alfred hitchcock uses sound as his third dimension to tell a story within his films
I
think what sound brought of value to the cinema was to complete the realism of
the image on the screen. It made everyone in the audience deaf mutes."
-Alfred Hitchcock
Because he is known for his visual techniques, Alfred
Hitchcock’s unique use of sound is a topic which receives less attention. While
his first several films were silent,Blackmail (1929) started him on a path of
aural manipulation that continued through his later works.
Hitchcock’s instinctive styles of soundscaping during a time
period where little was yet known about the cinematic powers of sound.
Blackmail demonstrates ongoing tactics, such as: withholding sound from the
viewer to pique curiosity, exaggerating sound as a form of narrative emphasis,
and creating tension through both ambient noises and silence. Further, in a
world where music was the dominant form of narrative accompaniment, he stripped
music score away from his scenes and instead used the act of singing (and
whistling) as a suspense device. Lastly, Hitchcock’s manipulation of human
speech ranged from technical malfunctions of telephone calls to dizzied audio
abstraction of the characters’ subjective thoughts.
At the time of Blackmail’s release, most theaters still
didn’t have speakers, only 22% having sound. Nonetheless, Hitchcock was keen to
consider those 5,200 theaters worldwide which did have sound, and knew that
more would follow (Belton 1999). Film scholar Elizabeth Weis wrote The Silent
Scream in 1982, a thorough examination of the use of sound in Hitchcock films.
According to Weis, Hitchcock saw the arrival of sound technology as a ‘new
dimension of cinematic expression’ (Weis 1982, p.14). This dimension enabled
him to break away from the flat plane of the visual and create cinematic worlds
more deeply entrenched in realism.
Hitchcock tended to find clever ways to incorporate songs
into the plots of his films. Josephine (Doris Day) sings 'Que Sera Sera' at the
climax of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) in order to catch the attention of
her son being held by kidnappers in the same building – the very act of singing
generates suspense. In The Lady Vanishes (1938) the secrets Miss Froy (Dame May
Whitty) has memorized are in the form of a tune that she must sing to the
recipient to be decoded. More than half of his films include music as an
essential component, and eight of his protagonists are musicians
Human speech takes on unique attributes in Hitchcock films,
often setting up situations where the act of talking is more important than
what is actually being said. Dialogue has always been something which Hitchcock
treated as merely sounds emanating from the mouths of his characters, whereas
the story was revealed visually in other ways – by a glance, a close-up on an
object, a reaction, etc.
Hitchcock often portrayed speech from the perspective of a
character’s mind – either selectively manipulating speech heard through their
ears, or projecting their internal thoughts as voice-over
‘Silent film’ as a description is not entirely accurate
because most films of the time period were screened with loud music
accompaniment. It is only with the advent of sound, and Hitchcock’s full
manipulation of the soundtrack that he truly pushed silence forward as a device
of its own. Silence in a Hitchcock film represents the realism of traumatic
events, as well as their secrecy from the public world. Contrary to convention,
he used silence without music to heighten moments of tension.
Silent murder scenes would become a hallmark of Hitchcock’s
aural style, especially in films such as Torn Curtain, where a man is burned in
an oven; Strangers on a Train, where a girl is strangled in a park; Rope
(1948), where a man is murdered with a rope; Rear Window, where Jeff
frantically fights for his life and falls off a balcony; and Saboteur, where
Fry falls off the Statue of Liberty – all in silence without music score. An
ironic exception of course is The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) in which the
murder takes place during a loud orchestral concert; the villains plan to fire
a gun precisely timed with the clash of cymbals so to mask its sound.
When
we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it’s
impossible to do otherwise’ -Alfred Hitchcock
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