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

3. The Look of 5.1: Visual Aesthetics

84 The Look of 5.1: Visual Aesthetics If people are thinking about [sound] early on, when they’re shooting and when they’re editing, you approach the film differently. You think about how you’re going to use sound, what you put in the background of scenes—the length of your cuts might change. Gary Rydstrom, sound designer A film’s soundtrack does not operate in isolation, but rather as part of a larger whole; changes in film sound technology thus have an impact beyond the soundtrack. The advent of the “talkie,” for instance, led to significant shifts in the ways films were shot and edited. Silent films of the late 1920s had an average shot length of five seconds overall, with about three-fourths having an average shot length between four and seven seconds.1 With the introduction of sync sound, average shot lengths nearly doubled to around 10.8 seconds; films also showed more variation in the tempo of their cutting than they did in the silent era, with average shot lengths ranging from six to fourteen seconds depending on the specific film.2 And this was not a temporary aberration while filmmakers and engineers worked to overcome the initial technical difficulties of sound shooting; over every six-year period from 1934 to 1987, average shot lengths were never again as low as nor as homogenized as those of the late silent era.3 This measurably clear shift to longer shots was but one effect of the transition to sound on visual style; that 3 The Look of 5.1 · 85 technological change also sparked a decrease in camera movement and an increase in scene length. Later innovations in sound technology similarly affected cinematic visuals, and digital surround sound (DSS) is no exception to this pattern . Determining exactly what shifts in visual aesthetics its use has provoked, however, is no easy task. In the last chapter, the technical differences between Dolby Stereo and digital surround sound served as a guide to considering how DSS might have affected filmmakers’ aesthetic choices in the aural realm. This approach does not work when exploring the visual realm, however, since no technological differences differentiate the image tracks of DSS-equipped films from those of their predecessors. Moreover, many factors—production technologies, cultural norms, trends in non-film media, economic concerns, and so on—affect shifts in cinematic style. Given this breadth of influences and the lack of a specific change in imaging technology tied to DSS, it is nearly impossible to point to specific changes in visual style and claim them unequivocally as results of the move to 5.1 digital surround. This chapter will thus take a more heuristic approach than the last, exploring ways in which digital surround is linked to shifts in cinematographic and editing practices rather than asserting a specific cause-and-effect relationship. Additionally, this analysis will necessarily be audio-visual rather than purely image-driven, since it deals with the ramifications of an audio technology on the visual field. The “Superfield” and the “Poor Little Screen” The effects on the filmic image of digital surround’s immediate predecessor provide a useful starting point for this exploration. Michel Chion, one of the few film theorists to have written about the implications of multi-channel sound (which he calls multitrack) for cinematic visuals, argues that from the time Dolby Stereo was first introduced, its multi-channel capabilities were used to expand the world of the film beyond the screen: We also must not forget that the definitive adoption of multitrack sound occurred in the context of musical films like Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock or Ken Russell’s Tommy. These rock movies were made with the 86 · Production and St yle intent to revitalize filmgoing by instituting a sort of participation, a communication between the audience shown in the film and the audience in the movie theater. The space of the film, no longer confined to the screen, in a way became the entire auditorium, via the loudspeakers that broadcast crowd noises as well as everything else.4 Chion dubs this “space of the film” that spreads from the screen into the entire theater the “superfield.” Specifically, he defines the superfield as “the space created, in multitrack films, by ambient natural sounds, city noises, music, and all sorts of rustlings that surround the visual space and that can issue from loudspeakers outside the physical boundaries of...