#3 "What I See," What's to be Heard

For Fontaine, the French résistance fighter imprisoned in a Vichy jail in Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956), the visible world is limited within the walls of his cell or the prison courtyard, but the sounds heard by Fontaine place allude to him and the viewer that there are several levels outside his immediate visual realm from which experience is restricted. Where the image remains more or less static, comprised of tightly framed close up and medium shots that give little spatial information, the experience of space and time in A Man Escaped are determined by the worlds created by the orchestration of the off-screen sounds. Key sounds like footsteps and door locks reverberating against the cold prison walls expand a space that would be difficult to place on camera as well as act as markers of time for an environment and routine for which the passage of time is very difficult to establish. The boundaries between these worlds and environments are constantly put into play as the characteristics of the sound environments fluctuate between Fontaine’s inner world through narration, the sound of his cell, the area of the prison outside his cell, the nearby town center, and the sounds that evoke images of a world outside all these factors.



Sounds within the cell and jail exist within a frame of silence, whereas the texture of the outdoors as heard through the window operates with vastly different properties. Juxtaposed with the cold, near-silence of the jail cell, the viewer can see how the cold, stagnant sonic texture of the jail behaves when in the context of being near a bustling town center. The placement of the jail microcosm is established by the sonic texture of the town center and the larger surrounding space: cars, the streetcar bell, children playing, and the sounds of people moving about their daily business. These sounds, associated with movement, travel and freedom, help define the prison space as somewhere where movement or travel does not happen, and elicits a desire to escape and be closer to that world. As much as the audience receives the impression of lush imagery from these acousmatic markers, visual cues are not given, denoting instances of visual image superfluous for the audience as they are able, like Fontaine, to comprehend the extremities of the space through sound alone. The streetcar for instance, seen only for a short moment in the first scene of the film, is heard ringing brightly as Fontaine views the outside from behind the bars of his window. The audience never again sees the streetcar after the initial arrest scene, but it is heard ringing throughout the film, invoking a noticeable presence and sense of imagery with the audience, reminding them of the world that continues to move outside this jail while inside, the perception of time inside the prison seemingly ceases to exist. In addition, the train image brought on by the ringing also marks Fontaine’s desire to leave, and the effects of the environment that constantly remind him that he must escape at any cost.



Within this short scene, the properties of the prison are set in place for the rest of the film. As Fontaine and the audience are introduced to the physical properties of the jail and the surrounding areas, expectations can be made for the reasons what sounds in any of the spaces would mean. Because the visual spectrum is so sparse, both Fontaine and the viewer are required to explore the space through what is heard rather than what can be seen. Once the range of sounds that the prison and its inhabitants are made familiar, steps can be taken to introduce themes of instability by simply adding other sounds or forgoing a sound that the audience is trained to expect. As a result, by instilling a connection of familiarity between the audible, spatial world of the film to the viewers, the incorporation of unknown sounds, sounds at a different volume, pitch or density, and sounds the guards are not expected to make all become that much more monumental to the experience.



(I thought I published this long ago)