The cinematic experience is simultaneous and synchronised audio-vision. While often characterised as a stream of images ‘seen’ with our eyes, a film’s form is as much an aural construction, ‘seen’ with our ears.
The screenplay, which is the film’s procedural planning document and blueprint outlining what will be seen and what will be heard, is also a poetic literary text informing the dialogue between itself and the film’s creators by broadcasting mood, sensation, and feeling, emerging as literary representations of what Michel Chion calls, the film’s “audiovisual phrasing”: the placement of primary audiovisual synch points crucial for meaning and dynamics.
And so, we might find that, in the written text of the screenplay, the audio-vision of the film already present.
The method for locating the audio-vision in the screenplay is something I will call Screen-To-Text, and draws on Bruce Isaacs’ method for analysing three iterations of Brokeback Mountain (novel-screenplay-film) but, while the two approaches both seek to locate cinema as a function of writing I am not concerned with the mechanics of adaptation, but rather the location of cinematic audio as a function of writing, and, another point of difference is that my process is reversed, going from Screen (film) to Text (screenplay).
The first step is to locate notable points of audiovisual synchronisation, the film’s “audiovisual phrasing”. These synch points are what Bordwell, in his analytical poetics, would call “particulars”: a ‘something’ that attracts your eye, or your ear: from this pattern-purpose structure can then be used to outline “principles” which will provide ideas about the “practices” involved in the filmmaking process.
For this particular analysis I have chosen selected a moment from Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. The farmers have, unsuccessfully tried to dig Mr. Fox out by hand, but realise that more drastic measures will be required. First, let’s look at the clip, then we’ll locate and discuss some audiovisual synch-points, and try to determine the elements that make up the selected clips “audiovisual phrasing”, and then, lastly, we will trace and locate this phrasing as it appears in Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach’s screenplay.
Let’s look at some synch-points
Screenshot 1: The Terrible Tractors
- from Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) American Empirical Pictures
Visual: The machines are coming right at us, with a low camera-angle they are threatening, huge diggers like claws, or jaws of deadly metal teeth, pumping out dirty, oily exhaust.
Aural: Discordant and harsh clanging, grinding, scraping and grating of metal and machine, pumping puffs of smoke, on screeching tank treads. The sounds are rhythmical, pumping, relentless.
The farmers driving the machines forward are equally crazed: shrieking, cackling maniacally, highly excited: release of tension from previous shot (foxes out-digging farmers).
Screenshot 2: Sleeping Foxes
- from Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) American Empirical Pictures
Visual: Foxes in hole sleeping.
Aural: Hushed and muffled: contrast to the main of the previous shot. Then, the ‘rhythmic pump’ of machines fade in, and wakes Mr. Fox, and then segues into: Rolling Stones “Street Fighting Man”: the pump and rhythm of the song carries over the mania from previous shot, and jolts Mr. Fox into action.
Screenshot 3: Dig!
- from Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) American Empirical Pictures
Visual: Foxes digging frantically.
Aural: Frantic song: frantic tempo: synch and rhythm carried over from exhaust fume puffs, and clanking machines now to digging foxes.
Screenshot 4: Manic Farmers
- from Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) American Empirical Pictures
Visual: Farmers cackling and screaming, frantic tempo as they maniacally operate the machinery: levers, gears, pumps, and dials and gauges – their rhythms are markedly different: there is no direct synch between vision and audio: deliberately frenzied and discordant, following discordant machine sounds.
“Ev’rywhere I hear the sound
Of marching charging feet, boy
’Cause summer’s here and the time is right
For fighting in the street, boy”
There is also an interesting semantic synch between audio-vision and text, in this case the lyrics. The song is about wanting to revolt, to make a disturbance, to “kill the king” and “shout and scream” while not being able to do so but rather accept a compromise solution and adjust to the “sleepy town”, which reflects Mr. Fox portion and his narrative arc as he fights against his own gentrification.
Now that we have located the particular points of audiovisual phrasing, we’ll trace them back to the scripted text in the Fantastic Mr. Fox screenplay written by Wes Anderson & Noah Baumbach. Then, in line with Boris Tomashevky’s idea of motif: “the smallest particles of thematic material” - we reduce the text to its critical elements, the “irreducible” parts. These particular elements we are looking at here are what Tomashevsky calls “free motifs”: those elements added by the ‘author’ that the story can do without, but without which the story would not be ‘this particular’ story.
From Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) by Wes Anderson & Noah Baumbach
Screenshot 1 - The Terrible Tractors: The machines are “murderous” and “brutal” with “terrible, high-pitched growling noise” animal like: growling, even though they are machines.
From Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) by Wes Anderson & Noah Baumbach
Screenshot 2 - Dig!: Digging frantically – this is the interesting bit: while it is shown in action and heard from characters huffing and straining, it’s the music that drives it: frantic rhythm.
From Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) by Wes Anderson & Noah Baumbach
Screenshot 3 - Manic Farmers: Characters - “drunk with digging, they laugh manically”. The mania ‘shown’ by the tempo and rhythm of song apparent in the diggers “tossing” the “huge chunks of earth […] into the meadow”.
And so, tracking the audiovisual phrasing back to the screenplay text we can see that the use of literary techniques such as metaphor and simile, and the highly descriptive usage of specific and intentional adjectives builds up a fertile field of description from which to harvest the material for the construction of the audio-vision.
Just out of interest, and to further acknowledge Bruce Isaac’s method, here are some excerpts from Roald Dahl’s original text for the book. There are some notable differences, but all in all the ‘audio-vision’ remains intact:
Excerpt sentences from Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970) by Roald Dahl