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| 32 Sounds |
Every year there are more films about filmmaking, celebrating particular directors or stars or addressing the difficulty of bringing an original idea to life in an industry full of ruthless players – yet it’s vanishingly rare for any film to go behind the scenes and explore the craft of sound. This is where Sam Green’s new documentary, 32 Sounds, begins, but not where it ends. Providing context for the experience of cinematic sound takes it in all sorts of other interesting directions, and leads to musing on the fundamental nature of our relationship with sound as a sense, as well as the ways in which recording it has transformed our world.
Discussing the film with Sam, I note that I often feel that sound is an underappreciated area of the craft of filmmaking, with a huge amount to contribute.
“It is funny, because it's kind of a conundrum that film is such a visual medium,” he says. “Sound rides in the passenger seat. I got started on this through a previous movie I made about the Kronos Quartet. And that got me thinking a lot about listening and sound, and how people listen to movies. And that was really the seed of this. But the actual film started when I read a reference to Annea Lockwood. I read a reference to the fact that she had recorded rivers for more than 50 years. I was intrigued by that image. That that led me to look her up. I'd never heard of her and I just emailed her and said, ‘Can I talk to you?’ And we got talking, and everything came out of that, really. She’s such a great muse.
“I started off with this idea that I wanted to make something called 32 Sounds, that portrayed the sound of a film in bits and pieces, but as I put it together, it started to take on a life of its own and a significance of its own. I think that's how movies generally work, unless you have them all laid out, which I never do. You have a sense of something that is compelling, you don't quite understand why. And then over time, as you edit, it starts to emerge and it makes more sense to you, and the film starts to take shape.” He shrugs. “That's always been the way it worked for me.”
Did he begin with a clear sense of the sounds he wanted to include?
“There were sounds that I wanted to include that didn't fit,” he says, “and you have this funny thing where you put it in and the film would sometimes reject that sound. There was one that I really loved. It was this device called the mosquito, and it emits a very high pitched sound that teenagers and dogs can hear but people like us can't. It's a commercial product. They put it in the parking lots of seven elevens to keep teenagers away, and so I was going to get one of those and play it and see who who hears it. But after a while, the film starts to have a certain set of ideas and themes. And that was a fun one but it doesn't actually work with all the other sounds. The goal with this one was to make something that is more than the sum of its parts. The sounds make a larger poem about bigger ideas. And as fun as the mosquito is, it doesn't fit.”
It’s an interesting idea, I say, because it would be audible to some audience members and not others. The film is already complicated in the way that it communicates to viewers. Some parts of it will work best in a cinema with a good surround sound system whereas others will work best on headphones.
“I made a kind of sketch of this called Seven Sounds for Sundance the first year of the pandemic,” he says. “Everybody was at home, and that was really a great creative challenge because I wanted to make something that you wouldn't sit in front of your computer and watch. I was bored of watching things from my computer and I thought most other people were too, so for that we made something where you could start watching it on your phone, but then go outside and just listen to it. Sit outside and listen. And so that was a really interesting way of trying to create a new ‘audience’ relationship.
“I've always been interested in that kind of relationship. But it's different in a theatre. It's different when we do the live version of it, where I'm narrating, and it's different if you're alone with headphones. Trying to make something that works well in all those contexts is complicated. But with all of them, my hope is to scramble a little bit the normal way in which a person watches something or experiences something, because there's so many things out there. We're very used to episodic TV, which I’ve got nothing against. I mean, I like it too. But people watch in very lazy ways, very passive ways. And so the idea of like, ‘Just close your eyes,’ it's a very simple intervention. It doesn't ask a lot of people, but it kind of scrambles the normal way in which people experience something, or I hope it does.”
We talk about the parts of the film which explore the history of sound technology in cinema.
“That's a much larger issue,” he says. “It has only been 140 years or something that people actually could record anything. So our great great grandparents went their whole lives without ever hearing music that wasn't right in front of them, live. We are so in the sea of recording that we can't even imagine what it was like, or what it was like to experience that kind of stuff for the first time.”
It complements another aspect of the film, which explores the way that capturing sound gave people a sense of contact with loved ones who had died, and changed their relationship to the passing of time.
“Yeah. The film is about all these different sounds, but it's also about personally thinking about sound, and it centres on all these voicemail messages that I've saved for a long time. Since we got answering machines with little tapes, I would save them and I have over the years, and many people who I’ve loved who are gone, I have messages from them. And it's very odd to hear a person's voice. You know, it's one thing to see a person's photo, but if you hear a person's voice that you love who’s gone, it's real in a different way. The human voice carries so much with it.
“There's a physicist in the film who finds a tape that he made aged 11, that he wanted his older self to listen to in 30 years. And he sits and listens to it. I love that because the kid is 11-years-old bossing him around...then there's a scene with Annea Lockwood where she's looking at footage of herself from 60 years before. I said, ‘Does it seem like you were a different person?’ And she said ‘No, it's me.’ So the older versions of ourselves are still out there.”
Also, a little more conventionally, there’s a visit of a Foley studio where different sound effects are being created.
“Yeah. It does make you think about the sounds you're hearing going on in the Foley, in cinema in general, and where they come from. Anything that makes people think about listening is helpful, because it unmasks the processes. I've always loved Foley and been kind of intrigued by it because there's this thing about Foley in most movies, which is that they do Foley to replace the sound a lot of times because the real sound doesn't sound real to us. We imagine a different sound.
“There's all these great examples like, when a plane lands in a movie, you see that shot of the wheels. And you know, there's like that kind of sound of wheels hitting the runway.” He purses his lips and makes a blowing, squeaking noise. “And that doesn't exist. It doesn't make that sound. But we need to hear that now. We expect to. Or there's another thing where the sound of a handshake, like, there's no real sound of a handshake, but we need it in movies. I like that kind of thing. So much of sound happens in your mind.”
The way we relate to sound in our day to day lives has been shaped by cinema, we agree. I ask how he chose all the little sounds used in the film’s montage scenes.
“A lot of it is just like whimsy. Things that interest me, you know? Also, we come to this binaural microphone to record a spatial sense of sound, so I was trying to think of things that lend themselves to that. So like the hockey player, a person skating around the microphone and hitting the puck, and it shoots off to the side – that will work very well. It was fun to think of what would what would look good and sound good.”
There’s a fascinating look at Charles Babbage’s theory that all the sounds ever made – all the words ever spoken – are still floating around out there somehow and might potentially be retrieved.
“It's a great idea. A lovely, powerful idea. Marconi, the radio guy, towards the end of his life he became obsessed with the same idea – that all the sounds, that the sermon at the Temple Mount is still out there, if you could find the right kind of machine that could replay it.”
Early on, the film references Walter Murch and his ideas about how the sense of hearing develops in the womb.
“Sound is, according to him, the first sense,” Sam notes. “And it's often the last, because you know, when people are on their deathbed, a lot of times they can still hear. So it's interesting, it's very deep sense. I mean, all senses are deep, but we understand and think about and consider and talk about visual things much more, I think.”
I ask how closely he’s been involved in sound design in his previous films, and he laughs.
“Making this film made me realise that I knew almost nothing about sound as a filmmaker. And also that documentary is very rudimentary in terms of sound. I mean, cinema in general, it's interesting, because binaural sound doesn't really work with speakers very well but it does work with headphones. What that's meant is that gaming and VR are, in some senses, way ahead of film, and especially documentary film, in terms of sound technology, which I didn't know.
“I learned a lot about sound. Now we're doing this theatrical distribution, I sometimes laugh at myself, knowing all this stuff, but it's forced me to, and I mean, I'm happy because as you said at the beginning, sound is often overlooked as one of the elements of cinema. In some ways it's an equal power, and it works in a mysterious way. There's a sort of added power of that, which I'm happy to embrace with my movies and I’m sometimes surprised more people aren't doing.”
Sound is an area which is often overlooked in the marketing of home entertainment. is that starting to change?
“I think that's sort of happening. Headphones, obviously, have gotten way better. I think Apple is trying to do something with spatial sound and music. And there's ASMR, as a whole interesting universe. So it's definitely happening, but I wish it would happen faster.”
Now he’s moving on to a different kind of challenge.
“As if making a movie about sound wasn't hard enough – with no main character, no conflict, no, celebrities, you know, none of that – I'm doing something even harder. I'm making a documentary on trees.
“I've learned a lot about how to make something that doesn't have a main character. It's a lot harder, but I feel like there's a lot that movies about celebrities and movies with gripping narratives, so I'm personally a little bored with those. Well, not bored, but you know, I'm interested in things that are surprising, unique things I haven't seen before.”
