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, to 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. Yet, 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 Asynchronous Sound, The Diegesis, Cinema Space, Onscreen-Offscreen Choreography. The reassociation of images and sounds activates spectatorship. This is unique to audiovisual filmmaking.
Film captures a quality of experience closer to that of dreams, memory, the changing landscape of the mind. Perhaps this poetic expression reached it’s apotheosis before the dawn of the talkie. Perhaps it was sound that shattered the palace of dreams…
The cinema is a cocoon, isolated and out of reach from the encroaching world outside. The cinema is a focus space for 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 listening space; the optimal conditions for public ritual, site for our shared horizon of meaning.