Every now and again, the French teacher at my school would click a Tricolore cassette tape into a chunky red tape recorder and inform the class that we were now going to listen to an ‘invisible film strip’.₍₁₎ It was, of course, just an audio recording in clear and slow French, from which we desperately tried to salvage meaning. There would have been no likelihood of any of us, at that time, making any connection between those tapes of conversational French and Walter Ruttmann’s 1930 experimental German radio programme, Weekend, described by its creator as ‘a photographic radio play’ (photographische Hörspiel) ‘yielding what amounts to a blind film’.₍₂₎ But in their different ways they both bring the promise of something that is neither one thing nor the other – not just audio, but not really film.

When I occasionally feel too unwell or sore to get up, but not too unwell for comfort, I too turn to an ‘invisible film strip’, that completely made-up category. I listen to a film. It must be a familiar film, something already seen. I choose one on my phone, connect it to my Bluetooth speaker, and leave them both by the bedside. In this limbo I have experienced many films. The sounds become unmoored from their visual ballast. In most films, dialogue drives, and of course this is usually the element that comes to the fore, but I particularly like how the untethered sound effects and music reveal themselves.
The three components of film sound – music, speech, and sound effects – carry the weight of the whole film, leaving huge, ambiguous gaps where the visuals would usually provide information. It’s neither one thing nor the other – not radio drama, but no longer really film.

In his seminal 1990 work Audio Vision: Sound on Screen, Michel Chion highlights some methods of audio-visual analysis equally suitable for students, teachers, and enthusiasts. One of these is masking, a method where you listen to a film’s sound in isolation, without looking at the image, or conversely turn the volume down and just watch the screen. As Chion says, ‘this gives you the opportunity to hear the sound as it is and not as the image transforms and disguises it’, although he adds the caveat that this method requires training, discipline, and humility.₍₃₎ When I use the masking method myself I find it brings a surprising freshness to familiar films, allowing me to access a new aural perspective. The film needs to be one I’ve seen at least once before, otherwise I’m completely adrift. However, I am fully aware that this is a niche activity and, I imagine, that the majority of film and music lovers would find it boring and pointless. But for me it is a rewarding glimpse into the works of the film, like being able to listen to individual pre-mixed tracks of a classic song, or following an orchestral score. It separates and defines the film’s sound, but also takes it into new territory as I rely on the strength of my visual memory which is surely conflating correctly remembered images with those that don’t belong.

I recall the comforting presence in childhood of televisions switched on in other rooms. Curiously, this is something I can rarely tolerate as an adult. Perhaps because programmes themselves now sound so different, and the acoustic qualities of the TV speakers and living spaces are themselves also different, and maybe even my sensory sensitivities have altered somewhat. But then it wasn’t a problem, and televisions of memory seemed to sound nicer than those of today. Probably less sub-bass than home-cinema systems, or less tinny than a phone or laptop. Moving images with sound weren’t found everywhere we went. Televisions were in living rooms, occasionally bedrooms, or in school libraries, locked in wooden cabinets, and the sounds from these boxes seems, to my memory, somehow warmer - loud enough to be a gentle lull in the next room, but rarely loud enough to disturb me. I remember the feeling of climbing the stairs at bedtime, hearing the theme of a post-watershed program rise through the landing. Sometimes it was comforting, sometimes unnerving. At best it was both, maybe Ron Grainer’s shimmering theme for Tales of the Unexpected (1979-88). Or think of Kevin in Time Bandits (Gilliam, 1981) overhearing his parents watching a game show both vacuous and scary, ‘Your Money or Your Life’. I recall listening outside the closed door as my parents laughed uproariously to comedy shows, trying to decipher the fun. The comforting sound of Saturday night light entertainment, a mash of applause, jaunty music and laughter, all combining with the aroma of bolognese sauce simmering in the kitchen to bring a feeling of weekend contentment. I have a special fondness for the sound of Italian films and TV, where overdubbing voices was the predominant practice, so that no matter where the location, every voice on every film sounded like it came from the same room. Even today I find this a particularly comforting sound, reminding me of long, happy days in Malta with family, at a time when Italian TV was the country’s dominant media. I couldn’t understand the language, but I absorbed on a sonic level the speech rhythms and recording textures. For me, The Film in the Other Room is a place to focus attention on sound, to mix history and analysis with memory and opinion, and perhaps return to viewing a film again with a fresh pair of ears, or at least a new tuning.