Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre by Robert Spadoni

Author:Robert Spadoni [Spadoni, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2011-05-29T22:15:39+00:00

20.2

20.3

F R A N K E N S T E I N A N D T H E V A T S O F H O L L Y W O O D / 1 0 1

(Edward Van Sloan) from the other side of a closed door.24 These quiet sounds alert viewers to the approach of a figure they have seen only under a sheet and bandages until now. The film, along with the original promotional campaign—which, while the film was in production, teas-ingly touted the secrecy of the monster’s appearance—have predisposed viewers to take careful note of these scuffling noises. Mise-en-scène (in the case of the dirt hitting the lid), narrative (up to the point when we hear the monster’s footsteps), and marketing (on the occasion of the film’s first release) all compel viewers to listen closely to these sounds—and to listen with a combination of fascination and dread. In these ways Frankenstein elicits responses that can be compared to some initial responses to ordinary sounds in films released during the transition, when, as I note in the first chapter, “footsteps—scrunch, scrunch—on the path”

could transfix a film viewer. Also, recall that this was when ordinary noises could sound to viewers quite unreal. (A commentator in 1932 referred to recent improvements in “the reproduction of common sounds, such as hand clapping, footsteps, and rustling paper, which have in the past sounded far from natural.”)25 Whale makes these noises fascinating and unnatural sounding again by recontextualizing them, first to set the right mood at the start of his film (Shudder no. 1), and later to por-tend the imminent arrival of an unnatural being.

Viewers also listen closely to the monster’s vocal utterances. The monster does not speak eloquently as in the novel, nor haltingly and with a tiny vocabulary as in the 1935 sequel.26 Instead he grunts and snarls, making sounds that the film’s first critics noticed and tried to describe.

(One mentioned the figure’s “mooing”; another referred to his “barking.”)27 We can understand this subspeech to be performing a function similar to Dracula’s moody pronouncements in the earlier film, though with an important difference. In early 1931 Lugosi’s Hungarian accent and off-kilter line deliveries were foreign sounding enough to cast viewers back onto the initial strangeness and materiality of synchronized speech. Now, just a few months later, the memories of those sensations had grown more distant. Now the experience of being so astonished by the weird textures of synchronized speech that one might forget to pay attention to its semantic content was further out of reach. Whale compensates for the added distance by presenting a figure whose “speech”

possesses no semantic content whatsoever. Viewers so confronted have no choice but to register the sensuous qualities of the creature’s guttural noises and strangely plaintive coos—and to project the unearthliness of these sounds onto the speaker’s body. This is one way Whale uses sound 1 0 2 / F R A N K E N S T E I N A N D T H

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.