Philip Brophy (ed.),
Cinesonic: The World of Sound in Film.
North Ryde, Australian Film Television and Radio School, 1999.
ISBN 1 876351 08 X
266pp
AU$24.95 (paper)

Uploaded 1 March 2000 | 1160 words

Philip Brophy’s new film sound anthology Cinesonic is a highly engaging and significant publication that italicises the rapidly growing importance of film sound/music studies in local and international contexts, and specifically, attests to the refreshing role that Melbourne’s first Cinesonic conference has played in ushering in new timely cross-disciplinary theoretical and industrial/practical perspectives into the study of the film soundtrack. Further, hagiographical sentiments aside, the anthology also clearly points to Brophy’s indefatigable energy and prolific seminal ideas on film sound matters. The calibre of the film theorists, critics and film composers and sound artists/ designers who contributed to the anthology is also further incontestable evidence of the importance of the conference itself and Brophy’s refreshing innovative project to open up wide the Australian film conference landscape.

In this critical sense, both the anthology and the first two conferences (so far) have been concerned with (amongst other aims) contesting the increasing canonisation and institutionalisation of film and media studies. Brophy’s brief editorial words introducing the thirteen conference essays and interviews to the reader suggest his multifaceted and far-reaching objective to plumb the “deep oceans” of film sound under the relatvely unexamined weight of literary and visual discourse that marks contemporary cinema studies. To this end, the anthology is quite successful – for one of the underlying focal points that unites all the various contributions is the hermeneutic objective to make us aware (as often we need to remind ourselves) that cinema consists of image and sound. Too often, we think of it as solely as image. This is not to overlook the increasing trend in European art cinema and video/media festivals in the last twenty years or so to speak of “the image” as something being more than just the visual.

Central to the anthology’s conceptual architecture is the notion that many of the neglected areas of cinema sound point to the accelerating development of cinematic effects in mainstream narrative cinema and its critical impact on film and media studies. In a word, the overall “theme park” culture of special film effects and their dynamically rapid growth has put film theory into a crisis. The soundtrack challenges us to reconsider our assumptions and beliefs about cinema as a camera-based medium of representation-production. It questions our received wisdom about the aesthetic, cultural, historical and technological dimensions of cinema. Our silence concerning the many uncharted areas of the soundtrack is a damning critique of our critical lethargy to ask difficult questions about cinema as an institution and as a mass art form. It also suggests the ever-present question of how best to discuss and write about cinema ? It is far more epistemologically comforting to stick to cinema’s imagetrack and ignore its other vital half part as we are surrounded by its all encompassing audio-visuality. Even the recent spate of books that are analysing cinema’s intertextual links with photography, televison, and the new media arts ignore addressing specific questions of the cinesonic.

The anthology is helpfully structured in four thematically interrlinking parts refecting its accessible academic and popular cultural contents : (a) film scores and film sound design (the latter representing, in particular, a growing theoretical and empirical area of enquiry and practice) (b) speech, genre, voice and eavesdropping (c) American documentary film music and European film modernism and, finally, (d) the transition of the talkie era, theme songs and nickelodeons and popular song. All four parts point to the anthology’s global view of contextualising the film soundtrack in terms of its intricate cultural, industrial and historical roots in twentieth century mass culture. One of the book’s attractive qualities is its open-ended and speculative underpinning as numerous contributors see and hear cinema within its own terms and do not “shoehorn” their subject into the more predictable parameters and closures of traditional film theory. The eclectic and thoughtful selection of the anthology’s contributors adds to its appealing well-informed cross-disciplinary ideas and perspectives. To read “Cinesonic” is to traverse the rich, fascinating and convulsive terrain of cinema sound as contemporary cultural and theoretical practice.

Cinesonic‘s contributors include leading film sound theorists such as Elisabeth Weis, Royal S. Brown, Carlyn Flinn and Rick Altman, prominent local film critic and essayist Adrian Martin, influential composers like Howard Shore and Carter Burwell, archivist and author David Sanjek, and accomplished Japanese animation sound designer Yasunori Honda. All of the contributors in their respective essays probe in a non-dogmatic and accessible critical fashion myriad aspects and issues of sound in the cinema. In a crucial way, “Cinesonic” is an invaluable introductory survey of the hyper dynamic and challenging features of the past and contemporary film soundtrack — it may be read as a very timely and necessary “road map” that cognitively charts (for the lay person as much as the specialist ) new frameworks of interpretation to help us decipher the ongoing omnidirectional critical and cultural aspects of film sound and its contribution to our understanding of cinema in itself and as a vital integral part of our contemporary “post-film media” zeitgeist.

Consequently, all of the contributors, including theorists like Will Straw, Alan Williams, and Sarah Kozloff, examine all the different expansive complexities of film sound as an ongoing mutant of our everyday culture. As Brophy puts it, cinema sound is “a beautiful mutant. It is visceral, abstract, poetic, material, eventual, spatial, psychological, temporal, narrational.” (p.v.) Time and again, the anthology’s contributors do manage in their respective ways to vividly paint the enormous intricacies of culture, space, time, genre, audience, emotion and industry that have shaped the cinema soundtrack. Whether it is Shore discussing his collaborative work with David Cronenberg, Yasunori Honda, whose genre-bending sound design work is at the forefront of Japanese animation, talk about his analogue to digital journey as a sound designer, Weis cautioning us against using global theory to analyse the many issues of filmic eavsedropping behaviour, Martin on the magisterial voice-over narration used in Carlito’s Way (1993), or Brown examining the inventive interactions between visual montage, sound monatge, narration, music and sound music in Alain Robbe- Grillet’s cinematic oeuvre, we appreciate the enormous malleability of cinema sound as a complex cultural system of representation.

All in all, Cinesonic is a most welcome contribution to contemporary film and media studies. It is essential reading to anyone who is curious about how sound functions in the cinema and affects us as consumer-auditors of its proliferating image-music-sound configurations. It is a book that urges us to never be smug with our understanding of cinema – to ask ourselves what the medium itself is saying to us through its two tracks of meaning. In jazz it is a compliment if a musician or a jazz critic is said to have “big ears.” In cinema we need to know how to listen to it, to have “big ears.”

John Conomos