Unsound visions : phantacusis as visually implied sound in silent film

Abstract

Looking back on the ‘silent era’ in cinema as synchronised sound was becoming industry standard, Benjamin Fondane asked: “Did sound lack reality, when it was only in the mind?” Counter-intuitively, sound events were not excluded from depiction in silent films. Through various devices, a filmmaker could use the visual depiction of sound (or its index) to produce a kind of implied or phantasmal sound, somehow perceived by its audience in the absence of an actual corresponding sound event. Though familiar to many, no term for this phenomenon has gained widespread theoretical acceptance. As such, this thesis suggests the word ‘phantacusis’ for the phantasmal auditory perception involved in viewing these cinematic moments.

I begin by exploring the specific silence involved in phantacoustic phenomena, articulating its historical context and development, before offering an inventory of methods to achieve the phantacoustic effect. Once phantacusis is established as a formal device, I turn to its thematic and theoretical deployment – specifically in three case-study chapters that use its hallucinatory qualities to call into question the boundaries of the individual subject. The relation of sound (and silence) to the sense of self are explored through The Wind (1928), with relevance to the wider field of sound studies. Phantacusis is then related to the potential risk of a kind of solipsism within the aesthetic programmes of modernism, through Jean Epstein’s theoretical texts and his The Fall of the House of Usher (1928). Finally, the uncanny role of articulation-prompting text in a number of Weimar films suggests the aesthetic and embodied consequences of the complete breakdown of the subject. Through the figure of phantacusis, I therefore explore what exactly is going on when we hear sounds in silence, and what those cinematic quasi-sounds might signify.