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The Birds (1963)—together with Secret Agent and Rear Window— is one of the three Hitchcock films in which sound is most important. Hitchcock's emphasis on sound effects is indicated by the fact that he forgoes background music in The Birds for the first time since Lifeboat twenty years earlier.[1] (In both cases, the starkness of the scoreless sound track emphasizes the vulnerability of a human community in a hostile natural environment.) The Birds is also Hitchcock's most stylized sound track—it is composed from a constant interplay of natural sounds and computer-generated bird noises. The particular emphasis on the sound track at this point in Hitchcock's career would seem to have resulted from two converging developments, one technical, one personal.

The technical development was the new sophistication of electronic sound. Hitchcock told Truffaut in his discussion of The Birds, "Until now we've worked with natural sounds, but now, thanks to electronic sound, I'm not only going to indicate the sound we want but also the style and the nature of each sound."[2] Such an interest in new technical challenges was, of course, characteristic of the director who immediately experimented with synchronized sound, elaborate camera movement, and 3-D as soon as each became available to him. Indeed, the challenge of mastering a new technology has provided a major creative stimulus for Hitchcock in many films.

The personal development involves Hitchcock's interest from about 1958 to 1963 in going beyond point-of-view shots identified with a given character, an interest begun in Vertigo, developed in Psycho, and culminating in The Birds. In these three films, which to varying degrees might be called the "extrasubjective" films, the director sought most seriously to touch directly the fears of the audience.[3] They are his least detached, most unsettling and haunting films. (North by Northwest, which Hitchcock directed between

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Vertigo and Psycho, is darker in mood than the earlier espionage thrillers it resembles, but it is still a romantic comedy.) The extrasubjective films introduce terror through the experience of a character with whom we identify, but then Hitchcock removes the surrogate and we experience the sensation more directly. (The reverse occurs in Vertigo, where the very opening title designs induce dizziness before the first sequence attaches the sensation to the hero's vertigo.) Hitchcock himself has said that "in Psycho there is no identification with the characters. There wasn't time to develop them and there was no need to. The audience goes through the paroxysms in the film without consciousness of Vera Miles or John Gavin. They're just characters that lead the audience through the final part of the picture, I wasn't interested in them. And you know, nobody ever mentions that they were ever in the film."[4] Hitchcock's comment is somewhat overstated. Although there is no single character to whom we remain emotionally attached for the whole film, at one point or another we share the subjective experiences of almost every major character. Similarly, in The Birds, as Mike Prokosch has argued, "the principal characters have no monopoly on audience identification."[5] Hitchcock gives us a heroine, however shallow, and then a family with whom to experience the film. However, as William S. Pechter has pointed out, their "suffering is incommensurate with the provocation. . . . The theme is the audience" and our reaction to the film.[6] The characters may or may not have escaped the birds at the end of the film, but the audience is left behind, in a world where the birds, which represent any terrifying, uncontrollable forces, have prevailed.

When Hitchcock aims toward direct audience involvement, he often shifts from a dependence on visual techniques to a greater dependence on aural techniques. In Vertigo the emphasis is still visual; the sensation of vertigo is created more specifically through computer-generated designs for the titles and later through shots ' Ithat combine tracking out with zooming forward. To be sure, Herrmann's score, with its hypnotic arpeggios, is important, but it is part of an overall effect and not dominant during Hitchcock's vertigo-producing sequences. In Psycho the scoring generally maintains the tension in moments of relative tranquillity. During the killings, however, the music picks up the visual motifs of birds as

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predators; violins are scraped during the three attacks to sound like shrieking birds. Sound and visual effects work together to provide three of Hitchcock's most terrifying sequences. (That the scoring alone is not so terrifying is indicated by the fact that on the fourth occasion when the violins shriek—during Norman's run down from the house after Marion's murder—the audience does not cringe in terror.) A crucial aspect of the scoring here is that the shrieking not only associates Norman with his stuffed birds of prey but it also associates the viewers with the onscreen victims. That is to say, the cries of the victims, the screeches of the violins, and the screams of the audience merge indistinguishably during violent sequences. The distinction between screen victim and audience is broken down. By contrast, the subjective films rarely elicit screams during the violent sequences, such as the cornfield attack in North by Northwest or the struggle on the carousel in Strangers on a Train. The attacks in Psycho, however, almost always incite the audience, and Hitchcock has guaranteed these screams by inserting them into the sound track to prime the viewer's response. During Norman's attack on Lila there are screams added to the violin shrieks that may or may not be attributed to Norman or Lila. It does not matter who makes them. The moment is one of abject terror for attacker, victim, and viewer alike. If each attack in Psycho evokes such strong identification between victim and viewer, how then does Hitchcock move beyond identification with the characters to more direct audience involvement? The impact derives from the severity of the attacks plus the interchangeability of the victims. The viewer suffers more intensely and more often in Psycho than in past Hitchcock films. However, because the viewer survives the attacks on each character with whom he had identified, he begins to feel a generalized terror dissociated from any specific victim.

By the time of The Birds, screeches are even more important than visual techniques for terrorizing the audience during attacks. Indeed, bird sounds sometimes replace visuals altogether. Moreover, Hitchcock carefully manipulates the sound track so that the birds can convey terror even when they are silent or just making an occasional caw or flutter. As Truffaut points out, "The bird sounds are worked out like a real musical score."[7] Instead of orchestrated instruments there are orchestrated sound effects. If in

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Psycho music sounds like birds, in The Birds bird sounds function like music. Hitchcock even eliminates music under the opening titles in favor of bird sounds. Moreover, once Hitchcock has established the birds as a menace, he controls suspense simply by manipulating the sounds of flapping and bird cries that recur quite unrandomly for the rest of the film. At any point in the film a bird noise can be introduced naturally, so Hitchcock has a means of controlling tension even more effective and less obtrusive than musical cues. Of course, he also introduces birds visually, but the audience is much more conscious of their appearances than of their sounds. To introduce a bird visually without an attack is to tease the audience with a red herring, and so Hitchcock cannot manipulate the images as freely for suspense as he does the sound track.

One reason the sound effects in The Birds directly touch the fears of the audience is that they are relatively abstract—especially the bird cries. It is probably the abstract stridency of bird cries that accounts for their appeal to Hitchcock in Blackmail (Alice's chirping canary). Sabotage (a saboteur's bird shop), Young and Innocent (the sound and sight of shrieking sea gulls that precede the disclosure of the corpse), and Psycho (the violin shrieks). (I do not include some mewing sea gulls heard in Under Capricorn or Jamaica Inn because Hitchcock uses the sound in those films not for emotional resonance but simply for atmosphere, as any director might.) Because the bird cries are partly computer-generated in The Birds, that sound is particularly nonspecific, as is the electronic flutter that indicates the flapping of wings. The bird sounds are often so stylized that if the visual source were not provided, the sounds could not be identified. The effect of the resulting ambiguity is to universalize the noises—much as Hitchcock universalizes the arguments between spouses by muffling the specifics of their quarrel. Cameron and Jeffery consider this universality to be the essence of The Birds: "The ambiguity of the film's meaning is a prime virtue. If it had a specific allegorical meaning, it would have a particular relevance to each spectator, who could then deal with it on its own level. But its very ambiguity makes the threat operate irresistibly at every level of audience consciousness."[8]

The bird sounds are all the more abstract and terrifying when they come from unseen sources. As in Rear Window, the enemy is

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most threatening when invisible. The film's most frightening attack is the sixth, in which only a bird or two is seen. Mitch has boarded up the windows of his house. Ironically, his hammering, which is heard before it is seen, sounds like the tapping of beaks, a dominant noise during the attack. The situation is claustrophobic: as the human victims listen to and fight off the assault, they realize that the home is as much a trap as a protection. The attack's end is signaled by the receding of bird noises. Meanwhile, the audience has felt as threatened as the characters. By keeping the menace aural rather than visual Hitchcock has once more broken down the barrier between audience and screen. The theater and the living room have seemed one continuous space—one continuous trap. If this were the only attack, The Birds would be a subjective film (from Melanie's perspective). However, the attacks are not restricted to any character's private space.

There is a second scene in which the bird noises clearly are more menacing than the sight of them alone. William Pechter describes the shift in mood: "In one of the most amazing images of the film, we suddenly see the town, now burning in destruction, in a view from great aerial elevation; from this perspective, one sees everything as part of a vast design, and the scene of chaos appears almost peaceful, even beautiful; then, gradually the silence gives way to the flapping of wings and the birds' awful shrieking, and the image, without losing its beauty, is filled with terror as well."[9] We can distinguish the added effect of the sound because it is introduced later than the image of the birds and changes the mood of the shot.

At other times, however, the silence of the birds can be more frightening than their shrieks. There are seven attacks in all, and Hitchcock clearly was challenged by a desire to differentiate them. There are two sets of variables that he seems to be manipulating in relation to the sound effects: whether the birds are introduced first aurally or visually and whether the birds are ominously noisy or ominously silent.

One of the reasons The Birds is so unsettling is that there is no apparent logic or predictability about when or whom the birds will attack. (Hitchcock has said, "I made sure that the public would not be able to anticipate from one scene to another."[10]) Part of our

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unease is determined by Hitchcock's shifting of whether we. first hear or see the birds. The choice depends on whether he wants suspense or surprise for the attack. The first attack is made by one gull on Melanie as she drives a motorboat. The gull enters the frame well before Hitchcock adds the sound of wings or the bird's screech. He has now established suspense; after having surprised us the first time we now know that the birds can strike without warning. Any bird caw can make us nervous. For the second attack, at a children's birthday party. Hitchcock uses visual and aural effects simultaneously. At the height of the attack, the screams of birds and children are indistinguishable. Hitchcock extends the havoc both visually and aurally by having the birds pop balloons with their beaks. It enables him to add to the avian destructiveness without his actually having to show birds pecking at children's heads. (He saves the more gruesome sights for later impact.) The third attack, in which finches flood Mitch's fireplace, also involves simultaneous sounds and images. It is not so terrifying in effect except for our realization that the birds are now inside the home. Before the fourth attack, on the school children, Hitchcock shows the birds building up silently, unnoticed at first, for an attack on a schoolhouse. In counterpoint to their ominous silence we hear the innocent voices of children singing. The preparation i for the scene is considerably more terrifying than its realization. (The attack itself is so ambitious as a special-effects project that the more sophisticated viewer tends to speculate about how Hitchcock created the effects rather than to identify with the victims.)

The fifth attack alternates between silence and screaming. In a restaurant Melanie and other onlookers watch in silence as a man lights a cigarette next to a puddle of spilled gasoline. The people are inside a window and gesticulate wildly in pantomime. When they suddenly get the window open they all scream at once at the man not to throw down his match, but their babbled screams are as ineffective as their silence; they simply startle the man, and he tosses away the match, igniting an explosion. Hitchcock ends this sequence with the high overhead shot described above by Pechter, in which the silent image takes on terror when the bird cries are added. It is significant to the viewer's response that the sequence begins from Melanie's point of view but shifts with the overhead.

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shot to the apparently safe perspective of the birds themselves. At first we feel relief at our emotional removal from the holocaust below, but with the introduction of the terrifying screams we soon feel that even this space is threatening; there is no place where we can feel safe.

The sixth attack is the assault on Mitch's house that is created almost entirely through sound. By the end of this attack the birds have gained the advantage. Hitchcock himself has described how for the seventh and last attack he no longer needed to have the birds scream.

When Melanie is locked up in the attic with the murderous birds we inserted the natural sounds of wings. Of course, I took the dramatic licence of not having the birds scream at all. To describe a sound accurately, one has to imagine its equivalent in dialogue. What I wanted to get in that attack is as if the birds were telling Melanie, "Now we've got you where we want you. Here we come. We don't have to scream in triumph or in anger. This is going to be a silent murder." That's what the birds were saying, and we got the technicians to achieve that effect through electronic sound."

Thus Hitchcock has characterized his birds in the same way that he characterized many of his murderers; their silence is a sign of their control. Having established this connection between silence and supremacy, Hitchcock maintains it for the rest of the film. In his words:

For the final scene, in which Rod Taylor opens the door of the house for the first time and finds the birds assembled there, as far as the eye can see, I asked for a silence, but not just any kind of silence. I wanted an electronic silence, a sort of monotonous low hum that might suggest the sound of the sea in the distance. It was a strange, artificial sound, which in the language of'Ihe birds might be saying, "We're not ready to attack you yet, but we're getting ready. We're like an engine that's purring and we may start off at any moment." All of this was suggested by a sound that's so low that you can't be sure whether you're actually hearing it or only imagining it.[12]

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The shift in terror in The Birds from noise to silence is essential to its extrasubjective style. The film eventually makes us feel just as vulnerable in moments of relative tranquillity as during attacks. It is one thing to feel threatened when under attack; it is another to be frightened at all times, to feel that life is a permanent state of siege. Thus Hitchcock has achieved his career-long aim of making us wary, not so much of blatant evils, but of our precarious daily condition.

Another aspect of the film's sound track that is so insidiously frightening is the cross-identification of noises human, me-chanical, and avian. Although the major antagonists in the film are the natural order (birds) and the human order, the distinctions become blurred when we consider that both worlds are associated at times on the sound track with mechanical sounds. The associa-tions can be made precisely because Hitchcock has established a norm of abstracted, stylized sounds. The birds, when screeching and flapping their wings, sound at times like an engine screeching and crackling.

Hitchcock describes the low hum of their menacing silence as "like an engine that's purring," and throughout the film motor noises seem to link bird and human noises. Under the opening titles the electronic flapping sounds of wings are intermingled with the almost imperceptible sound of a truck motor. Although we see birds during the titles (the titles, as abstracted as the sound track, are presented as fragments that converge and then disintegrate), we do not see a truck until their close, when a van roars by shortly after a trolley car, on a busy San Francisco street where Melanie is walking. She enters a bird shop where she will meet Mitch and attempt to talk to him over the loud sounds of bird chatter. The sequence ends with Melanie rushing into the street to watch Mitch's car take off noisily. The bird store has no doors, and the sounds of chirping cross-fade into the sounds of traffic. Thus Hitchcock has shifted by the end of the first sequence from bird sounds with an undercurrent of truck noise, to obvious truck noise cross-fading to bird noise, to bird noise plus human speech, to bird noise cross-fading to truck noise.

A few minutes later Melanie is herself driving a sports car. During this sequence (in which Melanie takes two birds to Mitch's

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sister) Melanie shifts the car's gears noisily and often. In one shot the car is initially hidden by a hill, and we know of her impending approach only by the noise of the car motor. A close-up of the lovebirds swaying on their perches as she rounds the corners too fast is accompanied by the sound of screeching tires and shifting gears. It may be that Hitchcock wants us to identify Melanie with mechanical noises because at this point we are to peceive her behavior as cold and mechanical. Her intrusion into the peaceful hamlet of Bodega Bay is suggested predominantly by the noise of the sports car as she drives through the quiet streets. Soon Melanie is associated with the noise of a motorboat she rents to deliver Mitch's birds. It is possible to interpret the film as implying that Melanie does indeed bring the bird attacks with her to the town.[13] This interpretation is supported by the emphasis Hitchcock puts on Melanie's noisy approach by car to the town and by her noisy departure in the last shot of the film (an extremely long take of the car in which she and Mitch's family are escaping), the motor sound gradually dying out as they disappear into the distance.

Motor noise is associated with a second woman in the film, Mitch's mother, who resembles Melanie in appearance and apparent coldness. Hitchcock has described his use of motor noise as an extension of the mother's feelings just after she discovers a neighbor who has been killed by the birds:

The screech of the truck engine starting off conveys her anguish. We were really experimenting there by taking real sounds and then stylizing them so that we derived more drama from them than we normally would. ... In the previous scene we had shown that the woman was going through a violent emotion, and when she gets into the truck, we showed that this was an emotional truck, not only by the image, but also through the sound that sustains the emotion. It's not only the sound of the engine you hear, but something that's like a cry. It's as though the truck were shrieking.[14]

Insofar as the women are doubles, there has been an aural reversal. Earlier, when Melanie was still untouched by any deeply felt experience, she was identified as something less than human by being

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associated with her car motor. Now the mother is indeed suffering, and the motor is taking on human qualities. At first a person sounded like a machine; now a machine sounds like a person.

The machine also sounds like a bird. Hitchcock uses the word shrieking to imply that he was anthropomorphizing the truck, but the word he has chosen also describes bird noises. In other words, there are aural cross-references of all sorts: the birds sound like machines because of the electronic' origins of their sounds, the human beings sound like birds (especially when the children shriek during attacks), and in the above example the machines sound like birds or people. The aural exchanges in the film match its overall visual exchanges. It starts in a bird shop where hundreds of birds are caged. By the end of the film it is the human beings who are caged by birds—in phone booths, homes, and vehicles. All in all, the film offers a bleak picture of humanity as trapped by forces beyond its control; the world depicted seems all the more impersonal and hostile because of the mechanical nature of the sound track.

There is one more issue raised by the aural continuities of things human, avian, and mechanical, and that is the nature of film-making itself. Any film requires a certain subordination of human subjects to mechanical and technical necessities. Hitchcock's closed style has always emphasized that technical control, and The Birds is the most mechanical of all his films. Not only does the sound track incorporate computer-generated noises, but the visual effects include 371 trick shots combining drawn and model animation and elaborate matting techniques.'' The birds, then, are the mechanical creation of a director who fully exploits the mechanical resources of his medium.

However, Hitchcock further emphasizes his connections with the birds. The shift from Melanie's point of view at the start of the gas station sequence to the final aerial shot is quite literally a shift to a bird's-eye view. It is also a shift to the omniscience of the director himself. (In Psycho Hitchcock also associates the director's perspective with a bird's-eye view when he cuts to overhead shots during the murder sequences.) Hitchcock is fond of overhead shots that reveal his characters to be trapped by a destiny that they cannot control. Within the world of film, however, it is not fate but

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the director who is in control. Hitchcock's avian and human attackers are simply the agents of a malevolent fate imposed by the director on his characters. Yet most critics would agree with Wood that the essential meaning of The Birds, along with many other Hitchcock films, is that in a precarious and hostile world "the only (partial) security is the formation of deep relationships."[16] This humane message is presented paradoxically in a highly mechanical film. Hence the special importance of the film's last scene, which balances the humane and the mechanical. Although physically battered, the central characters have at least created genuine emotional bonds with each other—two shots establish a new tenderness between Melanie and Mitch's mother—and Hitchcock allows them to escape. Once again, however, they are observed from the birds' point of view. The car's retreat into the distance is photographed from the family's front porch, and in the foreground are hundreds of birds perched on their newly conquered territory.

The birds are in control, but so is the director. His last shot is a composite of thirty-two pieces of film [17] and dozens of artificial and natural bird sounds. In previous shots the predominant sound has been that low, artificial hum. of menace. This "electronic silence" is so important to the tension that when Mitch tenuously starts up and drives Melanie's sports car out of the garage there is absolutely no motor sound—from the same car that Hitchcock has previously shown to be particularly noisy. Thus, the silence that Hitchcock ascribes to the birds is ultimately a sign of the director's control over his characters, his viewers, and his art.

Notes (p 146 - 147)

1. Rope also has no score, but there is a considerable amount of source music from the onscreen piano and a radio that is left on.

2. Francois TruHaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967; originally pub-lished as Le Cinema selon Hitchcock [Paris: Robert Laffont, 1966]), p. 224.

3. Donald M. Spoto, in his The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1976), makes a similar point about Psycho.

4. Peter Bogdanovich, The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock (New York; Museum of Modem Art, 1963), p. 42.

5. Mike Prokosch, "Topaz," unpublished manuscript, 19 February 1970, p. 17.

6. William S. Pechter, The Director Vanishes," Moviegoer 2 (Summer/Autumn 1964), p. 48.

7. Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 223.

8. lan Cameron and Richard Jeffery, "The Universal Hitchcock," Movie, no. 12 (Spring 1965), p. 21.

9. Pechter, 'The Director Vanishes," p. 49.

10. Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 217.

11. Ibid., p. 224.

12. Ibid., p. 225.

13. See, e.g., John Belton, "Hitchcock: The Mechanics of Perception," Cambridge Phoenix, 16 October 1969. Belton argues that The Birds is a subjective film in which the whole world is a reflection of Melanie's state of mind.

14. Truffaut, Hitchcock, p. 224.

15. Bogdanovich, The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, p. 45.

16. Robin Wood, Hitchcock's Films (London: A. Zwemmer; Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Bames, 1965, rev. 1969), p. 151.

17. Bogdanovich, The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, p. 45.

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