1 Introduction - The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock's Sound Track

CHAPTER 1 Elisabeth Weis: The Silent Scream - Alfred Hitchcock's Sound Track (1982)

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In a famous attack on Alfred Hitchcock's work, Penelope Houston once complained that in The Birds (1963) "most of the menace [comes] from the electronic soundtrack, to cover the fact that the birds are not really doing their stuff." [1] I shall point out later how The Birds's great reliance on sound effects is not only an aesthetic strength but a logical outgrowth of Hitchcock's creative development at that point in his career [2] However, Miss Houston's comment is fairly representative in its implication that Hitchcock's use of film sound is a "poor relation" to his manipulation of the image.

The belief that aural techniques are a means of expression inferior to visual ones is shared by most film scholars and, indeed, by many filmmakers. It lingers from the beginning of the sound era, when visual expressiveness was limited by the technical necessities of recording sound. Sound technicians ruled the set for several years, and, as the traditional film histories rightly say, early talking pictures - with a few conspicuous exceptions - were inferior to their silent predecessors. Furthermore, the critical neglect of sound can be seen as a vestigial bias left over from the days when film scholars were struggling to define their discipline. Until recently serious film analysis predominantly emphasized visual style as an antidote to non-cinematic approaches to film.

Hitchcock himself appears to have accepted this bias by constantly defining "pure film" as film that expresses its meaning visually - specifically through montage.[3] A close examination of his statements, however, reveals that he is objecting not to sound but to an excessive reliance on dialogue. He told Truffaut: "In many of the films now being made, there is very little cinema: they are mostly what I call 'photographs of people talking.' When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise. ... In writing a screenplay, it is

Hitchcock's condemnation of static dialogue sequences therefore does not include sound effects or music. Hitchcock's oftenstated goal was to hold the audience's fullest attention, and to this end he applied whatever techniques seemed most effective for his purposes. In his desire to maintain close control over his audience's reactions he never overlooked the possibilities inherent in the sound track. From the time of his first sound films he treated sound as a new dimension of cinematic expression. He hardly ever used it redundantly but rather as an additional resource. Indeed, he was actually very proud of his control over the sound track. Much later in the interview with Truffaut, Hitchcock said, "After a picture is cut, I dictate what amounts to a real sound script to a secretary. We run every reel off and I indicate all the places where sounds should be heard."[5] Such attention to sound is rare in commercial filmmaking. Most American directors leave all but a few important decisions to their editors and sound editors.

Of course, the proof of Hitchcock's claim about control of the sound track does not lie in his words but in his films. Close analysis of his work reveals a consistent aural style, one that is inseparable from his visual style and ultimately inseparable from his meaning. By demonstrating that sound is much more central to Hitchcock's work than has heretofore been appreciated, I hope to suggest that research into the aural styles of other directors will also be valuable. (Sound is so readily ignored that a recent book on movie music could be entitled Soundtrack as if the two were equivalent; only the subtitle properly delimits the subject.)[6] To date there have been no extensive analyses of aural style. Numerous theoretical essays on sound appeared during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Most of these came from filmmakers; Rene Clair in France, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov in Russia, and John Grierson in Great Britain all wrote tracts expressing a preference for asynchronous sound rather than "talking heads";[7] and as filmmakers they made films that proved the expressive possibilities of asynchronous sound. However, film scholars writing on sound have largely restricted their speculations to theories about the types

and functions of sound. Spottiswoode, Kracauer, and Burch have all cataloged different combinations of sound and image available to the filmmaker, but there have been only a few studies of sound as an element of directorial style [8] Occasionally a scholar sensitive to sound will have valuable insights into the way sound is used in particular films [9] Of Hitchcockian scholars, Spoto is by far the most attentive to sound, although his most interesting observations usually pertain to music rather than sounds in general [10]

The only directors whose sound styles have attracted wider critical attention are those whose aural style is most obvious, such as Orson Welles, whose sound track is as flamboyant as his visuals; Robert Altman, whose use of multiple tracks and mumbled dialogue sequences draws attention to the non-cognitive aspects of his dialogue; and Michelangelo Antonioni and Jacques Tati, whose absence of dialogue calls attention to the presence of sound effects that help describe the depersonalized modern environment.

Concerning less conspicuous sound styles, however, almost no research has been conducted. As a start, it is hard to identify idiosyncrasies when there has been little classification of the conventions of sound editing (other than a few principles set forth in filmmaking textbooks). References to the use of sound in film histories tend to stop at 1932 or 1933 - just before the time when sound editing began in earnest.

An analysis of aural styles might begin by characterizing directors according to their overall approach to sound. They might be divided among the expressionists (such as Welles and Sergio Leone), who exaggerate their aural techniques, and the classicists (such as Frank Capra and John Ford), whose styles are more subdued. This latter category would include the majority of film directors who merely follow convention without giving much thought to the creative possibilities of sound. It also includes, however, a figure such as Howard Hawks, who, while he does not draw attention to his sound track, characteristically uses sound in counter-point with his images; that is, the tension in his films often derives from the contradiction between what his characters say and what they do. As for Hitchcock, he was an expressionist who moved closer to classicism as his style evolved.

their aural styles are closed or open." Directors operating in a closed mode (e.g., Hitchcock and Lang) are selective, stylized, and more in control of their material; their world is self-contained. Directors operating in an open mode (e.g., Renoir and Altman) are more realistic and less in control of their materials; there is an implication of life beyond the frame and independent of the camera. This distinction has been made in terms of visual techniques, but only minimally in terms of aural style. Thus, Renoir's open sound track is characterized by sounds that emanate from beyond the left or right edges of the frame and by what I call "deep-focus" recording that allows us to choose between listening to the characters in the foreground or those in the background. Hitchcock's sound track, by contrast, allows for less freedom. When sounds are heard from beyond the frame their intrusion does not seem accidental, as in Renoir's case, but threatening. And when Hitchcock uses deep-focus sound, he controls which sounds we attend to; background sounds contrast with or comment on foreground sounds. Major sounds rarely overlap, as they do in Renoir's films, and sound effects are sparser, more selective. When contrasting Hitchcock's closed sound track with Renoir's open one, it is interesting to observe that, while Hitchcock was experimenting with the highly artificial manipulation and distortion of sound effects in his early sound films, Renoir was experimenting with naturalistic sounds recorded on location in such films as La Chienne (1931) and Toni (1934). In his autobiography Renoir boasted, "There is not a yard of dubbed film in La Chienne." [12]

To appreciate Hitchcock's attitude toward sound it is necessary to understand the conventional way sound is handled. Traditionally, the film sound track is divided among three categories: dialogue, sound effects, and music. These categories reflect a literal separation of the sound elements on separate tapes or tracks that is maintained until the three tracks are combined at the final mix, where the director and several sound technicians adjust the relative volumes of each track.

Despite the studio tradition of separating the three sound tracks, Hitchcock did not conceive of them as separate entities. One distinctive element of his aural style is a continuity in his use of language, music, and sound effects that reflects his ability to conceive

of their combined impact before he actually hears them together. Hitchcock does not take for granted the conventional functions of a given track; there is an intermingling of their functions in many instances. In three films where Hitchcock eliminates musical scoring, for example, he uses sound effects to much the same atmospheric effect: wind in Jamaica Inn (1939), waves in Lifeboat (1943), bird cries in The Birds. Indeed, if in The Birds avian noises imitate the functions of music (instead of musical cues, bird cries maintain the tension), in Psycho (1960) music (screeching violins) imitates birds at various points. This intersection of effects extends to Hitchcock's use of the dialogue track. Although Hitchcock played a large part in the creation of the screenplay, he showed less creative interest in the dialogue per se than in such non-cognitive forms of human expression as screaming and laughter. Their value as sound effects is usually as important as their significance as human utterances. Similarly, Hitchcock pays less attention to what a character says than to how he or she says it. A person's actual words are less significant than his definition as glib or taciturn, voluble or silent. If human utterances sometimes function more like sound effects, conversely, Hitchcock's sound effects may function more like language. He often ascribes very precise meanings to his sound effects. He told Truffaut: "To describe a sound effect accurately, one has to imagine its equivalent in dialogue."[13]

Hitchcockian music, too, is interesting less as a separate entity than for its connections with other aspects of the film. Film music is traditionally divided between source music - that is, music that supposedly originates from a sound source on the screen - and scoring (sometimes called underscoring), that is, background music unacknowledged by characters within the film itself but accepted as a movie convention. It is both too problematic and too misleading to analyze scoring as an integral part of Hitchcock's aural style. The composition of the music is the aspect of filmmaking over which directors have the least control. They can only vaguely describe the effect they are after and specify approximately where they want music. After a cue is written, their only option is to accept or reject it, and Hitchcock, like most directors, rarely made a composer rewrite a cue. The main choice is one of composer, and that choice is influenced by economics and studio

contracts as well as by the personal styles of composers. Three of Hitchcock's principal composers were Dimitri Tiomkin, who composed four Hitchcock scores: Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Strangers on a Train (1951), / Confess (1953), and Dial M for Murder (1954); Franz Waxman, who composed the scores for Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941), The Paradine Case (1947), and Rear Window (1954); and Bernard Herrmann, who scored the seven films from The Trouble with Harry (1955) to Mamie (1964). Herrmann was also sound consultant to the scoreless The Birds and the original composer for Torn Curtain (1966). The best source for incidents about Hitchcock's relations with and choice of composers is Taylor's biography of Hitchcock.[14]

Hitchcock showed a serious interest in the scoring for his films not just by choosing the composers but by collaborating with them to an unusual extent before and during shooting.[15] Nevertheless, it is impossible to distinguish reliably his contributions from each composer's and therefore to consider scoring as a major component of Hitchcock's aural style. Ironically, the scoring for Hitchcock's films has been the only aspect of his sound track that has received much critical attention. Several books and many articles have been written on film scoring, and Hitchcock's major composers and their contributions to his films have received generous treatment (the more important writings are listed in the bibliography). These works have emphasized the continuity of the composers' styles, of course, more than the styles of the directors for whom they wrote. (The one exception is Spoto, who discusses the Hitchcock/Herrmann collaboration as the culmination of each man's style.) [16]

Much more valid in an analysis of Hitchcock's aural style than a study of the scoring for his films is a study of his attitude toward source music. Hitchcock had an abiding interest in finding ways to incorporate music into the very heart of his plot. As shown in chapter 5, Hitchcock frequently builds his stories around musicians and songs. Thus he can manipulate the audience's familiarity with and expectations about popular music as a way of defining character and controlling our responses without having to introduce any extraneous element. Hitchcock turns a piece of music into a motif that he handles like his other recurring aural or visual images.

He loves to yoke music with murder: consider the Albert Hall climax of The Man Who Knew Too Much, or the association of the murderers with innocent tunes in The Shadow of a Doubt ("The Merry Widow Waltz") and Strangers on a Train ("The Band Played On"). By using source music Hitchcock has control over the music because it is available before production - unlike scoring, which is written only after the rough cut of a film is assembled.

Hitchcock's incorporation of musical ideas into the thematic conception of his films is yet another example of how he uses the traditional elements of the sound track in unorthodox ways. However, if one distinctive attribute of Hitchcock's sound track is the frequent intersection of the functions of the sound effects, music, and dialogue tracks, his sound track is also distinctively contra-punctal to the visuals. That is to say, the sounds and images rarely duplicate and often contrast with one another. During a Hitchcock film we are typically looking at one thing or person while listening to another. By separating sound and image Hitchcock can thus achieve variety, denseness, tension, and, on occasion, irony. A simple example of ironic counterpoint is the opening of the trial sequence in Murder (1930), where Hitchcock deflates the dignity of the court proceedings by undermining the sound of a trumpet fanfare with a shot of the judge blowing his nose.

It is possible to generalize about Hitchcock's overall aural style because many elements of it remain relatively constant and distinctive. It is also possible to distinguish several different aural styles within his oeuvre. (Like most other writers, use the word style to describe both the constant and the variations in Hitchcock's manner of expression.) To some extent, the various aural styles correspond with chronological periods in Hitchcock's career, and they also correspond roughly with his visual styles during those periods. It would be an oversimplification, however, to restrict any given film entirely to one category. Although Hitchcock's visual style generally involved a shift of emphasis from montage in his English films to camera movement in his American films, for example, he did not forsake his dependence on montage for suspenseful or violent sequences. Similarly, his shifts in aural style are also primarily shifts of emphasis from some techniques to others. Before

I devote one chapter each to films I consider to be characteristic of the main styles of Hitchcock's films, I would like to sketch briefly the overall evolution of his aural style.

The most important shift of style in Hitchcock's films involves a move from expressionism toward greater realism. I am using the term expressionism in the traditional film context, which denotes visual (or aural) distortion of time, space, or sound as a means of rendering visible (or audible) interior truths or feelings. These feelings may either be those of the director himself or be attributed to a given character. Realism is a style of filmmaking that appears to manipulate space, time, or sound less. Expressionistic techniques generally draw more attention to themselves than do realistic techniques, which are less obtrusive. From the beginning of his career until about 1966, Hitchcock became more and more interested in audience involvement. He moved toward realism in an attempt to increase audience identification through his protagonists, an emotional identification that depended to an extent on a relative invisibility of technique.

Not surprisingly, the biggest shift in his career came in his move in 1939 from England to Hollywood, where the American predilection for stylistic realism matched his own interests. (In subject matter the American films are in many ways less realistic than the finely observed films about English behavior, but that is another issue.) The bigger budgets and technical expertise available to Hitchcock in American studios enabled him to switch to a style less dependent on such techniques as miniatures and editing that are more distracting, even to the untrained eye, than are fullscale sets and lengthy tracking shots. In his British films Hitchcock resorts to both aural and visual expressionistic effects in moments when he wants to reveal the feelings of his characters. In his American films Hitchcock uses sound as a way out of visual expressionism. His distortions of sound draw less attention to his style than would their visual equivalents because audiences are less likely to notice aural than visual distortions.[17]

In his American films Hitchcock generally works harder to establish connections between the audience and his characters. Whereas his British villains are likely to be overtly insane or criminal characters, in the American films the audience is forced

to identify with the evil impulses in relatively attractive and normal people. Hitchcock in Hollywood is interested in the malevolence of so-called normality and in destroying audience complacency by making the viewer complicitous with evil doers. In order to force the identification between character and viewer he has to move the audience inside the minds of his characters without resorting to distracting techniques. Thus expressionism - a film style originally developed to get inside a character's mind - is paradoxically given up by Hitchcock when he is most seriously interested in exploring the psyche.

Tom Gunning has referred to the shift from the British to the American films as "a shift from melodrama to psychodrama" - a shift in focus from external events to a character's mind [18] Gunning's distinction implies a lessening in distancing devices in the American films. In the British melodramas Hitchcock does not hesitate to draw attention to a clever technique or to the literary, stage, or cinematic convention with which he is working. Thus, in Blackmail (1929) the villain stands before a chandelier that throws the shadow of a handlebar mustache across his face, and in Secret Agent (1936) the villain draws a mustache on his own photograph. It is as if Hitchcock wishes to lessen a slight embarrassment at working in the genre by acknowledging it. Gunning observes that in the American psychodramas events may be just as melodramatic, but the exaggerations of technique or plot are motivated within the context of the films because they are presented as the perceptions of one or another character. It is the character whose perceptions are melodramatic, not Hitchcock's, and thus he can present the most outrageous situations or characters without worrying about their verisimilitude. He can present the most exaggerated techniques as a realistic representation of a character's perception.

It must be stressed that although Hitchcock became more realistic in his American period, he has always worked in a highly stylized manner. He has rarely hesitated to overstate or exaggerate effects. The red suffusions in Mamie are as outrageous as the cocktail shaker turning into a stabbing hand in Blackmail. The example of the red suffusions points out a second caveat to those who would segment Hitchcock's career too neatly - namely, that

his changes in style are not pure. He returns to or elaborates on favorite stylistic devices throughout his career. It is accurate only to speak of general trends in his work, of changes of emphasis, of experiments with specific techniques; the stylistic distinctions between the films lose their validity if the stylistic continuities are forgotten. Having made the above qualifications, however, I do think it useful to look for stylistic variations in Hitchcock's oeuvre.

Hitchcock's first and third sound films, Blackmail and Murder, reveal constant experimentation with the various uses of sound. In these films Hitchcock can be observed trying both to overcome the technical obstacles of early sound shooting and to establish his personal attitudes toward the relation between sound and picture. Most of the experiments are in the expressionistic mode, the two most famous examples being the subjective distortion of the word knife in Blackmail and the interior monologue in Murder. Both experiments are attempts to convey a character's thoughts and feelings. Yet at the same time both techniques draw attention to themselves as tricks and leave the audience emotionally outside the characters.

In the British films that followed Hitchcock continues off and on to experiment with expressionistic sound techniques, but with one exception the techniques tend to be bravura effects in films that are otherwise less interested in penetrating the psyches of their main characters. The exception is Secret Agent, the film in which Hitchcock most consistently sought to use expressionistic techniques to convey the feelings of his protagonists. Secret Agent is the British film in which aural techniques clearly predominated over most other considerations when Hitchcock was planning the film.

At about the point when Hitchcock settled down to make a series of widely acclaimed films at the Gaumont studios, he consolidated his treatment into what might be called his classical style - a term chosen because it implies an apparent simplicity of form, an art that conceals art. Starting in 1934 with The Man Who Knew Too Much, Hitchcock found ways of building aural ideas into the very conception of his screenplay so that they did not seem as obtrusive as the expressionistic techniques. Although most of the Gaumont films typify this style of filmmaking, the classical style remains a major approach for the rest of Hitchcock's career. It tends to be

used for what are variously called the lighter pictures, the thrillers, or the melodramas (depending on the writer). The British films in the classical style are almost as realistic in technique as the American films, but when Hitchcock does try to convey the feelings of a character he is more likely to revert to expressionistic techniques. In short, the Gaumont films combine a relatively invisible, classical style with occasional outbursts of expressionism. By contrast, the American films operate in a more fluid, consistent style - Hitchcock's subjective style.

Most of the American films of the 1940s and 1950s can be called subjective films because in them Hitchcock is concerned with presenting things through the distorted interpretation of a character. (In this book the term point of view refers to the perspective not of the director but of a given character, whose perspective may or may not be distorted. The term subjective as used here implies a distortion that corresponds with a character's particular interpretation of reality.) In a subjective film Hitchcock may never bother to provide an objective alternative to the way things are presented. The quintessential subjective films of the 1940s are Rebecca, which presents the story mostly through the eyes of the heroine until her husband's confession, two-thirds of the way through the film, and Suspicion, which also features the perceptions of Joan Fontaine as an impressionable, romanticizing young heroine. In the 1950s the two most subjective films are The Wrong Man (1956), which devotes much of its energies to conveying its hero's feelings about imprisonment, and Rear Window (1954), which almost literally restricts the viewer to what the hero can see from his apartment window. The most subjective film of the 1960s is Marnie.

Rear Window is one of four American films made between 1943 and 1954 in which Hitchcock experiments with highly restricted space. In Lifeboat (1943), Rope (1948), and Dial M for Murder (1954), as well as Rear Window, Hitchcock limits himself to a single set. Having established such stringent visual limitations, Hitchcock uses sound in a highly creative way, often depending on it to establish tension. In other films Hitchcock often creates tension between what is in frame and what is out of frame. In the single-set films he creates tension between on-set and off-set

space. People outside the room (or, in one case, the boat) are a source of either menace or salvation. In all of the single-set films but Lifeboat Hitchcock suggests that on-set space may be subjective whereas noises from off-set space represent reality. The use of what I call "aural intrusion" as a metaphor for the penetration of the psyche by this reality is a distinctive component of Hitchcock's style and is the subject of chapter 7.

It is possible to argue that The Birds (1963) is an extension of the subjective style, but I find in that film that Hitchcock moves beyond audience identification with any character, a move initiated in parts of Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960). In The Birds Hitchcock deals abstractly with fear itself, rather than with any particular manifestation of it. He does give shape to these fears in the form of birds, but the birds are less important for what they are than for the reactions they elicit. The Birds is especially dependent on sound because of the nonspecific quality of sound effects.

After Mamie (1964) Hitchcock abandons his interests in probing the individual psyche. Although in his late films - Torn Curtain (1966), Topaz (1969), Frenzy (1972), and Family Plot (1976) - he reworks and elaborates on many of his previous ideas, he takes a more casual attitude toward audience identification or boxoffice popularity. For instance, in an age when the audience demands an explanation for each character's motivations, Hitchcock blithely eliminates explanations for behavior and concentrates mainly on actions. He also seems to have fewer qualms about breaking the screen illusion. In the very last shot of his works - the concluding shot of Family Plot - the heroine, a fake clairvoyant, winks at the audience after she has fooled her boyfriend into thinking that she has some psychic ability. That wink to the audience is really made by Hitchcock, the ultimate master of illusion. He acknowledges that connection in the promotional displays for the film, which feature the master himself winking at the viewer through the heroine's crystal ball. The viewer is now a participant in the perpetration of illusion rather than in the perpetration of crime. Because Hitchcock is less interested in audience identification, it is not surprising that he also depends less on sound effects, for he is concerned with behavior, a visible phenomenon, rather than the invisible forces that control people.

Because this book deals with some stylistic elements that are constant in Hitchcock's career, others that show continuous evolution, and still others that recur intermittently, I have not chosen a strict chronological treatment for the subject. Nevertheless, the chapters do fall into a general chronological progression. Chapter 2 is a description of Hitchcock's earliest sound experiments, Blackmail (1929) and Murder (1930). In chapter 3, I jump ahead to Secret Agent (1936) in order to complete the discussion of Hitchcock's experiments with aural expressionism. Chapter 4 presents the first of the classical films, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), as a paradigm for all the films in the classical style that becomes an essential component of Hitchcock's repertoire. This analysis is followed by the chapter on music as motif because Hitchcock generally incorporates music and songs in a classical manner. Then the subjective films of the forties and fifties are introduced and represented in chapter 6 via Rear Window (1954). This chapter is logically followed by the analysis of Hitchcock's use of aural intrusion - a technique I introduce in the context of Rear Window. The aural intrusion technique culminates in the three single-set films, Rope (1948), Dial M for Murder (1954), and Rear Window, that form a subset of the subjective films. After the two chapters on aural subjectivity, I devote a chapter to The Birds (1963) as the film in which Hitchcock moves furthest beyond subjectivity

Whereas Hitchcock's stylistic emphases change over the years, a number of his thematic interests remain more constant. Several ongoing aural motifs, for example, concern Hitchcock's attitudes toward the relative value of silence, screams, and language as manifestations of human feelings. Silence, in particular, takes on moral values when Hitchcock uses it for characterization. A character's reticence may be a symptom of emotional immaturity, moral paralysis, or ruthless efficiency. Hitchcock's stylistic and thematic interests intersect when he links silence with control - an association that expresses a central tension throughout his work between the need for social order and the need for personal expression. Throughout the chapters and as a final discussion I analyze Hitchcock's careerlong fascination with such aural motifs as silence, screams, and inexpressive language; their recurrence emphasizes the continuities as well as the changes within Hitchcock's oeuvre.

2. It is the assumption of this book that Hitchcock was to a great extent in creative control of his work despite the collaborative nature of filmmaking. Most film scholars would agree that Hitchcock demonstrated a distinctive, personal style as well as a technical mastery of his medium. Even the predominant argument against Hitchcock — that his moral concerns are too superficial to rank him among the most serious artists — presupposes his control over the selection, preparation, and execution of his material. To date, the most thorough discussion of Hitchcock's responsibility for his work is Francois Truffaut's book-length interview with the director, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster. 1967); originally published as Le Cinema selon Hitchcock (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1966). Although it would be valuable to have still more precise knowledge about the extent of the contributions made by Hitchcock's screenwriters, technicians, producers, and the like, I do not give many details about his collaborators, for that subject would entail a book-length study in itself. Instead, I share the assumption of Hitchcock's defenders and detractors alike that Hitchcock is largely responsible for the films as we see them.

3. See, e.g., his interview with Peter Bogdanovich in The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Museum of Modem Art, 1963), p. 4.

6. Mark Evans, Soundtrack: The Music of the Movies (New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1975).

7. Rene Clair's articles, written in 1929, can be found in his Reflections on the Cinema (London: William Kimber, 1963); the joint Russian "Statement," which first appeared in the Leningrad magazine Zhizn Iskusstva on 5 August 1928, is reprinted as Appendix A of Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory and The Film Sense, trans. and ed. Jay Leyda (Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing, Meridian, 1957); John Grierson summarized his opinions in "Introduction to a New Art," Sight and Sound 3 (Autumn 1934):101-4.

8. Raymond Spottiswoode, A Grammar of the Film (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of Calif. Press, 1950), pp. 173—93; Siegfried Kracauer, Theory Press, 1960), pp. 102-56; Noel Burch, Theory of Film Practice, trans. Helen R. Lane (New York: Praeger, 1973), pp. 90-104. Burch is sensitive to the aural techniques of filmmakers such as Mizoguchi and Bresson, but only as pointers to the dialectical structures he hopes to see more fully developed in the future. The best single source of articles on sound is Rick Altman, ed.. Cinema! Sound, Yale French Studies 60 (1980). The entire issue is devoted to technical, theoretical, and historical essays on sound as welt as case studies of its usage in three French films.

9. Among the best examples are Lucy Fischer, "Beyond Freedom and Dignity: An Analysis of Jacques Tati's Playtime," Sight and Sound 45 (Autumn 1976); 236-38; Phyllis Goldfarb, "Orson Welles's Use of Sound," Take One 3 (July/August 1971):10-14; and Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Bresson's Lancelot du Lac," Sight and Sound 43 (Summer 1974):128-30.

10. Donald M. Spoto, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1976), and "Sound and Silence in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock," Keynote 4 (April 1980):12-17.

11. The terms were originated by Heinrich Wölfflin in 1915 as a dichotomy in art history. The English translation of his work is Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. by M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950), Two film writers who organize much of their argument around the distinction between open and closed forms are Louis D. Giannetti, Understanding Movies (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972), and Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame: What We See in Films (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor, 1976).

12. Jean Renoir, My Life and My Films, trans. Norman Denny (New York: Atheneum, 1974), p. 106.

14. John Russell Taylor, Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock (New York:Pantheon Books, 1978). According to Taylor, p. 286, Hitchcock fought to retain Herrmann's services for Torn Curtain but was unsatisfied with the results and allowed Universal to bring in John Addison.

17. This assumption is based on informal observation. There has been no psychological research precisely to determine whether an adult film-goer is more attentive to aural or visual information when presented with simultaneous stimuli. Some of the initial work on audio and visual perception is reviewed by Karl M. Dallenbach in a series of articles, each entitled "Attention," for the Psychological Bulletin: vol. 23 (1926):1-18; vol. 25 (1928):493-512; and vol. 27 (1930):497-513. In Dallenbach's day and more recently, there have been a number of experiments involving some relationship between aural and visual stimuli in a non-film context but none in which meaning is involved. See, e.g., Jack A. Adams and Ridgely Chambers, "Response to Simultaneous Stimulation of Two Sense Modalities," Journal of Experimental Psychology 63 (l962):198-206.

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