How does cinema make sense of the world? Why is cinema so easy to understand?
We get knowledge of the world through ideas. We never see the world itself, we only experience through ideas.
The topic of this week is cinema as ear: Acoustics and space. It is a “turn” towards the body and to “embodied perception”. There are 4 keys things:
1. flat space
Back in about 1925 when movies had no sound or only have a soundtrack. And then we start to move through space which is audiovisual correspondence, the next is identity crisis or cultural drift(through the soundtrack) and the last one, inner space or the little voice inside our heads.
What’s all about flat space? Rudolf Arnheim wrote quite a few text on film as art, back in 1920s, cinema was in a battle between other art forms. It wasn’t considered a proper art form. People argued that film actually is an art form. When there’s the transition from silent movie to sound films, Arnheim is comfortable with watching silent film as an art form. It follows the same language as painting.
“Acoustics completes the illusion to perfection. The edge of the screen is no longer a frame, but the margin of a whole, of a theatrical space: sound transforms the screen into a spatial stage.
One of cinema’ s main and special appeals is the fact that every scene poses a competition: the fragmentation of images and motion on the surface versus plastic bodies and motion in space. Sound film suspends this aesthetically important double game almost completely.”
Rudolf Arnheim (1928)
When we move into audio visual art, those clear definition become quite blurred. Arnheim also argued that the addition of sound provoked the conflict of medium specificity and intermediality.
When we are watching a silent film we are in a flat space, however when it become a sound film, we started moving through space. We have a lot of questions to think about with a sound film. Is the sound on-screen of off-screen? Is is diegetic or non-degetic? Is is out side of the narrative space? Synchronous or non-synchronous?
(Bordwell & Thompson, 2009)
We watched the opening sequence of the film Touch of Evil (1958) by Orson Wells in class, and we watched the studio version first as they don’t like the original version made by Wells so they recut the clip.
So the difference between two is in the other one, the sound is out of sync, the direction is different as well.
An idea that given by Vivian Sobchak is that sound give film a ‘body’, it has intentionality and spatial directionality, it is potential to destabilise the spectator and it reinforces emotion affective states.
When we look at an image, what sound merge in our head? The question we had in class is: Which is more real: mind or matter/ sound or image. There are few key issues in this debate. The oral culture or visual culture. The oral culture is the culture that is not written down.Since the invention of printing technique, things got printed out, so we move from the oral tradition towards the visual tradition.
I visited Hales Gallery and the exhibition is called Rayday by Jeff Keen. The work is originally presented at the 1970 ‘Film international underground film festival.”The film immerses the viewer in ints manic world of creation and violent destruction. I was surprised by the sound in the film because it has nothing to do with the content. There are so many things happening in really short time.
SHIYAOXU 