Managing Stages of Film Sound Production

The purpose of this article is to analyse the main stages of sound production in film. The study aims to establish the main principles of film sound design, prove the importance of a rational approach to each stage in the context of their impact on the results of the study, and determine the role of sound in film dramaturgy. The research methodology is based on theoretical methods, namely an analysis of information sources, comparison of Ukrainian and foreign approaches to filmmaking, generalisation and systematisation of practical knowledge and experience of sound production in film from the first sound film to the present day. Scientific novelty. The management structure of sound production’s modern stages and their impact on creative and technical components of film soundtracks is analysed in detail for the first time. Conclusions. The article analyses the stages of sound production in film and establishes the main principles of sound design by studying Ukrainian and foreign approaches to creating sound in the film. The author summarises the rational approach to each stage in the context of their impact on the results of the study and examines the role of sound in film dramaturgy.

Jean-Luc Godard’s Prénom: Carmen (1983)

In an interview discussing Prénom: Carmen (1983), Jean-Luc Godard underlines the correlation between the processes of music and filmmaking: ‘Making a film is like performing a quartet’. The emphasis on such a relationship between these two virtually different modes of artistic expression, the act of reflecting upon art in general, and the final artwork, represents Godard’s primary concern in this film. In order to emphasise this self-reflexive stance in Prénom: Carmen, the footage of the Quatuor Prat rehearsing Ludwig van Beethoven’s string quartets is intertwined with fictional material narrating a contemporary version of the Carmen myth. With this alternation, Godard conveys that his conception of cinema emerges from observing how performers create music. Music-making is thus as much a hands-on endeavour as filmmaking itself. Since we are limited to having two hands to edit the soundtrack and mix and arrange the different sounds, we consequently can hear only two sounds at the same time. With this self-inflicted limitation, Godard shapes the soundtrack of Prénom: Carmen with only two simultaneous sounds. Such an overtly self-conscious approach to film sound shifts the focus onto Beethoven’s music, not only as an artistic key device, but also as an alien within the surprisingly complex soundscape and more generally also within the contemporary Carmen story.

Liveness and Mediatization

Chapter 3 approaches liveness as an effect of immediacy. It analyzes how hypermedial opera constructs an opposition between live performance and that which is “mediatized,” that is, generated or reproduced by media technology. Relying, among others, on film sound theory, the chapter shows how the effect of liveness becomes a function of a particular relationship between sound and its source, and especially voice and body. Where some scholars have played up the discrepancy between the voice heard and the body seen in opera, this chapter is attentive to how an apparent unity of voice and body is maintained within the context of hypermediacy. With the help of Louis Andriessen and Peter Greenaway’s opera Writing to Vermeer, the chapter suggests that an alignment of liveness with femininity and body-voice unity subverts some of the critical claims that have been made with respect to both live performance and the embodied singing voice.

Hearing the Shadows at the Chat Noir’s Pre-cinematic Theatre

In the methodological introduction to his book Silent Film Sound (2004), Rick Altman focused his attention on “the extremely diverse pre-cinema practices that served as early models for film sound.” The aim of this chapter is to closely examine one such practice: that of the Chat Noir’s Shadow Theatre between 1886 and 1897. The first part of the chapter analyzes the different kinds of music that were used to accompany the shadow plays at the Parisian cabaret. The latter part focuses on the reconfiguration of the shadow plays after the closure of the Chat Noir cabaret (1897), exploring how Maison Mazo transformed the Chat Noir’s “ombres artistiques” into a mediatized and industrial production, while also promoting their artistic character in opposition to cinema’s photographic realism.

Audiovisual History

The aim of this chapter is to consider relevant theories of visual and audio history whose ontologies a histosphere absorbs and elaborates. The first section surveys the relatively new field of visual history. It argues that a histosphere creates not just disparate images but a visual sphere in which history is brought to life. Research into audio history is an even newer and less developed field. The second section therefore sketches the outlines of an audio history of film and examines the aesthetics and function of film sound, understood as an equally important expressive dimension of histospheres. The two aspects are brought together in the third section: The fusion of sound and vision makes the historical film not just a model of a historical world, but a form of perception in its own right.

Sonic Space and Echoes of the Flesh

This essay argues that the cinematic experience for audiences be reconsidered as a cinesomatic experience. Theorists such as Vivian Sobchack (1992; 2000; 2005) and Jennifer Barker (2009) have done much to conceptualise and theorise a sensory, embodied experience of cinema. These scholars, mainly drawing from either a Merleau-Pontian phenomenology or a Spinozist/Deleuzian theory of affect, have led the wave of new writings probing the ways in which audience engagement with film is corporeal. Their work explores cinema in terms of visual and haptic engagements, congruous with a broader move in scholarship towards the sensorial. However, despite the growth of embodied film theory in recent years, there is an even greater need to take the sensorial model of cinema spectatorship to film sound. This essay addresses cinema sound in specifically corporeal terms, demonstrating how audience experiences of film sound can be reconsidered as cinesomatic. By drawing a textual and phenomenological reading of the sound design in Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, 2013), this essay aims to reveal new insights into the materially rich experience of a film’s soundtrack and demonstrate how a multiplicity of ‘narratives’ converge during and beyond the cinema encounter.