6 - Sound, Silence, and Music

By Chloé and Marina 

Introduction

            Although every documentary filmmaker is known to have an aim and purpose to their film, they wouldn’t be able to convey the message without the help of sound and music. These two play a huge role in the film industry since it directs us to the way the filmmaker wants us to understand everything. By watching Berlin: Symphony of a Great City with our own choice of music, we got the chance to experience a documentry film in a whole new way; the way we wanted to see it, with the message we wanted to learn.

Part 1- Berlin: Symphony of a Great City

            Berlin: Symphony of a Great City is a silent movie directed in 1927 by Walter Ruttmann. The 64 minute movie displays the life in Berlin city at that time. The movie is separated in five parts like a symphony and its acts. The movie starts in an interesting way, a camera attached to a train captures images of the rural side of Germany and it leads us to Berlin's train station. It brings us on a tour, we will spy upon common people mostly unaware of the camera. Our journey in Berlin beggins; it is five in the morning, few drunk people on their way home wander in the streets. Men owning commerces wake up and start heading to work. Policemen make sure everything is fine. Berlin is still asleep, no cars, only the skeleton of the city. At 7 o'clock, the city wakes up, cars, tramways and school kids appear in the streets. Women are also shown at work, whether at home cleaning, as typist or as phone operator. Kiosques open and happy children play in the streets as they get crowded. It is now 12, lunch break for everyone. Animals get fed in zoos, workers eat in the cantine and some richer folks eat in restaurants. After lunch, sports tournaments are organised, people rassemble to play games. Some prefer to take naps! In the fifth part, it is night time. Everybody is enjoying themselves, clubs are full, shows are presented in which some ladies are displayed in big underwear (it was considered very daring at that time).  Casinos, drinking bars, nobody stays at home, they have fun as a community. The last image is of lights on a tower shutting off, as the cycle starts again.

            Throughout the film, the population seems mostly unaware of the camera except at one point when a woman jumps from a bridge, the scene was obviously staged. This movie was particular because there were no speech nor noises, only music in the background that was not recorded with the movie; it was commentative and extradiegetic since the music does not actually come from what happens in the scene. It is also asynchronous since it did not happen at the same time except at one point, the image was one of a man ringing a bell on a tramway and at the same time, the music did a "bell like" sound which went well together. We can not really say music was contrapuntal because the medley playing at the time was well agenced with the story. When listening to our own music, we feel it did not go well at all with what was presented and it made us see that music was not always a good thing since it was more of a distraction.      

      

            A man who shared the same opinion, named Stan Bakhrage, made a silent movie entitled Window water baby moving of his wife giving birth in 1958, enlighting us as to what difference does soundtracks make. The lack of sound in Stan's movie makes viewers focus even more on the images that are already pretty shocking for most people. Sounds are not required, the movie is brief enough to captivate the viewer throughout the whole screening. A soundtrack is in someway a cushion to fall back to when tired of looking at the screen. It distracts us and make the presentation more agreable and "easy". It sometimes also reinforce the feelings projected by the movie. In Berlin, there was not really much action but in certain movies, even just the trailer, music plays an important role. The movie 9, made by Tim Burton in 2009, is a great example of that. Even though barely any words are spoken, the difference is felt when watching with sound and without.

            As we include an other sense, it brings an other dimention to the movie as well as continuity.

continuity.

Part 2 - Night and Fog

         The 1955 French documentry short film, Night and Fog, was directed by Alain Resnais, and written by Jean Cayrol, who was sent to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp and survived. The 32 minute french documentry shows the audience a clear understanding of how the victims of the Nazi Germany concentration camps, that took place from 1933-1945, were treated by using horrid videos and photos.

            The documentary begins by filming a beautiful landscape where the narrarator, Michel Bouquet, describes as being an area where people drive past, and a village where people spend a vacation. He then suddenly tells us that this beautiful place was once a concentration camp. The camera passes through the wired fence and into the building where hell took place in 1933.  Images of the prisoners working, dying of thirst, were shown in black and white right after showing the buildings where they slept in the present day in color. Michel Bouquet explains that the 70 pound workers were being watched every step that they took. Everytime they tried hiding for just a few minutes for rest, or running, they were killed. At some point, they were gathered altogether, where they were “inspected and frisked” before sending them back to the camps. A picture of a tally of the victims is shown with the numbers being as high as 94, which is the amount they killed in one day for several rubbish reasons.  Prisoners that weren’t good enough to work, were put into a cabin-like box, where they died with gas, and their bodies were then stacked on top of one another as if they meant nothing, which is how Alain Resnais ended the film.

          

            The documentry ends with Micheal Bouquet saying “we turn a blind eye to what surrounds us, and a deaf ear to humanities never-ending cry.” The point he is trying to show the audience is that with our busy lives, we think that our world is hard, when the truth is that thousands of people died trying to survive during the Holocaust in the concentration camps. In today’s society, we get breaks during work, whereas these prisoners were killed for even taking a break for a few seconds.   
                

            Throughout the film, Alain Resnais goes back and forth from black and white to color images to clarify that he’s showing us the past compared to the present. He chooses to do so, because he wants to show that the place that now looks like a landscape to spend a vacation was once a place where hundreds of prisoners were put into a train for nights against their will, where some starved to death. Others were even shot as soon as they stepped off the train for going mad and being too weak. Resnais uses black and white to clearly show the audience that we are lucky to have such a beautiful landscape as a vacation spot, while the victims had that same beautiful place as a torture spot. By comparing the same landscape from now and then, the director is trying to convey that we shouldn’t take things we have for granted; those innocent victims would do anything to live the peaceful life we are given. We should be grateful for what we have, especially for the people who died trying.

            Sound was used very creatively in Night and Fog since it gave the images an even more dramatic push. The audience was able to be more into the film than they expected since the music went so well with the images presented. Although, without the narrarator, Michel Bouquet, the viewers would not understand what is going on in the film, they would only be watching the horrid videos and images, without understanding the purpose.

Part 3: Fear.

            Through this movie, we visited the daily life of citizen of Berlin in 1927 and I could not help but to compare with the modern way of living. Some workers woke up so early and left for their jobs where they worked hard all day long. As soon as they got a break, they would meet and play together. They lived at their fullest, as a community. Today's generation, with computers and television, children are born and raised in a community focused on the individual. This behaviour is also caused by fear, we fear our own neighbours. Media scares us with shocking images of shootings, roberies and sicknesses, for example, Sandy Hook's shooting.  In the movie, we saw female dancers taking off their skirts to be left in some big underwear and at that time it was very revealing. Nowdays, bathing suits are more sexy than their underwears! Women are no longer as prude and they reveal their body so easily for the purpose of commercials or just in everyday life, some might be considered "objects".

On a positive note, great advancement was achieved in the work field; women can occupy almost any job they want and in the same conditions as men. In the last part of the movie, we can see young folks having a blast in a pub dancing. Partys today are now mostly just an occasion to get drunk and "hook up" with people. Of course those are generalities and not everyone live like that! Even more, throughout the movie we barely get to see the inside of a private residence so the sample of people portrayed was biais. As every documentary, you can't alway show everything, and the movie would not be as interesting nor as flattering if it was any ordinary day.

In conclusion, Berlin: Symphony of a great city and Night and Fog opens our eyes on several aspects of filmaking. The fact that there was no speech in Berlin is a new experience that was quite interesting and educative. There is not a good or bad way of selecting a soundtrack, whether there is sound or no; it all depends on the director's intentions. As for Night and Fog, the fact that there was a narrarator explaining everything the whole way through, made the audience learn more about the Holocaust, and opened our eyes to a new way of looking at the world.