Where
Sound Is
Locating
The
Absent Aural in Film Theory
Sage Handbook of Film Studies, Sage Publications, London,.
2008
Introduction excerpt:
Was
there ever such a thing as silence? Surely only the
mind could project such an existence - a
mind with shrunken ears and swollen brain, cloistered
in the concert hall, the opera house, the theatre,
the library. That brainiac never experienced the rowdy
din of consumption that defined the 'sound of the crowd' excited
by the multi-media explosiveness that follows the morphological
slip across two centuries from slide lantern lectures
to carnival phantasmagoria to silent movies with live
accompaniment of all kinds to that thing people finally
call 'the cinema'. No, there was never silence; there
has only been the deluded desire for silence. That
wish for wisting the masses, their machines and their
mania cordoned off the cinema to welcome authors, librettists,
playwrights - respected soloists of silence - and disallow
any noisemakers during cinema's so-called formative
era. Thus, silence was born as a denial of the audience
and the auditorium - words whose etymology need only
be pointed out to the dumb.
This is the true abject silence of 'so-called silent cinema': a silence held
by the mute repression of describing these multi-media maelstroms at the time
which no sophisticated writer would bother to note in any way save for pretending
it didn't exist; a silence framed by the problematised historiography that places
Muerbridge and Porter in a mime puppet show to demonstrate the magical ocular
invention of cinema. It's the same silence that researchers have progressively
been impelled to 'sound out' by piecing together mood music cue folios, hyperbolic
trade magazine ads, faded photos of piano players. But despite the irrefutable
evidence provided by historians like Rick Altman in his ultimate summation
of the genesis of cinematic audiovisuality in Silent Film Sound, it is a
sonorum we will never experience, let alone hear.
This
impossible reverie and the fait accompli of its a-sonic
reality has created a gravitational pull back to the
silent cinema again and again. Maybe there we can rewrite
film history and get it right this time; maybe there
we can find some Darwinian proof to bring back to the
Society of Film Scholars to issue their silence as fundamentally
flawed in its false inscripture of the audiovisual medium
of cinema; maybe if we keep mounting 'authentically verifiable' versions of ye
olde musical accompaniment to faded and restored film prints this history will
come to life for everyone. Maybe, maybe, maybe. For all the amazing research
and presentations that have been forwarded in the field of silent film sound/music
over the last twenty years, one can't help feeling it falls mostly on deaf ears.
Film sound/music is still treated as a 'special issue' as if its destabilised
reprioritization of the aural is a disability, requiring a special rampway up
into the heads of film theorists, historians, academics and editors. The point
many are likely to miss in Altman's exhaustive Silent Film Sound is that his
tome's intention for cinema to be "reconfigured through sound" invites its manual
to be used for extending all possibilities of sono-musicality in the cinema from
the silent period onwards. I prefer that 'Silent Cinema' be renamed 'live cinema';
and that the advent of sound cinema to be regarded the birth of 'Dead Cinema' (more
on this notion later). For some, history is a virtual time machine: cosy and
baroque just like the chair Rod Taylor rides in The Time Machine. For me, history
is a giant metallic mobile-suit with internal psycho-neural fluids, just like
Shinji rides in Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Let's take a trip.
