A Mode of Listening

This week’s TV watching consisted of a Saturday night movie marathon. It’s always funny how I always forget about these blogs until after the movies are over and I can’t remember the specifics of the sound I heard. So, here I find myself blogging away late on Sunday night again while watching The Prestige.

Throughout the film there are hundreds of different sections of the film where different listening techniques can be used. But there is a specific repetitive scene when Hugh Jackman’s character is walking in the woods and I can hear birds chirping on the screen, but can’t see any on screen. This casual listening technique is continued throughout the film in different scenes including the one where the wife hangs herself and all we hear is the birds chirping in the background the same way as when we saw in the birds in the cages in the earlier scene. It’s almost like the birds have some kind of unique symbolism throughout the film but I’m not quite sure how to explain what it is.

In this film there is obviously a lot of Semantic listening as well, but that’s not really all that interesting to write about, except for the narrated parts, but even those for this film, I don’t think were required. I’d have to say that this is probably the first movie I’ve seen in a while that really didn’t need sound to figure out what was happening throughout the story by the scenes happening on scene.