| | | | | | To look at a film with dialogue, but without sound effects (as one does when building up a rough cut), forces us to question the soundness of the project. Without sound effects, the characters on the screen are not quite real: it is as if their soul had left them. As for the world they move in, it does not appear solid. It feels undeveloped, inadequate; it is found wanting. This lack of presence in fact replicates what we experience when we become aware of the emptiness of everyday life activities (the endless repetitions we go through, the waste of time on trivial issues, the time spent eating, washing, sleeping, going to work) or when we focus on what should matter most: the nothingness that awaits us in the end. When we become aware, Heidegger tells us, we are overwhelmed by angst. Hence angst emerges when the mental outlook which shapes our familiar world suddenly breaks down, often under the weight of a personal emergency of some sort. At that moment, everything one takes for granted family, friends, lovers, work becomes frightfully inadequate. However, the shift of perspective does not make us aware of another layer of reality hidden under the surface of things; rather, the familiar world, the "real" world, our world, is discovered to be a fiction with nothing else taking its place. "The threatening," Heidegger writes, "does not come from what is available or occurrent, but rather from the fact that neither of these 'says' anything any longer." 26 Although we see the usual objects around us, they fail to fulfill us as before. In film, the foremost raison d' tre for the sound effect track then is to make sure the world remains as we know it, to combat the emptiness in the core of things, a view that would show up "when something [usually] available is found missing. . . ."27 | | | | | | | | | Sounds effects are thus positioned throughout a film to "waken up the visual space."28 How do they do so? As Michel Chion demonstrated in his analysis of Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956), the sounds we hear infer successive circles of presence around a French Resistance fighter imprisoned in a Nazi jail. First, there are the immediate noises within the cell itself: those the man makes as he walks back and forth, sits on the mattress, writes something on the wall. Beyond the tiny cell, we hear what is happening in the rest of the block: the yelling of other prisoners, the guards coming and going, etc. Past that, there are the different sounds of the small town that surrounds the jail: children playing on a street, birds chirping, mostly the traffic. Then, at night, when everything quiets down, one is able to hear the whistling of a train at the outskirts of the city.29 As | | | | |
