Other Voices, Other Rooms: Acoustic Design in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965)

As the title sequence of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion suggests, with its violation of the human eye in closeup by thin striations of text, the film we are about to watch is one concerned with altered perceptions. Like the infamous razoring scene from Luis Buñuel’s surrealist masterpiece Un Chien Andalou (1929) to which it harkens, where a woman’s eye is bisected with a blade, a visceral call to arms by the director that we abandon old habits of viewing, this opening credit roll acts as an immediate declamation of Polanski’s concurrent aim at a new type of filmic experience. Although his departure will not be as radical as that of the surrealists, whose preoccupation with the disinterested play of thought leads to an often plotless scattering of associations, Polanski does share with the likes of Buñuel, Cocteau and Dali, a sense of the omnipotence of dream, but with a key difference: where surrealism considers the marriage of waking-reality and dream-reality to be the road to truth, Polanski treats this union as the road to madness (though André Breton does pine for the freedom of the insane in his seminal text, Manifestoes of Surrealism (1924), however facetiously).

The eye Polanski draws his name and title across belongs to the very beautiful and quietly disturbed Carol Ledoux (played here with startling vacuity by a twenty-year-old Catherine Deneuve), and the cleaving text acts as much as a departure point from the audience’s traditional modes of filmic experience as it does an entry point into Carol’s troubled world. It does not serve, however, as an invitation into Carol’s mind, for she is very much, despite her sexually aggressive hallucinations, an impenetrable character. This resistant quality can be partially attributed to Deneuve’s playing Carol as a blank slate, someone whose past circumstances and present thoughts are almost entirely vacant, left bare to be furnished by the audience’s own needs and inclinations—our imaginations make monstrous the smallest sound in the night, and by this principle Polanski lets us create our own undoing. More than by Deneuve’s acting, though, this impenetrability exists as a limitation of the medium itself. When it comes to achieving interiority, film, compared to literature, is decidedly lacking. One cannot simply present stream-of-consciousness in narrative film without it assuming the clunky form of voiceover (Janet Leigh’s character in Psycho (1960), for example) or, conversely, presenting itself as a disjointed montage of fleeting images, á la the surrealists. This conventional wisdom does not affect Polanski’s ambition, however, and he does everything within his technical ability to rebel against it, achieving an ultimate proximity to his subject’s interiority that is closer than the cinema has ever come before.

Of the five senses that account for human experience, film is bound, and privileged, to convey only sight and sound, and contrary to the implication of the film’s credit sequence, that it is the eye which will carry us through, Repulsion actually achieves a mimesis of Carol’s reality by way of the viewer’s ear. Take for example the auditory clues during the scene in which Carol murders her would-be suitor, Colin (John Fraser). The film as a whole is frighteningly silent, with the exception of a small handful of recurring sound bites. Some of these are presented rather frankly, the funereal march of a tympani drum that opens the film and accompanies Carol on her aimless walks, or Carol’s Theme, a dulcet though melancholy flute refrain that seems to announce Carol’s solitude as though it was a character in Sergei Prokofiev’s classic composition Peter and the Wolf (a broken bird, perhaps). Others of these sounds are given greater subtlety, existing at muted levels, both arriving and departing without direction. In the murder scene two such recurrent sounds conspire to give the audience an auditory impression of Carol’s imbalance. These are the sound of a child’s fingers clumsily inching up and down the C-scale on a piano, and that of an airplane passing far overhead. Both appear independently at other points within the film, yet they arrive together here at the moment after Colin barges through Carol’s front door and before he closes it for the last time. The aural montage created between the two is one of immense space, the very local, personal sound of fumbling through basic scales on a piano contrasted against the distant and anonymous noise of jet traffic. The source of these sounds, though potentially belonging simply to the ambience of a London flat, seems too specific and aligned to have arisen from anywhere else but Carol’s own memory, which leaves her and the audience, in a moment where rationality could right the situation with Colin, reeling instead in the telescopic distance between the local and the remote. The murder itself then becomes a silent byproduct of her auditory wandering, as Carol’s blank face while blunting Colin with the candlestick similarly reflects her nonpresence in the act.

Despite Polanski’s directorial eye and cinematographer Gilbert Taylor’s deft manipulation of the apparatus, producing some dizzying, confounding distortions of space, these acoustic pings are somehow more amenable to our experience of Carol’s psychosis. It is through auditory hallucination that we first suspect Carol’s madness. “We must get this crack mended,” she says early in the film, looking fixedly out of frame. The sound of broken concrete crumbles into and out of existence, and then the camera cuts to the shot of a crack in the kitchen wall, preformed and unmoving. Even when the theme of cracked walls returns later, with the visual hallucination of the walls physically cracking catching up to her auditory hallucination, it is the sound of their destruction, like the crash of a thunderbolt, which has the more potent effect.

The logic behind this sonic preeminence can be found in the way that we relate to sight versus sound in Repulsion. When we watch the film, the visual component has set dimensions that are informed by the size and shape the screen. The image occupies a certain small percentage of our field of vision and, more importantly, though the film itself is of a three-dimensional space, its projected visual exists in only two dimensions; the image is framed by the edges of the screen and exists separately from the non-cinematic world from which we view it. We see Carol as her dementia mounts pacing circles through an Expressionist iteration of her apartment, but with a clear ability to mark the distinction between her space and our own. This sense of delineation between the cinematic and non-cinematic is considerably blurred by the film’s sound, where even though the source of cinematic auditory stimuli is apparent, its separation from non-cinematic auditory stimuli often is not, as both types of sound occupy the same liminal space. This phenomenon is most quickly demonstrated by a telephone ringing in a film (as they so regularly do in Repulsion) and the viewer turning to see if his own phone has rung. Of course a full-fledged confusion of the cinematic and non-cinematic is rare, and thus a kind of added bonus to the sound department’s exquisite design, but the fact remains that because acoustics extend beyond the flatness of the screen and penetrate us, percuss us, actively violate our sense of hearing, where image, grotesque or beautiful (with Deneuve beneath Taylor’s lens, sometimes both), lies docile in two-dimensional space on the screen, the film’s audio component elicits an exponentially greater degree of empathy for Carol than does its visual counterpart.

Certainly this is not the case with most films. It is a rarity necessitated by Polanski’s aim to show us a woman who is insane but whose insanity is not recognized by those around her; we are the ones who must recognize it. He forces the audience into Carol’s ear, and we are synchronously attacked by the same stringent doorbells and phones, haunted by the same distant shuffling of feet, the same auditory echoes of memory that occupy such a large portion of Carol’s perceptions. Polanski strangles our acoustic space because he cannot constrict the physical walls around us, and the hearing of Repulsion thereby becomes something experiential. This technique is mimicked to similar effect in more modern films such as Darren Aronofsky’s Pi (1998) and Lodge Kerrigan’s phenomenal Clean, Shaven (1993), both of which, like Repulsion, attempt to approach the interiority of a schizophrenic main character.

Ultimately, though, we cannot breach the internal workings of Carol Ledoux, as no method exists, filmic or otherwise, to fully immerse one person into the sensorial reality of another, but the film does come startlingly close at times. What we come away from Repulsion with then is a lingering openness of perception, not exactly paranoid but not accepting either. Sounds are intensified, their origins dubious. As with the other two films in his Apartment Trilogy (Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Tenant (1976)), Polanski excels at presenting us with the banal only then to turn it over in his directorial hand and show us its rotting underbelly. He finds corruption in the seemingly uncorrupt, repulsion in the beautiful, and his surgical eye and ear brings the analytical scalpel down across the cornea of our own world, leaving us humming quietly to ourselves and searching the walls for cracks. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Thriller/Horror/Drama

Not Rated

DVD Release Date: 7/28/09

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,