Film Sound

Sound is one of the clearest distinguishing concerns of the film writing on this site, because it is never treated as a decorative layer added to image. The World Heard — the dissertation that gives this strand its theoretical center — frames sound as constitutive rather than supplementary: films “create immersive worlds for their audiences, and sound is instrumental in this world-building process.” The polemical edge is that media studies, even as the importance of sound in contemporary audiovisual media became increasingly clear, kept its theoretical apparatus oriented toward image. The dissertation argues for a “worlding theory” of cinema in which sound bridges classical and contemporary film theory, not by ornamenting either, but by making the perceptual world of a film inhabitable.

Notes on The Mirror shows what that commitment looks like in close reading. Tarkovsky’s relation to his own dialogue is treated as a working principle: “in an ideal situation, words themselves should become ’noises’, thus part of the non-distinguishable reality of the world.” Bergman’s anecdote — watching Andrei Rublev without subtitles, captivated — is registered not as proof that voice is dispensable but as evidence that voice carries a great deal beyond the meaning of words. Slow motion, music, the recited poetry of Tarkovsky’s father, the unanswerable presence of natural sound — each is treated as part of how The Mirror makes memory perceptible rather than narrated. Tarkovsky’s own formulation gets quoted as the through-line: “How does time make itself felt in a shot? It becomes tangible when you sense something significant, truthful, going on beyond the events on the screen.”

In Praise of Laconic Cinema extends the same argument from another direction by asking what a film without dialogue can still do. The essay distinguishes the silent (or “deaf”) cinema — where characters obviously talked, but we couldn’t hear them — from the sound era’s laconic and mute films, where speech is technically available and deliberately withheld. Marcel Pagnol’s riposte sets the standard: “Any talking film which can be shown silent and remain comprehensible is a very bad talking.” The essay reads Kim Ki-duk’s Moebius, Slaboshpytskiy’s The Tribe (entirely in Ukrainian sign language), and J. C. Chandor’s All Is Lost as three different ways of doing without dialogue — and uses them to make the argument that “sound cinema is not all about voice. It is even less about music… Sound cinema reinvents noises. It changes our perception of the filmic world and makes diegetic sounds a constitutive part to our experience.”

Taken together, these three pieces argue that cinema becomes more intelligible once sound is moved from the margin to the center of formal analysis. That is also where film sound connects to memory, perception, and worlding: sound is one of the main routes by which a film stops being a sequence of images and becomes a place. The Hitchcock anecdote about Lifeboat — “ask the composer where did the orchestra come from in the middle of ocean and I will use music,” to which the composer replies, “ask Mr. Hitchcock where the camera came from and I will tell him” — captures the stakes neatly. Music and noise don’t sit at the same ontological layer of a film, and getting that distinction right is what allows a film to feel like a world heard.