Film Sound Article Summary

           In short, in ‘Sound and Meaning in Film: A Short History of Theory and an Outline for Analysis’ was saying that what you see visually is not always the same meaning from what you get from listening and hearing. Throughout the whole paper the author, Jasper Aalbers, investigates this and offers up an introduction in the theory of film sound (from the early stages all the way to the 1980s and 90s) and he gives a rough outline of what he thinks is a rich approach to researching film sounds.

            In this paper, Aalbers divided the content into three different sections. The first was to discuss the history of film sound theory, the second was the modern debate on the ontology of film sound, in which sound is equal to the image, and lastly he proposed basic question that can be asked of film sounds and the more complex issues the questions lead to.

            The first section talks about how originally film was looked at as essentially a visual art form. Film history traditionally says that The Jazz Singer (1927) was the first sound film, when in reality it was in August of 1926 when Warner Brothers adopted Western Electric’s sound-on-disc system to create a series of short films. In the 1920s and 30s, a so-called formalist theory was developed that saw the medium as a visual medium only. It wasn’t until after WWII when realist theorists challenged the formalist theorists. Then in the 1960s and 70s the politically engaged (leftist) film theorists turned attention from the content, style, and themes of film to the operation of the camera, which neglected the microphone and sound.

            In section two, Aalbers tells how in the 1980s a new debate emerged on film sound when Jean-Louis Baudry asked what film sound actually was. Alan Williams took what Baudry said and challenged it; he said that the difficulty for sound theory is that the film image is considered a representation and sound is a reproduction, when sound is actually a representation as well. Rick Altman went even farther with the argument and stated that film sound always has a double spatial narrative. James Lastra identified this position as ‘non-identity’ theory.

            Section three talked about how Bordwell and Thompson’s ‘Film Art: An Introduction’ brought up some different questions. It asked what sounds are present taking into account volume, pitch, etc. It also said what rhythmical relations are there between image and the sound and whether the sound is faithful or unfaithful to its perceived source and what purposes are fulfilled and what effects are achieved by the sonic manipulations. Aalbers takes on all of these questions and answers them with his own insight.

            At the end, Aalbers states that the object of his research is to outline keynote sounds and sound marks of Amsterdam, London, and Berlin as represented in film, in addition to the narrative functions of urban sounds.