Destructural Sound

An entry in the Glossary project

Perhaps inspired by the way a flying trapezist orients himself in the 3-dimensional space of the big top using the balancing mechanisms of his semi-circular canals, it was Nanneman’s belief that movie audiences could be guided through the hidden substructures of a movie by their ears, although in this case through the use of structural sound mapping* rather than endolymphatic stimulation. With every last component of a Redestructivish film chosen from the finite (if massive) selection listed in the Catalogue, it was possible to assign each component (be it a character, a costume, a feeling or whatever) a more or less noticeable sound identity quite aside from any specific functional sound it might be associated with on a narrative level. Thus, an audience member should be able to position himself in relation to a Redestructivish movie’s invisible moral or sartorial or emotional framework at any point during a screening, by triangulating the sound identities of each activated component. It was Nanneman’s claim that, much like the trapezist (or man on the street) whose sense of balance is essentially an automatic process (with conscious attention demanded by the tricky bits), the audience would rarely have to work at recognising these sonically-highlighted substructures, although Hanni suggested that was a slightly optimistic view of how the human mind works.

Nanneman coined the term ‘Destructural Sound’ to refer to a recurring technical fault within this system whereby sounds intended to be ‘structural’ would leak between the materials of a film’s architecture, warping or even demolishing that movie’s substructures even as it unfolded.

For the most part, when this inexplicable glitch occurred, sound identities would jump between components, even between those components that did not feature together in the same scenes; some would become completely detached from their intended components and float freely through a movie without becoming attached to other components; still other sound identities would spontaneously begin to mimic adjacent components creating meshes of unintended meaning, exposing oversimplified versions of unintended undercurrents to anyone who was listening carefully. Hanni reassured Nanneman that such audience members would be few and far between, and that to the casual viewer of these early test movies the Destructural Sound - if noticed at all - would probably be attributed to faulty speakers. Still, Nanneman could only hear these distortions as structural damage and, when a remedy was not forthcoming, he instead opted to recast the defect in a positive light.

Nanneman’s suggestion that a filmmaker using the Catalogue to create a Redestructivish movie might "encourage" the phenomenon of Destructural Sound merely by the (non)-act of not correcting it when it occurred might seem disingenuous. Rather than taking the blame, wasn’t Nanneman attempting to take credit, as conceiver and craftsman, for what was essentially a major fault in the Redestructivish system? Was not his capitalisation of the very term Destructural Sound the equivalent of a car manufacturer trademarking the phrase "break down"?

In fact, the period that Nanneman spent developing sounds and sound systems for the Catalogue was, for him, a deeply troubling time, in which he lost faith in himself as a facilitator and an engineer. He had designed himself into a corner, considered himself professionally stranded and, despite his stated goal of facilitating films that would reassure the nation’s unsettled populace, he perhaps saw in the phenomenon of Destructural Sound an apt and personally comforting structural/aesthetic analogy for his own condition - and by extension a valid artistic mechanism. An audience member trying too hard to navigate the hidden substructures of a Redestructivish movie could now become literally ‘lost’ in it.

Of course, Nanneman eventually worked his way through his sound issues, variously fixing or explaining away or forgetting about the Catalogue’s audio shortcomings, the plain passing of time allowing him to look back on that period as what he might characteristically have called a "forest/trees" situation. All the same, once in the clear Nanneman never returned to confront the "forest" of sound in which he had become so lost: the flaws and their euphemistic labels remained integral to the Redestructivish package. The turmoil that Destructural Sound would have made on the cinema sound system repairs industry had the Catalogue ever progressed beyond the test stage can only be imagined.

*(not to be confused with geographic sound mapping in the films of Francis Dove, whose ever diminishing budgets saw an increasing reliance on sets built from light, fog and upturned boxes and who therefore oriented audiences in his characters’ surroundings through the use of consistent and aggressive soundscaping)

See also: Foley Bleed

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Shapes

An entry in the Glossary project

Nanneman’s Catalogue removed the trial of working with actors from the filmmaking process by creating the possibility of generating endless, digitally powered variations on just two pre-recorded performances (those of he and his second wife, Hanni). For a journeyman director like Francis Dove, forced to continue working with real actors and often with little say in the casting process, Nanneman’s reductive approach was understandably appealing:

"Could we postulate that, for those of us who cannot or will not utilise Nanneman's toolkit, there remain two possible approaches to putting an actor on the screen?" asked Dove, in his trade journal column. "The first is ‘acting for the screen’, in which the actor is the screen’s "goon", that is to say they act for and in total deference to the screen. The second, more tiresome method is ‘a screen for the actor’, in which the screen becomes a canvas over which the actor may freely ejaculate his or her deepest needs and instincts safe in the knowledge that none will be wasted, all will be caught and exhibited via the familiar media.

"In the instance of acting for the screen, only a contorted sense of human biophysics is directly referenced: the screen is a two dimensional light show rather than a stage play, and instructions or ‘shapes’ (fine-tuned and categorised through hundreds of hours of laboratory work) are imparted to the actor to carry out without question. (It is a given that such direction is most effective when conveyed with a firmness that borders on cruelty).

"By acknowledging the volition of the players, the screen for the actor method allows a complex but aesthetically arbitrary, exploration of idiocy (the fundamental subject matter of any human-oriented drama). Each actor becomes yet another inlet in the convoluted plumbing of an idea from inspiration to finished screen efflux.

"Thus before embarking on a new project, I always ask myself: can I afford to gamble on the idiocy of my cast? If they unexpectedly turn out perceptive actor-oriented performances of grace and dignity, will I have the resources to fix (break) them? If the answer is No, I get out my big book of shapes.

"Finally, it might be divulged here that actor and screen are both absolutely the goons of sound: this is one of the great secrets of cinema, and sound likes it that way."

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Screams

An entry in the Glossary project

As a former trapezist who had swung and dangled voicelessly over the abyss night after night and year after year to the gasps and cheers of audiences, Nanneman really had no idea what a scream was for, or even whether anyone actually did scream outside of the movies. Understanding, however, that the "woman's scream" was an essential part of the filmmaker's toolbox, he set Hanni the task of compiling a library of "one or two dozen" recorded screams in a variety of styles and meanings to be used by the Catalogue's computer-generated characters in appropriate situations.

It seems that Hanni already had a source in mind for the recordings: Serafina Kustra, a "scream musician" of sorts, a folk hero in a binary age whose live performances people would travel from far away to witness. Kustra had previously achieved mild fame fronting a band whose entire repertoire had consisted of songs built around repetition of the band's name and lyrics extolling the group's merits in very general terms: perhaps her messianic appeal as a solo artist can be attributed to the simplification and emotional inversion of this approach. Hanni, idolizing Kustra for reasons she never publicly articulated, offered the vocalist a not inconsiderable sum from the Catalogue project's unofficial city council fund, rationalising the gesture to Nanneman by suggesting he himself could provide the male screams at a cut rate. It is unclear why Nanneman failed to nip this plan in the bud given the expense and his desire to distance himself from the scream-cataloguing process, but perhaps he sensed that the issue was important to Hanni.

(Nanneman was not the only filmmaker of the time to be squeamish about vociferation. Jobbing director Francis Dove, who would generally work with scripts imposed on him by producers, kept a list of alternative non-linguistic utterances with which to replace a scripted scream on set. Dove acknowledged that a written scream is usually structurally important, with its removal potentially undermining a moment of climax or catharsis. However, he discovered that the straight replacement of such a scream with (for example) a laugh, a sigh, a raspberry or snort, would enable him to maintain the structure of the written scene while destabilizing its underlying assumptions. If, having filmed such a substitution, he found that a scene no longer worked, it was not uncommon for Dove to edit the vociferation and even the actress out of the entire scene, leaving murderers stabbing at thin air, rabid beasts howling at dumb walls and in one case the spontaneous materialisation of a pink, wet newborn on the back seat of a moving taxi.)

In the event, Serafina Kustra turned down the job of providing the Catalogue's screams, refuting in no uncertain terms the idea that her vocal style had anything to do with screaming, and taking deep offence at the suggestion that a selection of her most intimate and heartfelt vocal performances might be defined, categorized and donated to computer-generated movie characters. Respecting this position, Hanni instead recorded and labelled 144 wildly varying screams of her own, and finally cajoled Nanneman into providing one single scream for men, although it was recommended in the small print that the latter never be used.

See also: Whoops; Yells

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Dissolutionary Cinematograph

An entry in the Glossary project

A somewhat teleological contraption utilising a highly reactive film stock concocted by Nanneman while he waited for the Council to redeploy him following the crossing patrol debacle. The frames of a film are lined up face to face in a dissolutionary cinematograph, rather than end to end. The first thing the audience sees projected is a complete picture: the image simplifies as the frames disintegrate sequentially on contact with air, often telling a story in reverse. Movement, whatever the narrative trajectory, becomes synonymous with decay. In the cleverest compositions, visual elements from the final frames show through the preceding frames, playing different parts throughout as they are juxtaposed with shorter-lived visual matter, before themselves being fully revealed and dissolving.

Synchronising any meaningful sound with such films proved impossible; however, Nanneman mentions in the Catalogue how he encouraged Hanni (with whom he was not yet romantically involved) to incorporate the ambient sounds of the kitchen and the street beyond into her appreciation of each unique screening, and paraphrases her response that this approach to soundtrack "made a crushing sort of sense". They would be married before the year was out. He did not pursue the project after he was reassigned to the Town Hall; he did not save any of his dissolving films for posterity; it has never been comprehensively proven whether or not Nanneman’s invention was ‘intentional’ or the fluke result of a period of intensive pottering.

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Character Type

An entry in the Glossary project

Nanneman was pressured, during a washroom encounter with his line manager, to keep to the latter's list of "16 character types (17 for an art-house film)" when designing the character-generating feature of his filmmaking kit. So as not to jeopardise the continued asssembly of the Catalogue - which had already been vetoed from above and which his line manager, having stumbled upon Nanneman's misuse of city council lab space by mistake, was by turns tolerating and interfering with - Nanneman ostensibly integrated his superior's list, but reduced each of the 16 broad 'types' to its key trait and generated 65,536 new character types by exploiting every possible combination of those qualities. (He excluded the arty 17th type for obvious reasons). The psychological complexity of these new redestructivish archetypes meant that Nanneman was able to create distinct imprints of every one of them using just two actors: himself and his second wife*. Every time one of these intricately designed algorithms was given a new name, wardrobe, haircut and surroundings he or she became a unique character (excepting the improbable eventuality of another filmmaker happening to choose the same type, name and look and putting this ‘new’ character into the same situation).

It is not known which 16 traits Nanneman divined from his line manager's original types, but we do know that he excluded any 'opposites' which might have cancelled each other out. Instead, Nanneman assumed that certain traits - e.g. faith - are an a priori human characteristic so included only their opposite - e.g. incredulity - amongst the 16 potential attributes: if a character lacked any one of the 16 'nurtured' traits he was assumed to have its opposite through nature. Whilst Nanneman acknowledged that such opposites don't always exist in pure dichotomy but on a sliding scale, he considered such nuances to be uncommon and irrelevant to the cinematic representation of human nature, certainly in a time when audiences needed reassurance, not speculation. In the circus and in the civil service, it had tended to be Nanneman's experience that people were one thing or another, and any apparent gradation in between usually boiled down to a case of deception or illness. Hanni, charged with finding "8 good rules" with which to shape the Nannemans' performanced blueprints of the thousands of archetypes Volodymyr had created, briefly looked into the old social networking websites, and discovered that everything Nanneman had suggested about human nature was more or less true. However, in response to the publication of Francis Dove's misanthropic Undepth In Real People And Those Who Believe They’re Real, Nanneman relented, creating a set of digital faders for the adjustment of the archetypes' character trait level-settings, allowing access to the middle ground between opposing traits. The knobs on the interface were all the same deliberately designed "stubborn" to discourage their use.

On discovering the zealous manner in which his underling had misinterpreted his original instructions, Nanneman’s line manager is said to have remarked that, the Nannemans having between them taken the time to create 65,536 characters, perhaps the unremittingly earnest Volodymyr should, from then on, himself be referred to as "Character Zero".

*(we know from his tattoos that she was called Hanni)

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Colour Hunt

An entry in the Glossary project
As a young trapezist, not only was Nanneman's training restricted to the technical matters of physical fitness, aerialist technique and rope drill, but even his leisure time was policed against his pursuing any interest in the frills of his trade: music, costume, colour. Naturally, being forbidden from involving himself in what his superiors termed the "realm of the frivolous" only made those glimpses he caught of it more exotic, more unsettling - and more dangerous: music came to hold secret, incendiary meanings, and the unpredictable modulation of shirt colour in the audience, from performance to performance and even moment to moment, was fully capable of disorienting him as he swung, should he ever have let his concentration lapse (that he never dropped might be considered a fluke of disposition).

Years later, then, when he began to compile his standardized filmmaking kit, he had at least two good reasons for creating a reductive colour system - specifically, categorized palettes of up to 256 colours with the facility to utilise only one such set per individual movie: firstly, that the complexity of the colour aspect of his filmmaking system should not exceed his own limited understanding of that domain; and secondly, that it was his goal to facilitate the making of "reassuring" films, and only by control, by unity of colour, could he preclude the unbalancing effect he assumed that audiences had continued to suffer across what he considered to be the largely undisciplined history of the colour movie.

Perhaps it is this perceived autonomy of colour, then, its wildness-in-need-of-taming, that inspired Nanneman to term his city-wide colour sampling expeditions "Colour Hunts". Certainly there is evidence that these spontaneous adventures tended to be embarked upon during periods of professional stress and frustration - that the sheer thrill of unearthing and capturing a feral hue was accompanied by a sense of regained control proportionate to the borderline chromatophobia of Nanneman's aerialist youth. A comment scribbled on the back of the only known photograph (now lost) of such a hunt even suggests that the catharsis and primal satisfaction ("flush!") that came with the successful capture of a desired hue was entirely justified even if that hue was not in motion: whilst capturing a moving colour might seem the greater sport, the hunter himself is always in motion (in an ocular sense at the very least) and, in an uncontrolled environment, the movement of light provides an irregular and unpredictable ("fiendish") dynamic camouflage for a static ("cowering") hue. No colour comes cheap.

Although he did take others on the hunts (including Hanni, and the occasional jobseeker who wandered into the lab having taken the wrong direction on their way to the Town Hall's temporary JSA bureau), it was Nanneman who bagged the great majority of the 16,384 colours that eventually formed the full redestructivish palette. It is not known whether his decision to name and provide full back-stories for each shade was motivated by a desire to honour his fallen quarry or was rooted in aesthetic concerns. Neither is it known whether his decision to outsource most of this written work to others is an example of his personal predilection (through conditioning?) for practical work or an unwillingness to stare any longer than was absolutely necessary into the soul of any individual colour.

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Temporary Musical Lexicon no.1

An entry in the Glossary project

Over the course of one working day, Nanneman showed a movie scene to eight city council colleagues (Respondents A-H) in turn, asking each of them what meaning they thought the accompanying musical soundtrack was intended to convey. The eight answered respectively:

A. Apprehension
B. The secret presence of a third character (possibly an antagonist) within the scene
C. Resentment
D. Hunger
E. That one or both of the (visible) characters has an unspoken crush on the other
F. Some kind of alert regarding the main character’s bank account
G. Boredom
H. Sleepiness

The scene and its score had been identical for each viewer.

This was the first of a series of experiments designed by Nanneman to prove to his colleagues that the film score is, in its most familiar form, obscene: undisciplined, insular, a casual insult from the composer to the other technical departments of the conventional film set.

As music has no meaning outside of itself - is merely abstract sound selected or generated and organised according to taste - Nanneman postulated that to translate it into something meaningful for the purposes of a film score would require the invention and imposition of an internally consistent musical lexicon. Thus, for test purposes he invented a language of 1024 musical sounds with arbitrarily chosen but specific meanings, which could be combined polyphonically to either express that which isn’t otherwise manifest in a given scene or to reinforce that which is. He re-scored the sample scene from this new palette, and played it again to his test group. This time, the eight guinea pigs respectively understood the music as intended to evoke the following:

A. Terror
B. The secret presence of a third character (definitely an antagonist) within the scene
C. Resignation
D. Nausea
E. Sexual chemistry
F. The main character is ruined and will find out shortly in humiliating circumstances
G. Resentment
H. Sleepiness

For Nanneman, although the results lacked the consistency he sought, the fact that the respondents’ reactions had moved in broadly the same direction was encouraging. He speculated that for the consistency of his musical lexicon to take full effect, the test group would have to sit through several examples of its use so as to be able to infer meanings through context and repetition, as we do with any language: to hear a single theme in isolation means nothing by itself. Unfortunately, it appears that middle-management had by now grown wise to Nanneman’s misuse of his colleagues’ time, as several of the latter declared themselves unavailable for the next round of tests. In order to sustain the legitimacy of the experiment, he wrote up detailed character profiles of the absentees and asked Hanni to step in for them and answer as she believed they would. This time, the test scene was, for each respondent, preceded by an hour of preliminary scenes, each scored from Nanneman’s 1024-sound musical idiolect in order to familiarise them with its terms. Unfortunately, it is not known how many or which of the original eight guinea pigs Hanni stood in for. The meanings inferred were as follows:

A. Perplexity
B. The secret presence of a third character (possibly a gangster, and even if not that would be a good idea) within the scene
C. Perplexity
D. Perplexity
E. Erotic love
F. Perplexity
G. Sleepiness
H. Perplexity

These results represented a stunning vindication for Nanneman, and if the meaning his score was intended to convey could not yet be universally understood, he considered a degree of ambiguity to be forgivable - otherwise one might as well print the meaning of a score across the screen in plain letters. Discarding Temporary Musical Lexicon no.1, Nanneman now began work on a variety of automated composing systems for creating music of integrity, anchored scientifically to a movie’s fundamental qualities, internally consistent, and no longer obsessed with telling its own senseless story.

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Implicit, The

An entry in the Glossary project

In its redestructivish sense, the Implicit is the inverse of Visual Matter or, to put it another way, the essence that fills the holes in the mise-en-scene.

Nanneman stated that although the Implicit was intangible and existed only as an unambiguous natural force that would come into being between any two or more of his components once activated, there would still be a small fee applicable for its use. Hanni took to referring to this fee as a "subtext tax", although Nanneman discouraged her use of this term as it just confused things. The Implicit was an aesthetic side-effect which, whilst unavoidable, could hardly be considered vital to any movie, while the subtext was an essential structural tool which Nanneman suggested had been, since the birth of cinema, "screenwriting’s dark little secret".

For Francis Dove, Nanneman's idea of the Implicit was too weighted and specific. The gaps between screen presences were "less, even, than essence". While visual matter could be used to contextualise (not define) the nothingness that it framed, that was not the same as making this nothingness something itself. From this perspective, Dove's use of ostentatiously artificial sets, props and performances as a moving architecture of absence can be considered an acknowledgement of the futility of artistic pursuit against the dumb mystery of the universe. His contemporaries alternately labelled Dove’s work as "clunkyist" or "nothingist" depending on the part of the screen to which they were referring: he might more accurately have been described as a nothingist wrapped up in a clunkyist (as a filmmaker) or vice versa (in his day-to-day life).

Dove’s creative partner Harley Byrne, who had enormous respect for Nanneman as a thinker (but not as a man), countered that "just because the unknowable isn’t defined, doesn’t mean we’re unsure what it is," though it is possible that Dove wasn’t listening.

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Contract

An entry in the Glossary project

Nanneman issued Hanni and himself "contracts" for the creation of each redestructivish component: these contracts might otherwise be described as briefs, designs or scripts, but Nanneman’s preferred term (apparently arrived at without much in the way of forethought) indicates his ongoing need for discipline, and quite possibly an unconscious desire to add a sense of legitimacy to the pursuance of a project which had, after lengthy discussions both formal and otherwise, been vetoed by his superiors at the city council, and which Hanni and he were pressing ahead with anyway using city resources and apparently in a spirit of blinkered ignorance rather than insurrectionary defiance.

These contracts ran into the tens and possibly hundreds of thousands, ranging from single-word exhortations to individual sentences, statements and questions, scientific diagrams, abstract doodles, 3D structures made from paper clips and/or plasticine and often posed as questions, excerpts, cuttings, recorded conversations (with or without Hanni), knowing looks, mutual assumptions, the physical manipulation of Hanni’s and/or his own body, but - strangely - no collage, and each in the tone of absolute seriousness that characterized at least the public face of the Nannemans’ marriage.

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Establishing shot

An entry in the Glossary project

Not to be confused with their more integrative Backgrounds, the Nannemans’ establishing shots comprised a portfolio of static, un-modifiable exterior shots designed to be slotted into an edit in order to broadcast the fact of the subsequent scene’s location to the audience.

Whilst creating a test film from an early version of the Catalogue, Hanni apparently became confused over the concept of the establishing shot and ended up using the same one for every location. She was, some have speculated, so used to seeing the raw materials of the interior scenes laying around her husband’s lab in the Town Hall that, when it came to signposting the site of each interior with an exterior shot, she was unable to imagine any more suitable frontage than that of the city council headquarters itself – whether the interior that followed was that of a house or school or sports arena. More generous commentators have claimed that Hanni was in fact trying to make a profound phenomenological point: we never stray from the base of our own perception so place is just a state of mind.

The test film was unpopular among Nanneman’s colleagues, although whether this was an academic response to Hanni’s misuse of form or a visceral reaction to the unsettling viewing experience is unclear. Such was the provocative nature of Hanni’s film that several unnamed civil servants banded together one evening after drinks to create a sarcastic reply-film on a finance undersecretary’s mobile phone. Hanni’s contentious method was inverted so that, in the reply-film, a different establishing shot was videoed for each of several consecutive scenes manifestly set in the same interior location as each other. Thus a recurring argument in a fictitious if rather familiar office setting was variously introduced by images of a burger bar, a toll booth, a dog kennel, a hunting cabin, a river bed, a mountain range, deep space etc. The move backfired as the finished video, in its inadvertently emotive juxtaposition of the absurdity of modern man’s Sisyphean struggle and the diverse enormity of a universe in which we may be considered little more than mites with carpentry skills, may have genuinely countered Hanni’s solipsistic statement (if that’s what it was) but offered no less depressing an alternative. Whether Hanni ever saw this video riposte is not known, as the undersecretary subsequently took a six month sabbatical and, upon his return, was seen to have replaced his mobile phone.

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Backgrounds

An entry in the Glossary project

As an idealistic young civil servant, years before the inception of the Catalogue project, Nanneman’s efforts to understand the city of Manchester were frequently outrun by his desire to influence and improve it. Nanneman’s idea for an upturned and sunken city, a metropolis in which the windows of the buildings would lay on the earth’s surface and simultaneously reflect and take energy from the sun, and into the 'back' of which - towards the earth’s core - we would hurry in our harnessed boots in times of climatic or environmental distress, and the right-angled window-roofs of which would form, as we lay upright to sleep, a nocturnal study area for hairdressers and statisticians, may well have been inspired by the bizarre perspectives he experienced during al fresco trapeze sessions. Critics have scoffed that Nanneman would have considered himself, in such a world, a kind of perpendicular god. But such a poke at Nanneman’s architectural earnestness overlooks the importance of his early cityscape sketches to our understanding of Nanneman the man, and to his later work on the Catalogue. Working along the corridor from Manchester’s cliquish city planning department, Nanneman must have known even as he drew that his basement city would never be built: that it would exist only, but not merely, as an imaginary city, perhaps to be wandered by those trapped meanwhile in the penthouses of his own memory and who were deprived, like the sideways city, of physical manifestation. However, the city’s flatness, its submersion, the topsy-turvy topography itself drawn from the dizzying isolation of thousands of hours of trapeze work, would later be transformed into the flat worlds of his redestructivish cinema vision - in the demotion of the third dimension, in the essential separateness of parallel planes, in the partial re-angling of obsolete artefacts to serve new purposes, and in the overwhelming redestructivish tendency to turn in on itself: Nanneman’s city was, at heart, an impulse to release a fleet of steel- and glass-churning ploughs across the cityscapes that he’d always found emotionally inhospitable, and neaten up whatever remained.

It was perhaps in deference to his early urbanist ambitions that Nanneman did not later transform this - his most ambitious - cityscape blueprint into a useable redestructivish Background, instead appending digital fascias to Hanni’s comprehensive videography of Manchester’s outer surfaces, the nature of which can only now be appreciated through the surviving labels - City With Swellings, Tropical Metropolis, Anonymous City, Wooden Town, and so on. Or perhaps the superficiality of these urban visions, in contrast to the complex, warped optimism of his early sketches, reflected Nanneman’s realisation that it would take a force greater than the will of a provincial civil servant to realign the character of a city whose flesh, no matter how smartly swathed in the attire of a communication age it played no small part in creating, remained stubbornly ingrained with the soot of industrial-economic subservience.

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