Theories of the Soundtrack by James Buhler (review)

It is a strange experience trying to summarise a book that is itself a kind of summary, but perhaps that word short-changes this impressive volume from James Buhler of the University of Texas at Austin. A work which manages to be both survey and commentary, it is the kind of release that I did not know I needed and has certainly proved extremely valuable in both research and teaching. Gathering a broad landscape of audiovisual theory together in an easily-navigable work, Buhler provides us with the kind of compendium that–despite its few weaknesses–may continue to prove reliably useful.

An author whose name is now among the most familiar in the field, Buhler’s collaborations with David Neumeyer, Hearing the Movies (2015), and Music in Cinema (2000) (with Neumeyer and Caryl Flinn) are now staples of the audiovisual bibliography. Buhler has been working on Theories of the Soundtrack for a decade (its research crossing over the publication of Hearing the Movies), during which time the original objective, a chapter commissioned for The Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies (2013), grew into three chapters which survive in this book.

The original manuscript for Theories of the Soundtrack was–amazingly–‘more than twice the length of the current one’ (p.xi), but a more focused work was seemingly formed out of a thorough reorganisation. As a result, its purpose is ‘not to provide an exhaustive historical documentation but rather to sketch out the range of theoretical approaches that have been applied to the soundtrack over time’, and these approaches are organised in chapters ‘both chronological and topical’ (p.16). The early chapters look at early film and the first forays into audiovisual theorising, leading into the classical era and beyond, and into the present day in the last chapter. These clear sections confront ‘central issues for each generation: the problem of film itself, then of image and sound, of adequate analytical-descriptive models, and finally of critical-interpretive models’ (p.16).

Getting the tone right must have been one of the central challenges of writing this book. The extent to which the author needs to simplify ideas, or make them more accessible, must have been a consideration, since the object is to present multiple ideas in quick succession. Buhler states that he took inspiration from two works by Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories (1976) and Concepts in Film Theory (1984), and Francesco Casetti’s Theories of Cinema, 1945–1995 (1999), noting that these works ‘rarely mention the soundtrack at all’ (p.xi). This is of course a complaint against film studies that recurs in film musicology, and a problem that has only recently started to correct itself. That the author wanted to provide something that fulfils the function of explaining and codifying audio in film–as if providing what those authors left out–gives us an idea of where the book is pitched in terms of its target readership.

An early chapter deals with the coming of the sound film and the responses it provoked in the academy: Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov’s ‘Statement on Sound’, Balázs, Arnheim, and Potamkin. It clearly communicates the nuances of the entangled views on the new format that these thinkers articulated. The prose navigates a careful line: paraphrased passages do not over-simplify, nor does Buhler rely too much on direct quotation, and further chapters deftly maintain that balance. The subsequent section, ‘Theories of The Classical Sound Film’, is sensibly kept relatively short, perhaps because its subject is so extensively examined and summarised in other literature.

Chapters 4–8 broaden the scope to include a range of theoretical approaches drawn from the wide variety of stances since the 1960s, showing how seemingly distant disciplines have informed film musicology up until the present. Linguistics and semiotics, Jean Mitry, Gilles Deleuze, and Christian Metz in the fourth chapter lead on to a very useful overview of Neoformalism in the fifth. This latter chapter concisely articulates the rather knotty idea–as put forward by...