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
[7.] Booms, Bells and Distant Voice: The Ambiguity of Sound - Tarkovsky and Beyond | NFTS / 2014
Film, Time, Listening |2026 v2.0
Time; 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
- that what hints beyond a narrow conception of being.
Film; a time-based audiovisual medium soliciting attention
The audience is invited to look, to listen, to see and hear.
Deep Listening; a practice of expanded auditory attention
Film; a container of unfolding time, cultivating the practice of deep, attentive listening.
Modern film technology captures a familiar sense of everyday reality - everything feels like it is all there
Yet film also ventures beyond familiar, grounded sense experience.
Film; the reassociation of what we see and hear through a decoupling of time from space.
Montage, Contrapuntal and Asynchronous Sound, The Diegesis, Cinema Space, Onscreen-Offscreen Choreography.
The re-organising of images and sounds activates spectatorship
- this is unique to audiovisual filmmaking.
Film; revealing present, unfolding, uninterrupted temporal experience
- something also closer to the elastic, transient quality of dreams, memory and the changing landscape of the mind.
Let us imagine the film experience before the dawn of the talkie
Did sound shatter the palace of dreams?
The cinema; cocoon, isolated and out of reach from encroaching world outside.
Focus space; an immersive multi-sensory experience.
Gathering together the active participation of its audience in a unique state of mass-intimacy.
The rock, the hill, the temple, the church, the cinema, all as embodied listening space.
The burning campfire
Listening and Looking,
Optimal conditions for collective ritual
Site for our shared horizon of meaning.