2. Fragments of a theory: the counterpoint of sound and image

The cinema in its early days and radiophonic art were the forerunners of the audiovisual era. The evolutionary process initiated by these two 20th century innovations has been interpreted by Schaeffer as a sort of laboratory in which the foundations were laid for a new truly inter-media language. The first medium was dumb (and deaf), the second blind; both obliged adepts not only to throw off the shackles of a slavish imitation of other artistic forms (above all painting, theatre and fiction) but to come up with original modes of expression able to transform their respective weaknesses into strong points. As a result, in his consideration of sound films and other forms of interaction between sound and image, Schaeffer focused primarily on the importance of attaining a profound amalgamation of the properties of those arts. It goes without saying, however, that in analysing audiovisual commu­nication he did not stop at merely making a tally of the features imported from the individual media; in fact he pursued interpretations that often had much to do with poetics.

Significantly, Schaeffer’s writings on the encounter between sound and image all date from turning points in his career. The essay on the arts-relais mentioned above was produced during a period of enforced abstention from  his work in radio, and came a few months before the inauguration of the Club d’Essai, a laboratory for research and experimentation that led to the celebrated Groupe de Recherches Musicales that still exists today. Four years later, immediately after he finished work on the colossal radio drama La Co­quille à Planetes, two texts were published, Propos sur la coquille (Notes sur l’expression radiophonique) (Schaeffer [1946a] 1990) and L’element non visuel au cinema (Schaeffer 1946b; 1946c and 1946d) devoted respectively to the aesthetics of radio broadcasting and the study of the sound component in films. The latter essay, in particular, returns to and develops a constructivist vision of the audiovisual document according to which, independently of the topic being narrated, the aesthetic message is conveyed entirely by the for­mal organization of the objects, visual images and sound modulations. Starting from the usual three-fold division of the audio track into noise, voice and music, Schaeffer demonstrates how the whole acoustic process can ac­tually be linked to the first category, since verbalisation is none other than the noise humans produce: “[…] one can thus affirm that the text has much less importance than the intonation of the phrases, the quality of the indi­vidual voices and the degree of intelligibility […]. In this way it also makes the action explicit, but no less or more so than reality itself, which is all too often elliptical and ambiguous” (Schaeffer 1946b: 47). Thus verbal and envi­ronmental noises belong to a single domain of audiovisual composition, constituting a perfect foil to the image, inasmuch as the latter can do no other than show ‘things’. Furthermore, being the outcome of a physical movement, such sound events testify to the presence of an action, a change, and hence provide input for the dynamic of the scene as a whole.

The consideration of music is decidedly more complex, as it arises out of an apparent contradiction: since music cannot draw on any relationship of cause and effect with the images, it begins by distancing itself from the real­ity of what is represented and disowns any intrinsic link with the structure of the representation itself. At the same time, however, music is able to enter spontaneously into a relationship with the image, over and above any consider­ation of a formal nature and irrespective of specific emotional con­tent. For Schaeffer, in fact, the visual and the audio aspects tend to form an immediate semantic bond independently of the author’s choices. While the latter can undoubtedly reinforce and orient these relationships, it can never suppress them. In fact it has been proved that any standard repertory of musical motifs can be adapted to any sequence of images whatever, and be relied on to set up connections or caesuras in the film’s development. This does not mean, however, that music is necessarily subordinate with respect to the image. When the director is capable of imagining and organizing his work in audio as well as visual terms, the choice of the musical elements will cease to relate to the whole in a fortuitous manner and be on a par with all the other components. In such cases, Schaeffer points out, “we are at a far remove from music-illustration. Here we have music-material. From the temporal conjunction of two original materials each having strong charac­ters, one musical and the other visual, we get a particularly rich complex of impressions […]. It affords that exquisitely artistic satisfaction which consists in perceiving diversity in unity, divergence in simultaneity: it is the blos­soming of the instant in time” (Schaeffer 1946c: 65).

Noise, words and music enter into different relationships with the im­age. In principle this relationship can range from the inevitability of the physical correspondence between an action and the accompanying sound to the arbitrariness of the artistic construction of complex audiovisual units. It should not be forgotten, however, that the organization of the au­dio track is itself an act of composition and that, even when an acoustic event is perfectly coordinated with a visual phenomenon (for example the noise of footsteps matched with someone walking), one can never strictly speak of ‘realism’. Schaeffer’s understanding of audiovisuals is in clear contrast to Kracauer's ‘fundamental aesthetic principle’ of cinema – namely the revelation of the physical reality – and represents rather a ‘cre­ative tendency’ which progres­sively distances itself from reality to give rise to fantastic constructions, even when they are based on simulacra of real objects (Kracauer, [1960] 1962: 90-98).