More Than Background

It is perhaps unsurprising that discussion of documentary films has often concentrated on the visual content, editing and directorial decision making. Yet, as this book attests, it is vital to understand the way in which sound and music structure the meaning and impact of documentary film. In this chapter, we turn particular attention to the composition and importance of film soundscape: that is, the way in which a given ‘sonic environment’ is represented. ¹ Traditionally, the use of environmental sound has been seen as a sonic background. For Michel Chion, ambient (or territory) sound ‘envelopes a scene, inhabits the space without raising the question of the location of its specific source(s) in the image’. ² In other words, the normative use of ambient sound in film naturalises (and is thereby in service of) the image by providing a fully-rounded audiovisual sense of place. It is present but unremarkable, a kind of unnoticed perceptual anchor. Using the examples of two landscape documentaries, this chapter argues that greater attention needs to be played to the vital role that the soundscape can have in contributing to mood, narrative and the emotional impact of a film. The analysis will concentrate on the Irish film Silence (2010) and, to a lesser extent, the British film sleep furiously (2008). The chapter argues that these films are indicative and resultant of a wider historical blurring of sonic and stylistic boundaries between art film and documentary. In order to do this, we concentrate on normally understudied elements of cinema’s audio world: the sound of acoustic environments, of transient moments of weather and wildlife and of the space between music and dialogue. In essence, the argument works towards an approach that takes the film soundtrack as a soundscape composition of the type that emerged within the acoustic ecology movement in the 1970s. The result is a reading that takes all the elements of a given sonic environment as redolent with meaning and cultural significance.