FILM SOUND: Ideas, research and reflections on film, sound and cinema listening
[1.] Film Notes: The Cinema as Listening Space, Film as Sonic Medium | 2nd draft | 2022-2023
[2.] Film Notes: Additional film titles | 2023-2025
[3.] Film: Moving image collaborations and experiments | 2004-2025
[4.] Listening to Films | 2016-2020
I. 100 excerpts of film sound - edits 1931-2014 *
II. The Tarkovsky Suite - edits and collages
III. The Bergman Suite - edits and collages
IV. The Cyberpunk Suite - edits and collages
V. The Malaise of Modernity - edits and collages | Antonioni, Teshigahara, Welles and Film Noir
VI. The Phantasmic Ataraxic Cinematic - edits and collages
* Excerpts also presented on separate pages with film images, sound content description, credits and selected quotes:
1-10, 11-20, 21-30, 31-40, 41-50, 51-60, 61-70, 71-80, 81-90, 91-100
[5.] The Act of Listening Series: The act of listening performed and revealed as film image | images and text | 2017-2020
[6.] Encounters with Noise in the Dark: Personal reflections | images and text | 2016-2020
Film, Sound, Listening, Attention|2025
Time is a measurement of change. Attention, the cache value of our time, our curiosity, the faculty that joins us to the world. To be open and receptive - to really look and listen - is to examine the possibility of change. Change is to hint at something beyond a narrow conception of being.
Film is a time-based audiovisual medium soliciting attention. The audience is invited to look, to listen, see and hear. Deep Listening is a practice of expanded auditory attention. Film, a container of unfolding time, cultivates the practice of deep, attentive listening.
Modern film technology captures a familiar sense of everyday reality. It feels like it is all there. Film may also move beyond familiar sense experience.
Film permits the reassociation of images and sounds through a decoupling of time from space. Montage, Contrapuntal and Asynchronoud Sound, The Diegesis, Cinema Space, Onscreen-Offscreen Choreography. Film captures a quality closer to that of dreams, memory, the amorphous landscape of the mind. The reassociation of images and sounds activates spectatorship. It is unique to audiovisual filmmaking.
The cinema is a cocoon. It remains isolated, out of reach from the encroaching world outside. The cinema is a focus space for an immersive multi-sensory experience. It gathers together the active participation of its audience in a unique state of mass-intimacy. The temple. The church. The place of worship. The listening space. Modern cinema provides the optimal conditions for public ritual, site for our shared horizon of meaning.