How to Watch a Movie by David Thomson

Author:David Thomson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books

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WHAT DO YOU HEAR?

Sound seems to complete the ghostly contract movies have with life. Now the process sounds like life as well as looking like it. But realize that sound is another kind of editing. Sound cuts into the picture; it adds music to the visual stream; it can insert a narrator’s voice; it adds so many other nuances of sound effect to what we might call the silent film. You can experiment yourself. Take a famous stretch of silent film—try the opening of Sunrise, where the City Woman lures and seduces the rural husband to come out to the swamp. Run the scene with different types of music: Sinatra singing “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”; something from Debussy’s La Mer; Donna Summer singing “Love to Love You, Baby”; the opening to the last movement of Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony; or a sitar raga played by Ravi Shankar.

That range is comic, yet they all work. Just about any music plays with any stretch of film, or any sound track: the Sunrise scene would play with a very heavy-handed “swamp” sound track—cicadas, hyenas laughing in the distance, and the sound of heat—I mean the pressure of sweltering atmosphere; or try it with just the mournful wind of the prairies and the creak of dry trees. The characters shift as we listen to them.

Different scores edit or organize a picture. They take it toward a different meaning: La Mer makes the adulterous affair lyrical; Donna Summer turns the film and its 1927 iconography into camp satire; Sinatra makes us chuckle over the sexual obsession; while the sitar begins to suggest that this small local infatuation—heady and damaging, perhaps—is just a pebble on a large beach.

As the “invention” of sound was labored over in the 1920s, the target achievement that obsessed its inventors was to make it synchronized: to have the sound of talk as lips moved; to hear the sound of a shot as we see the flash of a gun; and for the footsteps of Frankenstein’s monster to match his movements on screen. That can be done. But in time filmmakers learned that asynchronicity had a point, too. So sound can begin two or three seconds before its proper sequence. A voice does not have to come from the mouthing face. And a particular sound effect can leap out of the overall naturalism of sound like a warning. In A Dangerous Method, Jung shocks and challenges Freud by anticipating that a cracking noise will occur, irrationally, in the room where they are sitting. The noise comes: Freud says it is accidental but explainable; Jung prefers to regard it as irrational but indicative. The auditory does not have to be a meek record of life any more than the pictures need to be accurate. Sound can have its close-ups and long shots.

Alfred Hitchcock was old enough to have made silent films. He had come into the business as a graphic designer. All his working life he spoke of “pure cinema,” putting the

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