FILM SOUND: Ideas, research and reflections on film, sound and cinema listening
[1.] Film Notes: The Cinema as Listening Space, Film as a 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|2.0|2025
Time is a measurement of change. Attention, the cache value of our time - our curiosity, our love, the faculty that joins us to the world. To be open, receptive, to really look and listen, is to entertain the possibility of change; that one might challenge, transcend, a narrow conception of self-other-world.
Film, a time-based audiovisual medium soliciting attention. The audience is invited to look, to listen, see and hear. Deep Listening is a practice of expanding our attention. Film - a container of time - cultivates the practice of deep, attentive listening.
Modern film technology captures a familiar sense of everyday reality, everything seems to be there. Words are heard when an actor opens their mouth; the sound of a door closing makes sense when someone leaves the room.
But film also moves past familiar sense experience. It permits the reassociation of images and sounds through an exploration of time and space. Time = montage. Space = onscreen/offscreen movement. Film captures a quality closer to the amorphous nature of dreams, memory, the landscape of the mind. The reassociation of images and sounds activates spectatorship and remains unique to audiovisual filmmaking.
Isolated from the distractions of the outside world, the cinema is a cocoon. A space designed to create an atmosphere of concentration and attentional focus. The cinema is a focus space for an immersive sensory experience. It gathers together the active participation of its audience in a unique state of “mass intimacy”- the optimal conditions for public performance, site for our shared horizon of meaning.