The Sound Crystal

Inigo Wilkins 23/03/05

The Sound Crystal

I have chosen to sound out or synthesise , rather than look at or analyse, a film by Werner Herzog, called ‘Heart of Glass’ . My aim is to investigate the sonic architecture of a short section of the film in relation to the Deleuzian conception of the movement-image and the time-image; to demonstrate the comparitive lack of rigor in the audio-visual lexicon of Michel Chion; and to outline Deleuze’s reinterpretation of Bergson’s monistic philosophy of images, particularly the idea of the time-cystal, and his assertion that ‘[i]n this film Herzog has set out the greatest crystal-images in the history of the cinema.’(2)
The first section of the film introduces us to the main character, Hias. We see only his back in the misty mountains, and hear the entrancing sound of a yodelling choir together with the stochastic shimmering of high frequencies that we later find is the (future) sound of ten racks of ruby glass on their line of flight over the border. We then hear his disembodied voice, which has all the formal properties, according to Chion’s schema, of a complete acousmetre (3).
The voice begins to intone prophetic poetry and, at a certain point of intensity, the voice becomes what Chion calls ‘textual speech’(4), that is it appears to control images we see by uttering them. Chion considers this a development from intertitles, or due to the encounter of the cinema with literature, I would rather posit a materiality of vibrations or vocogenesis . The visual image of gushing water imbricated with the somnifacient voice and non-diegetic music by legendary krautrock band ‘Popul Vuh’ are deliberately intended to be hypnotic.
Actually Hias is the only character in the film, excepting the glassblowers, who isn’t in a hypnotic trance. Herzog himself hypnotised all the actors (most of whom are untrained villagers) and taught them their lines under the effect, often allowing them freedom of imagination by merely making suggestions. It is in multiple senses then that Herzog’s film is metallurgical (the working of singularities following the flow of matter) rather than hylomorphic (the clay and the mold). Their altered state is clear by the glazed look in their eyes, their focus is diffused as on an indeterminate space, their gestures are aberrant, their voices are somnambulous.
To understand Deleuze’s extravagant comment regarding Herzog’s crystals we must grapple with the engineering controls of his time machine. Deleuze’s cinema philosophy is an example of transdisciplinary intervention, it is critical of the established consensus of film studies based on the triad of Saussure-Marx-Lacan , and instead reappropriates the Bergsonian concepts of the actual and virtual, using a Piercian semiotics such that ‘all thought is in signs’(7)and all images and signs are ‘fundamentally deterritorializing figures’(8), he demonstrates an awareness shared by Stengers of the transversal evolution of different assemblages (social, technical) in symbiotic relations(9).
Deleuze separates cinema into two distinct phases in the evolution of the medium, the movement-image and the time-image. The movement-image corresponds to early cinema such as Buster Keaton, but also to contemporary popular action films like ‘Terminator 3’ and animations like ‘Robots’. It is dominated by the body moving through space, and the sensory-motor schema that inform its perception. Deleuze’s construction of this category is directly informed by Bergson’s three theses on movement.
Bergson calls the belief that movement is composed of static instants ‘the cinematographic illusion’(11). Though film ostensibly consists of 24 static photgrammes per second, it is the invisible unrolling motion of the apparatus - the intermediate image - which gives us movement, that is the transition or interstice between one photogramme and the next in a continuity. Deleuze argues that the movement-image is then a mobile section.
The transition from the movement-image to the time -image, beginning in post-war European avant-garde cinema, indicates a metamorphosis in the manner that signs and images are apprehended, and a transversal evolution of the social image of thought (13). That is, the dominant model of thought in the first half of the twentieth century subordinated time to movement - following the universal mechanistic laws of Newton science made time an ‘independent variable’ (14) and thereby reduced it to ‘a sequence of instantaneous states linked by a deterministic law (what Deleuze calls “any-instant-whatevers”.(15)
The advent of the time-image coincides with the overturning of this logic in the arts and sciences; quantum mechanics demands a qualitative, co-determinate temporality (not merely quantitative and mechanistic) - a circumstance which finds expression in the cinematic medium.
Deleuze rejects the film studies approach, typified by the work of Christian Metz, which reduces cinema to text and its images to a grid of negatively derived significations much like structuralist linguistics (17). He also dismisses Eisenstein’s feeling that cinema is like an internal monologue (18). Instead he maintains that the movement-image, through the joint processes of specification and differentiation, comprises an amalgamation of visceral sensation, irreducible to language, that consists of actual matter (19) he calls signaletic material.
The section of the film I would like to focus on is the killing of the masters’ maid, an episode that begins with ‘Tony the Harp’ catatonically staring upwards into space as he plucks a rhythmic/melodic refrain that is anempathetic (21) and reminiscent of the menacing sweetness of the mechanistic music box, or the tragicomedy of the fairground. Deleuze and Guattari maintain that though the refrain is pre-eminently territorial, it also has other functions, and ‘passes into other assemblages’ (22) - it is the coverging point of three forces; chaos, terrestrial, cosmic (23). They insist ‘the Cosmos itself is a refrain, and the ear also’(24).
Deterritorialization occurs with the release of a machine that opens the territorial assemblage onto the interassemblage (25). The power of sound to affect directly the qualitative temporality of the audio-visual continuum is exemplified by the ritornello. ‘Music molecularises sound-matter and in so doing becomes capable of harnessing nonsonorous forces such as Duration and Intensity.’(26) The refrain is in fact ‘a prism, a crystal of space-time’(27).
At first the harp has a reverb which lends it warmth and emotion. The point of audition then changes to the adjoining room where the sound of the harp contains less reverb. We then hear the insane laughter of the master’s father this time with a reverb that makes us want to escape, it is a deeply disturbing sound, partially acousmatic, it functions like emanation speech (28), as Herzog says it is like an ‘extension of dialogue’(29). It seems odd that so much has been written about the scream in film but so little about laughter.
For Chion the scream is the pivotal instant in film, such that the whole trajectory of certain films, all its lines of convergence, centre on this point in time with no duration, the gushing forth of a-signifying vibration, ‘the unthinkable inside the thought. . .the indeterminate inside the spoken. . .unrepresentability inside representation’(30). He proposes that it is its placement in time that is of utmost importance. In this instance the (acousmatic then de-acousmatised) scream occurs at an anomolous juncture and is strangely objectless, it is a pure sonic event, a sound crystal(31), uncoupled from the image it wanders the screen, then mirrors itself. The sound-image is nomadic and relates to place or topology, the optical-image is territorial(32), stratisfied, and historical(33).
I readily concur with Chion’s claim that the scream is a ‘rip in time’(34) however his explanation of the overridingly feminine nature of the scream as due to ‘the “black hole” of the female orgasm, which cannot be spoken or thought’(35) is essentialist, as is his belief that the male cry delineates territory, and is willed, contrary to the female which concerns limitlessness and is ‘like the shout of the human subject of language in the face of death’(36) His gender stereotyping of the male shout as ‘centrifugal and structuring’(37) and the female scream as ‘centripetal and fascinating’(38)is grotesquely reductive. His proposal that de-acousmatization is a striptease whose endpoint is the phallic abscence of the female genitalia(39) is anti-corporeal and triangulated(40). Just as disturbingly essentialist is Brophy’s claim that the scream is an ‘ero-sonic moment’ or aural cum shot(41).
The laugh is also at the edges of language, a stuttering, centripetal force, on-off-on-off, it is the compulsive actualisation virtualisation process of the smallest circuit of perception-recollection. This particular laugh sounds like a vast resevoir of virtuality, a great collection of repressive machines, teeteringly perched on a thin membrane of actualisation and spilling into the void, seeping like a schiz-flow of urine or sunlight.
The privileging of the scream is a social machine which is constructed through the apparatus of the cinema itself, and which derives a great deal of its power from the fissure between the soundtrack and image . In fact the scream is only an extreme example of the speech act as resistance(44), the incommensurability of the sonic and optical(45), and the free indirect relationship between them(46).
Heautonomy is a concept introduced by Kant implying not only mutual autonomy within a unified structure, but also an interval of indeterminate nature between them. Deleuze’s use of the word, in reference to the audio-visual, covers several ideas that Chion has expounded in less rigorous terminology; his assertion that there is no soundtrack(47), the concept of added value(48), and his prized acousmetre(49). Chion’s acousmetre erroneously focuses attention on the ontological status of the schizophonic voice, the notion of faciality and probe-heads that Deleuze and Guattari developed is thus far more interesting. The paucity of Chion’s philosophy is most apparent not only in the oedipalization of the voice but also in his treatment of the off-screen as a spatial realm, where in Deleuze the ‘hors-champs’ is actual and actualizable, but the Whole is neither actual nor spatial, it is virtual and temporal(53).
The time-image may be either visual or auditory, and is formed by its estrangement from sensory-motor extension, it is a-centred and abberant(54). A visual time-image is called an op-sign whereas a sonic time-image is called a son-sign, and is equivalent to Schaeffer’s reduced listening(55) - Chion, however, opposes it to two other modes; causal and semantic; and therefor creates a cerebral, contemplative, and negatively defined practice, whereas with Deleuze the time-image is positively determined by its entry into a circuit with the virtual, and by its direct presentation of time.
The time-image enters into large circuits, as set out by Bergson, such as recollection-images, dream-images and world-images, however it only becomes a crystal-image when it oscillates on the smallest internal circuit with its own virtual image. This oscillation is caused by the reciprocal presupposition of the actual and the virtual (58), by their exchange around a point of indiscernability (not to be confused with the indistinct). This endless displacement has three aspects - the actual and the virtual, the limpid and the opaque, and the seed and the environment(59).
Perception always involves this double action of liberation and capture, where the present splits into the actual perception which passes or dies; and the virtual recollection which is preserved and retains the seed of life(60). It is this elemental schism in time, this paradoxical coalescence of the actual and the virtual, which we apprehend in the crystal(61). The crystal is a stage(62), the film within the film is a mode of the crystal-image(63), as is the actor ‘beholding himself playing’(64).
For Deleuze there are two dimensions of musical time; the gallop, which expedites the passing of presents and ushers in death; and the ritornello, which is the ontogenetic retrocession of the past(65). Deleuze argues that the crystal-images of Renoir are complete because they allow one of these tendencies to leave on a line of flight, the passing present escapes and only the preserved past remains. Those of Fellini on the other hand incorporate everything in a continuous expansion that causes the passing present to become a ‘danse macabre’(67).
The scene which interrupts the death of the girl contains a section where a farmer dances with the dead body of another peasant to the sound of a hurdy-gurdy. This instrument has a continuous bawdy drone with multiple overtones and rhythmic pulsations, it is the gallop that accompanies the movement of actualisation, the death-dance. It is antithetical to the harp with its clear succession of distinct pure tones - the refrain that preserves (the dead girl is ‘cooling’(68) like freshly wrought glass).
Pure recollection, which is virtual and luminous, is to be distinguished from the recollection image, which is actual and opaque. The former, which is preserved in a layer or sheet of time, acts as a magnetizer for the latter which derives from it. In dreams, and in the appreciation of art, film, music and literature we ‘constitute a sheet of transformation which invents a kind of transverse continuity or communication between several sheets, and weaves a network of non-localizable relations between them. In this way we extract non-chronological time.’(69) We may say then that ‘Heart of Glass’ is meta-cinematographic and crystalline since it is ‘precisely a story of magnetism, hypnotism’(70) and also that ‘hypnosis. . .reveals thought to itself’(71).

Footnotes

1 ‘Philosophy is no longer synthetic judgement; it is like a thought synthesizer functioning to make thought travel, make it mobile, make it a force of the Cosmos (in the same way as one makes sound travel).’ (1)
2 ‘Heart of Glass’ is based on a story by Herbert Achternbusch, a lesser known figure of New German Cinema, a genre made famous by the works of Wenders, Fassbinder and fellow Bavarian anarchist Herzog. His novel is inspired by the writings of a kind of eighteenth century Nostradamus from the same locality.
3 Contrary to Chion’s criteria his subsequent de-acousmatization in the following scene does little to reduce the power of his omniscience.
4 ‘In metallurgy. . .the operations are always astride the thresholds, so that an energetic materiality overspills the prepared matter, and a qualititive deformation or transformation overspills the form’(5)
5 A threesome in whose name film is reduced to identification, we would rather say, as Shaviro does, that ‘the subject is captivated. . .touched by - drawn into complicitous communication with - the passive. horrific, and yet strangely attractive zombies’(6)
6 The first of which states that ‘movement is distinct from the space covered. The space covered is past, movement is present, the act of covering. The space covered is divisible. . .whilst movement is indivisible’.(10)
7 the eye’s ‘retention of virtual images’(12)
8 ‘This is what happens when the image becomes time-image. . .The screen itself is the cerebral membrane where the immediate and direct confrontations take place between the past and the future. . .The image no longer has space and movement as its primary characteristics but topology and time.’(16)
9 ‘a signaletic material which includes all kinds of modulation features, sensory (visual and sound), kinetic, intensive, affective, rhythmic, tonal, and even verbal (oral and written). . .It is a plastic mass, an a-signifying and a-syntaxic material, a material not formed linguistically even though it is not amorphous and is formed semiotically, aesthetically and pragmatically.’(20)
10 ‘The sound image is born, in its very break, from its break with the visual image. There are no longer even two autonomous components of a single audio-visual image. . .but two ‘heautonomous’ images, one visual and one sound, with a fault, an interstice, an irrational cut between them.’(42) ‘movement maintains a set of exchanges or an equivalence. . .time is by nature. . .the impossibility of an equivalence’(43)
11 ‘Sometimes the abstract machine, forces flows into signifiances and subjectifications, into knots of arborescence and holes of abolition; sometimes, to the extent that it performs a veritable “defacialization,” it frees something like probe-heads (tetes chercheuses, guidance devices) that dismantle the strata in their wake, break through the walls of signifiance, pour out of the holes of subjectivity, fell trees in favour of veritable rhizomes, and steer flows down lines of positive deterritorialization or creative flight.’(50)The gaze is secondary to the black hole of faciality (51) the face is ‘the wall of the signifier, the frame or screen’(52).
12 ‘The relation, sensory-motor situation – indirect image of time is replaced by a non-localizable relation, pure optical and sound situations – direct time image. Opsigns and sonsigns are direct presentations of time.’(56)
13 ‘the opsign finds its true genetic element. . .[when it] crystallizes with its own virtual image, on the small internal circuit. This is a crystal-image’.(57)
14 ‘Everything that has happened falls back into the crystal and stays there: this is all the frozen, fixed, finished-with and over-conforming roles that the characters have tried in turn, dead roles or roles of death, the macabre dance of recollections’(66).


References

Herzog, W. ‘Heart of Glass’ DVD. Anchor Bay Entertainment
(1)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.343.
(2)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p75.
(3)Chion, M. ‘The Voice in Cinema’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1999. p.21
(4)Chion, M. ‘Audio-Vision’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1990. p.224
(5)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. Athlone Press 2003. p.410
(6)Shaviro, S. ‘The Cinematic Body’. University of Minnesota Press. 2000. p.53
(7)Rodowick, D.N. ‘Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine’. Duke University Press. 1997. p.39.
(8)Rodowick, D.N. ‘Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine’. Duke University Press. 1997. p39.
(9)Shaviro, S. ‘The Cinematic Body’. University of Minnesota Press. 2000. p.264.
(10)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 1- The Movement-Image’. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. 2003. p.1.
(11)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 1- The Movement-Image’. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. 2003. p.1.
(12)Shaviro, S. ‘The Cinematic Body’. University of Minnesota Press. 2000. p.51.
(13)Rodowick, D.N. ‘Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine’. Duke University Press. 1997. p.7.
(14)Bergson, H. ‘Creative Evolution’. Dover Publications, Inc. Mineola, New York. 1998. p.336.
(15)Rodowick, D.N. ‘Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine’. Duke University Press. 1997. p.19.
(16)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.125.
(17)Shaviro, S. ‘The Cinematic Body’. University of Minnesota Press. 2000. p.11.
(18)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.29.
(19)Rodowick, D.N. ‘Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine’. Duke University Press. 1997. p.28.
(20)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.29.
(21)Chion, M. ‘Audio-Vision’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1990. p.7.
(22)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. Athlone Press 2003. p.325.
(23)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. Athlone Press 2003. p.312.
(24)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. Athlone Press 2003. p.347.
(25)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. Athlone Press 2003. p333.
(26)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. Athlone Press 2003. p.343.
(27)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F.. ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. Athlone Press 2003. p.348
(28)Chion, M. ‘Audio-Vision’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1990. p.177.
(29)Herzog, W. ‘Heart of Glass’ DVD. Anchor Bay Entertainment. Director’s Audio Narrative.
(30)Chion, M. ‘The Voice in Cinema’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1999. p.77.
(31)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.90.
(32)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.255.
(33)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.258.
(34)Chion, M. ‘The Voice in Cinema’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1999. p.73.
(35)Chion, M. ‘The Voice in Cinema’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1999. p.73.
(36)Chion, M. ‘The Voice in Cinema’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1999. p.78.;
(37)Chion, M. ‘The Voice in Cinema’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1999. p.79.
(38)Chion, M. ‘The Voice in Cinema’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1999. p.79.
(39)Chion, M. ‘The Voice in Cinema’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1999. p.27
(40)Deleuze, G & Guattari, F. ‘AntiOedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia’. Athlone Press. p258.
(41)Brophy, P. ‘I Scream in Silence: Sex, Death and the Sound of Women Dying’ in Cinesonic the World of Sound in Film. AFTRS.p63.
(42)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.251.
(43)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.77-8.
(44)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.254.
(45)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.256.
(46)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.261.
(47)Chion, M. ‘Audio-Vision’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1990. p.39.
(48)Chion, M. ‘Audio-Vision’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1990. p.5.
(49)Chion, M. ‘The Voice in Cinema’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1999. p.17.
(50)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.190.
(51)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.171.
(52)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000.p.168.
(53)Rodowick, D.N. ‘Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine’. Duke University Press. 1997. p.48+52
(54)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.38
(55)Chion, M. ‘Audio-Vision’. Columbia University Press, New York. 1990. p.29
(56)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.41.
(57)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.69.
(58)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.69.
(59)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.71.
(60)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.92.
(61)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.81.
(62)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.71.
(63)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.77.
(64)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.79.
(65)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p93.
(66)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.87.
(67)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.91.
(68)Herzog, W. ‘Heart of Glass’ DVD. Anchor Bay Entertainment.
(69)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.123.
(70)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p.123.
(71)Deleuze, G. ‘Cinema 2- The Time-Image’. The Athlone Press, London. 2000. p125.

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