Where Sound Is
Locating The Absent Aural in Film Theory
Sage Handbook of Film Studies, Sage Publications, London,. 2008

Introduction excerpt:

Was there ever such a thing as silence? Surely only the mind could project such an existence - a mind with shrunken ears and swollen brain, cloistered in the concert hall, the opera house, the theatre, the library. That brainiac never experienced the rowdy din of consumption that defined the 'sound of the crowd' excited by the multi-media explosiveness that follows the morphological slip across two centuries from slide lantern lectures to carnival phantasmagoria to silent movies with live accompaniment of all kinds to that thing people finally call 'the cinema'. No, there was never silence; there has only been the deluded desire for silence. That wish for wisting the masses, their machines and their mania cordoned off the cinema to welcome authors, librettists, playwrights - respected soloists of silence - and disallow any noisemakers during cinema's so-called formative era. Thus, silence was born as a denial of the audience and the auditorium - words whose etymology need only be pointed out to the dumb. This is the true abject silence of 'so-called silent cinema': a silence held by the mute repression of describing these multi-media maelstroms at the time which no sophisticated writer would bother to note in any way save for pretending it didn't exist; a silence framed by the problematised historiography that places Muerbridge and Porter in a mime puppet show to demonstrate the magical ocular invention of cinema. It's the same silence that researchers have progressively been impelled to 'sound out' by piecing together mood music cue folios, hyperbolic trade magazine ads, faded photos of piano players. But despite the irrefutable evidence provided by historians like Rick Altman in his ultimate summation of the genesis of cinematic audiovisuality in Silent Film Sound, it is a sonorum we will never experience, let alone hear.

This impossible reverie and the fait accompli of its a-sonic reality has created a gravitational pull back to the silent cinema again and again. Maybe there we can rewrite film history and get it right this time; maybe there we can find some Darwinian proof to bring back to the Society of Film Scholars to issue their silence as fundamentally flawed in its false inscripture of the audiovisual medium of cinema; maybe if we keep mounting 'authentically verifiable' versions of ye olde musical accompaniment to faded and restored film prints this history will come to life for everyone. Maybe, maybe, maybe. For all the amazing research and presentations that have been forwarded in the field of silent film sound/music over the last twenty years, one can't help feeling it falls mostly on deaf ears. Film sound/music is still treated as a 'special issue' as if its destabilised reprioritization of the aural is a disability, requiring a special rampway up into the heads of film theorists, historians, academics and editors. The point many are likely to miss in Altman's exhaustive Silent Film Sound is that his tome's intention for cinema to be "reconfigured through sound" invites its manual to be used for extending all possibilities of sono-musicality in the cinema from the silent period onwards. I prefer that 'Silent Cinema' be renamed 'live cinema'; and that the advent of sound cinema to be regarded the birth of 'Dead Cinema' (more on this notion later). For some, history is a virtual time machine: cosy and baroque just like the chair Rod Taylor rides in The Time Machine. For me, history is a giant metallic mobile-suit with internal psycho-neural fluids, just like Shinji rides in Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Let's take a trip.