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We accept seen space as real only when it contains sounds as well, for these
give it the dimension of depth.
Bela Balazs (1970: 207)
KEYWORDS
sound space
spatialisation
voice
vocal proxemics
panning body sounds
2. To my knowledge there
are at least twelve such
trailers: aurora, argon,
canyon, city/Broadway,
curious George, Dolbee,
Egypt, enlighten, game,
rain, stomp, the train.
Some of these have more
than one version and
some (aurora, argon,
enlighten) are rather
short, logo-only pieces.
Sobchack mentions eight.
3. The phrase when the ear
dreams is from Gaston
Bachelard.
4. Sobchacks description of
the sonic motions of
these trailers recalls
Germaine Dulacs notion
of pure cinema, that is, a
cinema of pure motion:
. . .a visual symphony, a
rhythm of arranged
movements in which the
shifting of a line or of a
volume in a changing
cadence creates emotion
without any crystallization
of ideas. Quoted in
(Gunning 2007: 38)
Dong Liang
The essay is published here in two parts. In the first part, I introduce the
film, the spacesuit genre and then focus on its panning practice: how a
particular sound (object) such as voice, music, or even heartbeat moves
through speakers and creates a sense of space in the process; how this
practice draws from the past and breaks with tradition. While Gravitys
panning is justified by its camera movement and idiosyncratic diegetic
setting, its continuity editing, a tried-and-true method of constructing
space through images, becomes problematic with the extensive call of
spatialisation. The second part of this essay is concerned with the spatial
acoustics of human voice and the body sounds, two types of sound that are
significant components in the soundscape of Gravity.
Space exploration has been an attractive theme in the sci-fi genre since
Georges Melie`ss Trip to the Moon (1902). In the wake of the USs effort
to catch up with the space race and the formation of NASA in 1958,
Hollywood was able to put a spin on the genre and applied a dry coating
of rocket science on the basic dramaturgical elements of the genre. Despite
its many varieties (e.g., the majestic 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick 1968),
the contemplative and episodic The Right Stuff (Kaufman 1983), the
fastidious5 Apollo 13 (Howard 1995)), a space film contains often the
following generic ingredients: machine malfunction that endangers space
travelers;6 overabundance of technical jargon that could have come from a
NASA documentary, which this genre closely borders; the archetypal plot
of overcoming disasters and returning to home triumphantly; a parallel
depiction of astronauts life on earth as average human beings (i.e. in the
backyard, holding a beer) and their wives anxiety. The problem of the
genre, or its strength, consists in balancing what is familiar (astronauts as
emotionally comprehensible and predictable creatures so that our fear can
be projected and made visible), with what is unfamiliar but attractive (the
outer space experience) and what is neither familiar nor attractive but
nevertheless key to the genre: the highly verbalised, extremely technical
aspect of space travelling.
While Gravity has clearly drawn from its many predecessors in what
we might call the spacesuit genre, it could well be the ultimate spacesuit
film. Apart from the final scene, where Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock)
lands on earth (still no human being in sight), the entire film takes place in
outer space, under zero gravity. Other than a few remarkable moments
where Stone exposes her body, for the entire length of the film, all we can
see of the characters are their facesthe rest hidden in the cumbersome
and asexual spacesuit. This constitutes a very realistic challenge not only to
acting, but also to viewing. How are the actors and actresses able to convey
their emotional states with all their bodies and limbs blocked from
our view and their movements neutralised by the generic, all covering
spacesuit? How can a film connect and communicate with its audience,
when everything except the face7 (and a few interior shots) is generated by
CGI and animated on computer? After all, what defines the film as a live
action film, instead of computer animation?8
6. Susan Sontag in an
influential article explains
that we need malicious
machine against human to
happen: we have a
disaster complex. (Sontag
1965)
Dong Liang
Dong Liang
I frequently find myself following the invisible sound with my eyes before
I realise that I am staring at speakers on the wall or on the ceiling.
The films first subjective shot is also worth noticing for its intricate
manipulation of space. I say subjective shot, knowing that the films camera
movement (in the Lubezki-Cuaron signature style) merges seamlessly
what traditionally should have been several shots, subjective or not. To be
precise, what I call a subjective shot is the middle portion of the films
second shot, which is executed in a symmetrical fashion, starting from and
finishing by showing Stones body in the distance. Between these two
extreme long-shot scales the camera transits from free-floating (the camera
remains still relative to Stone so we can observe her movement) to a fixed
position in relation to Stone. The virtual18 camera then closes in on her
face and eventually penetrates her helmet. While the digitally sutured
camera movement manifests itself as one seamless flow, the accompanying
sound marks the entrance and departure by sounding significantly
different. Outside the helmet, the soundtrack has a sort of ostinato
underscore that we may interpret as the ruthless rhythm of outer space.
The moment the camera enters the private sphere of the helmet this
ostinato is gone and a new high pitch sound is switched on. In conjunction
with this change Stones breathing now has radically different acoustics.
Thanks to the expressiveness of sound space, therefore, camera movement
becomes a much more intense bodily experience for the audience. Similar
to what happens in Star Wars (Lucas 1977), where Obi Wan-Kenobis
urge use the force resonates in all channels, here Stones breathing is
momentarily spread out in the auditorium before settling down to the rear.
This sonic movement is justified by the camera taking up a classic
subjective view, with its characteristic instability and blurred vision.
Arguably for the first time in cinema history, a subjective shot is
perceptually reinforced by the voice of the very subject coming exclusively
from the surround back, as if the audience is magically shrunk and
relocated to the tiny space between her mouth and the helmet.
In consistently pushing the dialogue out of the screen (or rather, the
front speakers), Gravity presents a significant challenge to the established
codes of surround sound, and signifies a triumphant return to a crucial idea
in the history of sound space. For the last two decades, a key compromise
made by surround sound technologies is that certain sounds can break free
from the magnetic force field of the screen while others remain forever
trapped. The human voice, especially that which carries vital narrative
information, traditionally belongs firmly to the latter category. This is not
because the previous iterations of sound technology do not possess a means
to send human voice to the other end of the auditorium. Quite the
contrary. Experimental stereo films in the 1950s, Dolby Stereo six track
films in the 1970s, or Dolby Digital and other formats of digital surround
sound in the 1990s have all attempted, at one point in their lifespan,
to involve surround sound in the role of storytelling. For a few years,
Rick Altman recalls the early days of Dolby Stereo, every menace,
every attack, every emotional scene seemed to begin or end behind the
spectators. Finally, it seemed, the surround channel had become an integral
Dong Liang
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Dong Liang
it sees fit. The dialogue sequence between Blofeld and Bond, after his
disguise is blown, is a case in point. In this scene Bond sits on a sofa and
Blofeld on a chair opposite Bond several metres away. Instead of staging
the scene with two-shots or over-the-shoulder shots, the camera is
positioned in the midpoint of their eye line (naturally the eyeline is slightly
off-kilter). The soundtracks renovation sees this as a perfect opportunity
to apply voice panning: as Blofeld or Bond is speaking off the screen, the
voice would clearly come from the rear speaker, indicating the sources
spatial location. As the shots alternate the to-and-fro bouncing of the
voice becomes very noticeable, which in turn calls attention to the editing
itself. On several occasions, to maintain the consistency of the practice, a
voice would jump in mid-phrase from straight ahead to behind, the
experience of which is not unlike instant teleporting.
The above two examples show that editing in cinema, especially the
most banal but quintessential shot-and-reverse-shot formula, might
become the biggest hurdle for close space matching as an element of
contemporary audiovisual aesthetics. The full gravity of the situation can
also be understood by a historical lesson: this problem is in fact not a new
one. Indeed, what we are highlighting here is the same complaint about
many stereo films made in the 1950s such as The Robe (Koster 1953).
Being the first CinemaScope film, The Robe benefits from the stereo
recording of many of its dialogue scenes. While boosting realism by
accurately matching the sound space and the image space, the practice was
found distracting when editing is involved. As voices from characters
located at different parts of the screen are sonically (instead of visually)
located, the integrity of the sound space comes to the fore. Various shots
from the same scene stand out by their distinct sonic depths, threatening to
call attention to themselves instead of merging seamlessly into the overall
flow of the sequence.
What The Robe wanted to revive, voluntarily or not, can be regarded as
a dream conceived two decades earlier by the advent of sound. The early
talkies notably produce an uncanny impression, albeit only for a short
amount of timethe audience had difficulty believing that the body and
the voice are one, because they dont seem to come from the same spot in
space and their spatial signatures dont match. Lucy Fischer comments,
[. . .] the creation of a sound/image illusion was a highly tenuous process,
and one whose success revolved around the parameter of space. (1985:
232)23 The problem of the talkie, or at least its perceived imperfection of
fusing two spaces, has fuelled several initiatives in sound technology that
aim to explore how sound space can be convincingly captured and
represented. Among these is Alan Blumleins attempt24 to use a coincident
pair of microphones (a clever contraption now called the Blumlein pair)
that picks up phase differences and converts them into amplitude
differences by a pair of loudspeakers. Blumlein and his colleagues also
made a series of experimental recordings and films to demonstrate the
technology and to see if there was any commercial interest from the film
and music industry. One of these films, literally called walking and
talking, shows a stage where three men in suits or lab coats walk from left
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Dong Liang
and right, and vice versa, while counting numbers and days of the week.
Again, these experiments seem to work well only by neglecting editing as a
fundamental tool of feature length filmmaking.
Instead of a pair of microphones located at one same spot in space but
pointing to different directions, the stereo films in the 1950s use an array
of spaced microphones to record a scene, an idea that can be traced to
experiments conducted by Steinberg and Snow in Bell Laboratories in the
1930s. Both, however, conceive the scene as rather static, with no camera
movements and cutsagain, much like the canned theatre or music
performance in the first Vitaphone shorts. But unlike those shorts, or the
early talkies, a multiple microphone setup doesnt really solve the problem,
as each microphone would introduce its own sound space, easily perceived
as in conflict with others. Given all these problems of perception, hardly
solvable to this day, it is rather fortunate for cinema to be without sound
for thirty yearsfor if it had sound from the very beginning, probably
neither camera movement nor cutting would have been invented! Without
the burden of sound space, the camera is free to move around and the
image track enjoys an exclusive liberty to construct space at its own pace.
All these become problematic once the sound space is involved.
In my view, Hollywoods answer to the conflict of interest between
editing, camera movement and sound space integrity consists of essentially
two strategies: either the sound space is reduced to a barely legible sketch
(as in the majority of 1930s films) or it is entirely reconstructed from
scratch to avoid conflict with the image space. The latter process seems to
dominate contemporary filmmaking by treating every film as if it were a
cartoon. Instead of using various stereo recording techniques that register
the spatial location of sounds and their movements, a manual process is
introduced to locate and pan dramaturgically important sound across
channels. This technique of panning sound was first developed in
Disneys Fantasound. By 1958, John Belton reports (1992: 157) that
Foxs CinemaScope films no longer used stereo to record dialogue and
sound effects. Instead it went back to what Fantasound did two decades
earlier and revived the panning practice. Panning may achieve good results
when applied carefully, so that its inherent technical complications
(divergence control, spread, etc.) could be controlled. It may work fine if
what is involved is on-screen or off-screen continuous movement. But
when it comes to cuts that place the characters into opposite end of the
auditorium, the effect can be somewhat jarring. It is perhaps for this
reason, and the complexity of the process itself, that Ioan Allen claims:
by the 1970s dialogue panning had all but died out. (Allen 1991) The
convenient solution of leaving dialogue to the centre prevails.
Despite its inherent disruption, the idea of closely matching image and
sound space seems to have an almost irresistible appeal. As a result, the
practice is being revived with every new iteration of sound technology.
At this point it is unclear to what extent the use of sonic teleporting has
become an established norm by the industry. The phenomenon remains
somewhat inexplicable to sound designers and mixers themselves. But if,
indeed, a new generation of filmgoers will eventually take the orbiting
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