The Road Not Taken
Being an adaptation of Robert Frost’s (Frost 1916) poem of the same name, this film provided a number of opportunities to experiment with the soundtrack, partly because of the lack of dialogue. Indeed, there is only one word of synchronous character dialogue in the film. The text of the poem is provided through a voiceover, and the identity of the speaker is left deliberately ambiguous. The writer/director of the film is also the director of photography, and so the production stage of the film was almost entirely geared toward the visual representation in the knowledge that the images would subsequently be synchronised to the audio text of the poem. The story-boarding for the film contained a very detailed plan for the visual style of the film and was rigorous in detail, as might be expected from a director of photography who is also the writer and director. At the same time, care was taken to leave sufficient ambiguity in the visual representation for the audience to be able to create parts of the narrative for themselves. The voiceover was recorded after the production shooting was completed and was available during picture editing. Only after picture editing was complete did production of the remaining sound and music begin in earnest, with a composer having been engaged to provide an original score.
Since the soundtrack is not tied to the image through synchronous sound, the relationships between sound and image are almost entirely fabricated. The first scene indicates a non-realistic and non-literal relationship between sound and image. We hear a range of sounds (wind, drones) that do not appear to match the scene presented in the image. We see the priest talk, but hear a version of his voice that is out of sync with the images. We hear a faint church bell, but the landscape is desolate and contains only a single tree and five standing figures. The sounds themselves, acting as signifiers, do not immediately point to their objects, as there is scarcely any synchronous relationship between image and sound or else the sound is too obscure to make a definite and trustworthy causal link. The indexical relationship between sound and image is therefore largely absent. In its place, the narration, and thus the text of the poem, is given more prominence as a likely source of potential meaning along with the musical score that accompanies the majority of the film.
Fan Sound and Transition
This sound is also the sound that pre-laps the scene cut from the father slapping the mother in the interior of the car to the scene in the girl’s classroom (see Clip 1). For the sound of the fan, a metallic, sharp, grating sound of a fan was used, as its piercing qualities provided a metaphorical connection to the character’s experience. For the lead up to the (unseen and unheard) slap, the sound of the fan is reversed and stretched so that it shares the iconic properties of the fan sound loosely used as the sound of the classroom ceiling fan. The sound works as a bridge between the car scene and the classroom scene.
The sound for the fan is a real fan sound with metallic scraping qualities. The iconic properties of the sound suggest something unpleasant. The sound is first heard before its origin is revealed, but the girl never looks at it. In any case, it is not synchronous with the visual representation of the classroom ceiling fan, in that one auditory cycle of the sound does not match one visual cycle of the fan. The indexical link is thus deliberately vague; the sound has a possible origin, but it is a loose connection. The symbolic use of the sound of the fan occurs as it fades in to accompany the presumed slap. The hit is neither seen nor heard, and in its place we hear the fan’s repetitive scraping.
The Unseen Argument
In this scene, the two children are outside the house, and their attention turns to the house, toward muffled voices and the smashing of a plate (see Clip 2). As audience, this is all you need to know; the argument itself is neither seen nor heard. The sounds of muffled voices and a single smashed plate are sufficient. Character dialogue in the film is deliberately obscured or removed, and the poem is heard instead as a voiceover narration. The arguments between the mother and father in the car are not heard at all; the mother’s phone call in the house is not heard at all; the argument going on inside the house as the two sisters stand at the letter box is suggested, but no words can be discerned.
The sound for the argument scene suggests action without actually showing it. It is enough for the characters’ attention to be directed to the house, with the single sound symbolising something breaking. Rather than images and direct sounds of a fight between the parents, we instead hear as if from the children’s perspective: muffled, raised voices and the distant sound of plate or glass smashing. The indexical link is merely suggested, but we imbue the sounds with a wealth of meaning, building in associations with unhappy families, violence and children’s distress.
“No"
The single word of character dialogue in the film is “No”, uttered by the mother as she kneels alone at the coffin (see Clip 2). There is no sync sound prior to that, although there is some deliberately out-of-sync dialogue from the priest in the opening scene as well as the sound of the baby sister crying, which could be interpreted as dialogue. The power of the mother’s single word derives partly from this relative scarcity of character dialogue. Its absence, until now, creates the expectation (abduction) in the audience that there will be no sync dialogue in the film at all. When the single word of sync dialogue is used it breaks the abduction, and brings a previously hazy connection between characters, sound, image and narrative to a relative point of clarity by giving a very definite synchronous (indexical) link between sound and image. The single word becomes the focus of the tension that has been built up until that moment.
Abduction and the Creation of Meaning
Whilst the poem is used in its entirety, it is sufficiently ambiguous to allow for a number of interpretations. The metaphor of the two roads is carried throughout but can be interpreted to mean a choice between courses of action:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.
In this respect, many of the decisions taken for both image and sound were made to retain some level of ambiguity. It is never revealed whether the narrator is one of the two girl characters of the film, nor is it revealed how the elder girl dies. The images and lines of the poem share a loose bond, and so the audience is compelled to construct meaning from that which is presented. First, it illustrates how the Peircean model applies to sounds used metaphorically, and second, it shows how the Peircean concept of abduction applies to the soundtrack and the creation of the narrative.
The images in the film provide little in the shape of a literalised representation of the poem. Also, by withholding information in the form of synchronous sound, the search for meaning moves toward the creation of hypothetical links between sound and image. The three individual examples above illustrate the potential for sound to act as an indication of something whilst not directly referring to the object in question. A benefit of this approach is that the audience is required to provide the missing information, such as the words of the argument or the mother’s phone conversation, and thus construct the narrative itself, which is sufficiently open to individual interpretation. It must be acknowledged that there is also a danger in this approach, in that the individual may not be sufficiently inspired or interested to take on such a substantial role in the creation of the meaning of the text and thus might, on reflection, wonder what the film was about exactly. If we return to the design considerations of the soundtrack and the film as a whole, in terms of what the audience should know/think/feel both during and afterwards, this film’s conclusion leaves each of the three outcomes as relatively obscure. Like the poem, the film lays out several metaphors and allows the individual to create meaning for themselves.
Peirce describes the immediate interpretant as “the effect the sign first produces or may produce upon a mind, without any reflection upon it”; the eventual meaning, or dynamical interpretant, is “whatever interpretation any mind actually makes of a sign” (Peirce, Hartshorne and Weiss 1960: 8.315). As with the poem, the film’s immediate meaning may not be apparent, and a rereading or subsequent reflection may suggest a different interpretation.