Is Sound Recording Like a Language?

Author(s): Alan Williams

Source: Yale French Studies, No. 60, Cinema/Sound (1980), pp. 51-66
Published by: Yale University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2930004
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Alan Williams

Is Sound Recording Like a Language?

Critics and theoreticians who speak of film as a language or as being

"like" a language invariably refer solely to image recording and its
permutations when they claim that "film" is somehow language-like.
The communicative aspects of sound use in film, for most writers on
the subject, are limited to the languages relayed or reproduced by the
recording process (principally speech and tonal music). This attitude
is at the heart of the contemporary difficulty of thinking of sound
recording as a signifying practice with effects, ideological and other-
wise, comparable to those of camera and projector. The difference
commonly held to obtain between sound and image in film is
generally reduceable to terms much like the following: "Whereas the
image track represents the space-time accessible to the camera during
shooting, the sound track reproduces the sonic material selected for
inclusion in the film." From this point of view, sound recording
would seem to be capable of providing a literal replica of the "real"
events that served as "original" raw material; it would not reduce
them or change in any way their nature-or, dare we use the word,
their essence. Here, for example, is what becomes of the distinction
in the hands of Jean-Louis Baudry:

And it is true that in cinema-as in the case of all talking machines-one does not
hear an image of the sounds but the sounds themselves. Even if the procedure for
recording the sounds and playing them back deforms them, they are reproduced
and not copied. Only their source of emission may partake of illusion; their reality
cannot. Hence, no doubt, one of the basic reasons for the privileged status of voice
in idealist philosophy and in religion: voice does not lend itself to games of illusion,
or confusion, between the real and its figurativity (because voice cannot be
represented figuratively) to which sight seems particularly liable. i

'Jean-Louis Baudry, "Le Dispositif," Communications No. 23 (1975), p. 61;

trans. Bertrand Augst, "The Apparatus," Camera Obscura No. 1 (Fall 1976), p. 110.

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 Yale French Studies

It is worth mentioning, in passing, that Baudry neglects in his last

sentence the actual development of practices of voice synthesis,
which date as far back as the statue of Memnon at Thebes (built
about 1490 B.C. and endowed with "speech" by a series of hidden air
chambers) and include the celebrated talking automatons first con-
structed in the Middle Ages and perfected in the nineteenth century.2
But the crucial problem here is the distinction Baudry draws between
the "reality" of sounds and their "source of origin." "Sound," in
other words, is differentiated from its material conditions of produc-
tion. In the way he makes this distinction, Baudry falls prey to the
idealism he so carefully avoids elsewhere, an idealism denounced in
suggestive terms by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology:

Only now, after having considered four moments, four aspects of the primary
historical relationships, do we find that man also possesses "consciousness," but,
even so, not inherent, not "pure" consciousness. From the start the "spirit" is
afflicted with the curse of being "burdened" with matter, which here makes its
appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sound, in short, of language.3

"Agitated layers of air": what becomes of the opposition between

"reproduction" and "representation" if we take this phrase as a
definition of "sound" in considering recording practices? The defini-
tion needs expansion, but not much. For the purposes of the present
argument, "sound" henceforth will be taken to mean "audible
disturbances of air in the form of wave motion in a particular
configuration of space."
This definition does not strive for completeness, which would
require frequency range, amplitude, and so forth, as well as an
account of the position of the listener in relation to the sound source
(this will become crucial below). It demonstrates, however, what
Baudry's thinking omits. To define sound as a thing "in itself'
requires omission of the material circumstances of production and
reception of the sound. Baudry's sound can be heard only by God, or
perhaps by Philosophy. For human intercourse, in all circumstances

2Oliver Reed and W.L. Welch, From Tinfoil to Stereo (Indianapolis: Sams, second
edition 1976), p. 1.
3Ed. C.J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970), pp. 50-1 (emphasis
added).

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Alan Williams

including sound recording, it is necessary to consider the medium;

what vibrates is a particular volume of air. So it is that "identical"
sounds (voices, instruments) seem different in different acoustic
environments, a fact that one does not consciously notice in everyday
life precisely because the very constitution of a subject that can listen
(understand, unify in terms of a common point of reference) requires
the (learned) process of ignoring such variations in favor of an
identity posited as necessary to them. (Characteristic of certain
mental disorders is the loss of this ability, and the loss of actantial and
even merely physical coherence in the perceived world.) More
relevant to a later argument in this article, sounds are "different"
(even though posited as the "same," and listened to as such) in
different positions within an acoustic environment: there are "good"
seats and "bad" ones in a concert hall, and so on. It is the entire
volume of air that vibrates during a sonic event; the volume and its
vibration, and nothing less, must be termed the "sound" in question.
If sound is a three-dimensional, material event, if the notion of a
sound-in-itself independent of its environment is not real but a
construction of the subject that listens, then it follows that sound
recording can not by definition reproduce "the sounds themselves"
since it is obligated by its nature to render a sound (as vibrating
volume) as recorded from one point of the space in which and
through which the sound exists. (For the purposes of simplicity, I am
assuming a recording made with only one microphone.) Microphones
being more like ears than they are like rooms (they function as points
and not as volume), it is never the literal, original "sound" that is
reproduced in recording, but one perspective on it, a sample, a
reading of it. This situation can be reduced in apparent importance by
the use of multiple miking and multi-speaker playback, but the fact of
"sampling" will remain-just as in image recording one may increase
the number of frames per second to 30, 60, or more, but still have
only a workable sample of the motion to be represented, and not the
motion "in itself."
The notion of sound recording as reproduction and not as

representation would have us believe that sound, a three-dimensi

event (or events, in the case of multiple tracks), is turned into a thre

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 Yale French Studies

dimensional event in another medium (electricity or impressions on

wax, versus air), then recreated as still another three-dimensional
event in the original medium (but not necessarily the original acoustic
environment) and all this without loss of essence or "aura." There
would be "distortion," possibly, but not change of nature. Baudry,
specifically, would have it that the "source of emission" of the sound
may be tampered with, but not its "reality." This is a curious
distinction, one that I would suggest is idealist in the same way that
Baudry denounces Mitry, Bazin, and others as idealist in their
commentaries on image recording. If we examine the context in
which Baudry makes the statement quoted above, the importance of
this difficulty can be made more clear. It is a question, appropriately
enough, of Plato's cave:

All that is missing is the sound, in effect much more difficult to reproduce. Not only
this: more difficult to copy, to employ like an image in the visible world; as if
hearing, as opposed to sight, resisted being caught up in simulacra. Real voices,
then, they would emanate from the bearers, the machinists and the marionette
players (a step is skipped in the reference to reality) but nevertheless, given over to
the apparatus, integrated with it since it requires a total effort for fear of exposing
the illusion. But voice, which does not allow representation as do artificial
objects-stone and wooden animals, and statues-will at least let itself be
absorbed by the apparatus thanks to reverberation. "And suppose their prison had
an echo from the wall facing them? When one of the people crossing behind them
spoke, they could only suppose that the sound came from the shadow passing
before their eyes." If a link is missing in the chain that connects us back to reality,
the apparatus corrects this, by taking over the voice's echo, by integrating into itself
these excessively real voices.4

Note that it is possible to read Plato as more materialist than

Baudry in this context: what is modified, transformed in the arrange-
ment of the Cave is the relation between perceivers and sound
source. The cognitive activity of the prisoners is directed by a
medium-an aural mirror, no less. The wall of the cave, like mirrors
made of glass and spoken of by Lacanians, limits and reduces the
larger space behind the prisoners to precisely the shape of the screen
whereupon they see shadows. Their decision that the sounds must
come "from" the shadows is less pitiable than one might imagine,

4Baudry, op cit., pp. 60-1 (English translation, p. 110-translation modified).

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Alan Williams

inasmuch as it is a question of equivalence of sight and sound in a

particular field, a field produced and articulated, in the final analysis,

by the positioning of screen-mirror and spectators. "When one of the
people crossing behind them spoke, they could only suppose that the
sound came from the shadows passing before their eyes" (Plato).
Baudry maintains that the reflected sound is "the same" as the
original, and yet it has been vectorially altered, its dimensions
reduced. One could take the Cave's wall-mirror as a prophetic vision
of modem media if one assumes that this set of transformations,
material alterations that entail specific effects of signification, is more
important than the seeming identity of some ideal sonic material.
The question, then is: how to begin an examination of the specific
effects of sound recording as a signifying practice? If Baudry is
unhelpful in his specific (few) comments on sound itself, I would
nonetheless maintain that his analysis of image recording can serve as
an apt point of departure for a study of recorded sound. My argument
will be that recorded sounds share crucial properties with recorded
images, and that an analysis of the former is best begun with the
latter. In the following I will be relying on Baudry's "Ideological
Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus," which I will
supplement with Hugo Munsterberg's analysis of image recording
from The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. My reading of these will
lead back to sound recording and, eventually, to consideration of a
sound figuration practice frequently employed by Jean-Luc Godard.

Like many French essayists, Baudry likes to tuck away some of his
most interesting and frequently most speculative comments in foot-
notes, and "Ideological Effects" contains one particularly suggestive
example. Footnote number twelve (in the English translation),
appended to a passage devoted to the illusion of motion and its origin
in cinema's multiple but motionless single frames, reads:

It is thus first at the level of the apparatus that the cinema functions as a language:

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 Yale French Studies

inscription of discontinuous elements whose effacement in the relationship instituted

among them produces meaning.5

This comment, by its placement, applies solely to the phenomenon of

apparent motion, but it could apply equally well (and Baudry implies
by his wording that this might be his intent) to the level of camera
movement and editing discussed immediately afterward in the essay:

Film history shows that as a result of the combined inertia of painting, theater, and
photography, it took a certain time to notice the inherent mobility of the cinematic
mechanism. The ability to reconstitute movement is after all only a partial,
elementary aspect of a more general capability. To seize movement is to become
movement, to follow a trajectory is to become trajectory, to choose a direction is to
have the possiblity of choosing one, to determine a meaning is to give oneself a
meaning .... And if the eye which moves is no longer fettered by a body, by the
laws of matter and time, if there are no more assignable limits to its displacement-
conditions fulfilled by the possibilities of shooting and of film-the world will be
constituted not only by this eye but for it. The movability of the camera seems to
fulfill the most favorable conditions for the manifestation of the "transcendental
subject" . . As it is said of consciousness-and in point of fact we are concerned
with nothing less-the image will always be image of something; it must result from
a deliberate act of consciousness [visge intentionelle] .... The world is no longer
only an "open and unbounded horizon." Limited by the framing, lined up, put at
the proper distance, the world offers up an object endowed with meaning, an
intentional object, implied by and implying the action of the "subject" that sights
it.6

The potential implicit movement of the camera (either through

editing or by literal displacement of the apparatus), like that pro-
voked by the differences between individual frames, functions like a
language in that an initial continuum is cut up, analyzed into discrete
units whose combination (and effacement of their constituent discon-
tinuities) produces a synthesis at a "higher" level. What is analyzed is
the material world (the "raw material," continuous but meaningless
relative to the "finished product"), and what is synthesized is the
world for some entity, Baudry's transcendental subject, whose place
we are obliged to assume in viewing the film.7 This unseen spectator

'Jean-Louis Baudry, "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Ap-

paratus," Cinithique No. 78 (1970), trans. Alan Williams, Film Quarterly, 28, 2
(Winter 1974-75), p. 47.
6Ibid, p. 43 (translation modified).
7This formulation and much of the surrounding argument owe a debt to Thom
Andersen's Cinema and its discontents (work in progress).

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Alan Williams

with whom, like it or not, we must identify, has been aptly labeled by
Daniel Dayan, after Oudart, as "the absent-one."8
This is as far as Baudry goes in elucidating the working mechan-
ism of cinema's absent but omnipotent "transcendental subject," a
relative lack of emphasis probably occasioned by his reliance on
psychoanalysis for a model of the mind's functioning. As a psychol-
ogy of motivation, Freudian thought can enable Baudry to make
several tantalizing hypotheses as to why, exactly, the spectator might
willingly submit (consciously or unconsciously) to this absent ruler.
(Baudry's principal answer, briefly, is that the spectator's own
integrity of "self' is affirmed- if you will, it is the very idea of a self,
and hence the particular one sensed as his or her own by the
spectator, that is shored up, reactivated, or "liberated," to use
Baudry's term, during film viewing.) But the Freudian focus on
motivation, even in the reworked version presented by Jacques
Lacan and invoked by Baudry, leaves little relevance for a psychol-
ogy of perception, and it is perception (and related functions) that is
most in need of explanation here.
To sidestep the issue of perception itself in image and sound
recording would be to fall prey to mechanistic psychology, which
dualistically separates perceiver and sense datum. Hence, as else-
where, it is a materially constituted relationship that is at stake, and
not any sort of "pure sensation." Mechanistic psychology asumes the
senses to be direct, non-transformational or regularly transforma-
tional inputs from the "world" to consciousness. But Gestalt psychol-
ogy has shown (if nothing else) that the senses, in giving up an
"image" of the world, give up an image formed by the active
interaction of body and world:

There is no such thing as pure sensation, floating freely in the air, without
perceptual conditions. The nonexistence of pure sensations is analogous to the
nonexistence in physics of physical occurrences in their own right, without the
observer and his attitude .... Today it is asserted that experience apart from local
stimulation (e.g. most particularly the sense of touch) depends on the total pattern

8Daniel Dayan (with Brian Henderson), "The Tutor Code of Classical Cinema
Film Quarterly 28, 1 (Fall 1974), reprinted in Bill Nichols (ed.) Movies and Methods,
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 2138-51.

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 Yale French Studies

of excitation of the sense organ concerned, as well as on the stimulus constellation

of the other senses. In the last analysis it depends on the condition of the entire
organism.9

How a sound, recorded or otherwise, is received depends on the

"condition of the entire organism." My contention is that in sound
recording, as in image recording, the apparatus performs a significant
perceptual work for us-isolating, intensifying, analyzing sonic and
visual material. It gives an implied physical perspective on image or
sound source, though not the full, material context of everyday vision
or hearing, but the signs of such a physical situation. We do not hear,
we are heard. More than that: we accept the machine as organism,
and its "attitudes" as our own. My description of how this might be so
will be based upon a phenomenological, perceptual analysis of the
film-viewing situation, from which I will argue for analogous effects
with sound recording/playback. Probably the best such analysis (for
image alone) was offered early in the history of cinema by Hugo
Munsterberg, in his The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (published
in 1916). Munsterberg and Baudry complement each other in some
intriguing ways; here the relevant point of contact is that their
methods are both broadly phenomenological.10 But where Baudry
emphasizes motivation at the expense of almost all else, Munsterberg
begins with a study of perception-or, rather, what we might term
cinema's capacity to give pseudo-perceptions. Where Baudry invokes
Husserl and Derrida's critique of Husserl, Munsterberg, confronted
with the task of describing an effect quite comparable to that
described by Baudry as the "transcendental subject," has recourse to
the notion of "attention":

We may say that whatever attracts our attention in the sphere of any sense, sight, or
sound, touch, or smell, surely becomes more vivid and more clear in our
consciousness. This does not at all mean that it becomes more intense. A faint light

9David Katz, Gestalt Psychology: Its Nature and Significance, trans. Robert Tyson
(New York: Ronald Press Co., 1950), pp. 13 and 10 (inverted for quotation). In my
citation, original word order is reversed.
I?Thom Andersen's work has been of much value to me on this point.

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Alan Williams

to which we turn our attention does not become the strong light of an incandescent
lamp. No, it remains the faint, just perceptible streak of lightness, but it has grown
more impressive, more distinct, more clear in its details, more vivid .... We may
say, by a metaphor, that it has come into the center of consciousness ....

If on the stage the hand movements of the actor catch our interest, we no longer
look at the whole large scene, we see only the fingers of the hero clutching the
revolver with which he is to commit his crime. Our attention is entirely given up to
the passionate play of his hand. It becomes the central point for all our emotional
responses .... It is as if this one hand were during this pulse beat of events the
whole scene, and everything else had faded away. On the stage, this is impossible;
there nothing can really fade away. ( . . . )

Here begins the art of the photoplay. That one nervous hand which feverishly
grasps the deadly weapon can suddenly for the space of a breath or two become
enlarged and be alone visible on the screen, while everything else has really faded
into darkness. The act of attention which goes on in our mind has remodeled the
surrounding itself. The detail which is being watched has suddenly become the
whole content of the performance, and everything which our mind wants to
disregard has been suddenly banished from our sight and disappeared. The events
without have become obedient to the demands of our consciousness. In the
language of photoplay producers it is a "close-up." The close-up has objectified in
our world of perception our mental act of attention and by it has furnished art with a
means which far transcends the power of any theater stage. I I

What Munsterberg won't say-though he comes so close that the

omission seems almost deliberate-is that the "our" in his last
sentence is wholly rhetorical. The consciousness at whose demand the
world is remodeled is not "ours," but that implied by (and a virtual
part of) the mechanism at work. It is Baudry's "transcendental
subject."
What makes Munsterberg's account of the close-up image crucial
for an analysis of sound recording is that variations of microphone
distance produce entirely comparable effects. A microphone placed
close to a sound source will produce a signal that makes the perceived
source heard in the recording seem analogously close. A more distant
position not only lowers perceived volume but also includes propor-
tionately more room acoustics, giving a more distant placement of the
implied listener vis-a-vis the source. It suffices to experiment briefly

I IHugo Munsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York: Dover,

orig. 1916, rpt. 1970 as The Film: A Psychological Study), pp. 36, 37-8. (Munster-
berg's emphasis).

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 Yale French Studies

with a tape recorder to confirm this, and then to listen to almost any
Hollywood film sound track (ignoring the image) or any dramatic
radio presentation to find such effects used to signify spatial con-
figurations.
And what is true for distance of recording also holds for other
techniques; all manipulations possible in image recording have
analogs in sound. There are sound edits, for example, as well as
dissolves, super-impositions, and so on. Sound recording can favor
certain frequencies, can mask one signal with another. Claudia
Gorbman has argued for the concept of "off-track sound," which
would be the aural equivalent of off-screen space.12 Munsterberg's
argument implies that in image recording such techniques should be
considered as effects of spectator placement, on the model of the
close-up. Baudry's account asserts that image recording, seemingly a
response to an implied spectator, entails the creation of that spectator
as ideal entity (transcendental subject). If this argument is valid for
image recording, and if sound recording has analogous properties,
then may we not say that sound recording must produce what might
best be termed a "listening subject"?
A difference remains. Most film spectators simply do not notice
sound dissolves, etc., while they do or can readily learn to notice their
visual equivalents. One reason commonly advanced for this is that
spectators have greater explicit consciousnes of visual events than of
aural ones. A contributing factor is the subordinate role that sound
manipulation has been made to play in most narrative cinema. Visual
dissolves, for example, can be used to indicate lapses of diegetic time.
When they do, they are frequently accompanied by a matching
dissolve on the sound track (from one type of ambient noise to
another, e.g. music to muffled dialogue or to different music). The
two techniques refer to a single diegetic referent; however the sonic
occurence is generally taken as a consequence of the visual one
(whereas they are in fact mutually validating). Equally, a cut to a
visual close-up may be accompanied by simultaneous reduction of
implied aural distance. Most viewers' experience seems to be that the

12Claudia Gorbman, "Clair's Sound Hierarchy and the Creation of Auditory

Space," Purdue Film Studies Annual 1976, pp. 118-19.

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Alan Williams

visual shift is sensed as primary, though an attentive examination of

the sound track alone will reveal the actual autonomy of its effects.
This is the situation of The Cave: sounds are ascribed to images, and
not vice versa. But that this is so in The Cave and in most narrative
films is no reason for denying that sound recording is a specific
signifying practice. Rather, it explains how, in film at least, effects of
sound recording are so easily concealed.
It is also true that not all sound recording is so self-effacing. The
example of the work of Jean-Luc Godard, to which we will come
presently, demonstrates the possiblity of alternate uses of film sound.
So do so-called "mistakes," as fihmmaking students learn from
painful experience. Spectators do not notice "good" mixing, aural
perspective, sound edits, and so on, but they are painfully, physically
aware of "bad" execution of these techniques. (The lack of coin-
cidence of visual and aural distance in badly dubbed foreign language
films is the example most frequently encountered outside of film
schools.) What such examples demonstrate is that there exists in
sound recording practices the exact equivalent of what is called
"invisible" manipulation (editing, etc.) of the image track. "Good"
sound is "inaudible"-which is to say that we hear without attending
consciously to what allows us to hear. The importance of this
situation is twofold: (1) the "inaudibility" of good sound work, like
the "invisibility" of the image track in classic narrative film, is largely
a product of convention and not of fixed "laws" (though both have
some necessary basis, certainly, in physiology and the psychology of
perception), and (2) "inaudibility," like "invisibility," is only pos-
sible as the correlate of an implied subject that actively perceives,
whose demands we accept as our own.

The practice of sound recording implies by definition a reading, a

deciphering, an attending to a sonic event. This is the meaning of the
difference between the three-dimensional, physical "sound" and its
recording as a one-dimensional, analogically encoded event. Trans-
parent sound practices are "inaudible" to the extent that the auditor
accepts a surrogate listening facility, that of the apparatus. Recall

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 Yale French Studies

what happens in the exercise of attention. If in everyday life we listen

to one sound amidst many, that sound seems to become more
distinct, to stand out against other noises that might exist in our
vicinity (just as the hand with the gun is seen almost to the exclusion
of neighboring phenomena). These other sounds, or "noise" as far as
attention is concerned, may continue to exist without intruding on
consciousness unless they become loud or unusual. The best example
of this is the noisy refrigerator, or air conditioner, etc., that one hears
only for a brief instant when it is turned on or off, a classic example of
how the sense of hearing is, to use Robert Ornstein's formula,
"tunable" (as one tunes a radio to maximize one signal at the expense
of adjacent ones). 13 But precisely this decision, as to what is noise
and what isn't, is made in everyday life by the subject who listens (or,
at least, it seems that way to the subject . . . ). In recorded sound,
particularly as used in film, it is the recording engineer, not the real
listeners, who must decide such matters, much as Munsterberg's
"'we" in whose interest reality gives way is not the "we" who sit
before the screen.
Like so many aspects of sound recording, this one is most easily
observed in its absence. When Jean-Luc Godard puts an omni-
directional microphone in a Parisian cafe he records sound "demo-
cratically"; voices are not privileged, pinball noises and traffic noises
are almost unbearably loud. This aural configuration remains con-
stant throughout these scenes regardless of shot content; in such a
situation the autonomy of the sound track is constantly and complete-
ly apparent. The effect might well be described (though not explained)
with the Russian Formalist notion of de-familiarization. Godard
"makes strange" the sonic environment of an urban French cafe, a
milieu presumably familiar to most of his audience. But the notion of
de-familiarization would imply that this making-strange must be
related to another, dominant but relatively atrophied convention. 14
Compare Godard's strategy to a hypothetical Hollywood render-

13Robert Ornstein, The Psychology of Consciousness (San Francisco: W. H.

Freeman, 1972), pp. 23-4.
14For an important critique of "de-familiarization," however, see Part Three of
Medvedev/Bakhtine, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship (Baltimore: Hopkins,
1976).

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Alan Williams

ing of the same environment. In traditional, self-effacing sound work,

dialogue and ambient noise would be recorded separately (direc-
tional microphones for the former, omni-directional ones for the
latter). In the final mix, the voice track would be privileged by virtue
of a higher re-recording level accorded to it. It would have less room
acoustics, seem closer than the ambient track, which would be
accorded presence (by a level change and perhaps additional techni-
ques such as re-equalization) only during "dead" spots in the
dialogue. (If, as frequently happens even in studio work, dialogue is
even slightly muddled, there is the option, frequently exercised by
major American studios in the forties and fifties, of re-recording
dialogue and matching to image and ambient noise tracks. If the
ambient noise track is intractable, another one can be substituted or
mixed in. Hence the sound effects that "just happen" to emerge, like
car horns or animal noises, during conversational breaks in highly
mixed dialogue recordings.)
The difference between these two possible renderings of an aural
environment cannot be explained away in terms of realism, since it is
the calculatedly unobtrusive, doctored recording that seems to render
everyday reality better for most listeners. Godard's cafe seems
shocking, strange, while Hollywood's does not, however, largely
because the latter is implicitly more subjective. This subjectivity is a
product of an operation of analysis; what is analyzed is an implied set
of acoustic events, and what is synthesized is an implicit rendering of
those events according to a shifting set of priorities. This is the key to
the strategy of self-effacing sound practices: they function in terms of
an implied intentionality. Were we in Godard's cafe as heard by
Hollywood, we would not wish to hear traffic or pinball sounds (or not
to- have them relatively foregrounded) if we were attending to
another event, such as a conversation. Self-effacing sound recording
constructs this wish and responds to it; the spectator can forget the
recording apparatus by accepting its wishes as his or her own. As with
image recording, "good" sound recording rewards suspension of
disbelief with a perceptual fantasy, the attention that can remodel the
world according to its demands. This strategy of recording does not
deal with "the sounds themselves," were that Bazinian ideal a

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 Yale French Studies

possiblity, since efficient, convincing (verisimilitudinous) sound prac-

tices posit an ideal listening presence, delivering sounds as evaluated

and responded to by an ideal perceiver.
But that ideal listener, as much a part of the recording process as
that part of "our" consciousness that attends to Munsterberg's close-
up shot, must inevitably do much of the real listener's work for him or
her. In Munsterberg's formula, media "objectify" mental processes;
they deliver to us not a "copy" of some raw material, but a product
already worked over, processed-like predigested foods that are
"easy on the stomach."
Is sound recording like a language? In many ways, the answer
must be no, for the same reasons that, strictly speaking, image
recording isn't either: no double articulation, syntax, and so on.15 Yet
if we ask whether messages of some sort are nonetheless transmitted
from a source to a receiver via sound recording without directly
depending on -those languages simply relayed by the apparatus
(spoken language, music), the answer must be yes. The language of
sound recording may be seen as limited but highly significant, for it
might best be termed a language of the self (rather, of self-ness) or
perhaps of the pseudo-self (in the case of self-effacing recording
practices). "Here you are," it might say (metaphorically), "listening
to that couple's conversation. You are about three feet away from
them. Pay no attention to that pinball machine, those traffic sounds.
They are merely background; you don't want to listen. In fact, they
are faint because you don't want to listen." Godard's recording of
more or less the same scene would obviously convey a different set of
messages to the listener (and would imply a different perceptual stance
on the part of the listener), but in both cases messages would be
conveyed. There is no way not to convey them.
If sound recording is like a language in this sense-that it conveys
a latent spatio-psychological subjectivity, which may or may not
mimic that of everyday experience-then what is most necessary for
a critical, historical account of sound practices in film will be detailed

15The best statement of this case is still Christian Metz' "Cinema: Language or
Language System?" in Film Language, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford,
1974). pp. 31-39.

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Alan Williams

analyses of different strategies of sound use. Godard's work is one

place to start, as well as Rivette's. (In L'Amour fou, in particular,
there are two separate renderings of sound space in the film's
principal set. The sixteen-millimeter crew uses a boom mike [visible
in the thirty-five millimeter shots] that records dialogue with treble
emphasis and a great deal of long reverberation. The thirty-five-
millimeter camera, unseen, is paired with a visible set of hanging
microphones whose levels were faded up and down during recording.
Each representation of sonic space alternately localizes the other,
implying its effects by their absence.) Even within so-called "classic"
cinema, splits or slippages occur between viewing and listening
subjects (elsewhere I have examined one such figure as it appears in
the American musical film in the forties and fifties).16 The listening
subject can be posited as coinciding with that of an on-screen
character, by virtually the same mechanism as the "point of view
shot": close-up of a character seeming to listen attentively (perhaps
in apparent response to a recently foregrounded sound track occur-
rence) followed by a raised volume and information content on the
sound track, perhaps with a slight change of aural perspective (more
or less reverberation, etc.). 17
Such is the terrain opened up by the study of sound recording as a
signifying practice. If we dismiss the distinction currently drawn
between image recording as "representation" and sound recording as
''copying," then discussion of the representational capabilities of
sound recording will be possible. It will be possible to integrate such
discussion with examination of the image track, and analogies may be
proposed and tested. One I will suggest here only as an example is
this: omnidirectional, relatively un-analyzed sound recording such as
is frequently used by Godard is, in fact, completely compatible with
Bazinian principles. The Godardian microphone in the cafe is
arguably the aural equivalent of the long take, and in Godard is

16The Musical Film and Recorded Popular Music," in Charles F. Altman (ed.)
The Hollywood Musical: New Approaches to the Genre (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul for the British Film Institute, in press).
17Variations in sound position in Jack Clayton's The Innocents is explored in some
detail by Jeanne Allen in Aspects of Narration in The Turn of the Screw and "The
Innocents," Ph.D Dissertation, University of Iowa, May 1976, pp. 106-10, 165.

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 Yale French Studies

perhaps an attempt to be "non-bourgeois" in the sense that Brian

Henderson has argued Godard's lateral tracking shots to be in
Weekend. 18 Whether one judges such attempts to be successful or not
is another matter, but the point here is that critically this is,
implicitly, an ideological question. The same is probably true, in
varying terms, for the discussion of all sound recording.

'8Brian Henderson, "Towards a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style," Film Quarterly

24, 2 (Winter 1970-71), reprinted in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 422-38.

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