Between points there necessarily yawns an empitness, an empty interval in which nothing happens, in which no sensation takes place. In mythical and historical time, by contrast, no emptiness emerges, because neither picture nor line is interrupted by intervals; both of these form a narrative continuum. Only points allow empty in-between spaces to appear. These intervals in which nothing happens cause boredom. Or they appear threatening, because where nothing happens and where intentionality can find no object, there is death […] Point-time does not permit any contemplative lingering. (The Scent of Time, Byung Chul Han, 2017)
Film is a visucentric medium. But sounds do indeed affect the way we read its imagery. What one hears and how one listens is ultimately shaped by what the filmmaker chooses to reveal or conceal from the spectator.
Two Years at Sea [2011] dir. Ben Rivers
This dynamic interplay between presence and absence is achieved visually through choices of camera framing, composition, movement, choreography and mise-en-scène. In this way the spectator’s film listening only ever begins with what they first experience visually. And what is shown and correspondingly seen is always temporally framed.
Editing interrupts the flow of time in a given film shot. Classical continuity editing unifies images and sounds into a continuous and consistent sense of time and space. The synchronous pairing of sounds with images suggests a temporal realism that feels consistent with our perceptual experience of everyday reality.
In contrast to the rhythm and pace of conventional film editing, the long take provides a continuous, uninterrupted experience of time. Often demanding precise blocking and complex camera choreography, the long take remains one of film’s most enthralling showpiece moments. Perhaps its allure for audienes is twofold: First, the expressive temporal quality of the long take to further heighten the spectator’s sense of immersion - of actually feeling like one physically inhabits a place in the film - through the experience of unfolding, continous real time (notably when the camera suggests a pseudo first-person perspective). Second, a sudden or gradual awareness of a shift in visual language, marked by the dizzying flair of an athletic camera that invites the viewer into hiterto unimaginable visual perspectives.
This sense of uninterupted, unfolding time is tested at its extremity in so-called “Slow Cinema” - what Jonathan Romney, writing in Sight and Sound, has characterised as a "varied strain of austere minimalist cinema".
In a 2012 Guardian article on the subject, author Sukhdev Sandhu writes:
“the cinema that Romney describes in terms of austerity can also be seen as a form of cultural resistance. What links otherwise distinct films such as Jia Zhang-ke's Still Life (2006), Carlos Reygadas's Silent Light (2007), and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Palme D'Or-winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) is the extent to which they opt for ambient noises or field recordings rather than bombastic sound design, embrace subdued visual schemes that require the viewer's eye to do more work, and evoke a sense of mystery that springs from the landscapes and local customs they depict more than it does from generic convention.”
The Passenger [1975] dir. Michelangelo Antonioni
Consider the opening of Orson Welle’s Touch of Evil (1958) * (refer to audio excerpt above and notes below) or the famous crane shot in Mikhail Kalatozov’s Soy Cuba (1964), the camera seemingly floating to unprecedented elevations. The penultimate shot in Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger [1975] is seven-minute, seemingly impossible, long tracking shot that moves from Lock's hotel room through the iron railings and outside into the road, before returning back to the hotel.
As with the use of the long take by directors like Tarkovsky, Tarr and Weerasethakul, time here acts as a container for sound: time articulated through what is seen, heard and subsequently felt - the framing, composition and movement of the camera. Wind, voices, car engines, distant music, birds, footsteps on gravel, all precise sonic elements organised into a cohesive soundtrack, that still have the semblance of a “symphony of the sound of life” in which “the rhythmic cadence is not predictable, there is no search for a rhyme” (Chion). These techniques of uninterrupted spatio-temporal development would lead to further innovations with the emergence of Steadicam, Gopro and Drone camera technology.
Within the confines of the frame, the long take does more than reveal a smoothly changing visual landscape. It widens the scope for a continuously changing acoustic environment both inside and outside what is visibly present.
Memoria [2021] dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
The camera, like a painting or still photograph, appears to contain a world within its frame. This world within implies a world outside, one unseen and existing beyond the film frame. At any given moment sound exists both inside and outside what we see. Michel Chion has described how the audiovisual medium of film actively explores the visualised and acousmatic sound through an interplay of tension and resolution of meaning. This forms the fundamental basis of the offscreen sound space, underpinning its interpretive ambiguity.
Consider sound as an expression of time. Film time therefore functions as a container for sound, the emergent space of an audible world and the invitation to attend to it. Andrei Tarkvosky wrote extensively on the unique temporal qualities of film:
“No other art can compare with cinema in the force, precision, and starkness with which it conveys awareness of facts and aesthetic structures existing and changing within time.”
Always we listen to what time permits.
Film Selection:
Memoria [2021] dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Two Years at Sea [2011] dir. Ben Rivers
Sweetgrass [2009] dir. Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor
Enter the Void [2009] dir. Gaspar Noé
Werckmeister harmóniák [2000] dir. Béla Tarr
The Sacrifice [1986] dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
Stalker [1979] dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
From the East [1993] dir. Chantal Akerman
Le Dormeur [1974] dir. Pascal Aubier
Wavelength [1967] dir. Michael Snow
Notes:
*Touch of Evil (1958): Different genres of music are heard from multiple sources, each treated differently according to the playback device or acoustic location of the sound source relative to the moving camera position. Walter Murch would later explore this kind of complex treatment of multiple diegetic music sources in George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973), coining the phrase worldizing to describe the process of “playing back existing recordings through a speaker or speakers in real-world acoustic situations, and recording that playback with microphones so that the new recording takes on the acoustic characteristics of the place it was "re-recorded."
The initial studio-release version of Touch of Evil employed a music score that departed from Welle’s original direction. He outlines his diegetic design for this opening scene in the famous 1957 response notes addressed to Edward I. Muhl, Vice-President in charge of production Universal-International Pictures at the time:
“I assume that the music now backing the opening sequence of the picture is temporary...As the camera roves through the streets of the Mexican bordertown, the plan was to feature a succession of different and contrasting Latin American musical numbers - the effect, that is, of our passing one cabaret orchestra after another. In honky-tonk districts on the border, loudspeakers are over the entrance of every joint, large or small, each blasting out it's own tune by way of a "come-on" or "pitch" for the tourists. The fact that the streets are invariably loud with this music was planned as a basic device throughout the entire picture…”