The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound

Miguel Mera, Ronald Sadoff, Ben Winters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317398974
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound provides a detailed and comprehensive overview of screen music and sound studies, addressing the ways in which music and sound interact with forms of narrative media such as television, videogames, and film. The inclusive framework of "screen music and sound" allows readers to explore the intersections and connections between various types of media and music and sound, reflecting the current state of scholarship and the future of the field.

A diverse range of international scholars have contributed an impressive set of forty-six chapters that move from foundational knowledge to cutting edge topics that highlight new key areas. The companion is thematically organized into five cohesive areas of study:

• 
  
  

• Issues in the Study of Screen Music and Sound—discusses the essential topics of the discipline

• 
  
  

• Historical Approaches—examines periods of historical change or transition

• 
  
  

• Production and Process—focuses on issues of collaboration, institutional politics, and the impact of technology and industrial practices

• 
  
  

• Cultural and Aesthetic Perspectives—contextualizes an aesthetic approach within a wider framework of cultural knowledge

• 
  
  

• Analyses and Methodologies—explores potential methodologies for interrogating screen music and sound

Covering a wide range of topic areas drawn from musicology, sound studies, and media studies, The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound provides researchers and students with an effective overview of music's role in narrative media, as well as new methodological and aesthetic insights.

Part 1

Issues in the Study of Screen Music and Sound

1
The Ghostly Effect Revisited

K. J. Donnelly

In his chapter in The Sounds of Early Cinema, Tom Gunning suggested that the widespread advent and acceptance of recorded and synchronized sound cinema in the late 1920s was likely a product of the desire to reunite hearing and vision, which had been divided by technology (photography, phonograph, and film) a few decades earlier. This is an intriguing idea. There was “a desire to heal the breach,” as he puts it (Gunning 2001: 16). This seems like an unfashionable, sentimental, and untestable hypothesis, yet one that attempts to account for the emotional character at the heart of cinema that is more easily avoided by most historians and aestheticians.

To address the question as to why films used music right from their inception as a public event, various answers have been put forward. In Composing for the Films (1947), Hanns Eisler and Theodor Adorno suggest that music dissipated the ‘Ghostly Effect’ of the moving image that is particularly evident during silence. They state that it is not only a silent cinema phenomenon but also sustains into the cinema of recorded sound. Indeed, we should be careful, as the ‘Ghostly Effect’ is not simply a lack of sound rendering the silent moving image disturbing, but the naked moving image itself, allowing its true nature to become apparent. This is the mechanical nature of cinema, as well as an inherent reminder of our own mortality, where the flimsy illusion of life acts as an indication of the ephemeral and impermanent nature of life itself.

Tantalizingly, they failed to go into much explanatory detail. This speculative hypothesis addressing the emotional character at the heart of cinema habitually has been avoided by most historians, musicologists, and aestheticians. However, as a theory, the Ghostly Effect has been engaged by a large number of writers about sound and music in the cinema, although in many cases only briefly (Carroll 1988; Gorbman 1987; Larsen 2007; Rosen 1980). While this appears to be not a very ‘usable’ theory for the purposes of analysis, I remain convinced that as a theoretical concept, more mileage could be made from the notion of the Ghostly Effect. One criticism (of many) might be that this theory lacks an historical dimension. Audience attitude to film and music has doubtless changed between the time of Adorno’s and Eisler’s writing and now. They suggest, however, that the Ghostly Effect is an essential element of the medium (the union of audio and visual) that remained from the 1890s until their book in the 1940s, and indeed beyond.

Eisler and Adorno’s theory is pioneering in that it addresses film’s essence: the electrical-mechanical ‘reality’ of cinema as a creator of manipulative illusion. The Ghostly Effect is not simply ‘silence’ but the muted or seemingly incomplete image, and these are not the same. The heart of audiovisual culture, where sound and image are merged into one, is precarious in its unity with the constant threat of the collapse of the illusion and sound cinema’s magical wholeness.

Within a short space in Composing for the Films, Eisler and Adorno promulgate a number of concepts tied to the notion of the Ghostly Effect. These include the antithetical character of film and music, film’s relation to the “ghostly shadow play,” the magic function of music, the depiction of the living dead on screen, and shock and “exorcism.” These are all related ideas, used to give dimension to the notion of an inherent Ghostly Effect in film and the medium’s mechanisms for dealing with this problem. As a general backdrop to the discussion, they state that the film medium and music have “an antithetic character” (1947: 75). This appears to be a fundamental point. Some analysis of music and film assumes that it merges into a whole, while some assumes that the two arts remain distinct. Adorno and Eisler are explicit in their analysis, declaring that film and music are not organic partners; music and image have different functions. So, rather than constituting an unproblematic unity, they forge an alliance, although Eisler and Adorno see music as retaining a sense of separation. However, as musicians, they approach film music as ‘music’ rather than part of something else. Indeed, they are light on film analysis and stick more with what they know. Their approach corresponds with some of the more recent theorizations of ‘intermediality’ (Wolf 1999: 39–40), which approaches arts as composites where aspects of each individual medium can remain distinct. This is an important question for analysis that is rarely directly addressed. How far do (or can) film and music ‘merge,’ or do the components always remain distinct? The gluing together of different parts is a key to upholding film’s beguiling illusion and avoiding the detrimental Ghostly Effect.

‘Memento Mori’

Eisler and Adorno emphasize the verity that cinema was always connected with ideas about death and reanimation, and particularly specters and the undead: “The pure cinema must have had a ghostly effect like that of the shadow play—shadows and ghosts have always been associated” (1947: 75). Indeed, there was a consistent early association of moving images with death and the supernatural. For instance, Tom Ruffles in Ghost Images: Cinema of the Afterlife points to a continuity with popular phantasmagoria shows and spiritualist séances rather than film having a direct lineage from the theater and literature (2004). Indeed, the living dead appearing on screen is at the heart of cinema, where film was able to reanimate those who were absent or dead through a process of conjuring a convincing illusion. Eisler and Adorno continue:

The need was felt to spare the spectator the unpleasantness involved in seeing effigies of living, acting and even speaking persons, who were at the same time silent. The fact that they are living and nonliving at the same time is what constitutes their ghostly character.

(1947: 76)

The simultaneous state of alive and dead that the screen enabled was disturbing not only because it depicts an in-between state, but also because it stands as a reminder of death for the audience. Film contains, at its heart, a potentially negative thing: a ‘Memento Mori’—a reminder of our own mortality. In narrative terms, films allow us to experience immortality (in vampire films such as Dracula and the Twilight films, for example), but they also inevitably remind us that we have a limit. Indeed, dying is a commonplace element in films, and on occasions films can collapse a person’s whole lifetime into just a few minutes. But beyond this, on a material level, Adorno and Eisler propose that film reminds us of death in showing ‘dead’ images through its mechanical illusion of life. This plays out as an unconscious process, pushed to the back of our minds to allow film to remain a compulsive and enjoyable medium.

So then, a defining aspect of film is that it is comprised of the shadows of the dead, an uncanny yet compelling illusion of life. This is the heart of film, and a property exploited wholeheartedly by horror films, although also evident in some other types of film. In essence, the Ghostly Effect is the threat of physical ‘dis-integration’ of the film, and likewise by implication of the human body and psyche. Film is always teetering on the brink of the collapse of its own powerful illusion. Sometimes, all it takes is a refusal to accept the illusion to make it seem a jumble of disparate constituent elements. It can seem that these elements offer a thin and flimsy approximation of life, mechanically held together into a simplistic whole. Yet the dimensional world depicted is sometimes able to resonate strongly with that of the audience. The collapse of this illusion directly alienates the audience psychologically and also reminds them of their own social alienation. In this way, film might be understood as an unstable medium that, despite its alluring illusion, constantly threatens to remind the audience of their own mortality. Eisler and Adorno state that this phenomenon of illusory life “requires” music to dissipate the effect and ritualistically to ward off its associated evil. Although their theory sounds most pertinent to silent cinema, they contend that this phenomenon sustains into the cinema of recorded sound. The Ghostly Effect persists, and thus music is still required for the same purposes. They state of sound cinema: “Their bodiless mouths utter words in a way that must seem disquieting to anyone uninformed” (1947: 76). This situation can be apparent for audiences not used to slack dubbing or failures of synchronization. Even an awareness of the mechanical merging of sound and vision can lead to a bemused rather than absorbed reaction to sound film.

Aspects of the Ghostly Effect might be exploited directly as an infrequent but disquieting effect by films. For instance, the manipulation of mechanical rather than organic movement allied with disturbing silence is highly evident in the horror film Dead Silence (dir. James Wan, 2007). This film is premised upon uncanny, seemingly alive mechanical ventriloquists’ dolls, and exploits the threat of ‘seeing behind the curtain’ of film as a medium, with startling moments of ‘mechanical cut outs’ of sound. At one point, the film’s protagonist, Jamie, drives in a car with the ventriloquist’s dummy, Billy, sitting in the back seat. Suddenly, the car and all other diegetic sounds disappear, leaving an unearthly total silence, underlined by a shot of Jamie looking around concerned. In the midst of the eerie lack of sound, an acousmatic— unsynched, offscreen, possibly even non-diegetic—metallic scraping sound occurs; and in a dramatic shot, the dummy Billy subsequently turns his head to look at Jamie. This is an effective and unsettling moment, enhanced by the film’s intimation that sound might have broken down, allied with the implications of mechancal life (the dummy) and meditation upon the status of life and death. Later in the film, Jamie digs up Billy’s grave. Again and equally suddenly, diegetic sound and non-diegetic music halt abruptly; Jamie then looks around concerned, after which we hear a gradual and quiet return of diegetic sound. Here, as in the previous example, the withdrawal of sound threatens the continued illusion of film but is then pulled back into the narrative frame through the on-screen character’s response, which signals unambiguously that he is experiencing the same loss of sound as the audience. The threat is invoked and then dissipated. This is an example of film playing around with its own mechanical and illusory nature, and thus exploiting as well as denying the efficacy of the Ghostly Effect of cinema. Dead Silence’s representational regime moves from its conventional ‘normality’ to a moment of the abnormal supernatural, which is expressed in stylistic terms as unconventional. Equally, aesthetic aspects can (and usually do) function as a constant reassurance for the audience. Music is able to reassure, or make conventional, such moments in films. Through engaging aesthetic convention, music is able to render such disturbing moments less threatening through making them conform to convention and remain consistent with expectation. It also indicates to the audience members how they are expected to react. This facet of film music often receives less attention than it deserves.

As part of dealing with the Ghostly Effect, Eisler and Adorno discuss the magic function of music, where its charming and reassuring character works against the dark nature of film (the mechanical moving image’s nature). As a premise, music and film are approached as two fundamentally different discourses and arts, which can never lose their separate natures. They note: “The magic function of music […] probably consisted in appeasing the evil spirits unconsciously dreaded. Music was introduced as a kind of antidote against the picture” (1947: 75). Their approach and language confirms that theirs is no orthodox ‘cultural history’ but rather a ‘psychic history,’ which points to film music as a ‘protection.’ Thus, film music is not simply a mask of cultural manipulation, which Adorno’s ‘culture industry’ writing might suggest, but an absolute necessity for ‘safe’ consumable film.

Eisler and Adorno go on to state that “music was introduced […] to exorcise fear or help the spectator absorb the shock” (1947: 75). While again, it sounds as if they are using some stark but rich metaphors to describe the process, they retain a sense that there is something inherently supernatural about film, and while it may contain something of the shock of technological modernity, it requires a ritualistic practice to render it safely consumable. This ‘shock’ aspect is reminiscent of Robert Spadoni’s discussion of the effect of sound added to image at the turn of the 1930s. In Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre, he argues that early sound cinema had an uncanny effect, where its disturbing body mode comprising images and sounds was perceived as disturbing by ‘heightened’ audience members, who took in more than the simple illusion of unified sound and image but instead were aware of the technological basis of the disquieting effect of pseudo-life (Spadoni 2007).

We can always make ourselves aware of film as a manipulative illusion. Film works hard to retain its illusory effect and suspend our disbelief. Music’s place in the process might be conceived as one facet of a misdirection process: hiding film’s nature through compensation and directing attention elsewhere. Explicit examples of musical misdirection include the use of the comic piece of library music The Gonk in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) to accompany images of zombies wandering aimlessly around a shopping mall. Without the music, the images are far more disturbing, not least because the film’s satire of the emptiness of modern consumerism becomes more naked: we are the ‘dead’ people wandering aimlessly around the shopping mall. From a different point of view, the use of some of Krzysztof Penderecki’s music in The Shining (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1980) reminds the audience that they are watching something serious and deeply upsetting. During the sequence where Jack turns on Wendy and ultimately is knocked unconscious by her baseball bat, the dialogue is on the brink of comedy (bolstered by Jack Nicholson’s burlesque and pyrotechnic acting performance). The use of Penderecki’s music (Polymorphia edited together with his Utrenja: Ewangelia) at this point, behind the almost comic scene, not only holds it within the frame of horror, warding off its humorous aspects, but also redoubles the effect of the scene through the slight uncertainty of the mixture of comedic and disturbing elements sitting side by side. Such misdirection might be a risky process, where the audience might lose the illusion and be confronted with the reality of cinema as a manipulative mechanical operation, and its approximation of life being a reminder of the transience of our own lives. Rather than simply silence, the Ghostly Effect allows the unsettling nature of the moving image to become apparent. While films like Dead Silence are a rarity in that their misdirection is lost momentarily as a perceptual and emotional effect, some horror films retain diegetic sound but disorder, and perhaps problematize, the illusory whole of the film images and sounds. It is seemingly possible to remove the shock of the Ghostly Effect through a double misdirection, making an effective ‘near miss’ where the illusion almost collapses and threatens to reveal itself but is ultimately denied. In the sequence from The Shining, the music removes the shock of the comedy in this inappropriate situation. Sound and image retain the effect of unity and illusion, although gain in affect through the near revelation of the basis of that unity. Despite the horror genre’s exploitation of the phenomenon, Eisler and Adorno’s notion of ghostliness has perhaps less to do with merely the appearance of dead revenants and more to do with the incomplete illusion of life, or the illusion of incomplete life. Images can appear less than fully alive, and are not only disturbingly uncanny but also a reminder of the precarious nature of life and our place in the world.

The Ghostly Effect of the Blind Dead

The Ghostly Effect likely has contributed to and retained a notable place in the horror film genre. In the 1970s, there was a series of Spanish horror films directed by Amando De Ossorio and focusing on the evil characters of the ‘Blind Dead.’ These ghosts of the medieval Knights Templars are both faceless, in that they have decaying skulls, and wordless: both blind and mute. These films began with Tombs of the Blind Dead (1971), which was succeeded by sequels Return of the Blind Dead (1973), The Ghost Galleon (1974), and Night of the Seagulls...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Framing Screen Music and Sound
• Part 1 Issues in the Study of Screen Music and Sound
• Part 2 Historical Approaches
• Part 3 Production and Process
• Part 4 Cultural and Aesthetic Perspectives
• Part 5 Analyses and Methodologies
• Index