Extra Credit Opportunity: ThirdWork Symposium on Sound

On Saturday, I attended the 1:30 panel for Make Strange the Senses: Asynchronicity as Method and Argument.

While I wish I could have understood more about what was discussed, being an extreme novice in film making made it difficult to grasp what exactly the panelists were conveying in regards to asynchronicity and its impact on film, specifically those of nonfiction, and the audience.

At length, the panelists talked about what asynchronicity is, the challenge of identifying whether the sound is asynchronous or simply off screen, and what it offers to the image.

One of the things that stuck out to me the most was the notion- brought up by Asbjørn Tiller about the film Still Life with Ho Chi Minh- that sound can be a constant while it is the image that is asynchronous. Along with that, another interesting topic was one of the projects mentioned by panelists Asbjørn Tiller and Marit Kathryn Corneil.

Two films- one of which I believe is A Spell To Ward Off the Darkness- by Ben Russell and Ben Rivers were apparently filmed together, but asynchronous in sound. These films, which debuted one or two years apart from one another, contained footage from one film was accompanied by sound that belonged to footage in another. The example they showed us during the panel was a clip from one film of two people in the forest, with an unrecognizable sound in the background. They then showed us a clip from another film of a volcano, with synchronous volcano sounds, and revealed to us that the unrecognizable sound in the first clip was, in fact, the volcano.

Now, as interesting as that was, I am unsure as to how asynchronous sound like that is supposed to impact the film. What exactly was the intent behind putting that particular sound with that image? I have no idea.

After that panel, I feel more confused than before.

BLOG POST #3: Relationships Between Shots

The linear piece of media I chose to analyze is the music video for “Breezeblocks” by Alt-j. The editing work that was done on the video forces the audience to actively try to figure out what kind of story is being told.

The relationship between the sound and the images is not conventional. The lyrics are sung by a man, and the individual the singer addresses is referred to as a ‘she.’ The video immediately begins by showing the audience a woman, lying along the z axis of the image, presumably dead. This causes an association with the ‘she’ in the song to the female in the tub. Then, a man is shown from a slightly high angle, with his face covered (regret) and his wedding band on display. These two images, edited to be shown back to back, along with the first lines of the song make the viewer think that the man, out of his obsession for the woman, went too far and killed her.

Up until this point, the viewer is led to believe that this video is going forward. But then, we see water go back into the faucet and realize that the whole video is backwards! And from that point, the mind of the audience tries to continuously piece together the situation as new information is being displayed to them.

The song itself gives the false assumption that the woman is the victim, when she is actually the offender, while the video is edited to support the false assumption when played backwards. The woman’s face is seen more often than the man’s. His is only purposely focused on twice: when he is struggling with the woman for the breeze block, and when he crouches down to aid his wife. In the first image, we see his anger towards the woman, amplifying the idea that he is the aggressor. In the second, we see his surprise and worry, showing that he is actually not at all what we initially presumed.

The woman’s face, on the other hand, is focused on several times. We see the distress on her face as she runs down the hallway and the realization and hint of fear when she sees him with the breeze block. We see her getting up from the ground, but because it is played backwards, it feels as though she is kneeling to hide away. In this scene, where the top third is covered by the counter, the audience then sees her struggling. Because she has landed on her back, the light displays her face more clearly than the man’s face that is covered by his shadow.

One particular scene that makes the viewer more sympathetic towards her is after the man and woman are struggling for the breeze block. The view goes from the struggling figures along the 180 degree line to a low angle, over the shoulder shot of the man coming at the woman while she turns to get away.

Close ups shots of hands are used to emphasize the relationship between the three individuals in the video- of how there is a married couple and an intruder. The overall color of the video is dark, matching the mood of the situation in the video. In terms of shot length, it looks as though the scenes take audio cues from the music, and the cuts are seamless to allow more focus to be placed on the flow of events.

Project 2: Audio Portrait