Film-Philosophy
Journal | Salon | Portal (ISSN 1466-4615)
Vol. 6 No. 5, March 2002
Kristi McKim
Impassioned Aesthetics
Seeing Sound and Hearing Images in Michel Chion's _Audio-Vision_
Michel Chion _Audio-Vision: Sound on
Screen_ Translated by Claudia
Gorbman Foreword by Walter
Murch New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994 ISBN 0-231-0799-4
pbk Xxiv + 239 pp. 'The sound must seem an echo
to the sense.' Alexander Pope, _Essay on Criticism_.
[1] We would be hard-pressed to
find a more succinct conception of mimesis than Pope's. His
flawless iambic pentameter and soft sibilance gracefully
reinforce the line's content. Pope simultaneously offers a
definition *and* a performance of mimesis. As attentive
readers, we can both understand the content of his words and
witness that content's performance through the diction and
syntax of the line itself. Allotting equal attention to the
words and their aural resonance, we gain more from this line
than had we only noticed content or sound
independently. Granted, Pope's eloquent
line contextually refers to the musicality of verse; but he
proffers a mimetic concept that has informed critical
thought for over three centuries. In _The Voice in Cinema_
Michel Chion notes that: 'As surprising as it may seem, it
wasn't until the twentieth century that Pierre Schaeffer
first attempted to develop a language for describing sounds
in themselves' (17). [2] Moreover, once a language
within which we can speak of sound exists, how then might we
integrate our *sense* of sound with our language? And how
might we conceptualize this language relative to aesthetics?
While Pope addressed literature, the art of his time, how
might we conceive of sound and sense within a more
contemporary art, that of cinema? How might the aural
evocation (or representation) of sensory perception be
illustrated cinematically, and how does vision find a
particular position within this dynamic of sense and
representation? Moreover, how might this cinematic
juxtaposition of sound and sense, aurality and visuality, be
itself represented? Through what language can we describe
the complex aural and visual world that we apprehend in
cinema? We are not without many
answers to these questions. With the coming of sound to
cinema in roughly 1927, theorists and directors, including
Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Cavalcanti, Epstein, Balazs, and
Arnheim, sought to conceptualize the possibilities and
complications that this new aesthetic dimension introduced.
[3] Scholars have offered attention to the
soundtrack, albeit minimal compared to the visual qualities
of cinema (after all, audience members are 'spectators'). As
Mary Ann Doane notes: 'It has become a cliche to note that
the sound track has received much less theoretical attention
and analysis than the image'; while at the same time she
acknowledges that: 'In a culture within which the phrase 'to
see' means to understand, the epistemological powers of the
subject are clearly given as a function of the centrality of
the eye'. [4] This absence of critical discussions
of sound, in addition to the continued emphasis on visual
apprehension, makes for a theoretical impasse that cannot be
overcome merely by offering heightened attention to sound
itself. David Bordwell and Kristin
Thompson offer the most widely-cited delineation of sound
terminology in their _Film Art_, though their project's
focus is as their subtitle suggests: the aesthetics of
cinema as a whole. In the 2001 edition of _Film Art_, the
chapter on film sound encompasses 35 pages of their 458 page
cinema textbook, and it impressively manages to condense
sound's properties, dimensions, and spatio-temporal
manipulations into a small space. Though Bordwell and
Thompson offer formal definitions of their own sonic
lexicon, their focus remains more on framing the object of
sound and less on conceptualizing the way that we apprehend
sound and image together. For example, they explain how
'diegetic sound can be either *onscreen* or *offscreen*
depending on whether its source is within the frame or
outside the frame'. [5] In 'Aural Objects' (1980),
Christian Metz has critiqued such a terminology as
follows: 'We tend to forget that a
sound in itself is never 'off': either it is audible or it
doesn't exist. When it exists, it could not possibly be
situated within the interior of the rectangle or outside of
it, since the nature of sounds is to diffuse themselves more
or less into the entire surrounding space: sound is
simultaneously 'in' the screen, in front, behind, around,
and throughout the entire movie theater'.
[6] Metz argues that terminology
such as 'off/on-screen' fails to grasp the vastly distinct
properties that distinguish sound and image from one
another. As he argues: 'The situation is clear: the language
used by technicians and studios, without realizing it,
conceptualizes sound in a way that makes sense only for the
image. We claim that we are talking about sound, but we are
actually thinking of the visual image of the sound's
source'. [7] Of course, Bordwell and
Thompson *do* indicate that 'off-screen sound' actually
refers to the off-screen nature of the sound's *source*, but
nonetheless, the term remains 'off/on-screen sound'. And
though this term is introduced with the disclaimer that it
is the *source* and not the sound itself that is being
referenced, the idea of sound's manifestation in imagistic
terms surfaces through the dominant language that is used to
describe it. While we must laud Bordwell and Thompson for
offering us language through which to speak about and teach
film sound, we can literally see the moments when the
nuances of film sound are overlooked in the effort to
postulate a coherent language, accessible to introductory
film students and scholars alike. It is, of course,
necessary to find the words to talk about what it is that we
hear. Nonetheless, their
vocabulary and organization of film sound functions both as
the dominant way of classifying sound and, more important
for our purposes here, the very symptom of the malady
afflicting film theory. To their credit, Bordwell and
Thompson offer a detailed bibliography following their
chapter, where extrapolation on their terms and readings can
be found. Within this bibliography, they cite Michel Chion
as 'the most prolific researcher into aesthetics of film
sound', [8] and behold his _Audio-Vision_ as the
summary text of his ideas. It is thus, having addressed the
shortcomings of the primary text for film sound terminology,
that we can articulate the pressing question that remains:
how might we simultaneously account for our visual and aural
perceptions of cinema? Furthermore, would we have even known
or thought to ask this question, were it not for Michel
Chion's compelling insistence that we do so? Published in France in 1990,
Chion's _Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen_ refocuses film
theory's attention toward concerns of aesthetics, most
prominently that of sound. In a world of cultural studies,
which characterizes the 1990s, so often discussions of
beauty or meaning or what affects us are relegated to a
realm less significant than the politicization of
representation, the radical relentless pressure to critique,
think, and perform in the name of political correctness. By
no means am I suggesting that these conceptions of beauty or
poignancy are somehow unpoliticized or exist apart from
ideology; I realize that there are political implications
within aesthetic judgments. Julia Kristeva writes that
'there are political implications inherent in the act of
interpretation itself', [9] and while such claims
have established grounds for discussing the political stakes
of aesthetics, there has yet to be a significant reciprocal
exchange: aesthetics has not equally informed conceptions of
politics. I would contend that an explication of the
political is insufficient, if we are unwilling or resistant
to acknowledge how aesthetics inevitably affect our desires
or interests as a scholar and human being. We must not
neglect why we look in the first place; what aesthetically
moves us to pay attention, to consider, to ponder or
care? It is to this question, and
others, that Chion addresses his comprehensive work,
detailing the intricacy of film sound while always keeping
cinema's images in sight. In order for spectators, critics,
and scholars to begin to talk about films, we must first pay
attention both visually and aurally to the images and sounds
that are offered to our senses. From the outset Chion
establishes his sincere hope that we, as readers, are
convinced by this elaborate system for apprehending images
and sounds simultaneously. Chion's genuine enthusiasm for
his subject matter, combined with his utterly persuasive
passion that the reader *share* in his fervor, makes for an
energetic read and compelling case. Chion's fanaticism for
his newfound means of hearing-seeing a film seem couched in
a sincere plea for film audiences to appreciate *more* fully
and fruitfully the art of cinema. When apprehending the
soundtrack concurrently to the image track, 'we have read
and heard in a different way' (4). This 'different way',
this greater sensibility to the interworking of sound and
sight, yields the underscoring of his notion of 'added
value'. Added value, he claims, is
the 'expressive and informative value with which a sound
enriches a given image so as to create the definite
impression . . . that this information or expression
'naturally' comes from what is seen, and is already
contained in the image itself' (5). It is added value that
has so often given rise to our ignorance of sound, in the
assumption that sound merely 'adds' redundant information to
an image. Allow me to mark this moment of Chion's text, his
definition of 'added value', on merely page five of his
dense book, as the first of many creative terms that he
invents in the act of establishing a language for cinema
that mutually incorporates its aural and visual
components. It is also on this page that
Chion elides the multi-syllabic 'sound/image synchronism' in
the act of forming the word 'synchresis', which he defines
as 'the forging of an immediate and necessary relationship
between something one sees and something one hears' (5).
Again, this deft manoeuvring of language to corroborate his
theoretical needs mimics his broader aspiration to construct
a language within which sound and image can be read
together. As he carefully chooses terms, Chion literally
creates a linguistic means to compensate for the critical
gap he describes; by offering words to address sound and
image simultaneously, Chion dramatizes the theoretical
gesture of giving voice to what previously went unnoticed or
ignored. This postulation, he supports extensively, as he
abundantly makes reference to films from _Look Who's
Talking_ (Amy Heckerling, 1989) to _India Song_ (Marguerite
Duras, 1975), _The Magnificent Ambersons_ (Orson Welles,
1942) to _Nights of Cabiria_ (Federico Fellini, 1957), among
numerous others, and impressively notes how such examples
both uphold and complicate his model of audio-vision as he
proposes it. No longer
'conceptualiz[ing] sound in a way that makes sense
only for the image', [10] in Metz's terms, Chion's
_Audio-Vision_ offers a language that conceptualizes sound
in a way that makes sense for sound and image
simultaneously. Introducing a comprehensive bank of
terminology (all helpfully glossed at the book's end), Chion
demonstrates his faith, that he articulates as follows:
'audiovisual analysis must rely on words, and so we must
take words seriously -- whether they are words that already
exist, or ones being invented or reinvented to designate
objects that begin to take shape as we observe and
understand . . . Using more exact words allows us to
confront and compare perceptions and to make progress in
pinpointing and defining them' (186). In Chion's final chapter,
'Introduction to Audiovisual Analysis', Chion performs the
very attention that he has spent 184 pages detailing. He
champions an audiovisual analysis that 'aims to understand
the ways in which a sequence or whole film works in its use
of sound combined with its use of images', and claims that
'we undertake such an analysis out of curiosity, for the
sake of pure knowledge, but with another goal too, that of
aesthetic refinement' (185). He then proceeds to prescribe a
veritable elementary phenomenology, as he asserts that,
'first and foremost, we need to rediscover a certain
freshness in how we actually apprehend films; and we'll need
to discard time-worn concepts, which served mainly to
prevent us from hearing and seeing anyway' (186). As subject
for his sample audiovisual analysis, he selects the prologue
from Ingmar Bergman's _Persona_ (1965), 'a pedagogical
limit-case of sound-image experimentation' (209). This chapter proves a
fitting finale for the book as a whole. Since his attentions
are concentrated on this single film, his oft-wandering
(verging on rambling) style is contained under the guise of
brainstorming. His concrete and practical means of going
about this audio-visual attention offer us a tangible way of
enacting this knowledge. As if we are not already convinced,
the final chapter reinforces this book's appropriateness for
film theory classes, production classes, etc., as it offers
students possible scenarios in which their analysis can be
more aurally attuned. His tone in the _Persona_ analysis,
his speculative guesses at the opacity of sound and image,
are welcome as they perform the arbitrariness of these
labels in the first place. Additionally, this text proves
quite relevant to our philosophical film discussions, as
Chion extensively meditates on the temporal and spatial
dimensions of sound relative to image. Specific to the Columbia
edition of _Audio-Vision_, fellow film music theorist
Claudia Gorbman offers a lyrical translation of this pensive
text; she finely allows Chion's own eloquent and poetic
style to seep through to the English. Furthermore, her own
endnotes that are inserted among Chion's help tremendously
to situate his ideas within a theoretical context; she often
offers appropriate citations for further reading.
Undoubtedly, she works to steepen Chion's text in a context
not made explicit by _Audio-Vision_ itself. Were I
interested in holding _Audio-Vision_ to the academic
standard of citation and subject mastery, I could claim that
the relevance of this text to philosophical debates would be
heightened were it to include direct intertextual engagement
with the theorists echoed in his prose (whether or not he
was aware of such resonance). For example, as noted
previously, Christian Metz carefully and importantly
delineates the issues with 'off-screen' and 'on-screen'
sound, yet Chion seems to reinvent the wheel when he
addresses this phenomena at length (with no reference to
Metz, mind you). I might ask, would not his time have been
better spent pushing forward Metz's argument, instead of
vaguely repeating what was written over twenty years
ago? Again, Metz writes that
'spatial anchoring of aural events is much more vague and
uncertain than that of visual events', [11] while
Chion acknowledges that 'aural phenomena are much more
characteristically vectorized in time, with an irreversible
beginning, middle, and end, than are visual phenomena' (19).
And as purely a knee-jerk impulse, I might wonder if Chion
would have been right to acknowledge his argument relative
to Metz, when their notions so carefully and poignantly
intersect. I could even claim that Chion's discussion of
sound and time reads quite lyrical and smart, but it is as
if he writes in a vacuum, aware only of the films to which
he refers, the film crew who works on those films, and his
own work as a critic and musician; the veritable lack of any
means of philosophical or critical context for his insights
necessarily thwarts our efforts at understanding how this
text sees itself within the trajectory of works on film
sound theory. Interestingly, but with
great trepidation and consideration, I realize that it is
this critical absence of virtually any film theory (and the
abundance of film trivia) that figures as both the strength
and weakness of this text. Chion's attuned and insightful
ear for cinema prominently manifests itself in the fact that
he can write a book virtually ignorant of film theory, yet
can concurrently manage to evoke comparisons to Metz, Doane,
or Deleuze. Were I more cynical at this moment, I might have
hesitantly criticized this book for its clear yet uncited,
or even unmentioned, correlations; I would have proceeded to
claim that Chion stops short of offering a rigorous and
dialogic text of film theory, just as he profoundly exceeds
the limitations of yet another formalist analysis. I
understand, however, that Chion's book succeeds
magnificently on its own terms. A musician, a critic for
_Cahiers du cinema_, a writer of book-length studies of
David Lynch, Jacques Tati, and _2001_, Michel Chion seeks to
elaborate the intersections of sight and listening, of image
and sound, as he has worked with and observed them. The
passion and vigor with which he elaborates his method are
unimpeded by excessive quotations; his text reads like an
energetic and inspiring exaltation of cinema's potential. To
criticize his work on the basis of its absent theoretical
predecessors seems a trite complaint. What does puzzle me about
this 1994 Columbia edition of _Audio-Vision_ is the Foreword
by Walter Murch. Of course, I risk heresy to write anything
less than adulatory about this master of sound, but I can at
least claim that Murch's gifts lie in film sound production
and not foreword-writing. Throughout his 18 page Foreword,
Murch strangely carries out an extended metaphor of Queen
Sound and King Image, personifying each according to
gendered stereotypes. [12] Did you know that the
King enjoyed a 35 year bachelorhood (1892-1927) until his
'arranged marriage' with Queen Sound in 1927? (A Queen who
has 'glided around the hall mostly ignored' (viii)) And that
Murch's own coming to sound was induced by his desire to
'see through Sound's handmaidenly self-effacement and catch
more than a glimpse of her crown' (xv)? Indeed, such metaphorical
castings of sound saturate the entire Foreword and, although
creative, introduce and perpetuate some oddly archaic
gendered stereotypes -- of royalty nonetheless -- of which
he seems unaware. As his paraphrase of Chion's work, Murch
wonders 'why we generally perceive the product of the fusion
of image and sound -- the audiovision -- in terms of the
image', and then pushes this one step further, into his
metaphorical universe, by asking 'why does King Sight still
sit on the throne?' (xxii). The excess with which he turns
to these metaphors grows far too droll. Furthermore, Murch seems all
too keen to emphasize how his own work on _Apocalypse Now_
(1979) and _The Conversation_ (1974) so brilliantly
exemplifies Chion's dream of conceptual resonance, in which
'sound makes us see the image differently, and then this new
image makes us hear the sound differently' (xxii), and so
forth. Murch claims 'this happens rarely enough (I am
thinking of certain electronic sounds at the beginning of
_The Conversation_) to be specially prized when it does
occur' (xxii). It is thus that Murch seems less concerned
with the field of sound as a whole, and how Chion's book
speaks within that context, and more interested in his own
sense of self-satisfaction gleaned from reading this text.
It is only because the book as a whole offers such careful,
thoughtful, and elucidating insights that this particular
segment of tired metaphor and egoism grows
exhausting. In contrast to Murch's
Foreword, I offer a moment of Chion's brilliance to close
this review-article: first introduced in _The Voice in
Cinema_ as a continuation of Pierre Schaeffer's thought,
Chion's 'acousmetre' stands out as one of the book's central
and most salient concepts. Within the most profound chapter
of _Audio-Vision_, 'The Real and the Rendered', the
acousmetre, a disembodied voice, is a 'form of 'phantom'
character specific to the art of film' (128) that retains a
significant mystery, omniscience, and omnipotence from its
absence in image. I would argue that his exploration of the
acousmetre, both here and in _The Voice in Cinema_, marks
his greatest contribution to contemporary thinking about
cinema. In interrogating this
disembodied voice that inextricably affects the visual, but
nonetheless remains primarily an aural force, Chion locates
a space where sound is central to a theoretical pursuit. Of
course, previous scholars have addressed sound, but their
choice to discuss sound is precisely that, a choice. They
focus on sound because it has been ignored, but underlying
this parameter of study lurks the presumption that image
still dominates. What Chion offers is a moment of reading
films that postulates the sound as central to inquires of
the entire sound-image as a whole. The acousmetre does not
have as its unspoken premise a decision to ignore the image;
rather, the hyper-presence of voice correlating with an
absence of image necessitates a simultaneous seeing-hearing
that originates with sound. It is to this end, of
understanding cinema with cooperative aural and visual
attentiveness, that film theory has been working; and this
end, having been articulated in Chion's work, inherently
generates its own new questions and possibilities for better
attuning our senses to a more fulfilling and rewarding
art. Emory University Atlanta, Georgia,
USA Footnotes 1. See Alexander Pope,
'Poet's Corner -- Bookshelf', _Essays on Criticism_
<http://www.geocities.com/~spanoudi/poems/pope02.html>;
accessed 2 October 2001. 2. See Pierre Schaeffer,
_Traite des objets musicaux_ (Paris: Le Seuil,
1966). 3. John Belton and Elisabeth
Weis's anthology _Film Sound: Theory and Practice_ (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985) offers an excellent
collection of classical sound theory, in addition to other
significant film sound developments before 1985. See
Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov's 'A Statement',
Pudovkin's 'Asynchronism as a Principle of Sound Film',
Clair's 'The Art of Sound', Cavalcanti's 'Sound in Films',
Arnheim's 'A New Laocoon: Artistic Composites and the
Talking Film', Balazs's ' Theory of Film: Sound', and
Kracauer's 'Dialogue and Sound', to name a few. 4. Mary Ann Doane, 'Ideology
and the Practice of Sound Editing and Mixing', in Belton and
Weis, eds, _Film Sound_, pp. 54-55. 5. David Bordwell and
Kristin Thompson, 'Sound in the Cinema', _Film Art: An
Introduction_, 6th ed., (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), p.
306. 6. Christian Metz, 'Aural
Objects', in Belton and Weis, eds, _Film Sound_, pp.
157-8. 7. Ibid., p. 158. 8. Bordwell and Thompson,
_Film Art_, p. 324. 9. Julia Kristeva,
'Psychoanalysis and the Polis', in Sandra Kemp and Judith
Squires, eds, _Feminisms_ (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997), p. 229. 10. Metz, 'Aural Objects',
p. 158. 11. Ibid., p.
158. 12. See also Jean Renoir's
Foreword to the first volume of Andre Bazin's _What is
Cinema?_, Volume 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1967). Similar to Murch (though only
lasting two pages), Renoir relies on metaphors of royalty to
describe cinema. Renoir writes: 'In the days when kings were
kings, when they washed the feet of the poor and, by the
simple act of passing by, healed those afflicted with
scrofula, there were poets to confirm their belief in their
greatness. Not infrequently the singer was greater than the
object of his singing. This is where Bazin stands vis-a-vis
the cinema . . . For that king of our time, the cinema, has
likewise its poet' (v). Renoir's metaphor extends throughout
the paragraphs that follow. Copyright ©
_Film-Philosophy_ 2002 Kristi McKim, 'Impassioned
Aesthetics: Seeing Sound and Hearing Images in Michel
Chion's _Audio-Vision_', _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 5,
March 2002
<http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n5mckim>.
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