Artificial, Natural, Historical: Ambiguities of Synthetic Sound in Documentary Film

This paper discusses the role of synthetic sound in the construction of authenticity and historicity of documentary film in the light of the documentary “All that we have” [9] and its making. It argues that the delimitation between the “natural” and the “artificial” constitutes a key element in the reflection on documentary film sound. After a general inquiry of cinematic sound (part 1 and 2) it is shown what role algorithmic composition can play within a process of investigating notions of “authentic source” and “historical identity” (part 3 and 4). 1. THE AUTHENTIC SOURCE “[Sound film] has conquered the world of voices, but it has lost the world of dreams. I have observed people leaving the cinema after seeing a talking film. They might have been leaving a music hall, for they showed no sign of the delightful numbness which used to overcome us after a passage through the silent land of pure images. They talked and laughed, and hummed the tunes they had just heard. They had not lost their sense of reality.” René Clair [3] Pleasant or unpleasant, many commentators who have experienced the transition from silent film to sound film describe a similar experience: It seems as if film had woken up, had lost its dream-like character. In the new genre of ‘talkies’, the human voice had entered the scene and brought with it a whole field of narrative possibilities, which were used excessively, and still today dialogue forms one of the main dimensions along which most films are organized. Dialogue is to a great extent tied to the correlation of voices to their according persons: It is the person who is the cause of the voice, and, from the perspective of the narrative, it is the person’s network of intentions, obligations and contingencies that causes what is said. The dream-like character of the silent movie period might be a result of a distortion of this causal relation: It seems as if a person tried to say something, but no voice leaves her mouth — then, a little later, we read in the following intertitle what has been said. The sensorimotor cycle is inhibited by the temporal interval that separates visual from the narrative, and opens a space for the psychic and for the ambiguity between inside and outside. Closing this gap, though, does not dispel the doubt about who is the true originator of an utterance: Was something said because the author wanted us to hear it? Was it said by a character in order to cause an action of another character? Is it an intrigue altogether? One can never be sure. At least the truthful source of the voice itself will be eventually reaffirmed, in a “cartesian strategy”, by the consistency of physical causality in filmic space: The consistency of “natural sound” provides the necessary background for the voice’s corporality. To this end, the sound is composed so that coincides with the picture in an expectable manner, forming a causal texture for the events. Thus, the physical impression of sound is the seal on the authenticity of their material source: the spoon rattling next to the cup, a quiet harrumph, or the famous footsteps in the gravel. In fiction film, the origins of actions usually is either attributed diegetically to the film’s inner logic and its characters, or simply to the motivation of the authors. Conversely, a documentary film is expected to be faithful to actions that either happened while the picture was filmed, or to those that happened possibly long before, where documentary takes on the role of a witness to the past. This fidelity can be passive, in the sense that the ‘profilmic’ actions are untouched by production and simply reflected, it may also be active in the sense that the film investigates In Triebe und Triebschicksale [7, p. 212] (1915), Freud describes the first differentiation between inner and outer world as the result of the experience that some stimuli can be avoided by muscular activity (e.g. escape), while others, necessities caused by drives, withstand such attempts. For Bergson, the indetermination between action and reaction is a key function that creates two systems: one in which the images change dependent on the movements of a single image (the body) and one for which the images vary by themselves (“Matière et Memoire”[1, p. 9]). This investigation of indetermination is taken up by Deleuze and serves as a basis for the distinction between image types [6]. The films by Ernst Lubitsch, such as ‘To Be or Not To Be’, are a good example for the extensive use of intrigue in dialogue that was common in the early talkie era. Figure 1: A scene from All That We Have, situated on a location of local historical relevance in order to clarify the delimitation between fact and fiction. This expectation is rooted in the promise, that the agency of protagonists, be they human or non-human, inscribes its trace as directly as possible into the film’s diegetic space. This explains the critical role of ‘natural sound’ in documentary film: It is witness to the ontic status of its material cause and stabilizes the realist perspective of the documentary dispositive. 2. NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL Interestingly, in the early sound films, the film music is very often diegetic film music — some of the films circle magically around dancehalls, attractive musicians, or find other excuses to place a musical sound source somewhere. Keeping in mind the conventional role of natural sound in film, this is no surprise. Contrary to silent film, by placing musical instruments on screen instead of letting them play in the “cinematic orchestra pit”, they are naturalized as material sound sources, thus closing the sensimotor cycle and, to a degree, freeing film from its psychic ambiguities. Just like fiction film, many conventional documentary films use nondiegetic film music as an emotional background, or as a compositional method, e.g. to smooth out picture sequences. This sound texture also provides an honorable accompaniment for the ‘voice of god’, who tells the audience what the picture means. At first, this seems to contradict the fidelity of a documentation — but it is clear, that instead of supporting the topos of direct transmission, it enhances the audience’s faith in the sincerity of the witness, repreThe definition of diegesis is debated: This term was coined (by Etienne Souriau) in opposition to the term ‘narrative’, to refer to all the film’s denotations, to the totality of the fictional world in which the narrative is only a part. Thus, nondiegetic sound conventionally denotes sound that is not caused and cannot be perceived by anyone who is part of the film’s denotative space. Background music and off-screen narration are therefore nondiegetic elements. But not unlike the distinction between form/content or medium/message, it is an external decisionabout where the delimitation is to be drawn. For a controversial discussion of these issues see e.g. [2] sented by the narrator’s voice. As long the level of explanation, which can be ‘artificial’ (i.e. fabricated by the film), is distinguishable from the level of the object, which needs to be ‘natural’ (i.e. factual), an ‘authentic’ relation between the two can be established. In conventional documentary, this relation is expected to be a clear separation between the observer and the observed, where the diegetic sound sources are what is observed, and the nondiegetic sound forms a sedan on which the observer is brought safely to the end of the film. One might argue that a film can hardly be in control over its interpretation and the attribution of authenticity is a complicated process. Since its early stages, there have been numerous film makers that have (implicitly or explicitly) made the documentary genre itself a subject of their work. Investigating the frontier between the attribution of artificial and natural provides a frame that allows us to reason about how sound may work in films that attempt to reflect on how authenticity is caused or fabricated. This study is likely to get involved in the relation between physical acoustics and whatever falls outside of this category. 3. THE SOUND OF HOME “[ . . . ] this feeling of unity and the history and all that . . . that’s what we want to preserve, that’s our heritage, our roots, that’s where we came from, we didn’t just fall from the sky, that’s our real history [ . . . ] without the past we’re nothing, that’s my opinion anyway. You can’t just go around claiming that we just suddenly happened, and here we are, now, and it’s all good and everything that was, was bad. That’s . . . history has taught us . . . oh well, that should’ve . . . I don’t want to stray from the point, . . . and the logical consequence of all this would be to build a Local History Museum.” Quite similarly to the natural and authentic, the past is an embattled place. Both objectivity and identity depend on a consent on what has happened so far, and any dispute about what is real and what is allowed seems to unavoidably revert to history. Since individual memory as well as the past ‘itself’ are inaccessible, external, timeless representations of past events serve as proxies and educational means to establish a stable notion of historical fact — on the level of the universal (like the state) or the local (like a family). History as a science maintains a distinct skepticism toward the idea of consistent history and holds that the historical is characterized by contingency regarding the past events, their mediation and their interpretation today. The documentary ‘All That We Have’ [9] investigates a typical representation of local historical identity, a local history museum in northern Germany. Being a documentary film It can be claimed, e.g. that the differentiation between fictionality and nonfictionality is independent of the film itself, but is the consequence of an “implicit contract” between viewers and producers [11]. Helmut Wattenberg, town archivist, transcript from an interview 2002 Regarding individual memory, the same skepticism has been maintained by psychoanalysis of course. — a classical medium of historical representation — it simultaneously makes it a subject of discussion what role film plays in the production of authenticity. Following the list of important localities that is published in the museum’s book “Lebendige Heimat” the film is composed of a series of panoramic 360◦ panning shots (e.g. Figure 1). The voice off-camera explains the history of the place, why it is characterized by a series of fires over many centuries, and that, as there are hardly any historical buildings left, a place of historical identity is indispensable. In a fluent transition, the male narrator’s voice blends into a female voice, who explains the more recent history of the local history museum itself, which has been set fire to regularly since the 1970s. The pictures show places that bear traces of a certain particularity, but obviously fail to present any authentic ‘past-as-past’. While the moving gaze of the camera sometimes gets hold of a car or a person, we have a particular, but fairly generic outlook until the cumulation of the final scene. Due to the peculiarities of ‘natural sound’ in documentary film that embed the observer in an envelope of authenticity, the film sound in ‘All That We Have’ investigates the border between natural and artificial sound. The terms “natural sound” and “original sound” often refer to the same thing. This indicates that the idea of the ‘origin’ is typically tied to the idea of the ‘natural’, which is another clue suggesting a certain inconsistency may be caused by the desire for authenticity. In order to be able to abstract from references to origin, the film restricts itself entirely to sound synthesis algorithms and does not use location sound recording. In a conversational process from memory, without listening or analysis of any recordings, the authors tried to find the sound for a certain situation. Negotiating a possible reconstruction of a sound memory, each of the acoustic situations is an acoustic portrait, or in some cases a sound icon of what could be called the phantasmatic sound object. Partly, this results in a kind of hyperrealism, where each sound is overly clear and separated, an impression that is magnified by the fact that in most cases one can only hear the sound whose source is visible. On the other hand, the unity of space is dubious — on many occasions the physical origin of the sound clearly becomes suspicious (Figure 2). Lacking clear locality, the attribution of the origin becomes perceivable “Living Homeland”, see: [8] The speakers are: Sarina Tappe, Helmut Wattenberg and Volko Kamensky German “O-Ton” The algorithms have been implemented in the programming language SuperCollider ([10]). Apart from the offscreen narration, no recorded sound has been used as material. The soundtrack was programmed during the year 2003 by Julian Rohrhuber, in conversation with Volko Kamensky, at the Hamburg Art Academy. It was mixed down by Alberto de Campo, Rohrhuber and Kamensky at the Academy of Media Art, Cologne. In this way it could be claimed (in contradiction to Metz) that the impossibility of off-screen sound is only conventional: Metz had stated a fundamental difference between image and sound due to the fact that, according to him, there is no off-camera in sound, as it always surrounds the audience. Figure 2: An agricultural vehicle is passing a church, a pipe organ is playing inside. as a process, sometimes even as a deliberate choice of the observer. Instead of attempting to simulate what is sufficient to cause a smooth and realistic impression, ‘All That We Have’ plays with the borderline of failure of what may still count as authentic. Since eventually, what specifies the sound is a program text, we may infer that the natural itself is a kind of text that is inscribed by the intervention of an investigation of truth. 4. SOUND AND FORMALISM What is the origin of an algorithmic sound? Usually, real sound synthesis tries to construct a simplified, but precise model of a physical situation according to the scientific formalisms that were developed in order to reason about natural causality. Once such a model is implemented, typically, the parameters of the physical model are controlled from a graphical user interface, setting cue points along a timeline. Experimentation is done with different parameters of the model, adjusting them to their appropriate values. Both the formalism that was originally used to implement the application, as well as the algorithmic process itself are not interesting at that point, because on the level of simulation, the object already exists. While such a procedure causes similar abstraction effects, by itself, it presumes the existence of the natural entity on the one hand, and formally reconstructs the unity of space on the other. In other words, the origin of the algorithmic sound is the simulated object that is mediated through the timeless mechanism of