FilmStack Challenge #4: Sound in Cinema Prioritizes Audience Imagination

What are the best uses of sound in a "visual" medium? Ask Robert Bresson!

This is a response to the ongoing FilmStack Monthly Challege started by

Ted Hope

and this month proposed by

Swabreen Bakr

. Previous challenges: Challenge #1, Challenge #2 and Challenge #3.

The Eye Goes Outward, the Ear Inward

I am a diehard Robert Bresson fan (French, 1901-1999), so it’s natural for me to write a sound-focused post on him and his filmmaking strategies. The funny thing is, I went through film school without ever hearing about him! It was so much harder to find obscure films back then, no Criterion Channel, no YouTube, no SubStack, etc. I found his work in adulthood, talking with fellow film lovers on set between takes.

The closest thing I had in school were the films of Hal Hartley, introduced to me by my film teacher Jill Godmilow, and he was influenced by Bresson for sure - both filmmakers using the 50mm lens for entire features, forcing actors to go against their dramatic instincts and creating their own special worlds on camera.

But especially for Bresson, the ear was more important than the eye.

He wrote a series of filmmaking “meditations” for himself over the years that were collected as “Notes on Cinematography,” which delved into his ideas on how to be an artist and how film is a different medium from theatre and other art forms. He wanted filmmaking to be its own art, not borrowed, not imitating, creating new forms of emotional charge.

And to judge by the following “Note,” Bresson wasn’t messing around:

The TALKIE opens its doors to theater, which occupies the place and surrounds it with barbed wire.

Sounds painful, right? Don’t trip. Makes me think of “no-man’s land” in Paths of Glory (Kubrick, 1957). In case you weren’t sure how committed he is, Bresson follows it up with:

Two types of film: those that employ the resources of the theater (actors, direction, etc.) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create.

He wants film to be an art form that creates its own form, not submit itself to filmed theater. Nothing wrong with the theater, of course. But watching a film should be a different experience, not a FATHOM EVENT. Or worse.

The terrible habit of theater.

CINEMATOGRAPHY is a writing with images in movement and with sounds.

So, what’s his solution? He has many, but for the purposes of this challenge, I’ll focus on how he proposes to use sound in order to expand the cinematic world that the audience can or can’t see.

For one, he wants to use the soundtrack to create a rhythm in the progression of the story, to have the audience focus on the sound as part of the storytelling rather than as a means to move things along (like a Hollywood soundtrack that tells you how to feel at any given moment).

Rhythmic value of a noise.

Noise of a door opening and shutting, noise of footsteps, etc., for the sake of rhythm.

This approach to noise appears throughout his projects, but one of my favorites is the opening sequence to A Man Escaped, which begins in a car with French Underground fighters who have been captured by Nazi’s and are now being escorted to prison and certain death.

Bresson does not give us a foreboding musical soundtrack to guide our experience or understanding - he has just concluded his opening credits, which feature a glorious rendition of Mozart’s “Kyrie” from Mass in C Minor as we stare at the prison wall. There is no escape in A Man Escaped, or is there?

The music soars, and the viewer can’t help but feel God’s grace through Mozart’s sound, powerful enough to break down the walls of Jericho, let alone this Nazi prison camp.

Then silence.

Then the sound of a car engine, he fades in on a man’s hand (Fontaine) as it tests the door latch, tilts up to his face, then down and left to reveal his compatriot handcuffed to an officer. We hear the car change gear and then cut to his perspective as the driver starts to slow.

Will he escape? It is the title after all, but the car speeds up again, and Fontaine settles back, but still alert. The sequence builds with one possible slowdown after another - a horse cart gets in the way, along with other traffic, and finally we hear the ding ding of a street car, which a few shots later comes to block the path.

Tires screech! The man escapes. But the camera stays static, focused on his empty seat.

We hear the chase, sounds of Nazi secret police footsteps and shouts, gun shots ring out. Why aren’t we moving with him?

Oh, we come to realize, he isn’t escaping, is he?

The chase sounds quiet down, and we hear footsteps approaching. Finally, Fontaine is roughly pushed back into his seat, handcuffed, and beaten with a pistol. He never had a chance, but in my imagination, he could have almost made it. I see him running for his life, dodging pedestrians and traffic, ducking around a corner, but it’s all in my head.

What’s for the eye must not duplicate what is for the ear.

Your imagination is always going to be more interesting than what’s on screen. How many times have you been scared at a horror film, only to lose the tension once the monster finally appears on screen?

Bresson knew that sound was the key to imagination, rather than image.

TELL, don’t SHOW, to reverse a common filmmaking axiom

When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it. The ear goes more towards the within, the eye towards the outer.

Image and sound must not support each other, but must work each in turn through a sort of relay.

The eye (in general) superficial, the ear profound and inventive. A locomotive’s whistle imprints on us a whole railroad station.

Throughout his career, Bresson was always implying a larger landscape. When the priest arrives at his first parish in Diary of A Country Priest (1951), he opens the door and pauses, looking to a passing horse drawn cart, but we only see his face and hear the cart, forcing us to put the small country town together in our minds. This is the essence of his approach - invite the audience to participate in the creative act and get involved in the artwork. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barks.

In the following scene, from deep into the Priest’s struggle, listen to the surrounding sounds that Bresson layers to fill the space. Where is he? Who is approaching from off screen? So many subconsious layers to puzzle out and draw us into the experience at a deeper level.

A few more Sound Quotes to Inspire Your Inner Ear

This one, seemingly written specifically for Christopher Nolan:

Your film must take off. Bombast and the picturesque hinder it from taking off.

And to bring it all home, a quote which applies nicely to our distracted age:

Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.

So, for all those lamenting the disaster of phone addicts, there’s nothing new here, Bresson saw it years ago. And in case you thought Seinfeld was original:

Cinematography, the art, with images, of representing nothing.

And for the NonDē community, a special observation that was true then as now:

Hollow idea of “art cinema,” of “art films.” Art films, the ones most devoid of it.

The future of cinematography belongs to a new race of young solitaries who will shoot films by putting their last cent into it and not let themselves be taken in by the material routines of the trade.

Savage burn from the dead French guy. RIP, Robert!

And if you don’t believe me, take it from genius film critics Bordwell and Thompson, presented by Criterion: