71
Fragments
Film
Comment Vol.42 No.5, New York, 2006
(Opening
excerpt only currently published online)
Michael Haneke is not alone when he comments that film 'comes to life with sound'. Has there been an auteur who has not realised as much when - after labouring over shot selection interred in the edit suite - felt revived by the mere alignment of the simplest acoustical occurrence to their silent moving imagery?
On
the one hand, this is testament to how 'auteurism' is forensically cited via the a-sonic discourses of literature, theatre and photography, to which most auteurs align themselves. Like the deaf, the critical diaspora which appends the Auteur Theory to the spread of global internationalist cinema 'signs' these assertions rather than 'voices' them. On the other hand, a problematic is exposed: what exactly might 'auteur sound' be?
While
the notion of mise-en-scene at its most rudimentary spotlights
theatre direction as the core vein of 'director cinema', auteurist film sound for the bulk of the 20th century mostly conforms to the European notion of 'direct sound': visuals are directed, while sounds are simply direct. Critics and theorists have long smothered the ontological investigation of so-called 'direct sound' with poor metaphorical assignations of 'truth' and 'honesty'. To wit: the classical auteurist film will 'sound' unaffected and unstylised. Poor audiovisual perceptiveness accounts for the unchallenged predominance of the soundtrack as a pseudo-mystical occurrence of natural events in front of the 'recording angel' - microphones as they are more commonly known.
