The Slow Motion of Sound

Translated by Franck Le Gac

[Jean Epstein, “Le Ralenti du son,” Livre d’or du cinéma francais (Paris: Agence d’information cinégraphique, 1948).]

In the fascination that comes down from a close-up and weighs on a thousand faces tense with the same rapture, on a thousand souls magnetized by the same emotion; in the wonderment that ties the look to the slow motion of a runner soaring at every stride or to the accelerated motion of a sprout swelling up into an oak tree; in images which the eye cannot form as large, as close, as lasting, or as fleeting: there the essence of the cinematographic mystery, the secret of the hypnotizing machine are revealed – a new knowledge, a new love, a new possession of the world through the eyes.

Until the very last few years and almost until the very last few months, the soundtrack, assigned to the old forms of speech and music, would reveal nothing to us of the acoustic world but what the ear had itself been used to hearing for as long as one could remember. Drowned in this overabundant triteness, the forerunner – the hum of the wheels on the train that took Jean de la Lune away – did not have any successors for a long time. These days, however, several foreign films attest to research that moves us towards improvements in sound recording – just as image recording improved over fifty years – in the direction of a genuine psychological and dramatic high fidelity, of a deeper and more accurate realism than that of an omnibus hearing, taken to be totally reliable. Already, it is no longer about hearing just speech, but thought and dreams as well. Already, the microphone has passed the threshold of the lips and slipped into the inner world of man, on the lookout for the voices of consciousness, the old repeated melodies of memory, the screams of nightmares and the words no one ever uttered. Already, echo chambers convey not just the space of a set, but distances in the soul.

In this refinement of sound cinema, it obviously seemed necessary to experiment with what could be added by the process of deceleration, which keeps enriching the visual reign with so many aspects not yet seen.