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Dr. Elsie Walker Department of English “Soundtracks and Humanity – The Beauty, Violence and Politics of Hearing Films”
Salisbury University Research Day & Innovation Showcase 2016
Dr. Elsie Walker • Soundtracks and Humanity – The Beauty, Violence and Politics of Hearing Films
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XRADqe3u74
Dr. Clifton Griffin, Dean of Graduate Studies and Research
I’d like to welcome everyone to the 2016 SU Research Day. As always, give a shout out and thank you to Dr. Janet Dudley-Eshbach for her support for research overall, for this event, for our office, also, in particular, my boss, the provost, who is a great champion for scholarly activities, i.e. while we are also celebrating our emerging faculty learning communities as part of today’s celebration. We’re going to have four great faculty presenters as part of our SU Research Day this year. We’ll be going on the times that have previously been published, so every 30 minutes – we’re probably one minute behind right now, Elsie’s getting nervous. So, thank you for showing up, we sure appreciate it. Our first presenter for 2016 SU Research Day is Dr. Elsie Walker from the Department of English. Her presentation is entitled “Soundtracks and Humanity – The Beauty, Violence and Politics of Hearing Films.” Elsie…
Dr. Elsie Walker, Associate Professor of English
Thank you, thank you everybody. Thanks so much for being here and for the invitation to be here, Dean Pereboom. I’m very proud and honored to be presenting for the Fulton School of Liberal Arts. Last year, I published a book with Oxford University Press that surveys many soundtracks from different points of view: feminism, psychoanalysis genre studies, post-colonialism. Even the simplest question about a film soundtrack can take on great meaning from a particular political angle, like whose voice is loudest.
I’m now working on a new book under contract with Oxford UP. It’s a more in-depth study of just one film director’s use of sound, Michael Haneke. Before I say more about Michael Haneke’s cinema, I want to begin by providing some answers to the question of why I find soundtracks fascinating and why I think they have something to offer us all, then I’ll move on to a series of clips from Haneke’s films and share some material from my current book.
As a film professor, I think it’s crucial that I keep asking the big questions. What can cinema do for us or why does cinema matter? I believe that cinema can awaken our eyes and our ears. And, I believe this is important, partly, because it’s easy for us to tune out so much; in fact, selecting what we should focus on is a necessary part of everyday life. For instance, I wonder how many of us remember everything we saw walking to this room, I wonder how many of us remember everything we heard on the way, perhaps we perceived more than usual because it is an extraordinary new space. Nevertheless, we were filtering things out and that’s necessary. We can be seeing all sorts of things without looking at them, we can be hearing all sorts of things without listening to them, but films prompt us to see and hear the world in new and very deliberate ways because everything in cinema is chosen or included deliberately, nothing is extraneous.
I believe that films can help us reawaken and discipline our senses of hearing as well as seeing, especially if we actively engage with them. Michael Haneke’s films are designed to reawaken the power of our ears. Before I give some specific examples, here are two contexts in which to consider his work. First there is the history of sound film. The rules for using elements of a film soundtrack and I stress that it includes dialogue and sound effects or noises as well as music, not just that music as soundtrack is more typically used. The rules for using a soundtrack quickly became normalized by the classical Hollywood period. You’ll know many of these rules even if you’re not conscious of them. These rules include the expectation of music in opening and closing credit sequences, for example, the use of music that comes outside the film world to guide our emotional responses, the clarity with which human voices dominate when people are talking, the sparing use of silence, and an essential complementarity between what we see and what we hear. Though any of these rules can be broken, they reassert themselves over and over. Today, I stress the significance of Haneke breaking rules and why that should matter.
A second context is the recent established subgenre of YouTube videos that focus on people seeing or hearing for the first time. I want to show you a particular example of a woman when she first hears her own voice in the presence of her husband, it’s been viewed more than 26 million times.
[Copyrighted Video Content]
Why is this video impactful? Well, I think it gives us an experience of sight unit by proxy. It captures something about the wonder of hearing that we can all take for granted. I learned about this specific video from a recent article in The New Yorker titled “Seeing and Hearing for the First Time on YouTube.” In this article, the author, Joshua Rothman, calls attention to the importance of reawakening our senses that have become dulled through everyday use. He argues that familiarity might be an obstacle, maybe the real vividness and power of our senses is something that we can’t know. For Rothman, the appeal of videos like those we’ve just seen and heard is witnessing transformative experiences.
The philosopher L.A. Paul refers to transformative experiences as those that can change your point of view, perhaps even change the kind of person you are or, at least, who you’ve set yourself to be. I think great films helps us know the possibilities of our senses better and potentially thus create transformative experiences for us. Through priming us to see and hear from new points of view, they help us potentially understand the world and each other better as well.
The popularity of YouTube videos like this one suggests that many of us are moved by the possibility of recapturing the first wonders of our senses and perhaps the return to hearing for the first time is the most difficult to achieve. As the sound designer Walter Murch, most famous for his work on Apocalypse Now, writes:
“Our hearing develops before we’re even born, just four and a half months after conception. From then on we develop in a continuous and luxurious bath of sounds. The song of our mother’s voice, the swash of her breathing, the trumpeting of her intestines, the timpani of her heart. Throughout the second four and a half months, sound rules as solitary queen of our senses. The close and liquid world of uterine darkness makes sight and smell impossible, taste monochromatic and touch, a dim and generalized hint of what is to come.”
Murch’s poetic phrasing, describing as he does each sound with orchestral flair invokes a desire to comprehend the very first things we hear with full appreciation of their beauty. And yet as infants, we obviously lack the faculties to conceptualize or describe the beauty of what we hear when we first experience that sense. As unborn infants, we will not hear our mother’s heart as timpani, for instance. Such words invoke possibility, while also reminding us that our return to our first hearing is impossible. As Murch also observes once the baby is born, she or he is bombarded by the senses and our sense of sight usually becomes king. The idea that we live in a visually saturated culture is commonplace, much as film was usually written about as a visual medium until quite recently. Sight has indeed been king of film analysis, at least, up until the last decade or so when we’ve seen a surge of new attention to soundtracks. The new writing on sound is not only an important corrective to the visually based scholarship that came before, but also reminds us that film has the capacity to orally represent reality, to reawaken our sense of hearing, along with prompting us to see the world in new ways.
Though we cannot necessarily have transformative experiences precisely like those of Sarah Churman, the women we just witnessed hearing for the first time, we are only beginning to collectively perceive what films can do to help us listen better. And even if we can never return to the initial glory of sonic stimulus as Murch imagines it, the reawakened capacity to hear has great implications for helping us understand the world and each other better.
Now, I turn to Haneke’s first feature film, The Seventh Continent. The film is designed to make us hear temporary middle-class life in a new way, but the sense of wonder just witnessed in the YouTube video is replaced by something terrifying.
Instead of privileging human voices and dialogue, this film has objects dominate the soundtrack. Again, I stress that Haneke is a rule breaker in the service of making us hear things better and hear in a new way. The scene begins by showing the lead female character climb in the car and not speak while applying lip gloss. We only see part of her face, the essence of speech works with the way she is herself turned into a visually dissected object.
Then come the banal noises of gathering consumables at the grocery store.
There’s no distinct dialogue, nor music to guide our responses. There is Musak, the unheard music of so many places for consumers and here, some indistinct German on the radio. The sounds of objects are closely miked, dominating the soundtrack, the wheels of trolleys, the chopping and weighing of meats, the packets of food.
Now we hear the cash register and the receipt that takes a long time to make and print.
The whole sequence places sonic emphasis on the sheer amount of stuff the characters buy to consume. The main characters have nothing to say; the objects speak for them. At the climax of this film, the main characters will literally destroy everything they own before they kill themselves. And the soundtrack will be taken over by noises of ripping paper, tearing fabric, breaking glass and axing furniture until the characters’ home is a heap of fragments. This is Haneke’s most haunting representation of human lives within the capitalist machine, his most startling critique of consumerist culture that prizes objects over humanity. Sound effects stress that things have triumphed over people.
Haneke is also anti-consumerist in that he avoids the crowd-pleasing clichés of genre movies, while also building strange suspense. Often, he compels my attention through what he does not show. He frequently uses off-screen voices to excite our imagination, and Haneke is outspoken about how much images have lost the capacity to shock or excite the viewer. Think of how often we see atrocities on the nightly news, for example. He says “It seems to me that the ear is fundamentally more sensitive than the eye. To put it another way, the ear provides a more direct path to the imagination and to the heart of human beings.”
This resonates to me, and to take a recent American example from the headlines, we might consider Eric Garner’s last words, “I can’t breathe.” These words have been repeated and shared by millions of people to signify new recognition of current racial politics. Such a phenomenon drives the potential significance of a single utterance and why it might and should matter for all of us. This recent tragedy also suggests that sometimes hearing means more than seeing, or hearing is believing, especially in our visually-saturated culture. Live-video footage showed Garner in Police Officer Daniel Pantaleo’s chokehold shortly before he died, but most people don’t refer to this or play the video, instead Garner’s last words have becoming a resonating, repeated rallying cry for justice. Just as hearing each other matters, there can be a great human cost to not listening. In Michael Haneke’s film Code Unknown, we witness this kind of harm.
Okay, in this clip, we’ll see a woman named Anne, here played by a famous actress Juliette Binoche, deliberately dressed in a low-key way. There will be no vocal training in the scenery here, despite her star status; just a woman whose voice is absent, but whose ordinary object, the iron, is comparatively loud within the sound mix.
The television is on, but the voices are not subtitled because they don’t really matter, nor does the fragment of experimental music that offers us little or no aesthetic beauty. Then something new enters the sound mix, and because Haneke layers sounds in relatively thin textures, each new piece of sonic material registers strongly. We hear a child crying next door, and the crying becomes more desperate, louder, like a rising note of sadness.
After a long pause as precisely scored as a resting music, Anne goes back to her ironing. Like all Haneke cinema, all sounds, musical or not, are precisely scored like this. Indeed, although he uses music only sparingly in his films, Haneke has described himself “being like a conductor of them.” He is a classically trained pianist, and he has a musician’s understanding of rhythm, tempo, texture and dynamics that influences everything in his sound mix.
In Code Unknown, we’ll later learn that the girl and her screaming has died. We never see this girl, but she makes her off-screen presence felt through her unanswered cries, and the film leaves what precisely happened to her to our imaginations and hearts to decide. We can guess that she died at her parents’ hands and that no one who heard her cries for help did anything to help or save her. So, Haneke’s soundtracks take us to distressing places, and they demand our actual comprehension of how the themes and lessons can resonate for us in real life. We shouldn’t just drown out sounds of sadness, like Anne does.
Because his films are so confrontational, he’s become a notorious as well as intensely celebrated figure in some criticisms. I have a final example to share, however, that magnifies the sense of hopefulness that I find in Haneke’s cinema as well. For me, this is a director with enormous faith in his audience to respond to what’s difficult. Code Unknown, the same film from which we just saw that distressing extract, begins with a very different kind of scene: a class of deaf-mute, multi-ethnic, young students. These kids live in the increasingly diverse and divided city of Paris. The film focuses on racial politics and on the need for greater efforts to understand each other across all cultural and physical barriers.
The children are playing a game like charades, but it feels more serious right away. The film will soon cut to show their multi-ethnic faces as they struggle to interpret what this girl leading the game is physically representing. The scene is extremely quiet, but as the famous near-deaf percussionist, Evelyn Glennie, says “Silence can be the loudest sound.”
Here, I’m especially struck by the sound of the little, white girl who signed “sad” with a gut-wrenching gesture of tearing at her face. It’s sign language, but it also communicates something performative. The sound she makes is like a low, quiet scream and it’s arresting in the context of the exceptional quiet that precedes it. It is a reminder of the plane that we can all perceive and feel. The scene is also about the ambiguity and the complexity of understanding any kind of language and how many different connotations physical language, in particular, can have. The children watching do not manage to guess the answer to the lead girl’s actions, but they’re guessing matters; her code is unknown, but the attempt to understand her is unending. In that sense the children represent hope, but not in an easy way. They are seriously disabled, they are confused and they don’t find an answer, but they try. The film makes us see the quiet effort by extension and invites us to interpret more thoughtfully and to listen more attentively to the language of cinema and to each other.
Thank you (audience claps).
Audience Member One
Is there a trajectory in Haneke’s work with the way he’s using sound or is it pretty consistent across the board? Or do you feel like he’s doing different things later on [inaudible], earlier, you know, I’m just curious.
Dr. Walker
That’s a very rich question, thank you. The question on the floor, you say you want me to repeat them, is there a patent or a kind of trajectory across Haneke’s work sonically? And I’m wary about generalizing or turning his filmography into my own narrative arc, but one thing I’ve noticed through studying his movies is that the earliest feature film, Seventh Continent, is the most accosting sonically; whereas, the most recent, Amour, which you may have heard of, Love, won the Palme d’Or, the second Palme d’Or, by the way, that film is incredibly quiet.
And as I’ve been studying the films very closely and I’ve been studying this in this very intense kind of way with headphones in my basement, and as macabre as the sounds, because you’ll imagine a lot of the content is very disturbing, listening hard to Haneke films means that when I took off the headphones and I went and made myself a cup of tea, I suddenly heard everything at this high amplitude. You know, so I heard myself taking out the spoon and closing the drawer and stirring tea, you know, and then it was like all these light bulbs went on. I thought “My God, I’m hearing my movements in the world better,” and then I thought “What does that mean?” You know, so I know that’s a bit of a tangent, but for me there was something extraordinary about that intensive experience.
But, with Amour, you know, the most recent and actually through his [inaudible], it’s as if the director is taking a giant hand to slowly turn the volume down, so you have to train yourself to hear better and the rewards are there, but the experience becomes more and more subtle, more and more nuanced, sometimes more painful, but also I think ultimately gentler, more rewarding. I think when he began, he had to be much more fierce about what he was trying to do, more radical. Now, I think there’s room to be a little bit more … have more faith in the audience to be listening. And I think audiences are listening to film more than they used to and it’s not just about soundtrack sales, it’s also about the new recognition that sound has. You know, think about how the Academy Awards include two awards for sound, for instance. And, you know, there’s a lot more scholarship, there’s a lot more general awareness.
That was a long answer for you (laughs).
Dr. Griffin
[inaudible]
Please.
Elsie, my question is more about society, in general, relative to sound. I couldn’t help but think when I heard the sound of the child crying, screaming in the background, the impact of sound and how, today, we seem to be pretty anesthetized, an easy word for me to say, as a society. We see pain all the time. Notice what I say, we see pain all the time; we see war, we see abuse, we see, you know, conflict, we see all these things, we see them, but we don’t often hear them. And to me, I think it’s curious that we don’t hear the sound of war, we don’t hear the sound of the violence in the streets often, we don’t hear, sometimes, even the bomb going off. We see the aftermath and we’ve almost gotten anesthetized to the idea of pain and violence and, you know, what do you think about that relative to the impact that sound could have if it just … I mean, it was just amazing, here’s a very simple scene; we hear one child’s, we think child, young person’s, cry for help and you had to be impacted. I wonder how we’d be impacted if we heard more.
Well again, I think it’s partly the power of using the off-screen presence, so that your imagination has to complete the picture, that’s the first thing. The second thing is your question is critical in so far as for Haneke there’s a moral imperative and he’s coming from – I don’t know if your familiar with the work of Bertolt Brecht, he’s coming from a very Brechtian point of view, in terms of wanting to ignite the audience’s awareness and active engagement with the work of art.
He’s very self-conscious about this and, you know, the Brechtian kind of precedent in my mind is Mother Courage’s silent scream, you know, when she lifts her head back and she opens her mouth to scream because she knows her child is about to die and she knows she’s responsible, and it’s war, so she can’t make a sound. And the silence of the scream is incredibly powerful, even though there’s nothing actually sonically present, something happens, something’s ignited.
Haneke sometimes incorporates, going back to your first illustrative example of wartime footage that we see, he sometimes incorporates wartime footage or scenes of actual violent events from television or news footage, but what he’ll do is he’ll combine those all too familiar images with sounds that don’t belong with them, so voiceover that is telling a different story or an argument that’s going on. And, there’s a famous example of this in his movie Cache, the French word for “hidden,” which is a film about literally doing what you were talking about, which is bringing what’s all too easily swept under the carpet to light. It was inspired by Haneke having seen a documentary about the killing of 200 Algerians who were peacefully protesting for their independence and who were murdered and thrown into the Seine river by the prison police, and then there was this massive cover-up, you know, it was quite literally a silenced history.
Cache is one of the most confrontational films, it’s one of the films I love to teach, it’s one of the most difficult films I teach, but it’s also one of the most rich because it makes excruciatingly high demands of your ears. There’s literally no music in the film, so there’s nothing to soften the image and I think that’s very important.
If you think about the way news stories seem to be recorded, there might be music or there might be a familiarity to the intonation of the newscaster’s voice. So, when there are sonic properties, they’re conventionalized enough that they become unheard or they become so familiar that even when you’re hearing something incredibly distressing it’s [inaudible] and made somehow sonically pleasing, it’s somehow softened orally, so that that lessens the impact. But, Haneke is not interested in lessening the impact, he’s interested in amplifying it. And as you imagine this takes me to some incredibly distressing places, but it also makes me see how much he cherishes life. You know, for him, everything is at stake in representing life morally, ethically, sometimes in an extraordinarily difficult way, but in a way that also, I think, places faith in the audience.
Audience Member Two
I found the YouTube video very powerful with the woman hearing her voice for the first time, and for some reason it made me think of the movie, The Piano, where we have the mute having a voice through the piano, directed by a female director. I was wondering when we look at films, have we seen female directors using sound differently from male directors?
Oh, gosh, I would hate to generalize about that. Nevertheless, I think certain female directors, like Jane Campion, have found a way to honor and privilege the complexity of the female voice in a way that’s still relatively unusual, and I completely agree that that’s an extremely powerful example of using music to, in a sense, become the voice.
It is interesting. It’s not as film free from controversy, even though, Ada, you know, the character at the center of that movie has an extraordinary kind of artistic power through the music. Nevertheless, some scholars are sometimes very critical that she remains almost mute and can only discover her voice by the romantic union with the man at the end of the movie. I, however, am more romantic about this particular example, and I have taught it in my Hearing Cinema class. I’ve also ended the course with a video like this because I want my students to be hearing more attentively and carry that into the world again.
I like to come full circle to that video, which like you I find very moving and I have to focus on my breathing very hard not to cry.
But something else I wanted to share with you, just by way of wrapping up to is that I like to use this unusual question to feature unusual coursework to try and foster that love of listening and that reawakened hearing. So, near the beginning of the course, I like to do something called a “sound walk,” where they have to go out and record different parts of our campus and what they hear as precisely and as fully as possible. And this returns me to something you were saying because films often have just so many channels of sound. You know, take a blockbuster, like Lord of the Rings or, you know that might have 200 channels of sound. If you’re sort of forced to stop and listen, you realize how much sonic stimulus is in our everyday life as well, and nevertheless you’re making choices all the time about what you decide to hear and about what you consciously perceive. So, you know, just being a little bit more aware of that choice that we’re making all the time is, I think, an important part of being a more engaged citizen.
Thank you very much (audience claps).