The Sound Continuum - Gilles Deleuze

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image: Ch 9 - The Components of the Image, Part 2:

We are sometimes reminded that there is not just one soundtrack, but at least three groups, words, noises, music. Perhaps an even greater number of sound components should be distinguished: noises (which isolate an object and are isolated from each other), sounds (which indicate relationships and are themselves in mutual relation), phonations (which cut into these relations, which can be shouts, but also genuine jargons', as in the talking burlesque of Chaplin or Jerry Lewis), words, music. It is clear that these different elements can enter into a rivalry, fight each other, supplement each other, overlap, transform each other: this was the object of thorough research from the outset of talking cinema by Rene Clair; it was one of the most important aspects of Tati'swork, where intrinsic relations of sounds are systematically deformed, but also where elementary noises become characters (the ping-pong ball, the car in Mr Hulot's Holiday), and where, conversely, characters enter into conversation through noises (the pfff conversation in Playtime).21l All this would be a sign, following a fundamental thesis of Fano, that there is already a single sound continuum, whose elements are separate only in terms of an ultimate referent or signified, but not ofa 'signifier'.21 The voice is not separable from noises, from the sounds which on occasion make it inaudible: this is indeed the second important difference between cinematographic and theatrical speech-acts. Fano cites the example of Mizoguchi's A Story from Chikmatsu, 'where Japanese phenomena, sound effects and punctuations by percussion weave a continuum whose mesh is so fine that it seems impossible to find its weft'. All of Mizoguchi's sound work goes in this direction. With Godard, not only can music hide the voice, as at the beginning of Week-end, but First Name Carmen uses musical movements, speech-acts, sounds of doors, sounds of the sea or the Metro, cries of seagulls, pluckings of strings, revolver-shots, slidings of bows and machine-gun bursts, the 'attack' of music and the 'attack' in the bank, the correspondences between these elements, and especially their displacements, their cuts, in such a way as to form the power of one and the same sound continuum. Rather than invoking the signifier and the signified, we might say that the sound components are separate only in the abstraction of their pure hearing. But, in so far as they are a specific dimension, a fourth dimension of the visual image (which does not mean that they merge with a referent or a signified), then they all form together one single component, a continuum. And so far as they rival, overlap, cross and cut into each other, they trace a path full of obstacles in visual space, and they do not make themselves heard without also being seen, for themselves, independently of their sources, at the same time as they make the image readable, a little like a musical score.

If the continuum (or the sound component) does not have separable elements, it is none the less differentiated at each moment into two diverging directions which express its relation to the visual image. This double relation passes through the out-of-field, even though the latter is fully part of the cinemato-graphic visual image. It is true that it is not sound that invents the out-of-field, but it is sound which dwells in it, and which fills the visual not-seen with a specific presence. From the outset, the problem of sound was: how could sound and speech be used so that they were not simply an unnecessary addition to what was seen? This problem was not a denial that sound and talking were a componen of the visual image; on the contrary: it was because it was a specific component that sound did not have to be unnecessary in relation to what was seen in the visual. The famous Soviet manifesto already proposed that sound referred to a source out-of-field, and would therefore be a visual counterpoint, and not the double of a seen point: the noise of boots is all the more interesting when they are not seen.22 We may recall Rene Clair's great successes in this area, like Under the Roofs of Paris, where the young man and the young girl pursue their conversation, lying in the dark, all the lights out. Bresson maintains this principle of non-redundancy, non-coincidence, very firmly: 'When a sound can suppress an image, suppress the image or neutralize it.'23 This is the third difference from theatre. In short, sound in all its forms comes to fill the out-of-field of the visual image, and realizes itself all the more in this sense as component of that image: at the level of the voice, it is what is called voice-off, whose source is not seen.

In Volume 1 we considered the two aspects ofthe out-of-field, the to-the-side and the elsewhere, the relative and the absolute. Sometimes the out-of-field is linked to a visual space, by right, which naturally extends the space seen in the image: in this case the sound-off prefigures what it comes from, something that will soon be seen, or which could be seen in a subsequent image. For instance, the noise of a lorry that is not yet visible, or the sounds of a conversation only one of whose participants is visible. This first relation is that of a given set with a larger set which extends or encompasses it, but which is of the same nature. Sometimes, in contrast, the out-of-field shows a power of a different kind, exceeding any space or set: it is connected in this case to the Whole which is expressed in sets, to the change which is expressed in movement, to the duration which is expressed in space, to the living concept which is expressed in the image, to the spirit which is expressed in matter. In this second case, the sound or voice-off consists rather of music, and of very particular speech-acts which are reflexive and not now interactive ones (the voice which evokes, comments, knows, endowed with an omnipotence or a strong power over the sequence of images). These two relations of the out-of-field, the actualizable relation with other sets, the virtual relation with the whole, are inversely proportional; but both of them are alike strictly inseparable from the visual image, and already appear in the silent film (for instance, Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc). When cinema acquires sound, when sound fills the out-of-field, it therefore does so in consequence of these two aspects, of their complementarity and inverse proportionality, even if it is destined to produce new effects. Pascal Bonitzer and then Michel Chion have called the unity of voice-off into question, by showing how it was necessarily divided according to the two relations.24 In effect it seems as if the sound continuum was constantly differentiated in two directions, one of which carries noises and interactive speech-acts, the other reflexive speech-acts and music. Godard once said that two soundtracks are needed because we have two hands, and cinema is a manual and tactile art. And it is true that sound has a special relation with touch, hitting on things, on bodies, as at the beginning of First Name Cannen. But even for a person with no arms, the sound continuum would continue to be differentiated in accordance with the two relations of the visual image, its actualizable relation with other possible images, realized or not, and its virtual relation with a totality of images which is unrealizable.

The differentiation of the aspects in the sound continuum is not a separation, but a communication, a circulation which constantly reconstitutes the continuum. Take, for example, The Testament of Dr Mabuse according to Michel Chion's exemplary analysis: the terrible voice seems to be always to the side, in accordance with the first aspect of the out-of-field, but, as soon as there is a move to the side, it is already elsewhere, omnipotent, in accordance with the second aspect, until it is localized, identified in the image seen (voice-in). None of these aspects, however, negates or reduces the others, and each survives in the others: there is no last word. This is also true of music: in Antonioni's Eclipse, the music that first surrounds the lovers in the park is discovered to come from a pianist whom we do not see, but who is to the side; the sound-off thus changes its status, passes from one out-of-field to the other, then goes back in the opposite direction, when it continues to make itself heard far from the park, following the lovers in the street. 25 But, because the out-of-field belongs to the visual image, the circuit passes equally through the sounds-in situated in the seen image (hence all the instances where the music's source is seen, as in the dances beloved of the French school). This is a network of sound communication and permutation, bearing noises, sounds, reflexive or interactive speech-acts and music, which enter the visual image, from outside and from inside, and make it all the more 'legible'. The prime example of such a cinematographic network is Mankiewicz, and especially People Will Talk where all the speech-acts intercommunicate but also both the visual image to which these speech-acts refer, and the music which harmonizes and goes beyond them, carrying away the image itself. Hence, we are moving towards a problem which does not now concern only the intercommunication of sound elements on the basis of the visual image, but the intercommunication of the latter: in all its forms of belonging, with something that goes beyond it, without being able to do without it, without ever being able to do without it. The circuit is not only that of sound elements, including musical elements, in relation to the visual image, but the relation of the visual image itself with the musical element par excellence which slips everywhere, in, off, noises, sounds, speeches.

Movement in space expresses a whole which changes, rather as the migration of birds expresses a seasonal variation. Everywhere that a movement is established between things and persons, a variation or a change is established in time, that is, in an open whole which includes them and into which they plunge. We saw this earlier: the movement-image is necessarily the expression of a whole; it forms in this sense an indirect representation of time. This is the very reason that the movement-image has two out-of-fields: the one relative, according to which movement concerning the set of an image is pursued or can be pursued in a larger set of the same nature; the other absolute, according to which movement, whatever the set which it is taken as part of, refers to a changing whole which it expresses. According to the first dimension, the visual image links up with other images. According to the other dimension the linked images are internalized in the whole, and the whole is externalized in the images, itself changing at the same time as the images move and link up. Of course, the movement-image does not only have extensive movements (space), but also intensive movements (light) and affective movements (the soul). Time as open and changing totality none the less goes beyond all the movements, even the personal changes of the soul or affective movements, even though it cannot do without them. It is thus caught in an indirect representation, because it cannot do without movement-images which express it, and yet goes beyond all relative movements forcing us to think an absolute of the movement of bodies, an infinity of the movement of light, a backgroundless [sans forufJ of the movement of souls: the sublime. From the movement-image to the living concept, and vice versa ... Now all this already applied to silent cinema. If we ask now what cinema music contributes, the elements of a reply appear. Silent cinema certainly included a music, improvised or programmed. But this music found itself subject to a certain obligation to correspond to the visual image, or to serve descriptive, illustrative and narrative ends, acting as a form of intertitle. When cinema develops sound and talking, music is in a sense emancipated, and can take flight. 26 But what does this flight and this emancipation consist of? Eisenstein gave a first response, in his analyses of Prokofiev's music for Alexander Nevsky: the image and the music had themselves to form a whole, revealing an element common to the visual and the sound, which would be movement or even vibration. There would be a certain way of reading the visual image, corresponding to the hearing of the music. But this thesis does not conceal its intention of assimilating the mixing, or 'audio-visual montage', to silent montage of which it would just be a special case; it fully preserves the idea of correspondence, and replaces external or illustrative correspondence by an internal correspondence; it believes that the whole should be formed by the visual and sound which go beyond themselves in a higher unity.27 But, since the silent visual image already expressed a whole, how can we ensure that the sound and visual whole is not the same, or, if it is the same, does not give rise to two redundant expressions? For Eisenstein, it is a matter of forming a whole with two expressions whose common measure would be discovered (always commensurability). Whilst the achievement of sound consisted rather in expressing the whole in two incommensurable, non-corresponding ways.

It is in fact in this direction that the problem of cinema music finds a Nietzschean solution, rather than Eisenstein's Hegelian one. According to Nietzsche, or at least according to the still Schopenhaurian Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, the visual image comes from Apollo, who causes it to move according to a measure, and makes it represent the whole indirectly, mediately, through the intermediary of lyric poetry or drama. But the whole is also capable of a direct presentation, of an 'immediate image' incommensurable with the first, and this time musical, dionysian: closer to an inexhaustible Will [Vouloir sans foruIJ than to a movement. 2M In tragedy, the musical immediate image is like the core of fire which is surrounded by apollonian visual images, and cannot do without their procession. In the case of cinema, which is first of all a visual art, it will be music which will be thought to add the immediate image to mediate images which represented the whole indirectly. But the essential point has not changed, namely the difference in nature between indirect representation and direct presentation. According to musicians like, Pierre Jansen, or, to a lesser degree, Philippe Arthuys, cinema music must be abstract and autonomous, a true 'foreign body' in the visual image, rather like a speck of dust in the eye, and must accompany 'something that is in the film without being shown or suggested in it'.2!l There is certainly a relation, but it is not an external correspondence nor even an internal one which would lead us back to an imitation; it is a reaction between the musical foreign body and the completely different visual images, or rather an interaction independent of any common structure. Internal correspondence is no more valid than external, and a barcarole finds just as good a correlate in the movement of light and water as in the embrace of a Venetian couple. Hans Eisler demonstrated this, criticizing Eisenstein: there is no movement common to the visual and to sound, and music does not act as movement, but as 'stimulant to movement without being its double' (that is, as wilI).30 For movement-images, visual images in movement, express a whole that changes, but they express it indirectly, so that change as property of the whole does not regularly coincide with any relative movement of persons or things, not even with the affective movement internal to a character or a group: it is expressed directly in music, but as contrast or even in conflict, in disparity with the movement of the visual images. Pudovkin gave an instructive example: the failure of a proletarian demonstration should not be accompanied by melancholic or even violent music, but constitutes only the drama in interaction with the music, with the change of the whole as rising will of the proletariat. Eisler gives many examples of this 'pathetic distance' between music and images: an incisive fast music for a passive or depressing image, the tenderness or serenity of a barcarole as spirit of place in relation to violent events which are happening, a hymn to solidarity for images of oppression ... In short, sound cinema adds a direct, but musical and only musical, non-corresponding presentation to the indirect representation of time as changing whole. This is the living concept, which goes beyond the visual image, without being able to do without it.

It will be noticed that direct presentation, as Nietzsche said, is not identical to what it presents, to the changing whole or time. It may therefore have a very discontinuous, or rarefied, presence. Moreover, other sound elements may assume a function analogous to that of music: hence the voice-off in its absolute dimension as omnipotent and omniscient voice (Welles's modulation of the voice in The Magnificent Ambersons). Or again the voice-in: if Greta Garbo's voice stood out in the talkie, it is because, at a certain point in each of her films, it was capable not only of expressing the internal, personal change of the heroine as affective movement, but of bringing together to form a whole the past, the present and the future, crude intonations, amorous cooings, cold decisions in the present, reminders from memory, bursts of imagination (from her first talking film, Anna Christie).31 Delphine Seyrig perhaps achieves a similar effect in Resnais' Muriel, gathering together in her voice the changing whole, from one war to the other, from one Boulogne to the other. As a general rule, music itself becomes 'in'32' as soon as its source is seen in the visual image, but without losing its power. These permutations are better explained if an apparent contradiction between the two conceptions that we have discussed, of Fano's 'sound continuum', and of Jansen's 'foreign body', is cleared up. It is not enough that they are both opposed to the principle of correspondence. In fact, all the sound elements, including music, including silence, form a continuum as something which belongs to the visual image. Which does not prevent this continuum from being continually differentiated in accordance with the two aspects of the out-of-field which also belong to the visual image, one relative, and the other absolute. It is in so far as it presents or fills the Absolute that music interacts as a foreign body. But the absolute, or the changing whole, does not merge with its direct presentation: this is why it continually reconstitutes the sound continuum, off and in, and relates it to the visual images which indirectly express it. Now this second movement does not cancel out the other, and preserves for music its autonomous, special power.33 At the present juncture, cinema remains a fundamentally visual art in relation to which the sound continuum is differentiated in two directions, two heterogeneous streams, but is also re-formed and reconstituted. This is the powerful movement by which, already in the silent film, visual images are internalized in a changing whole, but at the same time as the changing whole is externalized in visual images. With sound, speech and music, the circuit of the movement-image achieves a different figure, different dimensions or components; however, it maintains the communication between the image and a whole which has become increasingly rich and complex. It is in this sense that the talkie perfects the silent film. Silent or talkie, we have seen, cinema constitutes an immense 'internal monologue' which constantly internalizes and externalizes itself: not a language, but a visual materia1 which is the utterable of language (its 'signified of power' the linguist Gustave Guillaume would say), and which refers in one case to indirect utterances (intertitles), in the other case to direct enunciations (acts of speech and of music).

‘Carla/Etude’ is the second track Elton did with the London Symphony Orchestra (after ‘Tonight’ on ‘Blue Moves’) and is featured on his fifteenth studio album ‘The Fox’, released in 1981. Carla is the name of the song's co-producer (and Elton’s long-time sound engineer) Clive Franks’ wife who was a makeup artist on Elton’s tour at this time. The arrangement is by James Newton Howard, a premiere film composer credited for compositions on blockbusters such as Pretty Woman and Space Jam. The end of the track is known as ‘Fanfare’.

Difference and Repetition?