Godfather (2 page)

This metaphoric distance between the images of a film and the accompanying sounds is—and should be—continuously changing and flexible, and it often takes a fraction of a second (sometimes even several seconds) for the brain to make the right connections. For instance, the image of a light being turned on accompanied by a simple click is a basic association that is fused almost instantly and produces a relatively flat mental image.

Still fairly flat, but a level up in dimensionality is the image of a door closing accompanied by the right “slam”—this can indicate not only the material of the door and the space around it but also the emotional state of the person closing it. The sound for the door at the end of
The Godfather
, for instance, needed to give the audience more than the correct physical cues about the door. It was even more important to get a firm, irrevocable closing that resonated with and underscored Michael's final line: “Never ask me about my business, Kay.”

That door sound was related to a specific image, and, as a result, it was “fused” by the audience fairly quickly. Sounds, however, that do not relate to the visuals in a direct way function at an even higher level of dimensionality and take proportionately longer to resolve. The rumbling and piercing metallic scream just before Michael Corleone kills Solozzo and McCluskey in a restaurant in
The Godfather
is not linked directly to anything seen on screen, and so the audience is made to wonder—at least momentarily, if perhaps only subconsciously—”What is this?” The screech is from an elevated train rounding a sharp turn, so it is presumably coming from somewhere in the neighborhood (the scene takes place in the Bronx).

But precisely because it is so detached from the image, the metallic scream works as a clue to the state of Michael's mind at the moment—the critical moment before he commits his first murder and his life turns an irrevocable corner. It is all the more effective because Michael's face appears so calm and the sound is played so abnormally loud. This broadening tension between what we see and what we hear is brought to an abrupt end with the pistol shots that kill Solozzo and McCluskey: the distance between what we see and what we hear is suddenly collapsed at the moment that Michael's destiny is fixed.

This moment is mirrored and inverted at the end of
Godfather III.
Instead of a calm face with a scream, we see a screaming face in silence. When Michael realizes that his daughter Mary has been shot, he tries several times to scream—but no sound comes out. In fact, Al Pacino was actually screaming, but the sound was removed in the editing. We are dealing here with an
absence
of sound, yet a fertile tension is created between what we see and what we would expect to hear, given the image. Finally, the scream bursts through, the tension is released, and the film—and the trilogy—is over.

The elevated train in
The Godfather
was at least somewhere in the vicinity of the restaurant, even though it could not be seen. In the opening reel of
Apocalypse Now
, the jungle sounds that fill Willard's hotel room come from nowhere on screen or in the “neighborhood,” and the only way to resolve the great disparity between what we are seeing and hearing is to imagine that these sounds are in Willard's mind: that his body is in a hotel room in Saigon, but his mind is off in the jungle, where he dreams of returning. If the audience members can be brought to a point where they will bridge with their own imagination such an extreme distance between picture and sound, they will be rewarded with a correspondingly greater dimensionality of experience.

The risk, of course, is that the conceptual thread that connects image and sound can be stretched too far, and the dimensionality will collapse: the moment of greatest dimension is always the moment of greatest tension.

The question remains in all of this, why we generally perceive the product of the fusion of image and sound in terms of the image. Why does sound usually enhance the image and not the other way around? In other words, why does King Sight still sit on his throne and Queen Sound haunt the corridors of the palace?

In his book
AudioVision
, Michael Chion describes an effect that he calls the acousmêtre, which depends on delaying the fusion of sound and image to the extreme by supplying only the sound—most frequently a
voice—and withholding the revelation of the sound's true source until nearly the end of the film. Only then, when the audience has used its imagination to the fullest, is the identity of the source revealed. The Wizard in
The Wizard of Oz
is one of a number of examples, along with the mother in
Psycho
and Hal in
2001
(and although Chion didn't mention it, Wolfman Jack in
American Graffiti
and Colonel Kurtz in
Apocalypse Now
). The acousmêtre is—for various reasons having to do with our perceptions—a uniquely cinematic device: the disembodied voice seems to come from everywhere and therefore to have no clearly defined limits to its power.

And yet … there is an echo here of our earliest experience of the world: the revelation at birth that the song that sang to us from the very dawn of consciousness in the womb—a song that seemed to come from everywhere and to be part of us before we had any conception of what “us” meant—that this song is the voice of another and that she is now separate from us and we from her. We regret the loss of former unity—some say that our lives are a ceaseless quest to retrieve it—and yet we delight in seeing the face of our mother: the one is the price to be paid for the other.

This earliest, most powerful fusion of sound and image sets the tone for all that are to come.

First of all, I am grateful to Francis Ford Coppola, who was willing to talk with me at the Cannes International Film Festival, for reading the précis from which this book was developed and for reading through all of his published interviews to check for factual errors. In addition, I would also like to single out the following among those who have given me their assistance in the course of the long period in which I was engaged in remote preparation for this study: Tennessee Williams, for sharing his thoughts with me about
This Property Is Condemned
, a film that Coppola co-scripted; film director Fred Zinnemann for discussing with me the parallels between the Johnny Fontane character in
The Godfather
and Frank Sinatra in his film
From Here to Eternity
. Actors Shirley Knight (
The Rain People
), Terri Garr (
The Conversation
,
One From the Heart
), the late Elizabeth Hartman (
You're a Big Boy Now
), and the late Richard Conte (
The Godfather
); and producer Albert Ruddy (
The Godfather
) for speaking with me about working with Coppola.

Many institutions and individuals provided research materials. I would like to specifically mention: the staff of the Motion Picture Section of the Library of Congress and the staff of the Film Study Center of the Museum of Modern Art. Research materials were also provided by the Paramount Collection of the Margaret Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Research Library of the University of California at Los Angeles; the Warner Brothers Collection in the Archive of the Library of the University of Southern California; the Script Repositories of Warner Brothers, Paramount, Universal, and United Artists; Musette Buckely, Vice-President of Production Resources, Warner Brothers; Vincent LoBrutto, research professor of the School of Visual Arts, New York City; Lieutenant Robert Clarke, U.S.M., for discussing Coppola's two Vietnam films with me; film expert Edin Dzafic, who helped track down Coppola's amateur films; and Raymond Baumhart, S.J., Professor of Management in
the Loyola University School of Business Administration, for discussing
Tucker: The Man and His Dream
with me.

The essay by Walter Murch, which appears as the foreword of this volume, is reprinted from the
New York Times
(1 October 2000, sec. 2, pp. 1, 24–25, copyright 2000 by Walter Murch) by permission of the author.

The interview with S. E. Hinton, which is quoted in this book, is reprinted from the
New York Times
(20 March 1983, sec. 2, pp. 19, 27, copyright 1983 by the New York Times Co.).

Some material in this book appeared in a completely different form in the following publications:
The Movie Makers: Artists in an Industry
(Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1973, copyright 1973 by Gene D. Phillips); “Francis Coppola,”
Films in Review
40, no. 3 (March 1989, pp. 155–60, copyright 1989 by Gene D. Phillips);
Conrad and Cinema: The Art of Adaptation
(New York: Peter Lang, 1995, copyright 1995 by Peter Lang, used with permission).