Photographer Jerry Thompson worked as Walker Evans' principal assistant from 1973 to Evans' death in 1975. In his 2013 publication Why Photography Matters, Thompson writes the following:
"Fox Talbot, and the cohort including Evans and Cartier-Bresson seven decades later, proposed a new kind of epistemology, a new, hitherto impossible way of learning about the world [...] The opposite of Mathema (a model projected to enable understanding), Pathema is an experience passively received: acquiescence to what is seen [...] When a pathema holds sway, the artist will no longer be Master of the Universe. He or she will be instead an attentive observer, a willing participant in, perhaps a servant of, a system larger than that artist's individual, personal, particular needs." (Jerry L. Thompson, Why Photography Matters, p.14-15)
How might this epistemological perspective be relevant to filmmaking with sound?
Homo Sapiens [2016] dir. Nikolaus Geyrhalter
“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.” - John Cage, Lectures and Writings
A lack of dialogue suggests a kind of silence. But the world beyond human language is anything but silent. The absence of words, or any sense of overt musical score, discloses the space for the sounds of the world, both real and imagined, to be heard and felt.
Film Selection:
Il Buco [2021] dir. Michelangelo Frammartino
Cemetery [2019] dir. Carlos Casas
Homo Sapiens [2016] dir. Nikolaus Geyrhalter
A Spell to Ward Off the Darness [2013] dir. Ben Rivers & Ben Russell
Le Quattro Volte [2010] dir. Michelangelo Frammartino
Hukkle [2002] dir. György Pálfi