43. Film: The Sensorial

"Any understanding has its being in an act of understanding" (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, p.118-19)

The Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) is an experimental laboratory based at Harvard University that promotes innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography. SEL projects encourage “attention to the many dimensions of the world” […] “taking as their subject the bodily praxis and affective fabric of human and animal existence”.

In recent years the academic lab has produced a number of experimental films that challenge the anthropocentric and linguistic-based conventions of traditional approaches to ethnography and documentary filmmaking. Lab director Lucien Castaing-Taylor describes these works as:

“attempts to use filmmaking, not as a way of illustrating written ethnography, but rather to evoke the sensory experiences of certain kinds of lives in particular places.”

In the article The Flesh of The Perceptible: The New Materialism of Leviathan author Max Bowens draws a comparison between the film practices of the ethnographic lab and the New Materialism of philosopher Jane Bennet. He writes:

“The philosophical origins of both Sensory Ethnography and New Materialism bare enticing similarities to each other, most acutely in their advocacy for Nature's intrinsic vitality, the necessity for humans to have a more sensorial engagement with it, and for a relational, systems-based phenomenology […] Lived experience becomes a necessity for the filmmakers to endure and to capture simultaneously.”

De Humani Corporis Fabrica [2022] dir. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel • Levaithan [2012] dir. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel

This interest in the sensorial aspect of experience is particularly notable in such film works as Leviathan (2012), Expedition Content (2020) and De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022), each of which explores perspectives on a new type of immersive ethnographic cinema through innovative approaches to filmmaking technology. In an overview of the lab for the 2016 Porto/Post/Doc festival retrospective, Daniel Ribas writes:

“There is, therefore, a technological side to the films produced by SEL: smaller, portable digital cameras, more effective and “invisible” audio capture systems allow a close monitoring of ritual practices or certain locations and their communities.”

In Leviathan and De Humani Corporis Fabrica, small, portable camera and microphone technology facilitate a highly dynamic capture of reality from unusual angles and physical perspectives - underwater, airborne, inside the body.

Unlike choices of cinematography that efface the presence of the filmmaker’s camera, these films do not attempt to conceal the use of the filmmaking technology in motion. Instead the spectator feels the operation of camera and microphone, probing with intent into tiny crevices, strikingly close, in and out of focus, roaming into odd angles, revealing hidden sounds and textures. This calls to mind the handheld, running-camera approach pioneered by film diarist Jonas Mekas who in 1959 wrote:

“There is no other way to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses.”

Such derangement of the senses is produced by the probing film apparatus, revealing a unique sensorial experience of an all too familiar, and overlooked, reality.

Cow (2021) dir. Andrea Arnold

This particular approach to location filming emphasises the unique role that innovative production sound techniques perform in the sensorial realisation of the total audiovisual work. The use of experimental microphone techniques in films like De Humani Corporis Fabrica highlight a rare point of contact between the domains of sound art - under the rubric of 20th century experimental music and sound practices - and that of film sound. Such interaction emphasises how an explorative and inventive approach to production sound can yield exciting new possibilities for creating a unique type of deep sonic cinema.

Film Selection:

De Humani Corporis Fabrica [2022] dir. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel
Cow (2021) dir. Andrea Arnold
Expedition Content (2020) dir. Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati
Levaithan [2012] dir. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel
Sweetgrass [2009] dir. Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor

References:

In Search of the Sensory Experience: The Sensory Ethnography Lab / Focus SEL by Daniel Ribas
The Flesh of the Perceptible: The New Materialism of Leviathan by Max Bowens
Vibrant Matter, 2009, Jane Bennet

38. Film: The Experimental Soundtrack

One of the ways in which the film work of avant garde and moving image artists differs from narrative-based filmmaking is how sound and music is used. In rejecting concerns of story or character development, filmmakers operating in this interdisciplinary region between cinema (film), performance (expanded cinema) and gallery exhibition (video installation) free themselves to examine the medium inside and outside the confines of linear time. *

The Movement of People Working [2003] dir. Phil Niblock (2 stills from DVD version)

An elastic approach to the temporal arrangement of moving images and sounds opens up opportunities for interesting and unusual audiovisual juxtapositions. The use of contrapuntal sound in this way can have the effect of registering a floating, dream-like atmosphere that departs from the grounded, synchronous interaction of image and sound. Located within such a dreamscape lies the mind of the filmmaker who, in the expressive stream of consciousness, is capable of achieving a highly personal sensibility to filmmaking. In this space images and sounds drift in and out of focus like fading memories, fragments of a passing life. Here the expressive diarist work of Jonas Mekas comes to mind. 

With the freeing up of time and the relinquishing of synchronous image-sound relationships, the conventional distinctions between diegetic/non-diegetic, music/sound, signal/noise begin to unravel and blur. Operating in this sonic territory - one that historically covers video art, sound art and experimental music - we locate moving image artists and filmmakers, many of whom arrive at film with a background in fine art or contemporary and experimental music. In some cases respective film and music activities co-exist (e.g. Phil Niblock), while for others, an interest in sound and music is a starting point in a trajectory that moves them further towards moving image and video installation (e.g. Bill Viola). 

The Birds [1963] dir. Alfred Hitchcock • The Red Desert [1964] dir. Michelangelo Antonioni

The electronic film score belongs to any discussion concerning alternative and experimental approaches to working with film sound and music. Amongst some of the most famous examples of commercial films that deploy a purely electronic palette of sounds is Alfred Hitchcock’s horror classic The Birds from 1963. Utilising the Mixtur-Trautonium electronic synthesizer, composers Oskar Sala and Remi Gassmann were commissioned to produce the eery, atonal textures that would score the birds fluttering and cawing. In her book The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock's Sound Track Elisabeth Weis writes about the relationship between the film’s atmosphere of fear and the uncanny quality of the electronic sounds:

"The Birds deals abstractly with fear; thus it is especially dependent on sound because of the non-specific quality of sound effects."

We find the “non-specific quality” of electronic noises and tones put to novel use in other films of the time, such as Forbidden Planet (1956), considered the first completely electronic film score, Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Red Desert (1964) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972).

In Jack Clayton’s gothic psychological drama The Innocents (1961), electronic feedback and delay effects are put to great effect in a memorably tense and atmospheric sequence midway into the film. Described as the sound of the governess’ encroaching madness, "…what really disturbs us, at the very moments when the film is at its most disturbing” writes Robert Barry,

“are the eerie electronic noises that creep around the edges of Auric’s lush impressionistic score. These noises, though unmentioned in the film’s credits, were created by Daphne Oram.”

Oram (1925-2003) was a pioneering British electronic composer, inventor of the Oramics Machine and co‑founder of the highly influential BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Often where experimental and electronic music interacts with film we might find the use of continuous sustained sounds. Whether such soundtracks are considered music, sound or noise is prone to subjective standards and an unimportant here. Instead, what remains significant in this context is the non-diegetic, sound or music, dimension of what's being heard and how this correspondingly relates to what is being seen.

How does the image and soundtrack synthesise in film to express something - a meaning or a sensorial experience - for the spectator? Consider the use of sustained, layered drones in Phil Niblock's video work The Movement of People Working (2003). This ia an extended 16mm piece in which the camera records the repetitive manual work of labourers working in fields. Faces cropped, location sound mute, silent moving limbs set to the sounds of shimmering microtonal drones. (Or perhaps the other way round). What is this experience? +

Film Selection:

Tectonic Plate [2016] dir. Mika Taanila
The Movement of People Working [2003] dir. Phil Niblock
In Absentia [2000] dir. Quay Brothers
The Black Glove [1996] dir. Maria Beatty
Solaris [1972] dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
Entrance to Exit [1965] dir. George Brecht
The Red Desert [1964] dir. Michelangelo Antonioni
The Birds [1963] dir. Alfred Hitchcock
Ai [1962] dir. Takahiko Iimura
Speak {1962} dir. John Latham

Notes:

* Hitting the 'non-linear button' in film school was often an indication that it was time to depart from script and begin experimenting temporally in an attempt to uncover new ideas in the material.

+ Additional Thoughts: In some sense continuous sound has the uncanny effect of delineating the soundtrack from the image, setting up independent streams of sensory information; a return to a more primitive state in which film sound and image are decoupled from one another. In such instances, the absence of any significant points of audiovisual synchronisation can perceptually suggest a flattening of a sequence of moving images. The image lacks a kind of acoustic depth. Consequently, it seemingly lacks a three-dimensional presence (an inability to conform to realism) in the listening space of the cinema. Perhaps the sum effect of this is to establish a soundtrack that acts as a spatio-temporal frame through which the changing images are performed. 

25. The Cinema: Beyond the Black Box

Commenting on the future of cinema for the publication Where is Cinema, writer and former artists' moving image programme director at Tyneside Cinema (2018-20) Adam Pugh says:

“If cinema has a future, it certainly is in its being a social space. There are a lot of things that the visual arts could learn from cinema. A lot of people will not go into a gallery because they feel put off or threatened by it. A cinema is inherently more democratic because its history is all about this space for people to come together and have a collective experience.”

How does the cinema define itself in an age of multiplexes and online streaming? What kind of public setting for the screening of films exists beyond the conventional cinema space? Do the operation of alternative spaces compromise the filmmakers vision?

Art galleries, pubs, bars, community halls, churches, drive-through spaces and city parks are all commonly used to organise film events. These spaces broaden the public presentation of films to a wider audience who might not normally have access to a traditional cinema venue. The codes and practices of these spaces, as well as their technical and physical affordances, open up a variety of film experiences for audiences across different cultural and geographic contexts.

Images: Deptford Cinema - a volunteer-run 39-seater cinema space in South-East London.
For more information visit: http://deptfordcinema.org/.

The environmental, technical and social factors of these alternative spaces contribute to the formation of a unique screening soundscape, one in which the signal and noise of the film work, as well as the event itself, are redefined. The alternative space is, to apply Jonas Mekas’ famous phrase, the promise of “a less perfect but more free” site for cinema. 

“There is no other way to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses.” - Jonas Mekas [1959].