Embedded listening
Embedded listening (CHION 2009, 476) occurs when a character is listening to a sound recording, and that the mechanical medium through which this recording is being heard (a gramophone, a radio, etc) is being shown, or at least has its physical presence being implicitly justified within the fiction.
- Technology of sound feature prominently in movies from the late 1920s and early 1930s: since the introduction of synchronized sound was a recent phenomenon, many movies from this period insist on the presence of such recording devices; thus, embedded listening is a frequent occurrence during this period (for notable cases, see Jean Vigo, L'Atalante, René Clair, À nous la liberté; Augusto Genina, Prix de beauté). That said, such fascination for recording technologies has never disappeared in contemporary cinema (Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, Brian de Palma's Blow Out, Jean-Jaques Beineix's Diva...)
- Situations of embedded listening put us spectators in a similar position to the diegetic characters who are listening: we are experiencing the listening in the same way as the fictional characters. It is a form of mise en abyme making us aware of the cinematic apparatus.
In a sequence of embedded listening from René Clair's À nous la liberté (1931), the presence of the mechanical medium is not immediately revealed to the listening character, as well as to us, audience: standing in front of a building, the man believes he's listening to the voice of a young woman singing in her apartment (the window is open). It is only when the song slows down that we (and the fictional character) realize that it is a recording. The presence of the gramophone is revealed in the subsequent shot.
In Augusto Genina's Prix de beauté (1930, France), the embedded listening is rendered more ambiguous through the effect of dubbing: the singing voice comes from the gramophone, not herself.
Stanley Donen's Singin' in the rain (1952, USA) exemplifies Chion's claim that "embedded listening foreground[s] the spectator's own experience in the movie theater." (476) In this sequence, a short film of a brand new kind (for that period, i.e the late 1920s) is being shown to a select audience: it is a "talking picture" in which image and sound are perfectly synchronized: the perfect correspondence between sound and image creates the condition for synchresis. At the same time, it performs a myse en abime, as we are watching a movie in which diegetic characters are watching a movie.
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