B0041VYHGW EBOK (117 page)

Once musical motifs have been selected, they can be combined to evoke associations. During Jim and Catherine’s first intimate talk after the war, the bass-line-dominated version of the enigma waltz is followed by the love theme, as if the latter could drown out the menacing side of Catherine’s character. The love theme accompanies long tracking shots of Jim and Catherine strolling through the woods. But at the scene’s end, as Jim bids Catherine farewell, the original woodwind version of her theme recalls her mystery and the risk he is running by falling in love with her. Similarly, when Jim and Catherine lie in bed, facing the end of their affair, the voice-over narrator says, “It was as if they were already dead” as the dangerous love theme plays. This sequence associates death with their romance and foreshadows their fate at the film’s end.

A similar sort of blending can be found in the film’s final scene. Catherine and Jim have drowned, and Jules is overseeing the cremation of their bodies. As shots of the coffins dissolve into detailed shots of the cremation process, the enigma motif segues into its sinister variant, the menace motif. But as Jules leaves the cemetery and the narrator comments that Catherine had wanted her ashes to be cast to the winds, the string instruments glide into a sweeping version of the whirlwind waltz
(
7.19
).
The film’s musical score thus concludes by recalling the three sides of Catherine that attracted the men to her: her mystery, her menace, and her vivacious openness to experience. In such ways, a musical score can create, develop, and associate motifs that enter into the film’s overall form.

We’ve seen what sounds consist of and how the filmmaker can take advantage of the widely different kinds of sounds available. In addition, the way in which the sounds relate to other film elements gives them several other dimensions. First, because sound occupies a duration, it has a
rhythm.
Second, sound can relate to its perceived source with greater or lesser
fidelity.
Third, sound conveys a sense of the
spatial
conditions in which it occurs. And fourth, the sound relates to visual events that take place in a specific time, and this relationship gives sound a
temporal
dimension. These categories reveal that sound in film offers many creative possibilities to the filmmaker.

Rhythm is one of the most powerful aspects of sound, for it works on our bodies at deep levels. We have already considered it in relation to mise-en-scene (
p. 156
) and editing (
p. 230
). Rhythm involves, minimally, a
beat,
or pulse; a
tempo,
or pace; and a pattern of
accents,
or stronger and weaker beats. In the realm of sound, all of these features are naturally most recognizable in film music, since there beat, tempo, and accent are basic compositional features. In our examples from
Jules and Jim,
the motifs can be characterized as having a ¾ metrical pulse, putting an accent on the first beat, and displaying variable tempo—sometimes slow, sometimes fast.

We can find rhythmic qualities in sound effects as well. The plodding hooves of a farmhorse differ from a cavalry mount galloping at full speed. The reverberating tone of a gong may offer a slowly decaying accent, while a sudden sneeze provides a brief one. In a gangster film, a machine gun’s fire creates a regular, rapid beat, while the sporadic reports of pistols may come at irregular intervals.

Speech also has rhythm. People can be identified by voice prints that show not only characteristic frequencies and amplitudes but also distinct patterns of pacing and syllabic stress. In
His Girl Friday,
our impression is of very rapid dialogue, but the scenes actually are rhythmically subtler than that. In the start of each scene, the pace is comparatively slow, but as the action develops, characters talk at a steadily accelerating rate. As the scene winds down, the conversational pace does as well. This rise-and-fall rhythm matches the arc of each scene, giving us a bit of a rest before launching the next comic complication.

Any consideration of the rhythmic uses of sound is complicated by the fact that the movements in the images have a rhythm as well, distinguished by the same principles of beat, tempo, and accent. In addition, the editing has a rhythm. As we have seen, a succession of short shots helps create a rapid tempo, whereas shots held longer tend to slow down the rhythm.

In most cases, the rhythms of editing, of movement within the image, and of sound all cooperate. Possibly the most common tendency is for the filmmaker to match visual and sonic rhythms to each other. In a dance sequence in a musical, the figures move about at a rhythm determined by the music. But variation is always possible. In the “Waltz in Swing Time” number in
Swing Time,
the dancing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers moves quickly in time to the music. Yet no fast cutting accompanies this scene. Indeed, the scene consists of a single long take from a long-shot distance.

Another prototype of close coordination between screen movement and sound comes in the animated films of Walt Disney in the 1930s. Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters often move in exact synchronization with the music, even when they aren’t dancing. (As we have seen, such exactness was possible because the sound track was recorded before the drawings were made.) Matching movement to music came to be known as
Mickey-Mousing.

Films other than musicals and cartoons exploit correspondences among musical and pictorial rhythms. Michael Mann’s
The Last of the Mohicans
culminates in a chase and a fight along a mountain ridge. Alice has been captured by the renegade Magua, and Hawkeye, Uncas, and Chingachgook race up the trail to rescue her. We might expect, then, the standard thunderous action score, but what we hear is a quick, grave Scottish dance, initially played on fiddle, mandolin, and harpsichord. The tune was heard in an earlier dance scene at the fort, so it functions to recall the two couples’ romances, but here it gives the scene a propulsive energy. Hand-to-hand struggles stand out against the throbbing music. Eventually, the theme swells to the full orchestra, but the same implacable beat governs the action. When Alice hovers on the cliffedge, about to jump off, somber chords repeat a seesaw pulse, as if time is standing still.

At the scene’s climax, Chingachgook sprints urgently into the fray, and faster musical figures played by stringed instruments recall the early dance tune. His attack on Magua consists of four precise blows from his battle-axe; each blow coincides with the third beat in a series of musical measures. In the final moment of combat, the two warriors stand frozen opposite each other. The shot lasts three beats. On the fourth beat, Chingachgook launches the fatal blow. As Magua topples over, the music’s pulse is replaced by a sustained string chord.
The Last of the Mohicans
has synchronized dance music with visual rhythms, but the result doesn’t feel like Mickey-Mousing. The throbbing 4/4 meter, the accented beats, and the leaping melody give the heroes’ precise movements a choreographic grace.

The filmmaker may also choose to create a disparity among the rhythms of sound, editing, and image. One of the most common options is to edit dialogue scenes in ways that cut against natural speech rhythms. In our specimen of dialogue overlap from John McTiernan’s
The Hunt for Red October
(
7.11
–
7.13
), the editing does not coincide with accented beats, cadences, or pauses in the officer’s speech. Thus, the editing smoothes over the changes of shot and emphasizes the words and facial expressions of Captain Ramius. If a filmmaker wants to emphasize the speaker and the speech, the cuts usually come at pauses or natural stopping points in the line. McTiernan uses this sort of rhythmic cutting at other points in the film.

The filmmaker may contrast the rhythm of sound and picture in more noticeable ways. For instance, if the source of sound is primarily offscreen, the filmmaker can utilize the behavior of onscreen figures to create an expressive counterrhythm. Toward the end of John Ford’s
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,
the aging cavalry captain, Nathan Brittles, watches his troops ride out of the fort just after he has retired. He regrets leaving the service and desires to go with the patrol. The sound of the scene consists of two elements: the cheerful title song sung by the departing riders, and the quick hoofbeats of their horses. Yet only a few of the shots show the horses and singers, who ride at a rhythm matched to the sound. Instead, the scene concentrates our attention on Brittles, standing almost motionless by his own horse. The contrast of brisk musical rhythm and the static images of the solitary Brittles functions expressively to emphasize his regret at having to stay behind for the first time in many years.

At times, accompanying music might even seem rhythmically inappropriate to the images. At intervals in
Four Nights of a Dreamer,
Robert Bresson presents shots of a large, floating nightclub cruising the Seine. The boat’s movement is slow and smooth, yet the sound track consists of lively calypso music. (Not until a later scene do we discover that the music comes from a band aboard the boat.) The strange combination of fast sound tempo with the slow passage of the boat creates a languorous, mysterious effect.

Jacques Tati does something similar in
Play Time.
In a scene outside a Parisian hotel, tourists climb aboard a bus to go to a nightclub. As they file slowly up the steps, raucous jazzy music begins. The music startles us because it seems inappropriate to the images. In fact, it primarily accompanies action in the next scene, in which some carpenters awkwardly carrying a large plateglass window seem to be dancing to the music. By starting the fast music over an earlier scene of slower visual rhythm, Tati creates a comic effect and prepares for a transition to a new locale.

In Chris Marker’s
La Jetée,
the contrast between image and sound rhythms dominates the entire film.
La Jetée
is made up almost entirely of still shots; except for one tiny gesture, all movement within the images is eliminated. Yet the film utilizes voice-over narration, music, and sound effects of a generally rapid, constantly accented rhythm. Despite the absence of movement, the film doesn’t seem uncinematic, partly because it offers a dynamic interplay of audio-visual rhythms.

These examples suggest some of the ways in which rhythms may be combined. But of course, most films also vary their rhythms. A change of rhythm may function to shift our expectations. In the famous battle on the ice in
Alexander Nevsky,
Sergei Eisenstein develops the sound from slow tempos to fast and back to slow. The first 12 shots of the scene show the Russian army anticipating the attack of the German knights. The shots are of moderate length, and they contain very little movement. The music is comparably slow, consisting of short, distinctly separated, chords. Then, as the German army rides into sight over the horizon, both the visual movement and the tempo of the music increase quickly, and the battle begins. At the end of the battle, Eisenstein creates another contrast with a long passage of slow, lamenting music and majestic tracking shots but little figure movement.

By
fidelity,
we don’t mean the quality of recording. In our sense, fidelity refers to the extent to which the sound is faithful to the source as we conceive it. If a film shows us a barking dog and we hear a barking noise, that sound is faithful to its source; the sound maintains fidelity. But if the image of the barking dog is accompanied by the sound of a cat meowing, there enters a disparity between sound and image—a lack of fidelity.

From our standpoint, fidelity has nothing to do with what originally made the sound in production. As we have seen, the filmmaker may manipulate sound independently of image. Accompanying the image of a dog with the meow is no more difficult than accompanying the image with a bark. If the viewer takes the sound to be coming from its source in the diegetic world of the film, then it is faithful, regardless of its actual source in production.

Fidelity is thus purely a matter of expectation. Even if our dog emits a bark on screen, perhaps in production the bark came from a different dog or was electronically synthesized. We do not know what laser guns really sound like, but we accept the whang they make in
Return of the Jedi
as plausible. (In production, their sound was made by hammering guy wires that anchored a radio tower.)

When we do become aware that a sound is unfaithful to its source, that awareness is usually used for comic effect. In Jacques Tati’s
Mr. Hulot’s Holiday,
much humor arises from the opening and closing of a dining room door. Instead of simply recording a real door, Tati inserts a twanging sound like a plucked cello string each time the door swings. Aside from being amusing in itself, this sound functions to emphasize the rhythmic patterns created by waiters and diners passing through the door. Because many of the jokes in
Mr. Hulot’s Holiday
and other Tati films are based on quirkily unfaithful noises, his films are good specimens for the study of sound.