Film Direction

There is a consistent anxiety among the best of the sound engineers and sound designers in India that the auditory simulation model, the ‘grammar’ of sound ‘aesthetics’ of surround sound has been and is being constantly torn apart by the mainstream demands of the cine industry. In a way this anxiety can be placed in the historiography of a longer chain of technological appropriation in Indian landscape for more than hundred years, starting from the tactile realism of oil painting, or the use of Renaissance Perspective in painting and cinema in Indian condition. While this linking can be relatively easy, thanks to the works of cultural theorists and cine-scholars to some extent, what we need to look at is that – whether there is a significant change in the mode of technological appropriation, which can explain the often demand for +100 dB level of sound, various other ‘non-realistic’ movements of sound elements (digital SFX or pre-recorded sound passed through various digital sonic filters, almost on the verge of non-recognition of the sound source) in the surround channels and often a kind of over-deterministic applications of musical bits and pieces throughout the soundtrack. Somehow the job is more complex than it looks, for that we need to map somewhere the cultural history of sound production and listening, the politics of ‘noise’, the frequency spectrum of the indigenous sound producing instruments, specially in the lower strata of the society and even the subaltern/dalit aesthetics -- which hardly can be done within the span of the present paper, nevertheless some speculation can be done. And a take off point can be reached, where we may propose, whether there can be a kind of extension of Deleuzean Movement-image, Time-image, Affection-image etc to the sonic images as well!

The challenge of surround sound has different signification for the ‘avant-garde’ section of Indian cinematic forms. While there are some scanty moorings on the possibility if Indian theory of cinematic sound, specially in the writings of Ritwik Ghatak, Kumar Shahani, Mani Kaul, Ashis Rajadhyaksha etc, the surround sound phenomenon has not been addressed there for obvious historic reasons. We can take cues from the works of these masters (e.g. reverse perspective in Khayalgatha, musical or non-diegetic use of diegetic sounds in the films of Ghatak and Kaul) and place these works vis a vis the important sonic sequences from world cinema (e.g. trolley sequence from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the film Milky Way by Benedek Fliegauf etc). That comparison might lead us to understand one of the latent tendencies of cinema – the cinema becoming ‘ambient’ in nature, ‘ambient cinema’, and the possible sphere of negotiation of Indian cinematic forms with this upcoming, yet futuristic form of cinema; because in ambient cinema, more than the realism of sound, the ecology of sound is important, more than the relationship of sound to the visuals of cinema, the sound has the potential to be treated as independent soundscape, even as a kind of sound installation. It is important to look for the possibilities of Indian responses to this form of perceptual extension of cinema.