TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

The viewer’s perception of time and rhythm depends also and above all on his or her ability to create bearings which will be called upon after watching the film as units of measure. This unfolding of time is measured, even relatively, on a horizontal axis, as Norbert Elias remarks: “Timing thus is based on people’s capacity for connecting with each other two or more different sequences of continuous changes, one of which serves as a timing standard for the other (or others).”^[1]

As we mentioned above, while becoming aware of passing time happens in the course of experiencing a film, it often derives from a loss of attention. This is why alternation between slow and rapid passages delays this awareness, because it is less easy for viewers to step back from the articulation and organisation of the filmic elements as they are concentrating so much on the elements themselves. In this way, their perception of time and rhythm is disturbed.

From this perspective, Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson propose an analysis of the original soundtrack of Christophe Gans’ film Silent Hill, which we mentioned in our introduction. This soundtrack is made up of pre-existing pieces taken from the video game, most of which are arrhythmic and created by the wind, casting aside any recognisable motif:

However, the film’s music makes the film a fragmentary experience. It contains little in the way of clear and memorable repetition, and little sense of a sonic continuity. In other words, the score is not orchestral, does not consist of songs and does not follow a particular musical style or genre. Yet, for someone who has played these games and interiorized the game music, the experience is a constant evocation of memories of the game and feelings associated with the game. […] Silent Hill mixes up noisy austere pieces from Silent Hill 1 noise, using mechanical loops and scraping sounds, and more conventional musical pieces derived directly from the first four games^[2]

The authors add that Silent Hill “was not ‘scored,’ however, and therefore music to a lesser or greater degree articulates the image.”^[3] The pre-existing music from the eponymous video game, of which the film is an adaptation, was for the most part used again, with the assistance of the composer, who was credited as “executive producer” of the film.

One of the film’s tasks was also to distance viewers from reality and social time. Viewers freely consent to giving these up in plunging into the intra-filmic time, whose “conventions specific to it edify cinema’s entire heritage” as well as their own experience – what Ethis calls “interfilmicity.”^[4] In this case, it is best to accompany the viewer, or to throw them off balance, by imposing on them a screen time which orders its own rules around time.

The credit sequence for the David Lynch and Mark Frost television series Twin Peaks (1989) illustrates this idea ideally through the slowness it imposes on its “restrained” images – “silent and slow-motion shots”^[5] – even before the music adds a “sentiment blending loss and survival, between irreversibility and nostalgia,” as Guy Astic describes in a volume devoted to the series.^[6] He continues:

From the outset, there is a charm at work – a desire which is already a regret, a kind of languor – troubling one’s conscience as much as it envelops it. What can return something that has disappeared? This is the question that appears to arise in the face of the bittersweet images of the credit sequence carried along by the theme by Badalamenti. The irreversible makes no doubt about itself, and the vague resistance one feels towards it in no way alters the uninterrupted unfolding of swells before the fade to black which serves to raise the curtain on the episode.^[7]

Just the same, this is not something new in itself: most classical Hollywood films had already worked on the sequencing of long time, rather than juxtaposing short times. As Michel Chion remarks, films in the 1930s made use of musical “airs” (because of either a formal constraint or an artistic opportunity). They will then gradually evolve to a long “recitative” whose structure would be implicitly perceptible and not experienced as a découpage, despite the recurring interruptions to the musical stream preventing continuous fluidity imposed by the narrative.^[8] From Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933) to Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) by way of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), with Victor Fleming’s Gone with the Wind (1939) as the climax, the search for continuity in diversity was obvious in that ten-year period.

This measurement of time can nevertheless be immediate and not intellectualised, by means of an intuitive and corporeal perception when it is clearly brought out through contrast: a slow scene will never appear as such when it follows a lively scene, and vice versa. In Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), time stretches during the embarrassed silences between Alex DeLarge and his worried acolytes in the course of a long conversation following the frenetic tempo of torrid lovemaking set to Giachino Rossini’s William Tell Overture (Ouverture de Guillaume Tell, 1829), arranged by Wendy Carlos for synthesisers.

In addition, the effect of silence after a highly animated scene takes the contrast effect to its paroxysm: “Every sound is just a pause in silence,”^[9] the composer Ennio Morricone asserted in the twilight of his career. When silence arrives by surprise, the viewer, suddenly deprived of all audio activity, becomes alert with heightened attention to the slightest event. Then, when the silence is accepted as such, the viewer enjoys it and takes pleasure in filling it up with his or her own thoughts about what came before and what may follow. In this way, music is able to suggest a slowing of time by its absence, through an effect of inertia when it is not present. In Mark Herman’s Brassed Off (1996), after a performance of Percy Grainger’s Danny Boy (Londonderry Air) (1918), a nearly three-minute scene of sustained music, a pious silence on the part of the Grimley brass band takes hold in tribute to their conductor. This search for contrast is especially eloquent in the sequence mentioned above following the discovery of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and more recently in Rian Johnson’s Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi (2017), when the enemy flagship craft is torn asunder at the speed of light in absolute silence, filmed in black and white. In this latter case, in a kind of audiovisual symbiosis, the shock of silence is accompanied by the visual shock of the loss of colour.