Film-Philosophy 16.1 (2012)
Haptic Aurality: Listening to the Films of Michael
Haneke
Lisa Coulthard1
Focusing on listening as an act that moves beyond simply understanding
what one hears, Jean-Luc Nancy’s Listening offers a provocative call to
philosophical thought and theory. Opposed to mere hearing, listening for
Nancy implies attention, anxious focus and resonance: it suggests meaning
in motion rather than a fixed idea or full understanding. As an acoustic
experience and a rich metaphor, listening evokes the enlarging and
undulating characteristics of the sonorous as well as the reverberant echoing
of the resonant. In order to clarify this point, Nancy encourages us to think
about skin stretched over a drum as a metaphor for listening as sonorous
resonance: “A blow from outside, clamor from within, this sonorous,
sonorized body undertakes a simultaneous listening to a ‘self’ and to a
‘world’ that are both in resonance” (Nancy 2007, 43). This listening based
on the vibratory, the corporeal and the felt is placed at odds with what
Nancy sees as philosophy’s model for listening – the neutralized hearing of
understanding.
Accentuating the tactile and experiential, Nancy’s Listening insists on
taking the relation between hearing (écouter) and listening/understanding
(entendre) seriously in order to rethink philosophic inquiry within the realm
of timbre, accent, resonance and sound. More than hearing and beyond pure
understanding, the act of listening involves “an intensification and a
concern, a curiosity or an anxiety” (Nancy 2007, 5). To listen is to strain
toward meaning “that is not immediately accessible” (Nancy 2007, 6), “to
be on the edge of meaning” (Nancy 2007, 7), and to open oneself up to “the
resonance of being, or to being as resonance” (Nancy 2007, 21). As Nancy
perceptively notes, it is only in this linguistic pair of hearing and listening
(unlike tasting and savoring, or smelling and sniffing, for instance) that we
find a “special relationship with sense in the intellectual or intelligible
acceptance of the word” (Nancy 2007, 5).
Listening always implies an approach to the self, as the resonant
subject is one who is philosophically, epistemologically and sensorially
active, who is persistently approaching meaning but not complacently
arriving at it. Nancy’s conceptualizing of listening as resonant is indebted to
the work of Maine de Biran and his analysis of the listening subject as one
who is his own echo: “The ear is as if instantaneously struck both by the
direct external sound and the internal sound reproduced. These two
imprints are added together in the cerebral organ, which is doubly
1
Film Studies, The University of British Columbia: [email protected]
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stimulated [s’électrise doublement] – both by the action which it
communicates and by the action which it receives. Such is the cause of têtes
sonores [literally, sonorous or resonant heads]” (Biran as in Derrida 2005,
148). Meaning continues to resonate and move within such a subject as
what is listened to agitates, resounds and reverberates. This agitation
returns us to Nancy’s central question -- can listening be recuperated as a
resonant act not set on understanding sense but on the senses themselves?
In what follows, I will consider Michael Haneke’s philosophically and
ethically engaged cinema as a model for interrogating one of the ways that
this listening ear might be pricked – silence.
Through acoustic minimalism paired with essential narrative
ambiguities that are left to stand unresolved, the use of silence in films such
as Der siebente Kontinent (1989), Benny’s Video (1992), 71 Fragmente einer
Chronologie des Zufalls (1994), La Pianiste (2001), Le Temps du Loup/Wolfzeit
(2003), Caché (2005), Funny Games (1997; 2007) and Das weisse Band
(2009), demands a kind of resonant listening, one aimed not at full
understanding, but rather unsettling openness. Mysteries without answers,
open-ended stories, inaccessible and inscrutable characters: these are the
cornerstones of Haneke’s persistent ambiguity. Aiding these thematic
concentrations is a stylistic stress on a space for contemplative thought that
is emphatic in its insistence on active audience engagement. Combined,
these concentrations shape Haneke’s signature formal severity, glacial
minimalism and ethical impact. Although Haneke’s auteurism has been
frequently analyzed, parsed and referenced, it is rarely examined in terms of
an acoustic definition. Indeed, given the obvious acoustic patterns in his
films (silence, noise, acousmetric or offscreen dialogue and a lack of nondiegetic music), his own comments about the centrality of rhythm in
working to structure his films like music, and the precision with which his
soundscapes are constructed, it is clear that sound can fruitfully be
considered as a major part of Haneke’s cinematic vision. It can also be
argued that this same aural attentiveness operates in concert with Haneke’s
ethical concentrations on guilt, self-reflection, failed interpersonal
communication and the implication of the spectator and bystander.
The Hapticity of Silence
Moving beyond the recognition of the centrality of sound, I will argue here
that Haneke’s film sound is productively approached as a kind of haptic,
reverberant and indeterminate listening – in short, the kind of listening
outlined by Nancy. Although aiming his discussion at musical listening,
which he argues is listening at “the keenest or tightest point of its tension
and its penetration” (Nancy 2007, 26), Nancy’s discussion offers
provocations for both philosophy and film that are condensed in particularly
fecund ways in cinematic sound. Like music, the unique phenomena of
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cinematic silence, which is rarely total and almost always relative and
complexly layered, offers this kind of keen space for inquiry into the
tensions at the centre of resonant listening. And as a director whose work is
characterized by a prominent and quite particular use of silence, Haneke
offers a productive point of inquiry for the elaboration and illustration of the
ethical implications of listening to silence in the cinema.
Further, in approaching this kind of resonant listening in silence I
hope to interrogate Haneke’s cinema as a philosophical one, but also to
frame his films within what has been called French New Extremism or
cinemas of sensation. To be more precise, Nancy’s resonant listening can
work to highlight the haptic aurality that I contend is as crucial to
considering these cinemas as the haptic visuality according to which they
are usually examined. Borrowed from Deleuze’s work on Francis Bacon
(who in turn adopted the term from Alois Riegl), the concept of haptic
visuality has gained a great deal of currency and popularity in contemporary
film studies and theory. A sensually inclusive approach to visuality, the
haptic gaze is seen to interrogate the role of all senses (touch, smell,
hearing) in the visual. In so doing, it reorients theoretical discussion and
spectatorial experience away from narrative logic, character identification or
even formal analysis and toward the phenomenological, experiential,
sensual and corporeal.
The haptic foregrounds tactile experience, the skin or body of film
and its relation to the sensations of the spectator. When considering tactility
and sensation of this kind, it is imperative to bring back Nancy’s
conceptualization of listening as resonance in order to remind ourselves of
the inherently and emphatically tactile nature of hearing: sound literally
touches our bodies, moves and vibrates the inner workings of our ears and
echoes through our bodies in order for us to hear. As Jonathan Sterne
(2003) notes, it is not insignificant that Alexander Graham Bell’s first
experiments with sound reproduction machines used excised human ears as
parts. Sound is above all else, tactile and corporeal (as any instance of
hearing damage due to loud noises proves); it not only communicates
physical presence, sensuousness or feeling, but actually moves outward to
quite literally move the body of the spectator, sometimes in aggressive and
assaultive ways (as in Gasper Noé’s use of nausea-inducing infrasound in
Irreversible) and sometimes in thought provoking, contemplative and
ethically implicated ways (as in the films of Haneke).
Essential to Nancy’s listening, the haptic highlights all those elements
of sensory experience that are not directed at pure understanding but rather
at the vibratory resonance that Nancy wants to recuperate for philosophy. It
is also essential to Haneke’s soundtracks and silence, which foreground and
amplify the banal everyday noises associated with living: breathing,
walking, brushing teeth, eating, touching skin. By putting Nancy’s listening
in conversation with Haneke’s haptic aurality, we can begin to understand
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the philosophical import and direction of Haneke’s film silence. Put simply,
experiencing sound as sense - in the tactile, not rationally comprehensible
way – shapes Nancy’s discussion of listening, Haneke’s cinematic
formalism and the approach to his films as productively ambiguous and
philosophically open. It also allows us to place Nancy’s discussion within
the frames of cinema and silence. In silence we find the loudest call to listen
and strongest imperative to interrogate, contemplate and resonate. As
Nancy notes in Listening, it is in silence that we can begin to approach the
self, for it is in the absence of noises, music or voices that the subject’s self
can be heard: “’Silence’ in fact must here be understood [s’entendre, heard]
not as a privation but as an arrangement of resonance: a little – or even
exactly . . . – as when in a perfect condition of silence you hear your own
body resonate, your own breath, your heart and all its resounding cave”
(Nancy 2007, 21).
Silence is the essence rather than absence of sound, and the body of
the subject is its origin and endpoint. This is perhaps what Nancy is getting
at when he notes that the resonant subject is not a phenomenological nor a
philosophical subject, nor even a subject at all: rather this subject is “the
place of resonance, of its infinite tension and rebound, the amplitude of
sonorous deployment and the slightness of its simultaneous redeployment”
(Nancy 2007, 22). Listening, like hearing itself, is an active process in time
and space, that moves, resounds and reverberates and the subject it
constitutes is likewise in movement and agitation.
Listening to Haneke
Haneke has frequently noted the significance of sound in his cinematic
approach. Asserting that “the ear is fundamentally more sensitive than the
eye” and that it “provides a more direct path to the imagination and the heart
of human beings” (Haneke in Reimer 2000, 171), Haneke has argued for the
primacy of hearing in ensuring cinema’s affective and intellectual impact.
Yet it is also clear that this assertion of the affective nature of the auditory
comes from a director whose work is most commonly associated with a
surgical precision, glacial alienation and an assaultive approach to
spectatorial pleasure (and not with appeals to the sensitive hearts of the
audience). Evidently for Haneke, this direct auditory path of film sound is as
significant in its denial as in its plenitudinous fulfillment. In addition to the
formal and thematic glaciation that is frequently discussed in Haneke’s
cinema, is his austere, fragmented and incommensurable use of sound.2
2
Variations on the words freezing, coldness or glaciation appear in almost all critical and
scholarly accounts of Haneke’s films. See for instance Brigitte Peucker’s “Violence and
Affect: Haneke’s Modernist Melodramas,” in her The Material Image: Art and the Real in
Film (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), Mattias Frey’s “Supermodernity, Capital,
and Narcissus: The French Connection to Michael Haneke’s Benny’s Video,” (cinetext,
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Most obvious in this acoustic glaciation is the way that Haneke’s
soundscapes downplay human, affective dimensions of sound.
Characterized by a lack of non-diegetic music (and a restriction of diegetic
music), an emphasis on noise, silence and off-screen vocality, Haneke’s use
of film sound echoes his visual form insofar as it shifts attention away from
the human figure as a psychological entity available for affective
identification and engagement.
Towards this end, Haneke stresses aural disturbance and deemphasizes dialogue, the human form and the affectivity usually associated
with the traditional musical scoring guiding viewer response and emotional
investment. In the absence of these stylistic audiovisual cues conventionally
tied to affectivity, we can note an aural “coldness”, a glaciation as present in
film sound as it is in image. The lack of non-diegetic music is most obvious
in this acoustic glaciation, but it is equally present in the attention to sounds
associated with the body (breath, footsteps, clothing, skin) – sounds we hear
in part because they are amplified and in part because they are not covered
by music or voice.
Indeed, in their refusals of auditory pleasure whilst inviting active
listening, Haneke’s films suggest the contradictions of hearing and listening
with which I began; hearing might be pleasurable but listening, as Nancy
suggests, can be frustrating, anxiety producing and agitating. For Haneke,
his cinematic acoustic techniques highlight this active, anxious listening and
audition itself becomes more than a mere formal element of cinematic style
(affectively directed or otherwise); rather, it becomes a subject and theme
that he interrogates throughout his works both narratively and structurally.
In short, Haneke calls on us to listen, to pay close attention to the auditory:
in the same way that Nancy calls for us to “prick up the philosophical ear”
(Nancy 2007, 3), to actually listen with its concomitant associations of duty,
intensity and frustrated meaning, Haneke asks us to prick up not only our
audiovisual but our ethical ears, to reconsider the ways in which the cinema
can operate to query, interrogate and force issues and concerns of
philosophical consequence through resolutely auditory and audiovisual
means.
More than silence alone, it is the interaction of acoustic and visual
moments of quiet that renders a haptic, tactile aurality most present. In
Haneke it is not only acoustic minimalism itself, but the reduction of visual
elements in combination with this relative silence that accentuates acoustic
October 2002) and Andrew J. Horton’s De-icing the Emotions: Michael Haneke’s
retrospective in London” (Kinoeye 26 October 1998). Also note numerous other articles
that focus on his use of alienation and secrecy: see David Sorfa’s “Uneasy Domesticity in
the films of Michael Haneke, “ (Studies in European Cinema 3.2 (2006)), Libby Saxton’s
“Secrets and revelations: Off-screen space in Michael Haneke’s Cache,” (Studies in French
Cinema 7.1. (2007)), D.I.Grossvogel, "Haneke: The Coercing of Vision" (Film Quarterly
60:4 (2007)): 36-43 and the dossier on Caché in Screen (48:2 (2007)): 211-249.
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details, emphasizing the necessity of active aural engagement. The blackouts of Der siebente Kontinent, 71 Fragmente and Code Inconnu, the static
long takes of the house in Caché or the extended scene of total darkness in
Le Temps du Loup all focus our attention and enjoin us to listen carefully.
As visual pauses dominated by silence or secondary background noise (as
opposed to dialogue and music), these audiovisual interstices slow down
action, encourage contemplation and focus on the effects of actions rather
than propulsive, kinetic movement.
Indeed, in an interview Michel Cieutat, Haneke notes the precision
of the timing of these black-outs: in Code Inconnu and 71 Fragments each is
two seconds long, while in Der siebente Kontinent the duration of the black
shots varies according to the depth and content of the preceding scene. As
Haneke comments, “[i]f there was a lot to think about in the sequence, I
made the black last longer” (Haneke in Brunette 2010, 143). The timing of
these black shots is as essential to Haneke’s form as the long take, tracking
shot and static frame and all relate to his assertion that film is closer to
music than literature because of the way it stresses rhythm and repetition
over all else (Haneke in Brunette 2010, 154). It is also crucial to note that
the black shots offer a silent pause in the action in order to facilitate
thinking: “I give the spectator the possibility of identifying, and
immediately after, with the help of the black shots for example, I say to him
or her: Stop a little bit with the emotional stuff and you’ll be able to see
better!” (Haneke in Brunette 2010, 142). Through these kinds of audiovisual
pauses, Haneke calls on the audience to pay attention, to look carefully and,
most importantly, to listen; they offer caesuras for the audience to hear
themselves think, to listen in Nancy’s sense of the word.
This intensification of the audiovisual relation in the black-out extends
the imperative to listen to a kind of visualization of hearing or, as Lacanian
theorist Slavoj Zizek would phrase it ”I hear you with my eyes” (Zizek
1996, 90). Working from Lacan’s concept of the gaze and pointing to the
interrelation of the gaze and the voice, Zizek’s transsensory reversal
suggests an imaging and visualization of listening, a sensorial redistribution
that begins to answer Nancy’s questioning of whether we can indeed talk of
“visual sound” in the same way we might, for example, speak of a sonorous
vision (Nancy 2007, 3). Clearly we can and we should. More than a form
of synesthesia (a transference of sensorial capacity so that colours have
music or sound has smell), this transsensorial nature of cinema emphasizes
what film theorist Michel Chion insists on as “audiovision” in his seminal
work on sound in cinema: cinema’s forging of “an immediate and necessary
relationship between something one sees and something one hears” (Chion
1994, 5). Integrated and imbricated, sound and vision in cinema create a
space for transsensorial hearing with our eyes and seeing with our ears: for
example, off-screen sound frequently produces the sense of having seen
something or someone that does not in fact appear onscreen (a device
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particularly prominent in scenes of violence or in horror cinema) and images
can have an aural dimension.
The transsensorial pairing of black-outs with silence is perhaps most
traumatically present in those moments when sound and vision are
eradicated in the same cut. For instance, after the initial opening credits (the
usual silent, white lettering on a black screen of Haneke films) and an
opening scene, La Pianiste moves to the credits proper during which we
have audiovisually synchronized scenes of piano lessons intercut with
scenes of total silence and a black screen (with credits). The disruption of
the music is jarring both musically (the cut frequently abruptly cuts off a
note’s sustain) and rhythmically (the beats of the music and the cuts of the
editing offer no audiovisual correlation, no regular tempi or rhythm): the
intercutting proceeds along violent interruption, on rhythm disturbed or
thwarted.3
But the truly disorienting thing about this interruptive auditory
editing is that it is not totally clear whether the silence is interrupting the
music or the other way around. In addition, the shift from the patterned
aural cutting between piano music and silence to a cut from silence to a
scene of amplified outside traffic noise (pictured as a break from the music
lessons) confuses the aural determinations that distinguish music, noise and
silence. This is further disrupted in the ever-present intrusion of the
demands and corrections articulated by the insistence of the piano teacher’s
voice. These interruptions play a significant part in a film that relies so
prominently on the acoustic beauty and aesthetic pleasure of music and its
listening cultures: not only is musical culture interrogated but its aural
pleasure, aesthetics and beauty are denied a listening. Throughout the film
we only hear fragments, as musical pieces appear and are cut off, played
only in part or interrupted by vocal intrusions and demands.
Through the uncanny presence of total silence and its emphatic
contrast with the musical and the acousmetrically vocal (the piano teacher
Erika is emphatically heard but not depicted speaking onscreen in this
sequence), the film’s philosophical engagement with discourses of
aesthetics is made explicit: we are invited to interrogate its silent absences,
the violence, brutality and death that lie under the surface of aesthetic
beauty. Between sound and silence, we note a terrifying void and uncanny
3
My focus is on silence and not music here but it is clear that music and the role of musical
listening play a fundamental role in La Pianiste. In particular, the role of the recital and
musical listening as a vehicle for seduction and as an aural activity with corporeal impact
are in clear evidence in the film. As regards the specific nature and character of the music
within the film, the reader is referred to Robin Wood and Christopher Sharrett, both of
whom have analyzed the use of music in La Pianiste and have paid particular attention to
the centrality of Schubert’s Die Winterreise in the film. See Christopher Sharrett, ”Michael
Haneke and the Discontents of European Culture”Framework: The Journal of Cinema and
Media (47.2, Fall 2006): 6-16 and Robin Wood, "Do I disgust you?" or, tirez pas sur La
Pianiste,” CineAction (March 2002): 54-64.
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suspension of life as sound is punctuated by its own violent eradication.
More than this though, the silences lay bare the act of listening itself, both
as the film articulates the problematics of passive aural appreciation
(offering an ironic and reflexive attack on the polite audience constructed
around and demanded by the musical recital), and as it makes clear the fact
that it is indeed listening to us, that is, reminding us of our own duty and
responsibility to the film. This injunction, the demand that we listen,
wrought by the silence makes clear in the opening minutes of the film the
spectator’s role as active listener and therefore as interlocutor and
participant.
The presence of this active listener is essential to the dynamics of
choice and ethics that the film presents: open-ended, indeterminate and
interrogative, La Pianiste asks us to question the very discourses it engages
– family, love, beauty, desire, violence are all stripped bare for an
inquisition. Although more visually and aurally saturated than most of
Haneke’s films, La Pianiste is nonetheless an exercise in reduction, in the
subtraction of elements that renders naked the raw confrontation with the
self that ends the film. Although inconclusive in terms of impact and
intention, Erika’s final gesture is suicidal insofar as it is aimed at severing
the social, psychological and emotional frameworks that have tied her to
family, work, artistic creativity and love: it is a result of her confrontation
with her own values and desires and it is aimed at the core of her being.
This implosion, as the film turns inwards on Erika before her final and
mysterious exit into the night, is echoed in the elevated traffic noises cutting
once again to absolute silence in the final credits. Alone, Erika’s isolation
and exit from the cinematic frame make way for the silence of the
concluding credits that in turn force us to turn inwards, to listen to our own
discomfort that is made explicit in the film’s silent inconclusiveness. As
David Sorfa notes, this cut to silence at the end “brings the action of the film
directly into the space of the screening since the only sound one can hear is
that of the Art House audience shuffling and preparing to leave the
auditorium” (Sorfa 2006, 101). In this way, the actions on screen become
tied to “our own activity as spectators,” through which Art House space is
transformed by “a powerful return of the real and of the uncanny” (Sorfa
2006, 101) and the audience is discomfited by their complicity and
implication in guilt.4
This complicity and isolated incommensurability is not particular to
Erika’s silent exit from the frame but is essential to most if not all of
Haneke’s opening and closing sequences – sequences that emphasize silent
4
“This [the silent end credits of La Pianiste] brings the action of the film directly into the
space of the screening since the only sound one can hear is that of the Art House audience
shuffling and preparing to leave the auditorium. The implication that the terrible events on
screen are directly related to our own activity as spectators is a powerful return of the real
and of the uncanny into the Art House space” (Sorfa 101).
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thought and stillness.
As Thomas Elsaesser notes in his recent
“Performative Self-Contradictions: Michael Haneke’s Mindgames,” the
opening title sequence of Caché is not only a part of every commentary on
the film, but also gives the film a special place in the cinematic scene canon:
“The opening of Caché is already in line to become one of the most
commented-upon scenes in movie history, likely to take its place alongside
the shower scene in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and the extended
tracking shot from Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958) as the very epitome
of what cinema can do like no other art” (Elsaesser 2010, 64). Because this
sequence has been so thoroughly commented upon, I will not rehearse the
analyses here, except to point out the way in which the relative silence of
the sequence before the notorious vocal intrusion is crucial to its impact.
We hear footsteps, a bicycle go by and little else; out of this silence, the
voices erupt as if from behind us or from within the image itself, rendering
the sequence acoustically as well as visually disorienting. Analyzing this
sequence in terms of Noel Burch’s concept of “the space in front”, Elsaesser
considers the way in which the opening of Caché creates a space in front of
the image that is also part of the image. Undermining the referentiality of
the image, this “no-go” area creates an ontological void that throws the
image back on the viewer (Elsaesser 2010, 65).
Silence in Haneke’s opening and closing credits frequently has this
implication of discomfiting void. As externalized spaces that work to
instruct the audience, guide them and place them in the mood for the story, a
film’s opening credits offer a privileged space for authorial signature and
focused contemplation. By eradicating the music usually associated with
both opening and closing sequences, films such as Caché and Das weisse
Band court the spectator’s aural engagement in an active and almost
confrontational manner. This is arguably even more true of the closing
sequence, where it is as if the film has now finished and transfers its
responsibilities to us the listeners. Left only with the sounds of ourselves,
our own bodies, the silence of the closing credits turns our thoughts
inwards. As Elsaesser’s ontological void suggests, Haneke’s credits offer
uncomfortable moments of audience engagement, moments that are more
discomfiting because of the imposition of silence.
Dead Silence
This aural discomfort wrought by silence is nowhere more present than in
the void or secret that truly listening contains – the silence of death. The
contemplation of death in a long and silent take constitutes the core of
Haneke’s aesthetic of violence: less concerned with depicting the act itself
(which almost always occurs off screen), Haneke concentrates on the aftereffects and impact of violent acts, a focus that takes as its starting point an
injunction to listen to death itself. Take for example, Majid’s suicided body
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in Caché or the murdered security guard in 71 Fragmente: in each film, the
event’s impact is registered through a static and silent (totally in the latter
instance, relatively in Caché ) long take focused on a dead body and, more
precisely, on the blood draining from that body. In 71 Fragmente, in
particular, this static long and silent take is almost unbearable in its
duration, its voiding of sound and its tight focus on the flow of blood. It is
as if we are being called upon to listen for the blood draining from the body,
to listen to the flow of death itself. This is also arguably the case in the final
shot of Der siebente Kontinent which, although not silent, concentrates on
the dead face of Georg while the buzz of television snow dominates the
soundtrack. The effect is still one of focused contemplation and the white
noise operates in much the same manner as a kind of silence. Unlike the
total silence associated with a non-diegetic credit sequence or the point of
audition silence associated with subjective dreams, fantasies and states of
damaged or altered consciousness, here total silence is indicative of the void
of subjectivity itself, or death; as desubjectivized silent listening, this scene
seems as directed at the audience as it is communicative of anything within
the diegetic world. This total silence renders death audible and insists on our
audition and attention.
Combined with his concentration on the theme of failed
communication, this call to listen creates a complicit discomfort that
implicates the audience through moments of shared failures to truly listen:
the abused child whose cries for help are ignored in Code Inconnu, the son’s
forced vacation as a response to his act of murder in Benny’s Video, the
family’s insistence that it was murder and not suicide in Der siebente
Kontinent, the shutting of the blinds and the taking of sleeping pills in
Caché (another form of silence, made explicit in Georges’ request that his
son be quiet when returning home) or the community’s blindness to its own
violence in Das weisse Band. In opposition to the violent, frequently
suicidal acts that I have argued elsewhere are radical gestures demanding an
attentive audience (Majid’s suicide in Caché , the family’s act in Der
siebente Kontinent, Erika’s self-stabbing in La Pianiste), what we see
articulated in these examples is the silencing of listening itself, its active
muting: like the television that is muted so that Anna can listen to the
screams in Code, audition itself is muted by these characters in the rejection
of their responsibility, their duty, to listen.
As is commonly noted, the ears, unlike the eyes, do not have lids: we
cannot avoid hearing in the same way that we can close our eyes to a scene
of imagistic film violence. However, what these scenes in Code Inconnu,
La Pianiste and Caché make clear is that this opposition between hearing
and listening can be a distinction of life and death: although one cannot shut
the ears to hearing, one can indeed render silent noise through a refusal to
listen. It is also worth noting that both Code and Caché suggest an auditory
component to surveillance. The sounds of neighbours in Code and the
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disturbing acousmetric voices at the beginning of Caché render palpable the
acoustic dimensions of a surveillance society. For Haneke, then, the
breakdown of communication is inseparable from the refusal to listen, to
respond to the call to duty in an invested, ethical, interrogative and
appropriative way. We see this position echoed in many of his other films
where listening is refused (the criminal silence of Benny’s parents in
Benny’s Video or Georges’ persistent uncommunicativeness and lying in
Caché ) or actively pursued and highlighted as an ethical gesture through
vocal silence (Benny’s silence throughout Le Temps du Loup, Erika’s lack
of dialogue in the final act of La Pianiste, the family’s silence about their
intent to suicide in Der siebente Kontinent).
The Listener as Witness
Peter Szendy’s recent Listen: A History of our Ears notes that the listening
relationship is one of responsibility, of duty: that it carries with it an
imperative, a necessity to fulfill our own rights and duties as listeners and to
make what is heard our own. And arguably nowhere is this weighty
responsibility more palpable than when one is asked to audit and listen to
silence. In an interview about his use of silence in his short film Boy
(2004), experimental filmmaker Welby Ings notes the feeling of complicity
evoked in scenes of total silence: “The inspiration for this, I confess, did
come from a piece of film. It was Edison's 'Execution of an Elephant' in
1903. The silent electrocution of this animal on film remains one of the
most devastating pieces of moving image I have ever seen. Somehow its
muteness implies complicity.” (Ings) Again in this example we are
reminded not only of the silence that is death but of the call to attention that
such silence enjoins: it makes overt our role and duty as an audience of
listeners, which, as Szendy and Nancy stress, is a gesture that transforms
passive hearing into critical, interrogative and appropriative action. This
auditory transformation makes us a part of the work – as its listeners, we are
its interlocutors and are thus complicit in the silence. As Chion has noted,
an audience can feel as if a film is also listening to us, and nowhere does
that seem to be more apparent and more uncanny than in the silent depiction
of death.
This kind of overt recognition of complicity, the direct call to the
audience demanding that they listen, is arguably a large part of what
criticisms of Haneke’s cruelty toward the audience rely upon: combined
with the lack of conclusive endings, the eradication of the comfort, pleasure
and interpretive or emotional confirmation of response (features that are
often associated with cinematic sound) creates an uncomfortable viewing
space where one is forced to confront one’s own role as spectator and is
required to respond to the film. This silence is even more aggressive as a
film’s final comment, as if the film were done talking and now demanding
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that the audience respond. As filmmaker Bruno Dumont comments
regarding Haneke’s insistence on audience reflection, “Haneke nous dit:
‘Attention, je pense!’”(Dumont 2008, 1). For Dumont, this call of
“Attention” (or Listen!), “I am thinking!” or “I think!” is an insistence on
our role to think as well: “La force du film [Funny Games in this example],
c’est qu’il ne pense pas: il met en place les conditions pour que nous
réfléchissions” (Dumont 2008, 1).5 In Haneke, the film does not do the
thinking for us, but rather creates a space for us to think.
This shared complicity between listening subject and object casts us
back to Zizek’s linking of the duo voice and gaze mentioned earlier. As
Zizek notes, “silence is not (as one would be prone to think) the ground
against which the figure of a voice emerges; quite the contrary, the
reverberating sound itself provides the ground that renders visible the figure
of silence. . . . voice does not simply persist at a different level with regard
to what we see, it rather points toward a gap in the field of the visible,
toward the dimension of what eludes our gaze” (Zizek 1996, 93). As Zizek
repeatedly notes, Lacan’s concept of the gaze has been misinterpreted by
film theory to be on the side of the spectator, when it is in fact on the side of
the object – it is the thing that looks at us and this is the true disturbing
power of the gaze. Silence can be seen as a similar point for traumatic
reversal and disruption -- we become aware that it is the film that listens to
us, that makes explicit our act of listening and that requires our own silence
in response to its quiet. The moment of film silence exposes us, renders the
act of listening subjective and imperative in its reflexivity and makes
explicit the kind of resonant subject discussed by Nancy, the one who listens
to oneself listening. Developing this correlation between listening and the
resonant subject, we can go further to include Zizek’s yoking of silence to
death, to that “absolute silence that marks the suspension of life” (Zizek
1996, 94). This is perhaps one reason for the rarity of absolute or total
silence in cinema and its almost complete relegation to the level of the
fantasy, dream or not fully conscious subjective experience. Total silence
marks the void of the soundtrack, the emptying of all sound whatsoever, a
potentially disruptive and traumatic moment symptomatic of death itself, or
at the very least of vacuity, erasure and the uncanny. This absolute
eradication of sound suspends filmic reality, thus throwing not just the
spectator but the film itself into a momentary otherworldliness more
disorienting, rupturing and resonant than any imagistic black-out. The aural
black-out reminds us of our own void and inevitable silence.
5
It is not a coincidence that Haneke has named Dumont (along with the Belgian Dardenne
brothers) as a filmmaker whose work most closely resembles his own – both Dumont and
Haneke make use of the combined effects of static long takes and musical and vocal
silence, both have been attacked for the use of violence and both place ethics at the
forefront.
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Working from Hegel’s mention of “an ancient Egyptian sacred statue,
which, at every sunset, as if by miracle, issued a deep reverberating sound”
(Zizek 1996, 92), Zizek asserts that this inanimate object mysteriously
resonating from within offers the perfect metaphor for Lacanian subjectivity
itself, for the reverberating void that constitutes the void of barred
subjectivity as such. Moreover, as Zizek goes on to note, silence is the
perfect condition for the recognition of this presence of the void: as audible,
resonating presence, silence is not an absence but an insistence on emphatic
nothingness -- it points toward the gap of what is unseen, elusive and
unknowable, and exposes the void at the centre of subjectivity. In this way,
audible silence can render explicit the ethical and ontological difference
between hearing and listening, can force us to recognize the transsensorial
nature of hearing with our eyes and seeing with our ears and can remind us
of our subjectivity and of the potentially troubling sense of duty and
exposure that this implies.
Perhaps this is the answer to Nancy’s question “What secret is at stake
when one truly listens” (Nancy 2007, 5)? Listening renders explicit not
only our own resonance but the imminent, eventual absence of that
resonance, a void that is most palpable in those moments of total cinematic
silence where this imperative duty to listen, to listen to our own subjectivity
as it were, is most oppressive. This secret is not merely the absence of
subjectivity (death) but the terror of confronting subjectivity itself. As
Zizek notes apropos the traumatic voice object, we listen to music and other
auditory intrusions in order to “avoid the horror of the encounter of the
voice qua object” (Zizek 1996, 93). That is, the horror of our own void of
subjectivity is the terror at the heart of silence. In the absence of the once
present soundtrack, we are left with nothing but the call to auscultate
ourselves, to listen to our own living bodies and our own subjectivity.
Bibliography
Brunette, Peter (2010) Michael Haneke. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press.
Chion, Michel (1994) Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Claudia Gorbman, ed.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Dumont, Bruno (2008) “Game Over” in Le Nouvel Observateur 24/04.2008:
1-2.
Elsaesser, Thomas (2010) “Performative Self-Contradictions: Michael
Haneke’s Mindgames” in A Companion to Michael Haneke. Ed. Roy
Grundmann, ed. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.
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Haneke, Michael (2000) “71 Fragments: Notes to the Film” in After
Postmodernism: Austrian Literature and Film in Transition. Willy
Reimer, ed. Riverside: Ariadne Press.
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Nancy, Jean-Luc (2007) Listening. New York: Fordham University Press.
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Zizek, Slavoj (1996) “’I hear you with My Eyes’: or, The Invisible Master”
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