Chion, Sound & "Mr. Hulot's Holiday"

          However, for good or ill, we have become so accustomed to sound effects in cinema today that we rarely stop to notice how they actually work. For the most part, cinema sound functions by a phenomenon Chion terms “synchresis”, a spontaneous reflex response which happens to the viewer when sound and image occur simultaneously, impelling the audience to “establish a relationship of close interdependence and ascribe to a single common source sounds and images that may be in their essence very different, originate from very different sources, and have little in common in reality”. (99) In defining this mutual relationship between sound and image Chion lays out six types of sound effects (anempathetic, acousmatic, symbolic, subjective, rhetorical, and punctuation) that may influence the narrative of any given film. For this essay I will concentrate on exploring the “added value” of these possible sound effects in the film, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (1953) by Jacques Tati. 
            In this film, what immediately strikes the viewer is the romantic music which rhythmically sets the opening scene with its simultaneous image and sound of waves washing up on shore, creating a quiet, soothing atmosphere with its promise of a pastoral escape in the classic French style when families retreat from the cities to the seaside for their annual August vacation. Cut to the vaudevillian scene of these vacationers racing up and down the wrong stairs to find the right platform to board a train to their resort, in a leeming-like surge underscored by garbled, incomprehensible instructions blared over a loudspeaker. This sound, wedded to the image of herding humanity sets the ironic tone for the film. Two moods – first, soothing music in rhythmic waves, then chaotic action as if jerked by sudden sound – are thus established from the beginning, and will run through the film in choreographed succession. This marriage of sound and image, often in counterpoint, is best represented by Monsieur Hulot himself (Jacques Tati). A man prancing through exaggerated gestures of ‘politesse’, juxtaposed with the haphazard, rattling and invasive bangs and misfirings of his ramshackle car, mirrors the undercurrents of conflict that disrupt the serenity of the bucolic holiday scene from the beginning. 
             This contrast in his character is also underscored by the continuing symbolic sound effects that characterize his relationship with his car – for every ‘after you, my dear Alphonse’ courtesy Hulot extends to those around him, his explosive ‘putt-putt’ car only leaves irritation and outrage in its wake. This pas de deux of man and car – reprised throughout the film in the various twosomes of the other characters (the old couple continually wandering through the scenes, he deferentially but resentfully strolling behind her, choric witnesses to the action, or the two young men bumping into each other as they vie for the attention of the blonde Martine (Natalie Pascaud)) – culminates in Hulot imploding into noise itself with the fireworks he unleashes at the end as if he can no longer restrain his off-the-wall inner nature. So also the wild, chaotic rush of wind, which hurls through the dining room just before Hulot first enters with his exaggerated courtesy, metaphorically telegraphs that despite his apologetic gestures, he like the wind is about to wreck havoc on his unsuspecting fellow vacationers. 
             This dichotomy of surface image and reality is effectively captured by the contrapuntal or anempathetic voice-over of the radio news – droning on about budget conflicts, war shortages, political intrigues – cutting across the social chitchat of the guests, belying the romantic music more suited to such a scene. Later in the film, as if to emphasize the idiotic charade of Hulot’s gallantry as he carries out a young woman’s backpack, the voice-over newscast mimics his elaborate ‘goodbye’, as if animating and “mickey-mousing” his actions. Such deliberate use of sound sets up audience response by either counterpoint or doubling the effect of behaviour.
          Throughout this comedic, slapstick film, sound effects blatantly call attention to themselves, reinforcing the gag lines and actions. Punctuation sound effects abound, cropping up in group scenes – witness the squeaky whistle noises that accompany the deep knee-bends of the morning exercisers on the beach. The echoing ‘dom, dom’ of the door to the dining room opening and closing, as of a musical string being plucked, becomes a recurring motif of repetitive meal time, synchronized with the various characters entering, a punctuation doubly emphasized when the maitre d’ slices thin and fat pieces of meat to visually match the guests as they arrive. Later, in the scene where they all search for the lost tennis ball, the swish swish of the foliage is so loud that the sound accents the exaggerated communal action – an “added value” that punctuates meaning to the point of parody. “Hitting the action” use of sound effects equally drives home the slapstick gags, such as the end of Hulot’s fishing rod goosing one of the guests when he first walks in – we hardly see it but the sound and the man’s startled jump complete the connection. The ‘chicken squawking’ sounds when the guests are all talking in the dining room is an equally obvious symbolic use of sound effect: the dining room door opens to a muted murmur as the chicken noise gradually builds, then a ‘ding’ goes off, and the room erupts into the jerky gestures of hands fluttering, heads bobbing and voices gabbling louder and louder. The viewer cannot miss the metaphor. Again, a repeated scene at night of the darkened hotel when the guests have gone to bed: one by one the lights come on in the upper rooms – at first to the ruckus of midnight revelers shouting below, then later in the film, to the bang bang of Hulot’s backfiring car. Such “added value” use of recurring disruptive sounds, linked to the visual impact of lights coming on, both punctuates and symbolizes recognition of the truth that Hulot’s is an uncontrolled, erratic and unthinking energy. Like the sound effects themselves, Hulot calls attention to himself no matter what he does – he is the force field at the centre of the film. 
           Chion’s acousmatic sound effect occurs in an interesting way at the beginning of the film when the recurring romantic musical theme is, from the outset, associated as a non-diegetic underscore. Then, after its second or third cue, its source is made visible to us when Martine puts the record on her turntable, thus bringing the theme music into the diegesis and establishing it as diegetic sound; as Chion would say, this action “de-acousmatizes” the sound. 
           Certain acousmatic uses of sound like the Ice Cream man’s call, “Crème Glacee for sale”, and the ringing of the Daily News bell by the delivery man on his bicycle, reveal their sources to us onscreen upfront. Once established visually, these triggers resound off-screen continually throughout the film, forming multiple layers of signified context within a given image, which help to create a sense of atmosphere and of time passing. Because the viewer is aware of the sources behind these off-screen sounds, they can register the wider range of simultaneous occurrences within the diegesis even if they are not all present in a single shot. Such off-screen sound to create atmosphere or to structure time is used most prominently within the hotel; a simple example, the chiming of the clock, matched with the chairs turned upside down on the tables in the dining room at the end of another exhausting day for the waiter. Or the sound of the ping pong match off-screen, overriding the murmur of the guests at their card games, before the ball and Hulot come volleying out of the games room into the frame; we hear him before we see him but a certain tension has already been built up by the off-screen sound of the frenzied ball, alerting us to a felt sense that it may be only a matter of time before the unseen gamer, Hulot himself, invades the scene with his unpredictable energy, inadvertently stirring up conflicts in his wake. So too the constant off-screen social chatter of the guests directs the attention of characters who are in frame but not speaking – witness the hilarious mute duo of Hulot and his tablemate caught in an arm-reaching/mouth-wiping charade. Acousmatic sounds so often set up the visuals, thus reinforcing the slapstick effects throughout the film. 
             The scene, which best exemplifies Chion’s “acousmatization of the unshowable” (96) occurs when Hulot is carrying Martine’s friend’s luggage up the stairs to the front door. One of her suitcases has been left flat on the top step. Hulot, carrying her largest case vertically, cannot see the other case, and mistakes it for the final step. His sudden step down sends him stumbling straight through the house and out the back door into the garden. The camera pans right, following him through the house, as his shoes squeak across the floor, cuts once and tracks his exit out into the garden, holding onto a vined statue as Hulot disappears from the frame. Hulot’s final crash occurs off-screen; it is only provided to us audibly, which, as Chion says, heightens the effect by drawing a veil over the climatic action or visual punch-line. It emphasizes the net effect by allowing the audience to fill in the visual description for themselves. 
            Acousmatic sound is used again during the funeral scene when Hulot accidentally drives his car off the road into the church lot when the roof of his car collapses. As he pulls out contents from his trunk, his spare tire is mistaken for a funereal wreath covered with leaves and picked up as an offering by one of the clergy. Moments later, while guests are lined up outside the church, hissing noises, which sound like flatulence, occur off-screen. In the next shot the spare tire, pinned to the entrance of the church, is revealed as the source of the sound. This gas gag is a common use of acousmatic sound: the audience figures the sound can only be coming from the tire (the implied source) but is not entirely sure in which visual context confirmation will occur; our inferences are then immediately affirmed in the following shot. 
            Throughout the film, sound shakes up the moment. It structures the story by triggering action in the characters. For instance, when loud jazz music is abruptly heard off-screen, it disrupts the dining room, and all the guests leap to their feet in curiosity to locate the source of the sound. They open the door to the lounge only to find Hulot by the turntable. Exasperated, they flick off the light switch on him, leaving him in the dark. The music stops – fading the visual in turn fades the audio, a kind of visual and auditory deflation. This plunge into darkness, of both music and its irritable source, is symbolic of Hulot’s ostracization. Sound is the animator of the scene, working both acousmatically and subjectively: acousmatic in the sense of the missing source, and subjectively in the sense that the discovery of the music’s source affects the ear of the characters within the scene – they ‘hear’ the jazz music differently – thus reconfiguring the meaning of the visuals in a kind of “conceptual resonance”. This scene in the lounge then becomes so blatantly associated with Hulot that when it is reprised, it acts as a sort of trick. When the jazz theme recurs, the guests race into the lounge thinking to corner Holut but find a child instead as the music’s instigator. This reprise also operates as a form of foreshadowing for at the end Hulot is sitting in the sand(box) with the children as the adult guests say goodbye. These reprises of certain sounds and actions, such as the music in the lounge, the wind blowing through the door, the ringing of the dinner bell and of the daily news, also help to create a sense of temporality through reoccurrence; the sound effects add value to the concept of time passing by highlighting each reprise with its multiple use. 
            Another instance of subjective sound is evident during the Masquerade Ball. Alone on the dance floor, Hulot and Martine begin dancing. However, before long, the relentless drone of the news on the radio, which the other guests are listening to in the reception room next door, begins to overpower the music. In response Hulot cranks up the volume of the record player to drown out the news. As the sound of the music rises and takes over the image, the news fades out completely. So too the guests are arrested in their activities and turn with one accord to watch Hulot and Martine; for them, the impact of Hulot raising the sound is disruptive, taking them hostage. However, the scene moves out to an exterior shot of the old man following his wife on their evening promenade; the sudden rise in the music causes him to pause, enchanted by the sound and sight of the dancers through the window. In his turn, he is arrested twice but for a whole other reason that the other guests. For a moment he is no longer slavishly following his wife’s lead but instead is soothed and inspired by the captivating confluence of sound and image. Here sound shapes the image, adds value by drawing out multiple subjective meanings from the characters’ responses. 
            The fireworks sequence, yoking Hulot to the explosive dance of sound and light at the end of the film, culminates the “added value” of the sound effects used throughout. In the ultimate gag, Hulot cannot hide in the shed (or in life) from the mad dogs, or from the impact of his own antic behaviour. In the perfect synchresis of sound and image, he himself becomes pure pyro-technics, both instigator and victim of the mad dance that lights up the night sky and the darkened hotel, for one last time drawing everyone out of their collective sleep. Sound here is both symbolic of Hulot’s character and punctuation for his actions – each thing he does to ‘reduce’ the fireworks, jabbing and dancing and lurching from one solution to another, only adds to the roar of the conflagration. It is as if, symbolic of the wind sweeping through the hotel when he first arrived, he is literally reaping the whirlwind; all his efforts at self-containment and proper behaviour spin out of control. Rat-a-tat-tat missile sounds go off like guns of war, echoing the Blitz and the rumbling news reports that have daily seeded the undercurrent of conflict in this pastoral vacation. In the eleventh hour before the final goodbye, here is Hulot once again at the centre of the action, trying ineffectually to put out the flames. However, this time, in a cathartic turnaround, mirroring a kind of collective release of tension, the scene turns into a party. Inside the hotel, the awakened proprietor flicks the light switch back on, bringing up the jazz music on the record player. The guests race down in their pajamas, wearing party hats instead of scowls. Outside Hulot dances round and round and then out of the frame with a flaming wheel as the fireworks fizzle out. It is as if in this spectacular display with its endlessly varied, multi-layered sounds and sights, the other guests, for one brief moment, have embraced Hulot’s character. 
               The final scene of goodbyes underscores, with a rhythmic return of the romantic music opening the film, the quality of a ‘time out of time’ experience that this holiday by the seaside has played out. Everyone returns to their social niceties and persona roles. And yet, as Hulot sits apart in the sand with the children, the old man comes up to shake his hand, shyly recognizing a kindred spirit he has not been able to acknowledge until now. Hulot may once again be shunned by the others or viewed as the butt of laughter – witness Martine and her friend on the train, snickering at a photo of him – but somehow the music lends an elegiac, warm tone that removes any sting. As he steps lightly on the balls of his feet towards his car, like a dancer in tune with the music, he too disappears from the scene; we don’t see him but the putt putt punctuation of his car can be heard acousmatically off screen before the signature vehicle crosses briefly and exits to the right out of the frame. Finally, the rhythmic sound of the sea and the romantic musical theme rise to enfold the closing image of the deserted beach as in a time capsule, to be sealed away for another year. 
            Chion’s study of sound effects, demonstrating “the reality of audiovisual combination – that one perception influences the other and transforms it” (Audio-Vision, xxvi), has revealed the power of sound in cinema. Sound is not subservient to image but rather floats free with an energy that adds value and impact of its own. Like Hulot himself, sound dances and weaves through the story, forging meaning scene by scene and directing perception to latent possibilities that visuals alone cannot capture. As Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday has shown, successful cinema is a skilled marriage of sound and image, where both sides shape the story. What the viewer projects as meaning cannot divorce one from the other without doing violence to the whole. By identifying the various sound effects that go to make up such skilled rhetoric, Chion has opened our eyes and ears to a much richer understanding of how cinema actually works.


Works Cited


Chion, Michel. "Audio-vision: Sound on Screen". Columbia UP,1994. Print