Foleyed cinema; Foley
Foleyed cinema (CHION 2009, 478) is an expression derived from "Foley," the name of the sound technician Jack Donovan Foley (1891-1967). "Foley" is used in film vocabulary to refers to a technique consisting in adding sounds at the post-production that are not pre-recorded, but performed live by a "Foley artist", who uses diverse objects to recreate the sounds of footsteps, hand clapping, broken glass, rain, etc.
- While the Foley technique is primarily perceived as reinforcing the realistic aural level of a film, the stylized nature of its sounds (as they are supposed to be sounds "more perfect" than the natural ones) can also aggravate the feel of artificiality, which is what Chion refers to as Foleyed cinema: according Chion (478), Foleyed cinema refers to a specific category of movies, "whose pleasure derives from the fact that their sound effects aren't disguised and recall the play of children who make sound effects with their mouths to go with toy planes, trucks, or cars."
- Early sound films often fall into the category of Foleyed cinema, for the imagination and fantasy they display in the use of sound that is very typical of that era, and in their explicit non realistic depiction of sounds.
Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936, USA) offers numerous instances of Foleyed cinema. In this sequence, there are two different aural levels: one is provided by the constant nondiegetic music; the other is filled with the mechanical sounds of the machine: these sounds act as a separate “aural” character. These Foley sounds clearly enhance the comedic and even grotesque mood of this scene.
Another sequence from the same film plays with the production of bodily sounds: both characters are having stomach growling while drinking tea, and feel awkward about these. Not only the aural rendition of the growling is not realistic (it is indeed "better than real"), but its emphasis is also unrealistic, since it is done at the expense of other aural details: the china cups do not produce any sound—contrarily to our expectations (see phantom sound).
[C. V.; J. W.]
In Stanley Donen's Singin' in the rain (1952, USA), Cosmo Brown's slapstick number of singing and dancing relies on Foley sounds, aggravating the comic character of his dance steps, of him running into a brick wall, or having his head hit by a plank, etc. Reliance on Foley here is explicitly non naturalistic—for instance, the sound of the wooden percussion caused by the tall puppet's arm on Cosmo's leg.
[E. G.]
French film director and actor Pierre Étaix famously relied on Foley in most of his films, shot during the 1960s—in so doing, he was explicitly relying on the tradition of early sound film. In Yoyo (1965), a movie shot entirely in black and white and almost completely in the style of a silent film, Étaix made extensive use of Foley; in this sequence, most of the objects produce a sound that has been typically "foleyed": Foley magnifies the aural anti-naturalism. This creates a playful and comedic effect; added to the visual nonchalance of the protagonist's facial expression, it creates a scene as poetic as absurd.
[C. V.; J.W]
The film director Michel Hazanavicius was himself very much influenced by Yoyo in his recent movie The Artist (2011, France/USA); in this sequence that also relies on Foley, George Valentin, a silent actor who stubbornly refuses the transition to talking pictures, realizes that the world around him has become "sounding"—except for him, as he remains completely unable to emit a sound from his mouth.
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