"Not for Tourists": Hitchcock's Sparse Sonic Set Pieces

From its release in 1963 to the present day, The Birds has been heralded for its innovative soundtrack. As James Wierzbicki has demonstrated, the fact that the film contained bird sounds produced electronically by an instrument known as the Trautonium in lieu of nondiegetic music was emphasized months before the film's release and commented upon extensively by contemporary reviewers.¹ Hitchcock was an eager participant in this publicity campaign, posing for photographs with the Trautonium (fig. 1, shown on the following page) and noting the film's experimental use of sound in numerous interviews, including his famous conversation with François Truffaut.² Beginning with a 1978 article by Elizabeth Weis, scholars have attended closely to the characteristics and meanings of the soundtrack of The Birds, trumpeting it as Hitchcock's "most revolutionary soundtrack," in the words of Jack Sullivan, and an important early effort to use electronic sound in film.³

There is much to admire about the soundtrack of The Birds, and I have no intention of challenging its significance in the history of film sound. Yet innovations seldom emerge full-blown from the head of a filmmaker. In this essay, I wish to trace what I see as one important lineage of the soundtrack of The Birds: Hitchcock's prior experiments with sequences featuring what I will call sparse sonic set pieces. By sparse, I refer to moments when a film avoids the use of nondiegetic music and relies on a soundtrack featuring a generally small quantity of different sounds at a relatively low volume level.

Figure 1.

By set piece, I refer to the process of sectioning off something and foregrounding its status as an attraction. In an action/adventure movie, for instance, the set piece typically draws attention to its own craft through such elements as noticeable visual effects, set design, or combat choreography. Action movie set pieces also constitute moments for admiration because they generally contrast with less flashy scenes positioned immediately before and after the set piece. The sonic set pieces that I analyze in this paper follow a similar pattern: they stand out from surrounding sequences of the film through the sparseness of their soundtracks, and it is precisely the unusual nature of this sparseness that encourages audiences to notice and attend closely to the remaining sounds. This comparison to action-based set pieces is not perfect, as action scenes typically thrive on visual and kinetic saturation rather than sparseness. Nevertheless, Hitchcock loved the notion of set pieces, and his use of sparse sound has much in common with the broader concept of the self-contained, technical virtuosity commonly associated with the set piece.⁴ Indeed, Hitchcock has been identified as a master of memorable "moments" in film, and his sparse sound scenes provide further evidence to support that claim.⁵

A few scholars have noted Hitchcock's use of silence or sparse sound, but no one has undertaken a detailed or systematic analysis of this technique across multiple films.⁶ In what follows, I focus mainly on sparse sonic set pieces found in four Hitchcock films prior to The Birds: Secret Agent (1936), Saboteur (1942), To Catch a Thief (1955), and North by Northwest (1959). For each film, I examine the concepts and themes that each sparse sonic set piece conveys and consider sound's contribution to these moments. I argue that Hitchcock consistently used noticeably sparse sound to enact a shift to a bleaker tone and to signal an inversion of character situation and audience expectation. In doing so, Hitchcock's sonic set pieces regularly suggest a stripping away of comfort and artifice and a revelation of a grimmer "truth" or "reality" that underlies facades. At times, sparse sonic set pieces also denote a shift away from a tourist milieu, normally associated with naiveté, complacency, and being attached to and misled by exterior appearances, and into a quieter, more deadly space—what one might call, to borrow a line from To Catch a Thief, an environment "not for tourists." I then turn to The...