Fear of Deaf Cinema

1 Fear of Deaf Cinema Alex Burns ([email protected]), 2010 [Note: Accepted for publication in M/C 13(3) (2010) but undelivered to publisher at final edit stage due to illness.] The French experimental film composer Michel Chion has proposed ‘deaf cinema’ as a new aesthetic framework to interpret film dialogue, multi-layered soundtracks and silence. This article suggests Chion’s aesthetic theory is fragmentary. Through a sampling of Hollywood films in different historical periods, the article explores the implications of Chion’s ‘deaf cinema’ versus Robert Bresson’s ‘tactics of silence’, for the boundaries of film soundtracks; aesthetic strategies of silence; the variations in silent, experimental, genre and contemporary films, and the absence of deaf filmmakers and perspectives. Film Studies scholars who use these aesthetic strategies to develop more emancipatory and inclusive frameworks, as demonstrated in the work of deaf filmmakers Samuel Dore and Robert Hoskin. “Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tactics of slowness, of silence.” ‐ Robert Bresson (Bennett, Hickmann and Wall, 15) Defining Deaf Cinema Michel Chion (www.michelchion.com) the French experimental music composer has proposed ‘deaf cinema’ as a new aesthetic framework to interpret film dialogue, multi-layered soundtracks, and silence. “The silent film may be called deaf,” Chion observes, “insofar as it prevented us from hearing the real sounds of the story. It had no ears for the immediate aural space, the here and now of action.” (Chion 7). As a past assistant to ‘musique concrete’ composer Pierre Schaeffer, Chion is sensitive to how inductive theories can shape how we perceive film and music. Is ‘deaf cinema’, however, a new analytical category for Film Studies theorists? How does it fit with other recent scholarship that attempts to redress the perceived historical bias of Film Studies to the visual image, rather than a more holistic synthesis of film aesthetics? Is it as emancipatory as Chion might claim? This article explores the tensions between Chion’s ‘deaf cinema’ and Bresson’s ‘tactics of silence’, in terms of Hollywood’s aesthetic strategies for distinguishing between sound and silence. To do so, I examine a sample of primarily Hollywood films from different historical periods, to show how the choice of aesthetic strategies is made. Problematically, Chion has not yet fully articulated what he actually meant. Instead, ‘deaf cinema’, like many other aesthetic theories in Film Studies and similar creative fields, remains fragmentary and an unexplored, normative idea. In coining ‘deaf cinema’ he was trying to resituate the phenomenological or interior, subjective experiences of film audiences during Hollywood’s formative, silent period until 1927. Regrettably, Chion did not mean deaf filmmakers like Samuel Dore (www.bursteardrum.net) and Robert Hoskin (www.innersense.com.au/mif/hoskin.html), nor initiatives such as Joshua Flanders’ Festival for the Cinema of the Deaf. At the outset, ‘deaf cinema’ normatively could be what Dore, Hoskins and Flanders envisage: films created by deaf filmmakers about the lives and experiences of deaf people. Yet Hollywood and Film Studies theorists have a fear of this ‘deaf cinema’. Despite the inroads made by feminist, cult, queer and other theoretical frameworks, ‘deaf’ is more likely to mean non-deaf actors who play deaf characters, and the use of silence in films as a deliberate aesthetic strategy, usually to evoke a major event or human experience. 2 Film history also conveys this fear, of unexplored possibilities. Hollywood’s silent era perhaps attracted Chion’s attention because silence was a choice imposed by technological constraints. During the classical era of major Hollywood studios, it became an aesthetic choice in experimental, underground films, and then either in genre films, or as a deliberate contrast to multi-layered soundtracks. In contemporary film, Chion’s ‘deaf cinema’ is treated as a design rule, similar to the explicit limitations that the ‘Vow of Chastity’ imposed on Dogme 95 filmmakers including Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg (von Trier and Vinterberg 1995). In researching this article, I found a similar self-limitation. My attempt to evoke the authenticity of Dore, Hoskins, Flanders and others failed. Instead, I found the same reflexive ignorance that Ken Booth described in his conscientisation about the assumptions of political realism in academic strategic studies (Booth 1994). Instead of knowledge, I found anti-knowledge based on self-ignorance (Taleb 2007). What follows is an attempt to trace this fear of ‘deaf cinema’ through a sampling of Film Studies literature and films in different historical periods, and that articulate various aesthetic strategies to deal with sound, silence, and in rare cases, the experiences of deaf characters and viewers. In doing so, I highlight some knowledge processes of how Film Studies scholars undertake theory-building, and under what conditions their aesthetic theories can fall apart (Dick 1995). The Silence That Surrounds Sounds Over a decade later, I still remember the film viewing that was possibly the closest that its audience would have to empathise with deaf filmmakers, and more generally, with deaf people. The event was a mid-1990s undergraduate class in cinema studies at La Trobe University: a 16mm copy of F.W. Murnau’s influential Sunrise (1927). The student audience had expected a piano accompaniment similar to Buster Keaton and Keystone Cops comedies. Instead, we experienced near-silence; this was just before laptops and mobile phones became common in classrooms. A fifth of the audience experienced cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957) and walked out of the Sunrise film screening. Years later, colleagues would compare this film screening to John Cage’s 4’33” in which the audience is confronted with the “subtle awareness of the silence that surrounds sounds” (Toop 141). What some of the Murnau and Cage audiences experienced was a kind of sensory deprivation that altered their phenomenological, subjective experience. In fact, this was the very psychological effect that Cage intended to convey to his audience, after encountering and reflecting on the silence of “Harvard University’s anechoic chamber” (Toop 140). Medical researcher John Lilly had a similar goal to Cage when he designed the flotation tank as an immersive environment to enhance self-awareness and to support human potential (Lilly 1977). In doing so, Cage and Lilly both developed environments and stratagems that foreshadowed Bresson’s ‘tactics of silence.’ The near-silent and all-encompassing environment of Lilly’s flotation tank however, never became a mainstream lifestyle accessory outside health spas and sports science facilities. The flotation tank was wrongly equated with Cold War research into sensory deprivation, hinted at in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010), which Lilly abhorred. Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980) also depicted Lilly’s research as hallucinogenic sensory overload, foreshadowing later films such as Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007). Aesthetic strategies in film can thus influence how frameworks and tools for self-liberation diffuse from subcultures into mainstream ‘contexts of use’. The exponents of Silent era cinema may already have understood what Cage, Lilly and Bresson were struggling to achieve. In the 1920s, the Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein and Russian formalists called attention through cinematography and editing to how aesthetic choices can shape viewer’s attention. After 1927, Chion believes that the turning point for many audiences from silence to film sound was Fritz Lang’s thriller Das Testamament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse) (1932), in 3 which Lang used the soundtrack to foreshadow major characters and plot changes (Chion 9; Gunning 2000). Consequently, film form became synonymous with radio and voice rather than silence (Chion 168- 169). In the late 1930s the aesthete and film critic Rudolf Arnheim expressed a different view to Chion. “People took the silence of the movies for granted because they never quite lost the feeling that what they saw was after all only pictures,” Arnheim contended (36). Thus Chion, and the Sunrise audience evaluated Silent cinema from a different aesthetic frame, shaped by the experience of contemporary film and multi-layered soundtrack. The next section considers three further aesthetic strategies: dead soundtracks, and experimental and genre films. Dead Soundtracks, and Experimental and Genre Films Hollywood films developed a new aesthetic strategy to ‘normalise’ the boundary between sound and silence: the ‘dead soundtrack’. Films such as Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979) used a dead soundtrack --- complete silence --- to emphasise the tragic deaths of major characters (Beaver 8). In doing so, Richardson and Fosse adopted the auditory equivalent to the visual freeze-frame that ends Francois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962) or the burning film stock which closes Monte Hellman’s existentialist road film Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). In all four films the ‘non-diegetic’ or off-screen world invades the ‘diegetic’ or on-screen world in the film. Chuck Jones animated short ‘Duck Amuck’ (1953) is amongst the most self-conscious films to explore the ‘diegetic’ versus ‘non-diegetic’ boundaries. During the Warner Bros. cartoon, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck remove all sounds from the soundtrack, reveal the edges of the animated

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