Graduation Year

2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree

M.A.

Degree Name

Master of Arts (M.A.)

Degree Granting Department

Humanities and Cultural Studies

Major Professor

Amy Rust, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Todd Jurgess, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Maria Cizmic, Ph.D.

Keywords

acousmatic sound, Edmund Husserl, Fritz Lang, Kiss Me Deadly, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, mood

Abstract

This paper analyzes the use of sounds displaced from their sources in classic filmsnoir. Noir is often understood as a dark and solipsistic moment in American cinema. Interpretations of noir frequently emphasize isolated individuals who are physically, psychologically, and socially displaced from their environments. Although scholarship on noir has examined this alienation through various sonic motifs such as music and voice-over, I investigate how several noirs draw attention to the act of listening through acousmatic sound—that is, sound heard without a visible source. Far from being an ephemeral auditory experience, I argue that the separation between sound and image invites characters and spectators to seek out the shared material basis of sound as well as our own embodied relation to the sonorous. I analyze case studies of voice-over in Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945), offscreen sound in Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945), an audio recording of a musical performance in The Blue Gardenia (Fritz Lang, 1953), and a synthesis of sounds both seen and unseen in Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955). Through the lens of phenomenology, I implement Edmund Husserl’s method of bracketing, through which our judgment of everyday experience is suspended, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of intersubjectivity, to show how the foregoing uses of sound draw our attention back to the material and embodied nature of sonic experience. Instead of viewing the characters of noir as alienated from their environments and each other, I demonstrate how the various displaced sounds of films noir help return characters and spectators to a sensuous and sonically connected world.

Download

Share

COinS