Sound and Image: A Further Hearing

Abstract

Do we gain a more accurate insight into a film by viewing it slowly and carefully on a Steenbeck or Movieola? Too often the answer must be No, because the sound gradually dies away as the image strip is slowed and examined frame by frame. Ironically, the emphasis of film criticism and theory is skewed by a technological accidentthe fact that the image strip happens to be divided into static and legible units. Although much has been written in recent years about the importance of sound, film studies continue to be based on the assumption that the image is the essence of cinema. Theories can and do flourish without acknowledging sound as an integral part of film-in some cases, almost without acknowledging its existence. Both theory and critical practice suffer as a result. In an earlier article' I argued that sound was of equal importance to the image and that films could not be adequately understood without consideration of the relations between sound and image. The present article develops those arguments further and opens up new lines of attack. First, there is one counterargument to overcome: Is is plausible that so many critics, theorists, and film-makers, with or without benefit of frameby-frame analysis, should have continued to operate on flawed premises? In one sense the tendency is understandable. Film could assert its independence from theater and establish its own domain only by emphasizing the role of the image, and writers followed this lead. Film-makers whose work I admire, such as Hitchcock and Powell, repeatedly declared that the image is what counts in a film (while both unobtrusively took great care of their sound tracks).2