Contact
The Truth of Sound
published in Real Time No.24, Sydney,
1998
In
a world where sight is clung to in desperation to prove
the existence of things, the validity of sound will always
be suspect. The law may rely heavily on words, but only
through recourse to its power of recording the spoken. And
the law mainly wants to hear the words of eye-witnesses
- those whose sight can be encoded through words for proof
of existence. Ultimately, sounds and images are equally
circumspect in their convolution of information for the
auditor-viewer. And so it is with cinema. Each modulates
the other to compound the experience: images confer with
sounds, sounds defer to images. When visuals openly declare
themselves, they do so with surreptition; when sounds boldly
project themselves, they do so through refraction. Restlessly
shifting between base linguistics and impenetrable phenomenology,
the truth factor of cinema is as indigestible as so many
laws. It hides away, beamed from a sound-proofed bio-box,
distributed through invisible speakers. In the cinema, neither
medium, form nor any dialectic juggling of the two will
grant audio-visual absolution. Such is the beauty of living
its many wonderful lies.
This
talk of cinesonic truth is not as obscure and unnecessary
as it appears. Sound designers the world over act like attorneys
of the sonic. They encode sound in order to prove existence
of events, actions and spaces, working to ordinances of
legibility, plausibility, believability. Every sound they
attach to an image lies "I come from this image". Every
sound they erase from an image lies "I am but image without
sound". Most films cannot bear the weight of their own falsehood.
Their legitimacy evaporates the moment their audio-visual
activity occurs, sucked into a smokescreen of artifice which
attempts to have us believe that cinema is a knowing theatre
of stylization. All cinema knows is that it cannot tell
any truth - yet cinema rarely can accept that it is actively
lying when it tells its story.
In
Alain Robbe-Grillet's inquiry into truth and fabrication,
L'HOMME QUI MENT (1968, The Man Who Lies), the validity
of image and sound are equally questioned, interrogated,
disproven - then accepted. From the film's opening barrage
of off-screen gun-fire causing a staged death and return-to-life,
to the film's closing of a draw containing multiple copies
of photos which incongruously 'prove' the impossible lie
Jean-Louis Trintignant has been spinning throughout the
story, L'HOMME QUI MENT fondles and fingers the lining between
sound and image, between the spoken and the witnessed, between
the suppressed and the imagined. Typical of French jouissance
and its slide from textual deconstruction into onanistic
gratification, the film revels in the charade of role-play
and its correlation to sexual games. In sex, all from of
fakery is acceptable if pleasure can be mobilized, generated
and sustained. That wig, those shoes, that implant, your
voice - all lie to produce an undeniable and implicitly
true effect. In greater accordance with artistic pretention
and ontological presumption, Michael Antonioni's BLOWUP
(1966) throws up a pasty, intellectualized pondering of
erotic and psychological truth via the highly unimaginative
metaphor of the camera lens. Brian De Palma's aural revisionism
of the film in BLOW OUT (1981) may foreground the sonic,
but only under terms of visual mimicry where sound technologies
stand in for their visual precursors. Despite the polarities
of the films' mode of address - fetishizing either lenses
or microphones - they concur in their reinstatement of a
truth presented with all the hollow pomp of barristers.
Many
films feature courtroom scenes where the truth is used as
a driving principle as desperately as cinema denies its
ability to deliver that very truth. In fact, too many films
feature courtroom scenes. It's a cheap tactic for a desperate
audience. Robert Zemeckis' CONTACT (1997) climaxes with
a courtroom scene. But it does so to quell the mania for
validity - to posit issues of belief as epicentral to the
dissolution of truth-seeking mechanisms, technologies, institutions
and dogmas. And it does so with a sharp awareness of the
formal contract it must take out with the cinesonic in order
to achieve its post-truth ideal.
The
title CONTACT evokes legal process. Did you have contact
with X? Was X aware of Y through your contact? When was
contact initiated? When did it cease? In the law, contact
implies awareness, in much the same way that sight impels
confirmation. In a wider sense, contact facilitates a joining
of realities, from infected bodies to psychological motivation
to spiritual conversion to extraterrestrial life-forces.
CONTACT opens with a visualization of much that we could
never see, but most of which we have culturally and historically
been privy to. What at first appears to be a gratuitous
computer-generated track through space is actually an astronomical
journey through sonic time capsules, dotted across outer
space in a line which documents the moments of their emission.
Like listening to a hundred radios broadcasting from ulterior
and unsynchronous time lines, a wash of song and noise is
jettisoned through the screen's frontal zones and spurts
into the rear surround sound field (one of many vibrant
and scintillating sonic collages by Randy Thom which defines
the unworldly sound design for the film). The direction
of the dynamics becomes clear: we are travelling not into
outer space, but from outer space. Our audio-visual perspective
is that of an extraterrestrial who has by chance encountered
the trajectory of our reckless and random data transmission
throughout time, summarizing a history of broadcast and
recording technologies. As with so many technologically
astute contemporary films, the cinesonic spectrum is used
to invert audio-visual relationships as key leverage for
proposing the realignment of cultural, textual and even
mystical precepts. This scene is a suggestion not of whom
we as central beings are in contact with, but who from beyond
is contacting us.
As
comfortably centred characters, David Hemmings in BLOWUP
and John Travolta in BLOW OUT go about their daily routines
until their process of recording is interrupted by the unintended
presence of data which provokes them to seek out a truth
of which they are no part. Visuality and aurality, respectively,
are the matter of their encoding, the rendered textures
with which they create illusions. CONTACT's central figure,
Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) is literally light years beyond
the pithy, planetary modernism of BLOWUP and BLOW OUT. from
the beginning, she is searching for something - an unjustifiable
existence which she cannot see - and is thus an active figure,
less concerned with the remote rendering of things like
models' bodies and women's screams, and more concerned with
the remote possibility of other forces outside of herself.
Crucially, she is not interested in encoding a past event:
she scans the airwaves in the present, fishing for sonic
signals which intersect her moment of seeking across radically
displaced zones of time and place. She replaces the camera
and the microphone - instruments behind which the in the
encoder hides - with radar. She does not wish to 'find out'
something; she wants to find something - directly, unmediated,
unconditionally. If astronomical charts map what exists
where, Ellie's obsessively pin-covered charts map what might
exist but doesn't reside there. While the archaeologist
(and all his symbolic brethren who populate the cinema)
visually confirms existence through remnants of the past,
the astronomer aurally sifts through the potentiality of
existence in the present.
Many
rich images in CONTACT affirm this, as Ellie closes off
her terrestrial world while plugged into another realm,
erotically lulled by a continuum of noise spiting through
her headphones. Just as her inverse maps of grow in scale
and density, so too do her ears: from a single set of headphones
to the earth-shaking scene when she commands a phalanx of
gigantic satellite dishes to rotate in synch with her as
she rushes in a pick-up truck to confirm the location point
of an extraterrestrial sonic emission. When she finally
makes contact, a dimensional pulsation grows which totally
re-territorizlizes the cinema's auditorium. Through deft
frequency manipulation and gorgeous spatialization, the
sparkling harmonic sound conveys the presence of something
which exists beyond that which is presumed to be the narrational
space and its fictive zoning (an artistic strategy Thom
defined in Dennis Hopper's COLORS, 1987). As auditors, looking
at a spectral analyser with its pumping LEDs while hearing
this sound, we occupy the fused headphonic/radarphonic space
of Ellie: a primed and imaginative place where the desire
to hear external presences creates the net wherein signs
of the beyond can roost. Here is a profound moment of cinematic
truth: surround sound activity (far more lively and kinetic
then the dry notion of "off-screen sound") captures all
that the screen cannot show. If we are to contacted by something
beyond, it is likely it will first make us realize the limited
recording range of both our mental facilities and monitoring
technologies.
The
complex phenomenological and technological ramifications
of CONTACT's hypothesis warrants further in depth discussion.
It is a first (especially in Anglo-American live action
cinema whose mystical rigour trails decades behind Indian
musicals, Japanese animation and Hong Kong action movies)
in employing surround spatialization not merely for Judeo-Christian
mystical spookery, but for the investigation of how one
shifts from a centred existence to a decentred one. Despite
the knee-jerk reactions by many hip pseudo-non-believers
who deep down fear the mythology of God, CONTACT's mystical
pondering is broad enough to not be thematically rooted
in either religious or humanist dogma, and open enough to
state the vitality of sound as a life-force whose energy
fields and physical expansiveness effect us deeply despite
the thinness of our ocular rationalism.
