Designing Sound

Jay Beck

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813573076
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

The late 1960s and 1970s are widely recognized as a golden age for American film, as directors like Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Martin Scorsese expanded the Hollywood model with aesthetically innovative works. As this groundbreaking new study reveals, those filmmakers were blessed with more than just visionary eyes; Designing Sound focuses on how those filmmakers also had keen ears that enabled them to perceive new possibilities for cinematic sound design.     Offering detailed case studies of key films and filmmakers, Jay Beck explores how sound design was central to the era’s experimentation with new modes of cinematic storytelling. He demonstrates how sound was key to many directors’ signature aesthetics, from the overlapping dialogue that contributes to Robert Altman’s naturalism to the wordless interludes at the heart of Terrence Malick’s lyricism. Yet the book also examines sound design as a collaborative process, one where certain key directors ceded authority to sound technicians who offered significant creative input.      Designing Sound provides readers with a fresh take on a much-studied era in American film, giving a new appreciation of how artistry emerged from a period of rapid industrial and technological change. Filled with rich behind-the-scenes details, the book vividly conveys how sound practices developed by 1970s filmmakers changed the course of American cinema.   

1

Introduction

The State of the Art

Film sound in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a major component of an organized attempt on the part of several filmmakers to challenge the conventions of Hollywood cinematic practices through formal and narrative experimentation. With the weakening of the major studios in the wake of several economic and social factors (the 1948 Paramount decree, the fallout from the HUAC hearings, the rise of television and subsequent drop in cinema attendance, the resistance in foreign markets due to quotas on American films, the challenges to and demise of the Production Code), the Hollywood studio system underwent a series of radical changes from the late 1950s through the 1970s. Commonly seen as a period of economic instability (the closing of RKO studio and bankruptcy of Twentieth Century–Fox) and commercial failures (Cleopatra, Darling Lili, Star!, Tora!, Tora!, Tora!), the late 1960s and early 1970s are often elided in cinematic histories that prefer to emphasize a link with the prior system in the rise of the blockbuster and the sequel strategies of the late 1970s. Even theorists who examine the period often do so by treating it as an anomalous moment, a temporary break in the relatively stable timeline of Hollywood cinematic representation. One of the decade’s staunchest defenders, Robert Kolker, bracketed these cinematic changes by noting, “That brief moment of freedom . . . was really a freedom to be alone within a structure that momentarily entertained some experimentation.”¹

However, a closer study of the period reveals a turmoil that was less random than previously perceived. During the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a break in the homogenous output of the film industry as studio styles, genres, and narrative centrality weakened along with the industry. This gave filmmakers the freedom to explore new forms of representation in their chosen images and sounds, and it is these experiments that form the focus of this study. While the visual aspects of cinema during the 1960s and 1970s are relatively well documented, there is a dearth of material evaluating the impact of the changes in film sound. Journals such as American Cinematographer paid near-exclusive attention to the visual components of Hollywood cinema during this time (despite the fact that almost half of their advertisements related to audio technologies) with only the slightest mention of film sound’s significance. In fact, sound was routinely ignored, and even marginalized, in most writings about cinema during the 1960s and 1970s until the introduction of new “spectacular” technologies, including Sensurround and Dolby Stereo.

Cinematic practices in the 1967–1979 period, and specifically film sound practices, served as a site for negotiation of an American identity through the reconfiguration of outdated models and forms of representation and their alignment with more radical political and social perspectives. Industrial, technological, and aesthetic factors must be seen in light of the ideological constructs of the period for a full understanding of the changes that occurred in 1970s film sound. The primary value in examining this period is an understanding of the potential pathways that cinema could have followed, and still can follow, in its sound practices. The changes ushered in by the near universal acceptance of Dolby Stereo before the end of the 1970s essentially shut down the experiments of the first half of the decade and obscured the aesthetics pioneered by those films. Following the model of “crisis historiography,” as delineated by Rick Altman in his book Silent Film Sound, this study examines the period’s identity crisis in filmmaking, which resulted from changes in industrial standards.² It reveals that deviations were partially instigated by pressures from within the film industry to adopt and assimilate aspects from parallel industries. These new models of cinematic presentation offer an important site for inquiry into changes in the cinema system.

As one form of experimentation for late 1960s filmmakers, film sound offered an untheorized and relatively unchanged set of practices that were inherited artifacts of the studio system of production. The fact that filmmakers chose to manipulate, abstract, and reconfigure practices of sound recording and mixing during this period shows not only a willingness to break free from the restrictions of the studio system but also a drive to change audience perception. During the late 1960s sound aestheticians explored new methods of constructing film sound tracks in an attempt to rethink regimes of seeing and hearing in narrative cinema. Formal alterations appeared in multitrack mixing, new miking strategies, the use of location sound in lieu of looped dialogue, a reintroduction of stereo, and the dismantling of hierarchically structured systems of film sound editing and mixing. Filmmakers resisted models that dictated accepted industrial norms of how to make a film correctly and proceeded to challenge audiences with films that required spectator/auditors to engage the cinematic action on new, visceral levels. Models were drawn from television, the music and recording industries, radio, and even surveillance equipment in an attempt to develop new forms of representation that addressed disparate and specialized audiences. Crucially, the narratives of many of these films relied on the cultural alienation and uncertainty felt by both the filmmakers and their target audiences in the late 1960s. These changes made the gap between the uniform address of classical Hollywood and the emergent cinematic forms of the period more palpable.

Most studies of film in the 1970s tend to look at the decade as a departure from the confusion wrought by the decline of the studio system into the organization and structure of blockbusters, sequels, and multi-generic crossover films. In this kind of history, the films of the 1967–1979 period offer very little by which to gauge the progress of the romantically mythologized Hollywood cinema. There is a tendency for historians to overlook this period, bookending it with cursory mentions of Bonnie and Clyde as the death knell of the studio system, and the reemergence of a “New Hollywood” with The Godfather, Jaws, and Star Wars. With the exception of scholars like Robert Kolker and Robin Wood, there is a paucity of critical work that treats the films from this period as crucial to the development of cinema.³ The vast majority of film histories position these films as predecessors to the commercial successes of the following decades without exploring the formal and aesthetic changes that they introduced. What is needed is a methodology for examining this period that can shed new light on the practices that emerged and were assimilated by cinema as an industry, and those that stood as idiosyncratic experiments in altering cinematic form. Only through a study of these moments can the full potential of the period be unearthed.

Sound functions as the central structuring device in this project, yet this book is not exclusively about sound—sound is also used as a heuristic to tell us more about cinema as an event. It is mobilized to elucidate several of the salient issues about cinematic structure in the period under scrutiny. Sound functions to allow access to three separate levels of understanding of the cinema system. First, it serves as an access point to explore and understand how cinema functioned during a certain era. Second, it provides an object of study that allows for the systematic analysis of cinematic spectatorship. And third, it offers a tool for reconceptualizing and rethinking cinematic practices today. Ultimately, this study of film sound from 1967 to 1979 is designed to tell us more about how we perceive cinema in the present. The study of film sound is a relatively new academic discipline compared to the extensive analysis of the image component of cinema; however, this absence of academic sensitivity to sound makes it no less important. By exploring what Altman calls “sound’s dark corners” we are able to learn more about the function and place of cinema in contemporary society.⁴ Here I contend that an examination of film sound reveals the potential of cinematic practice and, more widely, spectatorial roles.

In this period of sound experimentation, roughly from 1967 to 1979, the film industry underwent a massive change in industrial, technical, and aesthetic practices that were in keeping with a growing sense of discomfort in the public sphere. After the scrapping of the Production Code and its replacement with the rating system in 1968, cinema was free to explore modes of expression that challenged the fixed representational patterns of classical Hollywood. Sex and violence became visual markers of these changes, but the acoustical markers are harder to identify. While image strategies during the 1960s included greater use of direct lighting, hand-held cameras, zoom lenses, and the acceptance of lens flare as an aesthetic trope (devices that were considered antithetical to cinematic realism in prior decades), parallel changes in film sound lagged far behind. It was considered aesthetically acceptable to have grainy stock, oddly framed images, and a desaturated image, but insistence on narrative intelligibility of scripted lines still meant that almost all dialogue was heard clearly and recorded at close range. In the 1960s, with the introduction of technologies including lightweight Nagra magnetic tape recorders, smaller lavalier microphones with radio transmitters, graphic equalizers, and multitrack mixing boards, film sound could be reconceptualized and remobilized. This did not happen all at once, of course, and many of the changes that did occur were structured around the existing regimes of audiovisuality (lavalier mics and radio packs were used to get “clean” dialogue recordings at a distance), but the evolution in technology allowed several filmmakers to mobilize film sound toward creative ends.

The most famous example is Robert Altman’s use of overlapping dialogue in his films of the 1970s. While overlapping dialogue was not new to Hollywood filmmaking—as heard in the screwball comedies of the 1930s—Altman revitalized the technique by multiplying the number of speaking voices and divorcing them from their spatial relation to the frame. As a deliberate byproduct of the lavalier microphone and radio pack, voices in Altman films are heard “directly,” without reverberation, regardless of their proximity to the camera or their location within the frame. This odd equality of voices meant that spectator/auditors were able to follow multiple simultaneous conversations in a single scene. This freedom of interpretation opened up Altman’s films to a new level of narrative complexity that was hitherto unknown in Hollywood filmmaking.⁵ To ensure that the plurality of voices was heard in the release version of his films, Altman accommodated a plurality of voices in the production process through both multitrack production recordings and the democratization of the recording team. He conceptualized his production team as a collaborative endeavor rather than as a hierarchical construction passed on from the standardized patterns of Hollywood sound recording and mixing. This broke with classical film sound production standards to ensure a consistency of Altman’s artistic vision while allowing the director to oversee the creation of the sound track in its entirety.⁶

Altman proved to be a significant creative voice in his mainstream studio films and smaller independent productions, but many directors working within the Hollywood system—such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Arthur Penn, and Terrence Malick—were also able to utilize the film sound track as an effective medium for expanding the dimensions of the narrative. Coppola foregrounded the plasticity and constructed nature of the sound track when he demystified the mixing process in The Conversation (1974). He, along with sound re-recordist Walter Murch, deflected audience expectations of easily comprehensible dialogue with the mumbled, whispered lines in both Godfather films (1972, 1974). Similarly, Scorsese worked with live, improvised dialogue and refused to re-record lines to provide better audience comprehension. As an ancillary result, there is an increased sense of offscreen space in Scorsese’s films due to the realistic reverberant sounds that permeate his scenes. Scorsese also mobilized popular music as a register for internal character subjectivity, providing extradiegetic commentary on the profilmic events. Penn’s sound tracks emphasized the physical aspect of violence in his films by mixing gunshots, explosions, punches, and other corporeal sounds at a much higher level than the surrounding dialogue. The result is an immediacy in the sounds that gives them the same visceral impact as their correspondent onscreen actions. On the opposite end of the scale is Malick, who revels in the ambient sounds of his films and their ability to allow the diegetic space to spill into the theater. It is not surprising that Malick readily adapted Dolby Stereo’s ability to surround the audience in ambient sound while keeping the dialogue and internal narrations restricted to the screen speakers. These directors, as well as several others working in Hollywood, created a variety of competing models of sound usage that strained the boundaries of traditional recording and mixing practices, providing a tool for them to express their doubts and misgivings about American society. Technologies from other industries were modified and adapted to the exigencies of these experiments, and the period saw the growth and deployment of a variety of contrasting models of film sound usage.

But in the late 1970s, concurrent with films like Star Wars (1977), Dolby Stereo reintroduced classical rules of film sound recording and mixing that effectively served to patch over the gap created by prior sound experiments. Star Wars engendered an idealized sense of prosperity and validation of steadfast heroism—a striking visual and narrative contrast to the pessimistic films and “unmotivated heroes” that preceded it⁷—and it came wrapped in an acoustic package that introduced Dolby Stereo to a new generation of film viewers and makers. Dolby Stereo, the product of Dolby Laboratories, was a new procedure for mixing and encoding multichannel sound in the same space as the monophonic sound track on 35 mm film. It marked a moment of promised potential for sound mixing practices, but at the same time it represented a specific, concerted effort to ensure that such potential never emerged, by virtue of its need for standardization in the recording and mixing processes. The system’s backward compatibility meant that mixing practices had to be standardized and required that dialogue was always mixed in the center channel to ensure comprehension. By separating out dialogue mixing and elevating it to the top of the post-production sound hierarchy, forcing sound effects and music to be mixed according to prescribed methods, Dolby Stereo was a retreat from the democratic configuration of the sound team in the early 1970s to a classically minded hierarchy of mixing practices. It traded innovation for the commercial viability of audiovisual spectacle, linear narrative, and dialogue-driven stories. The acceptance of Dolby Stereo as a standard by the end of the 1970s meant that Hollywood cinema was unable to break completely with the classical model in order to build on the promise of the sonic experiments of the early 1970s.

The changes that took hold in the latter half of the 1970s, specifically the introduction of Dolby Stereo and its regimented mixing strategies, introduced a “new classicism” into Hollywood and derailed many of the formal and aesthetic changes initiated in the preceding years. Film sound shifted again from a medium capable of carrying an ideological message to a simple series of acoustic attractions. The literal “whiz-bang” function of Dolby Stereo allowed the sound track to expand into the three-dimensional space of the theater, but only after ensuring the fixity of the voice within the plane of the motion picture screen. These changes in film practice reveal an awareness of a higher order, an understanding that the standards and rules of filmmaking were just as constructed as the films themselves. In rethinking and revising these rules, filmmakers of the period sought to revitalize cinema as a site for social commentary and change. The ideological valences of the films reflected a sense of discontent with both the social order at large and its manifestation in the highly structured studio system of labor. During this brief period of creativity, filmmakers were temporarily able to free the sound-image relationship from the biases of technological and narrative determinism. A study of the films of this period is crucial to demonstrating the aesthetic potential of multichannel sound before the conservative strategies of spectator positioning in Dolby Stereo reinstated the classic divisions of labor and concretized the rules of narrative dominance over the interplay between sound and image. Therefore, this book foregrounds the specific historical factors that shaped the Hollywood system during this time, and the elements within the system that resisted the established forms of representation.

Any examination of the aesthetics of film sound in the 1970s requires understanding the dialectical nature of technological and industrial changes. Because aesthetics developed in accord with, as well as in reaction to, technological and industrial shifts, each aesthetic choice must be evaluated against the larger backdrop of cinematic evolution. For example, labor organizations, such as IATSE Sound Local 695 and Editors’ Local 776, were relatively slow to respond to new roles in sound creation and regularly resisted technological advances under the guise of protecting the working rights of their constituents. Despite these strong barriers to change within the industry, several significant advances did occur in film aesthetics that were to shape the future direction of film sound in particular and film form in general. More than just singularities on the part of independent directors, these experiments of sound usage were part of a wide-ranging series of formal explorations undertaken by various directors who had become disenchanted with the rigid form of American cinema. In the collaborative production processes fostered by Arthur Penn and Robert Altman, the turn away from dialogue in the films of Monte Hellman and Terrence Malick, and the emergence of new sound roles in the films of Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, the 1970s represents a renaissance of cinematic aesthetics.

Viewed on the surface, the aesthetic changes that took place during the late 1960s and 1970s were a brief period of heterogeneity within an otherwise tightly regulated and controlled system. According to Douglas Gomery, in an article examining the state of the American film industry from 1983, the power structure of the major Hollywood studios was still firmly in place and there had been virtually no change in the large-scale economics of the industry. While recognizing the influence of many new directors and the rise of auteurism, he concluded that “little changed in t...