Homer Dudley demonstrates the VODER (director unknown, 1939)

Calling Again

Like You Know It All (Hong Sang-soo, 2009)

Further adventures in the depiction of phone conversations in cinema: in this typically Hongian (cell phone, ugly room, cigarette, unremarkable lighting) scene from Like You Know It All, the sound design goes against the conventions of depicting a phone call from one character's "aural point of view" by mixing the voices of both actors at more or less the same level. There's none of the cheesy "tinniness" that's used to simulate a phone receiver, nor are either of the actors talking directly into a microphone; we hear both voices as a person sitting in the room with them would hear, though the image only ever shows one of the characters (if I recall correctly, Hong uses a similar technique in Lost in the Mountains).

But Hong goes further: he mixes in voice-over narration at a similar volume, so, while the image shows the actions of one character as he wakes up and has a cigarette while answering a phone call, on the soundtrack we hear the interplay of three vocal parts (two from the same actor, but recorded differently -- dialogue on the set, monologue in a studio).

Crash Sounds

I had a fascination with Crash. My habits were different then; I must've seen it 20 or 30 times in the space of a couple of years. Given the opportunity to re-watch any Cronenberg film, I would still probably pick that one. I had the opportunity to do so -- a friend wanted to watch it, and it'd been at least five years since I'd seen the movie. What fascinates me still, above all the other elements of the film -- the pharmaceutical composition of its images, its clinical editing, Howard Shore's music -- is the sound mix, which is very unusual.

[You might have to click this link link to hear the entire 2 1/2 minute scene]

Crash is a difficult film to watch quietly, because the dialogue is mixed in a muffled way, sometimes at the same volume as the sound effects, sometimes quieter. In the images, we're naturally drawn to human figures; we are people, and we like, above all, to watch other people do things. It's difficult to equate a machine and a person in a moving picture. You can do it through editing, but within a single shot, it's almost impossible. It's the sound, and the dispassionate way all of the actors talk, as though making notes into a tape recorder for themselves, like medical examiners in a thriller or David Petersen in Manhunter, that does it. Every sentence seems to have been recorded separately. It sounds less like we're "listening in" on conversation than that a particular sort of noise made by people is being played for us, like a Chris Watson recording of some forest. And as, when recording animals, one inevitably catches the sound of rustling leaves and rain (it is, after all, the animals and the trees together that form a "forest"), it's inevitable that when creating a recording of "society," one should have both human voices and city sounds at equal levels.

Listening to The Touch

When we think of Max von Sydow, we tend to think of his mountainous face, especially the way it looks in shadows, the way those crags and canyons shift as he talks. But there are many faces with the same qualities, but no voice quite like his. The face seems to belong to some landscape; the voice is completely organic. Von Sydow, more than any other actor, acts not with his words, but with his mouth, throat and nose. That is, when we hear von Sydow talk, it isn't dialogue that we're hearing, but a man breathing in and out, with words occasionally making their way out of his mouth alongside the carbon dioxide. The voice is made equal with a wide variety of sighs, coughs, quick inhalations, barely audible hums and whistles. To watch his face is also to watch his neck, and the way his Adam's apple bobs down when he swallows at the end of a sentence.

So who does Bibi Andersson leave good old Max for in The Touch? Elliott Gould. Elliott Gould, whose voice (always more feline that it seems like it should be), big head and lanky body are reminiscent of a recorder: the mouth as a labium, the brain as a fipple, the nose as a windway. Not a human flute, like Jean-Pierre Leaud (whose voice seems to be produced by the wind blowing against that embouchure hole of a mouth) -- no, certainly a recorder, and one that's being played by an amateur, maybe just a student, someone who knows the fingerings but can't get their embouchure right, the notes sometimes coming out as squeaks, sometimes wonderfully sweet, sometimes too quiet. He sounds as if his lungs were made of wood. And maybe that's the tragedy: she chooses an instrument over someone that can only be human.