Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age

7. Studying Image/Sound Interactions

225 Studying Image/Sound Interactions The mental effort of fusing image and sound in a film produces a “dimensionality” that the mind projects back onto the image as if it had come from the image in the first place. . . . We do not see and hear a film, we hear/see it. Walter Murch Cinema is an audio-visual medium and must be studied as such. While much film scholarship has neglected the soundtrack in favor of the image , it is equally inappropriate to do the reverse and focus exclusively on the aural component of cinema. The strategy outlined in the last chapter for analyzing multi-channel usage is thus incomplete: to be productive, any multi-channel-inclusive analytic approach cannot treat the soundtrack as if it exists in isolation but must incorporate interactions between it and the image. This is particularly true for movies that adhere to the digital surround style, which often shifts narrative and thematic burdens from the image to the soundtrack. In this style of filmmaking, image and sound are tightly tied together, each influencing the other, and neither makes complete sense outside the context of the sound/image pairing. This two-way influence is perfectly illustrated by an anecdote from sound designer Erik Aadahl about his work on the movie I, Robot (2004). For 7 226 · Analysis the scene described earlier where Detective Spooner has just emerged from his battered car and the soundtrack simulates tinnitus, Aadahl notes that the “spacey” feel of the soundtrack was suggested by the fact that the camera angles were slightly canted. As it turns out, the director and picture editor had not intended for Spooner to seem “totally out of it” as this sound design suggests; once they heard it, though, they let the scene run longer than had been intended so that the sound design had time to progress from muffled sounds at first, through the tinnitus effect, and finally back to normal.1 A sound design decision originally evoked by the image, in other words, itself affected the picture edit in turn. While this particular example relies on knowledge of I, Robot’s production process, close study of the film itself reveals similar collusions between image and soundtrack. As Spooner is about to leave a robot junkyard, for instance, sound effects in the surrounds lead him back into the site—where the old robots are now being viciously destroyed by new ones, an event propelling the movie toward its climax .2 The point is that the relationship between sound and image in the real world of film production is complex; textual analysis methods that fail to address image, sound, and their interactions are at best incomplete and at worst a catalyst for inaccurate conclusions. The goal of this chapter is to reformulate the text-driven but soundtrack-focused analysis method developed in the previous chapter into an analytic approach that recognizes—and provides a framework for addressing—the bidirectional importance of the picture track to the soundtrack and vice versa. Shot-by-Shot Analysis The conventional way to study a film sequence is through shot-byshot analysis; as the analytic approach with which film scholars are most familiar, this is a logical launching pad for the development of a more comprehensive method. As its name suggests, the shot-by-shot approach generally ignores the soundtrack—other than perhaps to note the lines of dialogue accompanying each shot—and is therefore ill suited for studying sound/image interactions, at least in its traditional form. The methodology of conventional shot-by-shot analysis, as de- Studying Image/Sound Inter actions · 227 scribed in Bellour’s landmark The Analysis of Film, is to examine every shot in a sequence, then try to explicate the sequence’s structure and meaning through commonalities or oppositions between those shots. An example will demonstrate this methodology and provide a common “proving ground” for each analytic approach considered here. The opening of the 1996 action film The Rock makes an excellent test case—in the span of under three minutes this sequence offers significant visual and aural fodder for discussion, employs several different types of interaction between sound and image, and aggressively activates the 5.1 soundscape. The specific segment considered here begins after the two production company logos (Hollywood Pictures and Simpson/Bruckheimer Productions) and ends with a close-up of a tombstone just before General Hummel (Ed Harris) speaks his first line...