Applause is an interesting film. At first glance I could hardly stand it, the actors annoyed me and I found the sound both grating and annoying. However, I wasn’t exactly putting the film into its historical context. Sound at this point is almost brand new, it isn’t going to have the clarity and depth of later films (of course) and the actors are coming out of silent pictures where movements and expressions were exaggerated. So thinking about it, this film really is quite a marvel. One thing I really noticed throughout the film was the density of the sound. It seemed that at any given point there was a cacophony of sounds and background noise. Fischer acknowledges this by saying, “Mamoulian’s ‘sound pace’ however, is always filled and it offers an auditory counterpart for the visual ‘clutter’ we experience” (Fischer 238). Personally I enjoy films where sound is not ever present, I enjoy a Malick-esque film in which I get beautiful background noises that are calming and a soft voice over. To me, that is beautiful sound. Therefore, having a cluttering in this film was to me sometimes hard to take in. I found myself straining to take in voices or other details. On the opposite side of this spectrum is the incredible ability for them to be able to do this. Not only a few years earlier they couldn’t capture all these sounds. To be able to now record anything and everything and have it work in a picture is incredible.
When looking at the sound editing of this film, we start to see overlapping sound and image and off screen sounds and effects like re verb. This film seems to take a place in the line of films that slowly evolve into the modern sound that we know today. I find this incredibly interesting, sound usage that we have today stemmed from films like this from 90 years ago. It would have been really something to be in that time and see something like Applause where sound is new and revolutionary. At this current moment I can’t even think of something in our time that would measure up to such a development.
One final thought I have, one line in Fischer especially stood out to me, “‘Sound arouses an illusion of actual space, while a picture has practically no depth’” (Fischer 232). Sound begins to fill in a film, if you think about it, with silence in cinema we use one sense, vision. With the addition of sound, we double the senses used and in turn this creates more depth. The advent of sound allowed films to not only be visually more appealing, but it may have also given them the ability to be more intellectually meaningful.
Perhaps the exploration of 3-D space is/was a search to expand cinema beyond its given boundaries, beyond the frame, and the same could be said for surround sound...but somehow it doesn't make the spatial experience any more REAL....just the opposite in fact. Glad you went beyond your initial taste test and imagined the film in a different context. Takes training and practice, like anything else.
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