chris@sloth.bc.ca (Chris Brougham) (06/15/91)
Ideology Cinema Sound Technology - Part 2
Chris Brougham 1991
Ideology in the Soundtrack
The film sound track may be seen to play a role in this process
by presenting a whole and unified acoustic diegesis that does not
disrupt and make apparent the movie watching experience as an
experience. In "Ideology and the Practice of Sound Editing and Mixing"
Doane maintains that "Symptomatic of this repression of the material
heterogeneity of the sound film are the practices which ensure
effacement of the work involved in the construction of the sound track"
(Doane, 1985: 53). The presentation of an "uncodified" flow is much the
same as that of the Quattrocento perspective. In this way, the
perceiver of the film is placed in a position much like that of the
interpellated subject in society or someone who is viewing a painting
rendered through this method. However, the sound track also reflects a
different mode of reality than that of the visual images. Doane (1985),
drawing on the work of Barthes (1972), maintains that the ideology
predominant in bourgeois society is of an empiricist order, and thus
"the ineffable, intangible quality of sound -- its lack of concreteness
which is conducive to an ideology of empiricism -- requires that it be
placed on the side of the emotional or the intuitive" (Doane, 1985: 55).
Sound effects, for example, whose sources are off-screen can heighten
dramatic moments by implying danger for the characters, and music is
often employed to heighten certain dramatic moments.
There are other difficulties for sound in emulating the illusion
of Quattrocento perspective. For example, dialogue is usually given
predominance over all other sound effects and music even when the visual
logic of the shot would necessitate unintelligible dialogue, as in a
crowd scene. Thus the "realism" of Hollywood narratives "operates
within an oscillation between two poles of realism: that of the
psychological (or the interior) and that of the visible (or the
exterior)" (Doane, 1985: 59). However, whenever possible the sound
track is constructed in such a way as to match the visual logic of the
film. Long shots are matched with sound levels that attempt to mimic
the spatial distance of characters or events, and sound reverberation is
most always in correspondence with the physical dimensions of the visual
space of the action. Moreover, synchronization (perhaps an acoustic
counterpart to alignment with a painting's vanishing point) is
absolutely essential for the Hollywood film, and this has engendered a
complex array of techniques and technologies that will be examined
shortly. There are conceptual and methodological problems in the above
outline of ideology and cinema which must first be engaged.
It seems that Doane is suggesting the ideology of bourgeois
capitalism is informing this sound editing process and that the social
organization of sound editing is somehow responsible. However, there is
no explicit delineation of why this particular practice constitutes a
reproduction of bourgeois ideology. Marxist filmmakers also engage in
similar sound editing practices, and although the theoretical language
which describes their procedures might be more sophisticated, the end
result is similar: synchronous dialogue, sound effects, and music. It
is clear, though, that the major difficulty that Doane has with this
mode of signifying practice is that, being based on the Quattrocento
system, it effaces the work that goes into creating a sound track.
Since Brecht, elaboration of the materiality of an art form has been a
concern of avant-garde practice, and it is clear that this form of
modernism has been transplanted to film studies.
There are two readily perceived difficulties with this
effacement argument. The first is that it is highly problematic to
maintain that the effacement of production occurs in the process of
Hollywood filmmaking. Within this practice the productive processes
themselves are, and have always been, culturally prominent, albeit in a
bourgeois way such as highlighting the budget of a film or the
pyrotechnical strategies used for special effects. Yet this does not
distract from the fact that the production of a film exists alongside
the cinematic images as products available to every movie goer to
consume. On the level of form, Belton (1985) and Johnson (1989) have
also touched upon the point that sound technology can never completely
reduce the noise in the system and so never fully effaces its signifying
system. It should be added that if the technology moves away from an
analog base towards a digital one their concerns would no longer apply,
and so it would seem that the stronger critique lies in the fact that
Hollywood cinema is overtly positioned as a product.
The second difficulty of the effacement argument is that realism
is only problematic within an Brechtian position. Luck cs saw no
difficulty with realist representation, and the debate between him and
Brecht is still important and not at all settled on the side of the
strategies of estrangement.
There are other problems as well. An analysis that posits an
exclusive relationship between the mode of production, of both
Quattrocento perspective and the sound track, and the ideological
effect, without considering the intervention of either the history,
social class, or cognitive predispositions of the receiving audience,
reduces film analysis to a simple base/superstructure model of Marxism.
Williams (1973) notes that artistic practice is often considered in
terms of an object that then undergoes analysis in terms that are not
unfamiliar to an undialectical Marxism. The model of analysis outlined
above considers film as text-as-object, which is then analyzed in terms
that correspond with this base/superstructure model. That is, the base
of film sound may be considered as the practice of editing and mixing,
which includes the specific technologies, social organization of the
labour, and economic considerations; and the superstructure is the
finished product and its corresponding (though not unproblematic)
ideological effect. Although Williams suggests that this
base/superstructure model is most wanting in relation to the performing
arts since a continual interpretive activity is at play, it also applies
to film sound since the acoustic events are always actively perceived by
an audience in a specific historical moment as members of distinct
cultures and classes and with certain cognitive predispositions,
something which the model of film analysis Doane offers does not
address.
It would seem that Doane's methodology is lacking precisely
because of the conceptual framework surrounding ideology and the
subject. Lovell (1980) has suggested that these issues are not well
developed by Althusserian Marxism since Althusser delegates the subject
to a specific ideological realm (misrecognition) and thus is incapable
of offering its own experience as a form or real knowledge. Perceivers'
encounters with film, therefore, are completely unimportant, for they
will receive the ideological effect regardless of whether they are
lawyers in Canada or shipbuilders in Japan. And again, Doane's position
reflects the highly anti-realist position of an aesthetic theory
developed from the Althusserian position. Since Althusser maintains
that knowledge is only obtainable through the second-order process of
theory, any empiricist-like phenomena, such as Hollywood narrative film,
will de facto be ideological. Finally, the ahistorical reading of
bourgeois ideology results from a notion of subject that is based
exclusively in psychoanalysis, a theoretical paradigm that does not
place history in high priority.
In summary, an understanding of the ideological effects of
cinema might, therefore, be somewhat more complex than contemporary film
theorists might admit for a number of reasons: (i) the concept itself
might be used equivocally as Mills' and Goldstick's re-reading of Marx
seems to suggest; (ii) the concept's Althusserian re-definition is too
all-inclusive and thus verges on meaninglessness as Lovell and Carroll
maintain; (iii) the concept of effacement within Quattrocento
perspective is problematic and plays too large a structuring role in the
claim that Hollywood cinema reflects bourgeois ideology; (iv) Williams'
observation that the methodology applied in analysis verges on an
undialectical Marxism; and (v) it would seem to be ahistorical as it
relies on psychoanalytic definitions of the subject and, as Vilar shows,
Althusser's anti-empiricism verges on a problematic idealism.
Yet, frequently the cinema does convey certain cultural norms
and values associated with the bourgeois class. For example, in Mildred
Pierce (1945), Mildred's punishment (the arrest of her daughter Vida)
for her transgression of the culturally sanctioned role of mother in the
bourgeois family most certainly conveys the ideological predisposition
of the bourgeois class in the 1940's. But is post-war ideology the
hallmark of bourgeoisie gender ideology today? If there are traces of
it still in existence does it reside in the same form? Do (did) all
social cultures and classes perceive this ideological formation the same
way? It is the socio-historical progression of the ideology of gender
that is the interesting question, but which the Althusserian
conceptualization is not well placed to answer since all one can say is
that any and all forms of a film's articulation are ideological.
It would seem then that if the sound track were exclusively
examined in relation to this guiding concept of ideology, the film
theorist would be primarily concerned in discovering ways in which the
music, sound effects, and dialogue operated in accordance or discordance
with dominant ideology. Since this concept of ideology has a rather
rigid definition, there is not too much to say about the employment of
sound in Hollywood cinema. Moreover, by adopting this ahistorical
account of the effect of ideology, the film theoretician will in fact be
trapped in a process of determining the articulation of ideological
effects using the same conceptual tools for films as temporally and
narratively disparate as Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and Total Recall
(1990). There are other difficulties as well. How, for example, do
cognitive psychological models of the perceiver fit into the paradigm of
interpellation? In other words, what kinds of sounds affect the
perceiver in what ways, how do these sonic events figure into an overall
theory of the auditor, and are these culturally determined or universal?
And finally, if film theorists adopt the Althusserian notion of subject
inscription, how is it possible for Hollywood cinema to realize any
other mode of expression other than that handed down to it by Donatello,
since the all-encompassing presence of bourgeois ideology operates
unconsciously on all subjects in capitalist society? If everything is
analyzed within the boundaries of the all-encompassing "bourgeois
ideological" programme, film theory really has nothing new to say since
what will be said about future cinema will (has already) be informed by
concepts which fail to undergo extensive scrutiny.
Technology and Ideology
The debate concerning the ideological nature of cinema
technology surfaced with the publication of Jean-Patrick Lebel's 1971
"Cinema et Ideologie" in Nouvelle Critique. This was an intervention by
Lebel into a series of articles published in Cinethique by Marcelin
Pleynet concerning the inherently ideological makeup of cinematic
technology, particularly the ideological articulations inherent in the
camera (Comolli, 1990: 215-16). It is here that Pleynet maintains that
the film camera "produces a directly inherited code of perspective built
on the model of the scientific perspective of the Quattrocento" (quoted
in Comolli, 1990: 215). Lebel, to the other hand, maintains that cinema
may be understood as a product of scientific invention since perceptual
effects produced by cinema can be explained in psychological and
physical terms -- and for this reason alone cinema cannot be considered
ideological.
In response to this, Jean-Louis Comolli published "Technique and
Ideology" which set out to "correct" some problematic assumptions that
were adopted by Lebel. Comolli's (1990) critique is a two pronged
investigation into the claim that cinema's technological base
necessarily engenders a non-ideological product.
The first query Comolli raises is methodological and concerns
the emphasis placed on the camera. Out of the many other technological
dimensions of cinema only the camera is considered theoretically as
either the wellspring of ideology, as Baudry (1980) and Pleynet maintain
or, as Lebel would have it, the guarantor of an ideologically neutral
cinema. Comolli suggests that cinema is too wide a field to narrow
all-inclusive claims about its nature to a single apparatus, no matter
however important that apparatus might seem. This in fact turns out to
be an ideological rather than a materialist approach to understanding
the nature of cinematic technology, since concentrating on the camera as
the "site" of ideology implies the primacy of the visual imagery and
engenders a "hegemony of the eye" over other "repressed" elements such
as film stock and sound (Comolli, 1990: 217-18).
The second strategy of inquiry for Comolli is an historical
investigation of the development of cinema technology. It is here that
Comolli shows that a purely scientific understanding of cinema
technology is impossible. Among the histories of cinema Comolli surveys
he finds fissures and disruptions that strongly suggest cinema is not
the primary result of scientific investigation. The fifty-year lag
between the development of all the necessary technical components of
cinema and cinema's beginning, as well as the contradictory accounts of
the purpose of cinema-like apparatuses, suggest that there was no
concerted scientific drive to realize the cinema (Ibid: 217, 224-25).
For example, when the chronophotograph -- virtually similar to the
Lumiere's cinematographe -- was developed, its sole purpose was to
analyze the physiology of movement. The images produced were looped
abstract representations of human forms that stand in stark contrast to
the monochromatic images produced by the cinematographe. The difference
in the two devices, according to film historian Deslandes, is
ideological since the former was used solely to analyze movement and the
latter to represent movement (Ibid: 225-6). From these and other
observations Comolli concludes that although cinema's history "may lack
pointers towards science, it does point to economics as a major
determining factor in the establishment of cinematographic technique;
and, through a two-fold social demand/response process, economics is
linked to ideology" (Ibid: 226). This claim is borne out through noting
the accelerated drive towards cinema's realization after the
introduction of Edison's financially successful Kinetoscope.
Moreover, Comolli disagrees with Lebel that previous historical
accounts of cinematic development, specifically the account given by
Andre Bazin (1967), are hopelessly idealist rather than materialist and
thus incapable of providing a strong foundation to counter Lebel's
scientific claim for cinema technology (Comolli, 1990: 221). Comolli
instead suggests that Bazin's account quite clearly reveals the
ideological nature of cinema technology since (i) Bazin's observations
on the representational function of cinema are generally correct in that
cinema is first and foremost a signifying practice; and (ii) the nature
of Bazin's highly humanist and idealist reading of cinematic history
serves as a metacritical pointer to the idealist nature of cinema
itself. Comolli achieves this later reading by critically engaging the
texts of Bazin (and Lebel) and illustrating the methodological
shortcomings of their readings. Comolli points out that these readings
not only first repress and then reconstruct teleological and idealist
histories based on singular phenomena (in this context, the
scientificness of Lebel and the supra-realism of Bazin, which are both
structured around the camera, which in turn embodies the ideology of
Quattrocento perspective) but also completely fail to take economic
determinants into consideration (Ibid: 220-2, 229, 236). These
accounts, then, provide ideological rather than material histories of
the evolution of cinematic technology.
This outline of ideology offered by Comolli clearly articulates the
extent to which ideology informs cinema technology and the histories of
that technology. This is not surprising since the Cahiers project is
deeply informed by Althusser. But does not Comolli offer something more
than a token reference to the real-concrete by emphasizing the role of
economics played in the development of cinema technology, and does he
not include real historical observations in the analysis? The problem
becomes one of degree, of how much influence economics plays in
technological development, and of Comolli's assertion that Lebel
privileges the scientific above the economic. It is here that the
exclusive rejection of Lebel's claim on the basis that he failed to
apprehend the economic is incomplete. It may be suggested instead that
technological developments include both economic and scientific
parameters and that their ideological effect results from specific
convergences of the historical and social.
In fact, this is where Comolli's analysis falls far short. In
identifying the "repression" of historical fact, which Lebel allegedly
engages in, Comolli closely follows a reading of history that is in
consort with Althusser's schema. Breaks, disruptions, and repressions
of history are foretold by Althusser; Comolli merely has to apply Theory
to the historical object and he will uncover them: the fifty-year lag,
the repression of historical consideration of cinematic elements other
than the camera, and the privileging of science. For cinema technology,
what he finds as determinant is economics (in the last instance) and not
science. It would seem that while emancipating economics from this
historical repression, and chastising the ideologist Lebel, there has
been a repression of the scientific. Lebel might be a bad historian,
but it is unlikely that he is a mouthpiece for the bourgeois class.
* * *
Since there has been considerable attention given to a critique
of ideology and its application in film, it may be useful to offer a
tentative definition of the term before the topics of Nagra magnetic
tape recording and Dolby are explored. Since the problem seems to be
one of breadth more so than its potentially non-pejorative meaning,
Lovell seems to offer a reasonable alternative definition:
"Ideology, then, may be defined as the production and
dissemination of erroneous beliefs whose inadequacies
are socially motivated. This definition recognizes two
other categories: erroneous beliefs which are not so
motivated, and valid beliefs which are, but places them
both outside the category of ideology." (Lovell, 1980:
51-1)
This definition has the advantage of locating the ideological
significance of beliefs within a socio-historical framework and
attributing much more significance to the factuality of the beliefs
themselves rather than, as Althusser does, the ideological status of
epistemological questions, such as reliability of knowledge generated
through our senses.
With this re-definition of ideology, however, can questions of
technology be addressed since neither Dolby nor Nagra magnetic tape
recording could possibly be ideological since technologies themselves
are not "erroneous"? Yes, because when Lovell's definition is examined
in light of the socio-historical configuration that surrounds the
development and usage of all cinematic technologies in actual material
circumstances, an ideological reading may be obtained, that of
"professionalism."
The ideology of professionalism consists of the maintenance of
an erroneous belief that narrative film must have a certain look: a look
realized through techniques that give the finished product an appearance
of having been constructed with great expense and within certain canons
established by the Hollywood cinema over its past 75 years. Bordwell,
Staiger, and Thompson (1985) have isolated the defining features of
Hollywood cinema, such as the shot-reverse-shot and the 180 degree rule,
and these may be considered the canons of that practice. However, it is
not a simple matter of maintaining these rules for a film to be
considered professional, because the filmmaker must also implement these
strategies with technical expertise through adoption of preexisting
standards laid down in the technical documents continuously published by
the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. These
"Recommended Practices" are augmented by technical specifications for
equipment that are approved by the American National Standards Institute
(ANSI) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
In this manner, standardization becomes a socially motivated
ideological form, in Lovell's sense, because it creates a social
structure akin to that of a medieval guild system, disallowing
participation by those who are unable (or unwilling) to pay the high
expense involved and gain prior acceptance into guild-type
organizations. Moreover, professionalism is situated as an ideal that
filmmakers should strive for, and this belief generally goes
unchallenged. It may be suggested that this ideology of professionalism
is one identifiable form of ideology in operation in Hollywood. The
purpose and function of this ideology is narrower and more limited than
that of the ideology of the bourgeois social class, and in this way it
is easier to examine and comprehend within the specific context of
cinema.
The question of locating the ideology of professionalism in
sound recording technology can now be addressed within this narrower
definition and with some of the difficulties with previous
conceptualizations of Hollywood's bourgeois ideological programme in
mind.
End of part 2
---
chris brougham
chris@sloth.bc.ca