Cinema Today: A Conversation with Thirty-nine Filmmakers from around the World

2. Cinema and Sound

26 As the last major element to be added to the language of cinema, sound was its final artistic frontier, and, in some respects, it still is. When sound was first added to moving images, it was widely regarded as an aesthetic tragedy and a business threat. Before, a good love story could be seen all over the world. No one cared who played the parts—Czech, Russian, English, American, French, or Japanese actors. Language wasn’t a barrier. A few contemporary purists still contend that cinematic art ended with the advent of sound, but most people believe that the addition of sound was a new beginning, one that offered possibilities of more realism and expression in a more complex medium. Sound can work powerfully in a film and speak to audiences in a poetic and emotional way. Cinematic sound basically consists of voice-over narrative, lip-synch dialogue, dubbed dialogue, music, special effects, ambient sound, and silence—the absence of sound. Diegetic sound is part of the film’s internal narrative space and includes dialogue and environmental noise that affect our sensibilities and sense of a film’s time and place. Nondiegetic sound does not belong to the film’s internal world. It includes sound effects and music intended to set rhythms, deepen understanding and empathy for a character, and influence mood and emotion. Even a single nondiegetic sound—for example, a song playing softly on the sound track—can totally transform the way a viewer relates to the images. At times, direct sound, which is recorded at the same time as the images, is not deemed sufficiently expressive to render the full load of the reality being represented, so certain sounds are emphasized or new 2 Cinema and Sound CINEMA AND SOUND 27 sounds are added during the edit. “Looping” (aka additional or automated dialogue recording, or ADR) is the process of recording new voices or rerecording voices, that is, when an actor must re-record lines he or she spoke during filming in order to improve audio quality or make dialogue changes. “Dubbing” refers to the recording of voices not belonging to the actors because the film will be viewed in another language without subtitles. Sound effects, as opposed to dialogue or music, are artificially created sounds or sound processes used to emphasize the film’s content. “Hard” sound effects—doors slamming, guns firing—synchronize with visual images. Background sound effects—street noises, waves washing ashore—do not synchronize with the images but can impact powerfully on the reality and atmosphere of a setting. All these sound effects must be recorded and processed during sound editing. The sound designer gathers all the film’s sound tracks and puts each sound in its place, thereby re-creating the film through sound; then the sound mixer’s job is to control the dynamics of each individual sound. Generally, sound is used to identify and underscore an image or to juxtapose and even contradict that image. For example, a close-up on a face can be paired with a sound relating to an off-screen action. A film’s visuals may appear real, even hyper-real, but its sounds can be abstract. Some filmmakers elide real-life direct sounds into music, playing off the contradiction between visual reality and aural abstraction. Music conventionally has less reference than a film’s images to the natural physical world, so many critics consider music to be more pure than cinema and other visual arts. Yet both cinema and music manipulate time and space, create rhythms, and convey powerful emotion. Filmmakers may even find inspiration for a film in the emotions evoked by a piece of music, rather than in literature, painting, theater, or photography, which cinema more apparently resembles. And many observers believe that the most deeply involving films often make the most creative use of sound’s expressive possibilities. Most art filmmakers regard image and sound as equals, with some, like Lucrecia Martel, even giving sound precedence by allowing it to shape a film’s action and emotion and lead the images. Unfortunately, cinematic sound’s full potential is infrequently explored and often abused—for example, when dialogue is used without discretion, simply to deliver exposition, or when loud music is used to shore up a scene that doesn’t CINEMA TODAY 28 stand on its own, or when ambient noise and sound effects are overdone. And...