Synchronization and Title Sequences

Audio-Visual Semiosis in Motion Graphics

Michael Betancourt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351619394
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Synchronization and Title Sequences proposes a semiotic analysis of the synchronization of image and sound in motion pictures using title sequences. Through detailed historical close readings of title designs that use either voice-over, an instrumental opening, or title song to organize their visuals—from Vertigo (1958) to The Player (1990) and X-Men: First Class (2011)—author Michael Betancourt develops a foundational framework for the critique and discussion of motion graphics' use of synchronization and sound, as well as a theoretical description of how sound-image relationships develop on-screen.

1Introduction

Informational structures tend to dominate the analysis of title sequences—the design and aesthetics of the title cards/montage presenting the individual credits (text)—or their function as an introduction to the drama that follows (narrative). However, this focus neglects other, non-lexical aspects of these sequences, in particular the crucial role that synchronized sound and music have for the organization, identification, and interpretation of title designs. This book emerged from the same disparate historical research that informed the analysis in Semiotics and Title Sequences: Text-Image Composites in Motion Graphics whose primarily visual engagement with title sequence designs (mostly) produced for feature films and television programs in the United States meant neglecting issues of sound and synchronization. The scope of this study ranges across an international spectrum that nevertheless remains primarily focused on Hollywood productions.¹ These selections reflect their utility for the present analysis. The works discussed are carefully chosen exemplars of form: mainly well-known works whose designs minimize the indeterminacy of their synchronization; the title sequences chosen for this study reinforce their underlying selective criteria—that the examples all provide a clear, coherent presentation of what are more commonly complex, ambivalent, and indistinct approaches that often organize the same design at different levels of its construction. The resulting selection’s limitations illuminates the complexity of more ambivalent designs by making their commingled morphologies of synchronization into distinct modes employed together in a composite fashion.

Questions of synchronization have been an ongoing concern related to my research into visual music for more than a decade. Understanding synchronization necessitates careful attention to sound::image relationships independent of the more common dramatic narratives of commercial media; title designs are a natural, even logical site for this analysis due to their independence from the constraints and demands of storytelling: title designs are semi-autonomous structures (typically) created and organized around their synchronization with music, making them ideal sources for the theorization of synchronization. They articulate meaning through the synchronization of audio-visual materials, parallel to the constraints imposed by text on-screen. Avant-garde and commercial films, title designs, and other motion graphic paratexts (such as music videos, commercials, and trailers²) have developed and explored this formative role for synchronization, making a semiotic theory of synchronized sound potentially relevant to more than just the title sequence.³ In spite of this logical connection, discussions of synchronization in title sequences are even rarer than the theoretical consideration of synchronization itself in narrative motion pictures; for example, film historian Rick Altman’s pioneering studies of ‘lip-sync’ in the 1970s and 1980s do not develop a semiotic theory for sound or its synchronization.⁴ This nearly complete neglect is surprising given the importance of synchronization to motion pictures generally.

For film theorists and practitioners, how to employ synchronization in motion pictures has been a point of theoretical concern guided by the commercial shift to “Talkies” in the 1920s. Heuristic theories of use modeled on ‘lip-sync’ act to hide other theoretical concerns in the decades since its introduction. Elizabeth Weis and John Bolton’s authoritative anthology on the role of audio, Film Sound: Theory and Practice, provides a range of approaches to film sound, but tends to focus on the innovative work of particular auteurs. There is little consideration given to a general theory; careful and extensive critical consideration of model examples provide insight into the use of sound by film auteurs such as Orson Welles or “sound designers” such as Walter Murch. Their anthology approaches the aesthetics of film sound, but does not address the theoretical issues arising from the basic issue of synchronization except in a historical sense via coverage of the 1920s–30s debates around “Talkies” when sync sound recording was new. And while there is an extensive literature on the avant-garde and its relationship to sound and sound recording, this is a literature that only rarely considers motion pictures, and never touches on the commercial title sequence. That synchronization is rarely theorized is surprising; it is a universally neglected, but also obvious, question.

However, music has been theorized extensively, and its theory is often confused with questions of sound and its synchronization, because music has been a part of the cinematic experience since its infancy; thus, analyses and critical approaches to sound and film tend to focus instead on music⁵—questions of scoring and appropriate choices of performance and composition—rather than the specific questions of synchronization outside the realm of the score.⁶ And these theories of film music and histories of sound recording are also almost always concerned with narrative film dramas: sound for fiction films has been discussed and considered extensively, but as with much about the design and structure of title sequences, there has been no consideration of the role and meaning of synchronized sound (rather than music composition) in the title sequence. This emphasis on scoring and composition is the historically dominant approach to theorizing synchronization, since it is one of the very first ways that motion pictures engaged with sound::image relationships—by 1912 the need for curated (if not specifically composed) music was becoming obvious. In his 1951 reminiscence about this shift, film composer Max Winkler describes “The Origin of Film Music,” as a necessity:

More and more musical mishaps began to turn drama and tragedy on-screen into farce and disaster. Exhibitors and theatre managers made frantic efforts to avoid the musical faux pas that made their films appear ridiculous. Carl Fischer’s [where Winkler worked] was probably the most famous and certainly the most successful in the field of orchestra music. I began to understand their problems. We gave advice, we helped some of them, and when they described to us a particular scene in a film, we would usually know of a piece that would fit the mood.⁷

As film historian Mervyn Cooke noted in his discussion of Winkler’s comments in The Hollywood Film Music Reader, Winkler is not entirely reliable in his account.⁸ However questionable Winkler’s comments may be, he was correct in observing that the music that accompanies what appears on-screen, especially for the early cinema, has a dramatic impact on how the audience understands what they see: it does more than merely set the mood, it can be a determining feature of how the audience understands the visual. This impact—what Winkler describes as the difference between tragedy and farce—gives music a central role in the construction and determination of meaning.

A similar neglect is also apparent in studies focused on the well-known field of “visual music” or abstract film. Film historian William Moritz’s monograph Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger is typical. The immediacy of synchronization is a foundational given; it neither receives nor requires a more thorough consideration. Visual music leaves the theorization of audio-visual form as little more than a formal description of potential linkages entangled with the cultural heritage and aesthetic choices that define “visual music” as such. Because Moritz accepts this cultural idea as a foundation, his study cannot address its organization except en passant—the audio-visual linkage described by “visual music” as a construct is not of concern; neither are the semiotics of its organization. These are not criticisms of Moritz’s work, nor of “visual music”—the issue of synchronization is a gap in this theory/history, a critical fallacy that puts the entire construct into question, and so cannot be addressed because it is often seen as the necessary and sufficient condition for “visual music”—the metaphor of synaesthesia is typically shown via synchronization.

Considerations of sound and synchronization in motion pictures, beyond some general remarks in studies of “art sound,” is not a topic of significant analysis. Douglas Kahn’s exemplary history of sound in art and the avant-garde, Noise, Water, Meat does not consider it. As in Film Sound, Kahn’s approach is historical, not theoretical, concerned with the heuristic debate around the “Talkies.” He does not develop a consideration of the synchronous linkages between sound::image in motion pictures; neither does Jacques Attali’s well known theory of sound proposed in the book Noise address motion pictures, being concerned instead with an ideological role and meaning for music.⁹

The only lengthy discussion of film sound in Noise, Water, Meat is concerned with Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s and 30s—primarily Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein. Approaches to synchronization that emerge prior to World War II are focused on the “Talkie,” with their analysis addressing only the realist needs of dramatic narratives for synchronized speech and sound effects. ¹⁰ But this focus on “Talkies” is not limited to live action films, as Douglas Kahn notes (in passing) about Disney’s use of sound in cartoons, what is commonly called “Mickey Mousing”:

Whereas Eisenstein sought to find an auditive equivalent to his visually derived montage, Disney extended the elements of silent cinema into sound under the actuality (not metaphoricity) of music in such a way that the music and sound performed the visual elements of the film—its characters, objects and actions. What may have once struggled awkwardly as an implied or otherwise compensatory sound made itself heard with a vengeance through every possible auditive technique. Voices, sounds, and music were spread out over the bodies of both characters and objects in a new form of homologous puppetry, whether a squeaking elbow joint, fly footsteps, flesh ripped off to play a rib-cage xylophone, or a piece of clothing mentioned in the title or verse of a familiar song. The exaggeratedly tight coordination of sound and image in the novel context of sound cinema meant that the visual experience of animated cartoons was itself animated by sound.¹¹

Kahn’s description of how sound performed the visuals in Disney cartoons makes its synchronization both the central focus of the discussion, and an implicit, unexplored, and unquestionable relationship: the linkage of sound::image is so direct and complete that the need to even consider it as a construct, an artificial assemblage, seems redundant. Understood in these terms, what could a theory of synchronization add? The autonomous connection happens so fully and directly that the “Mickey Mousing” he describes needs only to have the visual part mentioned to invoke the audible. The directness of this connection leaves very little room for other explorations in narrative cinema.¹²

Kahn’s discussion is typical: the question of synchronization is only engaged as specifically analogous to ‘lip-sync’ in the “Talkies”: the naturalistic connection of voice-to-speaker, extended by “Mickey Mousing” to everything that could make a sound. However, some filmmakers working during this transition produce a variety of statements and manifestos arguing for the use of sound in contrast to the imagery. What the Soviet directors Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov call “asynchronism” in their Statement on Sound from 1928 is typical of these oppositional arguments for a ‘counterpoint relationship’ between sound and image, a role that conceives sound directly in opposition to the “Talkies”:

A first period of sensations does not injure the development of a new art, but it is the second period that is fearful in this case, a second period that will take the place of the fading virginity and purity of this first perception of new technical possibilities, and will assert an epoch of its automatic utilization for “highly cultured dramas” and other performances of a theatrical sort.

To use sound in this way will destroy the culture of montage, for every ADHESION of sound to a visual montage piece increases its inertia as a montage piece, and increases the independence of its meaning—and this...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledge
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Direct Synchronization
• 3 Natural Artifice
• 4 Counterpoint
• 5 Songs and Voice-Over
• 6 Conclusions
• Index