As always, David Bordwell's observations on very
specific aspects of film art prompt us to search through our mental movie
database for instances of particular cinematic techniques. Thinking about the
movies we watch in a "transversal" way is an efficient test for
checking how much attention we pay to film style, and trying to recall
films featuring a particular framing, cut, camera movement, mise-en-scene etc.
can actually turn out to be a surprisingly difficult and not always fruitful
operation.
A recent entry in Bordwell's blog is dedicated to the use of sound in Nightmare Alley, a 1947 film featuring the downfall of an unscrupulous man working as a barker in a traveling carnival. In particular, Bordwell analyzes a scene in which a police siren is heard, but we can't clearly determine whether this sound is subjective (like an auditory hallucination), objective (probably coming from an off-screen police car), or whether it eludes both categories. He then contextualizes the scene within the overall film, showing that ambiguous sound cues form a motif and in certain cases represent a sort of commentary on the action. I invite you to read his astonishingly detailed, insanely entertaining analysis.
Nightmare Alley merits
our attention because it employs sound in unusual ways. In fact, most 1940s
films conform to the stylistic palette available at the time, choosing unambiguously
between objective and subjective sound and abiding
by well-established conventions (for instance, subjective sound is typically
signaled by a rather close shot of the character hearing that
sound). Nightmare Alley instead challenges those norms, and
encourages us to think about things we normally take for granted in movies.
It seems natural at this point to ask
whether Nightmare Alley's innovative use of sound is a
one-off instance, or if more examples exist. Can you think of a film in which a
particular sound doesn't strictly respect the objective/subjective distinction?
Note that here we are not taking into consideration the diegetic/nondiegetic
categories applied to music. I came up with just one example, Sam Peckinpah's
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974). Spoilers galore!
