The documentary 32 Sounds unfolds like a podcast. The image is mostly incidental to director Sam Green, to the point where the film has an interactive portion where he asks the viewer to close their eyes. Green also provides narration, guiding his audience through the strange possibilities and properties of sound that we mostly forget, sort of like something you might hear on podcasts like This American Life or Radiolab. But the constraints of a film are sneakily important to the documentary, a kind of intentionality that obliterates the passive listening that is common to music and podcasts nowadays. A little too disjointed for its own good, Green’s film nonetheless creates a kind of meditative space that is more than unusual. It is unique.
Together with his collaborator JD Sampson, a musician best known for their work in the groups Le Tigre and MEN, Green begins by addressing the audience. They say the best way to experience the film is with a theatrical surround sound system. This approach is direct and conversational, rather than being omnipotent or authoritative, a gambit that helps us accept the loose structure. Green begins us on a tour of intriguing sounds, with a mix of obvious choices and others that are less conventional, as a way to show its power over our feelings and memory. You can probably guess the obvious stuff: there is archival footage John Cage and several other musicians performing “4’33”– which unfolds in silence, in case you forgot – and there are moments where we simply listen to ordinary sounds like birds chirping with the kind of attention we reserve for a classical music concert. No matter the type of sound, Green uses context of theatrical presentation to sharpen the viewer’s intentionality while listening.
Though the introduction to the film suggests seeing it in surround sound, at one point Green says there are parts of the film that can only be properly understood with headphones. This is because he showcases the possibility of binaural sound recording, which allows us to perceive distance and direction with our hearing. Compared to a typical theatrical sound system, often designed to pulverize the audience with loudness, the binaural sequences are a true highlight. Green films a scientist who developed an unusual recording apparatus – it looks like a statuesque human head, with speakers around its ears – that showcases our aural sensitivity with a simple aid like a book of matches. Provided you watch the film with speakers, you can hear the matches ignite “close” to you, then hear the book shaking from behind you, or farther away. It is an amusing trick, the kind with limited use in most theatrical exhibition, yet it falls into Green’s larger project of getting us to use our sense in unusual ways.
The amusing part of 32 Sounds is its greatest strength, and its greatest weakness. There is novelty in a director asking his audiences to close their eyes, or dance along with the music that plays over the soundtrack. Sometimes the amusement can be melancholy, like when sound warps our sense of memory, as it must when we think about our loved ones (Green returns to tapes of old voicemails he kept from departed relatives). Each vignette achieves its desired emotional effect, but not even Green is clear about what they build toward. This documentary employs a kitchen-sink of approach, which is to say Green trusts you will care about at least one sound the same way he cares about all of them. There is value in having our ordinary experiences questioned, or upended, the way they are in this film. A greater value, one that eludes Green, would be to create something more cohesive around a goal beyond occasional reaction of, “huh, that’s interesting.”
Photo courtesy of Abramorama
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