A Phenomenology of Sonic Displacement in Film Noir

This paper analyzes the use of sounds displaced from their sources in classic film noir. Often understood as a dark and solipsistic moment in American cinema, interpretations of noir frequently emphasize isolated individuals who are physically, psychologically and socially displaced from their environments. Although scholarship on noir has examined this alienation through various sonic motifs such as music and voice-over, I investigate how several noirs draw attention to the act of listening through acousmatic sound – that is, sound heard without a visible source. Far from being an ephemeral auditory experience, I argue that the separation between sound and image invites characters and spectators to seek out the shared material basis of sound as well as our own embodied relation to the sonorous. I analyze case studies of voice-over in Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945) and sounds both seen and unseen in Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955). Through the lens of phenomenology, I implement Edmund Husserl’s method of bracketing, in which our judgment of everyday experience is suspended, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of intersubjectivity, to show how the foregoing uses of sound draw our attention back to the material and embodied nature of sonic experience.