who could bring to the audio the kind of imaginative assistance the cinematographer directs toward the image. Unfortunately, today, the job is mostly a passive one. Jean-Luc Godard was probably hitting below the belt when he declared that few production mixers "truly like their job: they don't understand what cinema sound is all about. They believe that the audio merely escorts the picture. . . . They don't even like to record mere sounds. . . . For the most part, they are bureaucrats who sit behind their little table and switch a knob up or down." 2 For all its unfairness, the image definitely rings a bell for anyone who has spent some time on a set! The idea here at the minimum is to rethink the situation, to reopen what can be heard and recorded at the time of the shoot. But more is needed. Sound designers like Walter Murch, who are often called upon to provide their magic after the fact, cannot emphasize it enough: think of sound (beyond dialogue) at the script stage.3 Some skeptics would point out the achievements of sound in the last twenty years, its razzle-dazzle technology which is now an important selling point for the film. But is loud sound great sound?4 Has sound really improved all that much? Is the director now thinking of sound when working on the shooting script? Has the sound mixer truly become a creative adjunct to the film process? Is sound itself finally the equal partner of the visuals?
II
"The eye is superficial, the ear is profound and inventive."5 This is how Robert Bresson expressed his sympathy for sound. If we hear what Bresson is telling us, we should realize that adding audio to images does not just allow for a greater manipulation of the images, fine tuning them so to speak. It also means that the world opened up by sounds can be radically different from the one our eyes have accustomed us to. What does it mean to listen to the world? For Jean-Pierre Beauviala (the designer of the Aaton cameras), our ears act somewhat independently from our eyes.6 While we may concentrate our sight on someone in front of us, our ears may be paying attention to what is being said behind us. Second, our ears are less domesticated than our eyes. Whereas our eyes seem to function as an accessory of one's will, discovering in the world the constructs they have been trained to find there, our ears remain locked in a sort of preindustrial mode.7 All kinds of raw sounds enter
