Film Sound

Nicolas Roeg makes an interesting point about the advent of sound in his recent book 'The World is Ever Changing', a collection of the directors thoughts and experiences in film-making.

He says that the introduction of film sound in 1927 had a detrimental affect on movie making in terms of what could be achieved visually in order to tell a story.

In Napoleon (1927), the last great silent film, Abel Gance told his story using astounding imagery. He pushed the boundaries of image making using techniques that were way ahead of their time, breathing life into the camerawork using innovative techniques like strapping the camera to a horse's back and projecting the final reel on three screens at once, different images interacting with one another across the screens. And then came sound.

Early sound films were shot with the camera housed in a bulky casing to muffle it's whirring mechanism. This made it impossible to get anywhere near the movement and freedom that Gance had shown with Napoleon. Shots became static, film-making took a step backwards. There was also a change in basic film language and the way stories were told, over emphasis was put on dialogue and films became obsessed with the spoken word pushing back the importance of the image.

Roeg believes we are only just catching up with where Gance had got to with film's visual development and two recent films that seem to support this theory are Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin and Miguel Gomes' Tabu. Both films break with the conventions of traditional film-making and value image and sound above spoken dialogue.

What little dialogue there is in Glazer's film is often left low in the mix and delivered  in the thick Scottish accents of the covertly filmed members of the public who make up the majority of Scarlett Johansson's supporting cast. Here's a recent interview with Jonathan where he talks about the guerrilla tactics of the crew and why it's taken him 9 years to finish the film:

Jonathan Glazer on Under the Skin

The second half of Tabu does away with dialogue altogether even though the characters are seen talking to each other, but it is far from silent. Voiceover plays over the top of heightened FX and atmos tracks lending the film a hypnotic dreamlike quality which perfectly suits the old man's memories being illustrated.

Tabu clip