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

9. Apparatus Theory

277 Apparatus Theory 9 Surround for film, for my taste what it does is it takes away the two-dimensionality of the screen. It opens up the room and it gives you more of a realistic experience. Erik Aadahl, sound designer I think the 5.1 environment still is centered at the screen . . . the reason there are speakers around you is to kind of create this environment around you but the focal point is still in front of you. Mike Knobloch, Universal Pictures executive In their introduction to the 2008 essay collection Lowering the Boom, editors Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda argue that despite assertions of cinema studies having entered a “post-theory” era, classic film theory deserves to be reexamined in light of the soundtrack it has so long ignored: The study of film sound theory, historically marginalized and thus underdeveloped in cinema studies, has only recently started to evolve, and it offers numerous possibilities for advancing, revisiting, and revising current feminist, Marxist, psychoanalytic, queer, and apparatus theories. . . . We recognize work on sound as a clarion call for a return to theory, one that allows for a number of innovative and original ap- 278 · Theory proaches to theoretical perspectives that have otherwise been regarded as defunct.1 The last sentence of this plea concedes that the grand theoretical constructs that once dominated film scholarship have largely gone out of fashion. What Beck and Grajeda wisely recognize, though, is that many of these theories were developed with little, or more often no, consideration for the cinema’s aural component. As one scholar writing in the late 1980s put it, “Theories can and do flourish without acknowledging sound as an integral part of film—in some cases, almost without acknowledging its existence.”2 Even those models of film theory that are now considered obsolete offered useful insights in their day; they may yield further revelations into the workings of cinema when reinterrogated from an audio-visual perspective. This and the next chapter offer bidirectional examinations, considering two strands of classical film theory in the light of digital surround sound and vice versa. That is, they examine both how these models illuminate the functioning of multi-channel cinema and how digital surround sound partially rehabilitates these theoretical constructs. Together , these approaches confirm Beck and Grajeda’s supposition that even obsolete elements of film theory can be productively reappraised from a sound-aware perspective and demonstrate the importance of including multi-channel considerations in that perspective. Why Apparatus Theory? One of the specific theories mentioned by Beck and Grajeda as deserving reexamination is apparatus theory. This is a logical first element of classical theory to consider in the context of digital surround sound (DSS) for two reasons. First, as a construct closely tied (as its name suggests ) to the technology of cinema, apparatus theory would seem likely to be affected by, and say something about, a technological change such as the adoption of DSS. James Lastra contends that apparatus theory represents a kind of technological determinism;3 if so, then a significant shift in cinematic technology should certainly impact the theory and its conclusions. Second, apparatus theory focuses specifically on the screen as the locus of the movie. In deeming cinema a primarily visual medium, Body and Voice · 279 apparatus theory is hardly alone. Unlike most other theories of film, though, apparatus theory makes the physical movie screen the literal focus of its argument. Rick Altman may have had apparatus theory in mind when he observed that “generations of film theorists have assumed that the whole of the cinema may be reduced to the screen.”4 Yet as the quotations that opened this chapter hint, the role of the screen as the lone “place” of the movie is in flux in the digital surround era. While Knobloch asserts that the screen remains the “focal point” of the theatrical experience, Aadahl’s claim that surround “takes away the two-dimensionality of the screen” and “opens up the room” implies that the screen may no longer be the sole focus of the audience’s attentions . This latter viewpoint is supported by the adoption of the digital surround style, which expands the diegetic world of the movie beyond the screen into the rest of the theater, making the movie not just what is in front of us on the screen but what is all around us. Briefly, apparatus theory encompasses several related arguments that...