Spellbound by Sound: What We Learn from Alfred Hitchcock’s Notes on Sound

Abstract

Spellbound by Sound: What We Learn from Alfred Hitchcock’s Notes on Sound Michael Slowik (bio) When can we say that a Hollywood director is the author or “auteur” of sound techniques found in his or her films? And if a director should be considered a “sound auteur,” which techniques might fairly be considered part of his or her “personal style?” Though authorship has long been a major focus in film scholarship and criticism, such questions remain difficult to answer, and for good reason. The earliest auteur critics in the 1950s and 1960s defined an auteur’s style in terms of what a director could reasonably affect on the set: visual elements like shot composition, staging, lighting, and, by extension, a larger “worldview” or “interior meaning.”1 Sound, a domain often shaped extensively during postproduction, was generally avoided in defining the realm of the auteur. Even today, while important exceptions exist, historians often struggle to make definitive statements on the extent to which particular directors molded their soundtracks.2 The films of Alfred Hitchcock, however, give historians an unusual opportunity to trace a director’s contribution to the soundtrack in detail for three main reasons. First, Hitchcock had the distinction and good fortune through much of his career of serving as a producer-director, which often gave him considerable control over the postproduction process. Hitchcock had already gained a reputation as a prominent British producer-director when David O. Selznick hired him in 1939, and outside of a few films for [End Page 1] Selznick, Hitchcock often held a producer role and thus could better supervise sound in his U.S. films too.3 Second, Hitchcock prided himself on closely monitoring every aspect of filmmaking, including sound. Third, and most important, Hitchcock provided extraordinarily detailed “notes on sound”—sometimes referred to as “dubbing notes”—for many of the films he directed. Hitchcock’s dubbing notes are no secret: he mentioned making a “sound script” for each film in his famous interview with François Truffaut and historians have quoted passages from them.4 Yet to date, no one has provided any comprehensive analysis of these notes to determine what they might reveal about Hitchcock’s style or degree of control with regard to sound: what recurring concerns or techniques might be uncovered, and what such recurrences reveal about Hitchcock’s broader attitude toward sound. This essay is devoted to a systematic analysis of the notes Hitchcock gave to his sound department for ten of his final eleven films, beginning with The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and then spanning from Vertigo (1958) through Family Plot (1976). I have chosen these films partly to maintain a manageable scope, but mainly because the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences contains extant, and often quite extensive, sound notes.5 Admittedly, such an approach prioritizes a period when Hitchcock was at his height as a powerful producer-director, and the concerns also may not be entirely reflective of Hitchcock’s sonic interests as a younger filmmaker. Yet their value is considerable because, taken in conjunction with the finished films, they illuminate the often-hidden ways in which Hitchcock molded the sonic landscapes of his films. Many of the choices Hitchcock made are nearly impossible to detect without these notes, yet they have ramifications for topics that scholars generally discuss solely in terms of Hitchcock’s visual or narrative approaches. Sound is an often-unheralded yet carefully wielded tool in Hitchcock’s cinematic arsenal. As we will see, Hitchcock fixated on [End Page 2] sound’s ability to help construct believable locations, articulate relationships between private and public spaces, and subjectively align viewers with characters in subtle ways. Much of what Hitchcock called for in his notes fell within the wide range of tasks that sound departments often performed. Yet by identifying those areas that Hitchcock regularly singled out, we can grasp with greater precision Hitchcock’s level of control over sound, his attention to detail, and the ways in which he conceptualized and manipulated his soundscapes. It is important to note that while Hitchcock’s notes offer clear evidence of his approach to sound, they do not...