of Music 46, no. 3 (2018): 375–91. 44. Cindy Chung and James Pennebaker, “Revealing Dimensions of Thinking in Open-Ended Self-Descriptions: An Automated Meaning Extraction Method for Natural Language,” Journal of Research in Personality 42, no. 1 (2008): 96–132, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jrp.2007.04.006; Ryan Boyd, “Psychological Text Analysis in the Digital Humanities,” in Data Analytics in Digital Humanities, ed. Hai-Jew Shalin, Multimedia Systems and Applications (Cham: Springer, 2017), 161–89. 45. Amelia Stanton et al., “Determining Women’s Sexual Self-Schemas through Advanced Computerized Text Analysis,” Child Abuse & Neglect 46 (2015): 78–88, https://doi. org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2015.06.003. 46. Boyd, “Psychological Text Analysis in the Digital Humanities,” 167. 47. Ryan Boyd, Meaning Extraction Helper[Software], version 1.4.20, Software, 2017, https:// meh.ryanb.cc/. 48. Boyd, “Psychological Text Analysis in the Digital Humanities,” 167. 49. I determined the appropriate number of themes to retain based on a screen test, the Kaiser rule (i.e., Eigenvalues of 1 or greater), and interpretability of the solutions. See Raymond Cattell, “The Scree Test for the Number of Factors,” Sociological Methods and Research 1, no. 2 (1966): 245–76, https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327906mbr0102_10; William Zwick and Wayne Velicer, “Comparison of Five Rules for Determining the Number of Components to Retain,” Psychological Bulletin 99, no. 3 (1986): 432–42, https://doi.org/10.1037/ 0033–2909.99.3.432. 50. Chung and Pennebaker, “Revealing Dimensions of Thinking in Open-Ended Self Descriptions.” 51. Simone Dalla Bella and Isabelle Peretz, “Differentiation of Classical Music Requires Little Learning but Rhythm,” Cognition 96, no. 2 (2005): B65–78, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. cognition.2004.12.005. 52. Andy Trudeau, “Oscar-Nominated Scores: ‘Pride and Prejudice’,” NPR Music (blog), March 5, 2006, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5245902. 53. For a review of the English pastoral, see Eric Saylor, English Pastoral Music: From Arcadia to Utopia, 1900–1955 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017).

Select Bibliography Boyd, Ryan. Meaning Extraction Helper[Software] (version 1.4.20). Software, 2017. https:// meh.ryanb.cc/. Boyd, Ryan. “Psychological Text Analysis in the Digital Humanities.” In Data Analytics in Digital Humanities, ed. Hai-Jew Shalin, 161–89. Multimedia Systems and Applications. Cham: Springer, 2017. Buhler, James. Theories of the Soundtrack. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Chung, Cindy, and James Pennebaker. “Revealing Dimensions of Thinking in Open-Ended Self-Descriptions: An Automated Meaning Extraction Method for Natural Language.” Journal of Research in Personality 42, no. 1 (2008): 96–132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jrp.2007.04.006. Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996.

574   Janet Bourne Gentner, Dedre. “Structure-Mapping: A Theoretical Framework for Analogy.” Cognitive Science 7 (1983): 155–70. Gentner, Dedre, Keith Holyoak, and Boicho Kokinov, eds. The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001. Gentner, Dedre, and Arthur Markman. “Structure Mapping in Analogy and Similarity.” American Psychologist 52, no. 1 (1997): 45–56. Gorbman, Claudia. “Scoring the Indian: Music in the Liberal Western.” In Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, 234–53. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Hatten, Robert. Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Herbert, Ruth, and Nicola Dibben. “Making Sense of Music: Meanings 10- to 18-Year-Olds Attach to Experimenter-Selected Musical Materials.” Psychology of Music 46, no. 3 (2018): 375–91. Holyoak, Keith. “Analogy and Relational Reasoning.” In The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, ed. Keith Holyoak and Robert Morrison, 234–59. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Long, Michael. Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Margulis, Elizabeth. “An Exploratory Study of Narrative Experiences of Music.” Music Perception 35, no. 2 (2017): 235–48. Monelle, Raymond. The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Ratner, Leonard. Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style. New York: Schirmer Books, 1980. Tagg, Philip, and Bob Clarida. Ten Little Title Tunes. New York: Mass Media Music Scholars’ Press, 2003. Winters, Ben. Music, Performance, and the Realities of Film: Shared Concert Experiences in Screen Fiction. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014.

chapter 28

Hea r i ng Secon da ry Ex pl osions The Naudet Brothers’ 9/11 and Audiovisual (A)synchronization in Twenty-First-Century Media Randolph Jordan

A common theme among initial reactions to witnessing the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center is that they seemed like something out of a Hollywood disaster movie, an experience described by witnesses on the street, picked up by numerous media commentators, and all the more true for the vast majority of us who watched the events unfold on our television screens.1 The attacks have often been touted as having been designed precisely for the ubiquity of twenty-first-century media, vast numbers of amateur cameras on the street providing outlets around the globe with an endless supply of new coverage of the same key moments, emulating a live music or sporting event staged for multiple cameras, or a film shoot capturing repeated takes from multiple angles. Except, of course, in the case of the initiating incident: the first plane crash at 8:46 a.m., of which only two known shots exist. The most famous is the one taped by French videographer Jules Naudet as he went out on a routine call with the New York City firefighters of Ladder 1 about whom he was shooting a documentary with his brother Gédéon. While inspecting a manhole for the presence of leaking gas, a low-flying aircraft is heard overhead, prompting the firefighters to look up. Jules also looks up with his camera, framing the north tower of the World Trade Center just before the plane hits. Upon impact he jerkily zooms in for a closer view of the emerging fireball as we hear offscreen voices begin to clamor with the now iconic exclamation of “Holy shit!” ringing out above the rest, all this before the sound of the crash itself finally emerges— four seconds after we see the plane hit. And in this lag between the image and sound of the impact the shot behaves very differently from the norms of Hollywood films—or any films for that matter—which generally shy away from such overt lack of synchronization between the seen and heard elements of any single sound-producing event.

576   Randolph Jordan In this essay, I argue that the striking audiovisual disjunction of that shot of the first plane crash stands as the symbol of twenty-first-century expectations for news media, a confrontation with an aspect of reality outside of audiovisual media that simultaneously reminds us of the constructed nature of its representation. While this duality is arguably as old as the dawn of image and sound recording technologies, I am interested in the question of how media coverage in the wake of the 9/11 attacks changes the way we approach the age-old dilemma of tensions between reality and representation. I will consider the extent to which these changes are the result of shifts in the mediasphere that have happened to emerge in the early part of the twenty-first century and for which the 9/11 attacks stand as a benchmark. In particular, I argue that the verisimilitude sought in a documentary like the Naudets’ 9/11 plays into the relatively recent trend of disseminating documentary media that has not passed through a post-production phase, a reality made possible by the potent combination of new digital camera technology and the arrival of video sharing networks on the Internet. The Naudet shot of the first crash provides a point of entry to consider how conventions of asynchronous sound in the cinema are challenged by recent forms of media production and dissemination, and, by extension, to think about whether or not we might shift our definition of what “cinematic” might mean in relation to listening. In that spirit I will examine the specific uses to which asynchronous sound is put in the Naudets’ 9/11, situate these uses within the discourse of “performativity” in documentary film, and assess the implications of the Naudet footage proliferating in other media including films such as Loose Change (2006) and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s contribution to the compilation film 11’09”01 (2002). The notion of “secondary explosions”—a staple of conspiracy theories of an inside job—becomes a guiding metaphor for the concept of ­ ­“asynchronization” in audiovisual media. I argue that the presentation of sounds as separate from implied visual sources on the screen takes on heightened importance in the post-9/11 media era. Although the use of various forms of asynchronous sound is ubiquitous throughout the world’s cinema (whether it be offscreen dialogue, sonic flashback, or Soviet Montage style contrapuntal juxtaposition), it is a general rule that if a filmmaker is going to present both a sound and a visualization of the implied event producing the sound, these will occur in tight synchronization with each other. So, however natural the lag between the sound and image of the plane’s impact may be in reflecting the differential between the speeds of light and sound in the world outside the cinema, this is one area where ideas about realism and naturalism in film sound dare not venture. In this sense, cinematic listening has not, historically, accounted for the reality of this differential, a situation that has carried over to mainstream television. Many of the replays of this shot in various news media (and the countless companion shots of the second crash and the collapsing towers) downplay the lack of synchronization, usually by having reporters and anchors talking over the images presented silently or, in some cases, by actually readjusting the synchronization to “correct” the disjunction. These modifications underscore that this shot stands as a marker of both inviolable truth and suspicious disjunction, creating a paradoxical situation whereby the experience of something that

Hearing Secondary Explosions   577 reflects the reality of hearing and seeing reminds us of the constructed nature of audiovisual media.2 The sound of the explosion separated from the image of the plane crash also in­ad­vert­ ently symbolizes conspiracy theories that have developed over the past two decades: that the towers were brought down by explosions apart from any caused by the plane crashes—a planned demolition organized from the inside. Any suggestion that the delayed sound of the crash in the Naudet shot of the first collision is evidence of a secondary explosion unrelated to the crash would be, of course, foolhardy. Yet in the immediate aftermath of the attacks countless earwitness reports of secondary explosions pervaded media coverage of the events until, later in the day, discussions of such possibility were eradicated from mainstream news media and the issue of planted explosive devices became the domain of “Truthers” relegated to the status of paranoid antiestablishmentarians. Perhaps more importantly for present purposes, however, is how the issue of heard explosions speaks to the confusion that surrounded people’s experience of these explosion sounds, inexplicable in their separation from source. In their documentary 9/11, the Naudet Brothers and James Hanlon emphasize the world of sounds dissociated from implied visual sources on the screen, beginning with the dramatic disjunction of sound and image in the shot of the first plane crash, continuing into Jules’ exclusive foray into the lobby of Tower 1 where he documented the work of firefighters trying to get a handle on the situation prior to the collapses, and finally in the work of rescuers listening for signs of life amidst the rubble in the days following the catastrophe. As I will demonstrate, the act of listening is emphasized at key moments throughout the film, offering an attention to the sounds of 9/11 that are so rarely explored in the vast sea of media coverage of the event as it unfolded both in the moment and in the proliferations of documentaries that would follow in the ensuing decades.

A New World? The concept of authenticity has long been the basis of evaluating a documentary film’s claim to reality, and the question of sound’s role in forging the “authentic” foregrounds the slipperiness of the term. As Holly Rogers argues, debates around the use of music and sound design in documentary film have demarcated different schools of thought and highlighted historical shifts in the notion of authenticity.3 For example, non-diegetic music overtly emphasizes the filmmakers’ shaping of reality and audience response to it, even while images may tend towards observational realism. In this context, one mode of thinking about authenticity is tied to limiting all sound to the diegesis, which, in documentary, means the pro-filmic world.4 However, this strict attachment of authenticity to the stability of the pro-filmic is shifting from issues of indexicality and filmmaker intervention to questions of ethics and audience engagement; the measure of authenticity now lies more in how a film situates the audience in ethical space rather than how “faithfully” the film represents the world.5 With this shift has come increasingly reflexive

578   Randolph Jordan approaches to documentary media-making, particularly in the realm of the “performative” documentary, which seeks to emphasize the filmmaker’s hand in shaping the ­material.6 However, with nearly twenty years distance from Sept. 11th 2001, some commentators are now identifying new trends in documentary media following the attacks that point away from overt reflexivity and towards a renewed appeal to the ideal of providing access to the real. Selmin Kara argues that, “In the realm of art and media, 9/11 led to a return to tropes of realism, marked and at times transgressed by an unprecedented degree of hypermediacy.”7 Indeed, nowhere is the combination of “realist tropes” and their transgression through “hypermediacy” more apparent than in the unusually dramatic immediacy of the Naudets’ shot of the first plane crash in its presentation of an aspect of audiovisual reality that feels unrealistic. As such, the shot ruptures the rest of the film’s careful narrative control through conventions of realist editing designed to prevent distanciation and present the illusion of immediacy. At the same time, the film presents a sustained voiceover narration by the Naudets and James Hanlon combined with cutaway interview segments with filmmakers and firefighters that continually remind the audience of the act of capturing this footage. So the film is a marker of tensions between late twentieth-century media skepticism exemplified by the notion of “performative” documentary practice, holding that the world presented on screen only comes into being as a result of the filmmaking process itself, and the renewed faith in the power of documentary to provide immediate access to the world it represents. Kara goes on to suggest that this combination of realist tropes and hypermediacy in post-9/11 media has “brought about a revival of interest in documentaristic forms of media and enabled a proliferation in the number of documentary films trying to assemble the pieces of a seemingly disintegrating world that also appeared to be more connected than ever.”8 As Jonathan Kahana puts it, this trend in post-9/11 documentary media was partly fueled by an increasing distrust of mainstream news media for having failed to deliver truth, “or at least an effective truth,” of the events that it covers.9 This sense of seeking the truth in the fragments of online media really took hold with the dawn of YouTube, emerging in the years following the attacks, when a vast array of bits and pieces of media coverage are now widely disseminated without the guiding hands of documentary filmmakers or news agencies to shape the material in post-production, one of the aspects that leads Carol Vernallis to describe such media as “unruly.”10 For Vernallis, one of the hallmarks of the YouTube aesthetic is a dramatically intensified approach to audiovisual synchronization exemplified by the dominance of the music video form, a product of heavy-handed post-production strategies. But on the flipside, there is also what Alexandra Juhasz calls the “gee-willickers enthusiasm for the fact of production, in and of itself,” non-professional and non-expert users generating content “unrelated to a history of images before them, springing forth, ­virgin-borne from this newly accessible technology” so that “What YouTube gains in access, it lacks in knowledge.”11 This is an environment where the rawest of the raw sits side-by-side with the highest of production values, as bedroom vloggers and big corporate media migrate to YouTube together.

Hearing Secondary Explosions   579 It is to the underproduced side of things that I turn for this essay. One of the most s­ ignificant developments in this new environment of media sharing is that now, to a much higher degree than has been possible before, audiovisual media items are being disseminated widely by amateurs with the synchronization of sound and image grounded in the moment of original capture, no pairing in post-production required. The new wave of film sound theory, born in the 1980s, has continually emphasized the fundamentally separate nature of sound and image in audiovisual media, as when Michel Chion famously declared that “there is no soundtrack,” a somewhat convoluted way of emphasizing that sound, in the cinema, must be understood as a consciously constructed pairing with what we see on the image track.12 If film sound theory is to extend into the realm of YouTube, however, it must now contend with the fact that much of what we encounter is not the result of selection, but rather simply what was recorded in-camera. The film 9/11 hovers between the modes of commercially produced cinema and the citizen journalist YouTuber, attempting to function as the presentation of the unmediated recordings of two brothers with cameras caught in the chaos of the World Trade Center attacks. At the same time, the recycling of its images and sounds in the online mediasphere complicates the modes of address in play in the original film. 9/11 brandishes an earnestness in its appeal to narrative continuity and a return of realist tropes in order to bring the audience into the moment of the crisis around which it is structured, a strategy that is momentarily broken by the shock of the disjunction in the sound and image of the first plane’s impact on the north tower. The power of the disjunction between sound and image here lies in its testing of the limits of our expectation for naturalism as a function of sound/image synchronization. Before considering the proliferation of the Naudet material outside the film, let us begin by listening to a few key moments from the Naudets’ 9/11 and consider their status in terms of synchronization.

Listening to 9/11 I have previously argued, along with many others, that proper accounting for sound/ image relationships in audiovisual media must recognize the duality of such media, consisting as it does of separate sound and image tracks that are fully adjustable in relation to each other.13 This is certainly true for productions turned on film with a separate sound recordist whereby sound and image, even if recorded in synchronization, must be paired in the post-production process. Video technology changes this situation a little, with cameras recording sound and image simultaneously to the same tape surface or digital file. Yet the moment these are brought into editing software, sound and image are immediately split and no less subject to alterations by an editor. As Britta Sjogren reminds us, the very idea of synchronized sound is somewhat arbitrary, as “All sounds . . . are equally separate from the image track in that they are only ‘married’ in the

580   Randolph Jordan final instance, brought together in the composite film print: prior to this, they are separate elements which can be ‘placed’ anywhere one wishes relative to the picture.” The upshot of this is that “one ‘synchs up’ ‘non-synch’ sounds with as much diligence as ‘synch’ sounds in film production practice.”14 This recognition that all sound/image relationships are a function of deliberate synchronization choices made by filmmakers is the basis for a certain level of skepticism about the power of documentary film to offer us something of the real world. Thinking about synchronization along these lines then troubles analysis of media material that has not been subject to any post-production, and compounded by media material that simply pretends towards this lack of post-production. The Naudet film rests largely on the audience’s belief that we are presented with raw footage from the cameras of the two brothers with sound and image recorded together and presented as captured. An example of audience investment in this notion comes with an online discussion forum commentator who, using The Surgeon as handle, claims to have found evidence that the Naudet brothers had a crew and thus were not the two lone cameramen caught in the 9/11 backdraft as the narrative line of their film claims.15 The Surgeon points to a few frames in the footage shot by Gédéon on the streets of Manhattan that appear to reveal a location sound recordist accidentally caught on camera. If this is a shot of a sound recordist working for the Naudets, and not a random shot of one of the hundreds of people out with recording devices that day, what does it mean? Obscuring their crew in the film’s narrative would, in retrospect, seem dishonest, calling their credibility into question, especially as no location recordist is listed in the credits. It would also point to the potential for greater levels of cinematic manipulation, as is suggested by that particular online blogger. Yet regardless of the presence of a separate sound recordist, you don’t have to listen very hard to find evidence that the Naudets were not shy about shaping their version of events using the techniques available to all filmmakers. Indeed, not a minute passes after the shot of the first plane crash before we are into a montage covering the firemen driving to the World Trade Center and constructed according to standard principles of continuity. Jules is in the truck with them, equipped only with his single camera. Yet the presence of multiple cameras is simulated, in part, by using an uninterrupted sound track as bridge across shots that continually cut back and forth between the firemen inside the vehicle and points of view out the window. This style of editing is, in fact, the norm throughout the documentary, which essentially alternates between footage shot by each of the brothers: Jules who accompanied the firefighters of Ladder 1 into the lobby of Tower 1 and was caught inside when the adjacent tower collapsed; and Gédéon, back at the fire station and then wandering the streets outside filming the catastrophe and people’s reactions to it. Intercut with occasional footage from news broadcasts to give a broader perspective, the footage of each of the brothers is generally not presented as long stretches of uninterrupted takes, as it was taped, but rather short shots organized according to principles of continuity. Giovanna Chesler uses the phrase “sound-up construction” to describe this common scenario where picture editing is made to follow a soundtrack edited for narrative weight and

Hearing Secondary Explosions   581 continuity.16 Such continuity editing has become an accepted staple of documentary media, in turn giving rise to the skepticism that has yielded increasingly reflexive documentary production and reception. And yet, as I have discussed elsewhere, such skepticism is often geared towards better understanding what access a film can offer us to the world it represents rather than eschewing the possibility of any such access altogether.17 Chesler, for example, chooses not to critique Frederick Wiseman for his prolific use of sound-up construction, noting that his practices are simply a necessary reality for documentary filmmakers, and that his choices offer a level of commentary on his subjects that reveals his political positioning as a filmmaker. Such critical analysis allows us to situate issues in sound/image synchronization in documentary film as part of a larger discourse about the functioning of representational media. So what about the Naudet film? With the soundtrack in 9/11 so carefully organized around continuous flow, it becomes especially significant that the film pays a great deal of attention to auditory aspects of the environments through which Jules and his brother pass. There are four key moments in the documentary where attention is called to something that we hear, and in each instance these are sonic details to which the firefighters react yet which are not visualized. In each instance the importance of these sound events is situated within some variation on the idea of “sound-up construction” through which we can identify the potential for overt manipulation by the filmmakers for narrative effect. Each of these moments is framed by that initial disjunction of the first plane crash, situating themselves within an environment that tries to play up the immediacy of the single camera shooting conditions, while also emphasizing auditory elements of the environment that are willfully kept apart from their visible counterparts. The first moment comes as Jules enters the lobby of Tower 1 with Chief Joseph Pfeifer. His voiceover narration explains that as he was passing through the revolving doors he heard screams and saw, to his right, people in flames—a sight he says he chose to avoid with his camera. We hear screams on the soundtrack, but see only a lobby in ruins, explained later by the suggestion that jet fuel had exploded out of the elevator shafts. This strategy foreshadows treatment of similar moments in future cinematic representations of 9/11 stories, such as the United Flight 93 films analyzed by Paul Ward in which he observes the tendency, even in dramatized accounts of the passenger revolts that are said to have prevented a fourth plane from reaching targets set by its hijackers, to limit representations of death to the realm of the offscreen.18 For Ward, such performance of a reality for which no footage exists speaks to the ethical position that considers these 9/11 deaths as unspeakable, a position demanding our consideration of the ethics of performance in documentary subjects more broadly.19 For Jules Naudet, the performance of the unrepresentability of death extends beyond the camera’s avoidance of such images, and into a problematic sphere of prioritizing registers upon which death may or may not be inscribed. As the camera passes through the revolving doors, the images are presented in slow motion, an effect introduced in post-production, while the sound continues at normal speed. The sound, therefore, cannot be what was recorded simultaneously with what we see. The point could be moot if the sound was recorded at roughly

582   Randolph Jordan this same juncture, the slow motion used simply as embellishment. However, the very fact that the sound and image here are not presented in synchronization indicates postproduction alteration of their pairing, removing a level of the potential trust we can invest in this moment. It also highlights Jules’ editorial presence in the moment of shooting, making decisions about what a potential audience should and shouldn’t see, posing a serious question about the differences in the ethics of documentation where sound and image are concerned. If the sound at this moment is, in fact, the screams of the people on fire that he says he saw, why should it be ethical for us to hear this but not to see? Naudet’s decision to withhold the visual here suggests an attitude that positions the visual as that which holds the power, while taking it for granted that the sound does not wield the same. In addressing differences between visual and auditory documentation of narratives of trauma such as the events of Sept. 11th, Beatrice Choi argues that, “In favoring visual media over audio media, the contemporary subject may ‘overlook,’ so to speak, the ethical positions that emerge from listening.”20 Yet Choi’s statement here is framed by her argument that the visual has become associated with distanciating spectacle, while sound has the capacity to bypass surface enthrallment and position us more directly as subjects of the represented event rather than objective observers.21 Choi claims that “Audio media offers what visual media cannot: a position of empathy and ethical awareness. By refusing to cede to a continuous narrative that prioritizes visible evidence, aural mediations do not fall prey to the removal of ethical positioning in the name of objectivity, nor do they succumb to the intrusive pervasiveness of the spectacle.”22 While Choi’s claims risk essentializing the kinds of differences between sound and image critiqued by Jonathan Sterne as part of a long-standing “audiovisual litany” that has tended to guide scholarly writing on sound,23 there is no question that sound and image have the potential to operate on different levels of experience, especially within a culture that has been so given to the primacy of sight as the bringer of evidence. More importantly, the differential between sound and image that lies at the heart of all audiovisual media ensures that questions about what we see vs. what we hear are heavily loaded, regardless of which track is more likely to trigger an empathetic response. So it is all the more significant that the Naudet brothers invite us to listen, their approach to voiceover leaving a great deal of space in which to hear the soundscape of the spaces in which the events we see on screen take place. Another significant “moment” from the Naudets’ 9/11 is a series of shots spread out across the lobby sequence in which, prior to the collapse of the south tower, loud crashing sounds periodically punctuate the ambient soundscape. We are told by Jules that these are the sounds of jumpers but we never see any images to corroborate this claim. In general, this sequence is an example of a documentary use of continuity editing, one camera being made to seem like several, capturing the situation from a variety of angles while maintaining a continuous soundtrack to provide the illusion of simultaneity. As we hear the crashing sounds and are cued to interpret them as the landing of falling bodies, we see various shots of the firemen with grave expressions on their faces. Sometimes we see the firemen reacting to these sounds within the confines of a single shot, suggesting

Hearing Secondary Explosions   583 that the synchronization of sound and image is presented as captured in-camera. Other times we hear the sound and then cut to images of firefighters apparently reacting, a situation that is echoed later when, back at the fire station, the regrouped members of Ladder 1 listen to an announcement of firefighter deaths on the radio, the sound presented as continuous while the image cuts from one face to another, ostensibly reacting to what we hear. Without diminishing the very real horror of the jumpers, there is a measure of intense emotional manipulation here as a particular recurring sound is given a fixed meaning for the audience underscored by the careful selection of images showing us concerned and disturbed faces. Thus the potential for these crashing sounds to act as what Barbara Flueckiger would call “unidentified sound objects” is removed, any tension surrounding their ambiguity being replaced with the affect associated with an emotional response to their implied source.24 A measure of audience engagement is also removed: as the status of these sounds as what Michel Chion calls “active offscreen sound” is stripped, the potential for the audience to question their source is diminished.25 The filmmakers are playing for empathy here, and there is no way of assessing whether or not some of those loud crashes might have been created by falling debris rather than human bodies, or perhaps even edited into the film during post-production. Similarly, we know that it would have been logistically difficult to capture a variety of reactions to any one of the crashing sounds, necessitating some shuffling around of the sounds and the reaction shots in the editing process. This process would also allow for shots of the faces of firefighters taken at other times, “borrowing” their reaction to different aspects of the environment for use as a companion to these sounds. Here the film provides a startling counterpart to the infamous shots of silent jumpers that appeared on the news for a short period before being pulled from broadcast. It would seem here that the fact that these images stopped being shown on television suggests their sheer power to disturb, breaking through the veneer of Hollywoodian spectacle that enshrouds the images of the plane crashes, burning towers, and masses of panicked people. The most critical moment comes as the south tower collapses while Jules and the firefighters of Ladder 1 are inside the lobby of the adjacent north tower. Here, in a single uninterrupted take, we see the firemen suddenly react to an unidentified rumbling sound and then run for cover as the sound becomes loud enough to exceed the capacity of the recording device and push the levels well into the red, resulting in audible distortion as the image is blackened out with dust. Unlike the previous examples, the use of the long take here suggests that what we hear and see were recorded in synchronization and presented as locked. Yet we can’t take this for granted either, given the general propensity for adjustments in the pairing of sound and image throughout the rest of the film. Here an important question emerges concerning the value of auditory evidence in documentary: what can we discern from the sound of the building coming down next door? One of the primary conspiracy theories to have emerged following the attacks is that the building collapses were the result of planned demolition, and (as I will discuss later in relation to the Loose Change documentary) “Truthers” point to earwitness accounts of secondary explosions as one form of proof. To what extent should explosive

584   Randolph Jordan devices in the adjacent tower have been audible to either ear or microphone in the north tower? Given the emphasis put on the sound of the jumpers, one could conclude that demolition-grade explosives near the ground in the adjacent tower should also have been picked up on the microphone. Yet no such explosion is audible in the documentary; only a distant rumble that gradually increases in volume as the firefighters run for cover and are buried in dust. The reality of what we hear in the film points to the problems of the evidentiary power of documentary media. The absence of such sounds in a film does not stand as evidence that the sounds were not present in situ. Finally, in the last portion of the film, listening becomes an essential component of rescue operations when workers sifting through the rubble occasionally demand silence as they call out for anyone who might be trapped alive below. In the film, however, no answers are ever forthcoming, a final silence as corollary to the horrifying dissociated sounds of the film’s first half. To me, the silence that meets their calls for answers is indicative of the general position of reception that the film places us in. The recurring use of sounds in the absence of implied visual sources is part of the film’s strategy for fostering audience engagement premised upon the basic idea of the lone cameraman caught in the chaos. Constructed upon a measure of authenticity associated with the shooting model of the single camera with mounted microphone, the film’s heavy reliance on conventions of continuity editing and re-synchronization indicates a breach in trust. It is not constructed as a reflexive documentary in its approach to montage. And yet, there are moments when the use of sound creates a jarring point of entry into a world that is not pictured on the screen, offering a measure of counterpoint in the sense that these sounds act not as redundant support for, but rather shocking extension of, the pictured world.

Performing Synchronization in 9/11 9/11 makes an interesting case for considering the idea “performativity” in documentary that emerged in response to the increasingly reflexive approaches to filmmaking taken by documentary filmmakers in the ’80s and ’90s, an age of heightened skepticism of the media. Speaking about 9/11, Paul Ward notes that “the representation of the events themselves [within mainstream broadcast news outlets] relied heavily on footage that was gathered from ‘unofficial’ sources such as tourist camcorders and mobile phones. The ‘reality effect’ of such footage is amplified; this in turn means that the ethical implications of reframing these events in a dramatic/performative arena are likewise amplified.”26 So it is worthwhile to consider how the Naudet film sits in the discourse of documentary performativity. As I will argue, the film’s fluctuating modes of address between the poles of over and underproduced media that characterize the online mediasphere can be tracked onto the differing modes of performance engendered by the approaches to audiovisual synchronization discussed earlier and the voiceover narration that I will address next.

Hearing Secondary Explosions   585 Stella Bruzzi describes the “performative” documentary as one that “uses performance within a non-fiction context to draw attention to the impossibilities of authentic documentary representation,” a feature which is “an alienating, distancing device, not one which actively promotes identification and a straightforward response to a film’s content.”27 She contrasts this definition with that of the “performative mode” identified by Bill Nichols as consisting of films that “stress subjective aspects of a classically objective discourse.”28 For Bruzzi, the idea of performance, “Whether built around the intrusive presence of the filmmaker or self-conscious performances by its subjects—is the enactment of the notion that a documentary only comes into being as it is performed.”29 In essence Bruzzi is discussing reflexivity in a positive light as it breaks with the canonical association between documentary filmmaking and the idea of the “real.” In so doing, Bruzzi refutes claims that the idea of the auteur has no place in documentary, “for one of the corollaries of accepting that documentary cannot but perform the interaction between reality and its representation is the acknowledgement that documentary, like fiction, is authored.”30 If we accept that Jules and Gédéon were the men behind the cameras then there is no question that the film is authored. Yet there is little sense here that this is a film in which the presence of the filmmakers have influenced the events portrayed, much less brought these events into being by way of their filmmaking practices. No, the film reads as a rather amateurish plod through an unexpected series of events conducted with an observational intent. This observational intent survives the post-production stage in which the material is constructed with voiceover narration to reflect their first-person experience of the events. The principal element of performativity in this film lies in its subjectivity, a factor emphasized mostly by way of the voiceover narration that keeps the audience continually aware that the material presented is the result of the filmmakers’ presence in the midst of the action. Their post-production synchronization work, on the other hand, shies away from revealing performative qualities. Yet there is a way in which we can think about this subjective voiceover presentation as profoundly connected to the film’s synchronization strategies as detailed previously. With the emergence of performative approaches to documentary there has come an increasing distrust of voiceover narration in film as the legacy of the days of propagandistic expository documentary filmmaking. Interestingly, Bruzzi situates debates about the use of voiceover within more general debates about sound/image synchronization in film. She tells us that, “The negative portrayal of voice-over is largely the result of the development of a theoretical orthodoxy that condemns it for being inevitably and inherently didactic.”31 Bruzzi critiques the way that histories of documentary have created the voiceover as what she calls an “unnecessary evil” in their constant emphasis on documentary films as “an endless pursuit of the most effective way of representing the ‘purity’ of the real,” a purity of visual representation that is displaced, and therefore threatened, by the “voice-of-God” style authority of the voiceover that dominates our understanding of the image.32 By extension, she situates the negative connotations of documentary voiceover in the context of general concerns over the coming of sound damaging the “purity” of the image.

586   Randolph Jordan These critiques of voiceover are all premised upon the problem of voiceover dominating other sound design elements, just as many commentators feared that through voiceover narration sound could dominate the image in an unwelcome reversal of the primacy of the image established prior to the coming of synchronized sound. Because of these critiques, Bruzzi notes the increasing popularity of the ironic voiceover in performative documentaries used as the narration equivalent of contrapuntal sound that deliberately sets itself apart from the image. Many documentary filmmakers have also opted to eschew the use of voiceover altogether. Yet this approach, too, has been criticized. Britta Sjogren addresses Mary Ann Doane’s argument that the “silencing” of the voice of authority “promotes . . . an illusion that reality speaks and is not spoken, that the film is not a constructed discourse.” Sjogren laments that, “One can only feel somewhat sympathetic towards documentarists, who apparently just cannot win, one way or the other.”33 In this no-win situation, the voiceover narration in 9/11 presents a tense mix of the authority of the men behind the camera who experienced the events first hand and their helplessness in the face of the events. They are neither presented as “voices of God” in their description of the events they lived through, nor are they adopting an ironic tone. We are meant to believe what they tell us, but the story we are told is dominated by confusion and indeterminacy. The filmmakers thus emphasize the fact that just because one is there doesn’t mean one has a mastery of the situation, hence the need to speak their reality. Although they do include bits of broader coverage of the events from news media, they successfully resist the urge to fashion a documentary that, one year after the fact, wraps these events up in an essentialized package. There are moments of didacticism, as when we are told without question that the loud crashing sounds heard inside the lobby are definitively the sound of jumpers. Here the voiceover does take command of the film and imposes itself upon the other elements present, bringing credence to critiques of sound’s power to dominate the image. At other times the filmmakers take a step back, allowing moments of uncertainty about offscreen sound to do its work. One such moment is the sound of the collapsing of Tower 2 heard by the firefighters inside the lobby of Tower 1. Here the confusion of the firefighters is imparted to the audience by letting the moment unfold without explanation by the narrators until after the fact. In the film’s final section, the lack of words that meet the firefighter’s calls for response in their search for survivors puts a profound cap on the film’s recurring play with sounds of things unseen; in the end, the unseen remains unheard. The film’s performativity, then, lies in how the voiceover guides us through the gaps opened up by the film’s presentation of sound in the absence of implied visual source. This performativity is set up by the shot of the first plane crash and the expectations it establishes for literal gaps between synchronization of sound and image to be understood as a function of in-camera capture. As the sound of the plane’s impact comes after the image, it is positioned as secondary to, and separate from, that image. This gap, however, is bridged in our understanding of the reason for the separation as a function of a natural phenomenon. The shock of the dramatic lack of synchronization here becomes the shock of the real, while initial reaction to this lack as being a function of filmmaker

Hearing Secondary Explosions   587 intervention gives way to the feeling that this moment has been left absolutely unaltered from its original capture. The path we follow through these experiences of that shot of the first plane crash determines our position in relation to the rest of the film’s demonstrations of various states of sound/image separation. Yet we must keep in mind that, in the context of a film that features extensive performance of synchronization, the decision to leave the sound/image disjunction of that first shot intact is a performance in and of itself designed to highlight the recurring role that sounds of things unseen will play through the rest of the film. In any film that makes use of post-production editing, “asynchronous” sound is always a product of synchronization. Here a new question emerges: What happens when the Naudet footage is performed in contexts outside the construct of their film?

True Asynchronicity: Performing the Naudet Footage Outside of the Film The moments of “asynchronous” sound that I have described are tense, in large part, because of their contextualization within expectations for a non-performative approach to documentation set up by the lack of synchronization between the image and sound of the first plane crash. The film came at the dawn of mainstream video sharing networks on the Internet in which audiovisual media is often disseminated as captured in-camera, without post-production adjustments in sound/image synchronization. The reality of such proliferation of “untouched” media creates new expectations for an “observational” mode of mediamaking that can, in turn, guide our expectations for the role of such footage in a film like the Naudets’ 9/11. However, another crucial aspect of the video-sharing networks is the exponential increase in what I will call “true asynchronicity” in which sounds and images from one source are attached to another. While found footage filmmaking is nothing new, the extent to which sites like YouTube make such media practice possible is historically unparalleled. Perhaps the most telling aspect of the Naudet film’s position at the intersection of overlapping modes of documentary address in this era is the fact that, as exclusive documentation of many of the events it captures, the Naudet footage has found its way into a variety of other media ranging from television news to alternative documentary coverage and experimental filmmaking. In these iterations of moments like the first plane crash, the sound of the jumpers, and the south tower collapse, the Naudet footage is “performed” beyond the context of its own shaping by the Naudets and their team. I conclude this essay with examples from two films in which elements of the 9/11 film have become truly asynchronous with their original text and made to perform for other purposes: Dylan Avery’s “Truther” film Loose Change (2006), and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Mexico” segment of the anthology film 11’09”01 (2003), both of which make extensive use of reclaimed footage from sources that have proliferated online.

588   Randolph Jordan Loose Change argues in favor of “inside job” conspiracy theories suggesting that domestic agents organized the attacks. The film emphasizes the chaos and confusion surrounding the unfolding of events on September 11th, when reports of all manner of unconfirmed happenings were made continually on live TV by professional reporters, uniformed authorities, and civilians alike. In a lengthy montage of clips from a variety of news broadcasts, Loose Change craftily builds a rhetorical narrative leading to the film’s claim that the buildings were ultimately brought down by planned implosion. Avery presents a string of “earwitness” accounts of secondary explosions, including some Naudet footage of firefighters describing their own experience of the sound of the collapsing towers, emphasizing the notion that it seemed like a series of explosions going off, akin to a demolition. At one point in this string comes a telling moment when a reporter approaches a police officer to ask about whether or not he heard any explosions prior to the collapse, and the answer is inconclusive. In this example, we have clear evidence that the people whose testimony the news was relying on in the early hours of the day is hardly reliable, confusing the sounds associated with building collapse with those of explosive devices. This is one of the uses to which offscreen sound is frequently put in all manner of films: to create ambiguity surrounding the sources of things heard but not seen, and this ambiguity was expressed by many earwitnesses on the ground who could not explain the sources of many of the sounds they heard. However, the uses to which these shared references to offscreen sound are put differ across the two films. Loose Change makes the interview with the firefighters work as alleged evidence of an “inside job” but it could just as easily go the other way: ambiguity around offscreen sound offers reasonable doubt for the inside job thesis. The Naudets’ 9/11 lets conflicting and ambiguous descriptions of the chaos hang without finalization, serving instead to highlight the general atmosphere of uncertainty that pervaded the unfolding of the attacks. The asynchronous sound referred to by the same witnesses in both films takes on different meaning when the footage of the witnesses is made asynchronous to their film of origin. A more malleable use of Naudet material in Loose Change comes in the opening credits as we are shown footage of a reporter on the air just as the south tower starts falling, in panic describing the collapse as an explosion just before fleeing the scene. Like the interior footage of this moment from the Naudet film, no distinct explosion is heard prior to this collapse. However, astute listeners will note that midway through Avery’s montage of the collapse following the reporter’s exclamation, the soundtrack shifts to the audio recording of Jules Naudet’s footage inside the north tower lobby as the collapse occurred. This strategy gives us an exterior view of the collapse simultaneously with an interior point of audition, an intriguing example of how sound and image can offer dramatically different perspectives on the same event. This strategy also demonstrates how recordings from multiple media sources can be brought together to create a more comprehensive coverage of the scene, the synchronous sound from the Naudet footage being stripped and re-attached to footage from other media outlets, challenging its technical status as asynchronous sound by replacing it into a context of synchronous events. Yet this strategy fails doubly as support for Avery’s argument for now incorporating two

Hearing Secondary Explosions   589 recordings that provide no sound of secondary explosions as evidence of planned demolition. This failure to fill in the gaps opened up by the conspiracy theory serves again to cast reasonable doubt on that theory, while at the same time speaking to the ultimate impossibility of full coverage of any event in the media, a reality that is resisted unsuccessfully throughout the film’s attempts at comprehensive reconstruction of the day’s events through massive compilation of materials gathered through sources like YouTube. Aside from weak premises for the claim to conspiracy, Jonathan Kahana critiques the broader claim made by Loose Change and its ilk about the power of new media technologies to intervene into questions of officialdom in mainstream media. As he says, almost every frame of the film has been culled from said mainstream media, in a way undermining its own message that such mainstream media cannot yield the truth sought by the Truther movement.34 Going one step further, Kahana positions Loose Change as exemplary of a longstanding conundrum in documentary theory and practice: the relationship between a filmmaker’s ability to shape reality and the power that any given film can have over that reality. The film’s largely online distribution, making it admittedly far more widely available than such a film would have been in pre-digital times, means that it is able to reach a large number of people with its argument. But if we accept the film’s claims to truth, what would—or could—we do with this information?35 It is on this last point that I suggest one of the film’s demonstrable use values in its resistance of the traditionally single-direction transmission channel of media culture, reflecting the attacks themselves as one extremist version of returning communication on the one-way channel of American military authority around the globe. The film is a compendium of footage lost to the vagaries of live TV broadcast, as sequences like that of earwitness accounts to secondary explosions testifies. Where it fails to cohere these fragments into the truth of the whole, it succeeds in speaking back into the void opened up by threads that have been dropped in mainstream media, thus breathing new life into the energy of  the day and its recurrent themes—which can then provide fodder for further audiovisual exploration into the event, perhaps exemplified most prominently in Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s contribution to the compilation film 11’09”01. Iñárritu’s film, part of a global collection of short film responses to the events of 9/11, handles the fragmentary nature of media coverage in a way that highlights the process of asynchronization as an experiential effect of the tragedy, in defiance of the norms of the media discussed thus far. The film consists mostly of black screen with an evolving soundscape, punctuated visually by glimpses of the footage of the tower jumpers. The flashes start as very brief and get increasingly longer as the film progresses, and the shots are organized so that with the increase in length there is also an increase in how far we see the individual jumpers fall. The climactic moments come when he lets one shot of a complete fall run entirely, and then later doubles its length by linking two such shots together through a dissolve. These brief flashes highlight both the scarce availability of these images as well as the extreme emotional effect of the images themselves, and they play out as we listen to increasingly intense recordings culled from the chaos on the streets in the wake of the attacks. Significantly, these recordings include the sound of the

590   Randolph Jordan first plane hitting the towers and the loud crashes inside the lobby of Tower 1 from the Naudet footage. Because of the long stretches in which Iñárritu invites us to simply listen in the absence of any visual information, the film allows us to experience some of the asynchronous material from the Naudet film here as sound alone. We hear the firefighters exclaim “Holy shit!” and then hear the plane crash, only now it is all the stranger for not seeing the impact beforehand. It is as though the firefighters react before the event occurs, a situation that emphasizes Iñárritu’s interest in maintaining a clear distance between sound and image. Indeed, he resists the urge to synch up the sounds of the jumpers crashing to the ground with his images of the jumpers falling from the towers. Like Avery’s Loose Change, Iñárritu’s project here is, in part, to reclaim images that were erased from mainstream media distribution. Unlike Loose Change, Iñárritu does not assemble these lost fragments to create an argument or persuade the audience towards any particular perspective on the events. He leaves the images and sounds to work independently, producing a powerful statement on the asynchronicity of the event itself from its coverage in the media. This strategy is made to work for the film’s final message, a title card with a question for the audience: “Does God’s light guide us or blind us?” Is there any possibility of unity across the divisions of culture so often demarcated by religious belief? Can we co-exist as distinct cultures who nevertheless occupy the same space? These are questions crucial to the nature of media consumption and dissemination as well, and it is here that the fragmented nature of media coverage of 9/11 finds its clearest expression. Iñárritu allows the asynchronous sounds of the Naudet film live as they are, mingling with other recycled material from the shards of the day’s media explosions, all outside the tension of the Naudets’ performative impulses or Avery’s didactic rhetoric, laying bare the problems of attempting coherent organization out of such chaos, and pointing to the larger cultural implications of these problems for the world at large.

Conclusion The new faith in the veracity of in-camera documents disseminated without postproduction interventions poses a problem for the increasingly skeptical attitudes ­characteristic of the “performative” documentary and its surrounding discourse. The Naudet shot of the first crash on 9/11 stands as a striking marker of this new proliferation of “untouched” in-camera footage, presenting a disconcerting duality between its relatively unmediated status as raw tape, and understanding the absence of post-production intervention in the shot as indicative of the Naudets’ approach to performing the practice of audiovisual synchronization in their film 9/11. In the end, 9/11 is quite typical in its approach to pairing sound and image for the purpose of narrative continuity, ultimately dissuading the audience from taking a critical, reflexive stance, and presenting its performative ­elements as an extension of the film’s subjective mode of address. Yet the

Hearing Secondary Explosions   591 reflexive power of the film’s footage can be felt in its iteration through other media items like the films of Avery and Iñárritu, both of whom are interested in today’s proliferation of media outlets as means towards reclaiming documentary evidence for alternative purposes. Secondary to the purposes of the Naudets’ in their film, these alternative uses of their footage open up ways of thinking about asynchronous sound that do justice to the term. Ultimately, hearing secondary explosions in this footage amounts to hearing its reverberation in the works of others, a situation enabled by the intensity of video sharing networks that have opened up since the 9/11 attacks, allowing for heightened levels of meditation upon the ideologies of sound/image synchronization in the cinema by way of encounters with the truly asynchronous.

Notes 1. An earlier version of this essay was published in German as “Waren noch andere Explosionen zu hören? Audiovisuelle (A)Synchronität in den Medien des 21. Jahrhunderts am Beispiel des Films 9/11 der Brüder Naudet,” in Ton. Texte zur Akustik im Dokumentarfilm, ed. Julian Rohrhuber (Vorwerk, 2013), 272–96. I am grateful to the editor and publisher for their kind permission to publish a revised version of this text in English here. 2. The DVD version of the documentary film 9/11 released one year later, signed by the Naudet Brothers and firefighter James Hanlon, is unaltered in this respect. 3. Holly Rogers, “Introduction: Music, Sound and the Nonfiction Aesthetic,” Music and Sound in Documentary Film, ed. Holly Rogers, (New York: Routledge, 2015), 1–19: 1 4. Rogers, “Introduction: Music, Sound and the Nonfiction Aesthetic,” 2. 5. Beatrice Choi, “Live Dispatch: The Ethics of Audio Vision Media Coverage in Trauma and the Legacy of ‘Sound from Shell Shock to 9/11,” Octopus Journal 5 (2011): 1–14. 6. Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006). 7. Selmin Kara, “Reassembling the Nation: Iraq in Fragments and the Acoustics of Occupation,” Studies in Documentary Film 3, no. 3 (2009): 259–74: 259. 8. Kara, “Reassembling the Nation,” 259. 9. Jonathan Kahana, Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 329. 10. Carol Vernallis, Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 11. Alexandra Juhasz, “Documentary on YouTube: The Failure of the Direct Cinema of the Slogan,” in Re-Thinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices, ed. Thomas Austin and Wilma de Jong (Berkshire: McGraw Hill/Open University Press, 2008), 299–312: 300. 12. Britta Sjogren, Into the Vortex: Female Voice and Paradox in Film (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006). 13. Randolph Jordan, “Audiovisual Ecology in the Cinema,” Cinephile 6, no. 1 (2010): 25–30. 14. Sjogren, Into the Vortex, 6. 15. The Surgeon, “PROOF the Naudet Brothers had a Sound Man! —- They Were NOT Alone!” Loose Change 9/11 forum, September 16, 2010, http://s1.zetaboards.com/ LooseChangeForums/topic/3791762/1/, accessed December 9, 2019. 16. Giovanna Chesler, “Die Realität der tonspur: Frederick Wiseman und das beobachtende Mikrofon,” in Frederick Wiseman: Kino des Sozialen, ed. Eva Hohenberger (Vorwerk 8), 142.

592   Randolph Jordan 17. Randolph Jordan, “Re-placing the Urban Soundscape: Performative Documentary Research in Vancouver’s False Creek.” In Critical Distance in Documentary Media, ed. Gerda Cammaer, Blake Fitzpatrick, and Bruno Lessard (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), 257–78. 18. Paul Ward, “Drama-Documentary, Ethics, and Notions of Performance: The Flight 93 Films,” in Re-Thinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices, ed. Thomas Austin and Wilma de Jong (Berkshire: McGraw Hill/Open University Press, 2008), 191–203: 200. 19. Ward, “Drama-Documentary, Ethics, and Notions of Performance,” 202. 20. Choi, “Live Dispatch,” 3. 21. Perhaps this is what Werner Herzog was thinking when he challenged such privileging of the image as carrier of ethical weight in Grizzly Man (2005), warning a family member not to listen to the sound recording of Timothy Treadwell being killed by a bear (an ethical position he betrays by listening intently to the footage himself, while on camera, wearing headphones so that the audience cannot hear). See David T. Johnson, “ ‘You Must Never Listen to This’: Lessons on Sound, Cinema, and Mortality from Herzog’s Grizzly Man,” Film Criticism 32, no. 3 (2008): 68–82. 22. Choi, “Live Dispatch,” 13. 23. Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 15. 24. Barbara Flueckiger, “Sound Effects: Strategies for Sound Effects in Film,” in Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media: A Critical Overview, ed. Graeme Harper, Ruth Doughty, and Jochen Eisentraut (New York: Continuum, 2009), 156. 25. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 33. 26. Ward, “Drama-Documentary, Ethics, and Notions of Performance,” 194. 27. Bruzzi New Documentary, 185–86. 28. Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 95. 29. Bruzzi, New Documentary, 186. 30. Ibid., 197. 31. Sjogren, Into the Vortex, 47. 32. Ibid., 47–8. 33. Bruzzi, New Documentary, 222. 34. Kahana, Intelligence Work, 335. 35. Ibid., 336.

Select Bibliography Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2006. Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Choi, Beatrice. “Live Dispatch: The Ethics of Audio Vision Media Coverage in Trauma and the Legacy of ‘Sound from Shell Shock to 9/11.” Octopus Journal 5 (2011): 1–14. Eisenstein, Sergei, V. I. Pudovkin, G. V. Alexandrov. “A Statement.” Reprinted in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. Elizabeth Weis and John Belton, 83–85. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Flueckiger, Barbara. “Sound Effects: Strategies for Sound Effects in Film.” In Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media: A Critical Overview, ed. Graeme Harper, Ruth Doughty and Jochen Eisentraut, 151–79. New York: Continuum, 2009.

Hearing Secondary Explosions   593 Johnson, David T. “ ‘You Must Never Listen to This’: Lessons on Sound, Cinema, and Mortality from Herzog’s Grizzly Man.” Film Criticism 32, no. 3 (2008): 68–82. Jordan, Randolph. “Audiovisual Ecology in the Cinema.” Cinephile 6, no. 1 (2010): 25–30. Jordan, Randolph. “Re-placing the Urban Soundscape: Performative Documentary Research in Vancouver’s False Creek.” In Critical Distance in Documentary Media, ed. Gerda Cammaer, Blake Fitzpatrick, and Bruno Lessard, 257–78. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018. Juhasz, Alexandra. “Documentary on YouTube: The Failure of the Direct Cinema of the Slogan.” In Re-Thinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices, ed. Thomas Austin and Wilma de Jong, 299–312. Berkshire: McGraw Hill/Open University Press, 2008. Kahana, Jonathan. Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Kara, Selmin. “Reassembling the Nation: Iraq in Fragments and the Acoustics of Occupation.” Studies in Documentary Film 3, no. 3 (2009): 259–74. Nichols, Bill. Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Rogers, Holly, ed. Music and Sound in Documentary Film. New York: Routledge, 2015. Ruoff, Jeffrey K. “Conventions of Sound in Documentary.” Cinema Journal 32, no. 3 (1993): 24–40. Sjogren, Britta. Into the Vortex: Female Voice and Paradox in Film. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Vaughan, Dai. For Documentary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Vernallis, Carol. Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Ward, Paul. “Drama-Documentary, Ethics, and Notions of Performance: The Flight 93 Films.” In Re-Thinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices, ed. Thomas Austin and Wilma de Jong, 191–203. Berkshire: McGraw Hill/Open University Press, 2008.

pa rt V I

AC RO S S M E DI A

CHAPTER 29

Evolv i ng Story li n e s a n d Pat ter ns of Listen i ng The Case of Invasion at the Dawn of the Binge Age (2005–2006) Robynn J. Stilwell

2005 was the most active Atlantic hurricane season on record; for the first time, the alphabetical list of storm names was depleted in October. On September 21 of that year, Americans were still reeling from the images of death, destruction, and dislocation from Hurricane Katrina, and the fourth most intense hurricane in recorded history, Rita, was headed across the Gulf of Mexico toward the coast of Texas. And that night, Hurricane Eve made landfall at Homestead, Florida. Unlike the other devastating storms, however, Hurricane Eve was fictional, the precipitating event of the ABC-TV series Invasion, intended by the network to be a companion to the highly successful Lost in its second season. Invasion was an ambitious, complex show eventually scuttled by the bad timing of its premier, erratic scheduling, and a slow, inexorable pace not well-suited to the structures of American commercial television, with its commercial breaks, sometimes weeks between episodes, and repeats of episodes within the season, breaking up the flow of new episodes.1 Invasion demanded continuity and attention in a way most other network, broadcast shows did not. Its arrival presaged the era of binge-watching.2 Drawing from the work of scholars like Sharon Marie Ross and Matt Hills,3 Mareike Jenner calls binge-watching a “viewing protocol” that engages many of the behaviors associated with fans without engaging in explicitly fannish behavior, such as live-tweeting, fic-writing, fan art, or cosplay.4 “Binge-watching is not textual productivity, but a mode of consumption,” Jenner argues. “The deliberate, focused attention . . . works to enable close textual analysis and the kind of implicit textual production viewers who are uncomfortable

598   Robynn J. Stilwell with the fan label may engage with.”5 The criteria for a “binge” are primarily determined by the viewer: “deliberate, focused attention,” autonomous scheduling, and a watching period that is “only excessive relative to a norm that is difficult to pin down.”6 But what makes a “binge-worthy” text? For Ross, Jenner, and others, complex narrative structures “invite” binge-watching because they demand the close attention, the unraveling, and perhaps even the uninterrupted viewing. Complexity becomes roughly synonymous with “quality,” and both scholars and bingers bandy about the term “cinematic,” often used without specific definition. It usually carries a whiff of value judgment,7 based on (expensive) traits associated with the “big screen”—big budgets, high production values (including orchestral scores), star performers and directors, and consciously filmic techniques.8 But the experience of the narrative itself can also be “cinematic” as television programming becomes more long-form, with season-long and multi-season arcs; despite their seriality, they thus become more continuous, less “polluted” by advertising and broadcasting breaks, and, yes, more luxuriously produced. As experienced on DVD or streaming, then—removed from the disruptive framework of broadcast television—Invasion is potentially, colloquially, provisionally cinematic, in its lush visual style and rich orchestral score, this last a luxury noted by co-composer Jon Ehrlich: Jason [Derlatka] and I were given the rare gift in television of a live orchestra. Our goal was to create something that reflected both the brutal, relentless nature of survival and the hypnotically beautiful, yet fragile quality of each life that the characters of Invasion struggle in every moment to protect.9

A few of Ehrlich and Derlatka’s scoring strategies resemble Michael Giacchino’s score for Lost, notably the lushness and depth of the string section and, most prominently, the use of a single, subtly shifting sonority as a signature for the show—for Invasion, an intensifying, oscillating dissonance reminiscent of a Penderecki string cluster (or a swarm of insects)—rather than a more traditional “theme.” It plays over the fade-in display of the title at the beginning, and usually accompanies the blackout to the end of an episode. Timbre plays a significant role in both shows, but while Giacchino’s score has themes for certain characters and situations, they are often of low melodic distinction and can easily slip by merely as harmonic underscoring with simple timbral and textural variations;10 Ehrlich and Derlatka deploy more obvious “tunes,” and fewer of them. In keeping with the complex and constantly shifting ground of the unfolding narrative, however, these motifs and themes are never what they appear to be at first. Or rather, they are never only what they at first appear to be. The show’s intricate narrative with an original three-year concept, replete with mirrors and doublings and onion-like layers of significance, made it difficult to sustain an audience in the flow of American broadcasting but made it enticingly binge-worthy. Although the title, the major conceit, and the rather brilliant casting of Veronica Cartwright11 as head of the local TV news station suggests yet another variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the show had as much or more to say about the emotional

Evolving Storylines and Patterns of Listening   599 dynamics of blended families, adolescence and identity, faith and science in an era of climate change, the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, the rise of a mercenary shadow military (outfits like Halliburton and Blackwater), the ethics of torture, and the culture of conspiracy theories. Even the nature of the titular invasion is ambiguous and never entirely resolved when the show ends on a cliffhanger.12 Invasion was only able to play out the first part of its three-year narrative. In that single season, however, enough of the narrative unfurls to recognize that evolution and adaptation were at work in the music as well as the narrative. In most cinematic contexts (particularly dramatic and/or epic genres), themes and motifs often follow certain characters or ideas, changing and adapting with the story. American television music has tended to operate differently, in part at least because of industry production practice. Series have traditionally had to rely on a “library” of cues written and recorded in the first few episodes of the season; these cues are then distributed in other episodes as they seem to fit.13 This leads to the cues often becoming less narrative in the long term and more situational: “action cue,” “intimate moment,” “humorous interaction,” and the like. As American drama series have become increasingly serial, the two functions—characterbased and situational—have become somewhat blurred. Ehrlich and Derlatka’s motifs seem transparently situational from the beginning, but are gradually revealed to be more multifarious and, if not exactly deceptive, then carrying more meaning than could ever be suspected from their initial presentation; the one full-blown melodic theme seems to be attached to a single, apparently ancillary character in cinematic fashion, but also accrues meaning through its permutations, revealing the character to be at the center of the larger conceptual web of the show and its score. The score thus could be argued to operate more cinematically than most television shows, but also may require more attention than ordinarily sustained across a season (or three) of a weekly broadcast television series, or over a series of fantastical adventure movies, two or three hours at a time over a span of years. Invasion invites not just intense, focused viewing, but a commensurate listening protocol. The music is not merely a situational accompaniment or emotional color to the story, but foreshadows, insinuates, and implicates the narrative to an extraordinary degree, even allowing us to consider some strands of the story that were never realized.

Nothing Is As It Seems . . . or Sounds Hurricane Eve precipitates inexplicable changes in those who spend time in the water during the disaster. These “survivors” include pivotal character Mariel (Kari Matchett), physician and chief of staff at Homestead Hospital, who was formerly married to park ranger Russell Varon (Eddie Cibrian) and is now married to Sheriff Tom Underlay (William Fichtner). Russell and Mariel have two children, teenager Jesse (Evan Peters) and second-grader Rose (Ariel Gade). Jesse and Rose split their time with Russell and his second wife, local investigative television reporter Larkin Groves (Lisa Sheridan), in

600   Robynn J. Stilwell their rural home and the Underlay household in town, which includes Mariel, Tom, and Tom’s adolescent daughter, Kira (Alexis Dziena), from his first marriage, which ended nine years earlier when his wife, Grace, was killed in a plane crash, of which Tom was the sole survivor. It is possible to watch Invasion almost entirely as a story about blended families: the trauma of divorce and fights over child custody, the tentative building of new family ties, the feelings of estrangement from family no longer living under the same roof, and the possibility of more children in the new families—Larkin is pregnant; Mariel and Tom have agreed on no more children, but he starts to have second thoughts during the season. Reproduction becomes a major theme in the show, an element often engaged in science fiction by amplifying biological messiness and danger; here the show draws both on foregoing Invasion of the Body Snatchers narratives and the more explicit body horror of Ridley Scott and H. R. Giger’s Alien designs. With few exceptions, however, the familial tensions in Invasion are only heightened versions of familiar human drama: survivors’ meetings in the local church could be almost any support group or twelve-step program; when school resumes after the hurricane, the teens find that negotiating high school alliances, cliques, and rivalries are complicated by the changes that have come over some of the inhabitants during the extended summer break. Such detail gives a glimpse of the richness of the canvas on which Invasion plays out and emphasizes how much of the story operates on at least two levels at once: the human and the “alien.” The series also performs one of the more ambitious manipulations of audience perspective perhaps ever attempted in American television. From the first episode, the point-of-view character is Russell: he’s handsome, he’s good with kids, he cares about the environment, he has sparky banter with his cute young wife; as the central character, he transmits his feelings to the audience that Mariel is an interfering and controlling mother, always checking up on the children when they’re with him. Russell is particularly irked by Tom. Throughout the first part of the season, Tom is the cocky, arrogant Sheriff who always seems just a step ahead of Russell, and the cinematography, music, and careful doling out of information set Tom up as the bad guy. And yet we increasingly realize that Russell is an unreliable narrator, harboring complicated feelings toward Tom, not just sexual jealousy over Mariel and paternal anxiety over Rose’s designation of Tom’s home as her “real house,” but also resentment that Tom is often proven right when they come into conflict. Tom seems to know more about what is going on than others in Homestead, and his liaison with the military—he is a former Air Force officer himself—heightens both his authority and Russell’s disdain for his grandstanding with the media. The revelation that Tom is a “survivor” is gradual over the first six episodes, although he is a “hybrid”14 of longer standing than others in Homestead. He was “taken” (the term that the show uses in lieu of “bodysnatching”) in the Everglades after the plane crash, but when and how he comes to know this is, like so much, ambiguous; it is possible that only during the span of the series does he truly realize that he is no longer (fully) human. In the last third of the series, Tom evolves into an antihero, if not a full-blown revolutionary hero, matched and sometimes challenged by Mariel’s resilience and strength. Our point of view has

Evolving Storylines and Patterns of Listening   601 expanded and been distributed among the characters so that we can see Russell’s misperceptions, and thus our own. The music is intimately intertwined with this intricate tapestry, and much like the gradual revelations about Tom, it works on one level on first viewing but acquires increasing meaning upon rewatching. And like Tom, by the end, some of the themes are representing things that seem wildly different from where they began, arguably escalating its binge-worthiness—you can’t just watch it once.

Out of the Deep: Modular, Familiar, Eerie The most pervasive and flexible theme is one that is heard first in the introductory montage of the main characters as the storm gathers. It is a rhythmically minimalist, modular theme of continuously rippling eighth notes comprising three main motifs that operate as individual cells, or modules: a downward rocking major third (see Example 29.1b), an upward rocking minor second (see Example 29.1c), and a combination of the two (rising minor second, downward major third (see Example 29.1a)) that is intervallically identical to Marius Constant’s famous motif for the television series The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–64), a show known for its eerie mood and fantastical situations. In isolation from harmonic function (as in The Twilight Zone), the pattern circles obsessively, driven by its apparent tonic-dominant motion (^7^1^7^5). Nestled into the context of a minor triad, as in Invasion, however, the same interval pattern reads as ^5^b6^5^b3 and blends into the watery quality of the rocking thirds and seconds. This is accentuated when, as it often is, the “Twilight Zone” (TZ) cell is embedded in the midst of the other modules, which dominate the flow of the theme. This modular theme sometimes starts on the rocking thirds before going to the TZ cell, accentuating the watery aspect; the seconds are almost always an ending gesture syntactically resembling an ellipsis, sustaining the sense of suspension present throughout the series. In its various configurations, the theme is often sequenced by major third or fourth upward, creating a sense of wonder and a sensation of expansion, with a deep swell in the strings that evokes the oceanic source and scope of the change coming. As ambiguous as it may be, this change is clearly triggered by something in the hurricane that is depicted in the first sequence, following a military plane flying into the eye and taking readings. At the end of the sequence, the weather observers see Example 29.1  Cells, or modules, of the modular theme: (a) “Twilight Zone (TZ),” (b) rocking thirds, (c) rocking seconds; (a) is a combination of the intervals from (b) and (c).

602   Robynn J. Stilwell something roiling the surface of the water and heaving up out of the deep, striking a wing of the airplane and sending out showers of tiny pink-orange spark-like lights. The frame pulls back to show streams of the lights emerging from the eye of the storm. The striking, almost astronomical image assumes the place of a credit sequence in a more typical television show, and a matched cut to a similarly shaped mud puddle takes us down to earth. There follows a La Ronde-like montage that introduces the major characters and the modular theme together. As the storm builds, we travel from Russell helping displaced people at the ranger station, through the television to reporter Larkin covering disaster preparedness for the local station; Mariel’s call to check on her children, who are prepping at the Varon home, creates the transition to her work at the hospital as they gear up for casualties, damage, and possible evacuation. This sequence introduces the major characters and their relationships; providing a liquid restlessness under the wind and bustle of activity, the theme relies heavily on the alternations of thirds and seconds. We are introduced to Tom last among the major characters, and he is explicitly framed to make him ominous. Mariel looks through the Venetian blinds of the main hospital window to see him standing beside his sheriff ’s cruiser outside the hospital, with his back to Mariel and the camera. In contrast to his khaki-clad deputies, he is wearing a blindingly white uniform shirt that fills the center screen; the white shirt (and his occasional spotlessly white t-shirt) will pay off symbolically by the end of the season, but here may either be a red herring about his villainy or a foreshadowing of his heroism. The wind is kicking up, ruffling his light brown hair, and the frame gives us only a partial view of his face, with dark glasses against a sharp cheekbone.15 Without missing a beat after deploying his troopers, he turns into a normalized medium-close-up and uses the loud-hailer to flirt with Mariel, who waves at him through the window. Their interchange seems light and playful, but the music’s rippling undercuts their byplay, casting both of them in a dangerous light. At the end of their short exchange, a retrograde variation of the TZ module rises out of the texture like a surge of the ocean (^b3-^5-^b6-^5), and ambiguously suggests both uneasiness and romantic longing. As the dark storm windows come down, the retrograde motive rises up a major third in a swelling motion that will become familiar, and the rocking thirds are now attached to the “top” of the motif, giving a sense of the flexibility of the modular theme. Leaving Mariel to batten down the hospital, Tom goes to pick up his daughter. As he gets behind the wheel, Tom takes off his sunglasses to look up at the gathering clouds, an expression of anticipation subtly crossing his face to the augmented strains of the raised motif, which tails off into a dissonance that is lost under the sound of pounding rain in the shift of scene to the high school. Like any teenager, Kira is mortified to be picked up by a parent, and she is particularly unhappy with him appearing in his cruiser. When she expresses concern about the storm, Tom reassures her with a serene warmth that he knows they will be safe. Kira wonders how he can know that, and Tom merely says, “I know.” The watery theme re-enters as they pull away from the curb, and we hear the first iteration of the TZ module. It is almost obscured by other strands of the soundscape, although its familiarity may pique the ear of the audience; like Tom apparently looking

Evolving Storylines and Patterns of Listening   603

Video 29.1  Tom anticipates the storm; cross-fade to the cruiser pulling away from the high school, with the “TZ” cell in the underscore.

forward to the storm, it is a low-level anomaly in the texture, alerting us to something beyond the immediate situation (see Video 29.1). The modular theme is capable of spinning out endless variations of rippling, watery underscore, a constant reminder of the source of the transformation overtaking Homestead. The TZ motif draws from a potent cultural code for the supernatural or fantastical, and its retrograde not only traditionally signifies a romantic longing but participates in a dense symbolism of mirroring and an alliance of the intimate with the eerie throughout the series.

Turning of the Tide: the “Hybrid Complex” and the Building of Community The modular theme that initially operates as a signal of unease gradually starts to accrue another meaning, especially when combined with a mobile steadicam circling around characters and a subtle shift into overcranking (slow motion). I will shorthand this sight/sound/movement combination as the “hybrid complex.” At first, this multi-modal symbol primarily emphasizes Tom’s preternatural awareness of his surroundings, and the first instance is so brief that it may easily be missed. While hunting in the woods for the missing Mariel after the storm, Russell and another park ranger converse in Spanish in the center of the screen as Tom turns his head into an overcranked shot of him finding a snag of blonde hair on a tree some feet away: here, the music is a solo violin playing hesitant, large downward leaps in harmonics; it never entirely coalesces into a theme, but suggests, in a ghostly fashion, a melody that will eventually become associated with the survivors. It is also the first correlation of Tom and the violin. Later in the episode, the Steadicam/overcranking subtly shades an interaction in which Tom comforts Mariel, still in shock from her ordeal in the swamp. The full hybrid complex comes together near the end of the episode in a scene that mirrors some of the elements of the introductory montage. Russell hovers curiously as Mariel examines wounds on his brother-in-law Dave’s legs, sustained in the swamp. Dave thinks it was an alien, Russell is skeptical but suspects it’s not the alligator that Mariel suggests. “What else could it be?” she asks with a curious smile as the TZ motif sounds clearly in the underscore, its familiarity and placement as an answer to her question popping the modular theme into the foreground by hailing the ear of the audience. Taking off her latex gloves, Mariel turns and leaves the hospital room, but is still clearly visible from Russell’s point-of-view through the glass wall. The shot shifts into slight slow motion. This visual motif, together with the rippling underscore, gives the sense of

604   Robynn J. Stilwell

Video 29.2  “The hybrid complex” of music, movement, and camera-work marks Mariel as a survivor.

a tiny suspension of gravity, or that the characters are moving through water, appropriately associated with the “survivors.” Russell watches Mariel pass a mirror and go to the window, peering out through the Venetian blinds to see Tom by his cruiser in a recapitulation of their introduction (see Video 29.2). By about the first third of the series, this theme that contains multitudes, as it were, in its constant mutability of ordering, repetition, and mirroring, comes to symbolize community among the survivors, and even the core family unit built from Mariel, Tom, and all three children. The circling camera shot begins to fall away, as signaling Tom’s otherness becomes less necessary, though the overcranking remains, hovering over moments almost like a glow. Episode 6 (“The Hunt”) is arguably the first time that the audience might start to realize the shifting significance of the modular theme.16 The crucial scene works both on the immediate, first-time-through recognition of Tom’s supernatural qualities and status as an alpha hybrid, but it expands to encompass the idea of “community.” Derek, a boy who has been pursuing Kira, is taken after an all-night beach party in Biscayne Park. Afterward, he is captivated by Mariel and begins to stalk her, watching her take a midday bath (another visual/narrative motif of the survivors is their fascination with water) and showing up at a survivors’ support meeting. Although uneasy about his attentions, Mariel feels both maternal and medical concern, encouraging his attendance at the meetings, and she even offers him a ride one evening. Derek asks for a diversion, saying he wants to show her something at Biscayne Park. “What’s there,” she asks? “The water,” he responds, wonderingly, and they end up at the beach where he was taken. Derek tries to convince Mariel to go into the water with him, but she refuses, and he starts to pull her in, but she resists. Suddenly, from out of frame, Tom bursts into the scene, tackling Derek into the shallow water to slow bursts of low brass. With his foot on Derek’s chest to hold him down, Tom urges Mariel to go to her meeting, and she finally, reluctantly leaves. Once she’s gone, Tom turns his attention to Derek, who babbles apologies as Tom straddles him and pushes him underwater. “Like the water, Derek? Like to go swimming? Let’s go swimming!” Tom holds him under until the boy’s struggles stop. But far from drowning, Derek becomes still, bubbles of air escaping in slight slow motion as he gazes up through the calming water at Tom, in wonder. When Tom finally lets him up, Derek gasps, “That was amazing!” The TZ motif plays, followed by the rocking thirds, and Tom gives him a paternal smile, saying, “You have a lot to learn.” Derek agrees and promises to stay away from Tom’s family, but as Tom hauls him out of the water, he encourages Derek to continue attending the meetings and muses about sending him away for a while to a camp to learn how to contribute to the community. This last part of the exchange is underscored by a more extensive iteration of the modular theme, and as Tom leads Derek out of the water, he tousles his hair almost affectionately (see Video 29.3). This gesture is striking, as Tom has been physically aggressive toward Derek until this moment. Tied to the realization that Tom wasn’t trying to drown Derek,

Evolving Storylines and Patterns of Listening   605

Video 29.3  Tom “drowns” Derek to reveal to him his transformation, and then urges him to become part of the community, helping rotate the meaning of the TZ cell from the eerie to the familiar.

but only to give him a glimpse of his new status in a way that evokes awe, and Tom’s stressing of community, the modular theme retains its sense of the unknown but starts to accrue a feeling of warmth and family.

Tom’s Waltz; or Is It? Tom is the only character who seems to have his own theme, as it is almost exclusively associated with him throughout the season: a folk-like waltz played on a fiddle with little harmonic framework from the orchestra and synthesizers; they primarily provide a vaporous pad of support that suggests a pedal tone. Although the tune has a clear antecedent/consequent periodic structure, the extended cadential gesture suggests a plagal rather than authentic harmony. Together with the raised sixth and lowered seventh, this lends the tune an archaic quality, and also plays into moments where it is used in church settings (see Example 29.2). Example 29.2  The waltz theme associated with Tom Underlay.

Unlike the modular theme, this theme is almost always presented with some degree of foregrounding; the solo instrument and clear melody demand attention, and it rarely competes with dialogue. It is also, however, almost always presented with cells from the modular theme, usually the TZ motif, filling out the empty bar and a half at the end of the first phrase, adding a touch of unease to the melody in the early stages of the series but increasingly tying both themes to the concept of family as the series progresses. Typical of Invasion’s long-ranging strategy of developing themes across the series, the tune is introduced early, first appearing at the end of the second episode (“Lights Out”) in a scene replete with doubling. At the highest level, it reflects a scene at the end of the first episode (“Pilot”) in which survivor Mariel is putting daughter Rose to bed; the two of them are talking intimately about Rose’s fear of the hurricane returning. The camera pans over their image in the dresser mirror, past a string of pink-orange dragonfly nightlights that recall the sparks from the night of the hurricane—the sparks that only Rose appears to have seen—past a window that reflects the lamp on the bedside table, to the two of them lying in bed. As Mariel kisses Rose’s forehead and brushes her nose

606   Robynn J. Stilwell against her daughter’s, Rose murmurs sleepily, “Mommy, you smell different.” Disturbed, Mariel leans over Rose to turn out the lamp, and her point-of-view shot sees Tom, through two doorways across the hallway in the master bedroom, sitting on the edge of their bed in the dark, watching them. The signature, Penderecki-like string cluster that draws the episode to a close casts him in an ominous light, accentuated by the visual blackout. The scene at the end of the next episode starts similarly, with Mariel tucking Rose into bed, but she is interrupted by a phone call from the hospital, which she takes in the master bedroom. Tom takes over bedtime duties, reversing their positions from the scene in first episode. The “Lights Out” scene highlights not just Tom’s image in the bedroom mirror, but his juxtaposition to the aquarium screen-saver on Rose’s computer (a hint of the marine nature of the invasion threat), as well as his tendency to linger in doorframes, another symbol of his duality (see Figure 29.1).17 Since the night of the storm, Rose has asked of everyone if they had seen the lights falling into the water. Everyone else has brushed her off, offered plausible explanations that fail to satisfy, or even dismissed her; but “Daddy Tom” takes the time to listen (see Video 29.4). The melody unwinds as he sits on the side of her bed, and she tells of seeing the lights almost poetically, her words supported by the theme that draws them together; he leans closer to listen. “They were beautiful,” she avers. He checks tentatively over his shoulder, then leans closer, asking softly, “Can you keep a secret, honey?” When she nods, he whispers, “I saw them, too.” Rose’s smile ends the episode, and the staging of the scene is both creepy and tender, playing on the way Tom is set up as threatening in earlier scenes, but also loving and tender with Mariel in just the previous scene. The fiddle waltz has the same quality of sweetness and eeriness, especially with the interpolated TZ fragments. Another version of the theme is underpinned by a pulsating accompaniment derived from the intervals of the modular community theme, recalling both a fiddle dance tune and the holy minimalism of a Pärt or Tavener. This version of the fiddle waltz is an excellent example of redistributing library cues. The first use comes at the end of the fifth episode (“Unnatural Selection”) when Tom testifies at a survivors’ support group meeting at the church as a thunderstorm brews outside. Lightning strikes light up the stained glass windows behind him and flickers over his sharp features, as he calmly tells about his survival of the plane crash with Mariel listening from the pews, as if she’s never heard him tell the story. The melody suggests the emotion under Tom’s serene delivery, and the restlessness of the accompaniment catches the uneasiness of the storm and of the listeners. This version of the theme will return in a scene later in the series, before the same stained glass windows, as Tom talks with Father Scanlon about his fears of losing Mariel; in this iteration, the accompaniment scores Tom’s near-frantic questioning of himself and his relationship, while the long-lined melody matches Scanlon’s certainty about Mariel’s love. The waltz and the interpolated modular themes recombine in a musically rich and visually sumptuous sequence at the end of the eighth episode (“The Cradle”). Obeying an urge common to the survivors, Mariel has returned to the cove of her rebirth. There, she discovers her human corpse in the water. Unnaturally calm, she returns home, still

Evolving Storylines and Patterns of Listening   607

Figure 29.1  As Tom and Rose talk about the lights, the shot composition emphasizes his duality with the aquarium screensaver, and with his own reflection in her full-length mirror.

Video 29.4  The fiddle tune associated with Tom is first heard as he listens to Rose about the lights, with the interpolation of the TZ at the end of the first phrase.

soaking wet, to Tom who has been waiting for her in the dark. She tells him what she had seen, and she only becomes subtly animated when she asks Tom if he knew. He denies it, and she challenges him to go see himself. A rich, new cello theme that builds in a prayer-like choir of strings and winds follows two intercut sequences, both slightly overcranked: Mariel and the children cooking dinner, and Tom descending into the

608   Robynn J. Stilwell

Figure 29.2  The image of Mariel’s corpse underwater and her survivor’s face in the mirror blend in the steam of the bathroom mirror, creating two registers of doubling (top); the scene and episode close with a mirrored image of a conflicted Tom in the foreground, with Mariel’s calm reflection even deeper in the dresser mirror (bottom).

waters of the cove, his white uniform shirt open over his t-shirt, arms outstretched almost as if he were entering for a baptism. The music grows more dissonant as he feels beneath the water until he finds her corpse with a shock chord. His panicked recoil and sharp gasp strongly suggests that this is perhaps more of a surprise for him than it had been for her. The transition back to Mariel at home occurs as she gazes at her reflection in the steamy bathroom mirror. The haze strikingly blends the image of the decomposing corpse under the water and the “living” woman (see Figure 29.2, top). The slow, lyrical pace remains, though now at normal camera speed, and the fiddle waltz plays as Tom returns home, exhibiting the same slow, eerie calm that Mariel had shown. The tune follows him down the hallway to their bedroom in one full statement. Mariel is sitting in the middle of their bed, slowly leafing through their wedding album; tellingly, the first iteration of the TZ module, now strongly signifying community and

Evolving Storylines and Patterns of Listening   609 family but also freshly reinvested with the uncanny and eerie, sounds just as she turns the page to the first picture we see, a photo of the entire blended family (Tom, Mariel, Kira, Jesse, and Rose). As Tom hovers in the doorway, the waltz begins again and she asks, “So?” He comes into the room so that we see him in the foreground, and an unfocused image of the two of them in the mirror, part of the complex, “cinematic” use of visual mirroring already seen in the parallel scenes in “Pilot” and “Lights Out” (see Figure 2, bottom). Mariel asks, “Did you see it?” And as the dissonance gathers for the end of the episode, it ends with a timpani drop and the one unequivocal lie he tells in the series: “I didn’t see a thing.” While by this time familiar as the closing musical gesture, here the cue intensifies the conflicting emotions while keeping the exact situational function ambiguous. In Episode 13 (“Redemption”) the fiddle theme is used—notably without the TZ cell—to enact the emotional resolution between Tom and Mariel. In a side-slip of time brought on by a gunshot, Tom awakens in 1996 in the wake of the plane crash. With his awareness of the intervening decade, his meeting the younger, still-married Mariel is fraught, and her connection to him may be more than simple attraction: she could be responding to the intensity of the emotional history he cannot reveal. Back in 2005, Mariel provides the blood infusion that saves his life, and as he slowly regains consciousness, watching Mariel walk toward him in slow motion, the theme in canon pulls together the two timelines. The final narrative twist on the theme occurs later in Episode 17 (“The Key”), and starts to unravel the connection with Tom specifically, his relationship with Mariel, and even his humanity. Although they had agreed on no more children before marrying, Tom’s recent experiences have sparked the desire for a baby with Mariel, causing tension; her treatment of a pregnant survivor has made her all too aware that such a pregnancy is not “normal.”18 In a scene directly reflecting one in “The Cradle,” fragments of the waltz play in counterpoint as they sit on the edge of the bath, talking intimately about having a baby. The fiddle theme rises, then falls, between their soft, fragmented lines; the music tries each phrase but breaks off, going astray as Tom resignedly agrees. The way that the theme constantly fails when Mariel tells Tom there will be no babies19 hints at something unfolding that is only revealed in a place few would find it: the title of the theme on the soundtrack album—“Evolution.” Just as the modular theme works on first hearing as a signifier of unease and the supernatural, but in retrospect holds up its accrued meaning of “community” and “family” for the survivors/hybrids, the theme that is so strongly associated with Tom makes sense all along as representing “evolution.” Tom is the earliest hybrid survivor; he tries to unify both the survivors and the human inhabitants of his community; and his desire for more children, whether little Underlays or little hybrids, would help bind that community. As the show unfolds, it seems that the “invasion” might not be extraterrestrial, but an evolution going on in the earth’s oceans, perhaps as a result of global warming. The persistent acoustic quality of the tune implies organicism, even humanity, playing against the seemingly threatening quality of Tom Underlay until it is revealed as foreshadowing.

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Surviving: Figure-Ground As the Twilight Zone module might demand audience attention through its familiarity, or the fiddle tune through the fragility of the solo violin texture, other themes also enact a figure-ground reversal—a sense of the music moving from “background” to “foreground”—through a combination of striking musical gesture, lack of dialogue, and shifts in volume or intensity. The survivors’ theme, for instance, is rarely used narratively, but is aurally imposing. With its wide leaps and odd harmonic fluidity—it shifts from d-minor to f#-minor—it is more emphatically unsettling than the rippling modular theme, but shares its tendency to sideslip harmonically in “real” terms rather than tonal ones, and in the way the final note might be heard as a tonic melodically, but in the context of the harmonies, it is a fifth, creating a subtle sense of suspension (see Example 29.3). The survivors’ theme is gradually revealed throughout the first episode, building its connection with Hurricane Eve. Its first appearance, with a half-step anacrusis, is attenuated timbrally in the synthesizer and played with a tentative, wandering rhythmic profile that dilutes its strength. It lies underneath Larkin’s television report about area residents who had survived earlier (real) hurricanes Andrew and Charlie, and later appears in a television report about the rescued Father Scanlon. The first full statement of the survivors’ theme is interpolated into the closing sequence of the pilot. As Mariel looks out through the window at Tom by his cruiser, Father Scanlon turns from speaking to Tom, looks up at Russell in the hospital window, and smiles. This emphatically rhythmicized version in a nearly monophonic full orchestra guise arises out of the rocking seconds module that functions as an extended leading tone, creating a link between the modular theme with the survivors’ theme that is different than the one between the modular theme and the evolutionary waltz, but conceptually similar as they can be linked up like musical Lego bricks. Like the waltz, this theme at first seems associated with a particular character but is revealed to be something broader and deeper. The priest’s odd demeanor, his association with Tom, and the strong but “untrustworthy” sideslipping melody help foster suspicion in the audience (Scanlon even becomes a suspect in Tom’s shooting in “Redemption”). The theme’s placement as weekly “end credits theme” sustains a sense of foreboding throughout the series and stands out when used narratively through its strong profile and relative familiarity. As the nearly submerged introduction of the theme under Larkin’s initial television report suggests, the theme soon comes to represent all the characters like Father Example 29.3  The survivors’ theme.

Evolving Storylines and Patterns of Listening   611 Scanlon and Mariel who survived Hurricane Eve, but it expands beyond that, as it comes to represent other characters who are taken after the hurricane. The most ­stable, musically and symbolically, of the major themes, it also undergoes the most ­significant transformation. Tom’s deputy Lewis Sirk starts as a peripheral character but gradually moves toward the center of the story. Lewis lost his left arm in Iraq and struggled to find a job before Tom gave him a chance. A deeply devout young man, Lewis has unwavering faith in two authorities: God and Tom.20 But in Episode 10 (“Origin of Species”), Tom nonetheless dangles Lewis as bait for the invaders under the guise of exploring an illegal chemical dump. Tom urges Lewis into the water, and an orange-pink light appears in the depths. Curious, Lewis bends down to get a closer look. He is snatched underwater in an instant, and Tom’s shocked reaction—like that to finding Mariel’s body—again suggests he had no idea what really happened when one was “taken.” It is the audience’s first view, too, of the invading creatures (a melon-colored, glowing blend of manta ray and grey alien) and their method of transforming the taken, which involves eight spiked tentacles (see Figure 29.3, top). The next day, Tom is grieving Lewis’s disappearance, although before she leaves for work, Mariel soothingly reminds him, “You’re only human,” a tender moment that heightens the irony. A knock at the sliding glass door draws Tom to the living room, and he finds Lewis on his patio, dripping wet and wrapped in a couple of beach towels. Lewis cannot really remember anything other than walking up from the beach, but is grateful for the miracle. Agnostic Tom doesn’t think his survival is exactly a miracle, but an awestruck Lewis replies, “Oh, it’s a miracle, sir,” and the top towel drops to the floor as he stretches out not one, but two arms. Tom is dumbstruck, and the orchestra plays an inverted version of the survivors’ theme (yet another mirror): instead of falling a minor sixth and then descending a half-step, the inversion rises a fourth then falls a step, then rises a fifth and falls a half-step (^5-^1-^b7, ^1-^5-^#4 by melodic implication), but the rhythm and particularly the full orchestration make it clear that this is to be read as a variation of the survivors’ theme. Both Lewis’s “taking” and the revelation of his “resurrection” visually reference crucifixion, and they also highlight the duality of the invasion, as embodied by Tom’s character and Lewis’s transformation: an act of good or evil? (see Figure 29.3). Later, Father Scanlon and Tom watch a joyous Lewis playing basketball (left-handed) at the driveway hoop while they debate the nature of miracles. Father Scanlon believes that Lewis’s restored arm is a gift from God; Tom knows that people will have questions about Lewis’s “miracle” and is afraid that “they” will want to dissect Lewis, to dissect all of them (a hint of the survivors’ theme sounds schematically in the underscore beneath their interchange). As Father Scanlon muses that Lewis could be convinced that his “miracle” is a private communion with God, Tom is struck by an idea of “sacrifice,” a concept that drives the episode to its conclusion, introducing the last of the major musical themes.

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Figure 29.3  Referencing crucifixion and resurrection, Lewis is taken by the invaders and pierced by tentacles (top), and then reappears transformed and whole to Tom (bottom).

The Toll of Sacrifice: Chimes of Lament for Believers and Non-Believers Alike This last theme is sonically related to a slow, blaring crescendo motif in the low brass with a tick-tock rhythm in pizzicato strings and xylophone that appears at points of tension throughout the series, but is elegiac in its tone. Coming at the climax of “Origin of

Evolving Storylines and Patterns of Listening   613 the Species,” it accompanies a scene that is restrained in its visualization but extraordinarily violent and emotionally manipulative. Tom takes Lewis to a cabin in the woods under the guise of searching for poachers. When the cabin proves deserted, Lewis turns to talking about how odd it feels to have two arms again, because having only one had defined who he was for so long. Opening the trunk of the cruiser, Tom talks about feeling like a freak as a survivor, and that perhaps Tom’s experience could save Lewis from the same fate. Tom takes something out of the trunk of the car as the blaring low-brass theme begins. “People don’t like different, Lewis,” Tom says, and Lewis’s eyes drop to the blade of the chainsaw we can now see. Tom proposes that God is challenging Lewis, and that giving him back his arm was a test of his faith, with the implication that giving up the arm is not rejecting a gift but understanding his true self. Lewis pleads with Tom, falling to his knees in a prayerful pose before him, sobbing, “I don’t know what to do, sir!” Tom tenderly cups the young man’s head and assures him, “You’ll do what’s right,” and squeezes his shoulder. Then he walks away, leaving Lewis beside the chainsaw. As Lewis makes up his mind, a rich string chorale builds from the harmonization of simple rising lines, not unlike the Barber Adagio in texture and tempo, but with more forward urgency. Lewis gets to his feet, taking the chainsaw with him into the cabin. The camera pulls back to show the cabin in the distance, the cruiser with the open trunk in the middle ground, and a medium close-up of Tom facing the camera (away from the cabin) in the foreground as we hear the chainsaw start. A subtle flinch passes over Tom’s face and he looks into the distance, then closes his eyes and bows his head as we hear Lewis scream. With the start of the chainsaw, the chorale merges into a theme marked by a chiming sonority on the downbeat, like the tolling of a great bell, and a plangent descending tetrachord—the musical signature of mourning in Western culture since the Renaissance— articulated by heavy, sighing motives in strings and brass (see Example 29.4). While the blaring motif tended to lie underneath the visuals, just threatening to break into the foreground because of its edgy timbre, the chiming lament takes over the foreground of the scene. The visual and musical focus is on Tom’s obvious pain and regret in the foreground, although the audience is undoubtedly horrified by Lewis’s sacrifice occurring in the cabin in the background. The image and music thus enact a figure-ground reversal. This scene threatens to be the point at which Tom most alienates the audience, and yet he is right, as is painfully obvious upon rewatch. We later find that the Air Force is performing grotesque, invasive (torturous) experiments on survivors.

Example 29.4  The tolling sacrifice theme.

614   Robynn J. Stilwell The tolling theme does return to reinforce the sense of sacrifice in a striking scene in Episode 15 (“The Nest”), with Tom’s daughter Kira. Rebelling against her family—Tom and Mariel are both survivors and she feels she no longer belongs—Kira walks into the ocean, expecting to be “taken.” Rejected because of a congenital heart murmur (they only take the physically perfect), Kira’s adolescent sense of isolation reels into overdrive, though she will eventually develop a relationship with Lewis, bonding them through their sharing of the sacrifice theme. The two instances of the theme (a repetition to keep it in the audience’s memory), together with the image of the petite brunette in a blood-red dress walking into the waves in the dark of night, foreshadow the last scene of the last episode, and as it turned out, the series (Episode 22, “The Last Wave Goodbye”). As another hurricane, Miranda, gathers in the Atlantic, the two families start to blend more in earnest: Russell and Mariel resolve some of their tensions; and Tom and Larkin have always shared their investigative impulses. Russell and Tom have increasingly joined forces to counter the hybrid forces from the training camp that Tom had thought was training survivors to assimilate to human culture. Instead, it had been training them to create more hybrids in the next storm. As Hurricane Miranda makes landfall, Russell and Tom work together to thwart the plan. When they split up, Russell finds Mariel and tries to help her rescue a group of pregnant hybrid women, and Larkin, Lewis, and the children end up as hostages of a pair of disturbed hybrid teenaged boys. Tom intervenes, but the heavily pregnant Larkin is shot. Her lung is collapsing, but they are trapped by flooding, unable to get her to the hospital and inaccessible to rescuers. Tom has only one option to save her. A slow waltz based on the modular theme begins under a last, reconciling conversation between Russell and Mariel as they drive toward home late at night, when Mariel sees Tom’s car. With a fragment of the evolution waltz, we see a desperate Tom, holding an unconscious and bleeding Larkin in his arms. Russell and Mariel pull off at the beach, calling out to him. The downbeat of the wavering waltz is hit with the tolling chime, growing in strength and intensity, an inexorable sound that reflects the waves coming into the beach. As Russell demands to know what happened, the last shot is of Mariel and Russell on the beach, confronting an anguished Tom standing in the surf, between sea and land, image reflecting in the water, pristine white uniform shirt stained with blood (see Video 29.5 and Figure 29.4).

The Never-Ending Story Mareike Jenner observes that, “a binge rewards attentive viewing, suggesting not only the viewing of an excessive amount of episodes, but also a somehow excessive audience– text relationship.” In this, maybe it is less the amount of hours spent watching, but rather the intensity of the experience that is a deciding factor.”21 She implies, as have others (notably Henry Jenkins),22 that fan engagement often mirrors the intellectual processing of scholarship. Speaking specifically of television, John Fiske coined the term “producerly text” for one that “has loose ends that escape its control, its meanings exceed

Evolving Storylines and Patterns of Listening   615

Figure 29.4  The last wave goodbye: Mariel and Russell confront Tom standing in the surf, caught between the ocean and the land, his pure white uniform shirt stained with Larkin’s blood.

Video 29.5  The symbolism of the show, visible and musical, come together for the cliffhanger/ climax of Tom offering Larkin to the “invaders” in the sea.

its own power to discipline them, its gaps are wide enough for whole new texts to be produced in them—it is, in a very real sense, beyond its own control.”23 A comparison between officially endorsed spin-off fiction and fanfiction almost always demonstrates that fans know their “canon” better than any hired gun. The fanwork that inspires most appreciation is usually that with moments that reference a small narrative detail, catch a gesture or turn of phrase familiar from a character’s performance, or participate in and/ or extend the symbolic network that spark the fan attention. Like scholars, fans may actually build on the new work for their own, creating a new alternative canon. Invasion was a show with almost nothing left unwoven into its dense symbolic web; one might suspect that that would eliminate the kind of gaps Fiske suggests, but instead, it proliferates uncontrollable hooks, referential threads, and turning points that can spin out in numerous directions. What would have seemed like villainy at the outset—Tom offering Larkin to the invaders—ends as the thing most likely to save her life (and perhaps, because she is pregnant, initiate a next stage of evolution). His pristine shirt is finally sullied, stained with her blood, the color of the dress that his daughter wore as she walked into the sea to offer herself voluntarily. And the music is a blend of three of the major themes in the show—the rippling, watery modular theme that hints at the supernatural; the plaintive Americana waltz that suggests the humanity—and the biological imperative of reproduction/evolution—at the center of the story; and the chiming lament of sacrifice.

616   Robynn J. Stilwell Music hails the listener in a variety of ways in the series, maximizing possible engagement. It operates as dramatic “background” music, but at times demands foreground attention, often at points where dialogue is absent and the audience is left to contemplate the ramifications of deliberate actions onscreen, like Lewis’s and Kira’s acts of sacrifice. While still following the conventions of situational themes in drama television and some of the tropes of the supernatural, science fiction, and suspense genres, Ehrlich and Derlatka turned many of these tropes on their head—notably making a melodic fragment that for most of us evokes the inexplicable into a theme representing family and community. The themes are cinematic in scope, but still work much more like television cues—by which I mean, the themes are not character-driven, but situational, which should be the first clue that although the fiddle waltz acts like a long-term cinematic theme and is strongly associated with Tom, it’s not all about him. The score foreshadows, but the shadow is long. Invasion was created for broadcast television, but in its intricacy, attention to detail, and multi-level, cross-modal symbolism participating in the extensive visual and narrative mirroring, it was really made for binge-watching. And listening.

Notes 1. Jason Jacobs calls this the “pollution” of the flow of broadcasting, a designation that privileges the coherence of the show, disrupting the continuous viewing that defines “bingewatching” (or “marathoning”). See Jacobs, “Television, Interrupted: Pollution or Aesthetic?” in Television as Digital Media, ed. James Bennett and Niki Strange (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 255–82. While an understandable, and even sympathetic view, it could also be seen as a misreading of the original experience of American broadcast television—indeed, “flow” was one of the first distinctly televisual elements taken up by scholars (see for instance Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Shocken,  1975); Nick Browne, “The Political Economy of the Television (Super) Text,” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 9, no. 3 (1984): 174–82.) 2. In the past few years, Invasion has begun to show up on lists of shows to binge, for example, Stephen Bowie, “So What’s Good? 33 Older Shows to Binge on over the Long Weekend,” TV AV Club, November 27, 2013, https://tv.avclub.com/so-what-s-good-33-older-shows-tobinge-on-over-the-lo-1798242216, accessed August 25, 2020. 3. Sharon Marie Ross, Beyond the Box (Malden: Blackwell, 2008); Matt Hills, “Fiske’s ‘Textual Productivity’ and Digital Fandom: Web 2.0 Democratization versus Fan Distinction,” Participations 10, no. 1 (2013): 130–53. (http://www.participations.org/Volume%2010/ Issue%201/9%20Hills%2010.1.pdf). 4. “Marathoning”—a term I remember from ca. 2000 with the advent of DVD box sets, or even earlier with stockpiled off-broadcast VHS recordings—has fewer potentially negative connotations (like the loss of control), but also lacks the implied intensity of involvement of the now-popular “binge-watching.” Lisa Glebatis Perks uses the term “marathoning” to describe a “conscientious media consumption strategy” that doesn’t necessarily imply loss of control, though she also suggests that the term “binge-watching” might be losing its negative connotations. See Lisa Perks, Media Marathoning: Immersions in Morality (Lanham: Lexington Books,  2015), 186. As audience strategies sometimes include “hoarding” episodes

Evolving Storylines and Patterns of Listening   617 of a favorite show so as not to be without new episodes, or waiting for a holiday weekend on which to indulge with a partner/family/friends, that implication of loss of control would seem not to be completely accurate—sometimes it can involve a great deal of self-discipline—though that behavior is also fitting with the kind of compulsive behavior sometimes seen around food. 5. Mareike Jenner, “Binge-Watching: Video-on-Demand, Quality TV and Mainstreaming Fandom,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 20, no. 3 (2017): 304–20: 305. 6. Jenner, “Binge-watching,” 307. 7. Brett Mills worries about this common tendency toward “cinematic” as value judgment in “What Does It Mean to Call Television ‘Cinematic’?” in Television Aesthetics and Style, ed. Steven Peacock and Jason Jacobs (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2013), 57–66. 8. This reliance on luxury, expense, and “high-end” aesthetics is represented, for instance, by Robin Nelson in State of Play: Contemporary “High-End” TV Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 9. The score was released on a limited-edition CD (1000 copies) and given comparatively lavish attention on the record company’s website, including the editorial note: “The music for Invasion is certainly one of the most impressive television scores in recent time.” The contract orchestra is also called the “Hollywood Studio Symphony,” another marker of high-end, “cinematic” traits. http://moviescoremedia.com/invasion-jon-ehrlich-jasonderlatka/ (accessed August 25, 2020). 10. The fan-produced Lostpedia Wiki (http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page) has an impressive compilation of musical themes and traces them through various episodes in which they appear. 11. Cartwright had been one of the stars of Philip Kaufman’s acclaimed 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and was also in Ridley Scott’s Alien the next year; both films thrive on anxiety about the infiltration of one’s body by an alien entity. As a child, she had also been in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), another tale of paranoia about a seaside invasion. 12. Although the cliffhanger is sometimes noted as a drawback for binge-watching, Matt Hills cites incompleteness (as in Twin Peaks and The X-Files) as a plus for cult television, as it invites rewatching and fan “production” in the form of speculation, continuation, and recreation. In Fan Cultures (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002). 13. See Fred Steiner, “Keeping Score of the Scores: Music for Star Trek,” The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 40, no. 1 (1983): 4–15. 14. In keeping with the show’s shifting points of view, “survivor” is the term used by those who were taken among themselves, as they do not realize what has happened to them. “Hybrid” is initially a more pejorative term from Dave, Larkin’s brother and a conspiracytheory blogger, assuming an extraterrestrial transformation/blending of the taken. 15. Actor William Fichtner has sharp, angular features and is well aware of the challenge of his look: “[I]n Hollywood, if you try to make interesting choices, and have cheekbones, then everybody thinks you kill people.” Johanna Schneller, “There’s More to William Fichtner than Crazy Roles,” The Globe and Mail, February 25, 2011, https://www.theglobeandmail. com/arts/film/theres-more-to-william-fichtner-than-crazy-roles/article622659/. 16. Although the theme’s attachment to a scene of unexpected tenderness from Tom toward a stranger in an earlier episode (Episode 3, “Alpha Male”) suggests that he and the man have a connection, it is not made as explicit. 17. I would like to thank Bianca Berman for helping assemble the graphics for this essay, under the auspices of the Georgetown Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program.

618   Robynn J. Stilwell 18. The series’ concern with reproduction is played out in almost every possible way, with the body horror familiar from Alien playing into the hybrid pregnancy to more political stances, including a teenaged father’s insistence that he has a say in whether or not to continue the pregnancy and an attempt to end that pregnancy in a horrifying reminiscence of coat-hanger abortions. 19. The only time that the fiddle waltz plays without Tom onscreen is in a brief scene where Mariel undergoes an MRI, which could reveal a pregnancy—thus Tom is “there,” conceptually. 20. In keeping with Lewis’s melodramatic surname (the most famous “Sirk” is the Hollywood filmmaker Douglas Sirk, who made highly emotional family dramas, often with usually unspoken or unspeakable racial or sexual themes as subtext), actors William Fichtner (Tom) and Nathan Baesel (Lewis) played both the paternal and the homoerotic subtext between Tom and Lewis, according to Baesel. See “INTERVIEW: Actor Nathan Baesel,” Tux: Tops, January 30, 2006, https://www.tuxtops.com/interview-actor-nathan-baesel. 21. Jenner, “Binge-watching,” 314. 22. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012). 23. John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Methuen, 1987), 104.

Select Bibliography Browne, Nick. “The Political Economy of the Television (Super) Text.” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 9, no. 3 (1984): 174–82. Deaville, James, ed. Music in Television: Channels of Listening. Taylor & Francis, 2011. Donnelly, Kevin. The Spectre of Sound: Music in Film and Television. London: BFI Publishing, 2005. Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. Abingdon: Routledge, 2002. Hills, Matt. “Fiske’s ‘Textual Productivity’ and Digital Fandom: Web 2.0 Democratization Versus Fan Distinction.” Participations 10, no. 1 (2013): 130–53. Jacobs, Jason. “Television, Interrupted: Pollution or Aesthetic?” In Television as Digital Media, ed. James Bennett and Niki Strange, 255–82. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012. Jenner, Mareike. Netflix and the Re-Invention of Television. New York: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2018. Mills, Brett. “What Does It Mean to Call Television ‘Cinematic?’ ” In Television Aesthetics and Style, ed. Steven Peacock and Jason Jacobs, 57–66. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2013. Nelson, Robin. State of Play: Contemporary “High-End” TV Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Perks, Lisa Glebatis. Media Marathoning: Immersions in Morality. Lanham; Lexington Books, 2015. Ross, Sharon Marie. Beyond the Box. Malden: Blackwell, 2008. Steiner, Fred. “Keeping Score of the Scores: Music for Star Trek.” In The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 40, no. 1 (1983): 4–15. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Shocken, 1975.

chapter 30

Proj ections of I m age on Sou n d Reassessing the Relation between Music Video and Cinema Mathias Bonde Korsgaard

In An Eye for Music,1 John Richardson notes that at times it seems as if “everything ­happening in audiovisual culture today is somehow related to music video aesthetics.”2 Richardson goes on to add that this is “a generalization but in some measure true,” though he sensibly leaves room for interpretation as to what “in some measure” actually means—perhaps because scholars tend to disagree on the extent to which music video has exerted an influence on audiovisual culture, but perhaps also because it is quite difficult to actually measure such relations and influences. Surely, most scholars with an interest in the interactions between music video and other audiovisual media will agree with Richardson in some measure, but even so: how do we go about proving this? How can we positively say, for instance, that music video has been a “catalyst of media change”3? This chapter seeks to address and revise the common assertion that music video has infiltrated the aesthetics of cinema, and considers the implications this might have on theorizing cinematic listening. I explore this matter by interrogating the audiovisual aesthetics of directors that work across media forms (or what a recent anthology proposes to call “transmedia directors”4). By now, there are several directors that have tried their hand at both music videos and feature films. Aspiring filmmakers have used music video as a stepping stone to directing feature films, while established film directors have used music videos as a means of audiovisual experimentation and a welcome break from the conventions of feature filmmaking. Perhaps the most clear-cut example of the former is Michel Gondry, who in his early days made music videos for a band in which he was the drummer, and thus could be described as a musician-turned-music-videodirector-turned-film-director. And one of the clearest examples of a director who has

620   Mathias Bonde Korsgaard moved in the opposite direction is David Lynch, whose career trajectory can be seen as the inverse of Gondry’s: a film-director-turned-music-video-director-turned-musician. Lynch first became known as a highly idiosyncratic film auteur, and along the way he also directed a few music videos, before eventually releasing music and videos under his own name. Both directors have also worked on television series and commercials. Exploring this kind of transmedia work potentially offers new perspectives on the very relation between music video and cinema. What can we learn about the relationship between audiovisual aesthetics and cinematic listening from analyzing the work of a music video director directing films alongside that of a film director directing music videos? By analyzing the films of Michel Gondry—with a particular focus on The Green Hornet (2011)—side by side with the music videos of David Lynch, this chapter provides an introduction to common debates in the field while also reorienting the habitual perspective.5 Rather than thinking about these matters in terms of a unidirectional influence from music video into cinema, this chapter proposes that it is a matter of cross-fertilization: music video and cinema are engaged in a permanent dialogue. And while their audiovisual hierarchies have historically been thought to be fundamentally different, and perhaps even opposite, in time they have come to share certain modes of vision and hearing.

The Audiovisual Hierarchies of Cinema and Music Video It has long been common to claim (or in some cases even complain) that “films look like music videos.”6 Indeed, several scholars have by now addressed the alleged influence of music video aesthetics on popular film, myself included.7 The main manifestations of music video aesthetics in cinema are most commonly thought to include a loosening of narrative structure and causality,8 a more pointed and intense visual style,9 an increasing reliance on popular music, and occasional reversals of the sound/image hierarchy, sometimes even taking the shape of what Amy Herzog has termed “musical moments.”10 The implication is that films that are influenced by music video aesthetics invite different (perhaps even atypical) ways of listening and watching. Traditionally speaking, music video and cinema can be thought of as opposites in terms of how they come into being and thus also in terms of how audiovisual relations are established. As formulated by Steven Shaviro in his book on digital music videos, “music videos are the inverse of conventional movies, for which the main task in postproduction is rather to match sounds to preexisting images.”11 In music videos, the opposite is normally the case—here images are matched to preexisting music, and this inverts one of Michel Chion’s famous formulations: if cinema can be thought of as “projections of sound on image,”12 perhaps music videos can be considered “projections of image on sound.” Since sound/music exists before the image, the image often responds

Projections of Image on Sound   621 to certain aspects of the music—and not the other way around as is as so often the case in cinema where the music is traditionally considered subservient to the image and the needs of the narrative. While music in cinema often adds value to and intones certain readings of the images, the opposite is true in music video, where the images often highlight musical details. In this way, the respective audiovisual hierarchies of music video and cinema are presumably very different in kind. So, if by now traditional cinematic structures and styles are being overturned as cinema draws closer to the aesthetics of music video, then new sensory modes and audiovisual hierarchies are also likely to have grown from this. In my own theorization in Music Video After MTV, I suggest that while music videos are obviously “visualizations of music”—at least to the extent that images are set to preexisting music—they also bring about a “musicalization of vision” where images frequently take on musical qualities and are structured according to musical logics. This also implicitly entails the possibility of a synaesthetic transfer13—as has sometimes been suggested in a play of words in relation to music videos: that we “listen to images” and “look at sounds.”14 In this sense, if music video has affected cinema, this must have happened in relation to both the listening and viewing practices associated with cinema. If we turn again to Chion and particularly his three listening modes15—causal, semantic, and reduced—might we imagine similar “viewing modes” in relation to moving images? The causal mode does not translate directly, because we do not tend to think of an image as being “caused” by anything. However, causal viewing could be linked to mere visual recognition on a denotative level (what does the image show?), whereas semantic viewing would imply reading images on a more connotative level (what does the image mean?). And as is the case with the three listening modes, these two viewing modes are probably more common than the third category. “Reduced viewing” could then be thought of as a viewing mode that directs itself toward the material qualities of the image—and it is thereby oriented at something in the images that speaks to us beyond or before any kind of narrative motivation or conventional meaning. Images that invite this sort of visual engagement are arguably rare in narrative cinema, but more common in music videos and avant-garde cinema.16 In fact, in music video, such “reduced images” are related to the musicalization of vision—given that the images of any music video are in a sense born from listening to music. Obviously the first thing a music video director must do is precisely that: listen to the music, in order to conjure visual ideas. When an image takes on musical qualities it quite often creates meaning in ways that are not merely related to the causal and semantic modes, but rather becomes wrested free from merely serving representational and narrative purposes, sometimes even veering towards utter abstraction. Thereby, it is also possible to “view” such images in a “reduced” manner. This would imply not merely registering what the image shows or how it serves to construct meaning or a story, but also an attentiveness to visual textures and rhythms. As I have claimed in Music Video After MTV, perhaps the most common way for the image to respond to the music is by becoming polyphonous. Just like we follow several different “tracks” at once when we listen to music, so we are presented with multiple images at the same time in music video

622   Mathias Bonde Korsgaard whether through fast cutting, images-within-images, image overlays, split-screens, or other techniques. Due to this visual multiplicity, music videos often present us with a temporal and spatial malleability—a coexistence of multiple overlapping temporalities and contrasting spatialities. Conceptualized like this, the “reduced image” is involved in a broader range of aspects that are central to music video aesthetics: the confluence of listening and viewing, the general reliance on music, the partial resistance to narrative, the focus on the textural and rhythmic qualities of the image, the visual polyphony, and the fragmenting of audiovisual time and space. Perhaps the “reduced image” is what truly ties together music video and cinema? In order to explore this, the following analyses of Gondry’s films and Lynch’s music videos focus on three related aspects: (1) the narrative nature of their work, (2) the function of musicalization,17 and (3) the specific use of “reduced images.”

Narrative Trickery and Visual Polyphony in the Cinema of Michel Gondry According to Richardson, the music video directors who “have had the greatest artistic successes in film” are arguably those “who tackled narrative structuring imaginatively in music videos,”18 and certainly no director fits this description better than Gondry. Several of his music videos have rather unique structures and seem designed to impress the viewer with just how many narrative layers and paradoxes they can contain in only a few minutes of runtime. Whether it is the use of split-screen backwards/forwards narration in Cibo Matto’s “Sugar Water” (1996), the mise-en-abyme of stories-within-storieswithin-stories in Björk’s “Bachelorette” (1997), or the impossibly metaleptic features in The White Stripes’ “The Denial Twist” (2005), there is no doubt that Gondry has a penchant for narrative inventiveness.19 This seems to carry over into his films. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) is the most highly acclaimed and heavily scrutinized example,20 but in fact most of Gondry’s films are characterized by a duality where two narrative planes are pit against each other, allowing for a level of narrative complexity. In Eternal Sunshine, the secondary narrative plane that runs counter to the narrative reality is the world of fading memories; in The Science of Sleep (2006), it is the world of dreams; in Be Kind Rewind (2008), it is the world of so-called “Sweded” home-made movies; in The Green Hornet, it is life as a superhero; and in Mood Indigo (2013), reality is opposed to what one might call “surreality.” Trying to escape from grim reality by fleeing into fantasy is clearly recurrent in his films. This common feature of Gondry’s music videos and films seems to beg the argument that narrative trickery is something the director learned from music video and then brought to cinema. Yet there are other equally convincing ways of explaining why

Projections of Image on Sound   623 Gondry’s films are structured like this. Even his most narratively convoluted and unpredictable films do not necessarily follow a music video logic as much as they follow a more general oneiric logic. This obviously goes for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind where the unpredictability could be said not to have anything to do with the narrative unpredictability of music videos, but rather taken to be a feature that is related to the way in which our minds and memories work—and thus as something that is in fact narratively motivated and completely justified, seeing that a large portion of the narrative takes place in the mind of its protagonist. Similarly, it could be argued that The Science of Sleep is the one of Gondry’s films that reads most perfectly as an extended music video with its seemingly chaotic narration and many Gondry-esque sets, but at the same time it is arguably also the one of his films that reads most perfectly as a “dream film” or as indebted to avant-garde cinema. As such, the way narrative is treated might be related to music video, but at the same time it also relates to a variety of other sources. And, certainly, the narrative aspect is but one part of the appeal of Gondry’s films: the stories of his films are often not the sole or even main attraction, seeing that especially their musicality and handcrafted mise-en-scène are also central parts of their fabric. If we turn from the narrative aspect to the use of music, then, it seems clear that Gondry is to be considered what Claudia Gorbman has termed an auteur mélomane, a music-loving director.21 His films are inhabited by musicians in leading roles (Charlotte Gainsbourg in The Science of Sleep, Jack Black and Mos Def in Be Kind Rewind, and in The Green Hornet it is the Taiwanese musician and singer Jay Chou). More importantly, music is a constant presence. Sometimes, the music we find in Gondry’s films is the kind of music we hear in his music videos: particularly The White Stripes/Jack White, but also Beck, The Polyphonic Spree, The Rolling Stones, Mia Doi Todd, and even his own band Oui Oui. On the whole, however, the soundtracks of Gondry’s films are very eclectic, a stylistic heterogeneity that has been noted by Richardson and Vernallis in relation to Be Kind Rewind and Eternal Sunshine, respectively.22 The same thing goes for The Green Hornet, where we hear an orchestral score, The Rolling Stones, Digital Underground, and Johnny Cash covering Sting—during the first twelve minutes of the film only. So, once more, the import from Gondry’s background in music videos is not absolute, and we should be careful in assuming that music in a Gondry film necessarily sounds or functions like it does in music videos. Some of the music heard in his films brings no reminiscences of the music video aesthetic, and functions instead as mostly unobtrusive underscoring. And even as different kinds of pre-existing popular music flow into his films at a steady pace, there are in fact also relatively few clear-cut “musical moments,” intended as scenes where the music becomes the center of attention or simply drowns out other sounds.23 Perhaps the most striking musical moment is when Beck’s cover of “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime” plays during the title sequence in Eternal Sunshine. However, it is hard to say whether it is the way in which the music is used here that makes this moment stand out, or whether it is simply due to the fact that the title sequence appears unexpectedly after almost 20 minutes of the film have passed. In other

624   Mathias Bonde Korsgaard words, Gondry’s music videos and films clearly share some common ground, while at the same time remaining altogether different enterprises. This also goes for the most mainstream of Gondry’s movies, namely The Green Hornet. Vernallis and Richardson have convincingly argued that Eternal Sunshine and Be Kind Rewind, respectively, are music video-infused films.24 The Green Hornet, however, is in some respects a less obvious choice for such an analysis: a film in the superhero genre, it is probably the most narratively conventional of Gondry’s films and not among his most highly regarded. Yet this is precisely what makes it interesting to study in this particular context. While on the one hand I am suggesting that we should question the extent to which Gondry’s “dream-narratives” are influenced by music video, on the other I want to suggest that The Green Hornet is an example of a film that, despite its narrative predictability, does relate aesthetically to music video, and that its critical “failure” is also in a sense exemplary of how music video directors have often broken their necks in taking the leap from music video to feature filmmaking. Like Gondry’s other films, The Green Hornet features techniques, traits, and motifs seemingly derived from the director’s videos. On the level of mise-en-scène, the film is not as permeated by handcrafted props, cardboard sets, and the like as his other films and many of his music videos, but many of the film’s gadgets are still tongue-in-cheek homebuilt, like for instance the villain’s two-barrel gun.25 More interesting, though, there are also several stylistic techniques that have clear antecedents in Gondry’s videos. The most complex scene in the film features split-screens in a way that is partly similar to what Gondry did in the video for Cibo Matto mentioned earlier. In The Green Hornet, the scene lasts little more than a minute and it shows the main villain dispatching his henchmen to kill anybody wearing green clothes in an attempt to take down the eponymous hero of the film. Every time two henchmen meet up, the image splits in two with each new image following only one of the henchmen as they all continue to fork out to different places. There are, however, no visible edits, making it seem as if the camera impossibly splits in two in order to move in two opposite directions at once every time a new split-screen is added (See Figure 30.1). In this particular sequence many of the characteristics of music video aesthetics I have been circling about thus far come together: the narrative appears to come to a halt as music replaces dialogue on the soundtrack, allowing us to revel in the sheer impossibility of the split-screen technique; the musical and visual intensity of the sequence increase in tandem; the image becomes polyphonous and quite literally fragments cinematic space allowing us to be in several places all at once. Another sequence in the film also features some of the stylistic antics of some of Gondry’s music videos. This sequence once again brings us into the mind of one of Gondry’s characters, as the main protagonist is struggling to piece together the conspiracy he is facing, finally arriving at an expository revelation. The sequence is visually quite fragmented. For one thing, we see several visual duplications of the characters (see Figure 30.2) as we also do in a great many music videos, and perhaps nowhere more forcefully than in Gondry’s own video for Kylie Minogue’s “Come into My World” (2002). But the scene also features camera morphs26 somewhat similar in kind to those

Projections of Image on Sound   625

Figure 30.1  Multiple split screens in The Green Hornet (2011).

Figure 30.2  Duplications of characters and camera morphs in The Green Hornet (2011).

invented for the video Gondry directed for IAM’s “Je danse le Mia” (1993). In relation to this use of camera morphs, it should also be noted that Gondry played a pioneering role in the development of “bullet time,” a technique that people otherwise mostly associate with The Matrix (1999). While the origins of filmic techniques are always difficult to ascertain, Gondry certainly played his part with The Rolling Stones’ “Like a Rolling Stone” (1995) and a commercial for Smirnoff (1996)—though arguably the foundation for bullet-time is already there in Muybridge’s pre-cinematic serial photography. But in its modern manifestation, bullet-time was present in Gondry’s non-cinematic work before it found its way into popular cinema. The Green Hornet is also reminiscent of bullet time27 in some of its action sequences. Here, we often see the sidekick Kato move at a different (faster) speed than his opponents, who seem to move in slow-motion (reminiscent again if not of a Gondry video, then at least of his colleague Jonathan Glazer’s video for Radiohead’s “Street Spirit” (1995)). These are examples of visual techniques that were first pioneered in music video, and that, in entering film, encourage forms of “reduced viewing.” While the scenes mentioned

626   Mathias Bonde Korsgaard do serve to forward the film narratively, they also invite us to engage in their sheer impossibility and ponder how they were made—whether it is the perplexing use of splitscreens, the eye-catching use of multiple speeds of movement within the individual image, or camera morphs that constantly reorient the visual perspective. Images such as these also clearly link up with music video imagery due to their very polyphony and spatiotemporal hybridity: this goes for the impossible co-existence of different contrasting times in some of the action sequences involving Kato, while in the split-screen scene it is the space rather than the time of the scene which constantly multiplies by being split into different parts. These sequences are also “musical” in a more straightforward sense: even when they do not actively foreground the music, they feature music through and through, and typically mark a transition from music-less parts of the film. Once these sequences are over, the music pauses again. The intensity of the action scenes and of the revelatory scene is thus both visual and musical in nature—and particularly the action sequences have strong rhythmic qualities where music highlights specific gestures, movements, and blows.

Cinematic Images and Visualized Lyrics in the Music Videos of David Lynch It is difficult to think of a director who has worked as insistently across media as David Lynch. He is perhaps mostly thought of as a film director, but has also directed television series, short films, commercials, and music videos (and has also occasionally appeared as an actor). Quite the polymath, he was originally trained as a painter, and in time he has also turned to photography, writing books, creating music under his own name, and even designing furniture, not to mention giving lectures on transcendental meditation. His music videos only amount to a small fragment of all these creative endeavors, but they provide an example of how cinematic practice can shape the images and sounds of music video. The first video he directed was for Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” in 1990. The song also featured in Wild at Heart (1990) and Lynch’s music video lifted images from the movie (the video had very limited visibility since another video for the song— directed by Herb Ritts and featuring Chris Isaak and the model Helena Christensen on a Hawaiian beach—became the official version that received airtime). His most recently released video (2018, though shot back in 1992) was for his own musical project with Angelo Badalamenti, Thought Gang, for the track “A Real Indication.” Between the release of “Wicked Game” and “A Real Indication,” Lynch directed a few others, most of them in the 2010s: Moby’s “Shot in the Back of the Head” (2009), Interpol’s “Lights” (also known as “I Touch a Red Button,” 2011), Lynch’s own “Crazy Clown Time” (2012), and Nine Inch Nails’ “Came Back Haunted” (2013). As discussed, the relation between music video and cinema is most commonly considered a one-way traffic where music video changes cinematic conventions. But what

Projections of Image on Sound   627 happens when film directors turn to music video? How does cinematic practice shape the language of music video? Quite literally, in the case of Lynch, imagery from his films has entered videos such as that for “Wicked Game.” This was quite common in the 1990s, when taking one of the songs featured in a film and creating a music video that consisted partly of images taken from the film in question was something of a standard tool in the promotional cycle of many films and in the commercial synergies between film and music. Gondry’s video for Beck’s “Deadweight” also did this, inventively establishing interactions between images showing Beck and images from Danny Boyle’s film A Life Less Ordinary (1997). This incorporation of pre-existing footage in music video once more inverts the principles concerning whether music or image “comes first.” However, this direct incorporation of images from Lynch’s films is arguably not the most important feature to have slipped from his films into his music videos. Just like Gondry’s filmmaking seems partially inspired by his background in music video, Lynch also brings facets of his filmmaking into his music videos—and his background as a painter also seems to enter into the mix as some of his music videos are animated. The three facets I have traced in relation to Gondry’s work—narrative, musicalization, and “reduced images”—are important features across Lynch’s work in film and music video. Lynch’s music videos do not really tell stories; at most, they hint at some kind of narrative. Both the video he made for Interpol and the one he made for Nine Inch Nails lack clearly defined narrative agents and coherent chains of events, and even the video of his that comes closest to telling an actual story remains rather absurd, namely the video for his own “Crazy Clown Time,” where we witness a backyard party filled with Lynchian weirdness. To an extent, these diluted narratives are typical of music videos as a form characterized by brevity, lack of diegetic sound (and thus dialogue), and a tendency to weigh style over substance. However, it could also be seen as simply related to the fact that Lynch has made most of his music videos late in his career where his films and television have also given up on any kind of narrative conventionality (in between Inland Empire [2006] and Twin Peaks: The Return [2017], that is). Surprisingly, the musical element that Lynch most frequently attaches to visually is the lyrics. More or less all of his recent videos contain parts where the images illustrate the lyrics of the song in a manner that is normally avoided in music videos. Even though it is an instrumental song, in “Shot in the Back of the Head” we see exactly that: someone getting shot in the back of the head as part of a vague narrative that seems to revolve around the classical Lynchian themes of jealousy and love triangles. In “Lights”—that carries the alternate title “I Touch a Red Button”—we see, well, a ghastly figure touching a red button. In “Crazy Clown Time” we see a woman ripping her shirt off as Lynch sings “Suzy, she rips her shirt off completely” and throughout the video the names and actions mentioned in the lyrics are attached to the characters in the video (See Figure 30.3). In “Came Back Haunted” Trent Reznor seems to “haunt” the shaky images along with a bug-like creature and something that looks like a deformed wax sculpture—both of which would not seem out of place in Lynch’s late films. And in “A Real Indication” we see the sewer by the side of the road once the spoken-word lyrics mention this.

628   Mathias Bonde Korsgaard

Figure 30.3  “Suzy, she rips her shirt off completely.” Blunt visual illustrations in David Lynch, “Crazy Clown Time” (2012).

Such literal visualizations of the lyrics of the songs run counter to much of what music video normally excels at: as already stated, the generally musical nature of the images in music videos tend to pull the images away from carrying meaning in conventional ways, whereas the direct illustration of words from the songs renders the images too concrete. The clear alignment between lyrics and image content in a way forces us to view the images causally, in a double sense: as caused by the lyrics, but also in the sense that we cannot help but see exactly what they portray. Perhaps Lynch is also the last film director one would expect this from, seeing that his films are normally very finely attuned to crafting nuanced relations between image and music. In fact, Lynch himself has claimed that music sometimes comes first in his working process, as he often listens to pre-existing music in his headphones when shooting scenes for his films.28 This should in fact imply that Lynch would make for a perfect music video director, as he insists that: “even one little sound or a sequence of notes can give you an idea for a story.”29 Lynch is even sometimes considered the director to have most insistently reversed the hierarchy of image and sound in cinema—and thereby his film work indirectly shares this particular affinity with music video aesthetics. It is quite common to note that Lynch “foregrounds” music and sound in his films—Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener even go so far as to claim about Lynch that he “has upset the ‘power relations’ between image and sound more than any other film-maker and inverted the characteristics of sound and image.”30 Yet, there is nothing refined about simply replicating the lyrics of a song visually—even though “Crazy Clown Time” of course also does more than just this. But in leaning so heavily on the lyrics, his music videos paradoxically fail to be as musical in nature as his films. If there is any clear musicality to the images in Lynch’s videos, then it seems mostly related to a sense of visual polyphony. A clear example of this is “Came Back Haunted,” a music video that even comes with an epileptic seizure warning at the beginning.

Projections of Image on Sound   629 The video alternates between imagery of different spooky creatures, Trent Reznor singing and other more fully abstract images. Even as there is a conflict in this video between still images on one hand and constant movement on the other, the video contains an abundance of imagery where it only rarely remains the same for long. Lynch uses several different means to achieve this effect, most prominently superimpositions, visual repetitions, somewhat fast editing, blinking images that change quickly between red and white, a confluence of visual background and foreground, and shaky images. In particular, the shaky images seem a constant presence in his music videos (as well as his films). Once more the effect of this visual multiplicity is that the images do not necessarily aim to “tell” us anything. Rather, by coming in quick succession, being placed on top of each other, and shaken out of focus, the images of the video are too many to be taken in all at once—much like the experience of listening to music, where we can normally only focus attentively on a few elements, tracks or voices at a time.31 In conclusion, Lynch’s music videos share a great deal with his films—they are often nightmarish, not all too intent on making sense, and—obviously—filled with music. Nonetheless, my analyses of Gondry and Lynch do not necessarily imply that it is possible to trace any simple lines of influence between music video and cinema.32 Even the “reduced images” that I have been claiming as the most common point of cross-fertilization can also be seen to derive from the influence of experimental and surrealist cinema, a cinema that privileges this kind of imagery and tends to entirely disrupt narrative conventions. On this note, it may perhaps only be a serendipitous coincidence that both of the directors discussed here seem partly inspired by avant-garde traditions—but nonetheless it is quite likely that the interactions between music video and cinema often involve such “third parties” as well. In fact, one could make the case that Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) could have inspired both Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) and Gondry’s video for Kylie Minogue’s “Come into My World.” Again, this particular video could also possibly be inspired by another avant-garde film, namely Zbigniew Rybczyński’s Tango (1981).33 Indeed, this is one of the basic properties of any process of remediation—as formulated by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin: “No medium today . . . seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media, any more than it works in isolation from other social and economic forces.”34 Thus, the cross-fertilization between music video and cinema is neither unidirectional nor something that happens in isolation from other media and genres or from general cultural and technological developments. And as transmedia directors increasingly work across such borders, the spread of ideas and techniques back and forth between one medium and several others has likely only intensified.

Looking as Listening The notion that music video has somehow “influenced” cinema thus remains a general notion, and it is difficult to move beyond the level of generalization when approaching these matters. Therefore, thinking in terms of cross-fertilization and of a movement

630   Mathias Bonde Korsgaard back and forward between cinema and music video appears more productive. Even if close textual analyses were able to reveal that the aesthetic traits we normally associate with music video have become increasingly common in films, the correlation would not, of course, imply causation. Indeed, scholars have offered competing explanation to changes in cinema aesthetics, pointing for instance at technological developments. In a compelling study, José Cláudio Siqueira Castanheira focuses on what he calls “timeline philosophy,” arguing that “the common identification of images and sounds as ‘clips’ on a timeline allows an approximation of procedures and hence a conceptual identification. Concepts such as rhythm, motifs, and voices come to meet both universes.”35 Thus the fact that the image sometimes becomes “musicalized” can be not only because many directors have learned to think this way through their work in music video, but also, for instance, because the software used to process and edit sound/music is somewhat similar to that used to process and edit images. Another reservation relates to how studies of the relation between music video and cinema often belie the fact that both music video and cinema are aesthetically heterogeneous. There is no singular “music video aesthetic” or “film aesthetic” though there may of course be some traditions that have historically proved themselves more dominant than others. Certainly, the music video was somewhat codified in the MTV days where a particular aesthetic was encouraged both implicitly and explicitly by the institutional norms of MTV,36 but music video has broadened aesthetically since then and in some cases has changed beyond recognition.37 Just as there is no singular music video aesthetic, it is also not cinema tout court that has been affected by music video, but rather particular kinds of cinema that are likely to have changed while other kinds remain unaffected by music video. Generally, music videos may be defined as “music first, image added” and cinema as “image first, music added,” but there are also cases where the visual takes the lead in music video and many cases where cinematic works have prioritized sound/music over the visual—also well before the birth of the music video. A final objection—and one that I am also indirectly leveling at my own approach here—has to do with the auterist position. Arved Ashby speaks of “a new, post-MTV auterism,” and there is no denying that, from the beginning of the 1980s, directors have moved more and more freely between music videos and feature films.38 Vernallis, for one, argues that this traffic of talent supports the notion that music video and cinema interact.39 Nonetheless, there are still only relatively few directors that are equally accomplished as directors of music video and of feature films. This even applies to Michel Gondry and David Lynch: while Gondry’s merits as a film director have been recognized, he is undoubtedly more acclaimed for and immediately associated with his videos (even as he only rarely directs videos these days), and the reverse is unquestionably true of Lynch. Those directors that seem aesthetically at home in both arenas are mostly found among those that took the jump from music videos to filmmaking—apart from Gondry, names like David Fincher and Spike Jonze are probably the most exemplary cases. But the point is in fact that they are not exemplary at all, but rather exceptions to the general rule: that music video directors rarely are also acclaimed filmmakers—and

Projections of Image on Sound   631 vice versa.40 Some of cinema’s major auteurs have tried their hand at directing music videos, but their music video production is much less known than their films, whether it is David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Lars von Trier, Wong Kar-wai, or even Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard. While this does of course not rule out that genuine cross-fertilization takes place, it does seem to imply that there is still some level of specialization in both fields and that the two media are still separate entities. And perhaps the reason why music video directors more frequently turn to filmmaking than the other way around simply relates to the fact that this is where the money is. Turning from the aesthetic to the economic, then, provides a different perspective—and also offers an entirely other explanation as to why popular music has become such a strong presence in cinema. Commercially speaking, popular music has always naturally followed the audience—whether it has found a home in cinema since the 1960s, in music videos since the 1980s, or in television drama and computer games as is increasingly common today. Popular music goes where it is needed—or, in other words, where it can be advertised and sold. In this light, perhaps the fact that films have in time come to promote songs in much the same way that music videos always have done is one of the clearest points of contact between the two. To return to the passage by John Richardson quoted at the beginning of this chapter, it should by now be clear that the best way of moving beyond mere generalization—like Richardson himself does in his book—is to provide concrete analyses of how the ­aesthetics, modes of listening, and modes of viewing of music video and cinema ­intermingle. Throughout, I have taken great care to maintain that it can never be shown irrefutably that music video has changed the way we listen to (and, look at) cinema, but with the analytical double-vision at these two transmedia directors I have also aimed to render the argument for a degree of cross-fertilization more plausible. In the introduction to his edited volume on a new generation of musically inspired auteurs, Arved Ashby concludes that this new auteurism “has come to rely on and redefine music as an art of listening-as-looking.”41 This once more speaks to the interrelatedness between looking and listening in cinema (and in music video), and we might ask: does it also mean that cinema has become an art of looking-as-listening? My insistence on the possibility of “reduced viewing” would certainly suggest so. Undoubtedly, the visual and the musical inform each other, and—as I have maintained here—the main impact of music video on cinema may be found in the way the music exerts an influence on the level of the images. So, while it used to make sense to see cinema as “projections of sound on image,” it has become increasingly common for cinema to approach the music video’s modus operandi of “projections of image on sound.”42 There is a brief moment near the beginning of The Green Hornet, where we see a television screen in the background that appears to be playing a music video, but with the sound muted (see Figure 30.4). This might, then, be taken as a metaphor for the way in which I have argued that music videos have mostly affected cinema: as a visual, but often silent presence. We do not as much hear the influence of music video as we see it. But the way in which this influence manifests itself on the visual level is still very much indebted to the workings of music.

632   Mathias Bonde Korsgaard

Figure 30.4  Seeing music video in The Green Hornet (2011).

Notes 1. This work was supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark under Grant Number DFF-4089–00149. 2. The quote is from John Richardson, An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 6–7. 3. Gina Arnold, Daniel Cookney, Kirsty Fairclough, and Michael Goddard, Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 3. 4. Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers, and Lisa Perrott, eds. Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry, and New Audiovisual Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). 5. Gondry’s films have been approached from a transmedia perspective before, most convincingly in Carol Vernallis’ analysis of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) in “Music Video, Songs, Sound: Experience, Technique and Emotion in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Screen 49, no. 3 (2008): 277–97; and John Richardson’s analysis of the film Be Kind Rewind (2008) in An Eye for Music, 92–106. Lynch’s music videos have hardly ever been addressed before. He is unmistakably one of the most celebrated and highly esteemed directors still working today, and this is also reflected in the impressively comprehensive amount of auteurist studies to have been conducted on his work—from Michel Chion’s David Lynch, trans. Robert Julian (London: BFI Publishing, 2005) onto a practically endless line of more recent books. However, most of these works never mention Lynch’s music videos, and if they do so, it is only done in passing. The only exception that I know of is yet to be published, namely Andreas Halskov’s The Art of Paradox: The Films of David Lynch (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, forthcoming). Here, Halskov moves beyond the traditional focus on Lynch as a film director by also including some of his admittedly more peripheral work in the shape of music videos, short films, and commercials. 6. Vernallis, “Music Video, Songs, Sound,” 277. 7. Mathias Bonde Korsgaard, Music Video After MTV: Audiovisual Studies, New Media, and Popular Music (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 149–57. See also, for instance, Arved Ashby, ed. Popular Music and the New Auteur: Visionary Filmmakers After MTV (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Marco Calavita, “ ‘MTV Aesthetics’ at the Movies: Interrogating a

Projections of Image on Sound   633 Film Criticism Fallacy,” Journal of Film and Video 59, no.3 (2007): 115–31; Kay Dickinson, “Pop, Speed, Teenagers and the ‘MTV Aesthetic’,” in Movie Music: The Film Reader, ed. Kay Dickinson (London: Routledge,  2003), 143–51; Barry Langford, Post-Classical Hollywood: Film Industry, Style and Ideology since 1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 256–57; John Mundy, Popular Music on Screen: From the Hollywood Musical to Music Video (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 224ff; John Richardson, An Eye for Music, 58ff; Jamie Sexton, “Low-Budget Audiovisual Aesthetics in Indie Music Video and Feature Filmmaking: The Works of Steve Hanft and Danny Perez,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Popular Music Video Analysis, ed. Lori Burns and Stan Hawkins (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 27–46; Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Technique (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 18–19; Carol Vernallis, Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 69ff. 8. For example, Andrew Darley has stated that music video’s “ties with narrative forms of meaning construction are not particularly pronounced,” in his book Visual Digital Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000), 55; while Scott Henderson has characterized music video as “a form that breaks continuity and is anti-narrative” in “Youth, Excess, and the Musical Moment,” in Film’s Musical Moments, ed. Ian Conrich and Estella Tincknell (Edinburg: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 152. 9. For example, Simon Frith has noted that in music videos “we are overwhelmed with images” in Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 216. Others link this visual plenitude to the anti-narrative impulse. For instance, Pat Aufderheide has claimed that music videos rely on “hectic montage rather than narrative logic” in the chapter “The Look of the Sound,” in Watching Television, ed. Todd Gitlin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), 120); while Geoff King states that music video is characterized both by “its violations of traditional cause-effect narrative structures” as well as by “its manipulations of the image” in New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), 253. 10. Amy Herzog, Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Kevin Donnelly has also suggested something comparable, though more directly related to the practice of using pre-existing music as the basis for constructing particular scenes. Using none other than David Lynch and his Wild at Heart as an example, Donnelly writes that “pre-fitting” a sequence in a film (that is, shooting it to fit to pre-existing music) has become much more common—he also notes that this technique marks “one of the most obvious points of cross-fertilization between films and music videos,” K.  J.  Donnelly, Occult Aesthetics: Synchronization in Sound Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 162. 11. Steven Shaviro, Digital Music Videos (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2017), 69. 12. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 3. 13. See for instance Kay Dickinson, “Music Video and Synaesthetic Possibility,” in Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones, ed. Roger Beebe and Jason Middleton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 13–29. 14. As for instance in Pat Aufderheide’s “The Look of the Sound,” or Even Ruud’s book in Norwegian, Musikk for øyet, which translates as “music for the eyes” (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1988). 15. Chion, Audio-Vision, 25ff.

634   Mathias Bonde Korsgaard 16. A possible connection might be established between the category of “reduced viewing/ listening” and Roland Barthes’ notion of “the third meaning”—referring to that which lies outside of denotation and connotation (Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath, London: Fontana Press, 1977, 52–68). While Barthes’ concept also seems to encompass the material or abstract qualities of a given image that I am aiming at here—or, as put by Barthes himself, that in the image which is “purely image” (61)—it seems that the scholars that have been inspired by Barthes’ concept most frequently locate such third qualities in “peripheral details”: Roger Cardinal, “Pausing over Peripheral Detail,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 30–1 (1986): 112–30, which most commonly ends up meaning concrete aspects of the miseen-scène—whether a particular object, prop, or a gesture made by an actor, etc. See also Chapter 2 in Christian Keathley, Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 29–53; or Kristin Thompson, “The Concept of Cinematic Excess,” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 130–42. 17. In her book The Musicality of Narrative Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Danijela Kulezic-Wilson suggests that the “musicality” of film most commonly rests in three parameters shared by film and music alike: rhythm, movement, and time. In this sense, this also means that the musicality of film is “of a composite, audio-visual nature” that can be fulfilled by “employing filmmaking strategies and devices such as the organization of the mise-en-scène, camera movement, movement within a shot, editing, sound design and music itself. Basically, any aspect of film’s audio-visual texture that may invest the parameters of time, rhythm and movement with musical qualities can be considered a carrier of film’s musicality” (4). I will arrive at a somewhat similar argument toward the end of this article—suggesting that if music videos have affected cinema musically, this is paradoxically mostly experienced visually. 18. Richardson, An Eye for Music, 106. 19. See also Warren Buckland, “The Unnatural and Impossible Storyworlds of Michel Gondry’s Music Videos: The Mise en Abyme of ‘Bachelorette’,” Volume! La revue des musiques populaires 14, no. 2 (2018): 83–96. 20. In fact, this film has probably been more frequently studied than has Gondry as a director—as witnessed by for instance the fact that there is an entire book devoted to Eternal Sunshine: Christopher Grau, ed., Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Abingdon: Routledge,  2009). New research on Michel Gondry as a director is being conducted, however, particularly by Kate McQuiston who—at the time of writing—is preparing a book on sound and music in Gondry’s work. 21. Claudia Gorbman, “Auteur Music,” in Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 149–62. 22. As Richardson astutely puts it, there is “nothing stylistically pure in the soundtrack of Be Kind Rewind” (Richardson, An Eye for Music, 98). Vernallis notes that in Eternal Sunshine the “musical score is remarkably heterogeneous” (Vernallis, “Music Video, Songs, Sound,” 289). 23. In Herzog’s definition, musical moments occur when “music, typically a popular song, inverts the image-sound hierarchy to occupy a dominant position” (Herzog, Dreams, 7). Before Herzog, Ian Conrich and Estella Tincknell have offered a slightly different definition of the musical moment, viewing it as “an isolated musical presence in a non-musical

Projections of Image on Sound   635 film which is most notable for its potential to disturb the text through its unexpectedness or at times excessiveness” (Film’s Musical Moments, ed. Ian Conrich and Estella Tincknell, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006, 2). Worth noting here is also the suggested association between musical moments and cinematic excess—see note 17. 24. Paraphrasing Vernallis, Richardson sums up a range of cinematic features that become decidedly accented through this relation to music video aesthetics, including “multiple motivic threads, unpredictable narrative structuring, open-endedness, hook-like repetition, rhythmic editing practices, and the layering of sound” (Richardson, An Eye for Music, 59). 25. Chudnofsky, the villain, comments: “My gun has two barrels. That’s not boring and it was very difficult to make.” This doubles as a reflexive statement of aims when it comes to Gondry’s affection for handmade props. 26. Morphing between two different cameras and thereby two different views of an object. 27. However, Gondry has stated in an interview that he invented this particular technique specifically for this film. In the same interview, Gondry speaks of how his training in music videos shaped his approach to filming the action scenes of the film. See Dan Kois, “Michel Gondry on the Gondry-esque Special Effects of The Green Hornet, and the One He Saved for the Sequel,” Vulture, January 10, 2011, https://www.vulture.com/2011/01/ michel_gondry.html. 28. Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret, “Interview with David Lynch,” in David Lynch Interviews, ed. Richard  A.  Barney (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 110; Chris Rodley, ed., Lynch on Lynch (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 133. 29. Rodley, Lynch on Lynch, 133. 30. Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (New York and London: Routledge, 2010), 145. See also Julie McQuinn, “Introduction: The Productive Potential of Interactivity,” in Popular Music and Multimedia, ed. Julie McQuinn (Burlington: Ashgate),  2011, xvii; Annette Davison, “ ‘Up in Flames’: Love, Control and Collaboration in the Soundtrack to Wild at Heart,” in The Cinema of David Lynch, ed. Erica Sheen and Annette Davison (New York: Wallflower Press,  2004), 119; Isabella van Elferen, “Dream Timbre: Notes on Lynchian Sound Design,” in Sonic Style in Cinema, ed. James Wierzbicki (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 175. 31. See for instance Eric Clarke, “Music Perception and Musical Consciousness,” in Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives, ed. David Clarke and Eric Clarke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 193–213. Referencing different studies and touching on the notion of “limited channel capacity,” Clarke contends that in listening to music “simultaneous streams of information are attended up to some level, but that only one (or at the most a small number . . . ) reaches conscious awareness” (207). 32. Indeed, others have approached this question with even more skepticism—for instance, Kulezic-Wilson who writes that “music videos are in no way solely responsible for the accelerated trend of the ‘musicalization’ of films in recent decades” (The Musicality of Narrative Film, 32). 33. See also Jaap Kooijman, “The Boxed Aesthetic and Metanarratives of Stardom: Analysing Music Videos on DVD Compilations,” in Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media, ed. Gina Arnold, Daniel Cookney, Kirsty Fairclough, and Michael Goddard (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 231–44: 239 and Laurent Jullier and Julien Péquignot, Le clip: historie et esthetique (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013), 125.

636   Mathias Bonde Korsgaard 34. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000), 15. 35. José Cláudio Siqueira Castanheira, “Timeline Philosophy: Technological Hedonism and Formal Aspects of Films and Music Videos,” in Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media, ed. Gina Arnold, Daniel Cookney, Kirsty Fairclough, and Michael Goddard (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 215–29: 228. Worth noting is the fact that Castanheira also uses Gondry as one of his key examples. Others have made similar suggestions—see Vernallis, Unruly Media, 4; or Shaviro, Digital Music Videos, 9. 36. See Mathias Bonde Korsgaard, “Changing Dynamics and Diversity in Music Video Production and Distribution,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Popular Music Video Analysis, ed. Lori Burns and Stan Hawkins (London: Bloomsbury Academic,  2019), 13–26. 37. See for instance Bonde Korsgaard, Music Video After MTV, esp. ch.7 [“Post-music video”]. 38. Ashby, Popular Music and the New Auteur, 5. 39. Vernallis, “Music Video, Songs, Sound,” 278; Vernallis, Unruly Media, 72. See also Richardson, An Eye for Music, 58. 40. An enlightening example is Steve Barron, who was one of the first directors to move from music videos into filmmaking. As a music video director, he did one of Michael Jackson’s by-now classic videos, “Billie Jean” (1983), as well as one of the most innovative music videos of the 1980s, a-ha’s “Take on Me” (1985). As a film director, he made the cult film Electric Dreams (1984) and found financial success with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), but none of his films have become canonical in the way his music videos are, with “Take on Me” recently becoming one of very few music videos made in the twentiethcentury to have reached a billion views on YouTube. 41. Ashby, Popular Music and the New Auteur, 23. 42. Similarly, music videos might have learned from cinema as well—having become increasingly “cinematic” on the level of style and better at telling stories, sometimes even suspending the music altogether in order to become mini-movies (at least dating all the way back to 1983 with Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”). For more on this topic, see Laurel Westrup, Chapter 31 in this volume.

Select Bibliography Arnold, Gina, Daniel Cookney, Kirsty Fairclough, and Michael Goddard, eds. Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Ashby, Arved. Popular Music and the New Auteur: Visionary Filmmakers After MTV. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Barthes, Roland. “The Third Meaning,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath, 52–68. London: Fontana Press, 1977. Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000. Buckland, Warren. “The Unnatural and Impossible Storyworlds of Michel Gondry’s Music Videos: The Mise en Abyme of ‘Bachelorette’.” Volume! La revue des musiques populaires 14, no. 2 (2018): 83–96. Calavita, Marco. “ ‘MTV Aesthetics’ at the Movies: Interrogating a Film Criticism Fallacy.” Journal of Film and Video 59, no. 3 (2007): 15–31.

Projections of Image on Sound   637 Castanheira, José Cláudio Siqueira. “Timeline Philosophy: Technological Hedonism and Formal Aspects of Films and Music Videos.” In Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media, ed. Gina Arnold, Daniel Cookney, Kirsty Fairclough, and Michael Goddard, 215–29. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Chion, Michel. David Lynch, trans. Robert Julian. London: BFI Publishing, 1995. Conrich, Ian, and Estella Tincknell, eds. Film’s Musical Moments. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. Davison, Anette. “ ‘Up in Flames’: Love, Control and Collaboration in the Soundtrack to Wild at Heart.” In The Cinema of David Lynch, edited Erica Sheen and Annette Davison, 119–35. New York: Wallflower Press, 2004. Dickinson, Kay. “Pop, Speed, Teenagers and the ‘MTV Aesthetic’.” In Movie Music: The Film Reader, ed. Kay Dickinson, 143–51. Abingdon: Routledge, 2003. Dickinson, Kay. “Music Video and Synaesthetic Possibility.” In Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones, ed. Roger Beebe and Richard Middleton, 13–19. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Donnelly, K. J. Occult Aesthetics: Synchronization in Sound Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Frith, Simon. Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988. Gorbman, Claudia. “Auteur Music.” In Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert, 149–62. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Grau, Christopher, ed. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. Halskov, Andreas. The Art of Paradox: The Films of David Lynch. Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2021. Herzog, Amy. Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Kooijman, Jaap. “The Boxed Aesthetic and Metanarratives of Stardom: Analysing Music Videos on DVD Compilations.” In Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media, ed. Gina Arnold, Daniel Cookney, Kirsty Fairclough, and Michael Goddard, 231–43. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Korsgaard, Mathias Bonde. Music Video after MTV: Audiovisual Studies, New Media, and Popular Music. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. Korsgaard, Mathias Bonde. “Changing Dynamics and Diversity in Music Video Production and Distribution.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook to Popular Music Video Analysis, ed. Lori Burns and Stan Hawkins, 13–26. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Kulezic-Wilson, Danijela. The Musicality of Narrative Film. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. McQuinn, Julie. “Introduction: The Productive Potential of Interactivity.” In Popular Music and Multimedia, ed. Julie McQuinn, xi–xxix. Burlington: Ashgate, 2011. Mundy, John. Popular Music on Screen: From the Hollywood Musical to Music Video. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999. Richardson, John. An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Sexton, Jamie. “Low-Budget Audiovisual Aesthetics in Indie Music Video and Feature Filmmaking: The Works of Steve Hanft and Danny Perez,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to

638   Mathias Bonde Korsgaard Popular Music Video Analysis, ed. Lori Burns and Stan Hawkins, 27–46. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Shaviro, Steven. Digital Music Videos. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2017. van Elferen, Isabella. “Dream Timbre: Notes on Lynchian Sound Design.” In Sonic Style in Cinema, ed. James Wierzbicki, 175–88. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012. Vernallis, Carol. “Music Video, Songs, Sound: Experience, Technique, and Emotion in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Screen 49, no. 3 (2008): 277–97. Vernallis, Carol. Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Vernallis, Carol, Holly Rogers, and Lisa Perrott, eds. Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry, and New Audiovisual Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.

chapter 31

Listen Aga i n Music Video’s Cinematic Soundscapes Laurel Westrup

In Bob Giraldi’s classic MTV-era music video for Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield” (1983), Benatar plays a teen runaway whom we first meet on the mean streets of Manhattan, with sirens blaring in the background. Cut to Benatar on a Greyhound bus, as she sing-speaks the first lines of the song. She closes her eyes and we move to a flashback, where her chorus lyrics become intercut with added dialogue from her father that is not present in the song. “We are strong,” she sings defiantly, to which he replies, “You leave this house now . . .” She sings, “no one can tell us we’re wrong,” and he continues, “You can just forget about coming back.” (See Video 31.1.) Here Benatar seems threatened, but elsewhere she takes control. Her biggest triumph comes in the video’s most iconic scene, when she leads a girl gang in dance combat (choreographed by Michael Peters) against a would-be-assaulter. The dance begins shortly after we hear a woman scream, “Leave me alone!” and it is accompanied by an extended instrumental break not heard in the original song.1 Following the showdown, and with newfound strength, Benatar hugs her girlfriends goodbye and we see her again on the Greyhound, whose rumbles provide the closing sounds of the video. It is unclear whether she is returning home to reconcile with her father, or if this is a flashback to her initial departure, but the message of female empowerment is clear. Almost thirty-five years later, in Andy Hines’s video for Logic’s “1-800-273-8255” (2017), Coy Stewart plays another troubled teen, a gay black track star struggling with thoughts of suicide. The video opens with sounds not heard in the song: a baby coos and its father (played by Don Cheadle, one of several established actors in the video) hums a lullaby as he feeds the child with a bottle. We later come to learn that this is the protagonist’s father, and the footage of the protagonist as a baby is juxtaposed with him running through the streets, distraught. The song’s simple initial arrangement of piano, guitar, and strings comes up over slightly sepia-toned shots of the protagonist’s childhood, and soon Logic begins, “I’ve been on the low/I’ve been taking my time/I feel like I’m losing my mind.” From there the video unfolds the story of the protagonist as he

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Video 31.1  Pat Benatar’s character spars in singing with her father’s dialogue in “Love is a Battlefield” (Giraldi 1983). Copyright UMG.

becomes romantically involved with one of his teammates. After his father discovers that he is gay, the teen becomes briefly homeless, and, during a gospel breakdown that is extended to almost twice the length of a similar break in the song, he cocks a gun and nearly commits suicide. As guest artist Khalid brings the song home, changing the earlier lyric “I just want to die today” to “I don’t even want to die today,” the troubled teen calls the eponymous phone number, a United States suicide prevention hotline, and turns his life around. In the final shots of the video we are returned to gentle humming and baby noises, this time revealed to be emanating from the now-adult protagonist and his husband’s baby. The protagonist’s father holds the baby, clearly reconciled with his son. “Love is a Battlefield” and “1-800-273-8255” are in many ways products of their respective eras. The former is a star vehicle with flashy dancing, a driving beat, and quick cutting that was in frequent rotation on MTV. The latter is a socially conscious video where we only rarely see the central and featured artists amidst high-definition, frequently slow motion, long takes of the protagonist’s home and school life, and its popularity can be measured by its 300 million plus views on YouTube at the time of this chapter’s writing. What unites these videos across the socio-cultural, aesthetic, and technological shifts of the past three decades is the way they ask us to listen cinematically to the songs at their center. Both videos demonstrate complex sound design that integrates at least two of three core elements of cinematic sound design: music, speech, and diegetic sound effects.2 Both videos rearrange their respective songs to find a more cohesive fit between the aural storytelling already present in the song and the visual storytelling that has been inspired by the song. In this process of audiovisual transformation, both videos create a new version of the song that provides something more and something different from the original song alone—something that I will argue we might deem cinematic. To assert that music videos can ask us to listen cinematically, a claim that I will elaborate over the course of this chapter, is to challenge one of the core assumptions about these media. Music videos are often defined as moving images synchronized to the lyrics and rhythms of a song, and this perspective tends to reduce them to mere advertisements for pop songs. However, as my opening examples illustrate, music videos have incorporated diegetic sound effects, dialogue, and other musical material throughout their history. Even when a particular song remains sonically central to a music video, as it does in both of these examples, it is often rearranged and/or extended to emphasize narrative or aesthetic elements within the audiovisual mix. In other words, the song we hear in a music video is often not precisely the song we would hear elsewhere. Michael Jackson and John Landis’s Thriller (1983) is probably the best known video to take a more cinematic approach to sound design, but works as diverse as Jonathan Glazer’s music videos for alternative rock acts and Beyoncé’s opus Lemonade (2016) demonstrate approaches to music video sound that complicate the role of the

Music Video’s Cinematic Soundscapes   641 song. These videos ask us to listen to songs within larger sonic contexts, both by situating the music as part of a more extensive and complex soundscape and also, in some cases, by reorganizing the song itself.3 These larger sonic contexts are frequently imbricated in a more general movement toward the cinematic with regards to narrative (e.g., development of characters and narrative tensions), production values (e.g., detailed mise-en-scène, high quality lighting, and sound mixing) and representational strategies associated with film genres and forms (e.g., horror, action, the teen film, the Hollywood musical, documentary). The phenomenon of featuring a song within a larger cinematic soundscape is not new. While my focus in this chapter is on music videos from the 1980s to the present, Vitaphone shorts from the early days of sound cinema attest to similar strategies. They usually featured more than one song (a strategy that music video has returned to), and they are similar to the music videos I will discuss here in that they enveloped the songs within a larger cinematic world that included, in many cases, dialogue and sound effects. A good example is The Night Court (1927), where a police whistle interrupts the introductory musical interlude—the speakeasy where we have been watching people dance has been raided. In a later (implausible) scene, the performers from the speakeasy put on their revue in the courtroom so that the judge might decide whether they are guilty of indecent acts. We hear the judge’s gavel and his directives, as well as Dottie Lewis’s memorable performance, on the stand, of “I Ain’t that Kind of a Baby.” We could consider The Night Court a musical narrative film, but it also functions, like a music video, to put explicit emphasis on the songs and performers. In fact, as in many music videos, the narrative here is arguably a vehicle for the songs, rather than the songs being a vehicle for the narrative. Or, to put it differently, the narrative dialogue and sound effects are there to deepen our engagement with the music. Lewis’s character’s innocence hangs on whether or not the judge believes that she “ain’t that kind of a baby,” and so we attend to the lyrics and her delivery of them all the more closely. The Night Court and other early sound shorts are striking for their experimentation with pairing sound and image. In the intervening decades, a vibrant scholarly literature has arisen around the audiovisual relationships in music video.4 However, the addition of non-song (often diegetic) sound effects and dialogue, as well as the remixing and rearrangement of existing songs for music video, seem to remain conceptual blind spots in much of the literature in this field.5 In Music Video after MTV, Mathias Bonde Korsgaard argues that his tendency to privilege the visuals in music videos is somewhat warranted because “the image is often the site of experimentation and innovation in music video. The music is already there—the musical innovation happens in the music, not in the video.”6 While music videos sometimes take an existing song as given, they just as frequently alter it. To reduce music video sound to a preexisting song is to ignore the soundscape of the form. In this chapter, I argue that a great deal of innovation in music and sound happens in music videos. In arguing for a more detailed examination of music video sound, I am inspired by recent scholarship on developments in film sound. K. J. Donnelly points out that digital technologies have enabled “ever more precise manipulation of all [film’s] aural elements:

642   Laurel Westrup music, sound effects, and dialogue.”7 This suggests, counter to Korsgaard’s suggestion that image is where audiovisual innovation happens, that sound is at least as manipulable, and hence ripe for innovation, as image. In fact, as Steven Connor has argued in relation to film sound and post-production, “Recorded sound has the quality of being much more manipulable than the image . . . A single sound can, if necessary, be stretched out to occupy the entire soundtrack of a film. It can be contracted, sweetened, dirtied up, damaged, accelerated, or slowed.”8 Music video’s focus on the song might limit its range of sonic possibilities, but we nonetheless often hear sounds layered in similarly complex ways in these works. And while recent digital technologies make such layering easier, intricate sound design is nothing new. William Whittington asserts that “in fact, sound processes, practices, and technology . . . led the way into the digital era and . . . these have been a driving force in shaping the audiovisual dynamics of contemporary cinema.”9 In other words, sound design has motivated audiovisual experimentation. Music video soundtracks, like film soundtracks, have long exhibited complex sound design. As I will demonstrate in this chapter, the motivations for incorporating cinematic sound into music video range from building a fuller narrative, to reinforcing the atmosphere or mood of the song, to subverting or challenging the song’s ostensible meaning. I have consequently divided my analysis into sections on “narrative sound,” “atmospheric sound,” and “subversive sound.” Of course, these motivations are not mutually exclusive. Michael Jackson and John Landis’s Thriller (1983), for instance, uses cinematic sound for narrative and atmospheric reasons, and we might also read its aims as somewhat subversive, since its cinematic elements contribute to its groundbreaking length (14 minutes) and overall aesthetic innovation.10 Given the sheer complexity and variety of music videos, any schema is bound to be reductive. Thus, I offer the following framework as a means of opening up a larger conversation about the interplay between music video and cinematic sound. Music videos’ incorporation and adaptation of cinematic sound challenge us to listen differently to music, cinema, and music video.

Narrative Sound Throughout the history of the form, scholars and critics have been divided about music videos’ capacity for storytelling. Carol Vernallis, noting that this debate goes back to the first wave of music video scholarship in the 1980s, acknowledges that music videos can tell stories, but that this function must be balanced with other functions, “such as underscoring the music, highlighting the lyrics, and showcasing the star.”11 She goes on to say that even when the generic characteristics of a music video suggest a narrative, “a story may not materialize” because it remains sketchy and incomplete.12 I agree that this is often the case, but music videos do tell stories, however elliptical, and sound—not just the song—plays a crucial role in this storytelling.13

Music Video’s Cinematic Soundscapes   643 One of my opening examples, “1-800-273-8255,” provides a good case study of a music video that uses rearrangement of the song as well as additional sound to help tell a story. In an interview with the popular culture blog Mass Appeal, director Andy Hines reveals that the idea for the video came out of a collaboration with Logic, who “wanted me to tell the story of a young black kid who’s gay or potentially gay, and he’s caught in the struggle of being a teenager and he’s discovering himself and how he fits in the world around him.”14 From there, Hines wrote a story and created a treatment for the video, which was approved by Logic and his team. Hines told Mass Appeal, “I wanted to make a minimovie, especially with Logic wanting me to tell a story and get into a narrative.” In order to do this, Hines approached the song as a starting point rather than a set soundtrack: “I’m doing something with [the song] that becomes a part of the storytelling or the experience of how you hear this. I’ll often bring in production audio and do stuff that’ll bring in more of an experience to what you’re looking at.”15 Here Hines explicitly indicates that he sees the addition of sound elements outside of the song as a means of helping us listen differently to the song, and also as a means of deepening the viewerlistener’s experience of the story. While Hines does not talk about specific scenes in the video, his aims are evident throughout “1-800-273-8255.” The bookending of the baby noises, for instance, brings the narrative and the sound design full circle, from a father’s love for his child, to his reconciliation with his adult son, now a father himself. The rearrangement of the song also enhances these narrative elements. The added instrumental break before Alessia Cara’s verse literally makes space for the scene where the protagonist and his teammate are discovered in bed by the teammate’s father (Matthew Modine). An audible knock on the door spells doom for the boys, and, while we don’t hear Modine’s character speak, the use of an instrumental arrangement of the song as underscore intensifies and draws attention to this pivotal moment. This is quite a different strategy from “Love Is a Battlefield,” where the dialogue is used in an explicitly confrontational manner—the dialogue is interspersed with the song’s lyrics, but it nonetheless interrupts the song’s instrumental track. By contrast, Hines’s video works more like a silent film. We often see characters speak, but he refrains from giving us the dialogue on the soundtrack, or even (as in “Love is a Battlefield”) lyrical material that might function as dialogue. This strategy works because we do not need dialogue to understand the characters or plot— these aspects of the narrative are made clear through visual gestures and other sonic/ musical cues.16 In “1-800-273-8255,” Hines uses musical and incidental sounds to deepen our narrative engagement with the song. During the shot of Modine looking out the door at his serene neighborhood, we hear the diegetic sound of a dog barking, a sonic tear in the perfect suburban façade, and a small bit of realism that places us in the scene. The score used during this sequence carries into Cara’s verse, which begins “It’s the very first breath/When your head’s been drowning under water.” Only after this line does the drumbeat come back in and the song, as such, resume. Later, in the scene where the protagonist cocks the gun, Hines not only extends the gospel breakdown from the

644   Laurel Westrup ­ riginal song, but also strips it down at some points to just the vocals, creating a sparser o mix that plays up the protagonist’s feelings of solitude. Like most pop songs, “1-800-273-8255” lends itself to the rearrangement we hear in the music video because it is already divided into parts. In this case, the song has roughly nine elements divided into four main parts: (1) the intro and chorus-verse-chorus by Logic; (2) Alessia Cara’s verse, during which Logic comes in and they duet briefly (a sort of bridge); (3) Logic’s return to the chorus, which is subsumed by a gospel breakdown; and (4) Khalid’s verse. This structure allows Hines to insert additional music between song elements, as he does between Logic’s second chorus and Cara’s verse, and to extend existing elements, like the gospel breakdown, with minimal interruption to the song’s (already segmented) structure. Extending an instrumental or minimally vocal break is a common strategy in music videos that rearrange the song—we hear this also in “Love Is a Battlefield,” where Giraldi follows the second chorus with an instrumental break that is not in the original song in order to provide space for Benatar and her gang to battle their nemesis. In both of these cases, the recombinant nature of the pop song, as an assemblage of verses, choruses, and sometimes breaks and bridges, allows for the insertion of additional material between elements, or the repetition of elements, without the song losing its song-ness. The cyclicality of the pop song is often held up as a barrier to narrative development, at least in the traditional sense. Andrew Goodwin, drawing on Theodor Adorno’s theorization of popular music, articulates a structure for music video that is based on repetition: “pop songs are based on the repetition of elements such as the verse and chorus within any given song, and on the repetition of lyrics, chord progressions, riffs, and rhythms.”17 Goodwin indicates that, through this repetition, popular songs achieve harmonic and structural resolution, and that it is this sense of resolution, rather than narrative resolution, that drives the music video. But the pop song’s cyclical structure might also allow for more substantial narrative development. Subtle changes to the chorus over the course of “1-800-273-8255” provide the bones of the story told in the video. The initial chorus speaks purely to the protagonist’s despair: “I don’t want to be alive. I just want to die today.” But in the second chorus, Logic takes on a seemingly different subjectivity, one that responds to the original speaker: “I want you to be alive. You don’t got [sic] to die today.” In the third chorus, Logic comes back to the initial character, but with a difference: “I finally want to be alive. I don’t want to die today.” This last version is reworked in the gospel singer’s lyrics, as she sings, “No, I don’t want to die,” and is echoed in Khalid’s verse (“I don’t even want to die”). Hines does not merely follow this plan visually, though. We actually see the protagonist with the gun after the shift to the third incarnation of the chorus, so that the gospel singer sings “No, I don’t want to die,” even as we see the protagonist very nearly pull the trigger. Here the song offers us a clue to the narrative’s denouement. As though speaking the protagonist’s inner voice, the gospel singer’s resolve not to die turns the narrative toward redemption. So while we hear the isolation of the protagonist in the somewhat warped and isolated incarnation of the gospel singer’s voice, we also hear the hope of the original song’s lyric. When we listen musically to the video, we listen cinematically to the song.

Music Video’s Cinematic Soundscapes   645

Atmospheric Sound While there are many other examples of music videos that rework and expand the song for narrative purposes, this is not the only motivation behind this practice. Another key motivation is to bolster or change the physical atmosphere or emotional mood of the song. This strategy can engage the acoustic characteristics of the song, the spatial characteristics of the video’s visual world, and/or the tone of the original song and video. Philip Brophy speaks to the ability of sound to conjure an environment: “For every ‘visual’ film that shoots slo-mo into the neon lights of a city’s sleaze strip, there could have been a sonic film that bluntly shows the grotty rear entrance to a club combined with the deep thumping of brooding beats bleeding into the rear alley.”18 Here it is the thumping and bleeding that are crucial: it is the quality of the sound that resonates, communicating something visceral about space and mood. In her work on music video, Giulia Gabrielli identifies several functions of music video images for communicating musical features. One of these is mood: “[a] function of images in respect of the music is to direct the expressivity of the song by creating a specific, guiding atmosphere.”19 This is undoubtedly a function of music video images, but it can also be a function of their sound design. A classic example of cinematic sound used to bolster the song’s atmosphere is Dominic Sena’s music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” (1989). Like many of the videos I discuss in this chapter, “Rhythm Nation” seems the product of a process where the original song spawned a visual idea, which was then reinforced through a rearrangement of the song. The original song’s acoustics suggest a vast, echo-y space, and the video translates this to an industrial warehouse. While the song we hear in the video is recognizable as “Rhythm Nation”—it contains the same melody, chorus, and verses—the music video version is a completely different arrangement from the album version.20 In a rare case of condensation, the song we hear in the video is a full minute shorter than the song we hear on the album. And yet, the music video edit does not merely cut components from the original mix. Rather, it drops some, reworks others, and adds throughout. The spoken word pledge that opens the album (albeit as a separate track) also opens the video. In a monotone voice appropriate for the stark black-andwhite industrial setting in which the video takes place, Jackson recites, “We are a nation of no geographic boundaries/Bound together through our beliefs/We are like-minded individuals/Sharing a common vision/Pushing toward a world rid of color lines.” While faint echoes of other voices can be heard underneath Jackson’s vocal on all versions of the track, sometimes diverging from the lyric with whispers of “music” and “dance,” this borderless, anti-racist nation is, as suggested by the song’s title, bound by rhythm. The original song was never lacking in rhythm. It begins with a number of percussive bursts before the driving beat that sustains most of the song sets in about 15 seconds in. But the video builds rhythm in additional ways, particularly through the soundscape of the video’s warehouse environment and through the bodies of Jackson and her dancers.

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Video 31.2  Atmospheric and bodily sounds help constitute Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” (Sena 1989). Copyright A&M Records.

For instance, throughout the opening part of the video, the space is brought to life through the sounds of running water and footsteps. These sounds issue from the video’s world, and they allow us to grasp the space sonically as well as visually. The video also places sonic emphasis on physicality through the dancers’ bodily sounds. The rhythms of the rhythm nation are not only created by the recorded song (in its original or rearranged versions), but also by the dancers’ bodies. In the original song, we don’t hear Jackson’s voice until she begins the first verse about 50 seconds in. The video puts emphasis on her voice immediately, through the pledge, but it is disembodied. Here Jackson’s voice works something like Michel Chion’s cinematic acousmêtre, a mysterious and somewhat omniscient voice “that speaks over the image but is also forever on the verge of appearing in it.”21 And indeed, Jackson’s voice soon appears in embodied form. But once she and her dancers appear about 33 seconds into the video, we hear their movements as much as their voices. The music has temporarily dropped out and they do a quick military-esque drill in unison. We can hear their feet hit the floor as they land in a wide stance, and when their arms hit their sides, we hear a convincing “thwack.” As the music starts back up, the first couple of bars are punctuated with the squad’s breathy, rhythmic “huh”s. The voices echo through the space, further reinforcing the setting of the video and embodying the dancers sonically. (See Video 31.2.) The rearrangement of the song in the video reduces the duration of the original song’s instrumental breaks and instead of relying on samples of Jackson’s voice for sonic interest, as the original song does, the video uses these sequences as backdrop for the sounds of the dancers dancing: their footfalls, the whizzing movement of their bodies, their hands slapping their thighs, etc. While Hines uses production sounds to bring the narrative world to life in “1-800-273-8255,” Sena uses non-song sound in “Rhythm Nation” to help us feel the space and the rhythms within it. The people who comprise the rhythm nation and the shadowy space in which they assemble come to life more vividly than they do in the song alone. This feeling is bolstered by the beautiful black and white photography, and the mise-en-scène of the warehouse, but the sound design remains central. Both “1-800-273-8255” and “Rhythm Nation” take on weighty social issues, and it would seem that complex sound design is often used to distinguish videos that want to be taken more seriously than the average promotional video. But the strategies of rearranging and adding sound to the original song can also be used to set a wider variety of music video moods, often in conjunction with conventions of particular film or television genres. In Spike Jonze’s well-known spoof of the TV show Happy Days in his video for Weezer’s “Buddy Holly” (1994) the sound design cheekily references sitcom sound. The video begins with a snatch of the Happy Days theme song and an announcer reminding us that “Happy Days is filmed in front of a live studio audience.” Jonze also interrupts the song in the middle to insert a “to be continued” card, after which we hear Ron Howard (one of the original cast members from the show) say, “Stay tuned for more Happy Days” before the song resumes. In this case, the sound design plays up the

Music Video’s Cinematic Soundscapes   647 nostalgia already inherent in a song that includes the lines “Ooh ooh I look just like Buddy Holly/Oh, oh, and you’re Mary Tyler Moore.” Somewhat similarly, in Joseph Kahn’s video for Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” (2017), the campy graveyard opening is augmented by the classic cinematic horror sounds of crows cawing and thunder booming. In these cases, sound design helps music videos claim a connection to classic media genres and their appeals to the audience.

Subversive Sound While the uses of cinematic sound discussed previously deepen our engagement with the music videos under discussion, none of these videos have diverged substantially from the standard objectives of the form: to promote a musical act, to tell a story, and to set a mood. However, cinematic sound can also be used against the grain in music videos. Music video history is peppered with examples of (slightly) subversive sound design, many of which use non-song sound in self-reflexive ways to comment on the practice of music video making, but director Jonathan Glazer has demonstrated a deeper engagement with this strategy, making subversive sound design a particular calling card of his music video work.22 Glazer’s music videos frequently withhold or obscure the tight relationship between song and image that we think of as characteristic of music video’s audiovisual pleasure. As a result, they encourage us to listen differently. Glazer’s video for Richard Ashcroft’s “A Song for the Lovers” (2000) plays with sound in ways we seldom hear in music videos. For the first 25 seconds of the video, we hear only diegetic sound—first, the somewhat ominous flickering of a light bulb, and then the quotidian sounds of Ashcroft drying his hair with a towel. He turns on the sound system in his hotel room, and his song begins: clearly positioned as diegetic music in this mini-movie.23 And, like diegetic music in any other film, this music is subject to interference from any number of other sounds, including, at a few points in the video, Ashcroft himself half singing, half mumbling along to his own song. Glazer also plays with acoustics and dynamics. Ashcroft leaves his room to walk down the hall, and the song grows fainter. Glazer leaves us in the hallway as Ashcroft re-enters the room, closing the door and thus muffling the music until a cut places us back in the room. (See Video 31.3.) Ominous sounds invade the room: if not an insistent knock at the door (which turns out only to be room service), then the persistent flickering of the bathroom light. The latter disturbs Ashcroft so much that he pauses the song and listens for a moment before turning it back on. When he does this a second time, he goes to the bathroom, seemingly to investigate the sound. Is the video taking a turn toward the horror film? We wonder, as Ashcroft enters the bathroom in silence . . . only to audibly urinate as the song comes back up to end the video. Should we, then, assume that

Video 31.3  Cinematic sound design subverts music video conventions in Richard Ashcroft’s “A Song for the Lovers” (Glazer 2000). Copyright UMG.

648   Laurel Westrup Glazer’s intention here is to take the piss out of music videos? By subverting the usually seamless unfolding of the song in music video (in terms of duration and volume) and instead subjecting the song to the diegetic and spatial/acoustic constraints of the room in which it is heard, Glazer suggests that music video sound and cinematic sound are inherently different, perhaps even incompatible. “A Song for the Lovers” is a rare example of a music video that persistently subverts the song. It requires us to listen cinematically to the song insofar as the song is positioned diegetically within the video’s world for its entire duration. What do we learn from this experience? Perhaps we reflect on the artificial nature of the average music video, and on our own listening habits. Like Ashcroft, we make calls, sing along, leave the room, or eat a sandwich while we listen to music. We seldom listen to a song in an entirely noise-free, dedicated environment (unless we’re wearing noise-cancelling headphones). But perhaps this is what most music videos ask or expect us to do. So one way that we can listen differently to music videos is to listen realistically—in other words, with distractions. But if part of the pleasure of music video is listening to the song (in whatever arrangement is provided), “A Song for the Lovers” surely withholds this pleasure, and Ashcroft seems to take little pleasure in his own creative output. Nonetheless, this might be read as itself part of his star persona. His half-hearted singing in “A Song for the Lovers” is one more incarnation of the irreverent persona we see in his former band the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” (1997) video, which has him walking down the street disinterestedly singing and bumping into the people he passes. The video thus works to distinguish Ashcroft’s persona from that of other pop stars—he is cooler, more aloof. Glazer’s subversion of conventions also distinguishes music video as a separate product than song, thus bolstering the director’s reputation as an artist who does not just shill for pop stars, even if that is, in effect, exactly what he is doing in “A Song for the Lovers.” It should also be noted that that there are moments in Glazer’s music video oeuvre when he goes for maximum pleasure. We have to work for it, though. In his video for UNKLE’s “Rabbit in Your Headlights” (1998) we are placed in the purgatory of a traffic tunnel, where we watch as a bedraggled and apparently mentally ill man (Denis Lavant) walks down the middle of the roadway, repeatedly getting hit by cars before getting up and continuing on his way. This makes for a disturbing audiovisual experience, not least because the man sometimes mumbles, sometimes shouts gibberish in a constant stream throughout most of the video. Glazer also makes no attempt to synchronize any of the repetitive action with the song’s lyrics or musical features, thus placing the music as ­cinematic underscore more than the central focus of the piece. The only (slight) ­correspondence between song and image is the eponymous line sung by Thom Yorke, “I’m a rabbit in your headlights” and the headlights of the cars that menace the man. Or does he ultimately menace them? Nearly four and a half minutes into the five-minute video, the song’s cymbals build to a big, echoing crash, and the image, finally, is perfectly synced to the song. As the cymbals build, we see the man through the windshield of a car about to hit him and, as the cymbal crash happens, in a slow motion reverse shot looking at the man, the car crashes into him as though he is a brick wall—he is superhuman, godlike. (See Figure 31.1.) For the last thirty seconds of the video, we absorb the impact of this dual crash: the percussion continues to reverberate as the man is slowly obscured

Music Video’s Cinematic Soundscapes   649

Figure 31.1  A muttering man suddenly becomes godlike in a sublime moment of audiovisual synchronization: UNKLE’s “Rabbit in Your Headlights” (Glazer 1998).

by smoke from the car crash. In “Rabbit in Your Headlights,” Glazer seems to purposely distract us from the song for almost four and a half minutes so that we can really listen to the last thirty seconds. Glazer seems interested in a form of sound design that troubles the way that we listen, not only to music video, but to music and to film. He uses sound to frustrate our expectations, but also to reward us (sometimes) for listening differently. As in the other examples discussed in this chapter, “A Rabbit in Your Headlights” has been rearranged for the video. The original song features preexisting cinematic sound: a sample of dialogue from the film Jacob’s Ladder (Lyne, 1990), but in the music video version, this dialogue has been excised and replaced by a verbal interaction between the Lavant character and some of the drivers, thus replacing the song’s original sample, which is about making peace with death, with a more contentious interaction.24 Consequently, where the original song begins to move toward resolution, the video amps up the tension. In the song, we might hear Yorke’s final repetition of the line “fat bloody fingers are tearing your soul away,” and the long, impassioned holds on “away” that follow (which are paired with a slow, eerie piano refrain) as the climax. But in the video, in part because Yorke’s repetitions of the line “away” are condensed, and because the diegetic sound drops out just before the cymbal crash, the video presents the cymbal crash that follows Yorke’s final lines as the song’s true climax. Resisting but also using the conventions of music video and film, Glazer combines cinematic sound design throughout the video with the audiovisual resources of music video—the synchronization of sound and image—at a key moment to produce a denouement that is both musical and cinematic.

Conclusion: Listening to Music Video Of the examples I have discussed here, Glazer’s experiments are certainly outliers. For the most part, as we have seen, the integration of speech and sound effects, and/or the

650   Laurel Westrup rearrangement of the song, work to deepen the pleasure we take in listening to a song rather than withholding that pleasure. But as Glazer’s videos do explicitly, all of these videos might challenge us to listen differently to music videos. The same might be true for other paradigm-shifting works, such as Beyoncé’s visual album, Lemonade (2016). Lemonade brings together two means of sonically situating and enriching the song: the album and the music video. Both the audio-only album and the visual album (as well as the individual music videos released for some songs, like “Formation”) provide additional sonic context for each of the songs.25 The visual album is a complex collaboration between Beyoncé, musicians as diverse as Kendrick Lamar and Jack White, and several notable music video directors/media artists, including Kahlil Joseph (most prominently), Melina Matsoukas, and Jonas Åkerlund. Its engagement with issues of race, identity, and American history, as well as its rich audiovisual layering, has mobilized scores of scholars to write about it.26 Lemonade demonstrates the strategies and motivations I have discussed with regard to music video’s cinematic sound: it rearranges individual songs and the audio album as a whole and it introduces additional sound for purposes of narrative (the basic structure of conflict and resolution in Beyoncé and JAY-Z’s relationship, for instance), atmosphere (the sounds of a splash and bubbles when Beyoncé drops underwater in the section labeled “Denial”), and perhaps even subversion insofar as several songs, most obviously “Pray You Catch Me,” are interrupted. Because of Beyoncé’s popularity, and because of the explicit rearrangement and layering of songs and sounds, Lemonade seems to be encouraging audiovisual scholars to listen again, and more closely, to music video’s soundscapes. For instance, in a roundtable on Lemonade published in Film International, Holly Rogers suggests that as the “Pray You Catch Me” song splits in two to make a space for a more avant garde-influenced, poetic, interstitial section, Beyoncé asks “Where do you go when you go quiet?” Later, a drummer sits at her instrument, silent and motionless; later still, Beyoncé laments “we can’t hear them [the orchestra].” These evocations of seeking to utter and straining to hear suggests a facility at both guiding and responding to an off-screen auditor.27

Here Rogers foregrounds the highly constructed, highly intentional sound design of the work, and the way it encourages us to listen and attend, not just to voices, but to soundscapes. Lemonade and the videos I have discussed in this chapter are particular instances of how music videos may encourage us to listen cinematically, but all music videos present us with complex relationships between sound and image. By wedding the song to a visual world, music videos not only call up the visual resonances already inherent in the song, but also sonic resonances that emerge from that world. Music and lyrics beget images, and those images beget additional sounds. And so, even if we do not actually hear anything but the song, music videos’ audiovisual world, both real and imagined, suggests new possibilities for listening to music, to cinema, to music video, and perhaps even to media forms that we have not heard yet.

Music Video’s Cinematic Soundscapes   651

Notes 1. When I say “original” I am referring to the three primary releases of the song in 1983: the album version (on Live from Earth), the single, and the extended single. The album version is the closest to the version we hear in the music video, as it is roughly the same length, but it still has significant differences from 3:15 until the end of the song. In the album version, after the second verse, the song goes directly to the chorus, then an instrumental break with whistling, into a guitar solo, and back to the chorus, which fades out. In the music video, after the same verse, the song goes to a keyboard-driven instrumental break not heard in any of the official releases, then to the chorus, then to the whistling instrumental break, with a fade out on the guitar solo. I want to thank Paul N. Reinsch for encouraging me to pay closer attention to the many releases of a given song. I would also like to thank him and Carlo Cenciarelli for their feedback throughout the process of writing and revising this chapter. 2. This is not to say that sound effects are always diegetic in cinematic sound design, but in these two music videos they are. 3. Of course, music albums also ask us to listen to the song within a larger sonic context: the other songs on the album, and sometimes interstitial material as well. On the topic of extending the pop song, see Andrew Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,  1992), 81. Goodwin does not talk about this practice specifically in music video mixes. 4. Goodwin’s work was foundational in this regard. More recently, Nicholas Cook, Carol Vernallis, and Mathias Bonde Korsgaard have taken up and extended this project, among others. See Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia (Oxford: Oxford University Press,  1998); Carol Vernallis, Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) and Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Mathias Bonde Korsgaard, Music Video after MTV: Audiovisual Studies, New Media, and Popular Music (London: Routledge, 2017). 5. As I’ll discuss at the end of the chapter, this is starting to change. In some of her recent work, Carol Vernallis has acknowledged that music videos increasingly incorporate nonsong material. In “Beyoncé’s Overwhelming Opus; or, the Past and Future of Music Video,” Film Criticism 41, no. 1 (2017), https://doi.org/10.3998/fc.13761232.0041.105, she says “Music videos can now showcase long intros and endings, breaks in the middle of songs, and song medleys, devices MTV and other satellite services previously disallowed.” I agree that these incursions are often more substantial and less subtle within the current music video landscape, but these practices are in fact longstanding. 6. Bonde Korsgaard, Music Video after MTV, 9. 7. K. J. Donnelly, “Extending Film Aesthetics: Audio beyond Visuals,” in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 357–71: 364. 8. Steven Connor, “Sounding Out Film,” in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 107–24: 117. 9. William Whittington, “Lost in Sensation: Reevaluating the Role of Cinematic Sound in the Digital Age,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, ed. Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 46–61: 62.

652   Laurel Westrup 10. See Laurel Westrup, “The Long and the Short of Music Video,” The Projector: A Journal on Film, Media, and Culture 16, no. 2 (2016): 19–35, https://www.theprojectorjournal.com/ past-issues for more on Thriller’s cinematic qualities. 11. Vernallis, Experiencing Music Video, 3. 12. Ibid., 24. 13. I discuss this further in “The Long and the Short of Music Video” and in “Spike Jonze’s Abbreviated Art of the Suburbs” in ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze, ed. Kim Wilkins and Wyatt Moss-Wellington (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 231–247. My work in both these pieces is inspired by Cynthia Felando, Discovering Short Films: The History and Style of Live-Action Fiction Shorts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 14. Shams Sharieff, “Meet the Director Behind Logic’s ‘1-800-273-8255’ and ‘Black Spiderman’ Videos,” Mass Appeal (blog), August 28, 2017, https://massappeal.com/andy-hines-logicmusic-video-interview/. While the story portrayed in the video has some resonances with Moonlight (Jenkins, 2016), I have not found any evidence that Logic and Hines were directly inspired by it. 15. Sharieff, “Meet the Director Behind Logic’s ‘1-800-273-8255’ and ‘Black Spiderman’ Videos.” 16. In this way, the video upends the usual hierarchy of speech/voice over other elements of cinematic sound. Michel Chion has theorized this in terms of the vococentric and verbocentric tendencies of cinema. See, for instance, his Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). Danijela KulezicWilson revisits this thesis in “Musically Conceived Sound Design, Musicalization of Speech and the Breakdown of Film Soundtrack Hierarchy,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks, ed. Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 429–44. While most music videos do feature speech/voice in the form of singing or rapping, I would argue that the combination of vocal and other musical elements in most songs functions differently than dialogue. 17. Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory, 79. 18. Philip Brophy, “Parties in Your Head: From the Acoustic to the Psycho-Acoustic,” in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics, ed. John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 309–22: 309. See also Goodwin’s chapter titled “A Musicology of the Image” and Connor on the bodiliness of cinematic sound. Several of the contributors to Greene and Kulezic-Wilson, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media also discuss cinematic sound as it relates to atmosphere and embodiment. 19. Giulia Gabrielli, “An Analysis of the Relation between Music and Image: The Contribution of Michel Gondry,” in Rewind, Play, Fast Forward: The Past, Present and Future of the Music Video, ed. Henry Keazor and Thorsten Wübbena (Piscataway: Transcript, 2010), 89–110: 94. Italics hers. 20. While I have focused on the album version of the song for purposes of comparison, the video version of the song also differs substantially from any of the single releases I have heard, in large part because none of these versions include the non-song elements of the sound design I will discuss. 21. Chion, Audio-Vision, 129. It is worth noting that Chion’s work on film sound has influenced music video scholarship as has his work explicitly on music video. The methods he describes

Music Video’s Cinematic Soundscapes   653 in the chapter on audiovisual analysis in Audio-Vision are as useful for the analysis of music video as they are for film, and they are the basis of my close readings in this chapter. 22. A classic, if only slightly subversive, example is David Fincher’s video for Paula Abdul’s “Cold Hearted” (1989). In the prologue to the video, Fincher uses observational documentary tropes and dialogue to send up the music business and music video production. Similarly, in the mid-1980s Phil Collins had a string of videos that parodied the production of pop music, often using diegetic sound to help clarify the parodic intent. See, for instance, his 1984 video with Philip Bailey for “Easy Lover” where, in a faux interview bit at the beginning, he says, “It’s kind of interesting because we’re doing a video making a video of making a video . . . It’s not like the normal kind of promo clip.” The video does feel more like a “making of ” video, albeit largely synchronized with the song. It is worth noting that Glazer frequently works with artists who have a combative or at least ambivalent relationship with stardom (for instance, Radiohead, Nick Cave, and Massive Attack). His brand thus reinforces their brand as artists more than pop stars. 23. Another video, from a few years earlier, that could be discussed in this regard is Spike Jonze’s video for Daft Punk’s “Da Funk” (1996), which also presents the song as diegetic music and, like “A Song for the Lovers,” obscures the music at times. See my “Spike Jonze’s Abbreviated Art of the Suburbs” for more on the video. I would argue that Glazer pushes the boundaries of the song as diegetic sound further than Jonze does. 24. The song’s title also references a line in the film. 25. In a recent piece on soundtrack albums, Paul N. Reinsch suggests that “visual album” is a redundant term, since albums have always included (and suggested, through their sonic dimensions) visuality. He also rightly notes that there is nothing new about feature-length visual albums. See Reinsch, “What Is a Soundtrack Album? Or, Spot the Soundtrack Album,” Flow 24 (March 26, 2018), http://www.flowjournal.org/2018/03/what-issoundtrack-album/. The Grammys have periodically given an award for best “long form” music video. Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 film, of which the “Rhythm Nation” video I discussed earlier is a part, is one example, as is, I would argue, Lemonade. Students in my music video seminar suggested that we call it a feature-length music video. 26. The work on Lemonade is already too vast to gloss here, and there are several additional special issues that are going to print as I write, but I cite a couple key pieces in this chapter. 27. Lisa Perrott, Holly Rogers, and Carol Vernallis, “Beyoncé’s Lemonade: She Dreams in Both Worlds,” Film International, June 2, 2016, http://filmint.nu/?p=18413.

Select Bibliography Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Cook, Nicholas. Analysing Musical Multimedia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Goodwin, Andrew. Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Greene, Liz, and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Keazor, Henry, and Thorsten Wübbena, eds. Rewind, Play, Fast Forward: The Past, Present and Future of the Music Video. Piscataway: Transcript, 2010.

654   Laurel Westrup Korsgaard, Mathias Bonde. Music Video after MTV: Audiovisual Studies, New Media, and Popular Music. New York: Routledge, 2017. Richardson, John, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis, eds. The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Vernallis, Carol. “Beyoncé’s Overwhelming Opus; or, the Past and Future of Music Video.” Film Criticism 41, no. 1 (2017). https://doi.org/10.3998/fc.13761232.0041.105. Vernallis, Carol. Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Vernallis, Carol. Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Westrup, Laurel. “The Long and the Short of Music Video.” The Projector: A Journal on Film, Media, and Culture 16, no. 2 (2016): 19–35. https://www.theprojectorjournal.com/past-issues.

chapter 32

Sum mon the Ci n em atic? Audio Mediation and Filmic Immersion in the Case of Remote Taipei Ya-Feng Mon

Looking beyond film works and film exhibition, this chapter investigates an example of promenade theatre in order to explore in what ways, and to what extent, filmic immersion can arise as the result of specific forms of audio mediation. The performance in question is Rimini Protokoll’s production of Remote X, particularly in its instantiations as Remote Taipei at the 2017 and 2018 Taipei Arts Festival. Replicating the formula established by Remote X since 2013, Remote Taipei asked participants to wear headphones and guided them on a two-hour-long walking tour around downtown Taipei via an intricately composed soundtrack made of verbal instructions, music, and recorded sounds. Rimini Protokoll’s declared aim was to use the soundtrack to facilitate a cross-modal transfer from audio to cinematic mediation, enabling—in the absence of screen technology—a sensorimotor experience much like filmic immersion. However, from September 2017 through October 2018, after Remote Taipei had locally generated much discussion, spectatorial responses I witnessed at public talks, in casual gatherings, and through personal interviews seemed to contradict the artists’ expectations. This chapter tries to explain the seeming discrepancy between the creators’ intentions and the spectators’ reports of their experience of the promenade. It does so by dissecting the mech­ an­ism of technological mediation and exploring its effects on participants: combining ethnography and autoethnography, I analyze first-person accounts by audience members and I also draw on my own experience of the show, which, on more than one occasion, contrasted with the impressions reported by my interviewees.

656   Ya-Feng Mon

Soundscape for a Film? Remote X by the Berlin-based author-director ensemble Rimini Protokoll counts as an example of the much-talked-about trend of “participatory theatre.” Named by Shannon Jackson as one of the “productive interlocutors” in and for the field of “socially-engaged” theatre, Rimini Protokoll experiments with theatrical conventions and real-life “interventions, performative installations and audio plays.” Their work is explicitly intermedial and interdisciplinary, as members of the ensemble often pursue collaborations “with experts who have gained their knowledge and skills beyond the theatre.”1 “Many of their works feature interactivity and a playful use of technology,” reads the ensemble’s official website. In addition to “[redistributing] the effects of theatrical engagement,” these works are seen by Jackson as an intriguing response to “the changing social landscape brought on by new technologies.”2 Engaging the audience and embedding their (re)actions into the fabric of the performance, Remote X, like many other Rimini Protokoll productions, uses the urban landscape as its stage by sending groups of audience members into the city (a maximum of fifty people for each performance). Each member of the group wears headphones, and is guided through a two-hour-long walking tour by a synthetic voice mixed with miscellaneous sounds and music. The voice, as Rimini Protokoll explains, though basic in terms of engineering and programming, is meant to represent the possibilities of artificial intelligence. The walking tour commences in a cemetery or a park, continues with brief visits to various town spots like a school, a hospital, a shopping mall, a fountain, a subway station, a parking lot, and a church, and eventually ends on the top floor of a tall building to give the audience a bird’s-eye view of the city. During the tour, at different points, the “artificial intelligence” inhabiting the headphones would instruct the audience to dance, to race one another, to hold a beloved object up high in the air for the passers-by to see, to stare at a building from afar and walk backwards, to take a selfie, to make pretend-binoculars with their hands and explore things through them, to carefully watch the passers-by as if they were professional performers on a stage, to look at another audience member in the eyes for as long as thirty seconds, and—above all—to contemplate life, death, ambitions, desire, competition, group politics, and other substantial topics inspired by the variety of sites visited. Since its premiere in 2013 at HAU, Berlin, Remote X has been “performed” in other major European cities including Paris, London, Copenhagen, Lisbon, Vienna, Milan, Zurich, and Antwerp, and in many other urban centers around the globe, such as Sao Paulo, Bangalore, St. Petersburg, New York, Abu Dhabi, Tunis, Buenos Aires, Tehran, Jerusalem, Macao, and Shanghai. In each city, the (re)production has been “site-specific,” even if “[built] upon the dramaturgy of the previous city,” according to Rimini Protokoll’s official webpage.3 In August 2017, Remote Taipei quickly became the most discussed performance at Taipei Arts Festival. As a result, a number of public talks were organized where critics and audiences compared Remote Taipei with similar local productions. These included a

SUMMON THE CINEMATIC?   657 talk hosted by Taipei Arts Festival and featuring the Remote X director Stefan Kaegi. Impressed by the local interest aroused by Remote Taipei, the festival organizers also threw a casual party for “lovers” of the show. That was where I met most of the participants I interviewed for this research. My interviewees, and myself, attended the show again when the festival brought it back for a second-year run in 2018. These public talks read Remote Taipei in diverse terms. At a talk organized by Pareviews—a web-based platform for theatre and performance reviews—Rimini Protokoll’s creation of a globally reproducible model for “site-specific” theatre productions4 was at once admired and suspiciously examined, seen as a possible example of technological domination.5 At the Taipei-Arts-Festival-organized fan party, on the other hand, loyal supporters of the show appeared eager to find out about technical details that had made the performance and its soundtrack possible. What drew me to the show and ignited my analysis, however, were these statements published on Rimini Protokoll’s official website: Fifty people watch each other, make individual decisions and yet remain always part of a group. While the artificial intelligence observes human behavior from a distance, the voice step by step sounds more familiar. Along the way, binaural recordings and film scores provide a soundtrack for the urban landscape. The journey through the city feels more and more like a collective film.6

Delivering a public lecture at Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District in 2015, Stefan Kaegi elaborated this comparison of Remote X to a film when asked to elucidate his view on participatory spectatorship: In a very simple way you became active. But you are more acting for yourself. You are acting in your own film. And maybe you are acting for the other 49 spectators that are walking along, that make you feel like being in a crowd . . . what I can say is that most of the experience that people take away with is almost more like being in a film. And you are the camera. And what I as an author deliver to you is the soundscape to your film.7

But then, how does a soundscape induce a film-like experience? Did Kaegi use “film” as a metaphor? Or was he suggesting that audio mediation could literally create a film-like sensation in the absence of screen technology? What would constitute such a “film-like” sensation? Was every spectator supposed to identify the experience as cinematic?

Listening That Creates Distance Somewhat to my surprise, the comparison to film was seldom, if ever, brought up at local discussions about Remote Taipei. In fact, when I intentionally raised the subject in

658   Ya-Feng Mon private conversations with several attendees at the fan party, many frowned at the comparison. The party attendees objected on the basis that watching a film would seem to bear more resemblance to seeing a conventional theatrical performance through an invisible fourth wall. “In the movie theatre I feel more like a distanced observer,” said Shu-Wen, a stage manager, “with Remote Taipei, however, I was very much involved in the immediate surroundings.”8 Snow, a nurse and fervent admirer of the show, underlined the dissimilarity by intimating that Remote Taipei had offered the opportunity for appreciating random happenings in everyday city life; by contrast, “that which occurs in movies is more planned and organized.”9 Enid, a graphic designer and regular theatregoer, was the one person who spontaneously drew a parallel between the experience of films and that of Remote Taipei. To throw light on the parallel, she singled out a part of the walking tour in which the audience group, having arrived in the main plaza in front of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, was instructed to stare at a tall building from afar and walk backwards.10 “Seeing the building recede further into the distance made me feel as if I had been watching a film; as if the camera had been zooming out on the high-rise, and I had been made to observe its movement.” But “that was about the closest it could get to a film experience,” she insisted, “for most of the walking about in Taipei, I was rather focused on the voice in the headphones, trying to let it direct my vision and actions.”11 While resisting the comparison with film, most interviewees found it natural to liken their Remote Taipei experience to that of listening to music on portable audio devices (e.g., Walkman devices, iPods, or smartphones). Shu-Wen was particularly keen on this comparison. However, in her view, it is the difference between the two that truly marks Remote Taipei: If I walked about the city listening to music on a Walkman, or if I drove around town with the car stereo on, I would still be confined in my own space, to my own imagination. But Remote Taipei did quite the contrary. It opened me up to new perceptions, linking me up with the city.12

Jhaoan, whom I met through Enid in 2018, after Remote Taipei had its second-year run at Taipei Arts Festival, concurred with Shu-Wen’s assessment. In addition, she confessed that she puts her headphones on when moving about the city only because the music helps block out the hustle and bustle of city life, “and thus renders travel within the city endurable.”13 Similar to Shu-Wen and Jhaoan, Enid emphasized music’s power to distance her from the immediate surroundings. She nevertheless described this as having a very specific effect. When she is on the move, she said, the music on portable devices qualifies much of what she sees precisely because of the distance it creates between her and the city. She described a particular instance of this: With the headphones on, I couldn’t really get a grip on what was going on around me. I would see people talk to one another, for example, yet had little idea what they

SUMMON THE CINEMATIC?   659 were talking about, or how they were feeling talking about it. I came up with my own interpretations, however. The music helped by tingeing all that I had come across. A sad song made an ordinary person look tragic while dance music turned a banal street view exhilarating. Since I had become detached from the world around me, the qualities of the music in my ears got to define whatever was happening within it.14

Enid called this experience “film-like.” Like Shu-Wen, Enid deemed herself “a distanced observer” in front of a screen. As the music on portable devices detached her from that which she observed around her, she assumed the detachment had allowed the experience of film watching to be evoked. Since the music on portable devices defines what she sees, it functions “pretty much like image-defining film soundtracks.”15 Yet, why would Enid call this experience “film-like,” rather than “theatre-like”? “Do plays not contain scene-defining soundtracks, too?” I asked her. “They do,” Enid contemplated before drawing a distinction between the two: I can’t offer you a lucid explanation; I could only tell you how I feel. Truth is, I have never once thought of theatre when moving about [in my day to day life] with headphones on. The experience always seems film-like to me. But occasionally, without headphones, I might come upon unusual things, dramatic things, such as people being engaged in passionate conversations. If that happened, be it in the street, on the train, or in a coffee shop, those moments would suddenly turn theatrical on me.16

In her own terms, Enid was raising the issue of mediation. Even though many of my interviewees claimed the experience of watching a film to be like that of attending a stage play, Enid’s accounts indicate there is a manifest distinction to be made. The experience of a stage play, as Enid suggested, is marked by a physical sense of co-presence—a sensation of being physically within the same place and time as the play. Long considered the defining characteristic of theatre, physicality in this case is defined by actuality— that is, the actual (rather than virtual) co-presence of audience and play. This actuality is what allows a play to affect its audiences through a combination of material and immaterial elements. When co-present with it, Enid had felt a passionate conversation between strangers to be theatre-like, not merely because of the actual co-presence, but also because she, as the audience, was open and susceptible to that particular conversation. The physical experience of a film, on the other hand, is dominated by virtuality—a situation entailing at once the absence of the represented subjects and the intervention of a technological apparatus. On this account, Enid’s music-defined experience of city watching should not plausibly have felt “film-like,” since what she had gazed upon was by no means absent from her immediate surroundings. But as Enid herself and many other fans of Remote Taipei have maintained, music on portable devices detaches them from, rather than opens them up to, the city. In this sense, the distanced observation that music facilitates bears little resemblance to the distanced observation of a stage play.

660   Ya-Feng Mon However distanced, the audience in the latter case remains susceptible to the play; conversely, the urban surroundings traversed while one listens to music on portable devices, although present, are nonetheless felt to be detached, with their potential impact upon the music listener relatively restricted. One might argue that, under these circumstances, personal stereo users register the virtual absence of their immediate surroundings, the virtuality of which highlights a possible parallel between headphone and film experiences.

Feeling the Verbal In Sounding Out the City, Michael Bull explores the link between personal stereo use and film experience. Bull’s interviews corroborate the idea that portable audio devices detach listeners from their immediate surroundings and bring forth “filmic” sensations17 in the absence of screen technology.18 Is this what Stefan Kaegi had in mind when he compared the Remote X experience to a film experience? If so, why did Remote X’s “cinematic” mediation not seem to function that well? In somewhat opaque terms, Enid addressed one basic difference between the two experiences: Listening, with Remote Taipei, is much concerned with letting verbal instructions in. Music on portable devices, on the other hand, absorbs me, inasmuch as I cannot help but give in and throw myself out into it. The music encloses me. Remote Taipei instructions act through me.19

What exactly was moving in, or out? And moving in or out of what? This sophisticated cultural consumer thus elaborated: Music is like the ocean. I jump into it, and it embraces me. It’s on the outside of me. Remote Taipei instilled instructions in me. The instruction voice drove me from the inside into action.20

While Enid experiences music on portable devices as immersive, she characterized the Remote Taipei soundtrack as something operating from inside. In this sense, she traced a difference between “immersion” and something that might be called “permeation.” Immersive, “the ocean” of music encloses its listener and hence segregates her from the actuality of immediate surroundings; it is a distancing mediation that brings about a film-like sensation. Permeative, the Remote Taipei soundtrack mobilizes the listener “from the inside”; it invites her to act on the surroundings, and thus “[links her] up with the city.” Another participant echoed Enid’s explanation. Snow, an ardent theatregoer I first met at the Remote Taipei fan party and later invited back for a personal interview,

SUMMON THE CINEMATIC?   661 claimed that—to her—theatre is less about impressions than about observations. As far as she was concerned, her walking through the city with Remote Taipei constituted more or less an investigative experiment: I was most interested to know how the passers-by would react to us—a group of headphone-wearing weirdos. A number of theatre critics wrote that we were the actual performing actors in the show, which presumed the passers-by would definitely look at us. As if together, we would for sure make a spectacle. But to me, the theatre existed in them, the passers-by. I was just there to watch them.21

When asked about any sensation that might have sprung up during the walking tour, she paused, contemplated, and replied with conviction: Obviously, Remote Taipei would not move me the way narrative theatre might. I did push myself to follow the given instructions, though . . . I walked about places I would not have visited had it not been for the show. But I did not feel much. Verbal instructions are different from music. They do not induce emotions or sensations, unlike movie scores. Having participated in the show twice, sometimes, as I ran around the city going about my business, I had a sense of déjà vu when passing by sites I had set foot on during the performance. It was much like remembering a travel. Because of the show, certain spots in the city have come to mean something to me. I don’t suppose this is what you had in mind when you talked about “sensations”?22

If “sensations” were not involved, however, what created that “sense of déjà vu”? Since a significant part of the Remote Taipei soundtrack is verbalized, most participants seemed to neglect that—apart from being instructive—the soundtrack also served to tinge and recolor their relationship with the city. In this sense, Enid’s strict differentiation between an immersive outward experience (such as that with music on portable audio devices) and a permeative inward experience (such as that with the Remote Taipei soundtrack), clashed with my own impression of Remote Taipei. For one thing, the show’s binaural soundtrack contained a lot more than verbal instructions. Simulated ambient sounds played all along, challenging the audience to distinguish the simulation from the real; at different points, there existed also synthetic scores or background music. The complex composition of the soundtrack apparently distracted many throughout the performance. One participant—Jhaoan—admitted to taking off the headphones from time to time, so as to “keep a good grip on what was going on.”23 I did not resist the effect of the soundtrack and, for me, the complexity added layers after layers to an already crowded reality. Ultimately, every track of sound within the Remote Taipei soundtrack came to “tinge all that I had come across” on the walking tour, as music on portable devices would have done for Enid. Strolling around my hometown, I felt as though I had been transferred to a space-time that was at once familiar and foreign, not least because I could not help but act in response to what I had heard via the headphones, which meant acting in unusual (and sometimes involuntary, unthinking)

662   Ya-Feng Mon ways on the environment around me. When Snow brought up the sense of déjà vu Remote Taipei had left with her, she suggested the show had changed her sensory connections to the city. Whether the connections had registered as “sensations” or otherwise, they were traces of affective transformations. Like it did for me, the mediation of the soundtrack changed something in the way Snow engaged with her surroundings. And this—I want to suggest—is where Remote Taipei may parallel a cinematic experience.

Rise of the Quasi-Virtual In my experience, Remote Taipei was as much immersive as it was “permeative.” The soundtrack enclosed me (from the outside), seemingly separating me from the immediate surroundings, and it also mobilized me (from the inside), impelling me to act on and engage with my surroundings. I have elsewhere argued—through ethnographic research—that this state of immersion-permeation also marks the encounter with moving-image technology.24 The effect is most conspicuous when a spectator reveals how film experience persists outside the cinema. For instance, Linwx, a participant I interviewed in connection with a previous project on film consumption in contemporary Taiwan, stated that when seeing a movie she would feel as if she had become “transferred to its time and space, caught up in its atmosphere,” insomuch that “[t]he air, the colour, the sunlight and the sounds in the movie [all] turned into something [her] body could feel.” For her, the immersive experience of watching a movie, with the film enclosing her on the outside, is equivalent to the experience of “living in the movie.” As she put it, “I felt estranged from my own actions. As though around me there had existed a membrane setting me apart from my moves. As though I had in real life lived through a bizarre dream . . . transplanted to a bizarre environment, stuck with a sci-fi-film-like bizarre feeling.”25 Along with other participants that I interviewed for my previous research, Linwx reported being compelled to act in very specific ways upon her surroundings when under the influence of a movie. As mentioned, most of my interviewees did not see a similarity between Remote Taipei and watching a film, which they considered a distanced form of mediated experience more comparable to a conventional model of theatrical spectatorship. In their opinions, what Remote Taipei offers is not simply watching. In this sense, my interviewees may actually have done the show’s creator justice. Stefan Kaegi’s vision of Remote X “[feeling] more and more like a collective film” aims at the experience of “being in a film.” Yet what Linwx’s experience indicates, but the interviewee-participants of this research did not fully realize (and Kaegi himself neglected to spell out), is the fact that watching a film can in many cases feel like being in a film. Pasi Väliaho explains the phenomenon by defining how moving images generate sensori-kinetic impact. The moving image, he writes, absorbs spectators to influence them in the same way a natural environment, or more abstractly an “atmosphere,” would

SUMMON THE CINEMATIC?   663 stimulate, assimilate, and actuate its inhabitants.26 Filmic immersion, as a result of such sensorimotor assimilation of the moving image, is arguably composed of haptic-visual sensations, which—by Donna Haraway’s definition—substantiate a visuality that involves “becoming-with or being-with.”27 In this way, the haptic-visual in and by itself brings to the fore a mechanism Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska associate with performance and performativity.28 That is to say, virtual media content, when mediating actuality, helps bring about the conditions it describes, and thus eventually allows the merging of actuality with virtuality.29 Both my state of immersion-permeation (brought about through Remote Taipei) and Linwx’s “bizarre” sensations of being “caught up in [a film’s] atmosphere” speak of this particular fusion. The combination of the permeative with the immersive in Remote Taipei, which encloses the audience on the outside and mobilizes them from the inside, adds yet another layer to the haptic-visual. Thus, it may be named the aural-haptic-visual—an aurality that embraces visuality to facilitate “becoming-with or being-with” technological mediation. To aurally-haptically-visually inhabit a film in the absence of the moving image nevertheless entails an actuality being rendered quasi-virtual—that is, mediated, but at the same time still capable of sensorimotor engagement.30 Kaegi struggled to elucidate this quasi-virtuality: But then again, it’s not really a film, because it’s reality. But it feels suddenly. . . That’s why the project is called “remote.” It feels suddenly remote, distant, like you were in a film in a way.31

The Disintegrated Local Bull theorizes the quasi-virtuality brought about by headphones as an “aestheticization” of the everyday via technological mediation. Aligned with Adorno, he is concerned with the degree to which mediation has privatized everyday experiences and encouraged individualism as a result of capitalist discipline. Jackson, in her analysis of the works by Rimini Protokoll, states for her part that technological mediation has been rendered a global phenomenon that is hard (if not completely impossible) to transcend. Rather, specifically situated within the current configuration of global economy, both the production and the effect of technological mediation have constituted the everyday at a level most mundane and personal. As very often exemplified by the “call center industry,” however, the global reach of everyday technology comes with worries about labor exploitation, cultural domination, and the undermining of local connections.32 All these concerns about global capitalism and technological mediation featured vigorously in local discussions on Remote Taipei. Some even argued upon these grounds that Remote Taipei represents the sweeping, world-flattening global force of technology,

664   Ya-Feng Mon which with the thriving business of the international theatre industry threatens to further Western universalism and erase local diversity.33 Frequently contrasted with Rimini Protokoll in discussions about Remote Taipei was Against Again Troupe. The Taipei-based theatre company has in its portfolio a number of works that are labeled as “promenade theatre”—a term used loosely to describe performances in which the audience is instructed to travel to different parts of a city, with various audio contents guiding them throughout the journey.34 At a talk centered on his work Daily Exercise: Vanishing Movements, Against Again Troupe co-founder Snow Huang thus spelled out the objective of promenade theatre: “The sounds on audio devices play the lead; they would conduct the body of each audience member to help it drink the city in.”35 Unlike the participants of Remote Taipei, however, who would be subjected to an all-encompassing soundtrack, the audience of Daily Exercise was meant to be only partially shepherded by audio technology. Made to guide the audience through a shabby commercial district on the west side of Taipei, Daily Exercise incorporated (rather than muted) the urban soundscape into the soundtrack. En route, the audience would be given the chance to “hear the old city center falling into decline,” as Huang put it: I had picked a quiet alley for the audience to stroll in. There they’d listen to recordings of bowling playing, karaoke singing, people playing video games in an oldfashioned amusement arcade etc. Meanwhile, those living in the alley went about their daily business, and the audience would hear things, such as kids blowing pipes and so forth. All these had been purposefully orchestrated together to embody and evoke memories of a collective past, including memories of once thriving but now declining industries. From time to time, though, loud digital sounds would burst out from the IMAX movie theatre just around the corner, improvising an intricate mix of now here and back then.36

The result, according to audience feedback given at post-performance Q&As, was a strong sense of disorientation. Instead of bringing forth a quasi-virtuality that may enable global experiences of technological mediation, Daily Exercise aimed at confusing the senses by building haphazard connections with local materiality, so as to challenge any overarching grand narrative at the level of mundane, everyday epistemology.37 On these accounts, Huang’s experiment with promenade theatre has been celebrated by local critics as having sought empowerment of local autonomies.38 But the interplay between the global and the local has proved experientially paradoxical. Jackson’s discussion of the call center industry renders it clear that despite all the class, cultural, and racial issues emanating from the global-local entanglement, the subsistence of the local is nowadays increasingly and inevitably dependent upon economic and interpersonal connections which are fundamentally global.39 LANDLINE: Halifax to Vancouver—yet another audio-mediated work of participatory theatre, created by Dustin Harvey and Adrienne Wong—makes a similar point. Guided by voices from personal stereos, the audience-participants of LANDLINE walk through their local cit-

SUMMON THE CINEMATIC?   665 ies endeavoring to see local familiarities from different points of view. Through instant messaging, audience-participants communicate with other participants who experience the same work in cities hundreds of miles away. Whether the long-distance interaction enhances or disrupts the walking tour, LANDLINE highlights a common experience: our relationship to our immediate surroundings is influenced by people and things that are far away. Since the influence is very often technologically mediated, technology in this case has reconfigured connectivity rather than buttressing utter individuality.40 The local, therefore, has been mediated by the global. By the same token, the global has been mediated by forces of the local. On various occasions, my research participants emphasized how Remote Taipei had altered their relationship to the city. From a sensory as well as conceptual and emotional perspective, these altered relationships encapsulate the intricate dynamics between the local and the global-technological. For, not unlike Daily Exercise, Remote Taipei also built haphazard connections with the local. This dynamic is evident in the audience’s experience of disintegration. It was at the Remote Taipei fan party that I first came to talk about moments of “disintegration.” I was vocal about dissatisfaction with technical errors such as a voice track abruptly stopping in the middle of playing. “It killed the enchantment,” I declared. I also complained of fellow audience members being indifferent to given instructions: “I was practically the only person dancing in the lobby of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall,” I bemoaned, and I did not appreciate the fact that nobody looked into each other’s eyes when the voice in the headphones had specifically demanded us to do so. “Did they not know the pleasure of make-believe at all? Had they not voluntarily signed up to a participatory performance?” I grumbled, “People simply do not understand how disinterest spoils the magic.” Except they do understand. Jhaoan works as a stage designer, and was to a great extent inspired by Remote Taipei. But she found it hard to yield, not merely to the soundtrack but most importantly to the group psychology the show seemed to encourage. Lightheartedly called a “dull rebel” by her friend Enid, Jhaoan intimated that normally she would not even give way to film scores: “It all felt way too manipulative,” she insisted. Since she mentioned she had taken off the headphones every now and then during the Remote Taipei walking tour to stay as “remote” as she could manage from being manipulated by the show, I asked what she thought had happened over the time she had kept the headphones on. “I must say I was not completely aware . . . ” she slightly shied away for a few seconds, “I guess then I was . . . I must have been taking it all in, without realizing it.”41 Enid, on the other hand, spoiled the fun for herself when she “suddenly felt so thirsty” that she had to abandon the show to look around for a drinking fountain. “I missed the whole dancing session at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall,” she gushed as if she could not believe it.42 But as a matter of fact, she had not taken much notice of the dancing session until Jhaoan and I remarked on it. This happened in spite of her commitment to participation. Remote Taipei is said to have demonstrated the power of technology, and above all the power of technological mediation. The spell it weaves over the audience remodels the mechanism of immersion-permeation by pushing the boundaries between sensory

666   Ya-Feng Mon modalities. But as an aurally orchestrated production of haptic-visual sensations that might prove comparable to cinematic immersion, its reception is like that of any film produced for collective consumption: it is subject to random intervention from all that is involved in its production and consumption.43 This includes pieces of equipment, skilled crews, unpredictable audiences who either deliberately resist to participation or accidentally fail to attend to significant moments, and many other factors that bear on the production and reproduction of a globally circulated, technologized, immersive and permeative cultural product like Remote X. Each intervention risks the experience of disintegration; each singular experience of disintegration in turn yields possibilities of indeterminate engagement with the cultural product in question. Despite its global appeal, that is to say, the effect of any technological mediation remains unstable and can be affected by something remarkably local. This indeterminacy in effect explains why the aural-haptic-visual has not invariably dominated the Remote Taipei experience.

Aural-Haptic-Visual In this chapter I have mapped the mechanism of the aural-haptic-visual, arguing that Remote Taipei has the potential to achieve through audio mediation something similar to cinematic immersion. This points to the intricacy of the current “distribution of the sensible.” We live under the Rancierian “aesthetic regime,” wherein the sensorium cannot help but operate through textual mediation (technological or otherwise).44 In an age of transnational traffic, with the ubiquity of technological mediations intensifying and the effects of discrete technologies merging into one another, it may appear worrying that the senses and perceptions could be globally managed (or even controlled). The local reception of Remote Taipei, however, questions the efficacy of such operations of control. Although expected to be universal, experiences of the aural-haptic-visual are randomly diversified by haphazard local intervention.

Notes 1. See Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (London: Routledge, 2011), 144; and Rimini Protokoll’s official webpage https://www.rimini-protokoll. de/website/en/about, accessed August 26, 2020. 2. Jackson, Social Works, 145. 3. See https://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/project/remote-x, accessed August 26, 2020. 4. The definition of “site-specific” theatre is highly contested. For the purpose of this chapter, I take an expansive definition that includes what Gareth White would call “site-sympathetic” theatre, which brings into focus theatrical works that have been created “for the site where [they are] to be performed, but without responding directly to that site’s history or context.” Typically, theatrical works that are marked as “site-specific” would be expected to be in a

SUMMON THE CINEMATIC?   667 more developed and more specific dialogue with the chosen location. See Gareth White, “On Immersive Theatre,” Theatre Research International 37, no. 3 (2012): 221–53: 223. 5. See https://pareviews.ncafroc.org.tw/?p=27,499 and https://pareviews.ncafroc.org.tw/?p= 27,673, both accessed November 5, 2018. 6. See https://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/project/remote-x, accessed August 26, 2020, emphasis added. 7. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waAcC_lHdbw&fbclid=IwAR110uN7RLA6x_ US_9k20bWhgvChaTfmNDqQB0llYFGE13w4x4Tr5pdr-P0, accessed August 26, 2020, emphasis added. 8. Shu-Wen, personal conversation, October 31, 2017. 9. Snow, personal conversation, October 31, 2017. 10. Located in Xinyi District, the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall is right in the center of Taipei city. 11. Enid, personal conversation, October 31, 2017, emphasis added. 12. Shu-Wen, personal conversation, October 31, 2017. 13. Jhaoan, group discussion, October 16, 2018. 14. Enid, group discussion, October 16, 2018. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. See Michael Bull, Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000). 18. See Bull, Sounding Out the City. 19. Enid, group discussion, October 16, 2018, emphases added. 20. Ibid. 21. Snow, personal interview, October 21, 2018. 22. Ibid., emphasis added. 23. Jhaoan, group discussion, October 16, 2018. 24. See Ya-Feng Mon, Film Production and Consumption in Contemporary Taiwan: Cinema as a Sensory Circuit (Amsterdam University Press, 2016). 25. Mon, Film Production and Consumption, 77–78, emphasis in original. 26. See Pasi Väliaho, Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema ca. 1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010). 27. See Donna Haraway and Martha Kenney, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Donna Haraway in Conversation with Martha Kenney,” in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, ed. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015). 28. See Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, Life after New Media (Cambridge, Mass., London: MIT Press, 2012). 29. Vivian Sobchack writes about “cross-modal transfer” in the case of film consumption. Her approach is, however, phenomenological, leaving out discussions of technological/ material mechanisms that, in the case of Remote Taipei, might have rendered a crossmodal transfer specific and possible. See Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 30. When delineating personal stereo users’ technologically mediated interaction with their surroundings, Bull critically argues that mediation prevents users from knowing social reality for what reality actually is. Drawing on my research findings as well as theories by Lisa Cartwright, Kember and Zylinska, and many others, I have nonetheless contested

668   Ya-Feng Mon in Film Production and Consumption in Contemporary Taiwan the possibility of any unmediated reality. 31. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waAcC_lHdbw&fbclid=IwAR110uN7RLA6x_US_ 9k20bWhgvChaTfmNDqQB0llYFGE13w4x4Tr5pdr-P0, accessed August 26, 2020. 32. See Jackson, Social Works, 144–81. 33. See https://pareviews.ncafroc.org.tw/?p=27,673, accessed August 26, 2020. 34. See https://againstagain.wordpress.com/past-productions/, accessed August 26, 2020. 35. See https://pareviews.ncafroc.org.tw/?p=22,427, accessed August 26, 2020. 36. Ibid. 37. See Snow Huang’s comments on https://pareviews.ncafroc.org.tw/?p=22,427, accessed August 26, 2020. 38. See https://pareviews.ncafroc.org.tw/?p=27,673, accessed August 26, 2020. 39. Jackson, Social Works. 40. For an introductory documentary of a LANDLINE performance, please see Canadian Theatre Review, LANDLINE: Halifax to Vancouver, YouTube video, 52:54, 2014, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0b7vvrOTMY&list=FLKFob9-c6r-POAQwz5ZhZgQ& index=59&t=0s, accessed August 26, 2020. 41. Jhaoan, group discussion, October 16, 2018. 42. Enid, group discussion, October 16, 2018. 43. For further details on random interventions into the process of film production and consumption, see Mon, Film Production and Consumption in Contemporary Taiwan. 44. Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004).

Select Bibliography Bull, Michael. Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Haraway, Donna, and Martha Kennedy. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Donna Haraway in Conversation with Martha Kenney.” In Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, ed. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, 255–70. London: Open Humanities Press, 2015. Jackson, Shannon. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. London: Routledge, 2011. Kember, Sarah, and Joanna Zylinska. Life after New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012. Mon, Ya-Feng. Film Production and Consumption in Contemporary Taiwan: Cinema as a Sensory Circuit. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016. Ranciere, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004. Sobchack, Vivian. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Väliaho, Pasi. Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema ca. 1900. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010. White, Gareth. “On Immersive Theatre.” Theatre Research International 37, no. 3 (2012): 221–35.

chapter 33

iPod Listen i ng as a n I-voice Solitary Listeners and Imagined Interlocutors across Cinema and Personal Stereos Carlo Cenciarelli

“Listening Speaks” Towards the beginning of the 2009 high-school movie musical Bandslam, there is a moment when the teenage protagonist—a self-professed indie rock fan—sits at the back of a school bus wearing an iPod and staring into empty space, aurally and spatially detached from his peers (see Figure 33.1). On the soundtrack, through a voiceover playfully addressed to his idol David Bowie, the character describes a sense of estrangement from his immediate social environment. “Dear David Bowie,” the voice goes, “today, in my Human Studies class, my teacher Miss Wittenberg said the two words I dread more than any others in the English Language: ‘Buddy Up’ ” (see Video 33.1). The use of the iPod as a signifier of teen isolation rehearses a dominant discourse that has accompanied personal stereos since their early commercialization in the 1980s, one that can be traced back to the earliest sightings of the Walkman stereo in American cinema. Yet this scene also helps identify an idea that in some ways seems to complement (or compensate for) the notion of the iPod as a technology of sensory and social isolation. Through a mix of aural cocooning and first-person voiceover, personal stereo listening is here presented as a particular kind of speech, an utterance that is both internal and shared with an imagined interlocutor. Instead of hearing the music the character is hearing, we hear thoughts directed to the musician whose music the character is listening to. It is a simple sonic substitution, though one that is conceptually complex, and Bandslam performs it coolly, absorbing it into an otherwise conventional style and story line. The

670   Carlo Cenciarelli

Figure 33.1  The isolated iPod listener in Bandslam (2009).

Video 33.1  iPod listening as an I-voice in Bandslam (2009).

strategy of iPod-motivated voiceovers is used a few other times during the film as a way of providing a personal and humorous commentary over the action on screen, justified by the fact that we know the character regularly writes letters to Bowie, as well as listening to his music. Michel Chion might call this voiceover an I-voice: a floating, first-person utterance that belongs to one of the characters on screen but that remains relatively independent from the images on screen.1 Positioned “half outside” the diegesis, as Christian Metz would put it, this is a voice that—like many voiceovers—flirts with the suggestion of becoming the point of origin of the narration.2 In a fundamental sense, this chapter tries to understand what it means for iPod listening to be turned into an I-voice. What kind of conventions, discourses, and phenomenological structures need to be in place for a listener’s private act of listening to pass as cinematic speech? And what can this tell us about iPod listening and the transmedia relationship between cinema and personal stereos? I will argue that what is at stake in this representation of iPod listening as an I-voice is a fantasy of communication: a communication that blurs the lines between introspection and confession, between listening and speaking, between hearing one’s own voice and being heard by an imagined other. More specifically, I will use Bandslam to explore how cinema can feed (and feed into) a broader cultural construction of personal stereo listening as a highly individualized activity that is always imaginatively open-ended, suggesting that this can prompt us to rethink what is cinematic about personal stereo listening. In his theorization of the I-voice, Chion focuses on the acousmatic power of the disembodied voice, which returns to haunt the narrative. Here, what interests me is the power of the imagined listener and the specific identities it dons. What kind of “Youlisteners” does this I-voice presuppose? If, as Roland Barthes famously put it, “listening speaks,”3 then who is meant to be listening? Talking to “David Bowie,” I hope to show, reveals a range of “media fantasies” revolving around iPods and Walkman stereos, and

iPod Listening as an I-voice   671 draws attention to the structural importance of imagined “others” in both cinematic and personal stereo listening.

Listening Alone? The Cinematic iPod There is empirical evidence to support the idea that cinema plays an important role in how personal stereo users make sense of their listening practices. Through wide-ranging ethnographic research, Michael Bull shows that iPod and Walkman users “often refer to their experiences as being ‘cinematic’ in nature,” alternatively imagining themselves as the filmmakers, actors, characters, and spectators of their own lives.4 While analyzing “a spectrum of filmic-type experiences” and noting that “almost any experience can be construed as filmic by personal-stereo users,”5 Bull focuses on how mobile listeners aim to create “a privatized sound world that is in harmony with their mood, orientation, and surroundings” by way of dwelling in musically mediated forms of “solipsistic aestheticization” that detach them from the material realities of their immediate social environment.6 A common thread running through Bull’s analysis is thus the idea that personal stereos tend to foster “asymmetrical” forms of “auditory looking,”7 whereby “reciprocal gazing [is] perceived as being impossible.”8 As Bull puts it, users often refer “to looking without being seen,”9 and they appear to achieve, at least subjectively, a sense of public invisibility. They essentially “disappear” as interacting subjects withdrawing into various states of the purely subjective. Subjective in the sense of focusing or attending to themselves.10

Bull’s words point to a broad analogy between the personal stereo listener and the “transcendental subject” of apparatus theory, a film spectator occupying a private, despatialized, and unified viewing position constructed by rules of continuity, technological equipment, and institutional forces.11 At the center of Bull’s analogy is a widespread understanding of cinema as an experience underpinned by what scholars such as Stanley Cavell and Linda Williams would call a “wish for invisibility,” whereby viewers are allowed to “see and hear everything without being seen or heard themselves.”12 The techniques and technologies of film sound have helped shape the notion of the cinematic that underpins Bull’s work.13 From Rick Altman and James Lastra’s analysis of the “ideal auditor” of early sound film14 to Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece and Meredith Ward’s discussion of how cinema’s evolving architecture, aural acoustics, and regulatory practices have worked to control and downplay the sounds (as well as sight) of other spectators,15 today we have powerful and detailed historical and theoretical frameworks for understanding how the standardization of cinematic sound and the optimization of listening environments have worked (in different ways, and at different points in time) to promote absorption and private aural experiences by suppressing audience awareness of their actual circumstances. In this sense, “cinematic listening” and “personal ster­eo listening” certainly share an orientation towards privatization and individualization.

672   Carlo Cenciarelli This is more and more evident as films are increasingly consumed on small (often ­portable) screens, with “the separated spectator,” as Stephen Groening puts it, emerging as a crucial figure that “looms over the new digital era of cinema culture.”16 Yet this process of individualization only tells part of the story. As Sherry Turkle reminds us, sensory separation and technological mediation do not just “isolate us,” but rather they redefine the architectures of our intimacies and—for better or for worse— also have the potential to redefine what communication means in the first place.17 The presence of “others”—and the relationship between “self ” and “other”—remains significant, but is reconfigured. Indeed, the complex technologies, architectures, disciplinary discourses, and formal strategies required to privatize cinematic and personal stereo experiences already put the idea of a solitary, “transcendental subject” in a dialectical perspective. For a start, all the labor required to sustain that cinematic “wish for invisibility” betrays the fact that aural absorption is a fragile ideal that inevitably jars with the material reality of theatrical exhibition and mobile listening. In this sense, both Ward’s recent study of the American cinema soundscape and Bull’s ethnographic work show ways in which the real bodies of others continue to play an important role, even just as a residual trace—a noisy glitch “in the system” that complicates the idea of solitary media experiences.18 And new developments in film phenomenology and sound studies are increasingly accounting for a broader range of interpersonal interactions. Julian Hanich’s work on the “audience effect” has highlighted a range of “positively attracting, negatively repelling, or simply neutral” ways in which, even though the cinema is designed to “hide us visually from others” and to drown “our noises,” the fact that “we are not alone can be vividly sensed otherwise,” and affects our experience of film.19 From an ethnographic perspective, recent work on personal stereos has similarly aimed to expand our understanding of the range of interactions revolving around seemingly private media experiences, for example through practices of “sodcasting” or headphone sharing.20 In this chapter, I try to build on these considerations by zooming into a different kind of “other.” Not the other as an irreducible material presence that has to be constantly managed and tolerated, nor a physical other we might decide to share our private listening practices with, but rather an imagined other—one imagined to share in the act of listening. An implied companion, that is, who might take a concrete, physical shape, but who is discursively constructed and does cultural work by taking over a symbolic function that—I will suggest—is crucial in the phenomenological structure of cinematic listening and in the cultural fantasies that circulate around personal stereos. Traces of this “other” can be found in Bull’s ethnographies. While Bull’s overarching focus is on how personal stereos are used to pursue radical forms of the “purely subjective,” the author also addresses the sense in which users are “floodlit” in “interpersonal resonance” and enter “a state of privatized ‘we-ness’ ”21 through their communion “with the products of the cultural industry.”22 Sound historian William Kenney famously coined the phrase “listening alone together” to suggest that through and around the use of records, “geographically and temporally dispersed” audiences . . . have always “entered into an imagined community of shared musical experience.”23 Kenney was primarily concerned with the solitary use of phonographs in America around 1900, but the idea of

iPod Listening as an I-voice   673 listening in the presence of imagined others has played an important if changing role in the discourse around personal stereos since the early 1980s. While Bull doesn’t see these forms of “communion” as genuine acts of communication (an issue I will come back to later),24 and does not talk about this aspect of personal stereo listening in specifically “cinematic” terms, I want to use Bandslam to show that cinema has a particularly important role when it comes to fleshing out the imagined others of personal stereo listening.

The Spectator as a Vicarious Addressee To the extent that cinematic representations of personal stereo listening often rely on cinema’s ability to render the acoustic bubble of personal stereos, they epitomize the sense in which film and personal stereos converge as theoretical constructs of aural individualization. The I-voice is a good example of how cinema’s techniques of listening can simulate the effects of private listening, in public. In keeping with Chion’s definition, the voice in Bandslam is not just characterized by “the use of the first person singular,” but also by “its placement—a certain sound quality, a way of occupying space, a sense of proximity to the spectator’s ear.”25 It also suppresses other sounds (such as the voices of other teenagers on the bus) by drawing clear auditory boundaries between characters on screen. In other words, whilst replacing the sound of the iPod, the I-voice preserves the sonic qualities of headphone listening in a public space. Yet cinematic representations of private listening are paradoxical, because—in the very act of establishing an analogy between the individualized spectator and the personal stereo listener—they inevitably enlist the spectator as a vicarious companion of the solitary listener on screen. The I-voice in Bandslam spells this out. From a narrative perspective, the letters to Bowie provide an opportunity for the filmmakers to have a protagonist speak to the audience while remaining within the conventions of cinematic realism. The spectator, granted the power to overhear the protagonist’s inner dialogue, is positioned in the role of a vicarious confidant who has privileged access to the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings. In the terms of Jean-Pierre Oudart, we might say that the I-voice foregrounds the place of the “Absent One,” the subject created by the cinematic discourse. It calls upon the spectator as the constitutive absence of cinematic representations.26 In this sense, listening to the I-voice is emblematic of the split positionality of cinematic listening. Film scholars have long talked about the so-called “dual look” of film: the way film channels the spectator’s gaze both through the camera and through the character’s own patterns of looking.27 Listening can present us with a similar duality, which is evident in how scholars have theorized the intimacy of cinematic voices. Thus, while for Chion the “close-miking” and “dryness” of the I-voice functions as “a pivot of identification,” because we hear the words resonating “in us as if it were our own voice, like a voice in  the  first person,”28 Altman talks of the lack of reverberation of point-of-audition

674   Carlo Cenciarelli sound as an example of how cinema addresses the individual audience member as a confidant. As he puts it, “The choice of reverbless sound . . . appears to justify an otherwise suspect urge towards eavesdropping, for it identifies the sound we want to hear as sound that is made for us.” “It is sound spoken toward me rather than away from me . . . sound that is pronounced for me.” 29 Along these lines, we can see how iPod listening in Bandslam engages us in what Metz famously called “primary” and “secondary” identification.30 To the extent that hearing the (meta-diegetic) I-voice is a means of experiencing through the character’s subjectivity, we take part in Metz’s secondary identification, an imaginary mis-cognition of another as oneself. Yet insofar as we are thereby granted a sort of aural omniscience, hearing the protagonist’s thoughts goes together with the absent look of the camera, encouraging a primary mode of identification with the cinematic apparatus. In lieu of a shot/reverse-shot (which would only highlight the imagined nature of the interlocutor), we get a moment of audiovisual suturing. Thus, in Bandslam, insofar as I am positioned in the character’s subjective point of audition while I also step in for his imaginary confidant, I become an active part of the fantasy that I am witnessing on screen: listening to and with the protagonist and overhearing his inner thoughts, I fulfil the character’s fantasy of being heard and I experience personal stereo listening as an utterance that is both inwardly and outwardly oriented. More broadly, insofar as this I-voice can be seen as a limit case of cinema’s customary use of the sounds and lyrics of popular music to provide inner focalization, it shows the irony of representing solitary acts of listening on screen: it is a literal example of the basic sense in which—by situating us in a solitary character’s point of audition—cinematic representations can train us to experience the privacy of listening as an utterance and a form of interpersonal communication. The situational nature of cinematic spectatorship adds a further level to this. If we accept, with Hanich, that mainstream cinema’s technologies and techniques of individualization do not preclude awareness of being part of a larger collective, then the I-voice carries a message that is both intimate and accessed by all film patrons. More precisely, this voice—which not only is for me (Altman) but also resonates in me (Chion) as if it were my own voice—provides a somewhat internal connection between me and other spectators, perhaps an example of the “underlying” cinematic “communication” that Jean Mitry located at “the level of feelings and fascination,”31 and that Hanich’s phenomenology recuperates, counteracting a long-standing theoretical emphasis on the idea that “cinema is made for the private individual.”32 While Hanich is mostly concerned with physical co-presence and the theatrical exhibition, the form of shared listening that I am sketching out here extends to what he calls “medial co-presence” (where spectators have real-time feedback of each other’s presence), and beyond, to situations where the (synchronous or asynchronous) presence of displaced spectators can only be presumed.33 As a spectator, whether I attend to this representation of iPod listening in a movie theatre, at home, or on my own mobile device, I share my own aural experience with a public of Bandslam viewers who might be physically co-present, geographically and temporally dispersed, or imagined. Which is to say that not only do I act as a vicarious

iPod Listening as an I-voice   675 interlocutor for the on-screen protagonist, but I also “listen, alone together,” with a range of potential others. In this sense, the scene’s spectatorial address and the nature of film viewing encourage me to vicariously experience personal stereo listening as a structurally and strangely open-ended activity: structurally because the element of withdrawal from the immediate social context is compensated or complemented by the constitutive presence of You-listeners, rather than actual, empirical listeners; and strangely because these You-listeners straddle different levels of (fictional and extra-fictional) reality.

The Romantic Other as an Implied Listening Companion At first glance, notions of cinematic address and collective spectatorship might seem to mark a significant difference between cinematic and personal stereo listening. After all, listening to personal stereos does not seem to involve I-voices and You-listeners, nor does it seem to rely on suturing techniques and the positional fluidity demanded by cinematic representations, nor lend itself to the communal sharing of experiential objects. Yet Bandslam, I want to suggest, can help us identify ways in which the discourse around personal stereos too, often posits an absent other, and one whose identities seem to emerge synergetically from the stories told by film and marketing. Our chosen film doesn’t take long to oblige. In keeping with the conventions of high school movies, Bandslam’s protagonist is soon provided with a heterosexual love interest. She materializes soon after our moment of iPod listening, and is immediately incorporated within its mise-en-scène, joining him on the bus where he previously sat in a solitary conversation with Bowie. Soon they share the little white earbuds (see Figure 33.2). The gesture of annexing a romantic other to the iPod reflects a broader trend in the cultural history of personal stereos. Media scholars William Uricchio and Carolyn Marvin talk of the early moments in a technology’s life as characterized by a “struggle for media identity”34 and by a proliferation of “media fantasies” that take part in the negotiation of the technology’s cultural meaning.35 In the early days of the Walkman, this struggle for identity revolved around the extent to which (and ways in which) the personal stereo could be conceived as communicative and social in nature. At the time of launching the first Walkman, some of the major personalities within Sony were worried that the new device could be seen as promoting social seclusion.36 As a way of addressing this concern, Sony built into their first prototype (the TPS-L2) the possibility of a second listener: the first Walkman featured two headphone jacks, and also included something dubbed the “hotline function,” a button that would activate an internal microphone and allow the two headphone wearers to talk to each other from within the space of the headphones. In this sense, sharing the Walkman was conceived in relation

676   Carlo Cenciarelli

Figure 33.2  The You-listener takes on the identity of a heterosexual love interest in Bandslam: (a) the love object is incorporated in the mise-en-scène; (b) the prospective couple shares the little white earbuds.

to a model of verbal communication, with a particular kind of speech—a voice both internal and shared—providing the bridge between the two listeners. If the second jack and the hot line function opened up an imaginary place within the symbolic structure of personal stereo listening, marketing ploys typically filled this place with the image of a romantic other (Figure 33.3). Some of the early Walkman models labelled the two outputs “Guys & Dolls” (Figure 33.3a), and on the products’ boxes (Figure 33.3b) and instruction manuals (Figure 33.3c), and in various print ads for the Sony Walkman, the romantic couple provided a framework for making sense of the new forms of “listening alone together” that the Walkman was supposed to engender. It afforded a way of re-coding the privatization of listening as the chance for an intimate form of communication. Other commercial campaigns of audiophile technologies tapped into this, using the heterosexual couple as analogous to stereophonic sound on the move: a small, essential (social and sonic) unit, mobile, symmetrical, and complete in itself (Figure 33.4).

iPod Listening as an I-voice   677

Figure 33.3  The romantic couple provides a framework for making sense of new forms of “­listening alone together”: (a) “Guys and Dolls” label on the early Walkman prototype; (b) original product box for the TPS-L2; (c) detail of 1982 Sony Walkman instructions manual for TPS-L2.

678   Carlo Cenciarelli

Figure 33.4  Selling “stereophonic heterosexuality” on the move: 1982 print ad for Sennheiser ­“Inside-Out” headphones. High Fidelity, January 1982, 79.

Video 33.2  Dual listening as verbal communication: excerpts from Begin Again (2013), 500 Days of Summer (2009), La Boum (1980), Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), and LOL (2012).

The hot line function and the second jack were soon discontinued. They marked a brief moment in the history of personal stereos and a peculiar find of media archaeology, but cinema has continued to situate the love interest within the private space of headphone listening. While for Marvin media fantasies are common in the early days of any given technology and then, as Paul Young puts it, they tend to become “obscured by institutional conventions and sheer, mundane familiarity,”37 Young’s own work on cinematic fantasies also draws attention to the fact that “ ‘struggle and argument’ over the conventional uses and institutional identities of media do not end when the institutions settle into a pattern,”38 and can continue within Hollywood stories and technologies. More specifically, I am suggesting that cinema’s representations are a space where the possibilities of personal stereo listening continue to be negotiated. Sharing the personal stereo has become a staple of cinematic romance, found in movies ranging from some of the earliest to feature a Walkman stereo (such as La Boum

iPod Listening as an I-voice   679 (1980)) to some of the most recent, such as Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and Baby Driver (2017). In these examples and many others, the idea of romance provides a framework within which listening is always on the verge of turning into speech. Indeed, as the montage in Video 33.2 shows, these cinematic moments tend to emphasize the music’s verbal content by means of lip-synching (Begin Again, 2013), or moments of singing along (500 Days of Summer, 2009), or by having the stereo owner pass on the headphones in the manner of a private serenade (La Boum and Guardians of the Galaxy). The on-screen couple becomes the context within which the generic “Is,” “yous” and “wes” of popular music’s lyrics acquire specificity; a context within which the song’s message is negotiated. Thus sharing the stereo turns the act of listening into a powerful, intimate utterance—a private confession which is shared while remaining internal, and whose agency often ambiguously oscillates between the singer, the song’s persona, and the two listeners.39 These representations also stage a form of “interpellation”—one analogous to mechanisms of spectatorial address, in which, as James Buhler sums up in his discussion of the cinematic dispositif, a “set of institutional devices . . . [prepare] in advance the place of the cinematic subject.”40 Typically, the scene establishes the private act of listening, but opens up a gap for the love interest to walk into. In the 2004 romantic film Happily Ever After the gap is rendered through strikingly asymmetric framing and narrow focus, creating an empty space on the left-hand side of the listener that is promptly occupied by a romantic interest (see Video 33.3a). In a further example provided in Video 33.3b, from 500 Days of Summer (2009), the gap is first established visually—the male actor moves to leave space for the romantic other and then she walks into the frame, so that the prospective couple can be framed in a conventional two-shot—before the leakage of sound opens up the private act of listening to the possibility of romance. The order of events: (1) the solitary act of listening, (2) the visual asymmetry and/or sound leakage, and (3) the forming of the couple dramatizes the sense in which, in this cinematic trope, the idea of romance is often implied before a love interest actually materializes; a listener is posited, a priori, to complement (and sometimes productively unsettle) the private act of listening. In this sense, these scenes emphasize how—within the context of mainstream cinema—personal stereo listening is always extendable (and often tends towards striking forms of stereophonic heterosexuality) because underpinned by a broader commitment to the ideological notion that the romantic couple is the natural extension of the solitary individual. Of course, this commitment to the normative couple also pertains to how films such as Bandslam conceive of their target audience. To the extent that romantic comedies address the individual spectator as half of a heterosexual unit—whether a couple that goes to the cinema together or individuals attached to absent or imagined others—it provides a further example of how the fantasy on screen is played out through the process of cinematic spectatorship, with the spectator at

Video 33.3  Structural gaps for prospective lovers to walk into: (a) visual asymmetry in Happily Ever After (2004); (b) asymmetry and sound leakage in 500 Days of Summer (2009).

680   Carlo Cenciarelli once acting as the protagonist’s vicarious interlocutor and expected to summon up his or her own implied companions.

The Star Singer as an Écoutêtre In the early years of the iPod, the idea of listening alone together took another significant turn. As Justin Burton has shown, at the time of launching its device in the already crowded market of MP3 players, Apple did much to promote the notion that the iPod (and its associated software iTunes) could provide an intimate connection with the artist.41 One of the ways in which this was achieved was by securing the endorsement of a range of bands and solo musicians. The endorsement took the form of a series of crosspromotional thirty-second music videos and gave life to Apple’s iconic “Dancing Silhouettes” commercials, a global marketing campaign which ran from 2003 to 2008. One of the earliest and most prominent examples featured the Band U2 performing the song “Vertigo” from their 2004 studio album How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. Burton discusses how the iPod in these commercials acts as a symbolic channel of communication between listeners who inhabit the same abstract setting, are energized by the same music, and virtually join in a collective dance. But—as Burton similarly notices—the “Vertigo” video also uses the iPod as a connecting device between the listener and the band: powering guitars and microphones, Apple’s white cables act as a visual link that bridges across performing and listening spaces. Bono seems to sing straight into the listener’s ears, in a gesture that bypasses (or at least condenses) the complex mediating role of the recording industry (Figure 33.5). The I-voice takes this fantasy to its ultimate consequences. It draws on the broader idea that the personal stereo can provide a special connection between artists and listeners, and it reverses the flow of the message, presenting us with an instance of an iPod listener actually speaking back.42 What’s more, the film ensures that David Bowie

Figure 33.5  Star intimacy in Apple’s “Vertigo” commercial (2004): (a) Bono sings into the listener’s ear . . . (b) in a gesture that condenses the mediating role of the recording industry.

iPod Listening as an I-voice   681 eventually hears the iPod listener. As is the case in many contemporary music-driven high school films, Bandslam’s narrative culminates in the self-fulfillment of its teen protagonist. In the film’s obligatory happy ending, our iPod listener—aptly named Will—becomes the producer of a successful high school band and wins the respect of his peers. In a grand display of cinema’s teleological powers, narrative closure is further achieved by realizing the protagonist’s utmost fantasy. The surprise is delivered by a stylistically marked tracking shot. It starts with a medium close up of a MacBook Pro on a small table in a cafe, a man’s legs just visible off-screen. On the laptop, we see a YouTube recording of our protagonist’s band. As the camera circles around the coffee table, it reveals the onlooker to be Bowie himself, plugged into a set of black earplugs, looking at and listening intently to the performance on screen. His interest is piqued, and we see him contacting our protagonist through a MySpace account: “Dear Will Burton . . . ” The circle is closed. (See Video 33.4.) In a long-range shot/reverse-shot of Schenkerian proportions, the image of the solitary teen plugged into his iPod and talking to an imagined “Bowie” (Figure 33.1) is eventually matched by an image of a Bowie of celluloid flesh and bones, plugged into a portable computer, voicing his email to our solitary character (See Figure 33.6). And, as Bowie’s voiceover reads out the message, we cut to our protagonist, who—astounded by the fact that his imagined interlocutor can “speak back”—falls to the floor, finally speechless in a shot that indirectly acknowledges the fantastic nature of the on-screen events.43 In his famous theorization of the omniscient, omnipotent, ubiquitous, and all-seeing acousmêtre, Chion talks of how “An entire image, an entire story, an entire film can . . . hang on the epiphany of the acousmêtre. Everything can boil down to a quest to bring the acousmêtre into the light.”44 Chion notices how the I-voice itself can sometimes act as an acousmêtre, in the sense of a voiceover searching for a body within the

Figure 33.6  The epiphany of the acousmêtre (with ear pods) brings the film full circle.

Video 33.4  The all-hearing acousmêtre receives the message and speaks back.

682   Carlo Cenciarelli diegesis. However, in Bandslam, the story culminates with the epiphany of the imagined listener. The identity of the I-voice is never in doubt, and it is the body of the You-listener that is brought, surprisingly, into the light. Paraphrasing another one of Chion’s famous dicta, we could say that here we have a listening function in search of a body.45 The fact that Bowie himself would provide such body is particularly unexpected not only because of the last-minute cameo of a global music star in a teen-pic of rather modest ambitions, but also because it asks us to revise our understanding of the role of “Bowie” as a mere placeholder for the audience. By claiming a listening function that we had assumed was part of the mechanism of cinematic address, the star singer takes on the quasi-mythical powers of an acousmêtre, though one that hid in silence throughout the film and was only heard indirectly and briefly—if acousmatically—through some of his songs; an acousmêtre defined by his quasi-mythical powers to receive the message, rather than by a voice haunting the narrative. Similarly to Chion’s “acoustic being,” this “listening being”—this écoutêtre, if you will—owes his aura to the way his delayed onscreen appearance complicates the boundaries between enunciation and the enunciated. It appropriates “the power of the Absent One,” as Buhler puts it.46 Yet the shift from verbal powers to hearing powers marks a significant difference, which reverses the characteristic narrative economy of Chion’s acousmêtre. Whereas the presence of the disembodied voice typically requires a solution because it threatens the unity of sound and image that gives coherence to the cinematic apparatus, the presence of a disembodied listening function in Bandslam (our Dear David Bowie) creates no comparable tension, because it is fully in keeping with the mechanism of cinematic address. In other words, whereas disembodied cinematic voices are assumed to be (fictionally) real, until proven otherwise, the listening function is expected to be fictional, until Bowie actually materializes on screen. In this sense, whereas cinema’s typical acousmêtre plays with the strangeness of giving the Absent One a voice, the visualization of Bowie on screen plays with the strangeness of giving a body to the You-listener of cinematic and personal stereo listening. Of course, the filmmakers find an indirect, pseudo-logical way to turn the imaginary conversation with Bowie into reality. The protagonist is “heard” once he becomes a music producer, his musical message conveyed by the amplifying power of the internet. And, in order to be heard, the protagonist’s “voice” has to change meaning and material, from being a letter written to a specific (if extremely unlikely) reader, to being music posted to a broad audience on YouTube. The cinematic rendering of this conversation— mixing spoken and written words, giving sound to the letter to Bowie and to Bowie’s reply—thus produces a text whose material hybridity is perfectly in keeping with the language of digital media. In this sense, the representation of iPod listening as an I-voice is tied to some of the ways in which the idea of communication is being redefined by social media. To the extent that DIY music making, amateur YouTube videos, and social networking websites such as MySpace are mobilized to realize the fantasy of communicating with Bowie, we could say—using Jim Macnamara’s words—that the film taps into a broader discussion of social media as “an empowering development contributing to the democratization of voice.”47 Yet as Macnamara and Nick Couldry remind us, the fact that “ ‘speaking

iPod Listening as an I-voice   683 up’ has become the dominant metaphor for participation in online spaces”48 always raises the question of who is listening, because online, “unlike public speaking or physically assembled groups of people, media audiences . . . are doubly assumed and imagined—assumed and imagined to exist and assumed and imagined to listen.”49 And they are also assumed and imagined to be “fragmented” and “atomized,” in keeping with the characteristics of new media environments. In other words, social media can function here as the natural extension of that act of listening because both media engagements are marked by a wish to be heard. In this sense, Bandslam’s final epiphany shows how cinema—thanks to a large dose of “poetic” license, a commitment to ­narrative closure, and synergies with the music industries—can draw upon the media persona of the rock star (here seen in his last, pre-posthumous cinematic appearance) in order to give a fantastical body to the imagined audiences of social media, film, and personal stereos.

From a Wish for Invisibility to a Fantasy of Being (over)Heard Bringing an imagined other inside the bubble of personal stereo listening, Bandslam provides an alternative route through the transmedia relationship between cinema and personal stereos. The I-voice creates a hybrid You-listener that is positioned across fictional and extra-fictional layers—part global star with quasi-magical powers of ubiquity, part overdetermined romantic interest, part Absent One—and shows how both cinematic and personal stereo listening rely on the presence of imagined interlocutors. While cinema and personal stereos offer powerful models of asymmetrical looking and solitary listening, turning iPod listening into an I-voice brings into focus a different kind of media fantasy: not just a wish for privacy and invisibility, but also a desire to be heard and overheard. In a sense, these fantasies are two sides of the same coin. To the extent that the communicative act is fully consumed within the listener’s own subjectivity, and that our interlocutors are confined to the solipsism of aural cocooning, the representation of iPod listening as an I-voice is in keeping with a reading of personal stereos as merely bathing in the illusion of social communion; it is a fantasy in Arjun Appadurai’s sense of something solipsistic and escapist, private, “even individualistic” and “divorced from projects and actions.” Yet things get more complicated when we consider the range of conventions, discourses, technological designs, and phenomenological structures that support that on-screen fantasy.50 As we have seen, cinema doesn’t just give us representations of personal stereos as technologies of interpersonal communication. The fantasy on screen goes to the core of a fundamental aspect of the phenomenology of cinematic listening. At the level of cinematic exhibition and distribution, as well as representation, private sounds are designed

684   Carlo Cenciarelli to be meaningfully heard by others. Listening is required to speak, and cinema works hard to turn us into each other’s You-listeners. It routinely invites us to step into (structurally) spacious and (strangely) porous aural bubbles that straddle fictional and extrafictional spaces, spanning across the worlds on screen and the spaces of cinematic reception. What’s more, thanks to a complex feedback loop with the making and marketing of sound reproduction technologies, the idea of listening as communication is grounded in material cultures and echoed across different media channels. Fleshed out through the film’s narrative trajectory, extending across multiple cultural artefacts, underpinned by a layered media archaeology, and experienced vicariously, the cinematic rendering of listening as a voice thus provides an example of how cinematic listening can shape our understanding of what may count as communication across a range of media experiences. At a time when distanced and asynchronous forms of interaction are reconfiguring the forms of our social intimacies, the theoretical ramifications and actual impact of these fantasies deserve greater attention. Films such as Bandslam seem to insinuate new ideas about what it means to experience something “together” in an age of ubiquitous technology while also ultimately subscribing to normative models of subjectivity and communication. They show how mainstream cinema—because of its commitment to the ideal of the couple and to ideals of self-fulfillment, because of its power to conjure up pop stars and romantic attachments, and because of basic patterns of cinematic address and the nature of film spectatorship—tends to complicate the boundaries between inward and outward space while also falling back on ideas of the bounded self and the heterosexual couple; it blurs lines between music and speech while essentially reiterating the language of music marketing; and it can engender new ways of thinking of listening as collective action while also typically prioritizing verbal models of interaction.51 Asking us to experience listening as an utterance while also resisting some of the more radical implications that being alone together has on our ability and means to communicate with others, the voice of iPod listening tells us to explore the cinema as a transmedia site where the possibilities of listening and the aural boundaries of subjectivity are being renegotiated.

Notes 1. See in particular Chapter 3 in Michel Chion’s classic text, The Voice in the Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 2. See Christian Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 109. 3. Roland Barthes, “Listening,” in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 245–60: 252. Emphasis in the original. Adopting a model that broadly reflects his tripartite theorizations of meaning and semiotics, Barthes argues that there are three types of listening: (1) listening as a way of being alert to meaningful sound indices, (2) listening as a way of deciphering signs, and (3) listening as

iPod Listening as an I-voice   685 performative act that develops “in an inter-subjective space where ‘I am listening’ also means ‘listen to me’ ” (246). 4. Michael Bull, Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 86. Sounding Out the City was published a little before the first iPod went on sale, but Bull’s body of work expands on this point. See in particular Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007) and a range of articles published on the Oxford Handbook series, including “iPod Use, Mediation, and Privatization in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies Vol. I, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 103–17. 5. Bull, Sounding Out the City, 96. 6. Bull, Sound Moves, 40. See also Bull, “iPod Culture: The Toxic Pleasures of Audiotopia,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 526–43. 7. Bull, Sound Moves, 43. 8. Bull, Sounding Out the City, 77. 9. Ibid., 77. 10. Ibid., 79. 11. For an influential account of the “increasing privatization of viewing behavior and the textual homogenization of positions of subjectivity,” see e.g. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). 12. The quotes are, respectively, from Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed. Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 40; and Linda Williams, Hard Core. Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 32. Both are quoted by Julian Hanich in his recent review and critique of this widespread theoretical emphasis on invisibility. See Hanich, The Audience Effect (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 8. 13. In talking about the techniques and technologies of listening, I am invoking a distinction made by Jonathan Sterne in The Audible Past (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). See in particular Chapter 2, “Techniques of Listening.” 14. Altman and Lastra have explored how filmmakers and engineers, in the early days of (vococentric) sound film, not only aimed to present dialogue with optimal clarity in (almost) all circumstances, but also conferred it the intimacy of a voice spoken/pronounced for the individual spectator (mostly through lack of reverberation). See Rick Altman, “Sound Space,” in Sound Theory/Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (Abingdon: Routledge, 1992), 46–64; and James Lastra, Sound Technology and the American Cinema: Perception, Representation, Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 15. See Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, The Optical Vacuum: Spectatorship and Modernized American Theater Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); and Meredith C. Ward, Static in the System: Noise and the Soundscape of American Cinema Culture (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2019). 16. Stephen Groening, “No One Likes to Be a Captive Audience: Headphones and In-flight Cinema,” Film History: An International Journal 28, no. 3 (2016): 114–38: 117. 17. See Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

686   Carlo Cenciarelli 18. In her recent study of the American cinema soundscape, Ward reminds us that “no attempt to block out noise is ever entirely successful,” a comment that applies even more to the novel conditions of watching films on the move, where the responsibility to negotiate the relationship between private and public has shifted from producers, architects, and exhibitors onto the individual user. See Ward, Static in the System, 145. For Bull’s analysis of how personal stereo listeners micro-manage their interpersonal strategies and attempt to erase troubling difference, see in particular Chapter 3 of Sound Moves [“Sounding Out Cosmopolitanism”]. And the sense in which the sounds of others are (significantly) never fully erased and continue to shape the experience of personal stereo listening emerges with yet greater clarity in David Beer’s work. See in particular David Beer, “Mobile Music, Coded Objects and Everyday Spaces,” Mobilities 5, no. 4 (2010): 469–84. 19. Hanich, The Audience Effect, 9. 20. On “sodcasting,” see Wayne Marshall, “Treble Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies Vol.2, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 43–76. On sharing earpods, see Tyler Bickford, “Earbuds Are Good for Sharing: Children’s Headphones as Social Media at a Vermont School,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies Vol.1, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 335–58. 21. Bull, Sounding Out the City, 26. 22. Bull, Sound Moves, 8. 23. William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4. 24. Writing from an explicitly Adornian perspective, Bull sees these forms of “we-ness” in overwhelmingly negative terms because unavoidably “mediated by the hand of commerce and ideology.” Bull, Sound Moves, 157. 25. Chion, The Voice in the Cinema, 49. 26. Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Cinema and Suture,” Screen 18, no.4 (1977–8): 35–47. 27. Laura Mulvey provides a critical discussion of these “looks” and their imbrication with patriarchal ideology in her classic study “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18. 28. Chion, The Voice in the Cinema, 51. Emphasis in the original. 29. Rick Altman, “Sound Space,” 61. For a powerful argument about the “for-me-ness” of sound (and music in particular), see also Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 5. 30. See Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986). Metz’s framework has, of course, been subject to extensive criticism. Among other things, scholars have denounced a tendency to characterise processes of identification as homogeneous and overdetermined. Here, I am adopting ­categories of “primary” and “secondary” identification in order to show how, as a listener, I am encouraged to stretch across conceptually contradictory positions. In this sense, I am in agreement with Elizabeth Reich and Scott R. Richmond, who argue that Metz’s scheme remains productive if we use it to describe how spectators can identify “dynamically across the filmic experience, technics, and text.” See Elizabeth Reich and Scott R Richmond, “Introduction: Cinematic Identifications,” Film Criticism 39, no. 2 (2014): 3–24: 18. 31. Jean Mitry, The Aesthetics and Psychology of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 321. A larger excerpt of this quote provides the opening epigraph of Hanich’s The Audience Effect.

iPod Listening as an I-voice   687 32. Hanich The Audience Effect, 8. Hanich is here quoting Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, 95–96, with emphasis added. 33. For Hanich, who is interested in the sharing of specific emotions, the differences between these collective experiences are crucial (and rightly so). The reason I am deliberately blurring such differences here is that my argument is based on the mere fact of a shared activity, without presuming a broader cognitive alignment. 34. William Uricchio, “Television, Film, and the Struggle for Media Identity,” Film History 10 (1998): 118–27. 35. Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 7. 36. Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 59. 37. Paul Young, The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals: Media Fantasy Films from Radio to the Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xxiv. 38. Young is here drawing upon Raymond Williams’s work, particularly Television, Technology and Cultural Form (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1992). See Ibid., xv. 39. For a discussion of the “Is,” “yous,” and “wes” of popular music and of how lyrics “leave themselves open to . . . completion and appropriation,” see Tim Murphey, “The When, Where, and Who of Pop Lyrics: The Listener’s Prerogative,” in Popular Music 8, no. 2 (1989): 185–93. Murphey compares pop lyrics to inner speech and to commercial messages that offer multiple opportunities for identification. 40. James Buhler, Theories of the Soundtrack (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 235. 41. Justin Burton, “Dancing Silhouettes: The Mobile Freedom of iPod Commercials,” in The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies Vol. 1, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 311–36: 328. 42. It could be argued that the notion that the flow of the message can be reversed is already present in the Vertigo commercial, if we agree with Burton that the song’s lyrics (“you give me something I can feel”) insinuates the idea that the listening silhouettes can “transmit via those same wires.” See Burton, “Dancing Silhouettes,” 329. 43. The character receives Bowie’s email on a Nokia phone, in a detail that betrays the fact that the fantasy of iPod listening as communication here predates the commercialization of iPhones, where music listening and verbal communication would converge in the same device. 44. Chion, The Voice in Cinema, 23–24. 45. See Chapter 9 [“The Voice that Seeks a Body”] in Chion, The Voice in Cinema. 46. For a discussion of how Michel Chion’s acousmêtre builds on Pascal Bonitzer’s work on on-screen and off-screen voices, see Buhler, Theories of the Soundtrack, 242–43. As Buhler niftily sums up, Bonitzer argues that “the power of the voiceover . . . lies in twining its ‘absolutely other,’ that is, its transcendent position, where it is ‘presumed to know,’ with an address to someone ‘who will not speak,’ namely, the spectator.” 47. See Jim Macnamara, “Beyond Voice: Audience-Making and the Work and Architecture of Listening as New Media Literacies,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 27, no. 1 (2013): 160–75: 160. 48. Kate Crawford, “Following You: Disciplines of Listening in Social Media,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 23, no. 4 (2009): 525–35: 526. 49. Macnamara, “Beyond Voice,” 161. 50. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 8. In his famous analysis of cultural imagination,

688   Carlo Cenciarelli Arjun Appadurai traces a distinction between “fantasy” and the “imagination.” In Appadurai’s words, “fantasy can dissipate (because its logic is so often autotelic—has a purpose in itself), but the imagination, especially when collective, can become the fuel for action.” In this sense, imagination for Appadurai is “central to all forms of agency, [and] is itself a social fact” (31). To the extent that we see the representation of iPod listening as an I-voice as an on-screen visualization of a solipsistic and escapist gesture, it is a cultural fantasy in Arjun Appadurai’s sense of the term. Yet I am suggesting that the distinction between short-lived impressions and more significant discursive interventions is extremely difficult to trace when it comes to media fantasies and that—once we couch it in a complex set of discursive and material traces—the fantasy of iPod listening as an I-voice takes on some of the more concrete qualities of Appadurai “cultural imagination.” 51. On the changing boundaries of listening, and their implications on questions of agency, see the introduction to this Handbook, and Sander van Maas, ed., Thresholds of Listening: Sound, Technics, Space (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). On the constantly evolving definition of “communication” and its implications for the changing boundaries between self and others, see John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Select Bibliography Altman, Rick. “Sound Space” In Sound Theory/Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman, 46–64. Abingdon: Routledge, 1992. Barthes, Roland. “Listening.” In The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, 245–60. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Bickford, Tyler. “Earbuds Are Good for Sharing: Children’s Headphones as Social Media at a Vermont School.” In The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies Vol.1, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek, 335–58. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Buhler, James. Theories of the Soundtrack. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Bull, Michael. Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Bull, Michael. Sound Moves: iPod Culture and Urban Experience. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007. Burton, Justin. “Dancing Silhouettes: The Mobile Freedom of iPod Commercials.” In The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies Vol. 1, ed. Sumanth Gopinath and Jason Stanyek, 311–36. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Chion, Michel. The Voice in the Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. du Gay, Paul, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. London: Sage Publications, 1997. Hanich, Julian. The Audience Effect: On the Collective Cinema Experience. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Kenney, William Howland. Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Macnamara, Jim. “Beyond Voice: Audience-Making and the Work and Architecture of Listening as New Media Literacies.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 27, no. 1 (2013): 160–75. Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

iPod Listening as an I-voice   689 Metz, Christian. Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Murphey, Tim. “The When, Where, and Who of Pop Lyrics: The Listener’s Prerogative.” Popular Music 8, no. 2 (1989): 185–93. Peters, John Durham. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Szczepaniak-Gillece, Jocelyn. The Optical Vacuum: Spectatorship and Modernized American Theater Architecture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011. Uricchio, William. “Television, Film, and the Struggle for Media Identity.” Film History 10 (1998): 118–27. Ward, Meredith C. Static in the System: Noise and the Soundscape of American Cinema Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. Young, Paul. The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals: Media Fantasy Films from Radio to the Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

chapter 34

Fa n tasi as on a Th em e by Wa lt Disn ey Playful Listening and Video Games Tim Summers

Disney’s Fantasia (1940), along with its sequel Fantasia 2000 (1999), are explicitly ­concerned with cinematic listening. In presenting diverse approaches to visualizing classical music across the program, these films encourage the audience to explore a variety of ways of audio-visually engaging with the music. Like almost all Disney films, the images and characters of Fantasia have not been confined to the cinema. Soft toys of Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice reside in many a child’s toybox, while Disney theme parks feature Fantasia-inspired statues, bars, gardens, and miniature golf courses. Fantasia also frequently supplies materials for the live shows and parades in those hyperreal worlds. Fantasia’s adaptation into video games is both expected as part of Disney’s embrace of a huge variety of media, and also particularly apt: since its inception, Fantasia has engaged with new developments in audiovisual technology—most notably through the Fantasound surround sound system created for the original film’s initial theatrical exhibition.1 There have been three video games directly based upon Fantasia.2 These games provide a useful site for investigating listening in ­audiovisual contexts, and in video games in particular, not least because they invite comparison with film. As William Gibbons notes, “To a greater or lesser extent, each of those games depends on players’ existing knowledge of Fantasia. And since the visual and musical aspects of the film are virtually inseparable, effectively incorporating classical music usually becomes an essential part of the games.”3 Keeping in mind both film and game incarnations of Fantasia, this chapter draws on narratology and phenomenology to discuss how modes of listening are configured in the video games. It further suggests what those games might tell us about musical listening more generally.

Playful Listening and Video Games   691

Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1983) The first Fantasia video game was produced for the Atari 2600 home console.4 The game focuses upon the Dukas “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sequence that had been the genesis for the whole Fantasia film project.5 In the game, players control Mickey, in-role as the titular apprentice, who must attempt to stop the enchanted brooms from flooding the cavern. In the cavern (Figure 34.1a), bucket-carrying brooms appear at the top of the screen and march to the bottom, where they add their liquid consignment to the rising water level. By running into a broom, Mickey can eliminate it before the water can be contributed to the increasing flood. The cavern is one of two main screens of the game. In the other, the mountains (Figure 34.1b), Mickey has further means to combat the encroaching water (occurring concurrently in the cavern). In the mountain scene, stars fall from the sky. Each star that meets the ground between the peaks causes another broom to appear in the cavern. By catching the stars, Mickey can stop the brooms from being formed, and, further, can fire this “caught” star back up into the sky, either to eliminate another star (and potential broom), or to target a comet. Comets are particularly valuable: each comet that Mickey hits conjures two enchanted buckets in the cavern that reverse the action of the brooms. As the game progresses, the speed of the stars increases, making Mickey’s task all the more difficult. Points are awarded for activities such as eliminating the brooms, catching stars, and summoning buckets. Unlike the film, Mickey is doomed to failure in the game. The cavern will flood, and no sorcerer will appear to save him. The question is how long Mickey can last, and how many points the player can accumulate before failure. The game’s instructions note: “Remember: What happens in the mountains affects what happens in the cavern. The key to playing in both screens is knowing where to be at the right time.”6 When Mickey is in the mountains, the player cannot see what is occurring in the cavern (and vice versa). However, the sonic output allows players to understand what is happening in the game, beyond that which is immediately visible to them.

Figure 34.1  Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1983): (a) The Cavern; (b) The Mountains.

692   Tim Summers The game’s instruction booklet guides players on how to listen to the game: Use the following sound guide to help you learn the different game sounds. Sounds are especially helpful when Mickey is in the mountains because they let you know what is happening in the cavern. Bell tone: When you hit or catch a star. Four rising notes: When you hit a meteor, creating two empty buckets. Swoosh sound: When a broom is created or stopped. Musical tune: When the water level changes.7

The “musical tune,” as one might anticipate, is the most memorable musical material of the Dukas piece: the motif that Carlo Caballero calls “the tune representing the trot of the broom,”8 first heard in the bassoon in the original symphonic poem. Here, it is sounded in A minor and split into four fragments, which are triggered as the brooms reach their destination (Example 34.1). The phrases are heard irrespective of whether Mickey is in the cavern or mountains. As the game speed increases and the player’s efforts become all the more frantic, the musical fragments are heard both more frequently and at a faster tempo. The impression is given of overwhelming ­inescapable repetition. The “four rising notes” that the manual describes (representing buckets) are a rapid ascending chromatic scale starting on C4. This phrase is not characteristically evocative of Dukas’s scherzo like the “broom” theme. That said, the ending of the piece in its symphonic and filmic incarnations takes the form of a four-note rising diatonic scale, dominant to tonic (discussed at length by Caballero); it is perhaps no coincidence that the game should deploy a musical fragment similar to a prominent gesture in the orchestral original. During the game, players may hear the musical fragments of Example 34.1 as indicators of the rising water level. That might occur through the manual’s explanation, or be learned through observation when playing the game. Even without the manual’s direction, players are prompted to interpret the music as somehow meaningful, given the sonically stark and distinct qualities of the fragments that sound at irregular intervals: they seem pregnant with meaning, and players are charged to find correlation with the in-game action.9 Example 34.1  The “Broom Theme” in Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1983). The bracketing indicates the fragmentation of the theme. Fragments A–D are sounded to represent the success of a broom, while the whole phrase (E) is heard when the game starts.

Playful Listening and Video Games   693 Once players understand the signification of the “broom” theme, they can decisively interpret the music for information about the game state: each phrase indicates another broom has reached its destination. The more brooms that do so, the more water has been delivered, the more urgently the player should take action to combat the progression. In this sense, we can consider that players use what Michiel Kamp calls “semiotic hearing,” where “music . . . provides the player with information about gameplay states or events.”10 Of course, the game exists in a textual network with the film version. It seems no coincidence that the 1983 game followed a re-release of Fantasia in cinemas the previous year. By drawing on the musical materials from the film, the image and world of the film are invoked to project beyond the limited blocky visuals of the game. As William Gibbons puts it: [T]he goal here was replicating memorable symbols from the film . . . sound is central to bridging the gap between Fantasia and Sorcerer’s Apprentice. . . . we might consider the tune’s role . . . as an abstracted symbol— a memory trigger that invokes L’apprenti sorcier without trying to replicate it. Players’ experiences fill in the gaps, the same way players understand the abstracted collection of pixels as a symbol of Apprentice Mickey from the film.11

The “broom” motif quotation recalls the orchestrated soundings of the music in the film, and along with it, the more detailed characters and visually ornate world of the cinematic version—a process I have elsewhere described as musical “texturing.”12 These enrich the game beyond the immediate technological restrictions of the Atari console. Carolyn Abbate used Dukas’s symphonic poem as a focal point of her bold and influential investigation into musical narrative, arguing that music does not typically narrate, but is instead primarily mimetic in representation.13 She writes, “Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is not a retelling of events; it is a depiction of events, happening as we listen.”14 The specifics of Abbate’s discussion remain contentious, both on musical-analytical and narratological grounds,15 but its emphasis on music as using an enacted mode of representation is helpful. Ben Winters has more recently drawn upon Abbate’s position to suggest that film music should often be heard as the “product of narration not the producer of narrative.”16 Here, the game seems to highlight this critical-sonic perspective, representing each broom’s success with a musical sounding, whether or not the broom is visible on-screen. How are we invited to listen in this game differently from the parallel episode in the film? As with any game, the interactive nature of the medium prompts us to attend to the music closely, so that we might gain ludically-relevant information to inform our actions. In the words of Karen Collins, “the stakes for players’ involvement, interpretation, and therefore attention are much higher in games [than film], so they listen more actively.”17 In the film version, the impetus for active musical interpretation is less keenly felt. Music in the game is interrogated not only for its meanings for what is shown on the screen, but (perhaps especially) for what is not seen—that is, what is happening in the broader world of the fiction. In Atari’s Sorcerer, this is obviously the case with reference

694   Tim Summers to the action in the cavern while viewing the mountains, but this phenomenon is widely observable in video games. I routinely listen to music in games in the hope that it will give me helpful information beyond that which is immediately visible, whether by indicating unseen enemies, alerting me to overlooked puzzle clues, or indicating upcoming obstacles in my avatar’s path. In Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the relationship between music and diegetic event is initially very specific—it not only relates to the brooms, but their success in their mission. In this way, music becomes meaningful in terms of particular ludic events. As the game round progresses, the rate of the brooms increases, the action becomes more frantic, and the individual fragments are triggered so often they begin to interrupt each other (as Mickey’s inevitable failure edges closer). Now it becomes trickier to maintain the distinction of individual fragments, or parse the music for the specific development of gameplay it represents. Instead, the musical accompaniment tends toward a continuity of sonic fabric whose ebb and flow engages with the gameplay in a way less specifically anchored to the individual ludic events. Nicholas Cook, in his analysis of the “Rite of Spring” sequence in the Fantasia film, describes the diverse hierarchical relationships between music and image in the episode, from the rhythmic mickey-mousing of the exploding volcanoes, to the hypermetrical organization of the sequence and broad-level narrative structure of the entire vignette.18 In the game, as the gameplay round tends toward chaos, the conformance between music and screen action begins to operate “further up the hierarchy” (as Cook would put it) on a broader level of organization.19 Listening to the game, the enacted musical depictions (the broom fragments), taken together, combine to form the narrative arc of the game round. We understand the musical materials as a higher-order representation of the progress of gameplay, rather than the specific semiotic signification of any one individual broom event. When playing in the mountains screen, it is music that most obviously allows us to understand the broader patterning of the game’s progress, and highlights our (degree of) agency as players to affect the ongoing course of that narrative, resisting progression toward the inevitable watery conclusion. Even within this simple sonic deployment, two subtly different modes of hearing are clearly evident.20

Fantasia (1991) The second video game explicitly based upon Fantasia was one of a number of Disney games for the home Sega Mega Drive/Genesis console.21 Like the successful earlier release, Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse (1990), Fantasia is a platform game in the mold of Super Mario Bros. (1985). William Gibbons has suggested that the choice to use Fantasia as the basis of a game likely stems from the concurrent fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the film and the opportunity provided by the subject to showcase the console’s sonic capabilities by reproducing classical music.22 In the game, players control the famous rodent, dressed in “apprentice” garb, as he collects points, defeats enemies and jumps between platforms. As the game progresses,

Playful Listening and Video Games   695 Mickey explores a variety of stylistically different worlds. In the Sega Fantasia, the music does not exhibit the kind of reactivity observed in the Atari game. Instead, each level is accompanied by a repeating cue. Excerpts from the orchestral pieces in the film are rendered in synthesized versions, and programmed to repeat until the game round ends, either by failure or success. As Mickey’s adventure progresses, he visits different “worlds” of the Fantasia universe. Though the gameplay remains fundamentally unchanged, the enemies and environments draw inspiration from episodes of the film. Each “world” is associated with particular musical cues. The manual details the “worlds” and their musical accompaniments for players, which are encountered in turn as the player progresses through the game (Table 34.1, Figure 34.2).23 Players may also listen to the musical cues in isolation from the gameplay: the main menu allows gamers to cycle through the game’s cues, sounded against the menu screen. The second Fantasia game prioritizes a broader level of musical hearing over the kind of specific event-music association that the Atari game initially emphasizes. When playing Fantasia, even though the looping cues do not directly react to the progression of the game round, gamers can engage with what Kamp refers to as “ludic listening”: “moments that invite us to act, move or play in some relation to the musical soundtrack . . . a recognition and an acceptance of an invitation to do something . . . a kind of force.”24 Kamp

Table 34.1  Descriptions of the worlds and musical accompaniments in Fantasia (1991), as explained in the game manual (Sega/Infogrames, Fantasia Instruction Manual [NP: Sega, 1991], 42–48), with musical details added by the author. Stage/Level

Musical Accompaniment

Water World The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, by Paul Dukas

Cues Excerpt 1: mm.42 (x 4), 68–100. Excerpt 2: mm. 354–436, 443–470, 3 measures transition, 931–940 (end of piece).

Earth World

The Rite of Spring, by Igor Stravinsky

“Adoration of the Earth Introduction,” mm. 1–62, 682–75. Runs continuously into “The Augurs of Spring, Dance of the Young Girls,” mm. 1–27, 18–19 (reprised), 34–381.

Air World

The Pastorale, Symphony No. 6, by Ludwig van Beethoven The Nutcracker Suite, by Peter Illich Tchaikovsky Dance of the Hours [from La Gioconda], by Amilcare Ponchielli

First movement, mm. 28–531.

A Night on a Bald Mountain, by Modest Mussorgsky Toccata and Fugue in D minor, by [Attr.] Johann Sebastian Bach

Rimsky-Korsakov version mm. 14–341.

Fire World

“Russian Dance,” mm. 1–32. Complete 45-measure sequence.

Complete 302-measure Toccata, omitting mm. 21–2 and 53–72.

696   Tim Summers

Figure 34.2 Sega’s Fantasia (1991): (a) Mickey in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice stage; (b) Mickey in the Rite of Spring stage.

emphasizes “the temporality of ludic hearing” as occurring simultaneously with gameplay.25 When the lolloping “broom” theme from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice accompanies Mickey bouncing across platforms (Figure 34.2a), and the enemies bob and lurch in uneven animation that echoes the musical rhythm,26 as a player, I feel the urge to respond to the music with my control of Mickey, even if to do so is not the best strategy for succeeding at the game. This rhythmic aspect is particularly notable because of the main way that Mickey defeats threats in the game: by bouncing on them. So powerful is this force that to play in a more strategically efficient, halting, approach to the level seems an act of defiance against the soundtrack. As such, it might be the case that the music makes the game more difficult. In a film context, I can identify the correspondence between the animated motion of the characters and the musical accompaniment. In game situations like that of Fantasia, I am further empowered to influence the game’s diegetic action to conform to, or obviously defy, such musical organization.27 If I wish, I can make my avatar live up to his reputation by “mickey mousing” along with the score. The Fantasia film’s tightlysynchronized audiovisual aesthetics may serve as a model for a way of playing the game. Even if the music is not directly reactive to my actions (as in the Atari example), I still have agency to influence the overall semblance between the music and other components of the media. I can make the music and gameplay complement or contest each other to greater or lesser extents (to use Cook’s terminology), as I explore potential modes of relating them to each other.28 Ruth HaCohen uses the Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence from the Fantasia film to illustrate her idea of a “dynamic audiovisual combination” she calls “generative,” where “the music is perceived as instigating action and change, and in particular, as lending movement.”29 She emphasizes the gestural/kinaesthetic correlation between music and image in this sequence.30 In a quasi-Wagnerian/Schopenhauerian way, she positions the music as the fundamental element of the audiovisual sequence, the source that “generates” the fictional world and story, right down to the level of the gestures of the characters.31 While this is clearly true in terms of the production history of Fantasia, HaCohen’s

Playful Listening and Video Games   697 argument focuses on the aesthetic result of the finished product, irrespective of the proc­ess of the film’s creation. In the case of Fantasia for the Mega Drive, HaCohen’s notion of music as a generating agent of the audiovisual result is given another dimension. HaCohen describes music (apparently) determining the gestural movement of characters. In the game, by virtue of the interactive dimension of the medium, players become a conduit for this agency when they are invited or prompted to “play along” with the music, in turn, directing the characters to react to the music. In this way, the game short-circuits any ontological questions about the source of the soundtrack (whether it sounds in the diegesis or not, whether it is audible to the characters or not); it is a force for affecting the ­on-screen action, through the player’s agency. No matter where it comes from, the music influences the player, which, in turn, influences the diegetic action of the game. In that way, players facilitate music’s “generative” power (in HaCohen’s terms), and allow music to explicitly, obviously, impact aspects of the audiovisual output of the medium. The role of music as influencing in-game movement through the player’s actions is evident in Fantasia when different “worlds” of the game invite a different playing style, even though the fundamental mode of gameplay has remained unchanged. I feel the force to (try to) bounce along to the Sorcerer’s Apprentice with the regularity of the piece’s rhythm, but move more slowly and haltingly to the uneven rhythmic profile of the Rite of Spring. In this model, music’s power is facilitated, in part, by mediating between the player’s world and the world of the fiction. By nature of the technology, music sonically extends beyond the screen: even when listening on headphones, it appears to “reach out” to the player’s environment, unlike the more constrained plane of the screen.32 That “reaching out” facilitates the player’s induction into the audiovisual system of interaction described above. One of the fundamental differences between the “closed system” of the film, and an interactive medium that introduces player agency, is the indeterminacy of how the player will respond to the audiovisual materials, and, in turn, the results of their actions. “Generation” models often risk presenting a reductive “determining” approach where music produces a specific singular outcome. When, however, the player is inducted into the system of musical agency, the diversity and fluctuations of that relationship are highlighted. Simply put, the player may ignore the music, and refuse the invitation to “play along.” Seen one way, that indeterminacy might indicate that music is not as influential as has been claimed. Instead, I would suggest that this very indeterminacy shows the diversity of responses to musical prompts, and this play of possibilities is part of the attraction. My decision to “play along” with the music would mean less if I were unable to choose not to “play along.” Of course, in a game the outcome is not just a direct result of the player’s planned goals. They have to contend with the gameplay challenge and ludic systems. Part of the fun comes from the continually fluctuating negotiation between music, player agency, and semblance of audio and visual materials. In the specific terms of the Fantasia game,

698   Tim Summers in one moment, I may be bouncing with the rhythms of Dukas, in the next, having that attempt at synchrony thwarted by the game’s ludic content, and in another moment, I  may deliberately defy the musical impetus. Like the Atari game, I can also understand the audiovisual semblance in the Mega Drive Fantasia as operating at different levels of the hierarchy. In the above discussion, I emphasized the correlation with movement, but the musical excerpts of each world can also imply different gameplay parameters. Indeed, as explored in terms of the Atari game, from the experience of playing video games, I have been trained to read music for its potential ludic significance in all sorts of dimensions. For instance, when a level begins accompanied by the fragmented and dissonant musical fabric of the Stravinsky excerpt, it might be thought to imply a more dangerous environment than subsequent levels accompanied by Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. This impression, however, is misleading: the latter levels are no easier or more sedate than the Stravinsky levels. Nevertheless, the music may project such dimensions of the gameplay challenge. If we “play along” with the music, as I suggested above, the score might also invite different styles of play, or different ways of approaching the same challenges, irrespective of ludic difficulty. The Mega Drive Fantasia game deploys a very different approach to music programming than the Atari game. In using repeated musical cues, rather than music that directly responds to game events, it highlights the ways in which players may choose to react to this music (rather than vice versa, which was more obvious in the Atari game). They may “play along” with the music, or, indeed, choose not to. That play of musical and player agencies, however, is part of the appeal of engaging with such audiovisual interactive artefacts, as we listen and play.

Fantasia: Music Evolved (2014) The most recent Fantasia game was produced for the Microsoft Xbox 360 and Xbox One consoles and required the use of the Kinect motion sensor.33 The game is ­controlled directly through the player’s physical gestures in the space around them, rather than through a handheld controller (as in the Atari and Mega Drive games). The game was developed by Harmonix, a video game company best known for producing the successful Guitar Hero/Rock Band (2005–2015) and Dance Central (2010–2019) game series. The influence of both of these earlier franchises on the Fantasia game is apparent.34 The game clearly takes its cue from two particular elements of Fantasia: the “abstract” shapes and patterns of the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor segment,35 and the moment in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice sequence when Mickey dreams of “conducting” the stars and waves, which respond to his gestures in synchrony with the music. The game is introduced by the Sorcerer, who explains that the player is taking on Mickey’s mantle as the new “apprentice.” The majority of the game takes the form of challenging the player to make particular gestures (directed by the game) in time with the music. As musical

Playful Listening and Video Games   699 selections play, gamers accumulate points by following on-screen instructions to move their arms. As one review explained: Fantasia resembles other rhythm games in the sense that it displays prompts on the screen in time to music. And you perform the appropriate actions within the necessary time frame. In games like Rock Band, success involves pressing buttons on plastic instruments. In Fantasia, triumph comes from sweeping your arms up and down and pushing them forward and back.36

These gestural instructions are represented on screen by geometric shapes and patterns that call to mind the abstraction of the Toccata and Fugue sequence from the film. The game combines the “match the instructions for physical action with the music” gameplay of Guitar Hero/Rock Band with the “body-as-controller” interface of the Dance Central games, in which players are challenged to copy the choreography of on-screen dancers. Like the Dance Central games, in Fantasia: Music Evolved, gamers earn points by performing the movements accurately and in time with the music. Despite the technological innovation of Fantasia: Music Evolved’s motion controls, gestural responses to musical listening are certainly not unique to the game. Consider the similarity between Ben Winters’s description of his own musical listening, and a review of Fantasia: Music Evolved for one of the premier game websites. Winters writes, [A]s an orchestral conductor and violinist, I have to admit that my “visualizing” at home when listening to a recording often takes the form of my imagining conducting the symphony in a concert, or playing the string parts…37

While Kevin VanOrd, reviewing the game for GameSpot notes: It turns the act of pretend conducting into a performance art and lets you bring your own musical energy to the game. To be clear, Fantasia does not replicate what it’s truly like to conduct a symphony orchestra. Instead, the game is a flight of fancy, reproducing the kind of gesticulations you might perform when listening to Mahler on the radio or when your favourite pop song shows up on your playlist. . . . At last, a game has come that gives you permission to sway about in your living room, waving your hands about as if you’re a wannabe Leonard Bernstein while Vivaldi’s Four Seasons blasts from the speakers.38

Both VanOrd and Winters describe the fantasy of gestural power over music that they report as already evident in everyday listening. According to the film, even Mickey Mouse has the same dream. Fantasia recognizes that gestural-embodied aspect of listening and facilitates it in a real, albeit virtual, musically interactive way. While both Winters and VanOrd invoke the image of the traditional classical music concert, Fantasia: Music Evolved includes a diverse selection of music. Pieces by Bach, Mussorgsky, and Tchaikovsky shared with the film stand alongside further “classical selections,” contemporary pop (including songs by Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj) and

700   Tim Summers older pop songs. The game suggests that listening in terms of bodily gestures is by no means exclusive to classical repertoire. VanOrd continues, When the a capella [sic] harmonies of Bohemian Rhapsody spill from your television, you naturally understand how your arms and hands must flow, even if you don’t know exactly what motions the game will expect of you . . . It’s one of Fantasia’s many wonders that those required motions so beautifully complement the melodies and rhythms they accompany.39

A detailed study of the relationship between gesture and musical properties is beyond the scope of this chapter. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile noting how the game prompts players to physically manifest gestural interpretations of the music. Naomi Cumming argues that The possibility of movement in musical space is presumed in even the most basic descriptions of music . . . [and is] basic to musical experience . . . When an element of music is heard as expressively “gestural,” it suggests the kind of “energy” or directionality commonly linked with an expressive gesture in a person or animal40

This game asks players to directly enact such “energetic” “expressive gestures.” Cumming describes how Musical “gesture” is a perceived indexing of bodily motion, as carrying a definite direction, weight and degree of impetus, to form a shape felt as “iconic” of gesture in another domain of movement, which may be human and expressive.41

The Xbox game realizes these shapes in the service of such expressive ends. The correlation between musical gesture and physical enactment is part of the joy of the game. Fantasia: Music Evolved takes steps to develop a gestural dimension of listening beyond one that has a purely reactive or accompanying relationship with the musical material, instead to one that has the power to determine aspects of the musical output. Fantasia departs from the Guitar Hero model in the degree of freedom and agency afforded to players. In the Guitar Hero/Rock Band games that preceded Fantasia: Music Evolved, players are (by and large) restricted to facilitating the sounding of well-known rock hits, either in their original versions, or in covers that are faithful to those originals. Even moments of improvisation on the original records are here often “fixed” as part of the static, canonical recording. In Guitar Hero, if the player misses notes, or mis-times their performance, the instrumental part is silenced, and continued transgression means that failure is not far away, and the piece will stop prematurely. There is relatively little opportunity for the player to improvise or suggest an alternative sounding to the piece. As Henry Svec puts it, “[The] player can either conform to the game’s logic by reproducing the requisite hits, which are presented as measurable, stable, complete, and eternal (structural), or not play at all.”42

Playful Listening and Video Games   701 Fantasia, however, takes a different view of player agency. Two dimensions of player musical-performative empowerment are apparent and directly contrast with Guitar Hero games. First, unlike Guitar Hero, Fantasia does not punish players for failing to conform to the directed actions. Players who defy the instructions do not gain points, and the music is filtered to be quieter, but incorrect actions do not result in the complete silencing of parts of the recording, nor the forced abandonment of the performance. One cannot “fail” a piece. This toleration of transgression allows players who favor personal expression over ludic success the opportunity to articulate their gestural response to the music, and to still enjoy the experience, even if that expression deviates from the movements required to win. Secondly, in Fantasia, players have the opportunity to make contributions to the musical materials. During some pieces, players may encounter a kind of “bonus round” where they may design a melody or other musical fragment. For example, in one such sequence in several tracks, players are presented with an oscilloscope-style screen, and by making vertical gestures, can outline a melody. This player-created melody is then incorporated into the ongoing sounding of the piece. Out of technological necessity, the opportunities for such user contributions are limited to specific moments and certain aspects of the user-provided materials are pre-determined, such as duration and pitch choices, so as to ensure successful musical integration with the rest of the piece. Those factors recognized, these moments nevertheless provide opportunities for players to make an active contribution to the music emanating from the game. Both the scoring system and opportunities for user contributions are ways of empowering players to respond to, and play with, the music. One of the main features of Fantasia: Music Evolved is the game’s capacity for ­re-arranging the style and instrumentation of the pieces. Using the gestural controls, during the performance, the player has the ability to select substitutes for components of the musical texture. Some of these substitutions represent radically different musical genres than that of the original piece. For example, in Night on a Bare Mountain, players may add in electronic dance music parts. Most featured pieces include three contrasting musical styles, the elements and instruments of which can be mixed and matched as the track progresses. To the orchestral version of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, I might add a rock guitar, but then a flamenco-style rhythm and trumpet section. For the passages at a faster tempo, I might decide to reintroduce the orchestral percussion instead, but use an electric guitar, and so on. Players thus may make “mixes” of pieces, experimenting with different sonic possibilities as the music progresses, by swapping in different musical elements to the performance. This is yet another way in which Fantasia attempts to give musical decision-making power to its players. In doing so, it presents the songs as far less fixed than the restrictive presentation in similar games. Instead, the pieces become domains of musical potential, which can be explored (or not) at the players’ direction. Though the user-determined musical elements are limited, they nevertheless represent the opportunity for players to exert musical agency. While players are encouraged to explore different musical combinations, the game does not pass judgement on the players’ musical choices: one mix is not rewarded with more points than another, and

702   Tim Summers there is no “correct” solution to the moments of invention. When there is no ludic advantage of one version over another, the decisions become purely musical: players must use their own aesthetic judgement when formulating the musical fabric. In this way, the game prompts players to listen critically to the music. Not all user-determined mixes are particularly aesthetically successful, so players may seek more pleasing mixes by exploring the musical choices that the game presents. As VanOrd explains: “[F]or every mix that doesn’t gel, there are two more that have me looking at the music in a new light and finding new ways to perform gestures.”43 VanOrd, then, also finds that the mixes prompt a reconsideration of the musical and kinaesthetic aspects of the performance: they cause him to listen and perform in a different way. Players are also primed to listen for the way that their “bonus round” contributions are integrated into the ongoing musical texture. An icon appears in the corner of the screen when the musical fragments developed by the player are sounded in the song. This allows players to more easily aurally recognize and pick out how their phrase is used in the mix. Throughout Fantasia: Music Evolved, the game revels in opening up alternative musical soundings, and encourages players to hear the potential for difference in the music: different motifs or user-created phrases, different stylistic and instrumental combinations, and different expressive responses to the music. It challenges them to experiment and explore the musical-performative-ludic possibilities, both in the gestural response and musical materials. To understand how this might usefully inform models of listening in audiovisual contexts, we may consider the three Fantasia games together.

Playful Listening, or “How will this play out?” Though these Fantasia texts are very different, and even taken together, by no means represent the entirety of the modes of musical engagement in the medium, they may yet betray some valuable insights into listening from the perspective of video games. Many authors, among them Andrew Goodwin, Michael Long, and Peter Franklin, have argued that, even before its combination with on-screen images, music conjures visual associations.44 In a similar vein, we might suggest that music can harbor ludic qualities. I would propose that video games, and the Fantasia games in particular, highlight how music in its concert, cinematic, and game presentations, can be understood to be implicitly playful, primarily through our awareness of its “potential to be otherwise.” That is, we understand that the particular sounding of music that we experience is only one outcome among a range of possibilities within a broader field of potential incarnations of that music. Playful listening is a mode of listening where we consider the alternative possible forms of the musical material. In games, music typically responds to player action. Such musical response might be as simple as starting and stopping music when the game begins and ends, or it might

Playful Listening and Video Games   703 involve complex interactive music systems. Since the sonic output depends on our actions as players, we become aware of how the music might sound differently—we may imagine other musical possibilities. Such projected possibilities can take a huge variety of forms. Some simple examples might include: • “That looping cue has stopped. I imagined it would continue.” • “That looping cue has continued. I imagined it would stop.” • “When will the ‘victory’ fragment/stinger play? I’ve nearly won, so it can’t be long now.” • “I didn’t hear that power-up chime. I must have missed it.” • “That’s not normally the cue I hear in this gameplay situation. It’s not what I expected.” • “The musical tempo has suddenly increased—that must mean time is running out.” • “The cue has been interrupted. Something has changed in the game, but what?” • “That cue does not synchronize with the avatar’s movement. What if it did?” Games prompt us to engage with musical possibilities because we listen for how the music can correspond (or not) with the gameplay, and what might happen next. We conceive of other musical alternatives. Playful listening is not confined to games, but the interactive agency of the player makes this aspect of listening, as a dynamic process, particularly obvious. As noted earlier, Abbate has emphasized an understanding of music as enacted in time, and as such, she characterizes it as primarily mimetic rather than diegetic (that is, showing rather than telling, enacting rather than narrating). Composer and theorist Joshua Mailman suggests that this enactment occurs through “emergent properties” that arise out of the combination of the fundamental elements of music (such as pitch, timbre, and duration) into holistic musical features.45 Mailman describes some of these “emergent properties” in terms of bodily motion,46 just as theorists have described musical “gestures” as foundational to the articulation of music. As Naomi Cumming writes, To say that a gestural quality “emerges” from the technical features is to suggest that it is something that comes out of the synthesis of elements, but which cannot be understood simply as their combined effect.47

Mailman argues that, as these “properties” or “gestures” sound, the musical fabric gives rise to processes and parameters. Under Mailman’s mode of listening, music in its sounding is also a form of worldbuilding—we perceive not only the musical materials in front of us, but also that there are sets of parameters, rules, and procedures that give rise to this music. Much like game theorist Jesper Juul’s conception of learning a game’s rules through its fictions,48 Mailman suggests that the “rules” that underpin the worlds of musical pieces are implied

704   Tim Summers by the sounded material.49 These rules/processes can be established, subverted, fulfilled, and so on. The music plays out within these frames of processes. Robert Hatten similarly argues that “Gestures may encompass, and help express, rhetorical action, as in a sudden reversal, a collapse, an interruption, or a denial of implication. Rhetorical gestures disrupt or deflect the ongoing musical discourse, contributing to a contrasting dramatic trajectory.”50 Hatten, too, characterizes gestures as playing out within spaces of possibility, negotiating with implied “forces.” He writes, “A spontaneous or “willed” individual gesture may be understood as being subject to various forces as it traverses tonal and metric fields, environmental forces which act upon it in various ways.”51 Both Mailman’s “properties” within “rules” and Hatten’s “gestures” subjected to “forces” imply that we are hearing only one musical articulation within broader spaces of possibilities—the music we hear has the potential to be otherwise. We can discern the implied organizing processes when listening to the music as it is “enacted” (as Abbate might put it). We do much the same when we listen to music in games. Games ask us to find the correspondence between musical processes and game processes. As Nicholas Reyland has described, recent research on musical narrativity has suggested that “Narrative music . . . enacts both a tale and its telling, like a film or a play.”52 This is an apt analogy. A film both constructs a narrative world and tells a particular story within it (this is part of the attraction of alternative/deleted scenes and is the basis on which franchises are built). Another similar example might be watching a YouTube playthrough of a video game with which we are otherwise unfamiliar: we can extrapolate some conception of what would happen if the observed player’s actions were different to those captured in the video. In these examples, of course, knowledge of the “being otherwise” remains implicit and unverified. Abbate herself alludes to this experience in her discussion of the Dukas: referring to the moment of the broom’s reanimation at which the musical theme associated with the broom begins again, this time in two interlocking parts, she describes it as “repeating again and again, far too many times . . . This recurring noise threatens—for a few seconds at least—infinite repetition.”53 Abbate here glimpses one potential other incarnation of the piece, another way in which the music might, quite literally, “play out” in the projected world of the symphonic poem.54 The 1983 Atari game enacts a version of this “threat” of “infinite repetition” directly (translation into bleeps notwithstanding), both in its musical and dramatic incarnation. Franklin, too, betrays the idea of an implied potential world of narrative possibility generated by music. Differently from Abbate, and writing with a specific concern for music in film, Franklin argues that music, even in mimetic mode, performs a narrative, and that it may operate in terms of reminiscence and foreshadowing. Like Abbate, however, he hears the potential for music to play out differently, and writes of the experience of listening to a film score as “building up a sense of a subject position allied to the music of passionate engagement, signifying a kind of pleasure which is repeatedly confronted, postponed, or actually thwarted by an alternative music, affiliated to external forces.”55 Recent scholarship has increasingly recognized the significance of playfulness and play to musical practices. Roger Moseley notes that “Music and the techniques that

Playful Listening and Video Games   705 shape it simultaneously trace and are traced by the materials, technologies and metaphors of play.”56 In characterizing a mode of listening as “playful,” I seek to emphasize the notion of a set of rules/processes/conditions and the awareness that we hear one particular outcome within that projected space of possibility.57 An understanding of the “play of possibility” whether in games or other contexts, leads to a kind of “playful listening,” as we cognitively interact with music, “playing with” music as it “plays out” in front of our ears. Video games, such as the Fantasia games, make obvious how we engage with the implied potential world of narrative possibility generated by music—those projected domain of play, because of how we engage with the music and the way that the audiovisual combination “plays out.” In the Atari game, we are listening playfully when we listen in anticipation for the Dukas fragments. We know they may appear frequently or sparsely, at a faster tempo or slower. We appreciate the potential range of soundings of the music, within the given parameters—we are listening for how the music is “playing out” to assess the state of the play (whether on the level of individual brooms, or on a higher level of resemblance between game and music). In particular, we desire Dukas to sound less frequently, and slower, for that implies ludic success. However, the game/music does not always sound as we would wish. We use our agency, in tension with the ludic parameters, to alter the output of the music, through our efforts to stop the brooms. The Atari Sorcerer’s Apprentice might as well be a game about inhibiting the musical phrases of Dukas from playing, so closely are gameplay and musical play linked. By projecting the possible soundings of music, we are engaging with playful listening. The situation is different in the Mega Drive Fantasia, which has a less specific relationship between music and play than in the Atari game. In the Mega Drive game, we engage in playful listening when we listen for the ways in which game and music might relate to each other, whether that be through a complementary relationship, or through identifying a mismatch of audio and game. In either case, players may take action to (attempt to) sustain, or change, that correspondence. Recognizing a way in which music and game match each other, necessarily relies on an awareness of how the music might not match the music. Similarly, an appreciation of music that does not fit the gameplay requires some undefined notion of what music that does fit would sound like. (Otherwise, how could non-conformance be detected?) If I find that Stravinsky’s rhythms appear mismatched to Mickey’s movements, I can continue to maintain that mismatch, or take action to make game and music conform to each other, until the ideal of appropriate musical correspondence with action is more closely incarnated. As noted earlier, avatar movement is only one among many ways in which music and game might relate to each other. The variety of ways in which game and music might be seen to correspond is part of the rich engagement of playful listening. Indeed, on a basic level of such correspondence, if the Atari game was about hampering the music from sounding, the Mega Drive might be one about keeping the music playing while Mickey progresses through the level. The music stops if Mickey fails, so players aim to keep the music sounding, avoiding premature silence before the level’s completion. Even if we lose midlevel, we can, of course, imagine how the music would have continued, until the level

706   Tim Summers end. This projected continuation is particularly strong in the game because, as Gibbons notes, “many players might never stay in one place long enough to reach the end of the loop—creating the illusion that the game contains even more music than it actually does.”58 When we consider the potential ways that music might sound to correspond (or not) with the gameplay, we engage in playful listening. It is perhaps the Xbox game that most clearly illustrates the potential worlds of possibilities projected by pieces of music. Here, the game obviously provides new opportunities for interacting with the musical fabric, making those hypothetical other soundings a reality. Players can contribute new materials to pieces, forge new mixes and use new gestural responses to perform the music. In Music Evolved, we listen playfully when we consider how we might change the music to sound differently: when playing, we consider the musical adjustments to the ensemble that we might make, how to form a usercontributed fragment to complement the piece, or how to respond gesturally to the music. All these involve engaging with the imagined—and then realized—potential alternative incarnations of the music. Games encourage a way of listening that I have called “playful” because the interactive nature of the medium explicitly prompts us to engage with alternative forms and possibilities of the music. It gives us awareness of the music’s “potential to be otherwise”, as we consider the possibilities within the parameters and processes set up by the music as it sounds. We hear only one outcome among a range of possible alternatives. Players are able to explore how these emergent properties and domains of musical play can contribute to, oppose, or enmesh with the gameplay with which they are bound. Clearly, much of this discussion is related to ideas of expectation, but playful listening is a broader concept and asks us to consider alternative forms of the music we are currently hearing, not just anticipating a musical future. Instead, we glimpse alternative musical realities, especially when informed by the experience of repeatedly playing the game. Playful listening is not exclusive to games, but video games highlight this aspect of listening because of the gamer’s agency to affect the musical outcome. * * * Mark Clague, in his discussion of the film Fantasia, emphasizes the movie’s educational dimension. He writes, “Fantasia thus teaches its viewers how to listen . . . In Fantasia image does not simply explicate sound, it introduces a host of associations, ideas, and references to music that bring new meanings.”59 We might make much the same claim with regard to the video games, though perhaps the education in these contexts concerns not only “new meanings” but aspects of musical listening more generally. Video games are well-suited to emphasizing music as a realm of playful possibilities. By virtue of the interactive quality of the medium, games recognize the dynamic relationship between player/viewer and the audiovisual presentation. In doing so, the games highlight the role of human agency in the creation of musical meaning, and the indeterminacy that such a relationship brings. In essence, then, games highlight different ways of listening, interpreting, performing, and reacting to music. Further, in the Fantasia

Playful Listening and Video Games   707 examples, these are shown to occur as dynamic processes, fluctuating and changing in time as the music sounds and the game develops. The title of the 1940 film was chosen by its creators because of the way that the word “fantasia” implies freedom from rigid or typical formal concerns.60 In that sense, these games are more than worthy of the same title, since they also suggest a challenge to static articulations of music and the moving image. Here, they highlight a mode of playful listening that allows us to consider the world of possibilities of music in its sounding, and its relationship with both other elements of media and viewer/player/listener agency. The Fantasia projects thematize the spaces of possibility in musical listening—what I have referred to here as recognizing playful listening—a musical and audiovisual potential “to be otherwise.” Games, and these games in particular, encourage us to listen playfully, and to enjoy the dynamic relationships of listening, in-game and outside, on-screen and off. While we might want to interact with music in the way that Mickey appears to command sonic and physical forces in Fantasia, we do not need any magical garb or spells to engage in a rewarding dynamic relationship with music: we do that every time we listen. Perhaps, then, like us, Mickey’s magic lies not in his sorcerer’s hat, but in his ears.

Notes 1. Charles L. Granata, “Disney, Stokowski and the Genius of Fantasia,” in The Cartoon Music Book, ed. Daniel Goldmark and Yuval Taylor (Chicago: A Capella, 2002), 73–92, 82–86, David Cooper, “ ‘Pictures That Talk and Sing’: Sound History and Technology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Film Music, ed. Mervyn Cooke and Fiona Ford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 29–50: 34–36. 2. There are also significant intertextual references to Fantasia in other video games, particularly those of the Kingdom Hearts (2002–2018) and Epic Mickey (2010–2013) series, though space does not permit exploration of those examples here. 3. William Gibbons, Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 58. Gibbons discusses the Atari and Mega Drive games of Fantasia as part of his exploration of the representation of classical music in video games. He concludes that the two games are not aesthetically successful in their treatment of classical music: “In their eagerness to tap into the universal familiarity of Disney’s beloved film, these early game developers underestimated the challenges of using classical music in a way that players find meaningful. Imitating the film, in other words, is not necessarily the same thing as capturing its essence. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, these games bring Fantasia to life but without truly understanding the limits of their own power to recreate what animates (pardon the pun) the original.” (64) I am very grateful to Gibbons for ­sharing drafts of his research with me when it became apparent we were both conducting concurrent research on the same subject. 4. This research is based upon playing the game using an Atari 2600 console and the Stella software emulator. 5. Clark Farmer, “ ‘Every Beautiful Sound Also Creates an Equally Beautiful Picture’ Color Music and Walt Disney’s Fantasia,” in Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound, ed. Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 183–97: 192.

708   Tim Summers 6. Game booklet, Walt Disney Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Sunnyvale: Atari, 1983), 14. 7. Ibid., 12. 8. Carlo Caballero, “Silence, Echo: A Response to ‘What the Sorcerer Said', ” 19th-Century Music 28, no. 2 (2004): 160–82: 162. 9. The observations in this chapter as based primarily on the version of the game for the NTSC television system. The version of the game released for PAL television territories exhibits a curious change. Somewhere in the production process, the colour palette of the game was changed and, more significantly, the musical material was altered and the pitches of the “broom” theme no longer resemble the motif from the film. Nevertheless, because the implementation of the music remains unchanged, it still fulfills the sonic functions described above, even if the intertextual connection with the film and orchestral work is weakened. 10. Michiel Kamp, Four Ways of Hearing Video Game Music, PhD Thesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2014), 15. 11. Gibbons, Unlimited Replays, 60–62. 12. Tim Summers, Understanding Video Game Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 58–66. 13. Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 27. 14. Abbate, Unsung Voices, 57, emphasis in the original. 15. See, among others, Caballero, “Silence, Echo”; Peter Franklin, Seeing Through Music: Gender and Modernism in Classic Hollywood Film Scores (Oxford: Oxford University Press,  2011), 85–114, Nicholas Reyland, “Narrative,” in Aesthetics of Music, ed. Stephen Downes (New York: Routledge,  2014), 203–23: 206–8, and Laura Watson, Paul Dukas’s Music-Text Aesthetic: A Study of its Sources, Theory and Practice, 1891–1907, PhD Thesis (Dublin: Trinity College Dublin, 2008), 185–214. 16. Ben Winters, Music, Performance and the Realities of Film: Shared Concert Experiences in Screen Fiction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 185. 17. Karen Collins, Playing with Sound: A Theory of Interacting with Sound and Music in Video Games (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013), 22. 18. Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 174–214: 208. 19. Ibid., 208. 20. Kamp distinguishes between “listening” and “hearing,” where the former refers to “active searching for or paying attention to sounds, while hearing is experiencing or encountering sounds . . . But we can hear sounds without having listened for them as well: a sudden noise, or music playing in the background when a conversation falls silent, for instance. Then, once we have heard a sound, we can attend to it actively by listening.” Four Ways of Hearing, 14. 21. This research is based upon playing the game using a Mega Drive II console and the higan emulator. 22. Gibbons, Unlimited Replays, 61. 23. The measures in Table 1 correspond to the following editions: Paul Dukas, L’Apprenti Sorcier: Scherzo d’après une ballade de Goethe (Paris: Durand et Fils, nd. c.1897 [1997]); Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1997); Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony 6 (Leipzig: Peters, nd.); Tschaikowsky, Pyotr, Suite Casse-Noisette Op. 71a (Leipzig: D. Rahter, nd.); Amilcare Ponchielli, La Gioconda: Vocal Score (New York: Kalmus, nd.); Modest Mussorgsky, arr. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Une Nuit Sur Le Mont

Playful Listening and Video Games   709 Chauve: Fantasie Pour l’Orchestre (St. Petersburg and Moscow: W. Bessel, c.1886); Johann Sebastian Bach (Attr.), “Toccata con Fuga in d: BWV 565,” in Johann Sebastian Bach Neue Ausgabe Sämtlicher Werke, Serie IV: Orgelwerke, Band 6, ed. Dietrich Kilian (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1964). 24. Kamp, Four Ways of Hearing, 56–58. 25. Ibid., 58. 26. The animated movement of the on-screen characters is not specifically synchronized to the music in any technical way, but the combination of the rhythmically distinct Dukas music and the exaggerated character movement gives the impression of a correspondence. 27. For reportage of a similar phenomenon, see William Cheng’s account of his timing of a bomb detonation in Fallout 3 in time with the music. Sound Play (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 47. 28. Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia, 99. 29. Ruth HaCohen, “Between Generation and Suspension: Two Modern Audiovisual Modes,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Western Art, ed. Yael Kaduri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 36–60: 36. 30. Ibid., 46. 31. Ibid., 48. 32. As Isabella van Elferen puts it, describing music in games, “Music dismantles the borders between virtual and real spaces, undoing the computer interface and replacing it with the 3-D interface of aural imagination. It widens the kinetic magic circle . . . Computer game music urges theorists not to think of hyperreality in terms of a Baudrillardian dichotomy between real life and virtual reality but as an organically moving alternate universe: the re-creative, intermedial, and yet uncanny virtuality of music is elastic, comes out of the speakers, and envelops the listener in its flow.” Isabella van Elferen, “¡Un Forastero! Issues of Virtuality and Diegesis in Videogame Music,” Music and the Moving Image 4, no. 2 (2011): 30–39: 36. 33. This research was conducted using an Xbox 360 and Kinect. 34. There has been a good deal of excellent scholarship on the topic of Guitar Hero/Rock Band games. See, in particular, Dominic Arsenault, “Guitar Hero: ‘Not like playing guitar at all?’ ” Loading . . . 2, no.2 (2008), (http://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/article/ view/32/29); Michael Austin (ed.), Music Video Games (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016); Kiri Miller, Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and Virtual Performance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Roger Moseley, “Playing Games with Music, and Vice Versa: Performance and Recreation in Guitar Hero and Rock Band,” in Taking it to the Bridge: Music as Performance, ed. Nicholas Cook and Richard Pettengill (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 279–318; David Roesner, “The Guitar Hero’s Performance,” Contemporary Theatre Review 21, no. 3 (2011): 276–85; Henry Svec, “Becoming Machinic Virtuosos: Guitar Hero, Rez, and Multitudinous Aesthetics,” Loading . . . 2, no.2 (2008), (http://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/article/ view/30/28). On dance games, see Joanna Demers, “Dancing Machines: ‘Dance Dance Revolution', Cybernetic Dance, and Musical Taste,” Popular Music 25, no. 3 (2006): 401– 14; Jacob Smith, “I Can See Tomorrow in Your Dance: A Study of Dance Dance Revolution and Music Video Games,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 16, no. 1 (2004): 58–84. 35. On this sequence and the history of the aesthetic ideas it deploys, see Farmer, “ ‘Every Beautiful Sound’.” 36. Kevin VanOrd, “Virtuoso [Fantasia: Music Evolved Review],” video, 6:15 and text GameSpot, October 21, 2014. https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/disney-fantasia-music-

710   Tim Summers evolved-review/1900-6,415,918/, accessed March 24, 2018. This quotation is from the video review, and VanOrd expresses the same sentiments in his written version of the review, articulated in a slightly different way. 37. Winters, Music, Performance and the Realities of Film, 144. 38. VanOrd, “Virtuoso.” 39. Ibid. 40. Naomi Cumming, The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 15, 92. 41. Ibid., 152. 42. Svec, “Becoming Machinic Virtuosos,” 6. 43. Van Ord, “Virtuoso.” 44. Andrew Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music, Television and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1993), 57. Franklin, Seeing Through Music, 85 ff. Michael Long, Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 7. 45. Joshua Banks Mailman, “Cybernetic Phenomenology of Music, Embodied Speculative Realism, and Aesthetics-Driven Techné for Spontaneous Audio-Visual Expression,” Perspectives of New Music 54, no. 1 (2016): 5–95: 22. 46. Mailman suggests that, when we conceive of musical properties in terms of physical reference, musical listening can, in turn, present new notions of bodily experience. Mailman, “Cybernetic Phenomenology,” 75. 47. Cumming, Sonic Self, 148. 48. Jesper Juul, Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 133, 176. 49. Mailman, “Cybernetic Phenomenology,” 44. It is no coincidence that Mailman uses the  observation of a game, Go, to illustrate his concept of implied organizational parameters. 50. Robert Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), 95. 51. Ibid., 116. 52. Reyland, “Narrative,” 208. 53. Abbate, Unsung Voices, 30. 54. On the structural design of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, see Everett Vernon Boyd Jr., Paul Dukas and the Impressionist Milieu, PhD Thesis (Rochester: University of Rochester, 1980), 109–153. 55. Franklin, Seeing Through Music, 98. 56. Roger Moseley, Keys to Play (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 22. 57. Much rhetoric strategy in traditional formal structures relies on a particular subset of such projection—the surprising introduction of a new theme, a recapitulation in the “wrong” key, an unexpected second tonal area, and so on. 58. Gibbons, Unlimited Replays, 64. 59. Mark Clague, “Playing in 'Toon: Walt Disney’s “Fantasia” (1940) and the Imagineering of Classical Music,” American Music 22, no.1 (2004): 91–109: 96–97. 60. Granata, “Disney, Stokowski, and the Genius of Fantasia,” 76.

Playful Listening and Video Games   711

Select Bibliography Abbate, Carolyn. Unsung Voices: Opera and Narrative in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Boyd Jr., Everett Vernon. Paul Dukas and the Impressionist Milieu, PhD Thesis. Rochester: University of Rochester, 1980. Caballero, Carlo. “Silence, Echo: A Response to ‘What the Sorcerer Said’.” 19th-Century Music 28, no. 2 (2004): 160–82. Collins, Karen. Playing with Sound: A Theory of Interacting with Sound and Music in Video Games. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013. Cook, Nicholas. Analysing Musical Multimedia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Cumming, Naomi. The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signification. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. Franklin, Peter. Seeing Through Music: Gender and Modernism in Classic Hollywood Film Scores. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Gibbons, William. Unlimited Replays: Video Games and Classical Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. HaCohen, Ruth. “Between Generation and Suspension: Two Modern Audiovisual Modes.” In The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Western Art, ed. Yael Kaduri, 36–60. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Hatten, Robert. Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Kamp, Michiel. Four Ways of Hearing Video Game Music, PhD Thesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2014. Long, Michael. Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Mailman, Joshua Banks. “Cybernetic Phenomenology of Music, Embodied Speculative Realism, and Aesthetics-Driven Techné for Spontaneous Audio-Visual Expression.” Perspectives of New Music 54, no. 1 (2016): 5–95. Moseley, Roger. Keys to Play. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016. Reyland, Nicholas. “Narrative.” In Aesthetics of Music, ed. Stephen Downes, 203–23. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014. Watson, Laura, Paul Dukas’s Music-Text Aesthetic: A Study of its Sources, Theory and Practice, 1891–1907, PhD Thesis. Dublin: Trinity College Dublin, 2008. Winters, Ben. Music, Performance and the Realities of Film: Shared Concert Experiences in Screen Fiction. Abingdon: Routledge, 2014.

chapter 35

Old ( er ) M edi a a n d N ew M usica l A ffor da nce s i n V irtua l R e a lit y Ex per ience s Michiel Kamp

Long before virtual reality devices became widely sold consumer products, ideas about the medium had spread across popular culture and academia.1 From the concept of cyberspace in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) to Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s “transparent immediacy” (1999), by the turn of the century VR had seen its fair share of utopian and dystopian visions.2 And understandably so: the idea of a technology that confronts our senses with a simulacrum of the world goes back to Plato’s cave and speaks to both futurists and sceptics alike. In particular, two examples from the cinematic discourse on virtual reality seem to illustrate the fears and hopes revolving around the medium in the late twentieth century: where Star Trek’s holodeck (1988) posits the promise of infinite verisimilitude as the ultimate form of entertainment,3 The Matrix (1999) paints these very aspects as means for pacification and enslavement by invisible tyrants. Janet Murray sees the holodeck as a narrative form “continuous with the larger tradition of storytelling, stretching from heroic bards through the nineteenth century,” like a book that can be opened and closed at the user’s discretion, offering glimpses of realities other than our own.4 The Matrix, on the other hand, is like a drug, insidious and seemingly inescapable; the verisimilitude of its reality is oppressive, and only when the film’s protagonist Neo learns to bend the laws of virtual physics to his will is a way out of the Matrix’s dystopian clutches revealed. The Matrix’s musical soundtrack helps chart this course between the virtual and the real, oppression and agency. The minimalistic main leitmotif of Don Davis’s score, with

Old(er) Media and New Musical Affordances in VR   713 which the film opens, consists of horns and trumpets alternating an E minor chord, representing the way in which the virtual Matrix and the real world mirror each other. Less symbolic and more illustrative of human agency over machinic oppression is The Matrix’s use of popular music. Rock and electronic dance music by artists such as Rage Against the Machine, The Prodigy, and Rob Zombie only appear in the virtual world, and these moments sharply contrast with the rest of the often-atonal orchestral soundtrack. Some of the climactic action scenes are even shot like music videos: the final thirty seconds of a gratuitous shootout in a skyscraper lobby are closely synched to a remix of “Spybreak!” by Propellerheads. The beat momentarily drops out as protagonist Neo ducks behind a pillar to reload his guns and comes back in as he pops out behind his cover to resume his killing spree. He is not only empowered by the music, but in a way “owns” it. The musical editing reflects Neo’s power over the Matrix: he is no ­longer chained to the virtual world, but able to control it and “Wake Up” whenever he wants, as the title of the Rage Against the Machine song that ends the film attests to. The rock and EDM tracks in The Matrix signal a move from dystopia to a more Holodecklike utopia as Neo is liberated and wrests control of the virtual world from his machinic adversaries. As music video-like MTV aesthetics take over from the naturalism of Hollywood continuity editing, these audiovisions reveal both the unreality of the virtual world and the power of the medium’s user.5 The Matrix and Star Trek’s holodeck appeared at the height of the academic and popular discourse on “virtual reality.” A cursory look at the popularity of the term in literature with the help of Google’s Ngram viewer shows a steady rise since the mid-1980s that peaks around 1998, after which use of the term gradually declines again into the late 2000s (see Figure 35.1).6 Perhaps this decline indicates the preference for “hypermediacy,” which was Bolter and Grusin’s conceptual counterpart to transparent immediacy and is a term that came with the rise of the internet and convergence technologies such as mobile phones.7 Where the logic of transparent immediacy involves the desire for all traces of mediation to “disappear” from experience, for the user to “forget” that what they perceive is drawn, computer-generated, recorded and played back, or

0.000160% 0.000140% 0.000120% 0.000100% 0.000080%

virtual reality

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Figure 35.1  An Ngram of the term “virtual reality” between 1986 and 2008.

2008

714   Michiel Kamp ­ therwise mediated, the logic of hypermediacy involves the opposite: a foregrounding o of mediatization by emphasizing the plurality of media. As opposed to the dream of fully “invisible” and “inaudible” VR technologies, multi-window operating systems or Augmented Reality interfaces work by constantly reminding the user of their presence. But perhaps the decline of VR in the popular and academic imagination in the 2000s also has to do with the incongruity between imaginations of virtual reality in popular entertainment such as Star Trek and the state of VR technology in the late 1990s. Nintendo’s ill-fated Virtual Boy (1995) gaming console, for instance, was infamous for causing motion sickness and eyestrain on players.8 It featured a stereoscopic display in monochrome red and black, and its sound chip, the six-channel Virtual Sound Unit (VSU), was much closer in its musical capabilities to 1980s video game consoles like Nintendo’s NES and Game Boy than to its hi-fi contemporaries, the PlayStation and the Nintendo 64, or even the older SNES.9 Neither the utopian promises of verisimilitude nor indeed the dystopian warnings of total, drug-like immersion were matched by the simple graphics and wavetable synthesis soundtracks of the Virtual Boy’s twenty-two games. It was only after major tech companies at the start of the 2010s heavily funded both development and marketing of consumer head-mounted display (HMD) VR devices— what Tom Garner calls the “second generation of consumer VR,” following the first failed generation of the 1990s that included the Virtual Boy—that the medium could be said to have gained any foothold in the home.10 These companies were Valve in partnership with HTC for the Vive, Sony for the PlayStation VR, and Facebook for the Oculus Rift (see Figure 35.2). Because of their shared control methods, forms of audiovisual output, and ­“protocols,” these devices, together with their less powerful but more mobile cousins—the Samsung Gear VR, Google Daydream, Oculus Quest, and Oculus Go— can be said to constitute both a new medium and a set of hardware platforms for software applications. This chapter will investigate the ways in which musical soundtracks are employed in these applications, and it is the proclaimed “newness” of the medium that is at stake. It is telling that both Oculus and HTC label VR applications as “experiences” on their websites. This marketing move distinguishes them from existent digital media artefacts such as video games and mobile phone apps and it has a certain Deweyan bent to it. In Art as Experience, John Dewey distinguishes an experience as set apart from mere, everyday experience, and as a coherent whole with “its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency.”11 Similarly, VR experiences are posited as unique, totalizing, and set apart from both older media and everyday life. At the same time, as media historians have effectively and increasingly shown, new media are never completely new. Thus while on the one hand we should ask what role music plays in the purportedly new experiences provided by VR applications available through the platforms’ various webstores (Oculus, Steam, and PlayStation), on the other it is important to acknowledge that many of these applications have a palimpsestic quality to

Old(er) Media and New Musical Affordances in VR   715

Figure 35.2  The Oculus Rift HMD. Retrieved from Wikipedia; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Oculus_Rift#/media/File:Oculus-Rift-CV1-Headset-Front.jpg photo in the public domain.

them, and they remediate soundtrack conventions from older media such as video games, productivity software, music videos, documentaries, and narrative films. The theoretical apparatus with which I will investigate this relationship between new and old is twofold. Firstly, because VR allows users to look around, scan their environment, and often interact with objects in that environment, it is useful to employ a theory of music perception that takes into account interactivity. For this reason, James J. Gibson’s concept of affordances will play a central role in theorizing the idiosyncrasies and remediations of music in VR. Secondly, because VR is a new medium whose design conventions are very much in flux, I follow Lisa Gitelman’s approach to media history, drawing on her idea of “protocols” as a way of theorizing how music is mobilized in VR experiences. My investigation will start with case studies that illustrate the variety of roles that musical soundtracks play in VR experiences, from the Oculus Rift’s start-up and calibration sequence to 360° music videos.12 These are followed by a more expansive consideration of Google Earth VR, a VR experience that remediates a desktop application and, in the process, acquires a musical soundtrack. All of these experiences are in some manner remediated from a number of older media whose protocols, I will argue, in turn form the basis of a variety of new audiovisual affordances. While my analysis will focus on the experience of musical soundtracks,13 I will also touch on the relationship between music and other sounds, particularly as the use of diegetic sounds typically plays a significant role in immersing the VR user and creating a sense of “presence.”14

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Soundtrack Ecologies in 360° Videos When it comes to VR experiences, what can a soundtrack “afford”? To ask this question is already to imply a degree of interactivity: what can VR users do with the music, or rather, what can they do with the information contained in the music, and how can they interact with a virtual environment in light of the music? Both the mutual dependency between user and environment and the relationship between perception and action are theorized in Gibson’s ecological psychology. Essential for this theory is the mutuality between animal and environment, together making an ecology. The perceptual systems of animals have evolved in tandem with their environment to pick up information for their survival, including ways of getting around (e.g. the location of obstacles and surfaces), finding food, and other essential operations. This means that, for Gibson, perception is principally meant for action, however basic those actions might be. Auditory perception, for instance, can be used for locating moving objects and events that might be dangerous or edible: collisions of surfaces create soundwaves that, to the ears, reveal both the location and intensity of the movements that caused them, and probably even something about the shape and makeup of the objects that collided.15 These sounds then carry certain affordances for the animal, such as fight or flight. Affordances are neither part of the animal or the object or event causing the sound, but a relationship that depends on both.16 While for Gibson affordances come into being over millions of years through the co-evolution of animals and environment, others have argued that, in human societies, affordances can be designed into the environment. Donald Norman, for instance, speaks of doorknobs that afford turning to those with appropriately shaped appendices.17 Elsewhere, I have argued that in the virtual worlds of video games both “animal” and environment are designed by game designers—“environments in the form of levels and stages in games, organisms in the form of avatars and controls schemes that represent the player.”18 And this goes for VR environments as well. Possibilities for interaction are directly designed into both the virtual objects and the actions that one’s virtual avatar is capable of. Music, too, can be part of this design, depending on the player’s familiarity with soundtrack conventions in games—what Isabella van Elferen, following Gonzalo Frasca, calls “ludo-literacy.”19 But the affordances of a musical soundtrack can also be based in broader cultural contexts. Eric Clarke, for instance, argues that music in general can afford “dancing, worship, coordinated working, persuasion, emotional catharsis, marching, foot-tapping,” and more.20 The question to what extent affordances are cultural or evolutionary will come up again in my discussion of Gitelman’s protocols in the next section. But there is another issue with existing accounts of musical affordances such as Clarke’s. While all of Clarke’s examples above share the fact that they arise from musical listening, Andrea Schiavio warns that not all those actions are of the same kind or should even be considered actions.21 While foot-tapping is a more or less direct motor action, “worship” can involve a whole host of different actions both directly and indirectly related to the music

Old(er) Media and New Musical Affordances in VR   717 one hears: singing along, head-nodding, but also more intently reading a religious text or going to service. Not all of these might be afforded by the same sequence of musical sounds. For Schiavio, this is an “epistemological ambiguity” that needs to be avoided. What exactly can a “direct” action entail in the interaction with music? One direct, inextricable link is between music and movement. In the case of interactive media, there is Karen Collins’s concept “kinesonic congruence” (based on Sandra Marshall and Annabel Cohen’s “audiovisual congruence” in musical soundtracks), which deals directly with the relation of sounds to motor movements.22 More generally, motor movements such as synchronization and gestures have been connected to the affordances of musical aspects like rhythm and melodic shapes.23 Even so, the relationship between user and avatar complicates the link between music and movement. Consider the “Starman” theme in the video game Super Mario Bros. (1985). When picking up a powerup that makes the player’s avatar Mario temporarily invincible, the soundtrack transitions to a theme that is noticeably faster and has a shorter loop.24 In one sense, the Starman cue can be seen as a reminder or signifier of the consequences of Mario’s invincibility. The player can temporarily rush through the level, bowling over Koopas and Goombas along the way instead of having to jump on or over them. In another sense, the cue can be said to afford the player to speed up their actions: faster music affords synchronization through faster movement, something that military drummers and EDM DJs alike have long made use of. However, it is not the player who is moving, but Mario. The motor action that is most directly involved in speeding through a level in Super Mario Bros. is pressing the NES controller’s B-button (the “sprint” button). When I experience the Starman theme while playing the game, I find my thumb leaning into the B-button just a little harder than is necessary, perhaps as a consequence of the music’s affordances. One might ask to what extent this has the same “directness” of running faster to faster music, and current VR devices such as the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive do aspire to more direct relations between user and avatar motor actions than traditional gaming consoles. Not only do they track and translate head movements along every possible axis through sensors in the HMD; they also track hand movements and position in space through infrared sensors and custom controller devices such as Oculus Touch. Marie-Laure Ryan argues that this aspiration is part of the “dream of a natural language” of interaction, meaning that “in VR symbolic code must disappear, at least in those areas in which it can be more efficiently replaced by physical actions.”25 In Bolter and Grusin’s terms, this is the dream of transparent immediacy. 360° videos, whether narrative- or music-based, aim to move one step closer to this “dream.” Lost (2015), a short, four-minute animation for the Oculus Rift, plays with the remediation from the two-dimensional medium of film to the three-dimensional medium of VR. Even before the animation starts, the logo of Oculus’s Story Studio references film visually and aurally with a silver screen and the distinctive rattling of a

Video 35.1  Opening sequence of Lost (2015).

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Figure 35.3  The well camouflaged robot in Lost (2015), announced by sound but barely discernible through the foliage (here circled by the author for clarity).

Video 35.2  Appearance of the robot finger in Lost (2015).

projector. Then, as with many VR experiences, but much traditional cinema as well, an environment is gradually revealed to the viewer through a fade from black (see Video 35.1). Immediately, however, a viewing direction is afforded by visual cues, first through a firefly that buzzes around the avatar’s head, then by the title and credits that appear in a  single location, defining it as “in front.” The score accentuates this with the occurrence of a simple four-bar piano theme when the title “Lost” appears. The first significant narrative occurrence, however, appears slightly to the right, outside the viewer’s probable viewing angle. The score momentarily drops out, and a synthesized beeping sound distinct from the environmental forest noises (including crickets, birds, and wind) is likely the first thing drawing the viewer’s attention to the occurrence. This is akin to what Rick Altman calls a “sound advance” in television, in this case an acousmatic cue: sound first, then visuals.26 At first, the aforementioned visual occurrence seems a head-like silhouette popping up from the ferns (see Figure 35.3 and Video 35.2), not unlike that of the velociraptors in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993). Spielberg’s film was a landmark in the cinematic use of

Old(er) Media and New Musical Affordances in VR   719 computer-generated imagery and digital technology, and this occurrence in Lost is an understandable nod to the iconic dinosaur movements. The dinosaur’s neck, however, turns out to be the index finger of a huge, disembodied robot hand that jumps out “in front” of the viewer, at which point the score comes back in, as if to reassure the viewer of the lack of danger. As the score climaxes, the hand is reunited with a giant but ­gentle-looking robot reminiscent of The Iron Giant (1999). In Lost, as in other animations by Story Studio, the musical score is not “spatialized” by responding to the viewer’s head movements through binaural processing. Audio director Thomas Bible argues that, in doing so, Lost’s sound design operates very much within existing listening conventions, “since most people hear music on headphones while also hearing sounds from the outside world.”27 This means that it is the diegetic sound effects that afford the interaction of turning one’s head, whereas the soundtrack merely prepares for this action by “ducking out” to afford what Claudia Gorbman might call a moment of “uncertain signification.”28 In the 360° music video for the song “Saturnz Barz” (2017), Gorillaz employ music and image relations in a similar way.29 Even more so than in Lost, where it is possible to move within a limited space, in “Saturnz Barz” (as in all 360-degrees videos on YouTube) user interactions are restricted to looking around. This can be done either through a VR HMD or, when using a two-dimensional computer screen, through the less “natural language” (Ryan) or “direct” actions of mouse and keyboard (Schiavio); my discussion here focuses on the VR HMD. Because here, compared to Lost, there is no spatialization through binaurally processed sound effects, the user’s decision of where to look relies more strongly on the music. In this sense, an important sonic cue is provided by the onset of vocals, which, as the video establishes from the first chorus, have a strong link to the diegesis as they always match up with the lip movements of one or more characters in the environment. Off-screen vocal onsets thus create an audio advance that is similar to the beeping sound in Lost: someone sings, I turn my head to look. The video plays with this affordance on several occasions, most prominently during a section where the user’s avatar soars through an asteroid field orbiting a planet. Here, singing characters tend to be positioned behind the avatar (assuming that the avatar is facing in the direction of travel), creating a tension between the “default” field of view afforded by the direction of movement and the source of aural information. This tension can lead to a visual climax if the user has turned to look at the singing monsters and their peripheral vision is suddenly enveloped by a curled space worm that their avatar flies through (see Figure 35.4). This moment is emphasized by the momentary dropping out of the beat, perhaps somewhat similarly to the moment of music-less uncertainty in Lost. To what extent does the audiovisual interaction in Lost and “Saturnz Barz” go beyond what normally happens in non-interactive narrative animation and music video? Or, to put it differently, are the experiencers of VR cinema and 360 videos “users” or “viewers”? Eye-tracking research into film music by the likes of Karen Auer and colleagues shows that musical soundtracks have always had the power to directly influence gaze patterns, guiding film viewers’ visual attention to different parts of the screen depending on the choice of music.30 To the extent that both eye movement and head movement are motor responses to musical cues, these affordances—and the link between sound and visual

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Figure 35.4  Moving through spirals in Gorillaz’ “Saturnz Barz” (2017).

attention—have long been a part of audiovisual media. However, what Lost and “Saturnz Barz” show is that VR experiences can make these affordances explicit; in this sense, the experience of viewing these videos becomes at least partly about turning one’s attention to visual aspects in response to musical cues. By using music to draw attention to their affordances, Lost and “Saturnz Barz” emphasize the newness of the medium.

Protocols and Remediation A further question prompted by Lost and “Saturnz Barz” is to what extent VR relies on the audiovisual conventions of their media ancestors animated film and music video. While turning our heads in the direction of a sound source is an affordance that makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint, whether viewers actually look for a sound source when hearing acousmatic vocals in a music video depends at least in part on their familiarity with music videos. This is a kind of “literacy” that is learned over the course of a life and that can drastically differ from culture to culture and even person to person. Clarke argues that affordances can both be cultural and biological, because “[t]he conventions of culture, arbitrary though they may be in principle, are in practice as binding as natural law.”31 Gibson himself considered listening to music as part of ecological perception. A particular set of soundwaves can be perceived as “music, 18th century music, Mozart, badly played Mozart, a sonata, etc.,” depending on the listener’s familiarity with the music.32 How affordances change over time, through the development of new media such as VR, however, is a process better theorized with more media-historiographical means. Gitelman’s approach to new media offers a framework that is well-suited to studying the development of VR and the emergence of musical affordances. As my

Old(er) Media and New Musical Affordances in VR   721 previous examples of media fantasies (The Matrix) and early VR experiences (Lost and “Saturnz Barz”) show, while virtual reality is typically posited as a whole new experience, many conventions and ideas about its use of music were already in place by the time the first consumer products arrived in the mid-2010s. To use Gitelman’s words: “[t]he introduction of new media . . . is never entirely revolutionary: new media are less points of epistemic rupture than they are socially embedded sites for the ongoing negotiation of meaning as such.”33 Media, in particular new media, are in flux. This finds expression in the changing ways in which they are designed and used. More specifically, media come with a set of what Gitelman calls “protocols”: “a vast clutter of normative rules and default conditions, which gather and adhere like a nebulous array around a technological nucleus.”34 These include usage conventions (English speakers answering a telephone with “Hello?”), but also material aspects such as formats (the sprocket holes on the sides of a film strip). These protocols arise, evolve, and change alongside the development of a medium, and they can be inherited from older media as well. For instance, Lost not only pays homage to the early CGI spectacle of Jurassic Park and The Iron Giant, but also adopts scoring protocols from those cinematic predecessors, pointing to the neo-romantic idiom of both John Williams (composer for Jurassic Park) and Michael Kamen (for The Iron Giant). What’s more, the deliberate lack of spatialization in Lost’s score, as Bible suggests, can be seen as a protocol inherited from nondiegetic film music and personal stereo listening. Looking for a vocalist in “Saturnz Barz” can then be seen as the remediation of a music video protocol, which shows the relationship between protocols and affordances in terms of action. Gitelman’s idea of the remediation of protocols is related to Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium.”35 With VR, we have a medium that is marked by the convergence of many audiovisual media, from animated film and music video to productivity applications and video games, with games playing a central role. The Oculus Rift was originally marketed as “designed specifically for video games” (its tagline was “Step Into the Game”)36 and the HTC Vive uses the Steam webstore—a platform used to sell and play games run by Valve, a company that started out as a game developer. Indeed, not only are marketing and sales protocols remediated from video games, but many of these second generation VR devices are literally tethered to gaming machines.37 Both the heterogeneous media heritage of VR and the importance of video game protocols show themselves most clearly in the relation of music to immersion and presence.

Affording Immersion and Presence: Music in the Virtual Lobby Plugging the Oculus Rift hardware into a desktop PC for the first time, the transition from flat screen to virtual environment is not completely seamless. Experiences are launched from the Oculus Home lobby, a virtual living room that acts as a VR desktop or main menu, but this room can only be reached after a first-time set-up. This process

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Figure 35.5  Oculus calibration environment. In this snapshot, the user is looking away from the instruction text, which occupies a fixed point in the virtual space.

entails a twelve-step calibration phase that takes place on the computer screen, in the physical space, and in virtual reality. First, sensors need to be placed throughout the room and a playing area has to be demarcated with one of the Touch controllers. Only then is the user able to enter VR for further calibration (see Figure 35.5). Putting on the HMD, one is confronted with the difficult relationship between machine and body: long hair and glasses, for example, fit awkwardly under the goggles, and—at first— you are surrounded by total darkness. But we are also confronted with music: a continuous C major chord resounds on a synthesizer, sometimes complemented by high repeated chord tones on chime-like synthesized instruments. Every now and then lower pitched material appears, most prominently a brief D-Bb-G-C motif. Pitch material of this kind gives the suggestion of a C dominant 9th alternating with a C major chord, looping endlessly in ebbs and flows of harmonic tension, but never quite resolving. This soundtrack supports the rest of this calibration phase, which takes place in a sparse black visual environment that virtually represents the user’s hands and sensors in the room, against only an evenly spaced grid of lines to indicate a ground surface in an endless space, and tufts of swirling, bluish smoke to give further indication of depth. The swirling of smoke provides an additional visual counterpart to the droning aspects of the looping soundtrack.38 We may ask why there is music present from the very beginning of the calibration process, and what this music affords, particularly when the Oculus Home environment has no music in favor of ambient sounds of wind, birds, and the rustling of leaves. In the calibration process, already, we find musical protocols of older audiovisual media remediated. The black screen with music preceding visuals is very much like the opening to

Old(er) Media and New Musical Affordances in VR   723 Lost, and common to two-dimensional narrative film. There, music carries the viewer from the extrafictional and peritextual—company logos and title credits—to the intrafictional, diegetic world of the film.39 These protocols can perhaps be said to go even further back, to the preludes and overtures of operas, played to a closed curtain to ease audiences into their seats and into the performance.40 In the Oculus’s calibration process, the soundtrack similarly carries the user from the real-world desktop to the virtual Home; music acts as a threshold between the intratextual and the extratextual, and, again like in Lost, its termination is a sign that the medium’s diegetic world has been entered properly. The Rift’s setup soundtrack can be related to another strain of media music as well: the startup chimes for operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Apple’s macOS. There is a similarity in both musical functions and qualities—that is, timbres and harmonies. Functionally, startup sounds are just a short reminder that your computer has booted up successfully, their major tonalities a little victory chime for bug-free software. But Thomas Rickert argues that they are more than that. After all, why else would avant-garde musicians like Brian Eno and Robert Fripp be contracted to compose them?41 Crucial to these sounds is the logic of Eno’s ambient music. As Eno argues, “Most music chooses its own position in terms of your listening to it. Muzak wants to be back there. Punk wants to be up front. Classical wants to be another place. I wanted to make something you could slip in and out of.”42 Importantly, Eno contrasts his ambient albums with Muzak or background music, stating that ambient music should afford attentive listening if so desired. This is echoed in Rickert, who quotes Eno saying about his Windows 95 startup music that “[a]lthough designers continue to dream of ‘transparency’—technologies that just do their job without making their presence felt—both creators and audiences actually like technologies with personality.”43 According to Rickert, Windows’ startup music, as short as it is, creates a personalized space or environment: Microsoft Windows is, quite literally, maximally shaping the computer space as it spills out into the uniqueness of a user’s local environment, personalizing an impersonal computer and software suite and integrating it into a securing and enabling space.44

The spatializing aspects of Eno’s music are also mentioned by Robert Fink: “the collective goal [of ambient music] is to create musical ‘space’ within which our minds can wander, by crafting a sonic experience that is somewhere between all-consumingly intense and alienatingly dull.”45 Harmonically, in the case of the Windows 95 startup music, this translates to a dense texture in two parts, moving from an E major chord with a prominently suspended F# to an E minor 11th chord, which keeps a major-mode sonority through the incorporation of a D major chord. Fripp’s Windows Vista startup music has the same major tonality with suspended second and fourth elements. This combination of dense tone clusters with a clear tonal center perfectly encapsulates the idea of ambient music as both pleasantly unobtrusive and cautiously exciting. It affords both transparency (or listening “past” the music) and depth (or listening “to” it).

724   Michiel Kamp Harmonically and timbrally, the Rift’s setup music is similar, and affords similar listening positions: its C major to dominant 9th tonality varies between the simple and the complex, echoing Victor Szabo’s suggestion that ambient music establishes “a global sense of stability (through use of a limited range of melodic gestures, a narrow dynamic range, etc.), while remaining inconstant on the local level (through unpredictable entrances, shifts in color, changes in harmonic quality, and so on).”46 The crucial difference between the Windows startup sounds and the Rift’s calibration music is that the latter’s soundtrack is, to borrow a term from film scoring, “wall-to-wall.” To some extent, the protocols are similar. Both cues announce the successful booting up and working of the software. However, the continued presence of music in the Rift setup can be more usefully compared to the way films and video games immerse viewers and users in their diegetic worlds. The concept of immersion is as central to the musical protocols and musicological discourse of these two media as it is to VR. The initial Kickstarter description for the Oculus Rift mentions the concept of immersion no less than four times, and an accompanying quote from gaming website Gamespy makes a specific reference to Star Trek’s holodeck.47 The official Oculus Rift website mentions that the “Rift’s integrated 360° spatial audio takes the immersive power of VR to new depths.”48 The HTC Vive website, too, mentions the word “immersive” multiple times in its feature listing.49 Since the late 1990s, Bolter and Grusin’s concept of “transparent immediacy” explicitly theorized VR as an immersive “medium whose purpose is to disappear.”50 The relationship between spectatorial immersion and the disappearance of the medium echoes Gorbman’s “invisibility” and “inaudibility” thesis, which theorizes the role of “unheard melodies” in creating a “bath of affect” that contributes to immersing the spectator in the fictional worlds of classical Hollywood cinema.51 While both Eno and Gorbman draw attention to music’s ability to create a “trance-like” immersive state, Gorbman’s conception is somewhat at odds with Eno’s because she explicitly connects the workings of film music to Muzak.52 Differently from Gorbman’s “unheard melodies,” and similarly to Eno’s theorization, the Rift’s calibration cue can be seen as an integral part of its environment: rather than completely disappearing from consciousness, it acts as ambient music. In this sense, VR seems to draw on a conception of cinematic listening that is closer to Ben Winters’s understanding of film music as an integral part of the story world, a “sonic wallpaper” against which narrative events take place.53 The calibration cue can also be related to how the concept of immersion has been theorized in the context of video game music. Rod Munday discerns two different types of musical immersion in games: “cognitive” and “mythic.”54 In cognitive immersion, music acts like a wall of sound to block out distracting noises from the environment, which is comparable to Gorbman’s argument about film music blocking out the sound of the projector and preserving the audience’s focus on the two-dimensional screen in front of them.55 A good example of this in the case of video games is the classic arcade, in which cabinets had to vie for the customer’s attention through attractive sounds, and to keep them from the distractions of other cabinets through a continuous “cocoon” of sounds.56 With mythic immersion, Munday refers to music’s ability to signify broad

Old(er) Media and New Musical Affordances in VR   725 themes, concepts, and emotions through traditional techniques such as leitmotifs, which allow the player to “transcend their everyday selves” and be drawn into the game’s narrative world.57 This is very similar to Tim Summers’ idea of “epic texturing,” whereby music semiotically points to the significance of a player’s actions or an event beyond the immediate situation.58 Complementary to Munday’s concepts is Isabella van Elferen’s ALI model, which posits not so much kinds of immersion as reasons for being immersed: “affective” immersion occurs on the basis of “emotional connotations” (that may be cross-medial);59 “literacy” implies involvement in “gameplay, game worlds and game plots”;60 and “interaction” with the music creates a “direct connection between player actions and game soundtrack.”61 The calibration cue’s musical immersion is in the first place cognitive, creating an auditory threshold between the virtual space and the outside world. But following Eno’s conception of ambient music, it can be seen as mythic or texturing as well, affording a kind of attention that is just enough to trigger the user’s imagination about the space that they are in, pointing to the promise of the software’s possibilities. The very notion of “immersion,” however, needs to be further unpacked. The term has been used in both scholarly and popular discourse to describe a state of prolonged voluntary engagement—a kind of engrossment or absorption—in a wide range of activities from painting to literature, and it has often been conflated with the experience of being in a virtual or diegetic environment. This, as theorists including Thomas Sheridan and Alison McMahan have argued, is something that can be more aptly described by the term “presence.”62 But the theorization of “presence” comes with its own complexities. Gordon Calleja notes that the term has been taken up to include imagining being in the diegetic world of a novel, for instance, thus blurring the phenomenological lines between imagination and the perception of an environment that responds our actions.63 Calleja draws the important connection between presence, the idea of perceptual illusions, and Bolter and Grusin’s logic of transparent immediacy: in presence, the medium temporarily withdraws from attention in favor of the mediated, diegetic space. Importantly, this is a space that the perceiver experiences their body to be in. While film, at least in the classic formulation of apparatus theory followed by Gorbman, has a similar logic of immediacy, there the perceiver takes on the non-persona of a disembodied voyeur.64 In VR and certain avatar-based video games and related interactive media, immediacy extends to bodily presence. The necessity of an avatar in VR is the crucial differentiator in this matter. Sound plays an important role in our experience of bodily presence. Mark Grimshaw goes as far as to say that “presence derives mainly from the perception of sound,”65 not only because hearing is omnidirectional, but also because it is active in the sense that we localize sounds by ascribing them to objects and events in the environment. This is related to the fact that, for Grimshaw and for other scholars including Calleja, Giuseppe Riva, and John Waterworth, action and agency are more essential to a sense of presence than realism or fidelity. Calleja suggests that we might not feel present in a world that does not respond to our actions, no matter how realistically rendered it is in terms of sound and graphics.66 Riva and Waterworth suggest that presence consists of three

726   Michiel Kamp different layers—proto-presence or proprioception, perceptual or core presence, and extended or reflective presence—each revolving around actions: motor-movement, present-directed intentions, and future-directed intentions.67 This model, in which both presence and action are based on perception, is very close to Gibson’s theory and it reveals the importance of affordances for presence in VR: we perceive the environment in terms of what it affords for interaction, and our sense of presence is based on the responsiveness of those affordances that are visually and auditorily signified by the graphics and sounds of VR experiences. In this sense, both Lost and “Saturnz Barz” are cases of presence based on affordances of sound and music: I turn my head to localize the source of the sounds I hear, and in doing so I am made aware of my bodily presence in the virtual space.

Google Earth VR and Musical Flânerie One experience in which bodily presence is shaped by soundtrack affordances based on protocols remediated from older media is Google Earth VR (2016). Unlike many other “experiences” topping the Oculus and Steam VR store charts in their early years, GEVR is not a video game, but a transmediation of the Google Earth desktop application. Google Earth has been available as a free application since 2005, after Google acquired the software from Keyhole, its original developers. It has always been the entertaining cousin to the more utilitarian Google Maps, and has served as a platform for more game-like experiences as well, such as a flight simulator mode. Like most desktop applications, however, Google Earth is silent, containing no sound effects or music. However, in converting Google Earth to VR platforms, the development team chose to add a soundtrack. This consists of ambisonic environmental sound effects (bird sounds at low camera altitudes and wind noises at high altitudes, for instance), interface feedback (“wooshes” and “swishes” when the user moves and rotates their viewpoint), and a nondiegetic musical soundtrack by Joshua Moshier. Lead developer Dominik Käser and colleagues argue that “it is key to build a multisensory experience where visuals, sound and haptics all tell one cohesive story and augment each other.”68 But why would the need to “tell one cohesive story” arise when moving from a desktop application to a VR experience, and how is GEVR’s musical soundtrack a part of that experience? In the words of its developers, GEVR features a “dynamically changing music track,” and the term “dynamic” alone indicates the remediation of a protocol from video game music: what Karen Collins calls dynamic or interactive music, which responds to the user’s actions.69 After a short loading screen, the experience opens by putting the user somewhere above an iconic location such as Venice or the Grand Canyon, rendered in 3D based on compositions of satellite imagery and Google’s street view photography. At the same time, the user is immersed into a piece of ambient music in 7/4 that centers on an E major chord and only occasionally departs from it, recalling the structure of the Oculus calibration cue (See Video 35.4). It trots along at a regular pace of around 110

Old(er) Media and New Musical Affordances in VR   727 bpm emphasized by an ever-present eight-note pulse, with several solo instruments and instrument groups fading in and out to carry this pulse and contribute eighth-note motifs, quarter-note ostinatos, and chords of indeterminable length. Timbres are soft, with (possibly synthesized, but acoustic sounding) strings and woodwinds rhythmically punctuated by soft acoustic guitar plucks, and by glockenspiel and marimba hits. Changes in harmony are rare. We occasionally hear a move to the major subdominant A—a flat VI, flat VII progression—or a borrowed A minor, but these all quickly return to E. The piece can loop infinitely, with a large variety of instrumental groups and motifs moving in and out regularly and gradually to conceal the repeating structure. These qualities align the musical style of this cue with Brian Eno’s ambient music and its dynamic between “global stability” and “local inconstancies,” but the regular pulse is also reminiscent of minimalist orchestral pieces like John Adams’ Tromba Lontana (1986). More importantly, Moshier’s cue builds on scoring protocols existent in other audiovisual media. Famously, there is the combination of top down aerial shots of cityscapes and minimal music in Philip Glass’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982), particularly its climactic “The Grid” section. But a closer relative can be found in the soundtracks to city-building games SimCity (2013) and Cities: Skylines (2015).70 Particularly the former’s score is very similar in terms of tempo (120 bpm), instrumentation (acoustic orchestral instruments, acoustic guitar), structure (regularly alternating sections), and harmony (E major interspersed with its flat VI, C major). Depending on one’s zoom level, the not-quite-photorealistic, and certainly not-quite-familiar visuals of GEVR’s “tilted down” perspective are in many ways like the isometric viewpoint of a city building game like SimCity (see Figure 35.6).71 Paul Roquet in his study of Eno and Tetsu Inoue’s “space music” identifies this broader relationship between cities and ambient music, arguing that “these sounds can negotiate a ‘sense of place’ with the environment around them—responding directly to new habitation patterns in cities around the globe.”72 But of course, this particular audiovisual congruence is much more prevalent when hovering high above a mid-sized American town like Springfield, Massachusetts, with its neat block layout and detached houses, than when moving over the Himalayas. The soundtrack first shows its ability to function as dynamic music when the user presses the “Tilt Earth Up” button to zoom out (see Video 35.4). The regular pulse quickly fades out, and although the music remains close to E major, a “Space” cue with different instrument groups takes over. The strings and woodwinds are supplemented with high-pitched, synthetic crystalline timbres, far removed from the familiar sounds of acoustic orchestral instruments. New incidental motifs and harmonies can be heard as well, such as a more metallic string-like D major chord—perhaps a clean electric guitar—and most strikingly the entrance of A sharp pitch material, which gives a more Lydian or whole-tone feel to the otherwise mostly diatonic piece. Whole-tone and Lydian scales have long been used in screen media soundtracks as a signifier for fantastical, otherworldly, and science fiction elements.73 Whole-tone material is, for instance, used in Star Trek in their representation of aliens and their music,74 but in the 1940s already, Adorno and Eisler remarked upon the clichéd usage of this device.75 In video

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Figure 35.6  (a) A high-angle perspective of a town in SimCity (2013); (b) Tilted down perspective of Springfield, Mass. in Google Earth VR (2016).

Video 35.3  The Tilt Earth Down perspective and cue from Google Earth VR (2016).

Video 35.4  The Tilt Earth Up perspective and cue from Google Earth VR (2016).

Old(er) Media and New Musical Affordances in VR   729 games, dynamic musical transitions such as these are an important indicator of space and place. They have served to emphasize both the differences between areas and the player’s traversals through those areas since at least early 3D games like Banjo-Kazooie (1998) and Ocarina of Time (1998).76 This protocol is remediated in GEVR: the combination of taking away the pulse and adding whole-tone elements characterizes the user’s situation as one of floating in space, science fiction’s favorite locale. A third dynamic element of the musical soundtrack can be heard when using the analog stick to move around in the “tilted down” perspective. When the user’s avatar moves, a quiet “Movement” stem is added to the “Ground” cue consisting of fast, sixteenth note percussion with a ticking quality to it. This element directly responds to the user’s movements and emphasizes an increase in speed. To some extent, this dynamic element can be compared with video game music such as Super Mario Bros.’s Starman cue. What does this soundtrack afford the user? As pieces of ambient music, the Ground and Space cues are composed to be neither teleological, nor conspicuously repetitive. They contribute to the creation of virtual environments or “spaces” (cf. Fink and Rickert) that can be inhabited by the user indefinitely. However, transitioning between the two cues by tilting one’s view up or down is different, and the change in pulse presence, instrumental timbres, and pitch material characterizes the action as a movement between two situations: two different spatial environments or two different avatar positions. For instance, the lack of a pulse can both indicate the emptiness of space and the user’s avatar as a floating astronaut; the whole-tone pitch material can both indicate the remote otherness of space and the high-tech suit of an astronaut. The Movement stem emphasizes movement even more directly than switching between Earth and Ground perspectives. As a whole, then, GEVR’s musical soundtrack can be said to afford movement through space, either by distinguishing one space from another (transitioning between Ground and Space cues), or by suggesting that one’s avatar is moving (the Movement stem). While this may seem like a truism, it is not something that the desktop application affords, at least not in the same manner. As Alex Gekker argues, “Google Earth bestows a God-Like view on its users,”77 or what Paul Kingsbury and John Paul Jones—drawing on Denis Cosgrove’s cartographic genealogies of the earth—call an “Apollonian” objective distance.78 Our bodily selves are not present in this kind of experience in the same way that we do not experience our bodies hovering over the represented landscape when browsing a paper map; similarly, we don’t experience a virtual representation of our bodily selves peeking through a screen or window when watching a film. In the Apollonian experiential gestalt, movement in Google Earth is like scrolling down a webpage or text file: we don’t so much move through it as we move it; we rotate the earth and we move the map. Kingsbury and Jones contrast the Apollonian experience with a Dionysian gestalt, that of the flâneur playfully wandering through a landscape. In the Dionysian gestalt, we experience movement as a movement of our virtual selves, our avatars, present in (or above) the virtual world: we move through GE. Jeffrey Geiger similarly argues that the “cinematic aerial view” that was developed in the first half of the twentieth century through cinema and aerial photography can encompass both an abstract, distanced Apollonian view, and an embodied feeling—particularly

730   Michiel Kamp through new technologies such as VR.79 In the desktop version of GE, the distanced Apollonian and embodied Dionysian experiential gestalts are bistable; like the Rubin vase or the duck-rabbit, we can perceive the app in either manner. In GEVR, however, presence is determined by the medium of VR itself. We are constantly reminded of our bodies both visually—in many applications we can see our hands or virtual representations of the controllers—and through other senses: movement is known to cause nausea, which is why GEVR has the option to restrict one’s peripheral vision, and looking over the ledge of a tall building in VR can cause vertigo. The music affords this embodied, Dionysian presence as well. The Movement stem affords rushing over landscapes, and the Space cue invites us to float like an astronaut in space. By affording movement, the music makes us aware of our bodily presence. Only when we return to the default tilted down view and its Ground cue are we afforded a respite from this, a potential Apollonian view from nowhere, inherited from musical protocols of SimCity and Koyaanisqatsi. For some, however, even the Ground cue offers no such escape from virtual embodied presence. As YouTube commenter Rogue says about an uploaded video of the Ground cue: “It makes me feel like an explorer who can go anywhere at any time.”80 This feeling is precisely the “cohesive story” or holistic experience that GEVR’s developers strive for. * * * While Bolter and Grusin argue that VR presents the logic of transparent immediacy more than any other medium, the cases discussed in this chapter suggest that the musical soundtracks of early second-generation VR applications in the 2010s afford both experiences of immediacy and hypermediacy as a result of the older media that they remediate. Drawing upon audiovisual protocols inherited from cinema and music video, 360° videos like Lost and “Saturnz Barz” draw attention to the interactivity of viewing. Building on a different audiovisual media lineage (and particularly on video game soundtracks), the musical soundtrack of Google Earth VR contributes to the affordance of presence, turning the disembodied act of using a desktop map application into the embodied experience of moving through a virtual world. Angela McArthur, Rebecca Stewart, and Mark Sandler suggest that we do not so much think about VR in terms of verisimilar environments, but rather as what McLuhan calls “anti-environments.”81 For McLuhan, media environments are active processes that operate invisibly, or as Bolter and Grusin might say “transparently,” shaping the way we view and act in the world; anti-environments such as artworks, on the other hand, work like hypermediacy, making visible the operations of the environment.82 Architecture, installations, or sculptures, for instance, can change the way we view a space, defamiliarizing and making us conscious of the way we relate to our surroundings. Similarly, VR experiences are unique experiences that are markedly different from our daily lives, and musical soundtracks strengthen the nature of these experiences as anti-environments. In this regard, these early consumer VR applications are perhaps more like the discrete Holodeck escapades from Star Trek than the all-encompassing

Old(er) Media and New Musical Affordances in VR   731 virtual reality simulacrum of The Matrix. The soundtracks here function not so much as an invisible “bath of affect” but more as uniquely conspicuous “sonic wallpapers” that make VR (anti-)environments very much unlike our own. Like Neo, freed from the oppressive mundanity of his Matrix office job by music video-like audiovisions, users can float through asteroid fields and soar over cityscapes in new experiences afforded by musical protocols with a long media heritage.

Notes 1. Many thanks to Tim Summers and Beth Carroll for their comments on an early version of this chapter. 2. J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin introduce the notion of “transparent immediacy” in their book Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). 3. The holodeck was introduced in the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1988), but an earlier version called a “recreation room” appeared in Star Trek: The Animated Series (1974). 4. Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017), 28. 5. Mark Evans connects also the non-musical aspects of The Matrix’s soundtrack to the difference between virtual reality and artificiality. See Mark Evans, “Mapping The Matrix: Virtual Spatiality and the Realm of the Perceptual,” in Off the Planet: Music, Sound, and Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Philip Hayward (New Barnet: John Libbey, 2004), 188–98. 6. Jean-Baptiste Michel et al., “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” Science 331, no. 6014 (2011): 176–82, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1199644. In 2018, the Ngram Viewer only shows results from books published before 2008. 7. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 8. Matt Zachara and José P. Zagal, “Challenges for Success in Stereo Gaming: A Virtual Boy Case Study,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, ACE ‘09 (New York: ACM, 2009): 98, https://doi. org/10.1145/1690388.1690406. 9. Tom A. Garner, Echoes of Other Worlds: Sound in Virtual Reality: Past, Present and Future (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 196. 10. Garner, Echoes of Other Worlds, 14. 11. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin, 2005), 37. 12. All virtual reality applications examined in this chapter were run on a first-generation Oculus Rift headset with either Oculus Touch or Xbox 360 controllers. I have had only brief experiences with HTC Vive and Samsung Gear VR hardware and none with PlayStation VR, so there might be differences in the software between platforms not addressed in this chapter. 13. This does not include music applications such as virtual digital audio workstations (DAWs, e.g. LyraVR) and virtual DJ equipment (e.g. Reality Decks), which are best understood as remediations of previous recording and production technologies. 14. In this sense, I take heed of recent arguments that emphasize the need to discuss the integrated soundtracks of contemporary audiovisual media. See Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

732   Michiel Kamp 15. James  J.  Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 87. 16. Eric Clarke gives the example of a wooden chair, which might (visually) afford sitting to a person of sufficient height and proportions, but eating to a termite. Clarke, Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 37. 17. Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition, (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 13. 18. Michiel Kamp, “Musical Ecologies in Video Games,” Philosophy & Technology 27, no. 2 (2014), 235–49: 238. 19. Isabella van Elferen, “Analysing Game Musical Immersion: The ALI Model,” in Ludomusicology: Approaches to Video Game Music, ed. Michiel Kamp, Tim Summers, and Mark Sweeney (Bristol: Equinox, 2016), 32–52. 20. Clarke, Ways of Listening, 38. 21. Andrea Schiavio, Music in (En)Action: Sense-Making and Neurophenomenology of Musical Experience, PhD Thesis (Sheffield: University of Sheffield, 2014), 85. 22. Sandra K. Marshall and Annabel J. Cohen, “Effects of Musical Soundtracks on Attitudes toward Animated Geometric Figures,” Music Perception 6, no. 1 (1988): 95–112. Karen Collins, Playing with Sound: A Theory of Interacting with Sound and Music in Video Games (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013), 35. 23. W. Luke Windsor and Christophe de Bézenac, “Music and Affordances,” Musicae Scientiae 16, no. 1 (2012), 112–14, https://doi.org/10.1177/1029864911435734. Rolf Inge Godøy and Marc Leman, Musical Gestures: Sound, Movement, and Meaning (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010). 24. See HearingVGM, “Super Mario Bros Starman Theme,” YouTube video, 0:19, 2014, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aQgI4TkBcY, accessed March 1, 2020. 25. Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 45. 26. Rick Altman, “Television/Sound,” in Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture, ed. Tania Modleski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 39–54. 27. Thomas Bible, “Binaural Audio for Narrative VR,” Oculus Story Studio-Blog, May 31, 2016, https://www.oculus.com/story-studio/blog/binaural-audio-for-narrative-vr, accessed March 1, 2020. 28. Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 58. 29. See Gorillaz, “Gorillaz–Saturnz Barz (Spirit House) 360,” YouTube video, 5:57, 2017, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVaBvyzuypw, accessed March 1, 2020. 30. Karin Auer et al., “When Music Drives Vision: Influences of Film Music on Viewers’ Eye Movements,” in Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition and the 8th Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences, Thessaloniki, Greece (12th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition and the 8th Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences, Thessaloniki, 2012), 73–76. See also Miguel Mera and Simone Stumpf, “EyeTracking Film Music,” Music and the Moving Image 7, no. 3 (2014): 3–23. 31. Clarke, Ways of Listening, 47. 32. Gibson quoted in Marilyn Nonken, “What Do Musical Chairs Afford? On Clarke’s Ways of Listening and Sacks’s Musicophilia,” Ecological Psychology 20, no. 4 (2008): 283–95: 288.

Old(er) Media and New Musical Affordances in VR   733 33. Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 6. 34. Ibid., 7. 35. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Berkeley: Gingko Press, 2013), 8. 36. “Oculus Rift: Step into the Game,” Kickstarter, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ 1523379957/oculus-rift-step-into-the-game, accessed March 1, 2020. 37. This is explicitly the case for the PlayStation VR, which needs to be plugged into the PlayStation 4 gaming console, but is also true for the Rift and Vive: they can only run when connected to a PC with ­powerful enough hardware, including graphic cards that are designed to run the latest games. 38. A more recent version of the Oculus Rift setup sequence has different visuals and music from the one analyzed in this chapter. Instead of a black environment, the user is placed in a white environment. The music that accompanies this environment has similar ambient or minimalist features, featuring a G-F-C chord progression played by piano and synthesized strings, sometimes embellished by arpeggiated electric guitar chords. 39. Guido Heldt, Music and Levels of Narration in Film: Steps Across the Border (Bristol: Intellect, 2013), 25–27. 40. See Giorgio Biancorosso, “Beginning Credits and Beyond: Music and the Cinematic Imagination,” Echo 3, no. 1 (2001), http://www.echo.ucla.edu/Volume3-Issue1/biancorosso/biancorosso.pdf. 41. Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 131. 42. Steven Grant, “Brian Eno Against Interpretation,” 1982, http://www.moredarkthanshark. org/eno_int_tp-aug82.html. 43. Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being, 135. 44. Ibid., 139. 45. Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 200. 46. Victor Szabo, “Unsettling Brian Eno’s Music for Airports,” twentieth-century music 14, no. 02 (2017): 305–33: 316. 47. “Oculus Rift: Step into the Game.” 48. “Oculus Rift|Oculus,” https://www.oculus.com/rift/ accessed March 1, 2020. 49. “VIVETM|VIVE Virtual Reality System,” https://www.vive.com/us/product/vive-virtualreality-system/ accessed March 1, 2020. 50. Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 21–22. 51. Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 6–7. 52. Ibid., 5. 53. Ben Winters, “Musical Wallpaper? Towards an Appreciation of Non-Narrating Music in Film,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 6, no. 1 (2012): 39–54. 54. Rod Munday, “Music in Video Games,” in Music, Sound and Multimedia: From the Live to the Virtual, ed. Jamie Sexton (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 51–67. 55. Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 36–37. 56. Karen Collins, Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory, and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 8. 57. Munday, “Music in Video Games,” 58.

734   Michiel Kamp 58. Tim Summers, Understanding Video Game Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 58–63. 59. van Elferen, “Analysing Game Musical Immersion: The ALI Model,” 35. 60. Ibid., 36. 61. Ibid., 39. 62. Thomas  B.  Sheridan, “Musings on Telepresence and Virtual Presence,” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 1, no. 1 (1992): 120–26, https://doi.org/10.1162/ pres.1992.1.1.120; Alison McMahan, “Immersion, Engagement, and Presence: A Method for Analyzing 3-D Video Games,” in The Video Game Theory Reader, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, 2003), 67–86. 63. Gordon Calleja, In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011), 22–23. 64. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). 65. Mark Grimshaw, “Presence Through Sound,” in Body, Sound and Space in Music and Beyond: Multimodal Explorations, ed. Clemens Wöllner (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 289. 66. Calleja, In-Game, 20–21. 67. Giuseppe Riva and John A. Waterworth, “Being Present in a Virtual World,” in The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality, ed. Mark Grimshaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 205–22. 68. Dominik  P.  Käser et al., “The Making of Google Earth VR,” in ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Talks, SIGGRAPH ’17 (New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2017), 63:1–63:2, https://doi.org/ 10.1145/3084363.3085094. 69. Collins, Game Sound, 125. 70. This is noted by several Reddit users commenting on the soundtrack as well. See “Google Earth’s Music Is Amazing! It’s ‘Reflective’ and Adds to Nostalgia and Curiosity When Visiting Places. • r/Vive,” reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/5e0ngu/ google_earths_music_is_amazing_its_reflective_and/, accessed March 1, 2020. 7 1. A relationship can be found with the postminimalism of John Adams, as well in the game Civilization IV (2005), which features similar isometric viewpoints of a world map and Adams’s music as a score to its modern era. See Karen Cook, “Music, History, and Progress in Sid Meier’s Civilization IV,” in Music in Video Games: Studying Play, ed. William Gibbons, Neil Lerner, and K. J. Donnelly (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 166–82. 72. Paul Roquet, “Ambient Landscapes from Brian Eno to Tetsu Inoue,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 21, no. 4 (2009): 364–83: 364. 73. Martin Kutnowski, “Trope and Irony in The Simpsons’ Overture,” Popular Music and Society 31, no. 5 (2008): 599–616: 605. 74. Jeremy Barham, “Scoring Incredible Futures: Science-Fiction Screen Music, and ‘Postmodernism’ as Romantic Epiphany,” The Musical Quarterly 91, no. 3–4 (2008): 240–74: 259. Tim Summers, “Star Trek and the Musical Depiction of the Alien Other,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 7, no. 1 (2013): 19–52: 36–37. 75. Theodor W. Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (New York: Continuum, 2005), 17. 76. See e.g. Collins, Game Sound, 71. 77. Alex Gekker, Uniquitous Cartography: Casual Power in Digital Maps, PhD Thesis (Utrecht: Utrecht University, 2016), 41.

Old(er) Media and New Musical Affordances in VR   735 78. Paul Kingsbury and John Paul Jones, “Walter Benjamin’s Dionysian Adventures on Google Earth,” Geoforum, no. 40 (2009): 502–13. 79. Jeffrey Geiger, “Making America Global: Cinemacity and the Aerial View,” in Cinematicity in Media History, ed. Jeffrey Geiger and Karin Littau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 133–56: 137–38. 80. Rogue, ca. 2018, comment on “Google Earth VR Music - Joshua Moshier,” YouTube video, 9:33, posted by “hallerd,” May 24, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yP-GWCBdlg, accessed March 1, 2020. 81. Angela McArthur, Rebecca Stewart, and Mark Sandler, “Sounds Too True to Be Good: Diegetic Infidelity—the Case for Sound in Virtual Reality,” Journal of Media Practice 18, no. 1 (2017): 26–40. 82. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Message: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), 68.

Select Bibliography Bolter, J.  David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. Calleja, Gordon. In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011. Clarke, Eric. Ways of Listening: An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Collins, Karen. Playing with Sound: A Theory of Interacting with Sound and Music in Video Games. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013. Elferen, Isabella van. “Analysing Game Musical Immersion: The ALI Model.” In Ludomusicology: Approaches to Video Game Music, ed. Michiel Kamp, Tim Summers, and Mark Sweeney, 32–52. Bristol: Equinox, 2016. Garner, Tom A. Echoes of Other Worlds: Sound in Virtual Reality: Past, Present and Future. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Gibson, James J. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Grimshaw, Mark. “Presence Through Sound.” In Body, Sound and Space in Music and Beyond: Multimodal Explorations, ed. Clemens Wöllner, 279–98. Oxon: Routledge, 2017. Kamp, Michiel. “Musical Ecologies in Video Games.” Philosophy & Technology 27, no. 2 (2014): 235–49. Kingsbury, Paul, and John Paul Jones. “Walter Benjamin’s Dionysian Adventures on Google Earth.” Geoforum, no. 40 (2009): 502–13. McArthur, Angela, Rebecca Stewart, and Mark Sandler. “Sounds Too True to Be Good: Diegetic Infidelity—the Case for Sound in Virtual Reality.” Journal of Media Practice 18, no. 1 (2017): 26–40. Munday, Rod. “Music in Video Games.” In Music, Sound and Multimedia: From the Live to the Virtual, ed. Jamie Sexton, 51–67. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Murray, Janet. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017.

736   Michiel Kamp Nonken, Marilyn. “What Do Musical Chairs Afford? On Clarke’s Ways of Listening and Sacks’s Musicophilia.” Ecological Psychology 20, no. 4 (2008): 283–95. Rickert, Thomas. Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013. Riva, Giuseppe, and John A. Waterworth. “Being Present in a Virtual World.” In The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality, ed. Mark Grimshaw, 205–22. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Roquet, Paul. “Ambient Landscapes from Brian Eno to Tetsu Inoue,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 21, no. 4 (2009): 364–83. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Schiavio, Andrea. Music in (En)Action: Sense-Making and Neurophenomenology of Musical Experience. PhD dissertation, University of Sheffield, 2014. Szabo, Victor. “Unsettling Brian Eno’s Music for Airports,” twentieth-century music 14, no. 2 (2017): 305–33. Windsor, W. Luke, and Christophe de Bézenac. “Music and Affordances,” Musicae Scientiae 16, no. 1 (2012): 102–20. Winters, Ben. “Musical Wallpaper? Towards an Appreciation of Non-Narrating Music in Film,” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 6, no. 1 (2012): 39–54.

Index

Note: Tables and figures are indicated by an italic “t” and “f ”, respectively, following the page number. For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. ABA song form  275 Abbate, Carolyn  140–2, 202–3, 693, 704 ABC television, The Lone Ranger on  321–2 Abdul, Paula  653 n.22 Abel, Richard  114 n.57 Aboriginal culture, Ten Canoes and  535–41, 539f Abschiedswalzer (Farewell Waltz) 296–7 accessibility, of cinema as live music venue 183–4 acousmatic cue  718–19 acousmatic sound  16, 199–200, 670–1 sonic aporia and  441–3 acousmatic vocals  720–1 acousmêtre (acoustic being)  436–7, 439, 443–4, 500, 586–7, 646, 681–2, 681f action films cinematic punch in  361–2 film trailers for  451 loudness of  451, 455 scoring trends for  327–8 “active offscreen sound” in 9/11 582–3 The Act of Killing 530–1 actuality, of theatre  659 Adams, John  726–7 adaptation, Flash Gordon soundtrack and 494–6 The Address of the Eye (Sobchack)  529–30 Ader, Clément  218 Adorno, Theodor  4–5, 38, 336, 644 on “Bourgeois Opera”  28–9 aesthetic listening  444–5 aesthetics beauty and  469

boom  381 n.4 of cinematic listening  11–13 of “cinematic” sound  119 impact  361, 368, 428 intensified  368–9, 376, 380 of music videos  619–20 unified soundtrack albums and  492 of YouTube  578 affect sound  428, 434–5 affiliating identification  337–8 African Americans blackface minstrelsy and  69, 76–8 “coon songs” and  77 ethnic stereotypes of, in Jones and Spencer records 76–8 in Hollywood folk musicals  80 racism, ethnic stereotypes and  77–8 African migrant audiences, for Hindi films in Tamale, northern Ghana  517–18 Against Again Troupe  664 Agawu, Kofi  520 L’âge d’or (Willette)  50–3, 51f, 53f agency, video games and player  700–2 a-ha  636 n.40 “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (Gaye and Terrell) 478 AIP (American International Pictures)  174–5 Akerman, Chantal  11, 248. See also La Captive Akumanyi, Kofi  524–5 The Alamo 149 Albela 516 Alexander Nevsky 188–9 Alice in Wonderland (2010)  190t

738   index Alien  347 n.1 Allanbrook, Wye J.  549 allegory, sci-fi cinema and  386 Allen, Ioan  452–4, 456 Allen, Richard  201–2 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (Jahn)  552–3 Altman, Rick  3, 42–3, 71–4, 80–1, 90–1, 139–43, 336, 339, 671–5, 718–19 Amadeus  305, 307, 309–11 ambient music  724–5 American Graffiti 477 American International Pictures (AIP)  174–5 Amistad 338–9 amplification. See also loudness cinema as live music venue and  177 live-score film screenings and  196–7 amplitude. See loudness AM radio  274, 277–8 anachronistic audiences, in composer biopics 299 analogy cinematic listening cognitive framework and  556–8, 558f cognitive process of  550–1, 551f, 569–70 Analysing Musical Multimedia (Cook)  349 n.27, 447 n.20 Anderson, Gillian  52 Anderson, Lauren  340–1, 347 Anderson, Paul Thomas  372 Anderson, Wes  479 animated films. See also Fantasia (film, 1940) blackface minstrelsy and  77–8 music in  1 stop motion, in trick films  93–4, 106–8, 107f as trick films  93–4 Ansons, Tamara L.  476–7 anti-environments, VR and  730–1 Antonioni, Michelangelo  436 Apocalypse Now 434 apotheosis ending, in Chat Noir  46–50 Appadurai, Arjun  687 n.49 apparatus theory  158, 203, 671, 725. Dolby Atmos and  235 n.65 archaeologies of cinematic listening  9–11 Foucault and  42–3 media 42–3

Archeology of the Cinema (Ceram)  62 n.2 Arnheim, Rudolf  119–20, 122, 129 Arnold, Alison  520 Arnold, Gary  499–500 Aronofsky, Darren  439–40 Arrival  13, 385 sensuousness of  372–4 sound design in  394–6 Stockhausen’s influence on  399–400 “the sublime” and  402 surround sound and  401–2 time and space in  398–401 War of the Worlds (2005) and  397–8 Art as Experience (Dewey)  714–15 Artemiev, Edward  436 art house exhibition accessibility of  165 attention challenges with  163–4 cinephilia and  156–7 cinephilic listening and  160 disciplinary power and  166–7 of foreign-language films  160–5 homo æconomicus (economic man) and 165–7 listening and  157–8, 160 luxury and  157 taste and  157–8, 165–7 widescreen projection and  162–3 Ashby, Arved  630–1 Ashcroft, Richard  647–8 Asimov, Isaac  20 n.17 assimilating identification  337–8 associational listening  14–15, 549–50 asynchronous sound  15, 129, 576–7. See also synchronized sound 9/11, death and  581–3 September 11th attacks conspiracy theories and  577, 583–4, 587–9 “true asynchronicity” and  587–90 Atkinson, David  326 Atmos. See Dolby Atmos Atmosphères (Ligeti)  141–2 atmospheric music  60 atmospheric sound, music videos and  645–7 Atomic Blonde 361–2 Atonement 434 Attah, Kwasi  518

index   739 attention at Chat Noir  45 foreign-language films and challenges with 163–4 Invasion demanding  597, 599 attentive listening  276–7 attractions audio of  227–9 cinema of  61–2, 90, 96–7 music of  61–2 The Audible Past (Sterne)  355–6 “audience effect”  672 audiences 12. See also concert audiences, composer biopics and Christian and Muslim, for Hindi films in Tamale, northern Ghana  512–18, 515t for cinema as live music venue  176 film music scholarship and  336–41, 346–7 imagined 682–3 in Jones and Spencer phonographs compared to Hollywood musicals  71 on The Lord of the Rings trilogy and film music 341–2 Maison Mazo and  60, 61f personal associations of  340–1 sound film initial reactions of  121–3 trailer ear and  450–1, 456 “vaudeville speciality” genre and  70–1 audience space  45 audio drop-in techniques  482–3 audio mediation, Remote Taipei and  655 audio of attractions  227–9 audiophilic cinephilia  157–8 Audio-Vision (Chion)  492, 531–2 audiovisual rupture  431–4 audio-visual synchronization. See synchronized sound auditory evidence, in documentaries  583–4 auditory perspective, Dolby Atmos and  214–15, 218 Auer, Karen  719–20 Augmented Reality  713–14. See also virtual reality “August and Katrina” (Jones, A., and Spencer) 75 aural-haptic-visual, Remote Taipei and  663, 666

Auslander, Philip  195–6, 198–9, 202–3 auteurism 257–8 documentaries and  585 authenticity documentaries and  577–8 9/11 and  579–80 YouTube and  578 authorship, Flash Gordon soundtrack and 494–6 Automatic for the People (R.E.M.)  216–18 autonomy, escapism and  38 Avadhanulu, M. N.  458 En avant la musique  93–4, 100–1, 102f Avengers: Endgame  461 n.13 Avery, Dylan  587 L’avventura  436, 445 Azaria, Hank  88 n.86 Babies  532–5, 533f, 534f Baby Driver  434, 484, 678–9 Back to the Fifties (Dwyer)  477 Back to the Future 190t Badalamenti, Angelo  626–7 Bad Day at Black Rock 359 Badlands classical music in  284–5 counterculture listening and  281–8 critical reactions to  282–3 diegetic sound in  286 eclecticism and  285–8 nostalgia and  282–3 popular music in  283–4 soundtrack of  271–2, 281–8 unconventional film sound strategies in 286–7 voiceover narration in  283 Bad Santa 326 Bailey, Peter  181 Bailey, Philip  653 n.22 Balázs, Béla  129 Balmès, Thomas  532, 534–5 bandiri music  520–1 Bandslam  669–84, 670f, 676f, 681f Barron, Steve  636 n.40 Barry, John  323–4 Barthes, Roland  670–1 Bass, Saul  147

740   index Batman Returns 224 Baudry, Jean-Louis  158 the Beach Boys  481 The Beaches of Agnes 530–1 Beach Party 174 the Beastie Boys  479–80 Beasts of the Southern Wild 190t Beat Girl 175 the Beatles  171–2, 172f, 176, 178–9, 181–2, 275 beauty, aesthetics and  469 Beck  623–4, 627 Beck, Jay  412–13 Beecham, Thomas  33–4 Beethoven’s Great Love (Un grand amour de Beethoven)  297, 302, 307–9 Begin Again 678–9 Be Kind Rewind 622–4 Belasco, David  33 Bellamy, Ralph  226–7, 227f Bellour, Raymond  20 n.21 Beloved Clara (Geliebte Clara) 295, 296f, 300 Belson, Jordan  222–4 Benatar, Pat  639–40, 644 Bender, Lou  360–1 Benjamin, Walter  196 Benny and Joon 480 Bentham, Jeremy  159, 421 Berger, Karol  256–7 Berkeley, Busby  85 n.25 Berliner, Todd  471–2 Berlioz, Hector  319 Berlyne, Daniel  470 Betz, Mark  161 Beyoncé  640–1, 650 Biancorosso, Giorgio  19 n.9, 22 n.45 The Bicycle Thief 164–5 The Big Sleep 339 Billboard Magazine 280 “Billie Jean” (Jackson, M.)  636 n.40 binaural sound  661–2 binaural soundtracks  719 binaural sound transmission  218, 220f, 225–7 binge-watching 15 definition of  597–8 fandom and  614–15 incompleteness and  617 n.12

Invasion and  598–9, 614–16 “marathoning” compared to  616 n.4 Bingham, Dennis  299 Biophon 106–8 biopics. See composer biopics Bishop, Elvin  478 “Bittersweet Symphony” (the Verve)  648 Blackboard Jungle  172–3, 181 blackface minstrelsy  69 animated cartoons and  77–8 kisses and  76–7 Black Panther 481 Black Swan 439–40 Blade Runner (1982)  339, 395 Blade Runner 2049 (2017)  382 n.28 Blake, Howard  499–500 Blesser, Barry  452–3, 457–8, 460–1 Block, Marc  42–3 blockbuster cinematic listening  12, 329–30 “Blondy and Her Johnny” (Jones, A., and Spencer) 73 Blood on the Sun 359 “A Blossom Fell” (Cole)  283–4 Blow Out 411–13 Blowup 411 The Blue Angel 162 “The Blue Danube” (Strauss)  340, 391–2 Blue Swede  479 Blue Velvet 439 Blumlein, Alan  220 The Bodyguard 475t, 476 Bolter, Jay David  629, 712 Bonanza 319–20 Bonhomme, Gaston  54–5 La Bonne Chanson (Verlaine)  113 n.34 boom aesthetics  381 n.4 Bordwell, David  197, 428 Boskin, Joseph  69 Botstein, Leon  4–5 La Boum 678–9 “Bourgeois Opera”  28–9 The Bourne Identity 361 Bowdle, Brian  571 n.13 “A Bowery Flirtation” (Jones, A., and Spencer)  72, 73f Bowery records  72–4, 73f, 82 Bowie, David  180, 184, 479, 680–2, 681f Boyd, Ryan  560

index   741 Brandon, Thomas  162 Brave  231 n.2 Breakfast at Tiffany’s 190t Brenon, Herbert  123–4 Brief Encounter 190t Britain. See also cinema, as live music venue cinema as live music venue in 1970s  182–5 cinema attendance in  173–4 delinquency films in  175 teen exploitation films in  175 US youth culture compared to  174–5, 278 youth musicals and  175–6 Brody, Richard  258 Brophy, Philip  439–40, 645 Brown, Julie  142–3 Brown, Royal  336 Bruant, Aristide  43 Bruckheimer, Jerry  327 Bruzzi, Stella  585 “Buddy Holly” (Weezer)  646–7 Buhler, James  199, 338–9, 679, 682 Bull, Michael  660, 663–4, 671–3 Burch, Noël  C2.N n.45, 194, C18.P32 Burgess, Anthony  254–5 “burletta laws”  31 Burlingame, Jon  490 Burt, George  194 Burton, Justin  680 Burtt, Ben  357–8, 482 “Burying the Hatchet” (Jones, A., and Spencer) 77 Butler, Judith  541–4, 542f Caballero, Carlo  692 cabaret. See Chat Noir Cabiria 49–50 Cage, John  12–13, 368–9 Cahiers du Cinéma 255–6 Calabretto, Roberto  436 Calleja, Gordon  725–6 Calvino, Italo  255–6 CAM (Congruence-Association Model)  486 n.27 “Came Back Haunted” (Nine Inch Nails)  626–9 Canadian Audiologist 455 “Can’t Stop the Feeling” (Timberlake)  475

La Captive 11 eavesdropping and listening in  245–6 listening to music in  246–7 noise and silence in  241, 243–8 Carlos, Wendy  326 Carr, J. Comyns  32–3 Carroll, Brendan  153 n.20 Carroll, Noël  197–8 Carson, Rob  482 Casablanca 190t, 259–62 Caserini, Mario  52–3, 54f Casetti, Francesco  20 n.21 Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse 694 CATO (Connecticut Association of Theatre Owners) 456 Cat People 241–3 causal listening  445, 621 Cavell, Stanley  671 censorship, Production Code Administration and  160–1 Ceram, C. W.  62 n.2 “chansons lumineuses”  58–9 Chariots of Fire 491 Le charmeur 103–4 Chasing Mavericks 214–15 “châssis à crémaillère”  58–9, 59f Chat Noir  9 apotheosis ending in  49–50 attention economy at  45 diegetic sound and  52, 54 L’épopée and  43–5, 46f lyrical plays and  50, 53–6, 55f, 56f Maison Mazo and  57–62, 59f, 61f music in  44–6, 47f, 48–9, 52–3 satirical plays and  50–3, 51f, 53f screen of  48f sound effects in  44–5 La tentation de Saint Antoine and  43–50, 47f, 49f “Cherry Bomb” (the Runaways)  478 “Cherry Hill Jerry” (Jones, A., and Spencer)  72, 73f Chesler, Giovanna  580–1 “Chimmie and Maggie at the Hippodrome” (Jones, A., and Spencer)  73–4 “Chimmie and Maggie at the Merry Widow” (Jones, A., and Spencer)  73–4

742   index “Chimmie and Maggie in Nickel Land” (Jones, A., and Spencer)  73–4 “chin sock” sound effect  358–9 Chion, Michel  2–3, 194–5, 242–3, 254, 266–7, 283, 287, 336, 387 on the acousmêtre  646, 681–2 on “active offscreen sound”  583 on audiovisual rupture  431–2 on cinematic punch  356–60 on corporeal covibrations  355 on “de-acousmaticization”  441–2 on Dolby sound  337 on emanation speech  378 on I-voice  670–1, 673–4 on listening modes  445, 621 on Lynch  439–41 on “pit music”  199–200 on “screaming point”  412 on semantic listening  543 on sound design and realism  427 on “spatiotemporal turntable”  531–2 on speech relativization  378 on squish sounds  363–4 on the unified soundtrack  492 on “visualized sound”  441 Choi, Beatrice  582 Chomón, Segundo de  9–10, 92, 100–4, 102f, 103f Christian audiences, for Hindi films in Tamale, northern Ghana  512–18, 515t Christian church, listening and  159 Christian films in Tamale, northern Ghana 515–16 Christian missions, Ghana listening in  509–12 literacy and  511–12, 516–17 Christie, Ian  109 Chronicle of Higher Education  545 n.12 El Cid 147 Cider House Rules 555 Ciment, Michel  285–6 CineConcerts 188 cinema. See also international cinema; theatrical presentation; specific types asynchronous sound and  576–7 of attractions  61–2, 90, 96–7 in Britain, attendance of  173–4

Chat Noir’s closure and birth of  57 concert films shown in  184 of contemplation  61–2 counterculture movement and  281 digital turn and  5–6 Dolby Atmos for, 2012–2016  212–15 as event  10, 139–40 funfair 267 iPod experience compared to  671–3, 683–4 kisses in  76 Maison Mazo compared to  57–8 music listening and effects of  4–5 music pastorals  553–6, 554f, 555f music videos cross-fertilization with  629–32 music videos influencing  620–2 narrative and  252–3, 267 of narrative integration  60–2 noise in  241 ontology of  6 opera compared to  140–1 poetry and  252–3, 257–9, 267 processing fluency of popular music in 471–2 Remote Taipei compared to  657–60, 662 as science tool  96–7 silence in  241 “slow” 248 Tamale, northern Ghana, history of  508, 512, 513f, 514f tapestry 267 theatre compared to  198–9 theatrical presentation practices of  142–4 visualized sound  95–100, 97f, 99f as youth space  173–6 cinema, as live music venue. See also theatrical presentation accessibility of  183–4 alternatives to  176–7 amplification advantages of  177 the Beatles and  171–2, 172f, 178–9 cinema culture and  179–82 concert films and  184 fandom and  171–2, 172f, 181–2 mass audience for  176 in 1970s  182–5 rock ‘n’ roll riots and  172–3 variety shows and  178

index   743 youth and  173–6 youth pop package show and  178–80 cinema effect  4–5, 14–15 The Cinema of Poetry (Sitney)  257–8 cinéma pur 101 CinemaScope 145–6 cinema surveillance. See surveillance cinematic eroticism  36–7. See also sensuousness cinematicity, of cinematic listening  5–7 Cinematicity in Media History (Geiger and Littau) 6 cinematic listening. See also hearing hearing, in Kubrick’s films; listening aesthetics of  11–13 analogy and cognitive framework of  556–8, 558f archaeologies of  9–11 aurality of  7–8 blockbuster  12, 329–30 cinema effect and  4–5 cinematicity of  5–7 cognitive framework for  549–51 cross-modal 433–4 “deeds of music” and  33 definition of  1–2, 6, 18, 329 dual focus of  3–4 embodiment and  12 erotics of  369–80 extensions of  13–16 Fantasia and  690 Flash Gordon soundtrack and  489–90 imagination and  4–5, 16–18 imagined others and  672–3 individualization and  671–2, 674–5, 683–4 musical discovery and  368–9 musical seeing and  27 music videos and  640–1, 649–51 operatic orchestral interludes and  33–4 overtures and  141–2 romantic others, iPod and  675–80, 676f, 677f, 678f, 684 sensuousness and  369–71 to soundtrack albums  490–1 split positionality of  673–4 symphonic music and  27 in Tamale, northern Ghana  512–18

A Village Romeo and Juliet and  33–9, 36f, 37f Wagner and  29 cinematic listening experiment designing 558–69 limitations of  570 meaning extraction method for  560–3, 561f, 562f cinematic loudness  13 cinematic punch  12–13 in action films  361–2 “chin sock” sound effect for  358–9 “digital visceral” and  363–5 in Fight Club 360 Foley sound for  360–1 hapticity and  356, 359–63 history of  357–9 hyperreality of  356, 364 in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 362 kisses compared to  361 music accompanying  361–2 post-1980’s 359–63 Production Code and  358–9 in Raging Bull 359–60 sound library effects and  357–9 squish sounds and  363–4 cinematic roadshow. See roadshow exhibition cinematic sound  6, 8–9 art-house exhibition and  157–8 ideas of, extending beyond cinema  13–14 in live-score screenings  196 music video and  640, 642 new conception of, with the early talkies  119–23, 131 soundtrack albums and  491–2 surveillant 408 trailer audio and  452 Cineophone Films  106–8 Le Cinéopse 57 cinephilia art house exhibition and  156–7 audiophilic 157–8 disciplinary power and  159–60, 166–7 feminism and  530–1 cinephilic listening  160 homo æconomicus (economic man) and 165–7 Cinerama  145–6, 220–2, 223f

744   index Cities: Skylines 726–7 Clague, Mark  706 Clair, René  123–4, 162, 199, 484 Clairs de lune (Fragerolle and Rivière)  57 Clarida, Bob  319–20 Clarke, Eric  549, 716–17 classical music  11. See also western art music (WAM) pastoral; specific works in Badlands 284–5 Kubrick’s use of  271–2 symphonic, cinematic listening and  27 Clément, René  164 Clemmensen, Christian  328 climaxes, exposure effect and film  476 A Clockwork Orange (1971)  256f voiceover narration in  255 William Tell overture in  326–7 A Clockwork Orange (Burgess)  254–5 closed system listening  16, 697 Close Up 124–5 Cocker, Joe  476 cognition analogy and  550–1, 551f, 569–70 processing fluency and  471 cognitive immersion  724–5 Cohen, Annabel  348 n.7 Coissac, Georges-Michel  57 “Cold Hearted” (Abdul)  653 n.22 cold romanticism, sci-fi cinema and  402 Cole, Nat King  283–4 College Chums  98, 99f Collins, Karen  693–4, 716–17 Collins, Phil  653 n.22 Colombo, Alberto  320–1 colonialism, Ghanaian Islamic schools and 510–11 Coltman, Rudyard  217–18 Columbia Phonograph Company  70 “Come and Get Your Love” (Redbone)  478 “Come into My World” (Minogue)  624–5, 629 “Coming Home From Coney Island” (Jones, A., and Spencer)  73 Coming Soon, Film Trailers and the Selling of Hollywood Technology (Johnston)  451–2 community, concert audiences in composer biopics as  298–9

compilation scores  48–9, 252, 271–2, 283–4 composer biopics  12 anachronistic audiences and  299 concert audiences and  295–9 external focalization in  305–7 historical and commercial factors in  294–5, 312–13 historical validation and audience endorsement in  296–7 internal focalization in  307–10 listeners of  293–4, 310–12 listening as relationship metaphor in 300 live performance and  293 musical pointers from concert audience reaction in  297–8 not listening to music in  303–4 other composers/musicians as witnesses in  304–5, 304f personal connection of listeners with 299–304 personal listening and  300 private meanings of music in  300–2 Composing for the Films (Adorno and Eisler)  4–5, 38 Le Compositeur toqué  93–4, 95f, 100 concentrated listening, sound film and  128 concert audiences, composer biopics and 295–9 anachronistic audiences and  299 as community  298–9 historical validation and endorsement of 296–7 musical pointers from  297–8 social milieu and  295–6, 296f concert films. See also cinema, as live music venue cinema showing  184 surround sound and  224 Un condamné à mort s’est échappé 242–3 Congruence-Association Model (CAM)  486 n.27 Connecticut Association of Theatre Owners (CATO) 456 Connor, Steve  184, 361 Conrad, Jess  175

index   745 conspiracy theories, on September 11th attacks  577, 583–4, 587–9 The Constant Nymph  153 n.13 contemplation, cinema of  61–2 The Conversation 409–13 Cook, Nicholas  3, 8, 91–2, 100–1, 139–40, 347, 428, 694 “A Coon Courtship” (Jones, A., and Spencer) 76–7 “coon songs”  77 Cooper, Alice  479 corporeal covibrations  12–13, 355 The Corporeal Image (MacDougall)  529–30 Cosgrove, Denis  729 Costa, Mario  52 Couldry, Nick  682–3 counterculture listening Badlands and  281–8 behaviors of  277–8 eclecticism and  277–8 “free-form” radio and  278–9 magazines and  279–81 popular music and  275–6 radical subjectivity in  275–81 counterculture movement cinema and  281 economic inequality and  272–3 New Hollywood and  281–2 radical subjectivity and  272–5 technology and  274 Coury, Al  474–5 Crary, Jonathan  97 Crawdaddy 279–80 “Crazy Clown Time” (Lynch)  627–8, 628f Cross-modal transfer  13, 655 “The Crushed Tragedian” (Jones, A., and Spencer) 82 Cubitt, Sean  355–6 Cueto-Asín, Elena  43 Cuffe, Carol  172f Cumming, Naomi  700, 703 Cummings, Irving  122 Currie, Gregory  194 Cusick, Suzanne  485 n.9 Custen, John F.  294, 299 cyclical time  398

d’Ache, Caran  43–5, 46f Daft Punk  653 n.23 “Da Funk” (Daft Punk)  653 n.23 Dahlquist, Marina  101, 104–6 Daily Exercise 664 Daily Mirror 171 Dance, Girl, Dance 358–9 dance, in Jones’s and Spencer’s records  75–6 Dance Central 698–9 Dancer in the Dark  434–5, 445 The Dark Knight 434 Darley, Andrew  633 n.8 Dateline Diamonds 175 Daughtry, J. Martin  355–6 David Lynch (Chion)  632 n.5 Davies, James Q.  29–32 Davis, Dane  360–1 de-acousmaticization 441–2 “Deadweight” (Beck)  627 Deane, Cormac  253 death documentaries and ethics of  592 n.19 in 9/11 581–3 physical qualities of  543–4 in Ten Canoes 539–41 Death Trilogy, of Van Sant  376–7 “deeds of music” Wagner and  28–31, 33 deep listening  370–1 DeForest, Lee  121 Déjà vu 419–21 De Laurentiis, Dino  496–8 Deleuze, Gilles  197, 407–8 Delicatessen  435–6, 445 delinquency films, in Britain  175 Delius, Frederick  33–8 del Río, Elena  5 Demers, Joanna  444–5 DeMille, Cecil B.  145–6 de Mille, William  123 democracy, sound film and  119–20 density, trailer ear and  458–9 Depp, Johnny  327 Deren, Maya  258–9, 629 Derlatka, Jason  598, 616 Derrida, Jacques  355–6 Destry Rides Again 358–9

746   index de-visualized listening, sound object in  442 Dewey, John  714–15 dialectical listening  381 n.1 dialogue. See also voice in The Conversation 409–10 early sound film and uncanny synchronization of  124–7 foreign-language, subtitling of  162 inner 673 in music videos  643 processing fluency in film and music cross-promotion and  482–3 in Terrence Malick’s films  286, 378 in “trick” films  109 in unified soundtrack albums  493 Diamond Vision  205 n.22 Dibben, Nicola  558 diegetic sound ambiguities of  253 in Badlands 286 Chat Noir and  52, 54 in composer biopics  310–11 documentaries and  577–8 eavesdropping on  130 hearing hearing in Kubrick’s films and  254 live-score film screenings and  194–5, 200–1, 203 in music videos  640–2, 647–8 on-scene and off-scene  311 realism and  194–5 sound film and  95–6 digital data surveillance  415–17 digital sound studies  69 digital turn  5–6 “digital visceral” cinematic punch and  363–5 Dion, Celine  482–3 direct address, in trick films  94, 98–100 Dirty Dancing 476 Disc Date 181 disciplinary power cinephilia and  159–60, 166–7 noise and  159 Discipline and Punish (Foucault)  407–8 disintegration, Remote Taipei and  665 distance Remote Taipei and listening creating  658–9 voyeurism and  410

Distler, Paul  82–3 distributed hearing, sound film and 128 Doane, Mary Ann  197–9, 431–2, 529–30 documentaries 15. See also 9/11 auditory evidence in  583–4 authenticity and  577–8 diegetic sound and  577–8 hypermediacy and  577–8 performativity of synchronized sound in 584–7 “true asynchronicity” and  587–90 voiceover narration in  585–7 Dolby Atmos  10–11 apparatus theory and  235 n.65 audio of attractions and  227–9 auditory perspective and  214–15, 218 for cinema, 2012–2016  212–15 design of  211–13 historical context of  212, 218–25 mobile listening and  227–31 “moving audio” and  212 for music, 2016–2019  215–18, 230–1 for presence  212–13, 217, 225–31 realism and  213–15 remixes utilizing  216 surround sound and  211–12, 218–25 trailer ear and  459–60 Dolby 5.1  224 trailer ear and  459–60 Dolby Low Frequency Effect (LFE) channel 457–8 Dolby split surround  224 Donahue, Tom  278–9 Donaldson, Lucy Fife  414–15 Don Kikhot 164 Donnay, Maurice  50 Donnelly, Kevin  336, 338–9, 386–7, 411–12, 440–1 on cinematic punch  357–8 on “pre-fitting” to music  633 n.10 Doolittle, Franklin  218 Doolittle, Hilda  125–7 Dorinson, Joseph  69 double exposure. See multiple exposure, in trick films Douglas, Susan  276–7

index   747 Dramatic Highlights from the MGM Technicolor Picture Quo Vadis 493 drive-in movies, presentation of  143 dual-focus narrative  71–2 dubbing, of foreign-language films  162, 164–5 Dulac, Germaine  101 Duncan, Dean  432 Dwyer, Michael D.  477 Dyer, Richard  75, 530 Dyson, Frances  355–6 Ear, Nose and Throat Journal 455 Eastern Promises 361–2 “Easy Lover” (Collins, P., and Bailey, P.)  653 n.22 eavesdropping in La Captive 245–6 the early talkie and  130 spectatorial identification and  673–4 surveillance 408 eclecticism Badlands and  285–8 counterculture listening and  277–8 economic man (homo æconomicus) 165–7 écoutêtre (listening being)  682 Edison, Thomas  104–8, 105f Edison Phonograph Monthly 72 editing analytic, to promote attentional synchrony 471 invisible, in trick films  93–4 MTV and MTV-inspired  376, 640, 712–13 multiple exposure and  96 in 9/11 580–1 nonchronological 377–8 realist, to prevent aesthetic distanciation 577–8 “sound-up construction” and  580–1 in trailers, to convey an impression of loudness 457–8 education. See also Christian missions, Ghana; Islamic schools, Ghana composer biopics and  294 Ghanaian Islamic schools using Hindi film songs for  518–24, 522t, 523t, 524t Ehrlich, Jon  598, 616 Eisenstein, Sergei  114 n.5

Eisler, Hanns  38, 336 electronic music, live-score film screenings and  208 n.78 Elephant 376–7 The Elephant Man 439 11’09”01 (2002)  576, 589–90 Elgéphone 106–8 Elliot, Ted  327 Elliott, Paul  529–30 Elsaesser, Thomas  4–5, 529–30 emanation speech  378 embodied cognition  442 embodied experience  387 embodied listening  524–5, 531, 699–700 Babies and  532–3 “screaming point” and  412 embodied simulation, and processing fluency 484 embodied sound, and “de-acousmaticization” 441 embodied spectatorship  369–70 embodied understanding  397–8 embodiment cinematic listening and  12 surveillance and  408–9, 417–22 Emerson, Victor  70 Emma (1996)  555 emotion film music scholarship and  342 in Interstellar soundtrack  388–91 silent films and  120 emotional contagion  546 n.13 The Empire Strikes Back  154 n.45 Empson, William  552 Enemy of the State 415–17 L’enfant prodigue (Wormser)  52 Eno, Brian  723–7 Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbas  429, 430f entr’acte music, roadshow exhibition and 145–9 episodic memory  546 n.16 L’épopée (d’Ache)  43–5, 46f Epstein, Brian  178–9 Epstein, Jean  156 Eraserhead 440–3 Ericson, Richard  417 “Erin” (La Barbara)  400

748   index Eroica  298, 304–6, 304f erotics of cinematic listening  369–80. See also sensuousness erotic watching  36–7. See also sensuousness escapism, autonomy and  38 An Essay on Liberation (Marcuse)  273–4 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 622–4 ethics of death, in documentaries  592 n.18 ethnic stereotypes, Jones, A., and Spencer records and of African Americans  76–8 of German immigrants  74–6, 75f of Irish immigrants  78–80, 80f Kinetophone films and  82 “melting pot” concept, Hollywood musicals and  83–4 racism and  77–8 vaudeville and  69–70, 77 Vitaphone films and  82–3 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial 190t European art cinema  10, 167 evaluative conditioning  546 n.13 event, cinema as  10, 139–40 “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime” (Beck) 623–4 Everyday’s a Holiday 176 evidence, auditory, in documentaries  583–4 “Ev’ry Little Bit Helps” (Jones, A., and Spencer) 76–7 An Examined Life  541–4, 542f exhibition. See art house exhibition; roadshow exhibition; theatrical presentation expectations“veridical” 324–5 experience, VR as  714–15 exposure effect film climaxes and  476 long-term memory and  484 processing fluency and  470–1 radio marketing for  474–5, 475t extensions, of cinematic listening  13–16 external focalization, in composer biopics 305–7 An Eye for Music (Richardson, J.)  619 Eyes Wide Shut  262–7, 264f Eyles, Allen  174, 178

Faber, Michel  374 “The Fair Fisher and Her Catch” (Jones, A., and Spencer)  81 Faith, Adam  175 Falck, Daniel  378 fandom binge-watching and  614–15 cinema as live music venue and  171–2, 172f, 181–2 Fantasia (film, 1940)  1, 226–7 cinematic listening and  690 Fantasound and  220–2, 221f, 690 playful listening and video games based on  702–7 Sorcerer’s Apprentice video game  691–702, 691f, 692f video games and  690–707 Fantasia (video game, 1991)  694–8, 695t, 696f Fantasia 2000 (film, 2000)  690 Fantasia: Music Evolved (video game, 2014)  698–702, 706 Fantasound  220–2, 221f, 690 fantasy of communication  670 Farewell Waltz (Abschiedswalzer) 296–7 Fargion, Janet Topp  520–1 Fargo (1996)  482 Fass, Bob  290 n.24 FCC (Federal Communication Commission) 278 Feaster, Patrick  70–1 Federal Communication Commission (FCC) 278 feeling, surveillance and  413–17 féerie, La flûte enchantée 103–4 feminism on art and sensuousness  370 cinephilia and  530–1 Women’s March#MeToo movement and 542–3 Festival Theatre  166 Feuer, Jane  71, 79 FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives) 92 Fight Club 360 film, listening to (as distinct from listening cinematically) 3–4 film climaxes, exposure effect and  476

index   749 Film Concerts Live  188 filmic immersion. See immersion Film International 650 Film Journal International 454 Film Music (Donnelly)  338–9 “Film Politics” course  541 film sound. See also cinematic sound; sound design; early sound film Badlands and unconventional strategies for  286–7 developments, impacting trailer audio 452 “heard/unheard”  112 n.23 made diegetic, in early sound film  95–6, 119–23, 131 narrative-centric 215–16 objective  307, 309–10 pre-cinema screen practices and  42–3 realism and  189–93 “shown”  112 n.23 sonically elongated  436 the sonic continuum and  435 subjective  307, 309–10 in trick films  90–1 visualized sound cinema and  95–100, 97f, 99f Filmtracks 328 Fincher, David  222–4, 630–1 Fink, Robert  723 Fire Walk with Me 439 Fiske, John  614–15 Fithian, John  456–7 5.1, Dolby  224 500 Days of Summer 678–9 Flaherty, Robert  131 “Flannigan’s Night Off ” (Jones, A., and Spencer) 78–9 “Flannigan’s St. Patrick’s Day” (Jones, A., and Spencer) 78–9 Flashdance 475t, 476 Flash Gordon (1980)  489 Flash Gordon soundtrack (Queen) compared to  489–90, 502–3 tonal inconsistency of  496–7 voice in  500–2 Flash Gordon soundtrack (Queen)  14 for album and screen  496–9

authorship and adaptation in  494–6 Blake’s contributions to  499–500 cinematic listening and  489–90 as first rock ’n’ roll soundtrack  497–8 Flash Gordon (1980) compared to  489–90, 502–3 legacy of  502–3 sound effects in  499–500 as unified soundtrack album  489–94 voice in  500–2 Fletcher, Harvey  218, 220f Flinn, Caryl  431–2 Florentine, Mary  457–8 The Flying Dutchman (Wagner)  29–30 FM radio  276–9 focalization  254, 674 external, in composer biopics  305–7 internal, in composer biopics  307–10 Foley sound. See also sound design for cinematic punch  360–1 in sci-fi cinema  386 in Strange Days 414–15 subtlety of  414–15 folk musicals, Hollywood  79–80 “Fooled Around and Fell in Love” (Bishop)  478 Footloose  474, 475t, 476 foreign-language films art house exhibition of  160–5 attention challenges with  163–4 distribution of  161 dubbing of  162, 164–5 profitability of  160–1 sound film challenges with  161–2 subtitling of  162–5 technical challenges projecting  162–3 widescreen projection and  162–3 Foucault, Michel archaeologies and  42–3 homo æconomicus and  165–7 listening and  158–65 on noise and meaning  158 ocularcentrism and  158 on surveillance  407–8 Foundation (Asimov)  20 n.17 fourth wall, live-score film screenings and 201–2 Fragerolle, Georges  53–8, 55f, 56f, 61–2, 62f

750   index Frankfurt School  273 Franklin, Harold  122–3, 129–30 Franklin, Peter  2, 104–6, 702, 704 Frasca, Gonzalo  716 “free-form” radio  278–9 Fregoli, Leopoldo  93 French New Wave  161 Fried, Michael  44, 61–2 Fripp, Robert  723 Frith, Simon  2, 277–8, 550 “Fritzy and Louisa” (Jones, A., and Spencer) 75f Frühlingssinfonie (Spring Symphony) 297–8 Fuller, Steve  405 n.54 “Fun at the Music Counter” (Jones, A., and Spencer) 72 funfair cinema  267 Futurama  1–3, 2f, 16 Gabrielli, Giulia  645 Gance, Abel  307–8 Garner, W. R.  470 Gaudreault, André  90–1 Gaye, Marvin  478 Geiger, Jeffrey  6, 729–30 Gekker, Alex  729 Geliebte Clara (Beloved Clara) 295, 296f, 300 gender cinematic punch and  358–9 deconstruction of  541 dual-focus narrative and  71–2 in early phonograph recordings  70 lethal epistemology of the ear and  248 patriarchal order of sound film and  127–8 “screaming point” and  412 Gendron, Bernard  43–4, 57 Genette, Gérard  268 n.11 genre composer biopics and  299 sonic clichés and  416 trailers and  450 “trick” film as film  92, 110 “vaudeville speciality”  70–1 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 163 Gentner, Dedre  571 n.13 George, W. Tyacke  110

German immigration, ethnic stereotypes and  74–6, 75f Gerry 376 Ghana. See Tamale, northern Ghana Ghost 477 Giacchino, Michael  598 Gibbons, William  690, 693–4 Gibson, William  712, 716, 720–1 “Gimme Shelter” (the Rolling Stones)  481 Giraldi, Bob  639 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)  361–2 Gitelman, Lisa  715–17, 720–1 Give and Take 130 Gladiator 190t Glass, Philip  388–9, 726–7 Glazer, Jonathan  374–5 music videos of  624–5, 640–1, 647–9, 649f Glennie, Evelyn  91–2 Goberman, John  188 Godard, Jean-Luc  386 The Godfather 190t, 192f “God Only Knows” (the Beach Boys)  481 Godøy, Rolfe Inge  442 God Rot Tunbridge Wells 299 Godsall, Jonathan  311 Goehr, Lydia  100 Gold, Ernest  149 “gold digger” characters  81–2 “The Golden Wedding” (Jones, A., and Spencer) 81 Goldwurm, Jean  164 Golgotha 516 Gombrich, E. H.  471 Gondry, Michel  15, 619–20 cross-media accomplishments of  630–1 music videos of  622–5, 627 narrative trickery and visual polyphony in cinema of  622–6 Gone with the Wind  146–8, 151–2 Goodmans Triaxonal Speaker System  227f Good Will Hunting 569 Goodwin, Andrew  644 Google Earth VR  715, 718f, 726–31 Gorbman, Claudia  3, 8, 199–200, 252, 310–11, 336, 385–6, 579–80, 623, 719, 724 Gordon, Arnold  456 Gorillaz 715f, 719–20

index   751 Goulding, Edmund  120–1, 129–30 Grajeda, Tony  227–9 Il grammophono di Polidor 108–9 Un grand amour de Beethoven (Beethoven’s Great Love)  297, 302, 307–9 The Grandmother 439 Grateful Dead  224, 275 Gravity 214–15 Grease 475t, 476 The Great Consoler 429 The Great Mr Handel  297–9, 305–6, 309, 309f Green, Joseph  164–5 The Green Hornet  622–4, 625f, 631, 632f Greenwood, Jonny  372 Gregson-Williams, Harry  416 Grevin, Musée  52 Grimshaw, Mark  725–6 Grizzly Man  592 n.21 Grobe, Charles  319 Groening, Stephen  671–2 Groom, Chris  182–3 Grusin, Richard  629, 712 The Guardian 171–2 Guardians of the Galaxy  477–9, 678–9 Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.2  14, 479 Guitar Hero/Rock Band 698–701 Gunning, Tom  49–50, 61–2, 90, 96–7 habituation, in music  472–3 HaCohen, Ruth  696–7 Hagener, Malte  529–30 Haggard, Merle  323–4 Haggerty, Kevin  417 Haigh, Alan  205 n.26 Haley, Bill  173, 178–9 Hall, Mordaunt  122, 130 Hall, Sheldon  144–6 Hall, Stuart  530 Hallucination musicale 103–4 Halskov, Andreas  632 n.5 Hamilton, Ken  318 Hanich, Julian  672, 674–5 Hanisch, Carol  530 Hanlon, Jeff  177 Happily Ever After 679 Happy Days 646–7

“Happy Mammy and her Joe” (Jones, A., and Spencer)  76, 80 hapticity cinematic punch and  356, 359–63 music, sensuousness and  371–5, 379–80 sound and  355–6 visual 372 haptic visuality  378, 387 haptic-visual sensations  662–3 Harris, Rachel  510 Harvey, Dustin  664–5 The Hateful Eight  153 n.14 Hatten, Robert  552, 703–4 head-mounted display (HMD) VR devices  714, 715f, 719 “heard/unheard” sound  112 n.23 hearing. See listening hearing damage, trailer loudness and  454–7 Hearing Film (Kassabian)  337–8 hearing hearing, in Kubrick’s films  11 Casablanca and  259–62 A Clockwork Orange (1971)  255 diegetic sound and  254 Eyes Wide Shut and  262–7, 264f narrative and  253–4, 257, 266–7 2001: A Space Odyssey and  257–62, 260f, 261f, 267 voiceover narration and  255 Heath, Stephen  235 n.65 hedonic marking, processing fluency and  471, 476 Hegarty, Paul  371, 435–6 “Heinie” (Jones, A., and Spencer)  71, 74–5 Hellmuth, Elizabeth  471 “Henny and Hilda at the German Picnic” (Jones, A., and Spencer)  74–5 Henry V 190t Herbert, Ruth  558 Herbert, Stephen  62 n.2 Herrmann, Bernard  404 n.29 Herzog, Amy  620 Herzog, Werner  592 n.21 high-fidelity. See also stereo sound listening practices  279–80 popular music and  275–7 (See also stereo sound) recording 194–5

752   index High Fidelity (magazine)  678f Hills, Matt  597–8 Hindi films African migrant audiences for, in Tamale, northern Ghana  517–18 content of  516 Muslim and Christian audiences and, in Tamale, northern Ghana  512–18, 515t Hindi film songs  14 as Ghanian Islamic schools  518–24, 522t, 523t, 524t in Nigeria  519 “Prem Ka Rog Bada Bura”  521, 522t “Qurbani”  522–3, 523t, 524t voice in  520–1 Hines, Andy  639–40, 643–4 HIP (historically informed performance practice)  139–40, 152 Hirschkind, Charles  510–11 Histoire d’un Pierrot (Costa)  52 historically informed performance practice (HIP)  139–40, 152 Hitchcock, Alfred  529–30 HMD (head-mounted display) VR devices  714, 715f, 719 The Hobbit (1977)  493 The Hobbit trilogy (2012–2014)  346 Hodge, Bob  347 n.1 Hodges, Mike  496–8. See also Flash Gordon (1980) Hofstadter, Douglas  550 Hollywood Aesthetic (Berliner)  471 Hollywood musicals audience in Jones, A., and Spencer phonographs compared to  71 Bowery records foreshadowing  73–4 British youth musicals and  175–6 folk musicals  79–80 “gold digger” characters and  81–2 “melting pot” concept and  83–4 Holophonor (fictional instrument)  1–3, 2f, 16, 17f Holt, Joseph  143 Home Alone 190t home entertainment, roadshow exhibition and 150–2 L’Homme orchestre  93–4, 98–100, 99f

homo æconomicus (economic man)  165–7 “Hooked on a Feeling” (Blue Swede)  479 Hopkins, Edwin  122 Hot Tub Time Machine 477 “House Cleaning Time” (Jones, A., and Spencer) 81 Howard, Clifford  119–20, 122 Howe, Arthur  178 Howe, Lyman  109 “How Kathleen Proposed” (Jones, A., and Spencer) 79–80 How to Marry a Millionaire 144–6 Huang, Snow  664 Huckvale, David  386–7 Hudson, Dale  156–7 Huhtamo, Erkki  42–3 Huron, David  324–5, 471–3 The Hurricane 147–8 Hurwitz, David  139–40 Hutcheon, Linda  495 Huxley, Aldous  122 hypermediacy documentaries and  577–8 VR and  713–14 hyperorchestration, sonic elongation and  434 hyperreality of cinematic punch  356, 364 sonic elongation and  428–9 “I Ain’t that Kind of a Baby” (Lewis)  641 identification  395, 441–2, 478, 673–4 film music scholarship and  337–9 illusion theories, live-score film screenings and 197–201 Image-Music-Text (Barthes)  634 n.16 The Imaginary Signifier (Metz)  686 n.30 imagination, cinematic listening and  4–5, 16–18 imagined audiences  682–3 imagined other, cinematic listening and 672–3 immersion  45, 434–6 cognitive 724–5 film music scholarship and  344 mythic 724–5 of Remote Taipei  655, 660–2 sci-fi cinema and  385–8

index   753 trailer ear and  460–1 VR and  721–6 immigration ethnic stereotypes and  69, 74–6, 75f German  74–6, 75f Irish  78–80, 80f Immortal Beloved 309–10 “I’m Not in Love” (10cc)  477–8 impact aesthetics  361, 368, 428 Imperial Leather (McClintock)  545 n.12 Impersonal Enunciation, or The Place of Film (Metz) 253 The Impossible Voyage 98–100 Impromptu 303 Iñárritu, Alejandro González  587, 589–90 incompleteness, binge-watching and  617 n.12 “incongruent film music”  432–3 individualization, cinematic listening and  671–2, 674–5, 683–4 Inland Empire 439 innocence, pastorals and  553 In Old Arizona 122 Inoue, Tetsu  726–7 integrated soundtracks  371 intensified aesthetics  368–9, 376, 380 intensified continuity  428–9 intention, listening and  22 n.43 interaction, listening and  693–4, 703 interactivity, VR and  715–16 intermission, roadshow exhibition and  144–7 internal focalization, in composer biopics 307–10 “International Cinema” course. See also foreign-language films Babies and  532–5, 533f, 534f Ten Canoes and  535–41, 539f International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) 92 International Projectionist 142–3 Interstellar  13, 190t, 385 emotion in soundtrack of  388–91 instruments used in score of  388–9, 391 loudness of  391 surround sound and  401–2 2001: A Space Odyssey’s influence on  391–3 intradiegetic music  201–2 Invasion 607f, 608f, 612f, 615f

attention demanded by  597, 599 binge-watching and  598–9, 614–16 cinematic music in  598 timbre in  598 Invisible Cinema  159–60 invisible editing, in trick films  93–4 iPod. See also personal stereos in Bandslam  669–70, 670f, 673–5, 676f, 679–83, 681f cinematic  671–3, 683–4 individualization and  671–2, 674–5 media fantasies and  688 n.50 romantic other, cinematic listening and  675–80, 676f, 677f, 678f, 684 solitary listening and  669–70 star singers in commercials for  680–1, 680f voiceover narration and  670–1, 673–5, 680–1 Irish immigration, ethnic stereotypes and  78–80, 80f Irving, Henry  32–3 Isaak, Chris  626–7 Islamic schools, Ghana  508 colonialism and  510–11 curriculum in  510–11 Hindi film songs as educational tools in  518–24, 522t, 523t, 524t listening in  508–12 Qur’anic schools and  510–11 religious books in  519 Isle of the Dead (Rachmaninov)  247 “I Touched a Red Button” (Lynch)  627 It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World 149 “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” (Medley and Warnes)  476 I-voice  670–1, 673–5, 680–1 “I Want You Back” (Jackson 5)  478–9 I Will Speak English 509–10 Jackson, Janet  645–7 Jackson, Michael  640–2 Jackson, Shannon  656 Jackson 5  478–9 Jacobs, Henry  222–4 Jacobs, Jason  616 Jacobs, Lea  130 Jacob’s Ladder 649 Jahn, Otto  552–3

754   index Jailhouse Rock 175 Janis, Elsie  130 Jay, Martin  158 “Jealous Julie” (Jones, A., and Spencer)  77 Jeanne, Paul  50 Jenner, Mareike  597–8, 614–15 Jerden, Bryan  457–8 Jerry Maguire 482 Jewell, Jim  319–20 “Jim Jackson’s Affinity” (Jones, A., and Spencer) 76–7 “Jim Jackson’s Last Farewell” (Jones, A., and Spencer) 77 Jóhannsson, Jóhann  13, 372–4, 398. See also Arrival “Heptapod B”  400–1 Stockhausen’s influence on  399–400 Johnson, Daniel Cook  482 Johnson, James  4–5 Johnson, Wilco  180 Johnston, Keith  451–2 Jolson, Al  82–3 Jones, Ada Bowery records of  72–4, 73f, 82 dance in records of  75–6 ethnic stereotypes, vaudeville and  69–70, 77 Kinetophone films and ethnic stereotypes of  82 kisses in records of  76–7 phonograph catalogue of  68–72 racism and ethnic stereotypes of  77–8 Vitaphone films and ethnic stereotypes of 82–3 White records of  80–2 Jones, John Paul  729 Jones, Sam J.  501–2 Jonze, Spike  630–1, 646–7 Jordan, Dave  479 Jordan, Randolph  376–7, 442 Journal of Film Music 336 Juarez  153 n.13 Juhasz, Alexandra  578 Jurassic Park  434, 718–19 Jurassic World 266–7 Just for You 176 Juul, Jesper  703–4

Kaegi, Stefan  657, 662–3 Kael, Pauline  282, 495 Kahana, Jonathan  578, 589 Kahn, Joseph  646–7 Kahneman, Daniel  486 n.21 Kaiser, Faruk  522 Kalinak, Kathryn  199–200 Kamerer, Dietmar  408 Kamp, Michiel  693, 695–6 Kane, Brian  442 Kapchan, Deborah  508–9 Kara, Selmin  577–8 Käser, Dominik  726 Kassabian, Anahid  3, 6–7, 199–200, 336–8, 521 Keller, Gottfried  27, 35 Kember, Sarah  662–3 Kenney, William Howland  72, 672–3 Kerins, Mark  413 keynote sound  444–5 Kill Bill: Vol. 1 361–2 “kinesonic congruence” VR and  716–17 kinetograph 97 Kinetophone ethnic stereotypes and  82 invention of  106–8 King, Rodney  414 King Arthur (Carr)  32–3 King Creole 175 King of Jazz 83–4 Kingsbury, Paul  729 Kirchmeyer, Helmut  222–4 Kiss, Miklós  432–3 kisses blackface minstrelsy and  76–7 in cinema  76 cinematic punch compared to  361 in early phonographic musicals  76 in Jones, A., and Spencer records  76–7 Kivy, Peter  198–9 Klenotic, Jeffrey  109 Klyce, Ren  222–4 Knight of Cups 377–8 Knobel, Dale  69–70, 78 Kondabolu, Hari  88 n.86 Kontakte 222–4 Korngold, Erich  143, 148–9 Korsgaard, Mathias Bonde  621–2, 641

index   755 Koyaanisqatsi 726–7 Kramer, Lawrence  199, 371–2 Krix, Harrison  16 Krumhansl, Carol  558 Kubelka, Peter  159–60 Kubrick, Stanley  11, 386. See also hearing hearing, in Kubrick’s films; specific films on “The Blue Danube”  349 n.23 classical music use of  271–2 compilation scores of  252 on music and cinema  257 Kulezic-Wilson, Danijela  634 n.17 Kustka, Joel  212–13, 215–17 Kuyper, Eric de  248 La Barbara, Joan  400 LaBelle, Brandon  444 Lambek, Michael  510 Landis, John  640–2 LANDLINE: Halifax to Vancouver 664–5 Lane, Anthony  252 Larsen, Peter  339–41 Larsson, Pontus  432 La Scala opera company  220–2 Lasky, Jesse  119–20 Last Days 376 Lastra, James  3, 671–2 Lawrence of Arabia 150 Leboe, Jason P.  476–7 Led Zeppelin  184 The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981)  323–4, 324f Lehman, Frank  328–9 Leidecker, Jon  212–13, 230–1 Leise flehen meine Lieder (Lover Divine) 303–4 Leitmotiv 28 Lemaître, Jules  55–6 Lemonade (Beyoncé)  640–1, 650 Le Roux, Hugues  46 “Let Me See You Smile” (Jones, A., and Spencer) 77 “leveraging technology”  232 n.5 Levi, Mica  374–5 Levin, Thomas  408 Levinson, Jerrold  195–6 Lewis, Dottie  641

LFE (Low Frequency Effect) channel, Dolby 457–8 LFO (Live Film Orchestra)  188 A Life Less Ordinary 627 Ligeti, György  141–2 Light Cavalry overture (Suppé)  319–20 lighting, theatrical presentation and  146–7, 150 “Lights” (Lynch)  627 Lili 160 Lincoln Center  189 Lindsay, Vachel  119 linear time  398 linguistic redundancy, processing fluency and  486 n.19 Lioretographe 106–8 listening. See also cinematic listening; counterculture listening; eavesdropping; personal stereo listening acousmatic 442 aesthetic 444–5 “alone together”  672–3, 676 art house exhibition and  157–8, 160 associational  14–15, 549–50 attentive 276–7 causal  445, 621 Christian church and  159 cinematically  3–4, 18 cinephilic  160, 165–7 closed system  16 composer biopics, music and not  303–4 concentrated, sound film and  128 creating distance, in Remote Taipei  658–9 deep 370–1 de-visualized, sound object in  442 dialectical  381 n.1 distributed hearing, sound film and  128 embodied 531–3 Foucault on structure of  158–65 in Ghanaian Christian missions  509–12 in Ghanaian Islamic schools  508–12 hearing compared to  7, 450 intention and  22 n.43 ludic 695–6 mobile  15–16, 227–30, 672 modernist 8

756   index listening (Continued) multimodality of  91–2 musical experience compared to  8 musical mode of  379–80 to 9/11 579–84 open system  16 personal, composer biopics and  300 personal history and  531–2 playful, video games and  702–7 as process  368 reduced  445, 621 reflective  381 n.1 as relationship metaphor, in composer biopics 300 semantic  445, 543, 621 semiotic 693 sensorial, trailer ear and  461 n.2 solitary 669–70 surveillance and  409–13 transcendental 276 trick potential of  91–2 ubiquitous  6–7, 521 listening being (écoutêtre) 682 Liszt, Franz  318 Lisztomania 299 literacy 91 filmic 561–3 in Ghanaian Christian missions  511–12, 516–17 ludo- 716–17 media 720–1 literature pastorals  552 Litt, Scott  216–17 Littau, Karin  6 Live Film Orchestra (LFO)  188 liveness  10, 108–9, 193–7, 202–3 live performance  10. See also cinema, as live music venue composer biopics and  293 trick films and  109–11 live-score film screenings amplification and  196–7 diegetic sound and  194–5, 200–1, 203 electronic music and  208 n.78 fourth wall and  201–2 illusion theories and  197–201 overview of  188–9, 201–3

pit music and  199–200 presence and  199, 202–3 realism and  189–97, 200–1 representation and  195–6, 195f Live: Take No Prisoners (Reed)  225 Logic  639–40, 643–4 Loimeier, Roman  510–11 The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold (1958) 322–3 The Lone Ranger franchise. See also William Tell overture (Rossini) on ABC television  321–2 blockbuster cinematic listening and  329–30 branding of  320–3 film 326–30 The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981)  323–4, 324f Looney Tunes parody of  322 1956 film  322–3 1958 sequel  322–3 as radio show  319–20 Republic Pictures films, 1938–1939  320–1 “veridical expectations” and  324–5 “veridical surprises” and  325 video game  323 William Tell overture and  317–18, 326–30 The Lone Stranger and Porky (1939)  322 Long, Michael  1–2, 151–2, 329, 549–50, 569–70, 702 Long, Paul  183–4 long playing (LP) records  275 long-term memory, exposure effect and  484 Looking for John Smith  113 n.43 “Look What You Made Me Do” (Swift) 646–7 Looney Tunes 322 Loose Change (2006)  576, 583–4 9/11 reclaimed footage in  587–9 Lorde, Audre  370, 375 The Lord of the Rings trilogy  12, 190t, 555 film music scholarship and audiences on 341–2 metaphor in  342 most memorable scene in  344–5 spirituality in  342–3 Los Angeles Philharmonic  188–9 Lost (360° video, 2015)  717–20, 718f

index   757 Lost (television show)  597–8 Lost Highway 439–40 loudness. See also trailer ear of action films  451, 455 of “cinematic” sound  119 hearing damage from trailer  454–7 of Interstellar 391 maximizer 457–8 TASA and  453–4 trailer ear and  450–4, 457–9 “Louis and Lena at Luna Park” (Jones, A., and Spencer)  74–5 Love, Actually 340–1 “Love Is a Battlefield” (Benatar)  639–40, 644 “Love Is Strange” (Mickey and Silvia)  283–4 Love Me Tender 175 The Love Parade  88 n.87 Lover Divine (Leise flehen meine Lieder)  303–4 Loving You 175 Low Frequency Effect (LFE) channel, Dolby 457–8 LP (long playing) records  275 Lubitsch, Ernst  88 n.87 La lucarne de l’infini (Burch)  65 n.45 Lucas, George  222–4, 477 ludic listening  695–6 ludo-literacy 716 “Ludwig’s Air Castle” (Jones, A., and Spencer)  71, 74–5 Lully, or The Broken Violin 103–4 Lumen screen  59 Lumière brothers  90 The Lusty Men 358 Lynch, David  15, 619–20 cross-media accomplishments of  630–1 music videos of  626–9, 628f sonic aporia and  439–42 lyrical plays, Chat Noir and  50, 53–6, 55f, 56f Maas, Willard  258 MacDougall, David  529–30 Machkovech, Sam  216–17 Macnamara, Jim  682–3 Macpherson, Kenneth  124–5 Madness and Civilization (Foucault)  158

Madonna 180 Maestri di musica 93 “Maggy Clancy’s New Piano” (Jones, A., and Spencer) 79 magic of music  103–4 of music, in The Lord of the Rings 344 stage, in trick films  93 The Magic Sword 109 Magnecorder  225, 226f Mahler  306, 308–9 Mailman, Joshua  703–4 Maison Mazo  57–62, 59f, 61f male gaze  248 Malevich, Kazimir  375 Malick, Terrence  11, 281–8. See also Badlands Knight of Cups 377–8 in New Hollywood  271 sensuousness and films of  377–9 Song to Song 377–8 spirituality in films of  378–9 The Thin Red Line 287 The Tree of Life 377–9 To the Wonder 377–9 Man About Town 162 The Manchester Guardian 172–3 “Mandy and Her Man”(Jones, A., and Spencer) 77 Mangolte, Babette  249 n.18 “The Man in the Mask” (Haggard)  323–4 Manovich, Lev  6 Mansell, Clint  439–40 “marathoning” binge-watching compared to  616 n.4 La marche à l’étoile (Fragerolle and Rivière)  53–6, 55f, 56f Marcuse, Herbert  273–4 Margulis, Elizabeth  558 Margulis, Hellmuth  472 Marianelli, Dario  434, 566 Marinelli, Peter  553 Marks, Laura  10, 108–9, 193–7, 202–3, 368–70, 372, 387 Marvin, Carolyn  675–6 Maskelyne, J. N.  109 Mass Appeal 643 Massumi, Brian  461 n.2

758   index The Master 372 The Matrix  624–5, 712–14 Maurice, Alice  77–8 mawlid 518–24 May, Brian  489, 495, 499–500 Mazo, Élie  57–62, 59f, 61f Mazo, Gaston  58, 60 McArthur, Angela  730–1 McClintock, Anne  545 n.12 McGuire, Patricia  545 n.12 McKim, Kristi  530–2 McMahan, Alison  90–1, 725 McQuiston, Kate  326 meaning, noise and  158 meaning extraction method (MEM)  560–3, 561f, 562f meaninglessness, in melodramatic music  31–2 mechanical reproduction, for sound film 119–23 media archaeology  42–3, 678 “media fantasies”  675–6 media music, William Tell overture as  323 Medley, Bill  476 Mekas, Jonas  257–8 Méliès, Georges  9–10, 90 direct address by  94, 98–100 film sound in trick films of  90–1 multiple exposure used by  93–4, 98–100, 99f multi-tracking and  98–100 music in trick films of  100 stage magic of  93 visualized sound cinema and  95–100, 97f, 99f Mellers, Wilfrid  34 melodramatic music  31–3 Melody Maker 179 Le Mélomane  93–4, 96–8, 97f “melting pot” concept, Hollywood musicals and 83–4 MEM (meaning extraction method)  560–3, 561f, 562f #MeToo movement  542–3 Mémoires de l’ombre et du son (Perriault) 42–3 memory. See also processing fluency episodic  546 n.14 long-term, exposure effect and  484

Mendlesohn, Farah  386, 402 Mera, Miguel  372, 379–80 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  388 Merwaert, Paul  45 Meshes of the Afternoon 629 metaphor, theorizing musical multimedia and  342, 347, 567 Metropolis 339 Metz, Christian  253, 408, 418, 670, 674 Mickey and Silvia  283–4 Microsoft Theatre  189, 193f A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935)  144–5, 148–50 military, music used for torture by  470–1 Miller, Karl Hagstrom  77 Millington, Barry  29–30 Le Million 484 mimesis  11, 201–2 minimalist music, time and  398–9 Minogue, Kylie  624–5, 629 Minority Report  417–18, 421 mirror neurons  486 n.27 Mitchell, Bob  165 Mitry, Jean  674–5 mixing 10–11 Mix Me A Person 175 mobile listening  15–16. See also iPod; personal stereo listening; personal stereos; Walkman Dolby Atmos and  227–31 modernist listening  8 Monarch Electronics  226–7 Monelle, Raymond  319–20, 551–3 Monster’s Inc. 529–30 Mood Indigo 622 Mooney, Jennifer  79 Morin, Edgar  201–2 Morricone, Ennio  153 n.14 Morris, Christopher  30–1, 33–4, 38 Moseley, Roger  704–5 Mosely, John  224 Moshier, Joshua  726 Mother India 516 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) 453–4 Motion Picture Association of America Production Code (MPPC) files  358–9

index   759 Movietone 121 uncanny synchronized sound in early shorts from  125–7 “moving audio” Dolby Atmos and  212 MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) 453–4 MPPC (Motion Picture Association of America Production Code) files  358–9 “Mr. and Mrs. Murphy” (Jones, A., and Spencer)  79, 80f MTV aesthetic  630, 639–40, 712–13 Mulajkar, D. D.  458 Mulholland Drive 629 Muller, Arthur  258 multichannel sound  222–5, 413 multimodal fusion  432–4, 437 multiple exposure, in trick films  93–4, 98–100, 99f multi-tracking, Méliès and  98–100 Munday, Rod  724–5 Münsterberg, Hugo  193–4 Murch, Walter  222–4, 431–2 Murders in the Rue Morgue 358 Murray, Billy  70 Murray, Janet  712 music. See also classical music; popular music ambient 724–5 in animated films  1 in art house exhibition  169 n.51 atmospheric 60 of attractions  61–2 La Captive, listening to  246–7 at the Chat Noir  44–6, 47f, 48–9, 52–3 cinema, pastorals  553–6, 554f, 555f cinema’s effects on listening to  4–5 cinematic listening and discovery of  368–9 cinematic punch accompanied by  361–2 Cinerama and  145–6 concert audience reactions in composer biopics as pointers on  297–8 of contemplation  61–2 Dolby Atmos for, 2016–2019  215–18, 230–1 entr’acte 145–9 habituation in  472–3 haptic, sensuousness of  371–5, 379–80 “incongruent film”  432–3

intradiegetic 201–2 in Invasion  598, 616 Kubrick on cinema and  257 in Lost 598 magic of  103–4 media, William Tell overture as  323 melodramatic 31–3 military torture with  470–1 minimalist 398–9 noise and  435 in Oculus Home lobby  721–6, 722f “on-track” and “off-track”  310–11 paratextual 145 in popular theatre  31–3 postminimalist 386–7 “pre-fitting” to  633 n.10 private meanings of, in composer biopics 300–2 radical subjectivity in counterculture listening and  275–81 referentiality and  256–7 roadshow exhibition and  144–50 sci-fi cinema and  385 sci-fi cinema’s historical stages of  404 n.16 in trick films  91, 100–11, 102f, 103f Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 336 musical acculturation  2 musical experience, listening compared to  8 The Musicality of Narrative Film (KulezicWilson)  634 n.17 musicalized image  630 musicalized soundtrack  16–17, 377, 397–8 musical mode of listening  379–80 “musical moments”  623–4 musical performance  10 musicals. See Hollywood musicals musical seeing, cinematic listening and  27 musical topics. See also pastorals components of  551–2 pastoral 551–3 theory of  552 Music for the Melodramatic Theatre in Nineteenth-Century London and New York (Pisani)  32 The Music Lovers  300, 301f, 311–12 Music Scoring for TV & Motion Pictures (Skiles) 550

760   index Music Video After MTV (Korsgaard)  621–2, 641 music videos  15 aesthetics of  619–20 atmospheric sound and  645–7 cinema influenced by  620–2 cinema’s cross-fertilization with  629–32 cinematic listening and  640–1, 649–51 diegetic sound in  640–2, 647–8 economics and  631 of Glazer  624–5, 640–1, 647–9, 649f of Gondry  622–5, 627 of Lynch  626–9, 628f narrative sound and  642–5 pre-existing footage used in  626–7 reduced viewing and  621–2 repetition in structure of  644 silent films compared to  643 sound design in  639–42 subversive sound and  647–9 visual albums and  650 on YouTube  640 musique concrète 375–6 Muslim audiences, for Hindi films in Tamale, northern Ghana  512–18, 515t Musser, Charles  61–2 “My Heart Will Go On” (Dion)  482–3 mythic immersion  724–5 Nanook of the North 131 narrative cinema and  252–3, 267 defining  266 n.11 Eyes Wide Shut and  262–6 hearing hearing in Kubrick’s films and  253–4, 257, 266–7 integration, cinema of  60–2 in Invasion  598–9, 615 sound, music videos and  642–5 surveillance and  408 trickery, in Gondry’s cinema  622–6 unified soundtrack albums and  492–3 Nasta, Dominique  91 Nathaus, Klaus  176, 181, 183 National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO)  453–4, 456–7 Naudet, Gédéon  575–7. See also 9/11

Naudet, Jules  575–7, 581–2. See also 9/11 Nayar, Sheila J.  91 Neale, Steve  144–6 Needham, Wilbur  124–5 neoclassical biopics  299 NES (Nintendo Entertainment System)  323, 714 Neuromancer (Gibson)  712 Never Let Go 175 Neveux, Georges  124–5 Newell, Stephanie  509–10 New Hollywood. See also Badlands counterculture movement and  281–2 Malick in  271 popular music and  490–1 soundtracks of  271–2, 281–8 New Italian Cinema  161 New Left  272–3 Newman, Alfred  144–5, 147–8 The New Soundtrack 336 Ngai, Sianne  77–8 Niasse, Ibrahim  519 Nichols, Bill  585 Nigeria bandiri music in  520–1 Hindi film songs in  519 The Night Court 641 9/11 576 “active offscreen sound” in  582–3 authenticity and  579–80 death in  581–3 editing in  580–1 11'09”01 using reclaimed footage from 589–90 hypermediacy and  577–8 listening to  579–84 Loose Change using reclaimed footage from 587–9 performativity of synchronized sound in  584–7, 590–1 “sound-up construction” and  580–1 synchronized sound and  583 voiceover narration in  581–2, 585–7 Nine Inch Nails  626–9 Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)  323, 714 Nixon, Marni  501

index   761 Nkrumah, Kwame  512 noise in La Captive  241, 243–8 in Cat People 241–3 in cinema  241 in Un condamné à mort s’est échappé 242–3 disciplinary power and  159 in fighting scenes  362 Ghanaian cinema halls and disruptions of  518 the “grain” and  395 haptic “dirtiness” and  372 hearing damage and  455 in Lost (360° video, 2015)  717 meaning and  158 music and  435 in music video  648 in silent film theatrical presentation 159–60 sonic aporia and  440–1 sonic elongation and  427, 435–6 Nolan, Christopher  388–9. See also Interstellar on Interstellar instrumentation  391 on “Stay” (Zimmer)  390–1 “non-fidelity” sound, sonic aporia and  429–31 non-linear time  398–401 Norman, Donald  716 Norrell, Clif  216–17 Norrington, Roger  139–40 nostalgia Badlands and  282–3 pastorals for  555, 555f pleasure and  476–7 popular music and, in Guardians of the Galaxy 477–9 popular music and, in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 479 processing fluency and  476–80 soundtrack albums as souvenirs and  480–3 objective film sound  307, 309–10 Occult Aesthetics (Donnelly)  411–12 The Octagon 359–60 ocularcentrism 158 Oculus Home lobby music  721–6, 722f Oculus Rift  714, 715f, 717–18, 721. See also virtual reality

Oculus Touch  717 An Officer and A Gentleman 476 off-scene diegetic sound  311 “off-track” music  310–11 Oil City Confidential 180 Ombres et lumière 58 “1-800-273-8255” (Logic)  639–40, 643–4 on-scene diegetic sound  311 “On the Nature of Daylight” (Richter)  373–4, 398–9 On the Waterfront 190t ontology, of cinema  6 “on-track” music  310–11 The Opening of Misty Beethoven 326 open system listening  16 opera 9 “Bourgeois Opera”  28–9 cinema compared to  140–1 orchestral interlude in  30–1, 33–4 A Village Romeo and Juliet and  33–9, 36f, 37f William Tell 317–20 orchestral interlude, in opera  30–1, 33–4 Orff, Carl  284–5 The Origin of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata  104–6, 105f Orr, J. Tillmann  164–5 Oudart, Jean-Pierre  673 Out of Africa 563–4 overtures 29. See also William Tell overture (Rossini) in home entertainment  150–2 in roadshow exhibition  144–5, 147 theatrical presentation and  141–4, 150–2 The Oxford Handbook of Music Listening in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Thorau and Ziemer) 7 The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (Richardson, J., Gorbman, and Vernallis) 385–6 O You Ragtime 103–4 Oz the Great and Powerful 217–18 package show, youth pop  178–80 Pagnol, Marcel  123 Paisan 164–5 panopticon  159, 407–8, 421. See also surveillance

762   index Paranoid Park  382 n.20 paratextual music  145 Parikka, Jussi  42–3 Paris Is Burning 541–4 Parker, Tyler  258 Parnes, Larry  178 “Participation Thesis”  201–2 participatory theatre, Remote X as  656 Pasolini, Pier Paolo  258 pastorals 549. See also cinematic listening experiment cinema music  553–6, 554f, 555f cinematic listening experiment and  558–69 musical topics  551–3 Western art music  551–2, 553f, 559–60, 559f, 565 Pastrone, Giovanni  49–50 Pathé 92 Paul, Robert  109 Paul, William  88 n.87 Paulin, Gaston  52 Pauvre Pierrot 52 PCA (principal component analysis)  561–3 Peiss, Kathy  71, 73–5 Pennebaker, D. A.  184 perceptual realism  194 performativity in documentary film  576 historical film presentation and  152 live-score film screenings and  189 mediation of reality and  662–3 of synchronized sound in 9/11  584–7, 590–1 permeation, Remote Taipei and  660, 697–8 Perriault, Jacques  42–3 personal associations, of audiences  340–1 personal history, listening and  531–2 personal listening cinematic trailers and  460 composer biopics and  300 personal stereo listening  669–70. See also iPod; mobile listening; Walkman cinematic listening compared to  670–1, 683 cinematic representation of  673 marketing of  676, 680 romantic others and  675–80, 676f, 677f, 678f, 684 VR protocols and  721

personal stereos  658, 661, 671, 683. See also iPod; Walkman Pfeifer, Joseph  581–2 Phono-Cinéma-Théatre 106–8 Phonofilm 121 phonographic musicals  9–10, 77–8, 82 African American stereotypes in early 76–8 audiences and early, compared to audience in Hollywood musicals  71 Bowery records  72–4, 73f, 82 dual-focus narrative and early  71–2 ethnic stereotypes, vaudeville and  69–70, 77 gender in early  70 German immigrant characters and  74–6, 75f “gold digger” characters and  81–2 Irish immigrant characters and  78–80, 80f of Jones, A., and Spencer  68–72 Kinetophone films and ethnic stereotypes of  82 kisses in  76 racism and ethnic stereotypes of  77–8 realism and  85 n.25 “vaudeville speciality” genre of  70–1 Vitaphone films and ethnic stereotypes of 82–3 phonograph parlors  70 Pi 439–40 The Piano 529–30 Piccardi, Carlo  52 Picnic in the Grass 257–8 Picturegoer 181 “A Picture of Long Ago” (Jones, A., and Spencer) 81 Pik Nik ha il do di petto  93, 94f Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii 184 Pinocchio soundtrack album  490 Pirandello, Luigi  123–4 Pirates of the Caribbean franchise  327 Pisani, Michael  32–3 Pisano, Giusy  97 Pisfil, Sergio  177 Pitchford, Dean  323–4 pit music  95–6, 199–200 A Plantation Act 82–3 Platte, Nathan  144–5 player agency, video games and  700–2

index   763 playful listening, video games and  702–7 Playing to Pictures (George)  110 Please Please Me (the Beatles)  178–9 pleasure nostalgia and  476–7 processing fluency and  469, 483–4 Wundt curve and  470 Poeme Electronique (Varese)  222–4 poetry, cinema and  252–3, 257–9, 267 point-of-view, in Invasion 600–1 The Policeman’s Nightmare 103–4 Pop Gear  185 n.10 Popson, Tom  491 popular music  11, 14 in Badlands 283–4 counterculture listening and  275–6 on FM radio  278–9 high-fidelity sound and  275–7 magazines on  279–81 in The Matrix 712–13 New Hollywood and  490–1 nostalgia and, in Guardians of the Galaxy films 477–9 processing fluency of cinema and  471–2 on radio and processing fluency  473–6, 475t repetition in structure of  644 in soundtrack albums as souvenirs  480–3 stereo sound and  275–6 popular theatre “burletta laws” and  31 meaninglessness in  31–2 music and spectacle in  31–3 Porter, Edwin S.  98, 99f “post-existing music”  317–30 postminimalist music  386–7 Postscript on the Societies of Control (Deleuze) 407–8 poststructuralism  546 n.13 pre-cinema screen practices. See also Chat Noir film sound and  42–3 Jones, A., and Spencer phonographs and 68–9 Shadow Theatre of Chat Noir as model of  45 study of  42–3

“pre-fitting” to music  633 n.10 “Prem Ka Rog Bada Bura”  521, 522t presence Dolby Atmos for  212–13, 217, 225–31 live-score film screenings and  199, 202–3 Magnecorder for  225, 226f sound and  725–6 VR and  225, 725–6 presentation. See theatrical presentation Presley, Elvis  175, 181 Previn, André  188 Pride and Prejudice (2005)  555, 569 Prince, Stephen  358 principal component analysis (PCA)  561 The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex  153 n.13 The Problem with Apu  88 n.86 processing fluency audio drop-in techniques and  482–3 cognition and  471 exposure effect and  470–1 “good figures” and  470 hedonic marking and  471, 476 linguistic redundancy and  486 n.19 mental processes and  470 nostalgia and  476–80 pleasure and  469, 483–4 of popular music in cinema  471–2 popular music on radio and  473–6, 475t soundtrack albums as souvenirs and 480–3 Production Code  160–1 cinematic punch and  358–9 Professor Do-mi-sol-do 93–4 progressive rock  275–8 projectionists, in theatrical presentation  142–3, 162–4, 222–4, 456–7 projective illusion  201–2 Prokofiev, Sergei  188–9 promenade theatre  664 Psycho 190t, 529–30 Psychomusicology  348 n.7 Pulp Fiction 480 punch. See cinematic punch Purple Noon 164 Purse, Lisa  363

764   index Quadrophonic sound  224–5 quasi-virtual, Remote Taipei as 662–3 Queen  14, 489–503. See also Flash Gordon soundtrack The Queen 563–4 Quintaphonic Sound  224 Qur’anic schools  510–11 “Qurbani”  522–3, 523t, 524t “Rabbit in Your Headlights” (UNKLE)  648–9, 649f Rabbit-Proof Fence 538 Rabin, Trevor  416 race“melting pot” concept, Hollywood musicals and  83–4 Rachmaninov, Sergei  247 racism “coon songs” and  77 ethnic stereotypes and  77–8 radical subjectivity in counterculture listening and music 275–81 counterculture movement and  272–5 social change and  273–4 technology and  274 radio AM 278 binaural sound transmission and  218 exposure effect by marketing on  474–5, 475t FM 276–9 “free-form” 278–9 The Lone Ranger franchise on  319–20 processing fluency and popular music on  473–6, 475t Radiohead 624–5 Radio Unnamable  290 n.24 Raging Bull 359–60 The Raid 2 361–2 Raiders of the Lost Ark 482 the Ramones  479 Rani Rupmati 520–1 Rasmussen, Anne  510 Rassell, Andrea  529–30 Ratatouille 190t Ratner, Leonard  552 RCA Victor  226–7, 228f, 229f

Reading Opera Between the Lines (Morris) 30–1 “A Real Indication” (Lynch and Badalamenti)  626–7 realism diegetic sound and  194–5 Dolby Atmos and  213–15 film sound and  189–93 in Jones, A.’s, and Spencer’s records  85 n.25 live-score film screenings and  189–97, 200–1 perceptual 194 sound design and  427 sound film and  122–5, 127–8, 131 Reber, Rolf  469–70 recorded media, synchronized sound and 579–80 Redbone 478 reduced listening  445, 621 reduced viewing  621–2, 625–7, 631 Reed, Lou  225 Reeled In (Godsall)  317–18 referentiality, music and  256–7 reflective listening  381 n.1 Reich, Elizabeth  686 n.30 Reinsch, Paul N.  482 relationship metaphor, listening as, in composer biopics  300 relativization, speech  378 R.E.M. 216–18 remixes, Dolby Atmos utilized for  216 Remote Taipei audio mediation and  655 aural-haptic-visual and  663, 666 cinema compared to  657–60, 662 immersion and  655, 660–2 listening creating distance in  658–9 permeation and  660, 661–2 as promenade theatre  664 as quasi-virtual  662–3 Remote X  15–16, 655 international performances of  656 as participatory theatre  656 Renoir, Jean  257–8 Republic Pictures  320–1 re-recording processes, for sound film  134 n.75 Rescher, Nicholas  429–31

index   765 Reservoir Dogs  480, 484 The Revenge (Reed)  225 reverse motion, in trick films  93, 94f Revolver (the Beatles)  275 Reyland, Nicholas  327–9, 704 Reynaud, Émile  52 Reznor, Trent  626–9 “Rhythm Nation” (Jackson, J.)  645–7 Richard, Cliff  175–6, 178 Richardson, Dorothy  127–9 Richardson, John  199–200, 377–8, 385–6, 619, 622, 631 Richmond, Scott R.  686 n.30 Richter, Max  373–4, 398–9 Rickert, Thomas  723 Ricoeur, Paul  202–3 Riesenfeld, Hugo  318 Righteous Brothers  477 Rimini Protokoll  656–7, 664. See also Remote Taipei; Remote X Riva, Giuseppe  725–6 Rivière, Henri  43–50, 47f, 49f, 53–7, 55f, 56f roadshow exhibition  10 CinemaScope and  145–6 Cinerama and  145–6 entr’acte music and  145–9 home entertainment and  150–2 intermission and  144–7 lighting and  146–7, 150 music and  144–50 overtures in  144–5, 147 theatre roots of  144–5 robots 395 Rock Around the Clock 172–4 rock ’n’ roll  10 audience behavior and  181 cinemas as venues for  171–3 modes of listening and  277 movies 174–5 musical experimentation and  275 riots 172–3 soundtracks 497–8 Rocky  359–60, 491 Roeg, Nicolas  386 Roger, Philippe  307 Rogers, Holly  577–8, 650 Rolling Stone Magazine 278–80

the Rolling Stones  182, 481 romanticism, sci-fi cinema and  402 romantic other, iPod listening and  675–80, 676f, 677f, 678f, 684 Il romanzo di un Pierrot  52–3, 54f Rome, Open City 164–5 Roquet, Paul  726–7 Rosalie et son phonographe  106–8, 107f Ross, Daniel  494 Ross, Jerry  357 Ross, Sharon Marie  597–8 Rossini, Gioachino  317–20. See also William Tell overture Rossio, Terry  327 Rósza, Miklós  147 Roszak, Theodore  272–3 Rothman, Ellen K.  88 n.81 Royal Albert Hall, live-score film screenings at  189, 192f The Royal Tenenbaums 479 Rózsa, Miklós  493 “Rudolph and Rosie at the Roller Rink” (Jones, A., and Spencer)  74–5 Rudy  189, 190t, 193f Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book 493 the Runaways  478 Rushton, Richard  194–5, 200–1 Ruttmann, Walter  101 Ryan, Marie-Laure  717 Rybczyński, Zbigniew  629 “Sabotage” (the Beastie Boys)  479–80 Sadowski, Piotr  57 Saint-Saëns, Camille  59 Salis, Rodolphe  43–4, 50 Sandler, Mark  730–1 Sansone, Matteo  52 “Santiago Flynn” (Jones, A., and Spencer)  83 Satie, Erik  48, 284–6 satirical plays, Chat Noir and  50–3, 51f, 53f Saturday Night Fever  14, 474–5 “Saturnz Barz” (Gorillaz)  715f, 719–20 Saving Private Ryan 529–30 Saying It with Songs (Spring)  490–1 Schaefer, Eric  161 Schaeffer, Pierre  368–9, 442 Schafer, R. Murray  355–6, 429, 442–5

766   index Schiavio, Andrea  716–17 schizophonia 442–3 Schmitt, Thomas  58 Schnitzler, Arthur  262–3 Scholes, Percy  472–3 “Schoolday Frolics” (Jones, A., and Spencer) 81 School of Rock 479 “School’s Out” (Cooper)  479 Schulwerk (Orff)  284–5 Schwartz, Norbert  469–70 science, cinema as tool of  96–7 The Science of Sleep 622–3 sci-fi cinema. See also Arrival; Interstellar; 2001: A Space Odyssey Foley sound in  386 historical stages of music in  404 n.16 immersion and  385–6, 388 music and  385 romanticism and  402 sound design and  385 space and time in  385–6 “the sublime” and  386 Sconce, Jeffrey  97–8 Scorsese, Martin  481 “screaming point”  412 Screen Crush 361–2 The Searchers 163 “Secret Garden” (Springsteen)  482 Seldes, Gilbert  125 Selznick, David O.  146–7 semantic listening  445, 543, 621 semiotic listening  693 Sena, Dominic  645–7 sensorial listening, trailer ear and  461 n.2 sensory turn  3 sensuousness Arrival and  372–4 cinematic listening and  369–71 feminism on art and  370 of haptic music  371–5, 379–80 Malick’s films and  377–9 Sicario and  372–3 Under the Skin and  374–5 sound design and  375–9 soundtracks and  370–1 speech and  377–8

September 11th attacks. See also 9/11 conspiracy theories on  577, 583–4, 587–9 media coverage of  575–6 Sergi, Gianluca  213–14 Serious Charge 175 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (the Beatles) 275 Shadow Theatre, of Chat Noir  42–50. See also Chat Noir Shatz, Leslie  363 Shaviro, Steven  6, 620–1 Shaw-Miller, Simon  1–2, 91–2 sheet music  490–1 Sheridan, Thomas  725 Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows 327–8 Sherman’s March 530–1 Shire, David  410–11 Shore, Howard  342, 555 Shostakovich, Dmitri  263 “Shot in the Back of the Head” (Lynch)  627 “shown” sound  112 n.23 Sicario 372–3 Sight & Sound 189 Siiasiäinen, Lauri  158 silence Dolby and  337 film trailers and  458 internal focalization and  307–8 in space  391 in La Captive  241, 243–8 in Cat People 241–3 in cinema  241 in Un condamné à mort s’est échappé 242–3 Silence d’Or 162 silent films. See also trick films “cinematic” sound and  119–23 emotion and  120 music videos compared to  643 noise in theatrical presentation of  159–60 sound film compared to  128–9 sound film transition from  118 theatrical presentation aspects of  139–40, 142–3 visualization of voice in  91–2 visualized sound cinema in  95–100, 97f, 99f William Tell overture and  318–19 Silent Film Sound (Altman)  42–3, 142–3

index   767 Silverlake Life: The View From Here 530–1 Silverman, Kaja  431–2 SimCity 717f, 726–7 Simon, Paul  479 The Simpsons  88 n.86 Siqueira Castanheira, José Cláudio  629–30 Sissako, Abderrahmane  266 site-specific theatre  657 Sitney, P. Adams  257–8 Sjogren, Britta  579–80, 586 Skiles, Marlin  550 Skin of the Film (Marks)  369 Skywalker Sound  214–15 “slow” cinema  248 Smith, Jeff  198–9, 428, 490–1 Smith, Joe  497–8 Smith, Murray  197–8 Snowden, Edward  421 Snow White and the Dwarfs soundtrack album 490 Sobchack, Vivian  368–9, 371–2, 386–7, 395, 529–30 social change, radical subjectivity and  273–4 social milieu, in composer biopics  295–6, 296f Société Film d’Art  59 solitary listening  669–70 Sollors, Werner  83 Solomon, Matthew  94 “A Song for the Lovers” (Ashcroft)  647–8 Song of Love  302–3, 303f Song of Summer  306–7, 307f Song of the Youths 222–4 The Song Remains the Same 184 Song to Song 377–8 sonic aporia  13, 427 acousmatic sound and  441–3 audiovisual rupture and  433–4 definition of  429–31 Lynch and  439–42 “non-fidelity” sound and  429–31 sonic elongation compared to  443–4 Tarr and  437–9, 439f sonic elongation  13 audiovisual rupture and  433–4 Dancer in the Dark and  434–5, 445 definition of  427

Delicatessen and  435–6 hyperorchestration and  434 hyperreality and  428–9 listener recognizability and  436 noise and  435–6 sonic aporia compared to  443–4 Stalker and  436–7, 438f Sonnenschein, David  359–60 Sontag, Susan  370 Sorcerer’s Apprentice (video game)  691–702, 691f, 692f sound advance  718–19 sound-and-lights shows  222–4 sound design. See also Foley sound; sound effects in Arrival 394–6 audiovisual rupture and  431–2 in music videos  639–42 realism and  427 sci-fi cinema and  385 sensuousness and  375–9 sound effects. See also Foley sound in Chat Noir  44–5 in Flash Gordon soundtrack  499–500 in unified soundtrack albums  493 early sound film asynchronous sound and  129 “cinematic” sound and  119–23, 131 concentrated listening and  128 conventions of  118 democracy and  119–20 diegetic sound and  95–6 distributed hearing and  128 mechanical reproduction and standardization for  119–23 realism and  122–5, 127–8, 131 rerecording processes for  134 n.5 Richardson, D., on modes of listening to 127–9 silent films compared to  128–9 silent film transition to  118 tempo concerns with  130 theatre compared to  119–20, 123–4 uncanny synchronized dialogue in  124–7 voice expectations with  129–30 whispering in  123 sound in film. See film sound

768   index Sounding Out the City (Bull)  660 sound library effects, cinematic punch and 357–9 sound mixers  214–15 sound object, in de-visualized listening  442 The Sounds of Commerce (Smith, Jeff)  490–1 sound studies  3 “sound-up construction”  580–1 Source Code 419–21 space in Arrival 398–401 Dolby Atmos for music and  215–18 in Interstellar 391–4 sci-fi cinema and  385–6 Spadoni, Robert  125–7 “spatiotemporal turntable”  531–2 spectacle, in popular theatre  31–3 spectatorship 10 attentive 166 cinematic, situational nature of  674–5 cinephilic  159–60, 165 classic theory of  385–6 collective 675 distracted 60 embodied  8, 369, 408, 529–30 erotics of  372 participatory 657 socialized 8 theatrical 662 speech. See also voice aestheticization 377–8 emanation 378 integration of, in music videos  649–50 relativization 378 sensuousness and  377–8 synchronized, in the early talkies  125 theatrical 131 Spence, Louise  535 Spencer, Len Bowery records of  72–4, 73f, 82 dance in records of  75–6 ethnic stereotypes, vaudeville and  69–70, 77 Kinetophone films and ethnic stereotypes of  82 kisses in records of  76–7 phonograph catalogue of  68–72 racism and ethnic stereotypes of  77–8

Vitaphone films and ethnic stereotypes of 82–3 White records of  80–2 Le sphinx (Fragerolle and Vignola)  55–6 Spice Girls  179–80 Spice World 179–80 Spielberg, Steven  338–9, 434, 482, 718–19 spirituality film music scholarship, The Lord of the Rings trilogy and  342–3 in Malick’s films  378–9 Splet, Alan  439–41 split surround, Dolby  224 spontaneous recovery  472 Spook Minstrels 109 Spring, Katherine  490–1 Springsteen, Bruce  184, 482 Spring Symphony (Frühlingssinfonie) 297–8 squish sounds, cinematic punch and  363–4 Staab, Wayne  455 stage magic, in trick films  93 Stalker  436–7, 438f, 445 Stalling, Carl  322 Stam, Robert  535 standardization, for sound film  119–23 Stanford Advocate 456 A Star is Born (1976)  474 star singers, in iPod commercials  680–1, 680f Star Trek (1988)  712–14 Star Trek (2009)  190t Star Trek: Beyond 479–80 Star Trek into Darkness 190t Star Wars films  155 n.45 soundtrack albums as souvenirs and  481–2 Steiner, Max  146–7 Stephen, J. Drew  497 stereophonic heterosexuality  679–80 stereo sound  145–6. See also surround sound FM radio and  276–7 invention of  220 marketing of  227f popular music and  275–6 stereotypes. See ethnic stereotypes Sterne, Jonathan  355, 582, 685 n.13 Stewart, Garrett  419–20 Stewart, Rebecca  730–1 De stilte rond Christine M. 248

index   769 Stilwell, Robynn  385 Stimmung (Stockhausen)  399–400 Stockfelt, Ola  508–9 Stockhausen, Karlheinz  222–4, 399–400 Stokowski, Leopold  220 stop motion, in trick films  93–4, 106–8, 107f Strange Days 413–15 Strauss, Johann  319, 340, 391–2 Street Hassle (Reed)  225 Street Scene 144–5 Streets of Fire 360–1 “Street Spirit” (Radiohead)  624–5 subjective film sound  307, 309–10, 396 “the sublime” sci-fi cinema and  386, 402 subtitling, of foreign-language films  162–5 subversive sound, music videos and  647–9 “The Suffragette” (Jones, A., and Spencer) 78–9 “Suffragette City” (Bowie)  479 Suite for Variety Orchestra (Shostakovich)  263 Sullivan, Arthur  32–3 Summers, Tim  724–5 Superman (1978)  224 Super Mario Bros. (video game, 1985)  717 Suppé, Franz von  319–20 surprises“veridical” 325 surround sound  10–11. See also Dolby Atmos Arrival and  401–2 binaural sound transmission and  218, 220f, 225–7 Cinerama and  220–2, 223f concert films and  224 Dolby Atmos and  211–12, 218–25 Dolby 5.1 and  224, 459–60 Dolby split surround and  224 Fantasound and  220–2, 221f, 690 Interstellar and  401–2 Magnecorder and  225, 226f multichannel sound and  222–5 Quadrophonic sound and  224–5 Quintaphonic Sound and  224 stereo sound’s invention and  220 Vortex shows and  222–4, 224f surveillance 13 Blow Out and  411–13 The Conversation and  409–13 Déjà vu and  419–21

digital data  415–17 eavesdropping and  408 embodiment and  408–9, 417–22 Enemy of the State and  415–17 late modernity and  407 listening and  409–13 Minority Report and  417–18, 421 narrative and  408 panopticon and  407–8, 421 rhetorics of  408 scholarly frameworks of  407–8 Source Code and  419–21 Strange Days and  413–15 technology of 1990s and  413 voyeurism and  408 “surveillant assemblage”  417–21 Svec, Henry  700 “Sweet Peggy Magee” (Jones, A., and Spencer) 79–80 Swift, Taylor  646–7 symphonic music, cinematic listening and  27 Symphonie bizarre  93–4, 101, 103f, 104 synchresis  428–9, 500 synchronized sound  9–10. See also asynchronous sound; sound film early sound film, dialogue and uncanny 124–7 initial reactions to  121–3 inventions for  106–9 9/11 and  583 performativity of, in 9/11  584–7, 590–1 realism and  124–5, 127–8 recorded media and  579–80 trick films and  104–9, 105f, 107f Szabo, Victor  724 Szczepaniak-Gillece, Jocelyn  671–2 Szendy, Peter  355–6 Tagg, Philip  319–20, 337–8, 340–1, 556 Le Tailleur habile  113 n.30 “Take on Me” (a-ha)  636 n.40 Take That  180–1 talkies. See early sound film Talking Machine World 76–7 Talmeyr, Maurice  45 Tamakloe, Sylvester  518

770   index Tamale, northern Ghana African migrant audiences for Hindi films in 517–18 Christian films in  515–16 Christian missions in  509–12, 516–17 cinema history in  508, 512, 513f, 514f cinematic listening patterns in  512–18 Hindi films in, Muslim and Christian audiences of  512–18, 515t Hindi film songs as tools in Islamic schools of  518–24, 522t, 523t, 524t Islamic schools in  508–12, 518–24 noise disruption in cinema halls of  518 Qur’anic schools in  510–11 Tango 629 Tape Recording Magazine  226–7, 276 tapestry cinema  267 Tarantino, Quentin  362 on soundtrack albums as souvenirs  480 Tarkovsky, Andrei  386 Stalker  436–7, 438f Tarr, Béla  248, 437–9, 439f Taruskin, Richard  399–400 TASA (Trailer Audio Standards Association)  453–5, 457 taste, art house exhibition and  157–8, 165–7 Taylor, Henry M.  300, 313 Taylor, Roger  496–7 Taylor, Sunaura  541–4, 542f technological mediation, Remote Taipei and 663–6 technology. See also specific sound technologies counterculture movement, radical subjectivity and  274 “leveraging”  232 n.5 surveillance and 1990s  413 trailer ear and developments in  452–3 Ted 502–3 Ted 2 502–3 teen exploitation films  175 telegraph 97–8 telephone  96–7, 218 trick films and  98 Temple, Julien  180 tempo sound film concerns with  130 William Tell overture and  319–20

10cc 477–8 Ten Canoes  535–41, 539f The Ten Commandments  145–6, 516 La tentation de Saint Antoine (Rivière)  43–50, 47f, 49f Terrell, Tammi  478 theatre. See also popular theatre actuality of  659 cinema compared to  198–9 participatory 656 promenade 664 roadshow exhibition roots in  144–5 site-specific 656–7 early sound film compared to  119–20, 123–4 Theatre 3 Productions  500 Théatre Robert-Houdin  90–1 theatrical presentation. See also art house exhibition; cinema, as live music venue; live-score film screenings; roadshow exhibition of cinema compared to opera  140–1 cinema practices of  142–4 CinemaScope and  145–6 Cinerama and  145–6 coordination of  147–8 of drive-in movies  143 historically informed  150–2 home entertainment and  150–2 lighting and  146–7, 150 noise and silent film  159–60 overtures and  141–4, 150–2 projectionists in  142–3, 162–4, 222–4, 456–7 roadshow exhibition and  10, 144–50 of silent films  139–40, 142–3 trailer ear and  451–2, 459–61 théâtrophone  9–10, 96–7, 218, 219f Théberge, Paul  224–5 There Will be Blood 190t, 372 The Thief of Baghdad 140–2 The Thin Red Line 287 “third meaning”  634 n.16 This Is Cinerama  145–6, 220–2, 223f Thom, Randy  197–8, 214, 355–6 Thomas, Dylan  258 Thomas, Lowell  220–2 Thompson, Kristin  197, 429 Thorau, Christian  7

index   771 Thor: Ragnarok 502–3 360° videos  717–20, 718f, 720f Thriller (Jackson, M.)  640–2 THX 1138 222–4 Tibbetts, John  294 Timberlake, Justin  475 timbre in Arrival 373–4 cinematic punch and  359–60 in Invasion 598 nasal, in Qur’anic recitation styles  521 pastoral topic and  552 Qur’anic learning and  510 in the Rift setup soundtrack  723 trailer ear and  454, 459 vocal, in Malick’s films  378 vocal performance and  69 Timbuktu 266–7 time in Arrival 398–401 cyclical 398 in Interstellar 391–4 linear 398 minimalist music and  398–9 non-linear 398–401 sci-fi cinema and  385–6 “timeline philosophy”  629–30 Timofeev, Nikolai  429 Tinchant, Albert  44–5, 48–9 Tiomkin, Dimitri  149 Tipton, George  283–4 Titanic 190t, 482–3 Tombelle, Fernand de la  59 Tommy 224 The Tommy Steele Story 175–6 “Tomorrow Never Knows” (the Beatles)  275 Tompkins, Jane  545 n.11 topics. See musical topics torture, military using music for  470–1 To the Wonder 377–9 Touch (Marks)  369 Tous les matins du monde 307 Trailer Audio Standards Association (TASA)  453–5, 457 trailer ear  13 audiences and  450–1, 456 brevity and  458

density and  458–9 Dolby Atmos, Dolby 5.1 and  459–60 expectations and impressions in  457–9 hearing damage and  454–7 immersion and  460–1 loudness and  450–4, 457–9 sensorial and semiotic listening and  461 n.2 TASA and  453–4 technology developments and  452–3 theatrical presentation and  451–2, 459–61 timbre and  459 “transcendental” listening practices  276 Transformers 360–1 transmedia directors  15, 619–20, 629 “transparent immediacy”  712, 724 The Transporter 361 Traumnovelle (Schnitzler)  262–3 The Tree of Life 377–9 Trendle, George W.  321 Trevorrow, Colin  266 trick films  9–10 animated films as  93–4 cinema of attractions and  90, 96–7 direct address in  94, 98–100 emergence of  92 film sound in  90–1 invisible editing in  93–4 listening and  91–2 live performance and  109–11 multiple exposure in  93–4, 98–100, 99f music in  91, 100–11, 102f, 103f reverse motion in  93, 94f stage magic in  93 stop motion in  93–4, 106–8, 107f synchronized sound and  104–9, 105f, 107f telephone and  98 under-cranking in  93 visualized sound cinema in  95–100, 97f, 99f The Triplets of Belleville 190t Tripp, David  347 n.1 A Trip to the Moon 98–100 Trois morceaux en forme de poire (Satie)  285–6 Trolls 475 Tromba Lontana (Adams)  726–7 Truax, Barry  355–6, 436 Trudeau, Andy  566 “true asynchronicity”  587–90

772   index Turkle, Sherry  672 The Twilight Zone (1959–1964)  601–5, 601f, 610 Twin Peaks 439 2001: A Space Odyssey  141–2, 146, 150–2, 190t, 388–9 “The Blue Danube” in  340, 391–2 Casablanca and, hearing hearing in  259–62 hearing hearing and  257–62, 260f, 261f, 267 Interstellar and influence of  391–3 U2  680, 680f ubiquitous listening  6–7 “Unchained Melody” (Righteous Brothers)  477 under-cranking, in trick films  93 Under the Skin 190t, 374–5 Unheard Melodies (Gorbman)  194, 252, 368, 724 unified soundtrack albums  14 aesthetics and  492 dialogue in  493 elements of  491–2 Flash Gordon soundtrack and  489–94 narrative and  492–3 sound effects in  493 UNKLE  648–9, 649f Unlimited Replays (Gibbons)  707 n.3 Upton, George P.  319 “Up Where We Belong” (Cocker and Warnes) 476 Urda, Kathleen E.  378–9 Uricchio, William  675–6 “Uses of the Erotic” (Lorde)  370 Ussher, Bruno David  147–8 Väliaho, Pasi  662–3 van Elferen, Isabella  716, 724–5 van Maas, Sander  7 VanOrd, Kevin  699–702 Van Sant, Gus  376–7 Varese, Edgar  222–4 Variety  121–5, 130 variety shows, cinema as live music venue and 178 Varney, Bill  456 vaudeville ethnic stereotypes and  69–70, 77

Kinetophone films in  82 Vitaphone films in  82–3 “vaudeville speciality” genre  70–1 Verbinski, Gore  327 “veridical expectations”  324–5 “veridical surprises”  325 Verlaine, Paul  113 n.24 Vernallis, Carol  578, 630–1, 642 Verne, Jules  98–100 Versuch über Wagner (Adorno)  28 Vertigo (1958)  190t “Vertigo” (U2)  680, 680f Vertov, Dziga  380, 429 the Verve  648 vibration, sound as  355–6 video games  16. See also virtual reality cognitive immersion and  724–5 Fantasia (1940) film and  690–707 Fantasia (1991)  694–8, 695t, 696f Fantasia: Music Evolved (2014)  698–702, 706 Guitar Hero/Rock Band 698–701 The Lone Ranger 323 mythic immersion and  724–5 player agency and  700–2 playful listening and  702–7 rules in  703–4 Sorcerer’s Apprentice  691–702, 691f, 692f soundtrack selection in  205 n.21 Vienna Boys Choir  220–2 viewing modes  621, 625–6 Vignola, Amédée  55–6 A Village Romeo & Juliet  33–9, 36f, 37f Villeneuve, Denis  372–4. See also Arrival Virtual Boy (1995) gaming console  714 virtual reality (VR)  16 anti-environments and  730–1 as experience  714–15 Google Earth VR  715, 717f, 726–31 historical ideas about  712–14, 713f HMD for  714, 715f, 719 hypermediacy and  713–14 immersion and  721–6 interactivity and  715 “kinesonic congruence” and  716–17 Lost (360° video, 2015)  717–20, 718f The Matrix and  712–14

index   773 Oculus Home lobby music and  721–6, 722f presence and  225, 725–6 protocols and remediation of  720–1 “Saturnz Barz”  715f, 719–20 soundtracks and  716–20 Star Trek (1988) and  712–14, 730–1 Virtual Sound Unit (VSU)  714 The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty) 388 Visi-Sonor (fictional instrument)  20 n.27 visual albums  650 Visual Digital Culture (Darley)  633 n.8 visualization of voice, in silent films  91–2 “visualized sound”  441 visualized sound cinema, in trick films  95–100, 97f, 99f visual polyphony, in Gondry’s cinema  622–6 Vitaphone  82–3, 121–2, 124–5 Vitavox 177 voice. See also acousmêtre; I-voice; speech; voiceover narration in Babies 533–4 in Flash Gordon 500–2 in Hindi film songs  520–1 silent films and visualization of  91–2 sound film expectations with  129–30 voiceover narration. See also I-voice in Badlands 283 in A Clockwork Orange (1971)  255 in documentaries  585–7 iPod and  670–1, 673–5, 680–1 in 9/11  581–2, 585–7 performativity and  586–7 in Ten Canoes 538–9 volume, of “cinematic” sound  119 Vortex shows  222–4, 224f voyeurism distance and  410 surveillance and  408 VR. See virtual reality VSU (Virtual Sound Unit)  714 Wagner, Richard cinematic listening and  29 “deeds of music” and  28–31, 33 The Flying Dutchman 29–30

Leitmotiv and  28 Die Walküre 30–1 The Wagner Compendium (Millington)  29–30 Walkabout 537 Walker, Jess  279 Walkman  477–8, 658, 669–70, 675–9, 677f, 678f. See also personal stereos “Walk to the Paradise Garden” A Village Romeo & Juliet  33–9, 36f, 37f Die Walküre (Wagner)  30–1 Waller, Fred  145–6 Wall Street Journal 363 WAM. See Western art music Ward, Meredith C.  159–60, 671–2 Ward, Paul  581–2, 584 Warner Brothers  82–3, 323 Warnes, Jennifer  476 War of the Worlds (2005)  397–8 Warrior 361 Waterworth, John  725–6 Watkins, Charlie  177 Waxman, Franz  333 n.48 Wayne’s World 480 weak narration  300 “Wedding Bells” (Jones, A., and Spencer)  81 Weezer 646–7 Weigl, Petr  33–9, 36f, 37f Weis, Elizabeth  409 Wen die Götter lieben (Whom the Gods Love)  300–2, 302f, 305, 309–10 Wessler, Rick  363–4 Westerkamp, Hildegard  376–7 Western art music (WAM) pastoral  551–2, 553f, 559–60, 559f, 565 West Side Story  147, 150 What a Crazy World 176 whispering, in sound film  123 White, Francis  376–7 White, Gareth  666 n.4 White records, of Jones, A., and Spencer  80–2 Whiting, Steven Moore  44, 48 Whittington, William  386–7, 391–2, 397–8, 414–15, 427, 434, 641–2 Whom the Gods Love (Wen die Götter lieben)  300–2, 302f, 305, 309–10 “Wicked Game” (Isaak)  626–7 widescreen projection, subtitling and  162–3

774   index “The Widow Dooley” (Jones, A., and Spencer) 78–9 Wienkelman, Piotr  469–70 Wierzbicki, James  428 The Wild Angels 491 Wild at Heart 626 Wilinsky, Barbara  162 Willemsen, Steven  432–3 Willette, Adolphe  50–3, 51f, 53f Williams, Linda  671 William Tell overture (Rossini). See also The Lone Ranger franchise in A Clockwork Orange 326–7 images associated with  318 The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981) and  323–4, 324f The Lone Ranger franchise and  317–18, 326–30 marching horses and galloping horses associated with  318–20 as media music  323 rebranding of  320–3 silent films and  318–19 tempo and  319–20 “veridical expectations” and  324–5 “veridical surprises” and  325 YouTube and  327 Winters, Ben  194, 201–2, 308–9, 344, 550, 693, 699–700, 724 Wise, Timothy E.  331 n.23 Wiseman, Frederick  580–1 The Wizard of Oz 441 Women’s March  542–3 Wondrich, David  318 Wong, Adrienne  664–5 Woodstock 184 World Soundscape Project  12–13, 368

Wormser, André  52 Wrather, Jack  321–4 Wreck-It Ralph 502–3 Wright, Benjamin  214–15 Wundt, Wilhelm  470 Wundt curve  470–2 Wurtzler, Steve  195–7, 195f, 203 Yes 377–8 Yorke, Thom  648–9 You-listener  674–5, 683–4 Young, Paul  678 Young, William  456 youth cinema as space for  173–6 musicals 175–6 pop package show  178–80 YouTube aesthetics of  578 authenticity and  578 music videos on  640 “true asynchronicity” and  587 William Tell overture and  327 Zajonc, Robert  470 Zanelli, Geoff  328–9 Ziemer, Hansjakob  7 Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars 184 Zimmer, Hans  13, 327–8, 388–9, 434. See also Interstellar “Day One”  389–90, 389f, 392–3 “Dust”  392–3, 393f “Stay”  390–1, 390f, 393 Zimmerman, Patricia  156–7 Žižek, Slavoj  189, 356, 437 Zylinska, Joanna  662–3