The cinematic experience, the act of watching a film, is often characterised and discussed in terms of seeing a stream of images through our eyes. But a film is as much an aural construction, ‘seen’ with our ears. As a matter of fact, film form is one of simultaneous and synchronised “audio-vision”, as Michael Chion calls it, an ensemble of sounds and images in a reciprocal relationship similar to that of putting several simultaneous notes together to create harmonies or dissonances (Fairfax, 2017, para. 21).

However, this simultaneous projection is only seemingly synchronous, as the sounds and images we hear and see, are often captured and/or constructed at different times, through different processes, sometimes not even coming from the same sources of origin. And, so, the relationship between the sound and image elements is not a natural one, but rather a symbolic pact, or “audiovisual contract” through which the audio-spectators consider the sound and the image to be “participating in one and the same entity or world” (Chion, 1994, p. 222). In this way, what we hear and what we see is an “audiovisual illusion”. 

 Chion says that this “illusion” forms the most important relationship between sound and image and provides “added value”,an “expressive and informative value with which sound enriches a given image”, leaving the viewer with the definite impression that the cinematic experience “naturally” comes from what is seen, “and is already contained in the image itself” (ibid., p. 5).

The audiovisual illusion is also what allows us to locate the key synch points, the places where audio and vision mesh together, or create a synchresis as Chion calls it, providing us with: “the primary synch points that are crucial for meaning and dynamics” (ibid., p. 190). Chion calls these crucial points of meaning and dynamics the film’s “audiovisual phrasing” (ibid.). Uncovering this phrasing, and so the functions and effects of the aural and visual devices, locates the traces of the audio-vision that stream through the film. 

But, in order for Chion’s method of observation and analysis to yield complex and fecund the sound-image structures that makes it possible to critically deconstruct the film’s audiovisual material, and determine the dominance, quality, and consistency of the audio, an additional set of systematic points of inquiry are necessary.

This set of inquiry tools can be lifted from David Bordwell’s methodology for uncovering the poetics of film. Poetics comes from the Greek word poiesis, meaning“active making”, and David Bordwell substantiated this approach to the formalist methodology in his book Poetics of Cinema (2009). Bordwell engages with this systematic inquiry into the active making as a valid avenue of academic research that sees the finished artistic work as the result of a process of composition and construction (2009, p.12). Poetics focuses on functions, effects, and uses through historical and theoretical analysis and, often, through a prescriptive craft component. Acquiring the knowledge of and insight into form as a result of creative practice can be achieved through a process characterised by Bordwell using: “Six P-words: particulars, patterns, purposes, principles, practices, andprocessing” (2009, p. 24). The first step then, is to locate “particulars” that attract your attention in the filmic text, or part thereof. These particulars can be small, or unique, but will be something that catches your eye, or your ear: for example, the sound of breathing over black screen and then the fluttering of falling paper as we fade into the the first images of the soldiers on a war-torn street at the start of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017).

The second step is to find how such particulars form “patterns”: is the particular used again? If so, how, and when, and why? The next step is to consider the potential “purpose” of the patterns, often conceived in a problem-solution dichotomy: how can one achieve a certain effect? Is there something that blocks it? If so, how can we get around it? Step four is the outlining of “principles”based on the pattern-purpose structure. These principles provide ideas about the “practices” involved. The final step is to consider how the result of these practices are “processed” by the viewers (ibid. p. 24).

This formal methodology that Bordwell outlines views the craft practice as choices made by the artist, choices that are correlated with a purpose of some kind, either the design of the work, or an effect on the perceiver, ultimately attempting to uncover “the filmmaker’s secrets, especially those they don’t know they know” (ibid. p. 22). Consequently, a formal analysis of the finished artefact, following Bordwell’s methodology, will reveal its construction, as pointed out by the formalists Viktor Shklovsky and Boris Eichenbaum, and so provide knowledge about the active making. 

And so, using Chion’s method of locating the ‘audiovisual phrasing’ and Bordwell’s six P’s to critically engage with these points of audio-vision will provide a solid and productive methodology to understand how audio and vision work in a film, and in what way these workings constitute the cinematic experience.

Bibliography

Bordwell, D. (2008). Poetics of cinema. New York: Routledge.

Chion, M. (1994). Audio-vision: sound on screen. New York: Columbia University Press.

Fairfax, D. (2017). The Audio-Spectator: An Interview with Michel Chion. Senses of Cinema. Retrieved from http://sensesofcinema.com/2017/feature-articles/audio-spectator-interview-michel-chion/