[in]Transition

At one point in Emilija Talijan’s beautifully meditative video, which reconsiders cinematic listening as homologous with auscultative listening practices from the medical arts, the author alludes to an idea Rick Altman articulated in a 1980 issue of Yale French Studies on film sound that helped launch a rich phase of film sound theory. “Fundamental to the cinema experience,” Altman wrote in his contribution to that landmark publication, “is a process—which we might call the sound hermeneutic—whereby the sound asks where? and the image responds here!” (1980: 74). 

In his article, Altman explores what he calls a “ventriloquial” feature of the cinema setting of his era. When we listen to sound cinema, it is our sub-cognitive errand to attach sounds emanating from loudspeakers to images on a screen, thereby substituting one source for another, one sense for another, and one location for another. The ear questions, the eye answers. The sound hermeneutic is so rudimentary that we only notice it when a hitherto untethered sound is magnetized to an image, albeit in an imaginary way. And there’s something oddly diminishing about that move, isn’t there? Uncertainty about the sound prior to its attachment to the image—the sense of magic power in the timbre of an offscreen magus, the snort of an unseen monster, the lost lover’s voice on the phone—goes poof. There stands the sonorous thing itself, common as dirt, denuded of the energy it had hitherto derived from unlocalizability. The sound has acquired a kind of body, and in doing so, aquired mortality, an openness to objectification, like the corpses on the Rembrandt anatomy slab depicted in Talijan’s video essay.

In keeping with the preoccupations of 1970s theory, Altman approached cinematic sound by way of two key technologies – the screen and the loudspeaker—whose histories converge in the cinema’s auditorium. Talijan starts from another premise. By turning from loudspeaker-based cinematic listening to a model that descends from stethoscopic listening we arrive at a kind of listening that’s much harder to collapse into the illusion of the image as “resolution” to schizophonic divergence between sound and source. Indeed, hermeneutics as an errand seems offset somehow by this alternative history, and I think this is why the metaphor of haunting is so important to this essay inasmuch as haunting is characterized precisely by its noncontinuity with interpretation.

Consider, as Talijan does in her series of well-curated exhibits, the sound of breathing in profilmic worlds. Where is breathing in the bodies we see - the lung sacs, the throat, the pharynx, the nose, the lips, the mouth, the exterior atmosphere, the eartips of the stethoscope? A funny thing about the sound of breath is that it never has a “single” source to begin with, but is a symphony of interior and exterior folds, sacs and spaces where moving gas meets material bodies in dynamic motion. The separation of sound from source, a modernist fantasy, begins with the assumption that sound and source are singular, readily identifiable entities to begin with. Thinking of the sound of a footstep or the sound of a gunshot, you might get away with that idea, but with breathing, the notion of a singular location from which a sound can be extracted (let alone reattached) lacks credibility from the getgo. 

After all, we see people who breathe, but do we ever really see breathing itself, in its totality? The same is true for the circulatory system, particularly Talijan’s use of films like La Jetée and Thriller, with their heartbeats everywhere yet nowhere. Externalizing the sound of interior processes, cinema turns the soundworld of the body inside out aurally even as it maintains a visual focus of externalities, preventing any “fusion of horizons” or healing of schizophonic rupture. 

Talijan’s brilliantly selected visual examples show characters and cameras prowling bodies, spaces, liquids and still images to find something able to hold the unruly affective power of the breathing lungs and beating hearts that their soundtracks magnify. But nothing quite does the job. In auscultative cinema, sound isn’t attached to anatomy. Instead, as Talijan says, it is haunted by anatomy. The sound asks “where?” and the image answers: “Here, maybe? Or here? What about this, maybe?” In the sound hermeneutic, experience starts with an amorphous sound and resolves in a tangible image, but in auscultative sound it’s the other way around. Small wonder that a cinema of mediated auscultation produces odd distances, bewildering immersion and umbilical distension, as in the example of the medical students feeling their own bodies penetrated by the sounds of the interior bodies of patients, or the cinemagoer who sees a sounding body move away from the camera while still sounding close. 

While rooted in illuminating historical examples, Talijan’s idea of mediated auscultation also feel bracingly contemporary. Just as Altman’s model had perhaps its clearest explanatory prowess in the architecture and technology of typical 1970s cinema spaces, auscultative listening is uncannily suited for a moment in which we often listen to film sounds alone, at home, with a pair of earbuds running to a screen with a cord that is strikingly like a stethoscope to a patient. And in a grim year of a global disease characterized by respiratory failure and body systems starved of oxygen, it is gripping to watch Talijan’s scenes of cameras desperate to “find” working cardiovascular systems, like nurses and doctors searching the bodies of struggling patients. The cinema of mediated auscultation is as haunting as it is haunted. 

Work Cited

Altman, Rick. 1980. "Moving lips: cinema as ventriloquism," Yale French Studies, (60), 67-79.

What do the stethoscope and the cinema have in common? This seems like a riddle that compares apples and oranges, but there is a fundamental and challenging insight here: cinema acts like a stethoscope when it provides the auditor/spectator with an experience of sonic immersion that also points to the split between sound and body inherent in the technology. A stethoscope creates a distance between patient and physician, who before the stethoscope listened to breathing and heartbeats by placing an ear directly against the patient’s chest. Cinema also creates a spatial distance between auditor/spectator and screen, or a temporal distance between performer and recording. With the stethoscope and cinematic experience, then, the listener experiences the odd sensation of being both immersed and distant. Adding to this oddness is the constant presence of the body, despite the split: the sound we hear is always accompanied by the sight of the body, or a reminder of its presence, even if the sound is more present to us. Listening through the stethoscope amplifies sound over image, forcing us to attend to sound when our inclination is to attend to the image. It is somewhat disorienting. Historiographically speaking, Talijan’s video does this, too: it reorients us to the soundtrack, just like many cases in sound studies, but here the analogy to the stethoscope makes sound immediate, present, and corporeal in a way that most sound studies analyses do not. 

The brilliance of the video lies not only in its initial insight, but also its choice of clips to illustrate the historical and ideological connection between sound, image, body, and immersion. I found each of them incredibly instructive, especially the final clip, from Hors Satan, which pulls back the curtain on our ideological investment in sound perspective as a technique that gives the bodies onscreen an illusion of wholeness. Together, the clips show us why this analogy between cinema and stethoscope is so fruitful: it reveals the hidden connection between cinema and medical technology. This is not just a historical coincidence, but an essential similarity in the way they (re)construct the human body. How cinema puts sound and image together, how it creates the relationship between auditor/spectator and screen, has much in common with medical imaging technology, but also, as Talijan shows, medical technology that privileges sound, which turns out to be even more fundamental to medicine’s mission and history. Indeed, Talijan also demonstrates that listening to the history of cinema and medicine from the perspective of sound can reorient our usual historiographic and theoretical priorities. She reminds us, after Altman, that the image only asks the questions; sound provides the answers.