Fathering sync sound

A few years ago at an international film festival, Taiwanese director Wu Nien-jen (吳念真) was asked a revealing question by a foreign journalist.

Does the word `tu duu chih' mean `sound editing' in your language? The word is always seen at the credit roll."

Wu said that this was the name of a person -- it just happened that this person was virtually synonymous with sound editing in Taiwan.

The man referred to was Tu Duu-chih (杜篤之), without whom the age of New Taiwan Cinema (台灣新電影), which brought names such as Hou Hsiao-hsien (侯孝賢) and Edward Yang (楊德昌) to prominence, would have been an age of silent movies.

This year at Cannes, Tu received the technical award for sound editing work on Millennium Mambo (千禧曼波) and What Time is it There? (你那邊幾點).

"He has deserved the award for a long time now," said Hou, who directedMillennium Mambo.

According to Hsiao Ya-chuan (蕭雅全), who worked as assistant director on another Hou film, The Flowers of Shanghai (海上花), it was working with Hou that honed Tu's skills as a sound editor. Hou's style of filmmaking, which favors improvisational dialogue to flesh out situations, makes the sound editor's job extremely difficult.

A number of scenes in The Flowers of Shanghai centered on characters eating and drinking round a table. When the shot began, Hou would usually just say, "Okay, you can start now," and leave the actors to develop a situation through improvisational dialogue. "The recordist wouldn't know which lines spoken by which actor were the important ones," said Hsiao.

"The only thing you could do was to guess, and observe carefully," said Tu. "Sometimes you simply didn't catch anything to record, and the shot has to be made again," he said.

It is Tu's ability to work in the difficult circumstances of a Hou shoot that Hsiao, now a director in his own right, most admires about him. "It takes experience, intuition and courage to deal with that kind of situation," he said. "Having worked with Tu on my first short film, I have brought him in on all my other projects, if possible," Hsiao said.

Tu has always been in strong demand, and has been the sound editor for about 70 percent of Taiwanese films released since the mid-1980s.

One of Tu's major contributions to the Taiwan film industry has been the introduction of synchronized sound. The first such feature film in Taiwan to be shot entirely with sync sound was Hou's The City of Sadness (悲情城市, 1989).

In the 1970s and before, most Taiwanese films tended to focus on war, martial arts and family romance genres, in which sound was invariably dubbed. Even in the 1980s, when realism gradually became the cinematic mainstream, many films only had partial sync sound due to a shortage of technical personnel.

"Five years before the shooting of City of Sadness, about 20 years ago now, I began to work on the technique of synchronized sound recording," Tu recalled.

"At that time, a group of directors had recently returned from the US, and they gave me a chance to watch and learn during the post production process," Tu said of this period when he was an assistant in Central Motion Picture Corp's (CMPC) sound department.

"In the early days when we were making realist films, the boom poles we used for the mics were the kind of poles that people used to hang their laundry out on. The 32mm cameras we used were also very noisy, so they had to be covered with two to three blankets, so that after a few takes, the cameraman would emerge tired and sweaty," Tu recalled.