TOWARD a TRANS-SENSORY CINEMA by J
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ABSTRACT LISTENING BEYOND THE IMAGE: TOWARD A TRANS-SENSORY CINEMA by J. Motts This thesis, written in English, proposes an ethico-affective theory of the sound event in film in an effort to rethink the relationship of film and spectator in terms of listening. The movements of the argument progress through an analysis of a two-minute scream from Maïwenn’s 2011 film, Polisse, that works to demonstrate the ways in which resonances in theoretical language on film, sound, affect and music, specifically as they relate to the interstice from Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2: the Time-Image, help us to think of the spectator in terms of her active participation in film’s material. This step away from cinematographic analysis forces us to scrutinize the methods through which film directly affects the senses of its spectators in ways that confound their ability to “read” the image. As such affections, as Baruch Spinoza suggests, influence how the spectator perceives her own capacity to act in the world, this thesis concludes that listening for sound events in film allows us to perceive the ethical dimensions of film and spectatorship. LISTENING BEYOND THE IMAGE: TOWARD A TRANS-SENSORY CINEMA A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts by J. Motts Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2017 Advisor: Dr. Elisabeth Hodges Reader: Dr. Jonathan Strauss Reader: Dr. Mack Hagood ©2017 J. Motts This Thesis titled LISTENING BEYOND THE IMAGE: TOWARD A TRANS-SENSORY CINEMA by J. Motts has been approved for publication by The College of Arts and Science and Department of French and Italian ____________________________________________________ Elisabeth Hodges ______________________________________________________ Jonathan Strauss _______________________________________________________ Mack Hagood Table of Contents entry point 1 I. sounding off 7 Brisez le silence. Finding a pulse and trying not to stare II. sounding out 19 examining bodies getting spiritual limits in-between resonance / rhythm III. sound bridge 34 lending an ear (im)mediate auscultation we a choice echo, an opening 48 Works Cited 51 iii to Blanche Motts and Le Sacré du printemps iv Acknowledgements To the Miami University Department of French and Italian, Department of English, and Department of Media and Culture; To my advisor and mentor, Dr. Elisabeth Hodges, and committee, Drs. Jonathan Strauss and Mack Hagood; To my many mentors in language and art; To Nicolette Utsinger and Irvin 001; To my friends and colleagues who listen; To my parents Sue and Dave, my brother Kyle, my (elected) sisters Jordan and Gwen; If only a “thank you” were adequate to express my gratitude for the ways in which you have motivated me to grow as a thinker and writer and human being in the world. To be in your orbits, whether through the last 2, 5, or nearly 24 years, was and is daily inspiration, and it is my earnest hope that this project accurately reflects the influence of our conversations and shared experiences upon my ideas and voice. You have helped to lead me here; for that, I cannot thank you enough, and I carry your legacies with me as I continue in this wild exploration of art and of life. v entry point An audiovisual din shifts about the young boy’s body; and suddenly, he screams. At first, the sound attacks: the young boy’s voice unleashes itself upon the characters and soundscape who surround him, colliding into the near silence that had preceded its arrival. Its high volume and pitch reverberate from the walls of the room in which he stands, sits and squirms, the combination of his image and sound seeming to communicate displeasure, pain, frustration. But then, the sound continues: it elongates into a full two minutes of guttural noise— shouts, cries, tears that evolve and overlap—and, in terms of the sound’s link to the image, it appears to devolve, divorcing itself from the young boy’s story and dissociating itself from any representational “meaning” the sound might have contributed to the visual cues that surround it.1 The listener may understand the sound to be coming from the young boy—he is a fictional character in a narrative film, and the listener can watch his image writhe in tandem with the eruptions of the scream upon the screen—however, the sounds that continue to quake from his chest no longer seem constrained by the 1920:1080 frame of their visual environment. Now, the scream is embedded within the senses of the listener as much as it had once seemed inscribed into the images of the film; it has become the noise of listening, of sound sounding into ears, 1 Experimental musician and sound theorist Michel Chion calls this association of sound and film image “added value,” a term which proposes that the editing of sound in film, though technically separate from that of the image, often enhances the spectator’s perception of the image in the way that it appears to be a pre-existing, “natural” component of the visual environment. He continues in Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (Columbia University, 1994): “Added value is what gives the (eminently incorrect) impression that sound is unnecessary, that sound merely duplicates a meaning which in reality it brings out, either all on its own or by discrepancies between it and the image” (5). In “added value,” then, sound’s “meaning” stems from its confirmation of the visual world, suggesting that any value added to the image by sound leads also and at the same time to a devaluing of sound as its own, separate entity. 1 colliding into the perception of we, the spectators, who no longer look, but listen. What do we hear in our experience with film? In this thesis, I propose a theory of the sound event in order to rethink the relationship of film and spectator in terms of listening. I propose this term and methodological shift in film theory in the effort to demonstrate that a vocabulary of listening enables us to theoretically (and finally) address our active and immediate participation in film’s material. As such, the analysis of a scream consumes this project: I dedicate the entirety of my thesis to the dissection of a two minute-long scream embedded in Maïwenn’s 2011 film, Polisse. In the term sound event, I call upon the Deleuzian understanding of the Event as it perpetuates change and differentiation (Beck and Gleyzon 329); by drawing out the linguistic links between theoretical texts on film, sound, affect and music, I argue that, in the sound event, the duration and recurrence of a given sound or sound pattern in a film shocks the spectator into an affective experience with sound that subverts the spectator tendency to “read” the film with the distanced terms of cinematographic analysis. Instead, the spectator is forced to become a listener, and the sound she hears no longer serves to confirm the visual world she sees, no longer “signifies” in accordance with an expectation established by the image. A structural and methodological upending has occurred: in the experience of the sound event, the listener transcends the status of passive observer, for she collides into the collective becoming of the film and her own sensory perception, realizing her status as an active participant in the film’s material. The affective element of this event comes from Baruch Spinoza, whose 17th century writings established the basis of what is now understood (thanks to the development of scholars like Brian Massumi, Gregory Seigworth, Melissa Gregg and Patricia Ticineto Clough) as Affect Theory (Sound 6). In Spinoza’s Ethics (studied in this thesis through an analysis of Deleuze’s Spinoza: Practical Philosophy), the philosopher defines affect in terms of colliding bodies, wherein each collision influences the involved bodies’ perceived capacities to act (S 192). By 2 A note on abbreviations: As this thesis references multiple works from Deleuze, I have implemented the following guide for understanding in-line citations: S will stand for Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (translated by Robert Hurley, City Lights Books, 1988); IM will replace Cinema 1: L’image-mouvement (Éditions de Minuit, 1983); and IT will replace L’image-temps (Éditions de Minuit, 1985). For all citations of French texts in this work that include translations, the page number listed in the in-line 2 analyzing the sound event of Polisse’s scream in terms that favor listening to collisions over reading signs, I propose that the relationship of film and spectator is ultimately a matter of ethics, which is to state that our experiences with film can (and do) amplify our capacity to act in the world. In this way, this ethico-affective3 argument suggests that a more focused scrutiny of the ways in which media affect our bodies also—and more importantly—calls into question the ways in which we perceive our ability to act and interact as part of a media multiplicity. It is for this reason that I shall articulate my argument as often as is appropriate in terms of we. I would like to emphasize here that this we is not a universalized consideration of spectator subjectivity; such a universalization would commit the grave error of erasing the specific and intersectional cultural influences that nuance the perspective from which each spectator approaches media. Rather, my we works to actively recognize and remind the reader of the multiplicity inherent in affect and central to the ethical potency of this argument. Even if our respective responses to media are undoubtedly and individually nuanced, we cannot deny that we are all, in some way, exposed to media through the input of audiovisual stimuli, called to action by way of sensory appeal.