| | | | | | Most film sound tracks are far from innovative. The problem is that its usual ingredients are made up of idle talk, cheap theatrics, and a serenade the kind of stuff, Martin Heidegger tells us, that "closes things off" for us, smoke screens that draw off attention from life-and-death issues. 12 Film sound for sure can be something else. It can help us question the visible, make us discover something we would have missed in the world, even suggest an extra dimension to ordinary life. The traditional dialogue, sound effects, and music tracks need not therefore be overturned; it is their makeup, their assemblage, their connection to the visuals that would benefit from serious reconsideration. | | | | | | | | | When looking at a scene, even the element most taken for granted the fact that the lines seem to originate from the actors' mouths is fraught with ambiguity. Why is it so important, Rudolf Arnheim remonstrates, to keep focusing on "the monotonous motions of the mouth," a decision he suggests that "yields little" in the long run?13 In fact, as Altman appropriately reminds us, it is the loudspeaker, not the actors, that "'speaks' directly to the audience."14 And even today its position in the theater may not match that of the speaking actor on the screen. The point then is that, through the technique of synchronization, a discourse by a screenwriter modulated by sound technicians "is recuperated to [mere story] when it is attributed to characters in a diegesis."15 Indeed, for all practical purposes, we are not aware, when watching a film, that a written text precedes what we take to be direct speeches by the characters. The ideological benefit is double: (1) the discourse the screenplay parades as pure presence (Jacques Derrida could point to this as a typical operation through which, in our society, speech camouflages writing); and (2) the work involved in transforming the latter into the former is also nowhere in evidence as per the demands of bourgeois culture. Needless to say, these lines of dialogue are also purified of the hesitations, the repetitions, and all the other malapropisms that pervade regular conversations. Taking all of this into consideration, it becomes clear that the emphasis on synchronizing voice and mouth goes beyond mere technicality. To use Mary Ann Doane's summation, it "guarantees the singularity of a point of audition, thus holding at bay the potential trauma of dispersal, dismemberment, difference'' for characters and audiences alike.16 We are reassured that the speech we hear comes from the human being we see on the screen, not a from writer about whom we know nothing. One alternative | | | | |
