◡◶▿ The diegetic membrane

🌲 A tree falls soundlessly in the woods and lands in the cinema aisle. Should you blame the boom operator? 🎞️ Plus: Kodak grants and film stock. | Summer sound letter #8

Any sound, object, or atmospheric condition that occurs within a movie’s story world is called ‘diegetic.’ 

Most sounds in most story movies are diegetic without the audience ever seeing their diegetic source. The hum of traffic outside an office window. A dog barking somewhere in the woods. 

The audience usually won’t notice the traffic hum or the dog barking. If they notice it, they won’t think of it much. The off-screen diegetic sound is there to ease the audience into thinking the window or the woods are ‘real.’ Even if they’ve been made from painted cardboard.

But what if the audience does think more closely about the dog’s bark? What will the audience assume? They will probably assume there is a dog of greater or lesser narrative importance just off-screen somewhere in the movie woods. What an assumption!

Here are some alternative theories.

• The filmmaker added the sound of a dog barking as non-diegetic music.

• The dog was in the background while the foley artist recorded the sound of diegetic leaves rustling, and the dog’s bark was included by accident.

  • Neither the filmmaker, the foley artist, the sound designer, nor the dog consider the dog part of the movie’s story world.

Diegesis is a very leaky concept.

Consider:

1. A tree falls in a movie woods. There’s no character to hear it. But the audience hears it quite clearly. Is the sound diegetic or non-diegetic?

   1. The vibration started within the movie but is only translated to sound outside the diegesis. To whose physical universe does it belong?

2. A dog is barking during a scene in the movie woods. But the audience can’t tell if the bark is diegetic or just some mad whim of the sound designer. A tree falls, and there’s nobody else to hear it, apart from - perhaps - the dog. How do we categorise it, since we don’t know which side of the screen the dog belongs?

   1. Is the tree sound diegetic?

   2. Non-diegetic?

   3. What if the dog is deaf?

The audience can hardly be expected to understand the movie fully without knowing this categorisation. They may feel the movie very well, however. Thankfully, in perhaps nine out of ten cases, the dog sound is intended to be diegetic. But dogs are not the only sound.

Thinking about sound this way helps the filmmaker to identify diegetic leaks in her movie. Leaks that let through sound, but also character, place, being, meaning. The filmmaker might patch these leaks, tend them, or pick at them. If she minds the membrane between her movie’s story world and this one closely, it’s because nobody else has the perspective to manage all the comings and goings.

Hello! September already, eh? You may spend the next few weeks gathering soft notebooks and pleasing pens, and urgently gathering living funds from friends and debtors, since the new UPV term does not begin until the 25th.

Meanwhile, Kodak is giving away cash and 16mm film stock for short movies. Deadline: the end of September. There is a fee to apply, which is rubbish, so make sure to hit all the points listed in the “Selection process” and don’t bother unless your application is poop hot. - GC.

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