[inaudible]: Point of Audition Representations of Deafness and the Cochlear Implant in A Quiet Place (2018)

Interrogating point of audition (POA) sound through the silences, noises, and closed captions of A Quiet Place’s critically lauded soundscapes, this article examines the ways point of audition aurally and rhetorically constructs deafness, technology, and the audio-viewer. In its sonic rendering of the post-apocalyptic world, A Quiet Place actively involves the audio-viewer in its fantastical conceit and ‘fantasy’ of deafness, folding the audience into the complex cyborgian politics and potential of the malfunctioning cochlear implant. This diegetic technological breakdown merges and tangles with the technology of the film, the point of audition sound highlighting the immersive capabilities and audist expectations of cinematic soundscapes. Yet, in this straining towards ‘immersion’, the uncaptioned silences of Regan’s point of audition further accentuate issues of access, raising questions of the composition and meaning of immersion and silence. Through the shades of silence and sharp whining feedback of A Quiet Place, this article ultimately details the possibilities and complications of analysing point of audition sound, in the process, illustrating the harmonic resonation of the studies of sound, deafness, and disability. This article is the winner of the 2020 Claudia Gorbman Graduate Student Writing Award, selected by the Sound and Music Special Interest Group of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in conjunction with Music, Sound, and the Moving Image.

Multiple-Music Versions?

With the advent of sound film in the early 1930s the German film industry produced so-called multiple-language versions as a part of its internationalisation strategy. These versions were produced for the French, English, and Italian markets (often) with a new cast of actors. Despite the importance of music in these films, a systematic study on the role of music in these multiple-language versions is still lacking. This article offers a first case study on the topic by comparing the German, Italian, and French versions of the sound film-operetta Paprika (1932/1933). It will be illustrated that the music (rather than sound) as well as the use of the musical material in the versions of Paprika differed significantly. Musical adaptation was used as an important means to shape the film’s narrative and to create a distinct aesthetic for each of the film’s versions. Historically, there are evident parallels to the adaptation practice of opera and operetta over the past centuries.

The Immersive Continuity of Roma

In Gravity (2013), Alfonso Cuarón introduced a fully three-dimensional sound design approach that was originally termed by Idrovo and Pauletto (2019) as ‘immersive point-of-audition’. More recently, in Netflix’s Roma (2018), Cuarón not only perfected such treatment of sound, but consolidated an audio-visual style that stands out for its capacity to enhance our sensation of ‘presence’ in the narrative world, a style that is referred here to as immersive continuity. Grounded on the spatiotemporal continuity of the long take, Cuarón’s immersive continuity allows sound objects to flow all around the 3-D space, and hence opens a giant window of opportunity for the exploitation of Dolby Atmos. Through an extensive analysis of Roma, this article describes the aesthetics of such audio-visual style, and beyond, it explores the methods and workflows that permitted Cuarón’s sound team to fully exploit sound three-dimensionality. Finally, I discuss the growing adoption of Netflix as one of the major challenges that the theatrical cinema industry has to face; and argue that embracing immersive continuity may be a powerful weapon for attracting audiences to a cinematic experience that cannot be found at home.

Lady in the Lake, Choral Voices, and Narrative Agency

A notable feature of the use of choral voices in cinema is the attenuation of language; singers hum, vocalise, and sing in invented or dead languages. Such an approach applies across genres and sees choruses used in two related ways: as evocations of human and inhuman collectives, and as celebrants of spectacle and narrative resolution. I argue that this approach is dictated by the particular implication of human agency that the voice, as opposed to the musical instrument, promotes. I sketch the ontological properties of choral voices in cinema and analyse Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1947). As well as being a singular experiment in first-person camera, the film is significant for its a cappella score, the only one of its kind in classical cinema, motivated, I argue, by the film’s distinct narrative strategy.

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.