A Man Escaped (Bresson, 1956)

While teaching our film music and sound course, I often introduced scenes from Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953) and My Uncle (1958) as a novel way of reinforcing the idea that sound can be a varying, vital, sometimes unavoidable element of a filmmaker's creative method. Monsieur Hulot's indecipherable dialogue and many outrageous sound gags are hilarious.

Robert Bresson's contemporaneous A Man Escaped (1956) is of a different order altogether: a French Resistance fighter in Lyon jailed by the Nazis recounts his methodically worked-out scheme to escape. David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson write that the soundtrack is "a central factor in shaping our experience of the whole film. .  . through Bresson’s control of what sounds we hear, what qualities these sounds have, and what relationships exist among those sounds and between sound and image."

Throughout the film, sound has many important functions. As in all of his films, Bresson emphasizes the sound track, rightly believing that sound may be just as cinematic as images. At certain points in A Man Escaped, Bresson even lets his sound technique dominate the image; throughout the film, we are compelled to listen. Indeed, Bresson is one of a handful of directors who create a complete interplay between sound and image.

Bordwell has generously posted a PDF of the case study essay from which I have just quoted. The essay was deleted from an earlier edition of Bordwell and Thompson's Film Art: An Introduction and has been posted for free download here: link. [Link checked on 3-01-2024.] Go the lower part of the page, under the heading "Film analyses from earlier editions of Film Art."

A Man Escaped is included in the excellent Criterion Collection series of DVD editions, and the entire essay posted by Bordwell (excepting only the scene example at the end) is included on the Special Features disk. An actor reads the text in voice-over while stills or clips are offered in the imagetrack. The PDF essay also includes a set of questions at the end; these could serve as the starting point for class discussion, assignment, or even paper topic.

The essay's headings are:

Fontaine’s Commentary
Sound Effects and Narration
Sound Motifs
Music
A Sample Sequence
Summary [and Questions]

About the music, they write that "another auditory motif involves the only nondiegetic sound in the film—passages from a Mozart mass." The work is the C Minor Mass, K. 427. Both Kyrie and Agnus Dei (which Mozart did not write) are said to be used -- I recognized only the Kyrie. Apart from the expected positions at beginning and end, brief excerpts (usually about 10 seconds or less) are heard at or near these timings: 20:28, 28:30, 40:00, 48:40, 51:40, 61:05, 69:00, and 100:00.

Reba Wissner on Hearing the Unseen

On The Avid Listener (W. W. Norton's in-house blog), Reba A. Wissner writes about "Hearing with Your Eyes: Science Fiction Television and Hearing the Unseen": link. [link updated on 3-08-2024]  Her video examples include a spooky scene from 19th century composer Carl Maria von Weber's opera Der Freischütz and three scenes from TV sci-fi shows (The Invaders, The Outer Limits, and The Twilight Zone).

Although she doesn't use the term, Wissner is writing about what Michel Chion calls the acousmêtre, an unseen agent "embodied" by sound (Hearing the Movies, second edition, pages 74-75), but she also discusses actions (physical attacks) carried out by these agents and also not presented onscreen (Hearing the Movies, chapter 3, describes and illustrates a number of types of offscreen sound).

As with Jonathan Godsall's Avid Listener post that we recommended a few days ago (link)  [link checked on 3-08-2024], Wissner's post has discussion questions at the end. These, however, assume fairly substantial student knowledge of television repertoires. One might complement or substitute for those questions an exercise that compares/contrasts techniques and effects in the TV clips with those in a feature film scene, perhaps from one of the films mentioned in Chapter 3, one of the versions of The Invisible Man, or even a teen horror flick (some films in that genre have achieved a kind of cult status and might well be familiar to many undergraduates; your current writer has found that students may seem a little embarrassed about their own knowledge of this repertoire, but one has only to ask and they will quickly come up with titles and also be enthusiastic about the chance to make presentations to the class).

Offscreen vs. Ambient Sound

When we hear a bark but do not see the dog or hear birdsong but do not see the bird, it can be difficult to decide whether to classify such sound as offscreen or ambience. This ambiguity points to a fundamental difference in narrative function, which in turn determines whether we expect the source of the sound to be shown. If the function of the sound is primarily atmospheric, if it serves primarily to establish mood and setting, then there is no reason to show the source. Indeed, showing the source might actually endow it with undue narrative significance. Think here of the atmospheric sound of a howling wolf against the image of a full moon; now think of that same sound, only this time the fog parts on a hilltop revealing an image of a wolf beneath the full moon. The presence of the wolf with synchronized sound asks for a much more direct interpretation. It asks us to make some narrative sense of the bodily presence of that wolf as opposed to the atmospheric presence of the call.

This suggests that one way of thinking about the difference between offscreen sound and ambient sound is in terms of an expectation determined by the needs of the narrative: with offscreen sound we expect the source to be shown whereas with ambient sound we do not expect the source of the sound to be shown. Sometimes, as with crickets at night or the wind howling, we understand that this sound could never be localized to a single sound source; such sound in that sense will always be ambient because, in a sense, it cannot be narrativized, cannot be turned into a character. (Crickets could, perhaps, (like locusts) manifest themselves as a swarm and the wind could become, say, a tornado—as it does in Twister. These are limit cases that show how ambience is bound to a general, rather than particular, representation of the environment or setting.) Even with bird song or a dog bark, where the sound could be much more easily synchronized and so be made particular, we do not expect the source to be revealed to the extent that we understand it as ambience.

Simple pedagogical example in Paris, Texas

Exaggerated, and therefore unusually clear, examples of offscreen sound occur one after the other in Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984). At the beginning of DVD ch. 16 (01:10:50), Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) walks past a club playing tejano music; we see the club only several seconds after the scene starts, and volume levels even rise and fall accordingly. Cut to daytime as he walks on a particularly long highway overpass; immediately we hear a man yelling; Travis continues to walk and only 30 seconds later does the man come into the frame as Travis pauses briefly before going on -- and the man's voice goes offscreen again.