◡◶▿ No silence

The tell-tale heart, the tell-tale Nokia, and the tell-tale tale-teller. Plus: Slow Film deadline today 🗓️ | Summer sound letter #3

Films usually come packaged with their own soundtrack. Either as a recording (of talking, crying, footsteps, beat music, dogs barking etc.) or as guidelines for a live accompaniment. The audience connects the soundtrack (which is loose) to the image (which is anchored) without being directly instructed to do so.

But, if a film arrives with no soundtrack, it doesn’t mean that the movie is silent. It is a fact that most audiences, compelled by convention, will connect the incidental sounds of the screening room to the moving images and their glow. These incidental sounds include those that the audience brings with them.

As such, there has never been a silent film. Only filmmakers who’ve failed to harness the free labour of the audience and the sounds that swirl around them. There’s always something. An orchestra, a couple, a coat, the projector, a train, the mind’s involuntary parps and whooshes. Attaching themselves to the images or framing them as something quite apart.

Japanese silent-era cinema had the convention of the benshi: a narrator standing right there in the room with you! Which of his sounds should you place in the film? His nervous system in operation? His blood in circulation?

Today is the final deadline for the new-look Slow Film Festival, which moves to East London for its sixth edition this October. You already know how I feel about this festival. (I feel good.) Submit here. Stand at ease - GC.

📹 Unfound Peoples Videotechnic | Cloud-based filmmaking thought. ☁️

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