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Peter Strickland’s 2012 film Berberian Sound Studio is a wonderfully entertaining homage to the giallo film genre. Capturing its pulpy outlandish style, Strickland's film also creates a metatextual framework by which to critique the gender politics of giallo as a whole. As I will lay out, Strickland cleverly sends up the genre's treatment of its women actors (both on and offscreen) by inverting the typical relationship between sound and image. In doing so, the film constitutes a valuable contribution to the history of voice in cinema, its relation to gender, embodiment, and spectatorship. It also allows for a new intervention into Michel Chion's concept of the acousmetre; the implications of which I will unpack in the conclusion.
Set in 1970s Italy, Berberian Sound Studio mostly centers around the character Gilderoy, a meek and diffident sound engineer from England. Gilderoy arrives in Italy after being commissioned by a director, the flamboyant and cocksure Giancarlo Santini, to complete post-dubbing and foley work on his forthcoming horror film, kitschily entitled The Equestrian Vortex. As Berberian Sound Studio progresses, we watch Gilderoy slowly descend into madness, as the studio’s paranoid, claustrophobic atmosphere builds. Ultimately the strain placed on Gilderoy by the intensity of the production process and the chauvinistic manipulation from the studio management becomes too much to bear. By Berberian Sound Studio’s conclusion, the boundary separating the production studio from the film being produced breaks down, plunging Gilderoy into the film-within-the-film, and fragmenting any distinction he once possessed between the reality of the sound studio space and the object of its production.
Throughout the film’s duration, we are given not a single glimpse of The Equestrian Vortex. Instead, as viewers we are allowed only to watch the characters of the sound studio gaze at it off-screen. The reunification of the sounded object with its visual referent is indefinitely suspended.Thus, the invisible screen operates as an almost monstrous, menacing Other. All we are allowed to see is the stinging, radiant light it casts on Gilderoy and the rest of the studio’s inhabitants. Day after day, Gilderoy stands in front of the screen, fixing his gaze at it with sheer resignation as he attempts to record foley sounds in lockstep with the unknowable images racing across the screen. In lieu of its images, all we are left with as viewers is to observe the cruel, physical toll the screen takes on Gilderoy, with sequences of his shoulders slumping, his eyes wincing and his mouth twitching before its invisible, yet almost corporeal presence. The screen seems to almost palpitate, asserting itself as an organism and intervening into the actual space occupied by Gilderoy and the others.
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| Gilderoy staring into The Equestrian Vortex |
In this way, the tension
between sonic production and the denial of its visual referent serves as the
primary dramatic backdrop to the film. The sounds we see constantly being
auditioned in Berberian Sound Studio
refer to a visual counterpart that is repeatedly hinted at, gestured and
alluded to, but never revealed. It is the radical split between the sound and
image that drives the film’s underlying sense of unease and disorientation, and
ultimately, what demarcates the psychic, or psychoacoustic
space of the film. In other words, it is this void of visual intelligibility,
one recuperated instead by a sonic excess, that produces Berberian Sound Studio’s unsettling and claustrophobic
dimensionality.
When speaking of
the film’s sonic excess, I refer not only to the richness and detail of its
soundtrack, but also the profuse, almost fetishistic representations of its
sounded objects. Perhaps no better example is found than the film’s extended
shots of fruits, vegetables and other organic matter. Being as it is a
production of a horror film, Gilderoy and the other sound engineers capture
human dismemberment and mutilation by hacking watermelons, stabbing cabbages,
decapitating radishes and dunking heads of lettuce underwater. The camera
pauses on these moments almost voyeuristically. The close-ups take on an almost
lavish, textural quality. In addition to focusing on the objects and
instruments used in recording these foley sounds, the film incorporates several
montages of the recording equipment itself, presenting a sort of audiovisual
close-up of their operations. Projectors spin into action, buttons and switches
flick on and off, tape reels flutter off their axis and machines continuously
hum and oscillate in the background. In this way, the near-tactile impression
made by the film’s soundtrack forces the viewer to constantly refer back to its
materiality.
But more than just
its lavish focus on sonic excess, Berberian
Sound Studio’s extended depictions of the recording process also
foregrounds it as a site of labor. Hence, Strickland shows the sound studio not
simply as a fully rationalized and professionalized space of sonic production,
but also as productive of a certain social relation, that is, as a workplace
that is gendered and classed like any other capitalist enterprise. This is most
noticeable in the film’s gendered division of labor. Nearly all the women in
the sound studio are there to perform voiceovers for The Equestrian Vortex. Thus, female labor is almost exclusively
relegated to vocality and bodily expression, while the male workers enjoy a
diversity of roles, from capturing and recording sound effects, to fulfilling
broader managerial and production tasks. In this way, the men enjoy the benefit
of distancing themselves from the psychological and bodily exertion
necessitated by the female performers. Male labor is rational and bureaucratic,
while the women’s work is emotional and physical, requiring them to fully
embrace the psychic atmosphere of the film-within-the-film.
This gendered
division of labor is best exemplified in the way the film depicts the primary
motif of the horror genre, the scream. In Berberian
Sound Studio, the scream fulfills a double role. In one sense, it is a
performative gesture, indicative of the horror genre as a whole. But being as
the film takes place in a sound studio, it extends the act of the scream beyond
its performative role, and situates it within the site of its material
production. In other words, the scream simultaneously becomes an act of
performance and an act of labor. In
this way, Berberian Sound Studio
unsettles how film typically reifies and mystifies the scream as an exclusively
performative act that hides its material and laborious physical origins. In
classic horror films such as Carrie, we
witness her scream at the film’s end in all of its dread and terror. But as an
act of labor, as a site of sonic production that requires repeated auditions,
this materiality of the scream is constitutively mystified and effaced. As
Strickland himself makes clear in an interview, “Berberian is quite an abstract
film, also it’s quite visceral in the realistic sense in that if you keep
screaming and screaming there’s a physical consequence to that. Your voice is going
to go. You don’t normally think of that when you see a horror film. I wanted to
show that” (3). As the soundtrack itself demonstrates, the screams and wails
emanating from its actors are overdriven and distorted to such an extent as to
reach a level of sheer sonic overload, as if their materiality can barely be
contained by the technical apparatus propelling the rest of the film forward.
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| Silvia |
Overall, it is the
burden of this process, the emotional labor required by the female performers
to produce the scream, to inhabit its psychic dimension that constitutes both
their subjugation and alienation in the sound studio environment. This
alienation is similarly experienced by only one male character in the film,
Gilderoy. His own psychic drama plays out through the eventual breakdown of any
border separating the reality of the sound studio from the film being produced.
Gilderoy’s estrangement from reality is brought about not only by alienation
from the object of his own labor, but by his sensitivity to witnessing the
psychic toll of the emotional labor undertaken by his female co-workers, most
notably Silvia, The Equestrian Vortex’s lead
actress. In this way, his general fragility, his inability to absorb the
psychic burden placed on him and those around him, operates as a sort of
vacuum, funneling the anguish produced by the sound studio environment into his
own battered psyche, and eventually by the film’s end, his own ethical
corruption.
Ultimately, what is
most peculiar about Berberian Sound
Studio’s portrayal of labor is the way its alienation and estrangement is
homologously reproduced in our own viewing experience. Even as
we linger within the hidden abode of sonic production in Berberian Sound Studio, there is never a suggestion of revelation
or demystification presented to the viewer. Unlike other films that foreground
the production process, such as Godard’s Passion
or the final shot of the sound stage in Fellini’s E La Nave Va, the space of the sound studio in Berberian Sound Studio is not a site of demystification. In what is
perhaps the most unsettling aspect of the film, even as we luxuriate in the
normally unseen spaces of cinematic production, even as we experience in lush
detail all of the processes of producing a film soundtrack; the sense of
unease, the feeling of the uncanny, the general alienation and disorientation
produced by its viewing experience is sustained, if not further exacerbated, by
occupying this space. Thus, in opposition to what we would normally anticipate
the hidden abode of production to reveal, that is, the grisly underbelly of cinema’s
glitz and glamor; in Berberian Sound
Studio, the site of production is no less uncanny, no less alienating, no
less ornamented in hieroglyphic subterfuge than the most fetishized commodity.
The characters’ alienation and estrangement from the object of their labor is
mirrored in our own experience of watching the film. This is because we are
similarly estranged from the object of the characters’ labor. But as
spectators, our alienation is produced not by the labor process itself, but
rather, through the perspectival restriction of being unable to see the images
that the characters in the film are laboring for. In other words, the
film that the characters are producing sounds for is severed from our own
visual experience. We are denied access to its images, and thus, we are only
able to see the labor put into it, not the object itself.
In this way, the sound studio,
rather than serving as a site of demystification, instead comes to occupy a
liminal zone between sonic production and its unrepresented visual referent. It
is precisely through this lack of access to the images of the film-within-the-film,
that we are instead compelled to occupy the interstitial borderland between the
sounded object and its unseen visual representation. By radically separating us
from mise en abyme that is being produced, by cutting off any recourse to any
visual representation of what the actors in the film are arduously laboring
over, our visuality is grounded exclusively within the depiction of the objects
being sonified, and the vocal acts being performed, rather than any visual representation
of what these acts of labor are being produced for. In other words, by
reversing the gaze away from the screen and back towards the studio and its
inhabitants, Berberian Sound Studio
forces our attention to gravitate towards the faces and gestures of its
characters painfully repeating their performances. As a result of this
bifurcation between being able to witness the laborious process of sonic
production, but being prohibited from visually verifying the object being
labored over, we ultimately end up being plunged into the insterstice between
sound’s synchronic relationship to its visual counterpart.
It is precisely in
this way that Berberian Sound Studio
forces us to resituate our relationship to the acousmetre. As Michel Chion explains, the acousmetre in film is defined by the phenomenon of a voice that cannot be seen. It is precisely in this invisibility that the film viewer is presented with a sense of tension and unease. Thus, in its indeterminacy, the acousmetre holds an inordinate power over the viewer. This power relies not just on its invisibility, but also on the viewer’s anticipation that the acousmetre’s sonic origin will reunite with its proper visual counterpart. As Chion says, “An entire image, an entire story, an entire film can thus hang on the epiphany of the acousmetre. Everything can boil down to a quest to bring the acousmetre into the light” ( 23). As Chion demonstrates, cinema is saturated with examples of this peculiar acousmatic effect, most evidently in the form of the acousmatic voice as an object of narrative revelation. From The Wizard of Oz to Fritz Lang’s M and Hitchcock’s Psycho, the voice which cannot be seen serves as the denoument in each film’s narrative unfolding.
In an inversion of
Chion’s definition, rather than being unable to see what is auditioned
off-screen, in the narrative world of Berberian
Sound Studio, we see precisely
nothing but the excessive plenitude of what is auditioned off-screen. Thus,
unlike the traditional role assigned to the acousmetre, wherein the voice or
the sounded object is eventually reunited with its visual representation, the
objects and vocal performances we see sounded in abundant detail within Berberian Sound Studio are kept strictly
separated from their visual counterparts. As a result of our prohibition from
ever experiencing the acousmetre reunite with its visual referent, viewing Berberian Sound Studio ultimately
becomes an experience of occupying the acousmetre as a psychogeographic or
psychoacoustic space. By quarantining the acousmetre’s visual referent, we are
instead compelled to remain within the acousmetre’s sonic materiality, to place
ourselves within the void left open between the auditioned sound and its visual
accompaniment. Thus, when we watch Berberian
Sound Studio, our experience extends beyond the traditional, audiovisual
cinematic experience. By cleavaging the audio from the visual, the film invites
us into a new space, an acousmatic space. In other words, by cutting off any
recourse to its visual referent, by denying any rendition to any outside of
visual representation, we are subsequently plunged into the liminal zone of
acousmatic space itself. We dwell and linger within its unsettling boundaries,
feeling its textures and edges in all of its desolation and alterity.
References:
Chion, Michel. The Voice in Cinema.
New York: Columbia U Press, 1999.
“Sound At The Center: An Interview With Peter Strickland.” The New Soundtrack Volume 3 (March 2013): 1-12. Print.
“Sound At The Center: An Interview With Peter Strickland.” The New Soundtrack Volume 3 (March 2013): 1-12. Print.
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