Sound-on-disc, however, proved clumsy and limited and was only tenuously incorporated as part of the film's body there were problems with maintaining synchrony with the film's more advanced visual fluency expressed by both the camera and the projector. Then technological innovation and synthesis solved the problems of synchronization and amplification, and sound-on-disc emerged so that the film could more directly hear the world and emotionally color it with sound. First, music was provided from a source completely external to the film's body, as dialogue and narrative occasionally were (spoken from alongside of or behind the screen by human beings who were often unaware of or insensitive to the film's unfolding contact and intentions). Sound emerges as a late addition to the ever-expanding, but ever more integrated economy of affective and perceptual capacities which is film's body.įrom its initial introduction as external musical and/or verbal accompaniment to the film to its current and sometimes problematic all-surrounding presence in Dolby stereo, cinematic technology has progressed towards the incorporation of external and discrete aural mechanisms into physically synoptic and synaesthetic union with the film's visual organ, the camera, and its expressive organ, the projector. Sobchack plies the onto-phylo-genetic analogy to establish his claim that film's body grows in the same way and through the same stages as the infant's body, moving in the direction of greater and greater complexity, coordination and self-control. What Sobchack calls 'film's body' has grown historically, through the progressive actualisation of possibilities and overcoming of limitations.
The most developed form of this argument about film's body is to be found in Vivian Sobchack's The Address of the Eye, undoubtedly the most sophisticated and particularised account so far available of the phenomenology of film experience.
Just as Condillac famously imagined a senseless statue progressively being draped with sensation and self-consciousness, so film theorists and historians have sometimes imagined the growth of film's body through its acquisition of different senses and faculties. So powerful and so transforming are these experiences, indeed, that there is a tendency to think of film, not just as an apparatus for simulating or stimulating bodily responses, but as itself constituting a kind of body. The body of sound is a body all right, but not film's own.įilm's Body Film offers some of the richest and most intense forms of bodily experience of any art form. Having learned to see things with its own eyes, film wants also to hear its own voice, but remains a deaf or dummy medium. There is no sense looking for a sonorous body to complete or even to compete with film's body à voir. It is sound, not in the civilian garb of music or voice, but as noise, which broaches the possibility which interests me of a wild phenomenology of film. What part is left for sound to play in the raising of this film-body, other than docile servant of the here-say and the see-hear? I say that certain kinds of sound belong, not to the order of ostension which dominates the image - in which everything is à voir, to be had by and made clear to the eye - but to an order of mutative commixture, characterised by the encounter and transformation of imaginary substances. I think of it as an unincluded enclosure within my Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)Ībstract Film theory has done its best to bring to life a phenomenological film-body through its way of 'being with one's own eyes' (Vivian Sobchack), in which everything is commuted into the narrow channel of visual perception. This is an expanded version of a paper given at the conference on Film, Literature and Modernity, mounted by the Institute of English Studies in London, 13-15 January 2000. Sounding Out Film Sounding Out Film Steven
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