‘Can you hear me?’ ‘Son sur le scenario’: The act of writing sound in Mark Jenkin’s script of Enys Men (2022)

Abstract

In 2000, Rick Altman, McGraw Jones and Sonia Tatroe presented the term mise en bande, or ‘putting onto the soundtrack’, as a framework to analyse the relationship between a film’s sound and its accompanying image. This article proposes an additional term for the study of sound on-screen – ‘son sur le scenario’ – the consideration of writing sound through the pages of a screenplay. Using the script of writer/director Mark Jenkin’s folk horror Enys Men (2023) as a case study, we consider cinematic sound through the perspective of its representation on the page, prior to its actualization through the subsequent processes of production, recording, design and postproduction. Under consideration is the manner that the written soundtrack can be used to articulate and evoke the complex temporal and spatial interrelationships with an imagined image at this stage of film development and its association with the visual realization of cinema’s characters, locations and narratives.