IX

VII
But what about sound effects in particular? Does anyone really care whether this tire screeching on the pavement was actually recorded at the time of the shoot or artificially made up later? Worse, what if, as Murch reminds us, "walking on cornstarch . . . happens to record as a better 'footstep in snow' than snow itself"? 58 There are gradations of authenticity here. As a director, you can decide to limit yourself to the sounds actually recorded behind the dialogue on the production track while you were shooting. This basically was the case in the very early sound films. As Murch puts it, in these films, the original recording on the film acetate could not be altered: "there was no possibility of fixing it later in the mix, because this was the mix."59 Today, of course, with all sorts of alternatives beguiling you, most people would ridicule such a position as way too rigid if not damn foolish. You can indeed record genuine sounds at different times and place them alongside your pictures. You can pick up what you need from a library of prerecorded sound effects. You can digitally embellish or invigorate your original or preexisting sounds. Or you can ask specialists to Foley the whole film in a studio after the fact.
To stick to the first method is certainly to go against the grain of professional filmmaking. Yet some directors limit themselves to the original track recorded at the time of the production, for it emphasizes the indexical aspect of the sound, its existence as an event.60 What is important to them is that the sound happened during the take, that it was heard and recorded. That consideration has precedence over the quality of its acoustics or its signification in the narrative. Other filmmakers place their priorities elsewhere. On the one hand, they may agree with B la Bal zs who looked at sound effects as "the speech of things . . . the intimate whisperings of nature . . . the vast conversational powers of life."61 On the other hand, they do not necessarily believe that the voices of nature can be recorded incidentally. One must pay special attention to them. One must go out of one's way to find them. In this case then, the sounds are real, the noises concrete, the animal grunts genuine, but they are recorded at a different time, one by one, and selected for their ability to express the surrounding world in that part of the film. Jean Cayrol speaks for these filmmakers when he writes: "we recorded thousands of rain drops, to keep only two (and it may even be that nobody hears them in the theater). And we spent days in the forest to become aware of specific sounds, like those made by the bark of the trees."62 The problem here is that most of us have

 



Film Production Theory2000
Film Production Theory2000
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2004
Pages: 126

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