COLLAPSING
IMAGE INTO MUSIC: Part 2
Noise, Noise, Noise
published in The Wire No.165, November,
1997, London
If
experimental music the first half of this century engineered a
metaphysical realm wherein all musical possibilities have been
rendered as pure sonic data, cinema this second half of this century
has commandeered that realm and transformed it into a chaotic
free market. There, any sound effect or musical motif is employed
as a value or marker of controlled meaning within the film narrative.
As a free market, the film soundtrack does not care how conservative
or radical sound or music is - so long as it does its job. For
some, this is a frightening world where art is rendered meaningless
assigned commodity value. For others, it is a decentred and destabilised
terrain across which the very notion of 'value' is endlessly re-invented,
thereby allowing multiple and lateral invention. This second point
of view is evidenced by the fact that radical sound experimentalism
often crops up in cliche-ridden Hollywood blockbusters. Rarely
is it marked on the soundtrack of respectable European art house
movies - most of which employ a fromage of emotive new-world muzak
just this side of Easy Listening but devoid of irony. Yet the
abject noise of Russolo, the aural complexity of Henry, the electronic
overload of Stockhausen, the sonic density of Cage, the overpowering
tonality of Young, the expansive harmonics of Penderecki - all
have found their way into films whose true contribution to the
audio-visuality of the cinema has fallen on deaf ears.
Play
a Roadrunner & Coyote cartoon from the early 50s and shut
your eyes. Flash back to the Atomic Era: the power of neutrons,
the wondrous glow of radioactivity, the breaking of the sound
barrier, the frottage of freeways across the nation. Listen to
the soundtrack: presses, plants and pumps from fantastic factories;
valves, pistons, ignitions from unimagined motors; gears, exhausts
and turbines from evenerated engines. This is the true sound of
the 50s orchestra: a machine of sonic production, unromanticized
for its collapse of music yet fetishized for the sheer power and
beauty of its metallica. Carl Stalling's orchestration - itself
an octane-fuelled cocktail of pre and postwar jazz populism -
spills onto the heated asphalt of Tregg Brown's earth-rumbling
speed-addicted sound effects montage. Bizarrely, contemporary
'industrial' and 'dark ambient' music sounds 'cartoony' when compared
to the genuine embrace of noise which these family-oriented animated
shorts extolled over forty years ago.
The
Warner Bros. cartoons from the mid 40s to the mid 50s - now marketed
as trademarked produce to exploit a vague nostalgic yearning for
'wackiness' - exemplify how deeply the mechanical had penetrated
the popular consciousness. Here was a mass medium which auditioned
both the scarring cacophony of wartime trauma and the heady eroticism
of postwar technologies. Cartoons digested by audiences whose
listening had been profoundly altered by bomb detonations, and
to whom the metallic ring of chrome appliances was strangely titillating,
the smell of exhaust a futuristic fragrance. While the Futurists
were attracted to noise for its destructive potential - its ability
to blast the orchestral academy back into history - common audiences
identified with noise in the Warner Bros. cartoons as an acceptable
and exciting record of their sonic landscape.
Throughout
the hysterically utopian 50s, noise - a gigantic sound effects
library of destruction, detonation and devastation - perversely
reigns on the cinematic soundtrack. And this is despite the pseudo-neo-Romantic
toning of symphonies which tried to split sound from music like
the space between two single beds in a married couple's bedroom
(a quaint denial of sexuality at the time). The aptly titled blockbusters
of the 50s went big on the screen, high on moral content, lurid
in their visuality, and loud in their sound design: THE GREATEST
SHOW ON EARTH (1952), THE ROBE (1953), MOBY DICK (1956), THE BRIDGE
ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957), BEN HUR (1959), JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE
OF THE EARTH (1959). All can be noted for their dramatic peaks
occurring in synch with explosive cacophonies when nature, machines
and the elements collide in gladiatorial spectacle. In a sense,
these blockbusters - far from being commercial 'bombs' - were
the exhausted expulsions of a dying studio system in Hollywood.
The more the authoritative voice of Hollywood weakened, the louder
its soundtrack, desperately trying to convince one that the MGM
lion roar was somehow more than a sound effect.
The
cacophony of the Roadrunner & Coyote cartoons' is reorchestrated
in numerous films from America and Europe toward the end of the
60s. To pick one of many machine cycles in the cinema at this
time, car films like Claude Lelouch's A MAN AND A WOMAN (1966),
Jean Luc Godard's WEEKEND (1967), Peter Yates BULLIT (1969) and
Lee H. Katzin's LE MANS (1971) feature passages of unadulterated
engine noise intended to be overpowering and debilitating to the
senses. Burning rubber, vibrating chassis, steaming carburettors
- these movies sonically inhale the smoke and exhaust which flared
the nostrils of J.G.Ballard. More often resembling documentaries
than fictional stories, they foreground the sounds and images
of revving machines for sensorial effect, enthralling audiences
with a celebration of noise brutally montaged and mixed.
A
celebratory explosiveness of sound inherited from the big screen
aesthetic still characterizes blockbuster cinema en masse. Yet
a regrettably facile dichotomy still holds fast: that loud, noisy
movies have nothing to say and are thus covering up their lack,
while films of substance have subtle soundtracks which don't need
to draw attention to themselves. In reality, those supposedly
'individual/personal/expressive' films which shy away from the
crassness of the big screen sound aesthetic simply resort to the
far more repelling archaic model of harmonious accord and lilting
idyllicism which has always imparted humanist cinema with a processed
chemical-saccharine taste. Films that wish to avoid noisiness
remove the excesses of sound from the mix - but leave in the gross
orchestrations (full or sparse) against which noise always fought.
Listen to THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI. The lugubrious score by
X desperately (and vainly) tries to drown out the dynamite blasts
which the audience has waited to hear for over seventy minutes.
Noise on the big movie soundtrack is and always has been its most
progressive element. An avoidance of it in the name of sophistication
is a decidedly reactionary move.
Even
though Francis Ford Coppola's THE CONVERSATION (1974) is overly
enraptured by the stylized existentialism that typifies the work
of Michael Antonioni, the latter director never produced anything
that sounds like THE CONVERSATION. With unnerving precision and
awe-inspiring craft, sound designer Walter Murch sculpts a psychological
landscape of piercing interiority which demonstrates how complex
and effective noise can be in detailing shifting mental states.
And I mean noise. Interference, distortion, unfidelity, overload
- all the tactile signifiers of the moment when sound becomes
its other, its nightmare, its transfigured monster. Gene Hackman's
understated, repressed portrayal of the solipsistic sound recordist
bent on tapping and taping other people's private conversations
gives rise to a character whose stability is maintained by treating
dialogue purely as legible sonic data. But when he reads meaning
into the recorded dialogue, the pure sound then becomes oppressive
noise, representing the impenetrability of both the tape he has
recorded and the psychological wall he has built around his sense
of self. The film contains many stirring moments predicated on
the Stockhausian aesthetics of ring modulation, sweep equalization
and inverted compression ratios, but never are they employed as
decoration. Walter Murch brings the noise as the drama demands
it, figuring the soundtrack as a resolutely tailored text with
little concern for gratuitous effects.
THE
CONVERSATION is unsettling due to the way it sonically pictures
the sound of a mind falling apart. William Friedkin's THE EXORCIST
(1973) - with sound editing by Chris Newman - unsettles by attacking
us with sound. Poles apart from just about every other demonic
possession film made then and since, the film spends its first
half by showing us little. But nearly every edit is an incisive
aural rupture caused by an inordinately loud and disproportionately
banal sound: a cup smashes, a phone rings, a car horn beeps, a
door slams shut. 10 minutes into the film, one is put on edge,
disoriented by the viciousness of common sounds while being smothered
by a visual domesticity. The tension between sound and image is
crucial to setting us up for the film's visual opera of visceral
ocularism. Watching THE EXORCIST knowing that the inevitable intrusion
of unspeakable evil is just around the corner puts one even more
on edge: one can hear exactly how Chris Newman has constructed
a soundscape that slowly turns the New England calm inside out,
not to mention the vocal chords of young Regan herself. Key images
may repulse, but all sound in THE EXORCIST is violent, forceful
and vilifying.
Numerous
other 'big noise movies' trail into the 70s: William Friedkin's
THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971), Richard Rush's FREEBIE & THE
BEAN (1974), Mark Robson's EARTHQUAKE (1974), Norman Jewison's
ROLLERBALL (1975). Cartoons reached a similar peak of sonic saturation
with the sound effects in Hanna Barbera series like SCOOBY DOO
WHERE ARE YOU? (1970), MOBY DICK & THE MIGHTY MIGHTOR (1972),
and SPEED BUGGY (1973). But as the 70s progress, filmic realism
becomes caught between socio-political dogma and escalating stylization.
The power of noise is usurped firstly by postmodern allusions
to foregrounding visual artifice, and secondly the demand for
fidelity required by the developing Dolby noise reduction applications.
Suffice to say, by the mid 80s, a balance is thankfully struck
by the superior quality the Dolby applications afford, and the
hyper-material aggressiveness with which sound and noise could
manipulate an audience.
One
of the best and earliest examples of this is Paul Verhoven's ROBOCOP
(1985, and well worth auditioning on a Dolby Surround Sound laser
disc). As cartoony as the Roadrunner and Coyote shorts and as
hell-bent on the cacophony of the machine age but with a non-comical,
brooding tone, ROBOCOP fetishizes noise to great extremes. Guns,
cars, doors, lifts, monitors, radios, buttons, gears, levers,
pistons, drills, cranes, wheels, gates, shields - everything is
mechanized in this Detroit of the near-future. If it moves, it
makes a noise. And because noise is so fetishized in this movie,
everything is constantly moving. Major fight sequences - Robocop
battling it out with X i the corporate office, the big shoot-out
in the drug factory, the gang playing with their new weaponry
downtown - are saturated with a mind-bogging track-lay of hundreds
of sound effects and sonic incidents, each perfectly legible in
the mix and designed to make one jump in one's seat. The fictional
Detroit of ROBOCOP - like the actual Detroit that inspired such
ground-breaking electronic landscapes in original Techno - is
a sonar mine field of intense action aimed as much at the nerves
and stomach as at the eardrums. Once again, no grand statements
carry the effectiveness of ROBOCOP. Like the Roadrunner &
Coyote shorts, it is yet another example of how the radical can
unproblematically co-exist with the popular in the chaotic free
market of the film soundtrack.
