There’s one question that filmmaker Sam Green hates being asked. What is his favourite sound? Luckily his answer is rather lyrical, and chimes (for want of a better phrase) with the tastes and practices of one of his documentary’s core protagonists, the 84-year-old avant-garde composer Annea Lockwood. A preoccupation of hers is to listen to rivers. It is what first attracted the filmmaker to her, because it is the sound of rivers that Green loves most.
We see a lot of Annea in Green’s wonderfully eccentric 32 Sounds, such as footage of her 1968 ‘Piano Burning’ happening, characterised by the sonically satisfying crackling of wood and snapping of piano wire, and she takes on something of guru status within the film.
That said, Green’s original intentions for 32 Sounds were altogether different.
“I started off wanting to make a very sort of cold movie about the British Library sound archive, which is wonderful,” he tells Business Doc Europe. “I’d read about it, it just tickled me. The idea of all these sounds, and what I wanted to do is just have shots from the archive with the different sounds. And it would be, in a way, almost like a structuralist James Benning type of film. But I quickly realized that there wasn’t enough visually. I mean, you could make a 15-minute film like that, but you couldn’t make a 90-minute film.”
So the brief was expanded and the film became altogether more multifaceted and jam-packed with detail on all things sonic. It also became interactive (but make sure you’re wearing headphones if you are watching at home) and shot through with myriad magical examples of how sound gets you as much in the gut as in the mind (or in the ear), and in the process elevates our very state of being.
Director Green also offers up some delicious oddities and reflections on the subject. Back in what was formerly a Newtonian world, for example, it was postulated that every sound ever made was still out there in the ether, waving and rippling, albeit with diminishing force, the air rendered into one great library of quiet noise. But then in the 1930s, along came quantum physics, which determined that all sounds hitherto were destined to have a limited life span.
In Japan, the film goes on to tell us, the onomatopoeic word shin shin describes the sound of snow falling silently on snow, hence the sound of no sound.
A Foley artist stresses how her practice, her art, “can elevate truth to poetry.” Meanwhile Randy Thom, Director of Sound Design at Skywalker Sound, likens sound to “a second class citizen in our consciousness” when assessed beside visual stimuli, but one with “a secret weapon of stealth.”
We also see how subjects of documentaries react on camera when asked to be quiet so the sound recordist can measure the room tone. It is a fascinating extended moment in which folk can do little other than reflect on, or rejoice in, the silent noise around them.
A particularly poignant moment in the film is when we hear the tape that 11-year old Edgar Choueiri made for his future self, now a world-renowned plasma physicist, to play over half a decade later.
“I think making a movie about any sort of idea has its own unique challenge,” Green articulates the difficulties in making a film about an abstract concept such as sound, one without physical properties. “There’s no protagonist, there’s no conflict or chronology, all the things you use to help structure a film, which is a challenge. If you made a film about light, it would be the same thing. At some point I thought, why doesn’t anybody make a move about time? It’s such a great topic that we all swim in all the time, and it’s sort of the same thing. Where, how would you do it? I think the one difference between a movie about light and a movie about sound is that sound affects us in very profound, slightly mysterious and often deep ways that I think light doesn’t necessarily. I mean, light can be so many things, it’s dazzling. Our world is light in a way, but it doesn’t have that sort of main line to your heart and your emotions and your memories the way sound does.”
In the documentary, the audience is invited at times to get up and dance or to close their eyes so as to experience better the sonic effects. At what point did Green decide to make the film interactive? “Well, that sort of became organic too. I mean, I had really struggled about how to get people to listen in the context of cinema, to really use their ears. Somebody said this to me, and I think it’s true that, and it’s an obvious idea, but you can only really focus on one sense at a time. If you’re really looking, you’re not super engaged with your ears, and if you’re really listening, it’s hard to pay attention with your eyes. And so in the context of cinema where you’re almost always dazzled with your eyes, how do you get people to really listen? And so I just sort of had that idea of asking people to close their eyes, which is sort of funny in the context of film where you would never want people not to be watching your film. But here it sort of made sense.”
The mysterious properties of sound also inspire and affect those who work with it, Green suggests. Temperamentally, sound personnel are “less alpha, and gentle, kind, interesting people. But there’s also something I always really love, which is people who are great at a craft. I really appreciate that.” One such example is sound designer Mark Mangini who worked on 32 Sounds in-between Dune (2022, for which he won an Oscar) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayh (2023).
“He’s really adventurous in what he works on, and he was just so wise about sound and about his craft. He’s like a master craftsperson and for me, it’s such a pleasure. As for artists and directors, a lot of it is like flimflam and smoke and mirrors and attitude, and there’s a lot of that. But when you’re a great sound designer, it’s pretty much just your love of sound and your mastery of the craft, that’s what it’s about.”
Green reflects on his film’s wide appeal to audiences, whether on screen or in a series of live performances with musician and collaborator JD Sampson. “You make something and you don’t know what it is until you start showing it, and then you learn what you’ve made by people’s reactions. And I’ve been very surprised.”
“I also think that we all went through this enormously traumatic and dramatic thing a couple of years ago, Covid, three years of that, and we just are done with it. We said it’s over and kept going, everybody, and we don’t think about it anymore. Nothing. There were no monuments to all the people who died. Nothing. [But] I think that we all are still carrying around a lot of feelings from that, feelings that we probably don’t really express much or have words for.”
“And I think in some way, I’m not sure if this is true, but I have wondered this in some ways, the film is an opportunity for some of that to come out,” Green continues. “I remember I read this great novel ‘The Tin Drum’, a just fantastic novel. And in it, and this is something that has always stuck with me, it was after the war, Berlin was devastated and there was a bar that opened where people would sit at tables and every table would have a cutting board with raw onions on it. People would chop onions and cry just so that they could cry. And I was always struck by that image. I don’t want to be too grandiose about it, but I do think maybe there’s something of that, that it’s an opportunity for feelings to come out in a way that surprises people.”
