The Undersea World of the Sound Department: the Construction of Sonic Conventions in Sub-aqua Screen Environments

The availability of new underwater cameras and sub-aqua diving gear in the immediate post-war era opened up exciting possibilities for both narrative and documentary filmmakers. While the visual elements of this new world could now be more easily captured on film, the sound elements of the sub-aqua environment remained more elusive. What did, or should, this undersea world sound like? This article examines the use of sound in the sub-aqua scenes of both fictional and documentary films in the 1950s and asks questions about the methods used in the sonification of these worlds. Comparing the operation of underwater sound and human hearing with the production and post-production strategies used by filmmakers, I seek to identify the emergence of a sound convention and its implications for issues of cinematic realism. Central to this convention is the manipulation of sonic frequencies. The sound strategies adopted also raise questions about the malleability of viewer perspective and sound-image relationship in terms of a realist mode of address. Linked to this is the use of sound to enhance audience experience on an affective level. As well as underpinning cinematic realism, these new sound environments offered fresh experiences to audiences seeking new reasons to visit the cinema in an era of widening forms of entertainment

Han Suyin’s Cold War fictions: Life-writing, intimacy, and decolonization

This article asks how the distinctive use of life-writing and focus on inter-ethnic intimacy in Han Suyin’s popular middlebrow romance fictions A Many-Splendoured Thing (1952) and The Mountain is Young (1958) constitute a critique of decolonization and align with her radical politics as a spokesperson for Bandung-era non-alignment. The author suggests that in these two major fictions of the Cold War era Han reprises what Christina Klein identifies as a familiar “Cold War Orientalist” trope of inter-ethnic love but repurposes it so that the genre’s characteristic objectifying treatment of (largely passive) Asian women desired by western men is reversed. In the process Han’s tactical re-imagining of inter-ethnic romance provides a vehicle for political satire, feminist self-realization, and figuring of new postcolonial/decolonial identities and subject positions