en deFenSA de UnA cienciA jURÍdicA inTeRPReTATivA

After 1930, due in part to adverse economic pressures from the Great Depression, codification of effective practices for producing sound film became an ever more important goal of the industry, especially in the United States. This had the effect of curtailing the spirit of experimentation, and the wide-ranging practices of the early years gave way to an increasingly ordered set of practices defined by the principles of ‘vococentrism’ (Chion 1999, 5;

Neumeyer 2015, 3–49). Despite calls for continued development of the possibilities of asynchronous sound by theorists, experiments in sound design that pushed against the default vococentrism of synchronized dialogue such as films by Chaplin, Clair, Lang, Pudovkin and Eisenstein frequently yielded excellent and provocative films but little real influence on the direction of mainstream filmmaking. Whether in the United States or internationally, in the years after 1930 commercial sound film increasingly simply meant talking film, and the vococentrism of talking film meant a high preponderance of synchronized dialogue.

In practice, however, vococentrism dominated because it was a robust yet flexible principle. If vococentrism insisted on the centrality of dialogue on the soundtrack, this did not mean that dialogue was uniformly ubiquitous or that sync dialogue featured prominently at every moment in the talking film.

Certainly, some films were edited primarily on the basis of dialogue, so that each new line motivated a cut and almost all of the soundtrack was taken up by dialogue. But the power of the reaction shot was understood almost immediately, as was the potential for sound effects, and to some extent music,

to complement and contextualize the voice, to make a setting for it. As Clair noted in his appreciative remarks about The Broadway Melody, ‘We hear the noise of a door being slammed and a car driving off while we are shown Bessie Love’s anguished face watching from a window the departure we do not see’ (Clair 1953, 94). Since Michel Chion draws vococentrism from an analogy with the face, it is worth lingering on this comparison. If the face dominated the cinematography and editing of narrative film, this did not mean that every shot was a close-up, or that every shot revealed a face (except perhaps in a metaphorical way: the face of things, the face of the world), or even that every shot containing a face centred it. The centricity of the face in classic style was instead interpretive: it presumed that the reading of the image would be guided by the placement and displacement of the face within and from the frame. A similar situation pertained to the voice and the soundtrack.

Vococentrism meant understanding the soundtrack in terms of the setting of the voice, and the expressive potential of the reaction shot lay at least in part in the way that it shifted the audiovisual interpretive significance of the voice from cause (the source of the dialogue in the speaking body) to its effect (on a particular listener).

Even as the industry rapidly standardized practices that favoured vococentrism, sound film continued to be widely distrusted by many who worked in the industry, both in Europe and America. If American companies moved quickly to convert to sound, the rapidity of the transition by no means indicated any kind of consensus surrounding its desirability over silent film.

Many still understood sound film, especially dialogue, as contrary to the spirit of cinema. Europeans, notably Soviet and French directors, were particularly resistant. In the USSR, Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov, three prominent directors, wrote an influential statement in 1928 attacking Hollywood’s approach to sound film before they had even seen one of its films. Rather than

having image and sound slavishly bound in synchronized dialogue, the Soviet directors advocated a counterpoint between image and sound, a relationship that they believed was the audiovisual equivalent of the dialectical montage for which Soviet films had become justly famous (K. Thompson 1980; Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Alexandrov 1928). Initially, Clair – well known for the visual style of his silent films – was also strongly opposed to the talking film, fearing synchronized dialogue in particular would destroy the expressive power of the image. He likewise advocated setting sound contrapuntally against the image in order to resist a naturalistically constructed synchronization grounded in realism, writing that ‘if imitation of real noises seems limited and disappointing, it is possible that an interpretation of noises may have more of a future in it … We do not need to hear the sound of clapping if we can see the clapping hands’ (Clair 1953, 91–4, emphases in original).

The opposition between talking film as slavish synchronization and sound film as a site for inspired counterpoint, or asynchronous sound, as its best antidote was picked up by most film theorists of the time, including Béla Balázs and Rudolf Arnheim. According to Balázs, sound film should

‘approach the reality of life from a totally different angle and open up a new treasure-house of human experience’ (1970 [1952], 197). Arnheim, by contrast, questioned the efficacy of asynchronous sound in many instances and focused as much on the power of synchronization as its redundancy:

synchronized sound transformed film, the act of synchronization opening a divide between foreground elements in the image and the background. Sound film, he noted, ‘endows the actor with speech, and since only he can have it, all other things are pushed into the background’ (1957, 227).

As Arnheim was quite aware – and none too pleased – the synchronization of the sound film had the effect of imposing an ordering hierarchy on the image: synchronized objects were important objects, and dialogue added

another level that made vococentrism the technical principle that implemented sound film’s irreducible anthropocentrism. In the silent film, by contrast, the world was not divided by a capacity to articulate meaning through talk; an essential continuity between people and things was assured in their common muteness, the universal condition of the silent image. With such a hierarchy of sounds established, the focus on the voice ensured the centrality of the human figure and its subjectivity in the sound film’s new economy of meaning and intention. Music and sound effects, then, set the voice within the economy of human meaning.

Vococentrism can therefore be understood as an effective reworking of the three principles of silent-film music, recast as powers within the hierarchal order of foreground and background. Centricity rewrites the principle of synchronization as a marker of import, the site of meaning that assures the appearance of subjectivity and its hegemonic status. Continuity becomes the power of background, the guarantor that the image presents only a view, a fragment of a world that extends indefinitely beyond the frame. Continuity also establishes the more or less neutral ground of asynchronous sound against which the synchronization of the foreground figure stands out in contrast.

Finally, vococentrism redeploys subjugation to unlock its full syntactical power, that of the hierarchy itself; but subjugation pertains not simply to music and effects vis-à-vis the voice or the soundtrack vis-à-vis the image, but ultimately to the subjugation of everything to narrative, the cinematic form of meaningful action. Vococentrism, then, is the principle of the voice of narrative, which organized the codification of classical style.