Look who's talking now : sound and popular imagination in "Walking with Dinosaurs"

Abstract

"Walking with Dinosaurs" is a 1999 BBC produced natural history documentary series about dinosaurs. While such a representation of dinosaurs is usually treated with focus on either the visual image, the technology used or the narrative structure in such films, this thesis deals with how sound works in such representations. Sound is in this thesis seen as central to film in general, because the members of the audience, whom the French music scholar Michel Chion calls the audio-spectators, rely on the successful combination of the images and the sounds into what can be called the audio-visual illusion. This is the illusion that the sounds we hear are produced by the characters or objects on the screen, and it is an illusion that makes the audio-spectators enter the so-called audio-visual contract, which both the audio-spectators and the producers enter, the audio-spectator agreeing to believe what the producers of the presentation tell them. The analysis of different layers of sound in the series is used as a tool for investigating how the popular image of the dinosaurs is constructed and reproduced. The dinosaur sounds themselves are seen as one expression of this image, being imaginatively produced by a mixture of imagination, popular conceptions and scientific knowledge. The thesis discusses how the series can be seen upon as a natural history documentary series, and how it can be said to be an example of popularisation of science. This might be said to lie in the authority of the narrative structure of documentary film, claiming to reflect realistically and truthfully upon nature. In this the documentary film differs from the fiction film, which holds no such claim. One definition of popularisation of science can be scientific knowledge is made understandable to a large audience. WWD, presenting the dinosaurs and their lives as naturally and truthfully as possible can be seen as science made understandable to a large audience, and WWD can therefore be seen as popularisation of science. Keywords: Sound, documentary, dinosaurs, popularisation, science