Utama Theories Of The Soundtrack

Theories Of The Soundtrack

A theory of the soundtrack is concerned with what belongs to the soundtrack, how a soundtrack is effectively organized, how its status in a multimedia object affects the nature of the object, the tools available for its analysis, and the interpretive regime that the theory mandates for determining the meaning, sense, and structure that sound and music bring to film and other audiovisual media. Beyond that, a theory may also delineate the range of possible uses of sound and music, classify the types of relations that films have used for image and sound, identify the central problems, and reflect on and describe effective uses of sound in film. This book summarizes and critiques major theories of the soundtrack from roughly 1929 until today. Rather than providing an exhaustive historical survey, it sketches out the range of theoretical approaches that have been applied to the soundtrack since the commercial introduction of the sound film. The basic theoretical framework of each approach is presented, taking into account the explicit and implicit claims about the soundtrack and its relation to other theories. The organization is both chronological and topical, the former in that the chapters move steadily from early film theory through models of the classical system to more recent critical theories; the latter in that the chapters highlight central issues for each generation: the problem of film itself, then of image and sound, of adequate analytical-descriptive models, and finally of critical-interpretative models.
Tahun: 2019
Penerbit: Oxford University Press
Bahasa: english
Halaman: 337
ISBN 10: 0199371083
ISBN 13: 9780199371082
Series: Oxford Music/Media Series
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Spring into Technical Writing for Engineers and Scientists

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A Revolução da América

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Theories of the Soundtrack

The Oxford Music/​Media Series
Daniel Goldmark, Series Editor

Tuning In: American Narrative Television Music
Ron Rodman

Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical
William Cheng

Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the
BBC Radiophonic Workshop
Louis Niebur

Sounding American: Hollywood, Opera, and Jazz
Jennifer Fleeger

Seeing Through Music: Gender and Modernism in
Classic Hollywood Film Scores
Peter Franklin

Mismatched Women: The Siren’s Song Through
the Machine
Jennifer Fleeger

An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the
Audiovisual Surreal
John Richardson

Robert Altman’s Soundtracks: Film, Music
and Sound from M*A*S*H to A Prairie Home
Gayle Sherwood Magee

Playing Along: Digital Games, YouTube, and
Virtual Performance
Kiri Miller
Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of
Holly Rogers
Composing for the Red Screen: Prokofiev and
Soviet Film
Kevin Bartig
Saying It With Songs: Popular Music and the
Coming of Sound to Hollywood Cinema
Katherine Spring
We’ll Meet Again: Musical Design in the Films of
Stanley Kubrick
Kate McQuiston
Occult Aesthetics: Synchronization in Sound Film
K. J. Donnelly

Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film,
and Popular Music of the Seventies and Eighties
Michael D. Dwyer
The Early Film Music of Dmitry Shostakovich
Joan Titus
Making Music in Selznick’s Hollywood
Nathan Platte
Hearing Haneke: The Sound Tracks of a
Radical Auteur
Elsie Walker
Unlimited Replays: Video Games and
Classical Music
William Gibbons
Hollywood Harmony: Musical Wonder and the
Sound of Cinema
Frank Lehman
Theories of the Soundtrack
James Buhler

Theories of the Soundtrack
James Buhler


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Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
© Oxford University Press 2019
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You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Buhler, James, 1964– author.
Title: Theories of the soundtrack / James Buhler.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2019. |
Series: The Oxford music / media series | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018006090 (print) | LCCN 2018007713 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780199371099 (updf) | ISBN 9780199371075 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780199371082 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Motion picture music—History and criticism. | Film
soundtracks—History and criticism. | Motion picture music—Philosophy and
Classification: LCC ML2075 (ebook) | LCC ML2075 .B844 2018 (print) |
DDC 781.5/4201—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006090
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
This volume is published with the generous support of the Gustave Reese Endowment of the
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

To Leslie and Judi

Acknowledgments xi

1. Introduction 1
Five Vignettes of Early Sound Film 2
The Hybridity of Sound Film 5
Sound Film, an Audiovisual Medium 9
Film Sound and “Occult Aesthetics” 11
This Volume 16
2. Early Theories of the Sound Film 23
Introduction: The Specificity of the Sound Film 23
The Statement on Sound and the Concept of Counterpoint 26
Sergei Eisenstein and Counterpoint 27
Vsevolod Pudovkin and Asynchronous Sound 28
The Case of Deserter 30
Perceptual Realism 32
Béla Balázs and the Physiognomy of the Voice 34
Rudolf Arnheim and the Unity of Sound 40
Harry Potamkin and the Compound Cinema 51
3. Theories of the Classical Sound Film: Grammars and Typologies 57
Introduction 57
Sergei Eisenstein and Vertical Montage 60
Modes of Synchronicity 63
Aaron Copland and the Functions of Film Music 65
Functions 65
Reservations 67
Hanns Eisler and Theodor W. Adorno and Critical Theory 69
Contra Eisenstein 69
The Negative Thesis: Sham Identity 70
Bad Habits 73
The Classical System and the Typological Analysis 76
Raymond Spottiswoode and Film Grammar 77
Siegfried Kracauer and the Types of Cinematic Sound 80
Roger Manvell and John Huntley and “Functional” Music 82
On the Difference between Realistic and Nonrealistic Music 83



4. Language, Semiotics, and Deleuze 87
The Linguistic Analogy 87
Jean Mitry and Language and Rhythm 89
Semiotics of Film/​Semiotics of Music 98
Christian Metz and Aural Objects 100
Gilles Deleuze and the Movement-​Image 102
Zero-​Point: Perception-​Image 103
Firstness: Affection-​Image 104
First Intermediary Stage: Impulse-​Image 106
Secondness: Action-​Image 108
Large Action Form 109
Small Action Form 112
Second Intermediary Stage: Reflection-​Image 114
Thirdness: Relation-​Image 116
5. Neoformalism and Four Models of the Soundtrack 119
Introduction: Semiotics and Formalism 119
Neoformalism 119
Kristin Thompson and the Analytical Approach 121
David Bordwell and the Music(ologic)al Analogy 123
Noël Carroll and Modifying Music 124
Formal Models of Music and Film 127
Kathryn Kalinak and Captain Blood 127
A Working Model of Film Music 129
General Considerations 129
Explicit Relations of Music to Narrative 132
Implicit Relations of Music to Narrative 133
Combining Implicit and Explicit Relations of Music to Narrative 135
Nicholas Cook and Multimedia Systems 136
David Neumeyer and Vococentrism 139
Annabel Cohen and the Congruence-​Association Model 145
6. Narratology and the Soundtrack 151
Introduction 151
Narratology and Film 152
Narratology and the Soundtrack 158
Claudia Gorbman and Narrative Functions 158
Sarah Kozloff and the Narrative Functions of Dialogue 161
Michel Chion and the Audiovisual Scene 163
Giorgio Biancorosso and the Cinematic Imagination 167
Robynn Stilwell and the Fantastical Gap 168
Jeff Smith and Film Narration 169
Ben Winters and the Nondiegetic Fallacy 172
Guido Heldt and Levels of Narration 176


Music and Focalization 177
Focalization in Casablanca 182
Conclusion 184
7. Critical Theory and the Soundtrack 187
Introduction 187
Hermeneutics of Suspicion 189
Ideology of Content (1): Topic Theory 189
Ideology of Content (2): The Table of Knowledge and
Communicative Efficiency 194
Musical Topics: A Postcolonial Critique 197
Ideology of System 199
Ideology of Apparatus 202
Gender, Sexuality, and the Soundtrack 204
Soundtrack Theory and Feminist Theory 204
Soundtrack Theory and Queer Theory 208
Queering Asynchronous Sound 210
Queerness and Spectacle 211
Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) and the Economy of Sacrifice 212
The Hours (2002) and Sacrificial Inversion 218
8. Psychoanalysis, Apparatus Theory, and Subjectivity 221
Introduction 221
The Appareil 224
Jean-​Louis Baudry and the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus 224
Jean-​Louis Comolli and Technique and Ideology 225
Mary Ann Doane and the Ideology of Sound Editing 227
Rick Altman and the Heterogeneity of Sound 228
James Lastra and Representational Technology 232
Music and the Appareil 233
The Dispositif 235
Jean-​Louis Baudry and the Dispositif 235
Jean-​Louis Comolli and the Dispositif 236
Christian Metz and Enunciation 236
Dispositif and Suture 237
Mary Ann Doane and the Fantasmatic Body 241
Pascal Bonitzer and the Voiceover and Voice-​Off 242
Suture and the Soundtrack 243
Jeff Smith and the Critique of the Psychoanalytical Model of Film
Music 245
Neo-​Lacanian Theory 246
The Gaze and the Voice 246
Michel Chion and “There Is No Soundtrack” 249
Mimetic Synchronization and the Sexual Relation 251
Michel Chion and Rendering 254




9. Theories of the Digital Soundtrack 257
Introduction 257
The Ontological Divide 261
Animated Image, Stylized Sound: The Radical Effects of Digital
Rendering 266
Music, Sound Design, and Digital Audio Production 270
Theories of Stereophonic Sound 273
Affective Intensities, the Withering of the Leitmotif, and the Withdrawal of
Identity 279
Postclassical Cinema and the Fraying of Narrative 284
Conclusion 288
Bibliography 291
Index 309

This book grew out of an essay on critical theory and the soundtrack that
David Neumeyer commissioned for The Oxford Handbook of Film Music
Studies. When I was done, that essay had become three, and they are included
in this volume in revised form as the basis for portions of c­ hapters 5, 7, and
8. Even as I drafted that essay, I recognized the value of expanding the material into something more comprehensive. I was inspired especially by Dudley
Andrew’s The Major Film Theories (1976) and Concepts in Film Theory (1984)
and Francisco Casetti’s Theories of Cinema, 1945–​1995 (1999); both authors
offer excellent surveys of major trends in film theory, but, in keeping with so
much film scholarship, which even today insists that film is a visual medium,
none of these texts discusses theories of the soundtrack in any detail. In fact,
they rarely mention the soundtrack at all, which puts them at a disadvantage in
the present, when film music studies and sound studies are rapidly becoming
prominent fields of inquiry.
My initial draft sought to be comprehensive, tracing speculative thinking
about film music and sound from the silent era up to the present day, but
it proved unwieldy, yielding a manuscript more than twice the length of the
current one. With the guidance of my tireless and extremely patient editor
at Oxford University Press, Norm Hirschy, who quickly found a sympathetic
(anonymous) reader to look over the manuscript, and David Neumeyer, I was
able to cut and reorganize that manuscript into this final form, now refocused
on major theories of the soundtrack. I want to take this opportunity to thank
all three—​Norm, David, and the anonymous reader—​for their work in helping
me deliver a slimmer and much improved book.
I have been working on this project for almost a decade now, and
many people have offered feedback over the years when I have presented
research from this book at conferences, in lectures, and in the classroom.
The “Music and the Moving Image” conference held annually at New York
University has been especially important to shaping this project, and many
portions of this manuscript had their first presentation there. I want to
thank Ron Sadoff and Gillian Anderson for their tireless work in ensuring
that this continues to be an annual event. I have benefited not only from
the responses to my paper presentations but also and even more so from
the strong community of scholars that the conference attracts, and the field
would be much less cohesive without it. I have also presented material from
this book at many other academic conferences. I delivered a selection from




the final chapter on the soundtrack in the age of digital media on a panel organized by Joan Titus for the American Musicological Society. The passage
on Hugo (2010) from that chapter was first presented on a panel organized by James Deaville and Mary Simonson for the Society of American
Music. I first presented ideas about scoring practices in action films on a
panel at the Society for Music Theory organized by Mark Richards, and
ideas about postclassical cinema were first tried out on a panel organized
by Carol Vernallis for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. Another
panel at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies organized by Lea Jacobs
and Jeff Smith offered me an opportunity to present ideas on the transition to sound, as did an invitation from Carlo Cenciarelli to talk about
cinematic listening in the early years of the sound film at a conference
on “Listening Cinematically” and an invitation from Jeremy Barham to
talk about transition-​era cinema at a conference on “Hollywood’s Musical
Contemporaries and Competitors in the Early Sound Film Era.” Daniel
Goldmark asked me to participate in a conference honoring Claudia
Gorbman’s Unheard Melodies, which allowed me to present my ideas
about focalization that found their way into ­chapter 7. I thank all of these
organizers for inviting me to contribute to their conferences and panels.
I have benefited greatly over the years from many conversations with
friends and colleagues, who have offered me insights, comments, and feedback and have posed useful challenges that have spurred me to think better
about the issues at hand. My thanks go to Gillian Anderson, Jeremy Barham,
Kyle Barnett, Michael Baumgartner, Sally Bick, Julie Brown, Carlo Cabellero,
Kutter Callaway, Justin Capps, Charles Carson, Carlo Cenciarelli, Jee-​Weon Cha,
Juan Chattah, Kevin Clifton, Annette Davison, James Deaville, Kevin Donnelly,
Rebecca Eaton, Phil Ford, Rebecca Fülöp, Will Gibbons, Daniel Goldmark,
Kariann Goldschmitt, Claudia Gorbman, Helen Hanson, Erik Heine, Berthold
Hoeckner, John Howland, Julie Hubbert, Brian Hyer, Jennifer Iverson, Lea
Jacobs, Michael Klein, Charlie Kronengold, Frank Lehman, Neil Lerner, Justin
London, Jean Ma, Marty Marks, Brooke McCorkle, Matt McDonald, Cari
McDonnell, Miguel Mera, Stephen Meyer, Tahirih Motazedian, Scott Murphy,
Michael Pisani, Nathan Platte, Katherine Quanz, Sarah Reichardt, Mark
Richards, David Roche, Ron Rodman, Colin Roust, Ron Sadoff, Jeff Smith,
Robynn Stilwell, Joan Titus, James Wierzbicki, Anna Windisch, and Ben
Winters. Carol Vernallis has been especially generous in support of the proj­
ect, always willing to Skype and brainstorm on short notice whenever I ran
into difficulty. Eric Dienstfrey has rescued me on more than one occasion with
a quick read of a section dealing with the history of sound technology. Alex
Newton helped me develop ideas about the contemporary soundtrack that
first appeared in our coauthored article on the original Bourne trilogy, a brief
portion of which is reprinted in ­chapter 9. Mark Durrand has proved a good
friend and an exceptional foil as I honed my ideas on music in action film.


At the University of Texas, I am fortunate to be surrounded by excellent friends and colleagues on the music theory faculty: Byron Almén, Eric
Drott, Robert Hatten, the late Ed Pearsall, John Turci-​Escobar, and Marianne
Wheeldon. Their support has made my work much easier. Sonia Seeman ran a
reading group during the early stages of my work on this book and portions of
­chapters 2 and 3 were first read by that group. An informal faculty film studies
interest group whose nucleus consisted of Kirsten Cather, Sabine Hake, Hannah
Lewis, David Neumeyer, David Prindle, Tom Schatz, and Janet Staiger met two
or three times a semester for much of the time I worked on the manuscript,
and the group read and offered incisive feedback on many excerpts of book,
which is much stronger for it. Janet also kindly shared her draft translations of
parts 5 and 6 of Jean-​Louis Comolli’s “Technique et idéologie” that greatly sped
up work on ­chapter 8. Eric Drott helped me devise translations to some particularly obscure passages of Comolli’s essay. I most heartily thank the stalwarts
of the faculty happy hour crew—​Charles, Eric, Hannah, and Marianne—​for
the weekly good cheer and sanity. May our weekly meetings long continue!
I am grateful to have been blessed with excellent graduate students during
my work on this project. Matt Young, Emily Kausalik, Alex Newton, Ally
Wente, Colleen Montgomery, Stefan Greenfield-​Casas, Catrin Watts, and
Steven Rahn have all passed through our program during this time, and they
have been a source of wisdom and common sense.
Ever since I arrived at the University of Texas at Austin in August 1999,
the institution has assisted me with timely leaves, research and conference
funding, and the opportunity to develop courses around the soundtrack.
I received two research leaves from the university to work on this project: a
Faculty Research Assignment early in the process that gave me time to research the theory of silent film accompaniment (most of which did not make
it into the current volume), and a Dean’s Fellowship at a key point that allowed
me to write a large portion of the manuscript. I have also received a number
of smaller equipment grants from the Butler Faculty Fund in the Butler School
of Music, from the College of Fine Arts Creative Research Grant, and from the
Office of the Vice President for Research to explore digital sound production
techniques. These grants have been crucial to my understanding of the contemporary soundtrack, and c­ hapter 9 would look very different had I not been
able to explore these digital production techniques on my own using the same
software and much of the same equipment as professional composers and
sound engineers use. I am most thankful for the steadfast support from the
deans of the College of Fine Arts, Robert Freeman and Douglas Dempster, and
from the directors of the Butler School of Music, B. Glenn Chandler, Glenn
Richter, and Mary Ellen Poole, all of whom have enthusiastically encouraged
me to focus my work in the area of soundtrack studies.
I want to offer special thanks to two colleagues. Hannah Lewis has been
a model colleague, always willing to read material and offer helpful advice on




short notice. My frequent collaborator, David Neumeyer, went far beyond
the call of duty, read and edited the entire manuscript twice, and asked the
right questions to allow me to reshape the contents of the book into an intelligible whole as I cut it down. The book is much better for the interventions of
Hannah and David, and I am incredibly grateful for their help.
I give a personal note of thanks to my family. My parents both loved the
movies, and some of my fondest childhood memories are going regularly as a
family to a small storefront cinema in Glencoe, Minnesota, in the 1970s and
seeing whatever was showing that night. My mom favored musicals and my
dad westerns, both declining genres at the time (and which they sought out
whenever older films played on television), but mostly they just enjoyed going
to the cinema. I am grateful that they passed this love along to me.
Finally, I owe a very large debt of gratitude to Leslie Bush, my partner
now for more than thirty years and the person who has done more to make
sure this project got done than anyone, and my daughter, Judi, who has just
embarked on her own intellectual journey of college. They have been my constant companions in watching films, both at home and in the cinema, and have
showed patience, humor, and love whenever the demands of the project spilled
over into family time, which was unfortunately all too often. This volume is
dedicated to them.
Portions of ­chapter 5 and 7 were first published as “Ontological, Formal,
and Critical Theories of Film Music and Sound,” in David Neumeyer, ed., The
Oxford Handbook of Film Music Studies (New York: Oxford University Press,
2014), 188–​225. ©Oxford University Press.
Portions of ­chapter 7 were first published as “Gender, Sexuality, and
the Soundtrack,” in David Neumeyer, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Film
Music Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 366–​82. ©Oxford
University Press.
Portions of c­ hapter 8 were first published as “Psychoanalysis, Apparatus
Theory, and Subjectivity,” in David Neumeyer, ed., The Oxford Handbook
of Film Music Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 383–​417.
©Oxford University Press.
Portions of ­chapter 9 were first published as James Buhler and Alex
Newton, “Outside the Law of Action: Music and Sound in the Bourne Trilogy,”
in Carol Vernallis, John Richardson, and Amy Herzog, eds., Oxford Handbook
of Sound and Image in Digital Media (New York: Oxford University Press,
2013), 325–​49. ©Oxford University Press.



From its beginnings in the later nineteenth century, film—​“moving pictures”—​
posed problems for critics, philosophers, and others concerned with the nature of art. At one level it was an abstract question: could film, a product of
mechanical reproduction, be an aesthetic object at all? At another level, it was
a matter of mechanics and effects: what did film do, and how did it do it?
At still another level, it was a matter of cultural hierarchy: how did film as a
popular art form relate to the very well-​established categories of the theater,
painting, opera, and so forth? The first systematic attempts to make sense of
film as an emerging art form began to appear in the 1910s (Lindsay 1916;
Münsterberg 1916), and by the 1920s, theories of film based in the art of editing began to proliferate.
When recorded sound and filmed image were combined into the sound
film, the task of theorizing the moving pictures only became more difficult.
Sound films had been an experimental form almost since the beginning of
the cinema itself, but relatively few theorists had much to say about them.
A variety of questions were nevertheless raised whose consideration became
urgent after sound film became common, first in newsreels and short musical
films in the early to mid-​1920s, then in feature films after the success of The
Jazz Singer (1927) and The Singing Fool (1928). The commercial success of
talking and singing film completely changed the industry, but theorists did
not really begin to tackle the sound film in a systematic way until around 1930,
when the techniques of the sound film first began to codify and the European
film industry converted to sound film production. To demonstrate what it was
that early theorists were confronted with in the soundtrack, I begin with five
examples, all essentially one-​shot shorts. These films trace the prehistory of
commercial sound film and demonstrate how, from the invention of cinema, a
range of approaches to the mechanical synchronization of sound existed that
would come to preoccupy film theorists.


Theories of the Soundtrack

Five Vignettes of Early Sound Film
The year c. 1895: “Dickson Experimental Sound Film.” A man, evidently William Dickson (Edison’s primary collaborator on the motion picture camera), plays a violin, as two other men dance in time to the music, a
number from the very popular operetta, Les Cloches de Corneville, by Robert
Planquette. The backdrop is draped in black, setting off the figures; a large
recording horn looms in the foreground. Because the recording reproduces
only the sound of the violin and Dickson’s fingers are hard to see, it is difficult
to evaluate the quality of the synchronization. This short film in its modern
reconstruction by Walter Murch is, moreover, precisely that, a reconstruction,
with significant doubts about its accuracy due to uncertainty about frame rate
among other things. Nevertheless, the large movements of the violin bow and
the dancing figures produce a convincing impression of synchronization in the
This is an image of origin before origin: an experimental film made before any moving pictures had yet to be shown in public, it was not intended to
leave the laboratory. As it was not viewed publicly until its modern reconstruction, it also had no direct influence on other early sound films. Yet it exhibits
many of the traits of early sound films including a static camera, a single shot
that makes the film seem like a recording of a slice of reality, a dark backdrop
that produces a sharp contrast between foreground and background, and a
recording technique that focuses on capturing the foreground sound (the violin) rather than the general sound of the scene (which might have included
the footfalls of the dancers). Even before it arrived, the sound film was already
a construction.
The year 1905: “Dranem Performs ‘Five O’Clock Tea.’ ” Armand
Dranem, a French music hall artist, walks out on stage and begins to sing
and move about. He performs a comic music hall act, a gentle parody of
British manners. The camera remains stationary throughout the number, and
Dranem plays to the camera as though it was his audience. Though Dranem
shuffles about the stage during the instrumental interludes between verses, no
footsteps sound. The focus of the sound recording is on capturing the voice
and accompanying orchestra, not his whole performance.
The result is a film that is obviously postsynced, shot to playback, and the
effect is more akin to an illustrated phonograph recording than the recording
of a slice of reality.
The year 1913: “Nursery Favorites.” Three men appear onscreen singing.
They are evidently on a small stage, with a fireplace located prominently in the
background, and they direct their song to the camera, which serves as a stand-​
in for the audience. As they complete their short song, they turn and throw
some objects to the rear of the stage, which land in perfect synchronization
with a prominent thump. A giant strolls onstage singing, and then the Queen


of the Fairies appears in the fireplace, saying she will cast a spell. Soon the stage
is filled with a whole set of fantastic characters, many singing brief songs using
familiar lyrics from nursery rhymes. Between songs, the characters speak with
the patter of stage repartee.
Like “Dickson Experimental Sound Film” and “Dranem Performs ‘Five
O’Clock Tea,’ ” “Nursery Favorites” utilizes a single shot, but the perspective of
the sound recording is quite different. The Edison apparatus used for “Nursery
Favorites” featured an improved recording mechanism that allowed sound
to be recorded at a greater distance than the standard recording horn of the
time. The sound recording here thus mimics the film image in providing a reproduction of the overall scene. Unlike Dickson’s film or “Five O’Clock Tea,”
the sound recording has not been optimized to capture the musical performance (or the dialogue, much of which is just barely intelligible); instead, the
recording aims for reproducing the sound of the general setting. The result is
the impression of canned theater, as though a stage performance has been recorded and then (poorly) reproduced.
The year 1923: “A Few Moments with Eddie Cantor, Star of ‘Kid
Boots.’ ” After a brief fanfare, Cantor walks onstage in front of a black
backdrop. The recording of the voice is clear and distinct, a marked improvement over the first three films we have considered. It seems closely
miked, and the film gives little sense of the theatrical space except that
Cantor treats the camera like it is a theatrical audience. The sound design
resembles the minimalist staging, which produces the effect of a spotlight performance. The dark backdrop and Cantor’s static body emphasize
the movement of his lips, which display perfect synchronization with the
impressively clear sound recording. After a series of disconnected jokes,
Cantor shifts to a song, explicitly cueing the unseen conductor to begin the
music. As he sings, Cantor also grows more animated, though he is careful
not to stray too far from his original mark, and his footfalls are never audible. The song ends with applause, presumably from an offscreen audience;
Cantor exits the frame; and the image fades. An inconspicuous cut, masked
somewhat by the applause, brings Cantor back for the second part of the
film, which replicates the first formally: Cantor telling jokes and then a song
Overall, then, the film presents a recorded performance, but not the
canned theater of “Nursery Favorites.” The recording process now uses a microphone rather than a recording horn, and the microphone allows the abstraction of the voice from the context of its performance even while sound
and image are recorded simultaneously. The audience applause for the song
is notable for how it emphasizes the silence—​especially the lack of laughter—​
elsewhere. Is this audience real or was the sound of applause added later? As
with “Five O’Clock Tea,” “A Few Moments with Eddie Cantor” is more a representation of a performance than a reproduction of one.



Theories of the Soundtrack

The year 1926: “Introductory Speech by Will H. Hays.” Hays approaches
the camera, winding his way between a table with some sort of box or machine
on it in the background along the left edge of the frame, a small table sitting
in the foreground in the lower left of the frame with a pile of three books, and
a chair, only the arm of which is visible along the right side. The background
is otherwise black, with a “VC” ornament (Vitaphone Corporation) hovering
in the upper right. The identity of this curious set is uncertain, but it seems
to suggest a small study. With the extremely precise diction and careful large
gestures of an experienced public speaker, Hays envisions Vitaphone as part
of the ongoing story of the development of cinema: “Tonight we write another
chapter in that story. Far indeed have we advanced from that few seconds of
shadow of a serpentine dancer thirty years ago when the motion picture was
born to this public demonstration of the Vitaphone synchronizing the reproduction of sound with the reproduction of action.”
Hays’s meticulous articulation demonstrates well the precision of the synchronization, even as his broad gestures point to a difficulty in representing
public speech. Aside from the moving lips, action in the image here seems
indeed to distract, as the gestures, rather than reinforcing the words as they
would in a public setting, take on an autonomous, almost monstrous quality.
Although each of these films captures a recording of a performance, they
display a surprisingly wide variety of approaches as to how recorded sound
should construct that performance. With the exception of the Cantor film,
they all consist of a single shot, and they each present a continuous recorded
performance. Nevertheless, they vary in the extent to which they regard the
recording as a reproduction or a representation. Each of them approaches the
camera as a stand-​in for the audience, playing to the camera if not always explicitly addressing it. Each of them, moreover, is dominated by the soundtrack.
If synchronization means image and sound are redundant—​that the soundtrack sounds precisely what the film already shows or vice versa (and this is
a line of argument that director Sergei Eisenstein especially would develop in
his writings, a line of argument that would be echoed by theorists all the way
to the 1960s)—​in the case of these short sound films, it is the image far more
than the sound that seems superfluous. In the case of “Five O’Clock Tea,” this is
literally the case as the phonograph recording was made first, and the film was
shot to playback to that recording, a procedure that would remain common
in musicals through the era of the classical sound film. The others all involve
recording a fixed perspective as sound and image were made at the same time.
But sound and image do not necessarily or even generally record the same
perspective. In fact, only “Nursery Favorites” attempts to match image and
sound perspective; the others all adopt strategies that focus on capturing clear
singing and dialogue. That is, the shorts emphasize the quality of the sound
reproduction and the fact of synchronization; the quality of the image, by contrast, is more utilitarian. The “redundancy” of synchronization proves, even


in these relatively rudimentary one-​shot sound films, to be a less-​than-​stable
Of course, many classical film theorists would scarcely acknowledge
these films as “real” cinema, since they contain virtually no editing, and the
movement in the image consists largely of moving lips, which emphasizes the
illusion of speech (or singing). These films are not “filmic” or “cinematic” in
a way that Rudolf Arnheim (1933), Siegfried Kracauer (1997), or Jean Mitry
(1997), for instance, would recognize. The hostility to sound from those
invested in the silent film came from the inversion of filmic values that the
talking and singing film seemed to impose. In the early sound film, as the
name implies, sound came first. If, initially, sound film also seemed to insist
on being the recording of reality, the variety of approaches in these sound
shorts suggests that “reality” was itself a construction from the beginning, and
usually less than it appeared. The art of recording worked to mold the sound
before the horn or the microphone so that it recorded only certain sounds.
Phonography may have espoused the value of fidelity, but it usually simply
managed the recording situation through abstraction so that only the sounds
wanted were captured (Lastra 2000). In any event, with respect to sound film,
the far greater impression of reality comes from the audiovisual figure of synchronization than from the fidelity of the sound, and for dialogue and music
usually a clear or well-​balanced sound seems more realistic even when it is a

The Hybridity of Sound Film
The theoretical claim that these early sound films are not cinema belongs to
ontological concerns about the nature and essence of cinema best framed by
André Bazin’s collection of essays, What Is Cinema? (2005). Bazin wrote hardly
at all about the soundtrack, and so he does not figure largely in this book, but
he did articulate a very influential realist theory that argued for a guiding idea
of film as total cinema, “as a total and complete representation of reality,” a
recording of the world. In a famous essay, “The Myth of Total Cinema,” Bazin
argued that the idea of a complete automatic recording predated the existence of the cinema. “Every new development added to the cinema must, paradoxically, take it nearer and nearer to its origins. In short the cinema has not
yet been invented!” (21). As Tom Gunning (2001) notes, Bazin’s myth of total
cinema was a response to the mechanical separation of the senses that had
been inaugurated with the phonograph (14–​16). Cinema both required that
separation and answered “a desire to heal the breach. In other words, Bazin’s
total cinema is a response to a previous sense of desperation and division” (16).
Film, then, was born incomplete, half an invention that was designed to
complement and complete the phonograph. In a caveat explaining the motion



Theories of the Soundtrack

picture camera for the patent office, Thomas Edison (1888) wrote: “I am
motion” (1). The idea of cinema followed from the success of the phonograph,
which had precedence in both conception and execution. He went on to consider their combination:
By gearing or connecting the Kinetograph by a positive mechanical
movement, a continuous record of all motion as taken down by the
Kinetograph and continuous record of all sound as taken down by the
phonograph and by substituting the photograph recording devices on
the Kinetograph for a microscope stand and objective, it becomes a
Kinetoscope and by insertion of the listening tubes to the phonograph
into the ear the illusion is complete and we may see and hear a whole
opera as perfectly as if actually present although the actual performance
may have taken place years before. (2–​3)
Thus, the Kinetoscope is a kind of monstrous scientific device for replicating
opera. A microscope is attached to a large cabinet containing a long strip of
celluloid with a sequence of images attached. A light source illuminates a frame
of the celluloid from behind and the frames move past the gate in succession.
This allows anyone looking into the microscope to have the impression of
images in motion. Mechanical gearing connects a phonograph to the mechanism that moves the celluloid strip through the Kinetoscope, allowing the two
to work in synchronization. Just as the user peers into the cabinet through the
microscope, so too the user places rubber tubing attached to the diaphragm
of the phonograph in the ears. The impression delivered by the cabinet, presuming it functioned properly, would be the synchronization of image and
sound, a reproduction of reality. This device is obviously complex, and the
monstrous quality of the Kinetoscope (which with ear tubes was known as a
Kinetophone) is evident in Figure 1.1. But its basic principles are not really
much different from taking in a video on an iPhone with headphones.
The promised synchronization of Edison’s original apparatus proved elusive, and, as it developed, cinema’s status as incomplete came to mark it as
mute. When fictional films became the dominant commercial form, they became known as “silent photoplays.” This original status of the moving picture
as mute pushed cinema in two directions that will be familiar to those who
have studied the topic of disability: on the one hand, a reformist valorization
of muteness as the distinctive property of the moving picture; on the other
hand, an ableist drive toward completeness and unity, toward Bazin’s (2005)
“myth of the total cinema” that would restore to film what it was missing and
so make it a complete reproduction of the world. In both cases, the binary dynamic constructs cinema around lack and its muteness as a loss. The former
leads to the construction of muteness as a magical state, a miracle of sense, the



Early Edison Kinetophone, combining Kinetoscope and phonograph.

Credit: Thomas Edison National Historical Park.

exception that reinscribes the compulsory character of the normative complete state. The latter leads to the sound film. With respect to the former, the
nonnormative body is one that is exceptional, out of control, or at least not
subject to the full force of the norm. That is where its magical properties derive from and also what makes muteness productive for art, where lack can
be transformed into pathos as a celebration of resilience overcoming adversity. This construction affirms the power of the norm even as it appears to
transcend it, because it marks muteness as other, as a state beyond. It is the
tale of redemptive overcoming, as when Beethoven, for instance, is presented
as wrestling with his deafness and is able to surmount it. So in terms of aesthetic theory as it evolved into the 1920s, the silent film became a distinctive
art form by virtue of its lack, which it displayed in pure form: the muteness of
film bestowed on it its visual dominance and gave gesture and movement the
mark of eloquence. If silent film seemed to promise even to present a distinct
ontology—​moveo ergo sum—​it did so by virtue of its original lack.
The deafness and muteness of the silent film apparatus had been long
recognized by the 1920s, and its prostheses of music and pantomime were



Theories of the Soundtrack

incorporated into the form to produce an affinity, often the appearance of an
integral whole. Yet because the music in particular did not belong directly to
the apparatus, it could bestow a meaning that was not strictly in the film or
could clarify what might otherwise be inscrutable. The relation was in essence
allegorical. As I have written elsewhere:
Music did not substitute for the missing voice, as one common theory has
it, so much as it underscored the absence of the voice, the muteness of the
apparatus, the failure of translation. The face could not say what it would
express. The silence of the cinema was in this sense a sign of its absolute
rootedness within a speech the audience did not—​could not—​hear. The
muteness of the film then marked the limit of universal expression as silence. As the sound of the voice’s absence, music played the face’s displaced
presence to plumb the depths of diegetic interiority. (Buhler 2010, 39)
Entwining music and muteness into an allegorical complex, the silent film also
created a representation that worked with an interiority that was hidden but
still in play. Although the pantomimic code allowed actors to exteriorize some
of this hidden content, and the play of emotions across the face in close-​up
especially pointed to interior emotions and motivations at work, music could
seize on these visual signs and transform them into something more definite
without thereby also collapsing the depth of character or negating the occult
status of interiority. The music sounded like feelings feel, perhaps, but music
did not thereby become the feeling. For one thing, the music emanated from
theater musicians, most often in a special arrangement made by the theater’s
music director from music in its library or improvised by its organist, not from
the screen. Yet since the relation was allegorical, the fact that music did not belong to the film did not diminish its impact. It was common for film theorists
of the silent era to point out how film was conducive to fantasy, and this related
not just to the overt content of exotic settings and the fiction articulated by the
edited images but also to the way music seemed to give access to a fantasy-​
filled allegory of interiority.
The introduction of sound film dissolved the affinities of mute cinema,
declared them unnatural, and forced film to speak through another body.
Talkies “enforced normalcy” (R. Johnson 2017, 2);1 that is, the new sound film
invented and imposed a system of “compulsory synchronization” that mimicked the unity of sound and image in “normal” perception. Initially, it took
the form of a rigid mimetic synchronization. That talkies untied the tongue of

Russell Johnson (2017) notes that the 1920s were a period when oral instruction to the deaf
was heavily promoted, but it was a movement that had been strong since the late nineteenth century—​
essentially the whole period of the silent film—​so the shift to sound film was unlikely to have been
unduly influenced by the cultural attitudes toward deafness except insofar as they encouraged the myth
of total cinema.


film (Green 1929), restored sound to the image, unified what had been divided,
and yielded a more perfect reproduction of the world (Bazin 2005; Gunning
2001)—​all of these attributes gave a representation that conformed to the
normal, the typical, the ordinary, the conventional arrangement of the senses.
The heightened realism of the union made a reality of the normal, typical, ordinary, conventional representation that it returned. Moreover, the early talking
film yielded a representation without depth and interiority: characters were
simply as they presented themselves; the soundtrack defined them much as
the image did, and mimetic synchronization insisted that the sound belonged
to the image.
Yet the established conventions of the silent film also challenged talking
film so that the addition of recorded sound initially appeared itself not so
much as a return to unity but as a new prosthesis. Therefore, to contemporaneous theorists like Arnheim (1997) and other critics like Hilda Doolittle (H.
D.) (1927), the talkies initially seemed a kind of natural monster, where the
voice was uncanny, neither belonging properly to the image nor yet separable
from it (Spadoni 2007). The hybrid quality of sound film, its heterogeneity,
had to be purified, turned into a complex but still singular medium.

Sound Film, an Audiovisual Medium
In the age of the silent film, when the music that normally accompanied the
images was not considered a fixed part of the film, the claim that film was a
visual medium made a certain amount of analytical sense, even if the story
(rather than the images) in fact dominated the conception of commercial film
even then. With the coming of the sound film, which mechanically linked
image and sound, the visual dominance of film could only be maintained
through habit and repeated declaration, ritualistically chanted, as Sarah
Kozloff (1988) puts it, “like a charm to ward off evil” (9). “Story” continued to
dominate the sound film, and the soundtrack, like the images, was generally
subordinated to the task of storytelling. But the medium of the storytelling was
not primarily the images with the sounds as an added special effect. Dialogue
was from the beginning of the sound era considered a key element (dialogue
had in fact been a key element of the silent film as well, as the abundance of dialogue cards attests), and for most of the transition and even into the classical
era, the priority in production fell on the vocal portion of the soundtrack.
There is a reason after all that they are called sound films, talkies, and musicals.
Indeed, as the complaints of directors and other film workers during the transition era make clear, the early sound film was dominated by the capture and
synchronization of sound. The whole routine of film production was upended
and restructured to ensure that sound, especially dialogue, was captured with
clarity and with a continuous flow. In the early years of the transition, dialogue



Theories of the Soundtrack

frequently determined the blocking and editing, since speaking actors needed
to be visible and in the proximity of a microphone, and cuts would almost invariably follow the delivery of the lines.
The hostility toward dialogue among many directors and theorists stems
in large part from the imposition of sound and especially dialogue. Director
William C. de Mille complained to one reporter how sound had upended the
old studio hierarchy: “while once he had been a director of pictures, now he
was nothing but [sound engineer] Roy Pomeroy’s very earnest assistant, with
promise that if he displayed due diligence he might again be promoted to be a
director” (“Too Much Vocal Attention” 1928, 7). Edwin Hopkins (1928) was
even more explicit that dialogue was the central stratum of the new sound
film. “A great revolution is taking place in motion pictures. Voices are presumably being added to films. In reality what is taking place is that films are
being added to voices” (845). As filmmakers adjusted to the new situation
and recovered elements of the earlier visual style, this was not really done at
the expense of the soundtrack. The much-​vaunted “Painted Doll” sequence
from The Broadway Melody (1929), for instance, was guided by its soundtrack.
In histories of film, this scene is often held up as an example of early sound
film overcoming the restrictions of sound technology to restore something of
the camera movement and editing patterns of the silent film. Yet such claims
are misleading. If the camera was “freed” in this sequence and allowed to regain much of its mobility from the silent era, this was because the music was
prerecorded and the whole thing shot to playback. The sequence has many
more edits than the other musical performances of the film, but the visuals,
though “spectacular,” do not determine the sequence; the music does. Similarly,
the ostentatious visuals of the Busby Berkeley musicals from the mid-​1930s
are closely tied to, even motivated by, their music.
If film production during the transition era moved quickly away from the
ideal of recording and mimetic synchronization, of filming a fiction staged
for the camera in order to reproduce it, and returned to the notion of film as
a fiction constructed in the filmmaking process, especially editing, this does
not mean that film returned to being the visual medium it was in the silent
era. The camera regained its former mobility, and scenes were again shot in
a manner resembling the practice of the silent film; but dialogue and song
were hardly diminished in significance, and dialogue in particular continued
to be of primary importance, governing blocking, shot selection, and editing
patterns, because dialogue was fundamental to the story. Indeed, synchronized dialogue became the zero point of sound film practice, even though film
theorists, critics, and directors like Arnheim, Eisenstein, and René Clair continually marginalized the audiovisual figure of synchronization when it was
not simply condemned for redundancy.
Given the status of the talking film as the dominant commodity after
1930, theorists found it impossible to ignore these films, and they needed to


speak to the actuality of sound to domesticate it to the image if for no other
reason. Consequently, a body of theory on the soundtrack did emerge, but it
was a largely antagonistic theory, and its terms were often implicitly stated.
Music as a more compliant sound received somewhat more favorable attention
from theorists, but generally film theory through the 1970s treated the soundtrack as supplemental, a superfluous addition. Because music was only needed
strictly speaking when it was a realistic (i.e., diegetic) element of the depicted
scene, music was also an excellent model for this supplemental status, which
may in part account for its positive treatment from such writers as Eisenstein,
Pudovkin, Kracauer, and Mitry.

Film Sound and “Occult Aesthetics”
If the soundtrack, especially music, has never been the neglected theoretical
object that it is sometimes presented as (Prendergast 1977), the continued
visual bias of film theory means that its treatment has remained somewhat
concealed. Kevin Donnelly (2014) astutely notes the soundtrack’s “occult”
status, which nicely captures both its hidden character as a theoretical object and the magical properties often attributed to it, from sound vivifying
the pictures to music saving the film (2). Here, I want to distinguish “hidden”
from “neglected” and suggest that its occult quality lies, as Donnelly suggests,
in the fact that synchronization especially is not a simple figure but a difficult one. “Retaining a sense of the occult means realizing that hidden aspects
might be the most important ones, and that by their obscured nature, the
most important to pin down” (72). Christian Metz once quipped that “the
movies are difficult to write about because they are easy to explain” (quoted
in Neumeyer 2015, 29), and there is something to this about synchronization
as well. Synchronization appears simple enough, especially if we presume redundancy, but it is actually a rather difficult figure to explain because it is not
really the uniform state we pretend. Often the synchronization is clear enough,
but frequently the lips are hidden, the face is turned or obscured by shadow or
by a veil or mask, the voice comes over a telephone or over a loudspeaker, and
so on. There is an indefinite variety of such semisynchronized cases, many of
which may be at any moment ambiguous but rarely threaten our belief in synchronization. Indeed, often they strengthen it. As Mark Kerins (2011) notes,
contemporary digital surround sound with its capacity to move the sound
around the theater complicates this situation even further but again without
threatening our basic belief in synchronization however it might affect the actual practice (262–​63). The occult status—​whether in classical or in contemporary film theory—​is acknowledged in a term like “synchronization” and its
work hidden and assigned to the image in a term like “redundancy,” which
eliminates the play of synchronization in a single concept.



Theories of the Soundtrack

The sound film is itself at base analytic: it separates image and sound and
records and reproduces them with separate technologies. Playback of a synchronized sound film is a kind of synthesis where our senses of vision and
hearing fuse the stimuli of the two technological streams into a unity so that
the voice we hear from the speakers seems to come from the body we see on the
screen. This trick makes it seem as though reproducing is simply the inverse of
recording that returns an identity in the ideal case (Altman 1980b): where recording analyzes into component parts, reproduction synthesizes the unified
experience. But this unity, though appearing natural, is incomplete and only
a limit case. Indeed, the relation between the streams is more or less arbitrary,
and in fact neither depends on the other: in principle, any recordable sound or
set of sounds can be placed against any filmable image (Altman 1980a, 6). As
Britta Sjogren (2006) notes, “all sounds . . . are equally separate from the image
track in that they are only ‘married’ in the final instance, brought together in
the composite film print: prior to this, they are separable elements which can
be ‘placed’ anywhere one wishes relative to the picture” (6). Of course, few
films exploit such radical autonomy of image and sound, just as few films have
been satisfied to simply record image and sound in tandem as a seeming mechanical identity. And as the five vignettes I started this chapter with suggest,
synchronization yields a particular construction of difference more than an
Both classical and contemporary theorists have generally started from this
implicit scenario, which is structured by poles of mimetic synchronization on
the one hand and autonomy of sound and image on the other. From Eisenstein
and Pudovkin through Hanns Eisler and Theodor W. Adorno to Kracauer,
classical film theory formulated a basic opposition between synchronization
(or parallel) and counterpoint around this scenario, and Donnelly (2014)
merely continues a long tradition when he writes, “matching or not matching
sound and image (so-​called parallel and counterpoint) might be construed
as different ways of thinking” (1). Where synchronization is troubled by the
figure of redundancy, counterpoint is haunted by indifference.
What is concealed by this formulation are other concerns, often exposed
at the poles, such as that what appears “real” under the press of mimetic
synchronization is often fabricated; sounds of violence—​
punches, kicks,
gunshots—​especially are rarely the actual sounds they represent. In the early
days of sound film, this was because loud sounds often overmodulated the
soundtrack; today it is often because they sound too puny for the power they
are meant to represent. Michel Chion (1994) notes that synchronization is a
powerful audiovisual figure because it can weld sound and image together
over a much wider range of variability than we might initially think (224). He
calls this process “synchresis” (63), and even in cases where we become aware
of a disjunction—​a small child, say, speaking with an adult voice—​we still are
willing to attribute that voice to that body for the purposes of the fiction.


Synchronization also has other important effects that are easily lost when
the theoretical emphasis falls on redundancy. “A focus on synchronization,”
Donnelly (2014) writes, can help us “radically [rethink] . . . the ‘space’ between
sound and image” (1). First, mimetic synchronization establishes an indexical
bond between sound and image. Synchresis reminds us that this bond may
not be real, but it is virtual, and it can be actualized in the diegesis. In this way,
sound comes to have its source in the image. The reverse case of the image
indexically calling forth a sound, director Robert Bresson claims, never occurs
(cited in Burch 1981, 90). Ironically, synchronization secures a certain precedence for the image that it enforces through terminology that understands
sound with respect to the image, notably the distinction between onscreen and
offscreen (Percheron 1980; Kalinak 1992).
Second, mimetic synchronization is less a mark of realism than a mark of
pertinence. Synchronized bodies are important bodies, bodies that the film
cues us to pay attention to. The audiovisual figure of synchronization, in other
words, divides an image into foreground bodies and background bodies, those
that have synchronized sounds associated with them and those that do not,
and then it imports “narrative sense” to naturalize the hierarchical formation
of an ordered fictional world. Such hierarchical work of synchronization is
evident in the preview screening of “The Duelling Cavalier” in Singin’ in the
Rain (1952). In the scene, Lina plays with her necklace, which makes a loud
rumbling sound; she turns away from the microphone, which audibly changes
the volume and timbre of her voice; Don throws his staff, which lands with a
loud thud; and so forth. The humor of the scene comes from the misbehavior
of sound, which is not unrealistic but instead simply a faithful recording. The
scene is disorienting because the sound seems narratively impertinent. R. F.
Simpson, the studio head, wonders about the sound of the pearls because they
are incidental to the scene, simply part of the costume, but their thunderous
sound suggests an inexplicably ominous tone. The thud of Don’s staff makes
it seem like the throwing of the staff rather than his entrance is the important
matter. The changing perspective of the microphone emphasizes Lina’s turning
head rather than her words. Synchronization does not reinforce the narrative
hierarchy in this scene but rather runs against it. The sound traces out a line
of sound effects without narrative cause, and the humor indicts it as improper,
not because it lacks sufficient fidelity with the promicrophonic sound but because it reproduces disordered reality rather than the fiction of hierarchy.
In contrast to mimetic synchronization, counterpoint has been the critically favored term by some theorists precisely because counterpointed sound
is not redundant with the image. Counterpoint reveals a novel potential to the
sound film, aspects of the audiovisual relationship that cannot be achieved (or
at least are difficult to achieve) in other ways. But it also creates inherently ambiguous asynchronous figures and juxtapositions where image and soundtrack
grow remote. At one extreme, anempathetic music or sound can nevertheless



Theories of the Soundtrack

remain expressive: a death occurs, say, and the sound of the motor keeps
going, happy children resound in the background, joyful music plays on the
radio, and so forth. Composer Max Steiner (1937) recognized the dramatic
power of this device: imagine, he says, a nightclub with a jazz orchestra playing
and a daughter notified of her father’s death: “it would be absolutely wrong to
change from the hot tune in progress to music appropriate to her mood. . . .
[N]‌o greater counterpoint has ever been found than gay music underlying
a tragic scene” (224–​25). The juxtaposition registers the indifference of the
world (Chion 1994). At the other extreme, music or sound simply goes its own
way with a kind of absolute indifference, an indifference that ceases even to be
expressive. At this extreme, the figure of counterpoint is conceived in such a
way that it does not impinge on the image and so does not call into question
visual dominance, even if the indifference might make us wonder about its
Early theorists of the sound film such as Eisenstein and Arnheim were especially hostile to dialogue, but even later writers such as Eisler and Adorno,
Kracauer, and Mitry continued to harbor serious misgivings over it, probably
because dialogue offered the greatest threat to the claim that film is a visual
medium. The better argument against dialogue, which was voiced early, has
always been that it makes sound film irreducibly anthropocentric. Béla Balázs
(2010b) had suggested already in 1924 that the silent cinema treated things
and people equitably by refusing speech to both. “Since [a mute object] does
not speak less than human beings, it says just as much” (23). In 1938, Arnheim
inverted the formulation. Sound film, Arnheim said, “endows the actor with
speech, and since only he can have it, all other things are pushed into the background” (Arnheim 1957, 227). By favoring some figures with dialogue, sound
film marks those who speak as special objects.
Other arguments against dialogue worked to separate film from theater.
Writing in 1930, director René Clair (1988), for instance, thought that the
talking film would “survive only if the formula suitable to it is found, only if
it can break loose from the influence of the theater and fiction, only if people
make of it something other than an art of imitation” (58, emphasis in original). The viewpoint was common, even in the earliest days of the transition.
Director William C. de Mille, for instance, was quoted by Variety: “The new
form is going to be dominated more thoroughly by the technique of the picture
than by the technique of the stage. . . . The talking picture will not be a stage
play photographed. It will be a motion picture that talks” (“Too Much Vocal
Attention” 1928, 7). And this line of argument would continue throughout the
classical era, parodically summarized by Alberto Cavalcanti (1939): “A play is
all speech. Words, words, words” (31). Theater and film are similar, then, but
theater is dominated by dialogue, whereas film is dominated by the image.
This distinction would be picked up by many subsequent theorists, including
Kracauer and Mitry, although neither opposes the sound film per se. Dialogue


in film, like sound in general, therefore becomes a property or extension of the
image, and this idea, which remains dominant, was revoiced by Metz, Gilles
Deleuze, and even in modified form by Chion and David Neumeyer.
The conception makes for a neat distinction between film and theater, but it also conceals the importance of dialogue to film, which is often
governed by the rhythms and needs of dialogue. That observation does not
mean that such films are “really” species of recorded theater. Even in films
governed by dialogue, the dialogue is usually structured differently, pithier
and without theatrical cadences. And the dialogue occurs with images, which
emphasizes different things depending on whether the image speaks (as in
synchronized dialogue), listens (as in a reaction shot), or shows something
else (as in a voiceover, in a shot showing the subject of conversation, or in a
shot of something else suggesting a distracted camera) (Kozloff 2000, 100).
The more important factor to film dialogue, however, and one that is not often
scrutinized, is that it is designed to be recorded, edited, and mixed. Among
other things, this means that the pace and delivery of film dialogue can be far
more nuanced, with much more emphasis in the writing to finding ways to
allow the actors to draw out the “grain” of the voice to suggest layers of characterization. Even in the case of direct sound and improvised dialogue, the dialogue is still designed to be recorded, with emphasis falling on capturing the
“reality” rather than scripting of speech. Like the image, recorded dialogue is
a material to be worked on in editing and mixing the film, not the thing itself.
Music, not dialogue, has been the preferred theoretical object, in part because it is a more compliant partner to the image; in part because it is unreal,
a special occult object; and in part because its work is not well understood by
audiences. This is true of both classical and contemporary theory. If Claudia
Gorbman (1987) describes film music as largely “unheard,” this does not mean
that audiences do not hear it in the way that they do not hear the inaudible
sound edits, only that it is unobtrusive much like the editing of a film is inconspicuous. Music remains accessible but out of sight, like the reverse side of
the image. On the other hand, music associates with the image in a different
way than effects and dialogue do. When it is nondiegetic and unreal, music
can express what the image in itself cannot, especially characters’ moods and
feelings. And this expression in turn posits a psychological world hidden beneath the surface of the images. Music divides the image into exterior and
interior, into visible and hidden regions. With unreal music, the psychology
of the characters can be more evident, can appear more real. This mimetic impulse of film music has been often criticized, presumably because it suggests
the inadequacy of the image, but nevertheless the idea that music underscores
feeling remains generally accepted, even basic to the theory of film music, and
we will encounter the idea repeatedly in the pages that follow, for instance, in
the discussions of Aaron Copland, Gorbman, Kathryn Kalinak, and Annabel
Cohen. Indeed, even theories that object to music expressing feeling will



Theories of the Soundtrack

generally accept that music often needs to take flight from the image in a lyrical extension if it is going to productively engage the film (Jaubert 1937; Eisler
and Adorno 1947).

This Volume
A theory of the soundtrack is concerned with what belongs to it, how it is effectively organized, and how its status in a multimedia object affects the nature
a theory may also delineate the range of possible uses of sound (and music),
in film. My goal in this volume is not to provide an exhaustive historical documentation but rather to sketch out the range of theoretical approaches that
have been applied to the soundtrack over time, and to do that within the broad
conceptual frame already outlined in this introduction. For each approach,
I present the basic theoretical framework, consider explicit and implicit claims
about the soundtrack, and then work to open the theories to new questions
about film sound, often by putting the theories into dialogue with one another. The organization is both chronological and topical: the former in that
the chapters move steadily from early film theory through models of the
move equally steadily through—​and highlight—​central issues for each generation: the problem of film itself, then of image and sound, of adequate
analytical-​descriptive models, and finally of critical-​interpretative models.
Chapters 2 and 3 provide an overview of how sound and music were
addressed in classical theories of film. Chapter 2 examines several major
theories that emerged during the transition to sound film, when even the
definition of the sound film was contested. I begin by discussing the specificity of sound film and its seeming inherent hybridity, since it combined two
disparate technologies: camera and projector for the image, microphone and
loudspeakers for the sound. Here, the idea that sound film would specialize
in mimetic synchronization, in making a recording of the world, came into
conflict with ideas that an artwork needed to be specific to its medium on
the one hand and with the edited nature of the silent film on the other. The
theories of sound film that arose during the transitional decade from 1926 to
1935 focused on the closely related forms of recorded theater and silent film
and worked to articulate how sound film differed from them. They also gave
considerable attention to asynchronous sound in part because it was a figure
specific to sound film (or in any event more difficult to produce in other art


forms) and in part because asynchronous sound had affinities with montage.
The chapter focuses on five important theorists who wrote prolifically during
the transition years: Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Béla Balázs, Rudolf
Arnheim, and Harry Potamkin. The first four are well known: Eisenstein and
Pudovkin as directors, Balázs and Arnheim as cultural critics (Balázs also
worked as a screenwriter, and Arnheim would go on to an important academic career). Potamkin, also a critic, is not as well known since he died young
and his essays were not collected into a book until the 1970s. But he offers a
distinct approach—​the “compound cinema”—​that manages to escape the theoretical quandaries faced by other writers during the transitional era.
Chapter 3 examines theories after the sound film had been codified. The
theories produced during this period are less concerned with whether sound
film is a viable artistic form than in mapping the terrain. As such, the characteristic forms of theory became the grammar and typology: the goal was
to map the potential formal relations between image and sound. Despite the
commercial dominance of talking films, theorists during this period continued to insist that film was primarily a visual medium. This manifested itself
especially in a theoretical suspicion of dialogue and the “redundant” audiovisual figure of mimetic synchronization; indeed, considering the importance
of dialogue to talking films, theorists actually had little to say about it other
than to recommend that filmmakers keep dialogue pithy, vernacular, and subordinated to the images at the level of construction. Music in many respects
served as the preferred theoretical soundtrack object because it was much less
likely to call into question the visual dominance of the medium. Moreover,
because background music often only had a nebulous relation to the narrative
(theorists at the time called it “unreal”) that did not accord with the terms of
realistic representation, music also required theoretical explanation.
To show the range of ideas that this line of thinking inspired, I look at
six theoretical models focusing on the treatment of music. I open with a discussion of Eisenstein’s concept of vertical montage and consider the modes
of synchronization that he developed from the concept. I then turn to Aaron
Copland’s typology of functions for film music. Copland worked as a composer in Hollywood and produced several variants of this list of functions,
as well as a list of reservations. I next consider Hanns Eisler and Theodor
W. Adorno’s Composing for the Films, one of the most important theoretical
treatments of film music. Eisler also worked as a composer, first in Europe
and then in Hollywood during World War II. Adorno was also a trained composer, who is best known for his writings on critical theory. I focus on their
response to Eisenstein, their critique of Hollywood practice, and their list of
“bad habits,” which is similar to Copland’s reservations. The chapter concludes
with discussions of three formal typologies offered by Raymond Spottiswoode,
Siegfried Kracauer, and Roger Manvell and John Huntley. Spottiswoode was
a British theorist and documentary filmmaker. Kracauer was an important



Theories of the Soundtrack

cultural critic in Frankfurt during the Weimar Republic and became an academic when he immigrated to the United States. Manvell and Huntley were
both prolific authors who worked for the British Film Institute. The typologies
of Spottiswoode, Kracauer, and Manvell and Huntley all seek to map the conceptual space of the image–​sound relationship in film. Spottiswoode and
Kracauer develop their typologies within the context of general theories of
film, whereas Manvell and Huntley are concerned specifically with understanding the place of music in film.
Each subsequent chapter takes up a topic and charts its development
over a portion of the historical range from the 1960s to the present. Chapter 4
starts with the issue of the “film language” and examines how the concept
served to ground film semiotics. Both film and music have been called universal languages, and this language-​like quality meant that both areas were
inviting objects to the emerging academic field of semiotics. The concept of
“film language,” much like “musical language,” had an informal sense that
related to materials and devices that could be assembled to make a sensical
arrangement that resembled a syntax. In this informal sense, the concept
worked as a vague analogy. Jean Mitry, a French film historian and theorist,
thought the analogy with language was useful but limited. Film is a language
because it communicates, but it does not have grammar and syntax like verbal
language. He would make an analogous argument with respect to rhythm
in assessing film’s similarity to music. After looking at Mitry’s contribution,
I turn to film semiotics proper and consider especially the influential work
of Christian Metz, who inaugurated the field. Metz attempted to understand
film as a language using the tools of structural linguistics. Like Mitry, Metz ultimately rejected the idea that film is a language, but he also shifted the focus
from grammar to signification. The importance of this shift can be seen in his
analysis of “aural objects,” where he examined sound as a characteristic of the
image, which becomes a way of acknowledging that sounds signify somewhat
differently than images do in film while upholding the visual dominance of
film. The chapter closes with a discussion of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the
movement-​image. Deleuze, a philosopher, was not concerned with the film
language per se, but he did presume that filmmakers think in images, and
his mode of analysis drew extensively from the semiotic tradition of Charles
S. Peirce. Deleuze himself offered mostly cryptic comments about the soundtrack, especially as it relates to the movement-​image of classical cinema. I use
the typology Deleuze developed for the movement-​image and seek analogues
in the treatment of the soundtrack.
In ­chapter 5, I consider the topic of formal theories and models, starting
with the movement of so-​
called neoformalism in film studies and then
examining four models that have affinities with it. Neoformalism emerged
in film studies about the same time that Metz abandoned his search for
a semiotic basis for a film language and turned instead to narratology and


psychoanalysis. Neoformalism in fact shares many concerns with semiotics,
structuralism, and Russian formalism, the last of which is the historical basis
for neoformalism in film studies and had a decided influence on the development of structural linguistics and structuralism. Following a brief overview
of neoformalism, I look at a number of scholars working within the tradition. Film analyst and historian Kristin Thompson presents a manifesto for the
analytical approach of neoformalism. Film historian David Bordwell draws
an analogy to musicology to formulate a different research program for film
studies based around the study of the art form. Noël Carroll, a philosopher and
film theorist, proposes an account of how music serves to modify the narrative
situation. Thompson, Bordwell, and Carroll are closely associated through institution and coauthorship, and although they do not agree on all particulars,
their work does show a broad shared vision of research.
The other authors considered in ­chapter 5 are not as closely aligned, but
they each share a similar concern with analysis and they all work to develop
models of how the music subsystem works in relation to the other subsystems
of film. Kathryn Kalinak, a film historian working on film music, develops
a working model for film music from an analysis of Captain Blood (1935),
and I organize her model to reveal better its underlying theoretical structure.
Nicholas Cook, a music theorist, proposes a model of pairwise multimedia
interactions that is useful especially for disentangling and assessing the claims
of other theories of media interaction. David Neumeyer, a music theorist and
historian of the soundtrack, reworks Michel Chion’s concept of vococentrism
into a full model of the integrated soundtrack. Annabel Cohen, an experimental psychologist, has over the past twenty-​five years developed an increasingly intricate cognitive model of how film music is perceived that confirms a
number of speculations and presumptions of other theories. Although taking
a very different methodological approach, Cohen produces a model that is
similar in many respects to other formal theories. The similarities and above
all differences of emphasis in these models illustrate the range of potential for
this kind of theoretical work.
Chapter 6 focuses on narratology, like semiotics a descendant of structuralism that developed outside of film studies and was later applied to film. In
some respects, these approaches resemble neoformalism (and there is more
than a little overlap), with an emphasis on the film (or soundtrack) as the object (which has now become a text). The chapter opens with a discussion of
narratology in film. The second section covers narratological theories of the
soundtrack, especially music, which was one of the first subsystems of film
to have its theory rewritten in explicitly narratological terms. Film historian
Claudia Gorbman’s Unheard Melodies (1987) made a key intervention here, as
she combined narratology with aspects of the then-​dominant psychoanalytic
theories to produce a compelling new reformulation of music’s place in the
soundtrack. The remainder of this section considers contributions by Chion,



Theories of the Soundtrack

Giorgio Biancorosso, Robynn Stilwell, Jeff Smith, and Ben Winters—​all scholars
working on the soundtrack—​and it traces how the basic conceptual distinction
of diegetic and nondiegetic music that Gorbman introduced has evolved. The
next section looks at the important narratological concept of focalization as
it applies to music in film. To amplify the range of the concept, I engage film
music historian Guido Heldt’s recent book on narrative level and work.
Chapter 7 considers critical theories of the soundtrack, and c­hapter 8
examines how aspects of these critical theories have been combined with psychoanalysis. Critical theories are in some respects the flip side of neoformalism
and structuralism: where neoformalism and structuralism seek a disinterested
perspective, critical theories insist on political interest; where neoformalism
and structuralism require objectivity, critical theories reveal that objectivity as
subjectively constructed. When scholars today say “film theory,” they usually
have in mind one of the modes of critical theory (Marxism, postcolonialism,
feminism, queer theory, critical race theory), or the so-​called apparatus theory
(considered in ­chapter 8) that combined semiotics, Marxism, and Lacanian
psychoanalysis into a heady mix that would dominate debates in film theory
for much of the 1980s. Critical theories nevertheless draw on many of the same
analytical tools as neoformalism and structuralism but put them to different
critical ends. Because critical theories aim to reveal, analyze, and explain a political interest that is concealed in a general ideology, the analysis often takes
hermeneutical form where the political interest is read out of the structure
of the film, which is at the same time understood as a concealed ideological
stratum. The forms and structures of the film are assumed to be determined
by the ideological forces of society. Critical theories thus often engage in ideology critique, distinguished from older forms of ideology critique in being
more focused on deconstructing forms, techniques, and structures rather than
identifying explicit ideological contents. Critical theories are also often concerned with the analysis of power, the traditional modalities being race, class,
and gender. In current usage race is usually expanded to include issues of ethnicity and colonialism, and gender expanded to include issues of sexuality and
Specifically, ­chapter 7 is devoted to general issues of critical theories and
the soundtrack. The first part considers its origins in Marxism, the analysis
of ideology, postcolonialism, and issues of labor. The largest portion of this
section examines the theory of musical topics (musical topics are conventional musical passages that signify generally like “stormy” or stereotypically
like “Indian”) and subjects the concept of musical topic to ideological critique.
The second part of the chapter contains a lengthy discussion of how debates
over gender and sexuality have influenced thinking about the soundtrack. The
analysis of gender and sexuality forms one of the major branches of critical
theory, and in terms of the soundtrack it has developed the deepest literature.


Chapter 8 examines the influential film theory that derived from the intersection of semiotics, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. The resulting so-​called
apparatus theory proved contentious but very influential, especially the concept of suture, which provided a model for film spectatorship and subjectivity.
Though apparatus theory itself is rarely embraced today in full form, many of
its concepts have remained useful. This chapter concludes with a section on
neo-​Lacanian theory and uses it to explicate the very influential soundtrack
theory of Michel Chion.
Chapter 9 serves as a conclusion to the whole project, arguing that
the conception of digital and “new” media in terms of “convergence” has
emphasized a shift in both aural and visual dimensions toward a general purpose rendering fixed on producing distinct feelings and sensations and away
from a reproduction and screening of real events. This turn away from semiotic indexicality as a grounding for film has met considerable resistance, which
has revealed the extent to which film theory remains bound to a conception
of film as a recording of reality and ultimately to André Bazin’s “myth of total
cinema,” however much film theory also understands film as a representation and so recognizes whatever reality it represents as inherently and necessarily constructed. This chapter concludes by sketching out some theoretical
implications of the soundtrack in the context of digital media.



Early Theories of the Sound Film

Introduction: The Specificity of the Sound Film
The earliest theories of sound film attempted to determine its nature and aesthetic possibilities by asking what was specific to it. They asked: What is sound
film? What are its fundamental bases? How, if at all, does it differ from silent film and recorded theater? What is the role and status of recorded sound?
How do image and sound relate? Is synchronization an accidental, emergent,
or ontological relation? In particular, these theories responded to the basic fact
that the sound film combines two sets of distinct technologies: camera, film,
projector, and screen, on the one hand, and microphone, record, phonograph,
and loudspeakers, on the other. Sound on film substitutes a sound strip for
the phonograph record and a sound head for the needle, but the technologies
remain distinct even when image and sound are printed together on the medium of film. Despite the fact that sound film was supposed to restore the
unity of sight and sound denied in the reproduction technologies of (silent)
film, phonograph, and radio, the distinctions in technology for reproducing
image and sound prompted theories that emphasized the basic hybridity of
the sound film apparatus and so also conceptual opposition of the two sets of
In several lengthy articles and a short book written in the late 1920s,
American cultural critic Gilbert Seldes offered one of the first extended public
attempts to theorize the new sound film. Drawing on a critical tradition that
grounded the cinematic art in the specificity of the medium of film and in the
technique of montage, Seldes sought to ground sound film similarly in the
specificity of the medium as such, which he located in the properties of the
technology, notably in the division between the camera and the microphone,
between the screen and the speakers: “The essential problem of the talkie is
to find the proper relation between the camera and the microphone” (Seldes
1929b, 298). Seldes, who was neither explicitly for nor against the talking film,
recognized artistic possibilities in the divided apparatus, and consequently saw



Theories of the Soundtrack

no need to yoke them together to form a unified perspective, as many writers
committed to sound film as a recording medium distinguished by its ability
to unite image and sound do. Seldes, in fact, argued that attempts to enforce a
unified perception was one of the major difficulties of the talking film because
it so restricted the possibilities of the camera. The difficulty of the talkies, their
lack of action and mobility, followed not from the nature of the medium per
se, but from (1) the immobility of the microphone and (2) the demand for mimetic synchronization, the demand that camera and microphone reproduce
the same perspective. Given the state of the technology in the early transition
years, the result could only be an unnecessarily static camera.
To break the impasse, Seldes explicitly rejected the model of perceptual
realism that dominated the thinking of those who developed the technology.
As a doctrine, perceptual realism insists that the technology should mimic
human perception, and the rule of mimetic synchronization grew out of this
doctrine, construing the apparatus as a recording device for the senses of
seeing and hearing. Other writers of the time, notably Vsevolod Pudovkin,
would question whether mimetic synchronization yielded an adequate model
of perceptual realism, but Seldes attacked the notion that there was a good
reason for the talking film to be dominated by mimetic synchronization.
Instead of accepting perceptual realism as the basis for the sound film, then,
Seldes instead looked for ways of putting the technological differences between camera and phonograph, screen and loudspeaker into aesthetic play.
The point, he said, was not to impose an artificial unity by synchronizing the
two technologies in a way that forced the technologies to conform, but rather
to find a way to allow each technology to follow the nature of its mechanism
and to regulate the result so that they coordinated in an artistically convincing
way even if they did not express an identity. Seldes analyzed the situation thus:
The voice in the talkies is recorded by one mechanism, the movement by
another. . . . The microphone is comparatively stationary; the camera is
mobile to the highest degree. From this separation of function it should
have been clear at the start that, while the voice might go on steadily,
the camera could leave it behind, could show not only the listeners, but
whatever else was relevant to the action at the moment. The producers
immobilized the camera in favor of the microphone; the result was not a
new form of entertainment—​the true talkie—​but a combination of movie
and phonograph. (1929a, 455–​56)
For Seldes, the early conception of the sound film was too bound to the recording of the voice, which had the effect of turning sound film into something resembling an illustrated phonograph recording.
Seldes’s analysis perceptively recognized that the phonograph and the
cinema have differing representational conventions, and the theory he developed is more interesting than most from the early transitional era in that it

Early Theories of the Sound Film

locates an aesthetic ground for sound film that allows the talkie to define a medium specific to it rather than understanding it either as a mere recording of an
event or as a silent film plus sound recording. Seldes’s theory focused on how
to reconcile speech with camera mobility, by which he primarily meant editing
rather than camera movement during a shot. And along with preserving the
editing of the image, he sought a purposeful (rather than mechanical) place
for dialogue. He argued that the talking film must show “a feeling of the necessity for speech which the talkies can use in relation to silent pictures—​speech
not as an accident, not as a toy, not as an additional attraction, but something
demanded by the nature of the whole which they have created” (Seldes 1929c,
147). For talking film to become an art in the way silent film was an art, it
had to “become thoroughly itself—​to be not symphonic music, not opera, not
movie—​but a distinct thing, growing and changing in accordance with its own
laws, as human beings grow, as all the arts grow” (154). The double technological base of the talking film made this a complex demand, and one that would
not be answered until the parameters of sound film had been worked out and
codified in the 1930s.
Seldes’s approach emphasized the technological basis of the sound film
and attempted to draw the nature of the sound film from that. Most theorists
of the sound film during the transition period focused less on the technologies
as ontological determinants and more on preserving the editing procedures
from the silent film, even when they looked for the artistic grounds of sound
film’s specificity. These theorists, which include most of the authors covered in
this chapter, were concerned about the emphasis on dialogue turning sound
film into talking film, and like Seldes they worked to denaturalize—​or at least
question the necessity of—​the audiovisual figure of mimetic synchronization.
But in general they understood the ontology of film to lie in the representational capacities of montage (the edited moving image), and argued that an
effective sound film therefore needs at least to preserve the montage of silent
film or find novel ways of extending it.
In this chapter, I examine in depth the views of five important theorists
who wrote during the transition to sound. Each of these authors recognizes
the great technological advance of the sound film, but they are all troubled
in some fashion by how dialogue fundamentally altered the cinematic values
that had been established with the silent film. The unrelenting mimetic synchronization of the early talking film made for a difficult audiovisual figure,
hard to work in editing and deeply hierarchical in content. On the one hand,
the moving lips of the image are difficult to part from the voice. Sound frequently does not allow the same freedom of editing as does the image, as edits
in the middle of a word radically alter the meaning or even render it meaningless. The sounds, especially the voice, are also “sticky”; once dialogue and
image were affixed to one another, filmmakers initially found it difficult to
cut away until the full line had been delivered. This considerably slowed the



Theories of the Soundtrack

tempo of the editing and forced the rhythm of montage to follow the delivery
of dialogue rather than the theme or action. On the other hand, talking also
transformed the structure of the image, or rather forced a new hierarchical
arrangement on it. Synchronized bodies are important bodies, and characters
speaking dialogue command the image to a much greater degree than was
the case in the silent film. The theories considered in this chapter therefore
give significant attention to synchronized dialogue and asynchronous sound.
Because of its important place in the silent cinema, music continued to receive
substantial attention from theorists, who often invoke it not just for a set of
metaphors but also to imagine an ideal relation of sound and image.

The Statement on Sound and the Concept of Counterpoint
I begin with the response to sound film from the Soviet Union. When sound
film was commercially introduced, Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin
were two of the most important directors of Soviet cinema. The “Statement
on Sound,” written by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Grigori Alexandrov with the
passion of a manifesto, appeared in 1928 before any of the signatories had seen
a sound film.1 The authors argue that synchronized dialogue is antithetical to
montage: “Sound used in this way [as synchronized dialogue],” the authors
direly warn, “will destroy the culture of montage, because every mere addition
of sound to montage fragments increases their inertia as such and their independent significance” (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov 1988, 114, emphasis in original). The idea of inertia is inspired, as it recognizes a stickiness
to synchronized sound that makes editing sound film much more fraught than
images alone. But the problem lies not just in the way the segments of sound
film are more resistant to montage. The inertia also makes the segments less
pliable, and the authors feared that synchronization as a mechanical principle
(rather than a theme or even a story) would come to determine the montage,
partly to ensure the illusion of reproduced reality, partly because sound and
image condense into a difficult audiovisual figure whose unity isn’t merely an
ideological illusion.2

The “Statement on Sound” was first published in July 1928 and appeared in English translation
in October of that same year in the journal Close Up. The more commonly encountered translation
appears in Eisenstein (1975), which was first published in 1942.
Arguably, Eisenstein would come to reorient his whole conception of montage around this recognition. Whereas his conception of montage during the silent era remained principally concerned
with cutting and joining on the basis of purposefully developing a conflict on the basis of a theme, his
later conception of montage was a much more general principle that suffused all of the arts. In terms
of film it meant that he gave much more analytical attention to montage within the shot. This had the
effect of making his later theory of montage much more diffuse.

Early Theories of the Sound Film

To counteract the inertia and to restore the flexibility of montage,
sound cannot be simply synchronized with the image but must rather
be “treated as a new element of montage (as an independent variable
combined with the visual image)” (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov
1988, 114). The authors thus advocate for a “new orchestral counterpoint of
visual and sound images.” Famously, they argue that “only the contrapuntal
use of sound vis-​à-​vis the visual fragment of montage will open up new
possibilities for the development and perfection of montage” and urge that
“the first experimentations in sound must aim at a sharp discord with the
visual images” (114, emphasis in original). Counterpoint thus becomes synonymous with montage and with the asynchronous use of sound. The latter
would also become the privileged theoretical mode of sound, since it is not
redundant with the image.
In Soviet theory of the silent film, as in much film theory of the 1920s,
montage was considered the constructive element of film and also what distinguished cinema from other arts (Eisenstein 1988, 113). As early as 1926,
Eisenstein had defined his artistic principle as “the rational constructive composition of effective elements; the most important thing is that the effect must
be calculated and analyzed in advance” (75). And montage was the primary
method to do this in film. The authors of the “Statement on Sound” argue that
sound film has the potential to solve certain “imperfections” in the methods
of silent film (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov 1988, 114). Sound, they
say, offers “an organic escape” from “blind alleys” of silent film that include
intertitles and “explanatory” sequences (long takes) (114). Silent film frequently
required the use of these devices or complicated alternatives that resulted in
“fantastical montage constructions” that were difficult for audiences to follow
(114). Sound film, the “Statement on Sound” argues, provides fresh solutions
to these intractable problems.

Sergei Eisenstein and Counterpoint
Writing in the wake of the “Statement on Sound,” Eisenstein (1988) remained
enamored of the idea of the sound film, so much so that he could assert that “the
whole future of our cinema and an as yet unimagined range of opportunities
for social influence lies with sound cinema” (129). He dubbed this new form
of film, one guided by audiovisual counterpoint, “absolute sound cinema,”
in which sound would be “organized by means of the cinematic recording of
noises and untempered sounds.” These sounds would in turn be distributed
across the film in a planned fashion: “neither anarchically nor by recording
sounds ‘as they really are’ but by the strict organization of the selection of
sounds and it is by no means obligatory for these sounds to correspond to the
event that is taking place” (131).



Theories of the Soundtrack

Although his enthusiasm for sound film continued after Hollywood
and Europe had converted to talking pictures, he remained unconvinced
of dialogue’s efficacy: “I think that a 100 per cent talking film is nonsense
and I believe everyone agrees with me” (200). Nevertheless, Eisenstein understood that the international success of the talkie meant that sound film
would have to deal with dialogue in a substantive way. He favored a freer
approach to it than deployed in Hollywood, arguing, for instance, that
matching of volume to image scale was often unnecessary in the cutting
of dialogue. “All depends on the intention of the author of the film. In
order to eliminate a particular effect or to produce an unexpected effect,
you can and must emphasize the discrepancy between the sounds and the
distance of the filmed object from the camera” (133). Thus, Eisenstein
shifted the basis from mimetic reproduction to directorial planning: the
intention of the director convincingly executed would make sense of any
treatment of sound. Although the mimetic synchronization of a mechanically reproduced scene might seem natural, Eisenstein argued that it
presented an acute danger because the director tacitly ceded control to the
machine. Eisenstein’s formulation, by contrast, demanded that any deployment of synchronized sound be meaningful. Such a meaningful deployment of synchronization occurs, for instance, when the intention or theme
of the film requires such an alignment, or when the conflict between image
and sound could be brought to its greatest pitch through synchronization
rather than mismatch.
Eisenstein remained too suspicious of synchronized dialogue to pursue
these options during the early years of the transition to sound; and when he
returned to develop the concept of vertical montage, his attitude toward dialogue had changed sufficiently that he no longer required a special theory
of montage to handle it. In summary, then, Eisenstein’s ultimate evaluation
of the audiovisual counterpoint comes down to deciding on its efficacy for
articulating the theme of the film.

Vsevolod Pudovkin and Asynchronous Sound
Like Eisenstein, Pudovkin privileged counterpoint and asynchronous sound
long after the “Statement on Sound” was published, but even in his theoretical writings from the transitional period, Pudovkin’s underlying issue with
synchronized sound was less the redundancy of image and sound per se than
the fact that mimetic synchronization was a mechanical figure that often ran
counter to the needs of the story and theme. Because of its proximity to the
story, Pudovkin’s account of counterpoint and asynchronous sound was also
more easily accommodated by Hollywood than Eisenstein’s more thoroughly
dialectical one.

Early Theories of the Sound Film

Pudovkin argues that “the first function of sound is to augment the potential expressiveness of the film’s content” (1949a, 156, emphasis in original).
Sound, Pudovkin says, allows for a deeper presentation of the content and for
a more rapid delivery of information. For Pudovkin, the audiovisual figure of
mimetic synchronization, though not a necessary condition for sound film
and often unduly naturalized as though it was, nevertheless adheres in the
idea of the sound film and can be used in an aesthetically successful manner
whenever it increases expressiveness. Consequently, compared to Eisenstein,
Pudovkin focuses more on the indexical qualities that arise from the asynchronous relationship than any all-​encompassing meaning that emerges from
their formal juxtaposition.
Analyzing the formal possibilities for treating dialogue in sound film,
Pudovkin notes that an exact coincidence of image and dialogue is only one
option, and often the least interesting because it tends to make film into a
species of recorded theater, especially when a single shot is used to cover the
scene. Pudovkin deems this approach to be extremely primitive, essentially
a reversion of film to a simple medium of recording as in the earliest days of
silent film. He finds the related approach of editing the scene to follow the
dialogue with each change of speaker bringing a cut to the image of the new
speaker to be something of an improvement, because it at least recognizes that
film receives its power from selecting pertinent elements from the whole and
giving them emphasis. But this approach does not resolve the basic issue. In
this case, Pudovkin argues, “the director has made of montage and editing no
more than a cold verbatim report, and switched the spectator’s attention from
one speaker to another without any emotional or intellectual justification”
(1949a, 159). The procedure, in other words, leads to an empty formalism, one
that simply follows the dictates of the raw material, rather than articulating
that material in a way that responds to a thematic need of the film.
Nothing in the sound film, however, binds image and sound into a necessary unity, and in fact the sound strip permits cutting just as readily as the
image. “The sound record on film is, in general, as pliable a material as the
pictures film on which the image is recorded. This record can be cut and edited,
more—​on occasion it must be cut and edited” (1949b, 81–​82). Even in cutting
dialogue, the rhythms of editing image and sound do not need to coincide
(1949a, 168). Pudovkin argues that asynchronous sound is a technical means
of domesticating the technology, allowing the sound film to eliminate the dead
intervals of mimetic rendering and to synchronize its rhythms instead to the
theme. “Directors lose all reaso