Conventions of Sound in Documentary

Abstract

This essay draws comparisons between various examples of sound practices and narration in the documentary tradition, focusing primarily on synchronous-sound observational films from the 1960s and 1970s, in particular the 1973 PBS series An American Family. While documentary sound tracks may include voice-over, dialogue, music, and effects, the hierarchy and distribution of these sounds differ in important ways from classical Hollywood conventions. In fact, Hollywood's increasing reliance on multi-track postproduction techniques contrasts significantly with documentaries that use only location-recorded sound. In a series of articles, Rick Altman has described the conventions of sound in classical Hollywood cinema as an interplay between intelligibility and fidelity, a system in which fidelity is sacrificed in favor of the more narratively central dimension of intelligibility.' Similarly, Noil Carroll has argued that the hallmark of Hollywood movie narration is clarity and comprehensibility. Popular movies offer experiences of places, events, characters, and drama more clearly delineated than our ordinary lives. In Carroll's words, The flow of action approaches an ideal of uncluttered clarity. This clarity contrasts vividly with the quality of fragments of actions and events we typically observe in everyday life.'2 Hollywood filmmakers use cinematic techniques of image and sound to focus the attention of the spectator on the salient elements that further the narrative action. Carroll suggests that it is not the purported realism of the cinematic apparatus that millions of viewers find compelling but rather the heightened intelligibility that is the hallmark of Hollywood cinema. If audiences were truly interested in greater fidelity to the real world, then presumably documentary films would form a larger part of the corpus that has made motion pictures a very popular art form in the twentieth century. While documentary films often use narrative forms, they rarely demonstrate the degree of clarity that these writers see as the standard of classical Hollywood cinema. Location sound work in documentary films occasionally makes discrimination among sounds difficult, if not impossible. Although works like Pare Lorentz's Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and Ken Burn's Civil War (1990) are perfectly comprehensible, the intelligibility of documentary only rarely approaches that of popular movies; characters lack clear motivations, speech may be inaudible in parts, lighting haphazard and variable, camera movements