The Guardian (24/Feb/2006) - Things that go bump

(c) The Guardian (24/Feb/2006)

Things that go bump

Suspense is created not so much by what the audience sees, but by what they hear. Sound becomes essential when racking up the tension

Alfred Hitchcock once said about movies, "I don't care about the subject matter, I don't care about the acting; but I do care about the pieces of film and the photography and the soundtrack and all the technical ingredients that make the audience scream." This succinctly encapsulates, at its most primal level, what cinema is about: visceral experience, action to manipulate and move you.

Surprisingly enough, the most powerful impact achieved on viewers is often created not so much by what they see but by what they hear. Sound is really the third dimension, the cinematic black art that inserts you aurally into the frame, where you forget being a passive spectator; music provides the emotional climate that makes you understand what the characters feel. Of course, all movies, to some extent, have done this since the dawn of talking pictures but it is in the genre that is most designed to push you to emotional extremes where sound is a filmmaking weapon designed to slice and dice your placid emotional state.

Looking at any history of the most powerful cinematic moments of all time, you soon realise that sound effects and judicious use of soundtrack music have contributed enormously to their lingering so long in the mind's eye. Think the shower scene in Psycho; shark attacks in Jaws; the torture scene in Reservoir Dogs; the shoot-out in Heat and most recently the suicide in Hidden. They all depend on supreme film-making skill that is as much about the ear as the eye.

Of course, movie-makers realised early on that sound could conjure verisimilitude and artificially produce emotional effect. Yet, it took clever, imaginative film-makers, who wanted to be sharper and more sophisticated in the way they explored audience experience, to push things forward. Hitchcock is one of the most obvious examples of someone who had an innate understanding of the aesthetics of sound interacting with image. He was aided in this, as often the greatest filmmakers are, by his relationship with a particular composer, in his case Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann's challenging, complex scores, restricted often to string instruments, provided a reservoir of every conceivable emotional effect for Hitchcock to select from.

It is difficult to realise, unless you have seen a film stripped of its soundtrack, just how much movies, particularly ones based on narrative suspense, need the texturing of sound scoring to move you through the story. The shower scene in Psycho is a masterpiece of suspense and then shocking horror because of the way its visual is cut with the discordant, rapid string movements of Herrmann's legendary score that simultaneously suggest screams of pain and the slashing of a knife.

Herrmann and Hitchcock went on and experimented in even more extreme ways with The Birds where there was no score, simply the acoustically manipulated, multilayered sounds of birds' cries, utilized brilliantly to conjure the uncanny and unearthly horror of nature turning against human beings.

The relationship between Hitchcock and Herrmann is one mirrored much later by the working prtnership between Stephen Spielberg and composer John Williams. Pick any sequence leading to a shark attack in Jaws and Williams' smooth, rapid, bass-heavy string scoring not only builds up almost unbearable anticipation for a dreadful event but embodies the speed and movement of the great white shark underwater, homing in on its victim. Cut to some 30-odd years later and Spielberg's latest film, Munich, features a similar, if far more understated form of scoring from Williams, with rapidly accelerating electric bass notes, used to ratchet up the tension, immediately prior to each assassination attempt by the Israeli hit squad.

Nevertheless, while Spielberg and Williams' relationship has been sustained, many aspects of creating soundtracks and score have changed beyond belief in the last 30 years. In particular, Spielberg's movie brat contemporaries, like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, who, because of their own listening interests, brought popular music more firmly into the film-making arena.

This trend proved to be both good and bad. Popular music is brilliant at evoking a precise period or a particular kind of emotion, thus offering a kind of audio short cut for film-makers who don't want to have the more traditional and often more complicated relationship with composers. At its finest, contemporary music, while it doesn't have the flexibility or specificity of music written only for one film, can brilliantly counterpoint action on screen. Whether it be the numerous examples in still the only great rock'n'roll war movie, Apocalypse Now, or most shockingly, the use of MOR rock group, Stealer's Wheel in the torture scene of Reservoir Dogs, where the music acts as a blanket and incongruous accompaniment to the graphic onscreen violence, cherry-picked pop music can really work well. At its worst, it is lazy audio shorthand that has the audience playing more "spot that tune" than suspending disbelief.

Film-makers were also aided by another significant leap in sound technology (mainly as a result of the advances that were being made by the demands of rock musicians in the recording studio and concert hall) and led to the rise of a new generation of engineers and editors, arguably led by the sound designer Walter Murch (from Apocalypse Now to Cold Mountain and a lot of other great movies in between).

Indeed, sound technology is now so much more sophisticated that you can give audio life to almost anything, and amplified through sophisticated cinema sound systems, the over-reliance on foley artists (sound effects technicians) has substituted for much imaginative use of musical soundtracks. Nevertheless, in, say, movies like Jonathan Demme's recent remake of The Manchurian Candidate or even something like Sin City, it is admittedly damned impressive.

The good news is that the really gifted film-makers have realised and understood the importance of the soundscape and have started to mix together pop records ("source music" as it is technically known) with composers who have more unconventional music experiences. Steven Soderbergh, for example, has brilliantly combined use of evocative pop tunes with stunning contemporary scoring from electronic DJ musician and songwriter David Holmes to incredible effect in both the smart, tough Out of Sight and the glamorous, funny caper thriller Oceans Eleven. In the latter, Soderbergh manages to play with all the references to the film's locale in Las Vegas (cue those Elvis songs) and combine them with arresting, rhythmically driven, electric rock orchestrations that use guitar and piano synthesiser to perfectly heighten the atmosphere of tension and anticipation, as our gang of criminal heroes prepare to heist a casino.

As one of contemporary cinema's greatest thriller directors, Michael Mann is perhaps the perfect embodiment of someone who is so in control of the different elements of his ultra fine-tuned film-making that you always get seamless, interdependence of images, sound effects and superbly selected music. This is clearly apparent in his masterwork Heat, where he intercuts a sublimely appropriate soundtrack score by Elliot Goldenthal with oh-so-subtle, contemporary music and bravura sound effects editing, especially in the film's tour de force bank robbery sequence, where it is only "natural" sounds of action echoing around the streets that are heard in the most violent, fast moving moments.

In terms of bravura, imaginative film-making, one of the most recent, if less mainstream examples, is found in Michael Hanneke's wildly acclaimed new thriller, Hidden. Here, Hanneke deliberately takes a low-fi approach. Hidden is about surveillance from concealed digital cameras that are in a stationary position, and to emphasise the apparently unmanipulated reality presented, Hanneke dispenses with all the complex trappings associated with soundtracks. There is no score and, indeed, none of the characters are even seen listening to music. The sound mix of Hidden is also deliberately naturalistic, forcing the viewer to have to read each nuance of what, on one level, is merely background noise (car wheels on a street, doors slamming, birds chirping) in the same way as we are forced to try and read into the depth of the often static images in front of us. It is a clever and unsettling strategy, which does away with the paraphernalia of things usually designed to manipulate you and engage you, in order to manipulate you and engage you all over again but in a different and more cerebral way. The contrast between American film-making and Hanneke's European psychological game-playing is marked, but it is also affirmative, showing how some film-makers are listening, as well as looking, and want us to continue to do so as well.