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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Intern's Palette, The

An entry in the Glossary project

Having hunted, indexed and categorized his (revised) target of 16, 384 colours, Nanneman set the work experience boy the task of creating full back-stories for each hue. Given the vigour with which the unnamed teen took to his work, he must either have believed Nanneman’s lie-by-omission that the project was a genuine City Council task passed on by colleagues tired just by the scale of the project, or been enthusiastic and quite stupid as many of the happier of people are, or, as is most likely, some of Nanneman’s quixotic fervour rubbed off on him. Whatever way around, it was some feat for him to complete, as he did, biographies several pages long for each of precisely 256 colours in the two weeks before he was obliged to return to school. There are indications that Nanneman was all the same disappointed at the tiny dent made in the full spectrum of redestructivish colours and, given that his superiors refused him custody of any further work experience students, progress on further colour back-stories was sporadic. The work experience boy’s accomplishment stands therefore as the largest fully-documented colour range in the Catalogue, and it is from the informal name that this collection became known by that the phrase "the intern’s palette" passed into popular use to indicate a naïve and incomplete glimpse of a utopian new system within the breakaway department of an immoveable institution.

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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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Mnemonic Control Effect

An entry in the Glossary project

Nanneman was not the first to hypothesize that films 'help' us by contextualising our experiences: that they interact with our memories, coaxing them into bolder relief that we might explore and understand them more fully. By standardising the basic materials that the state's filmmakers had to work with, however, Nanneman’s Catalogue created for the first time the possibility of an aesthetic and moral continuity across these filmmakers' output, providing a more consistent context in which the audience might analyse their inner worlds. This 'control' effect - the provision of a scientific standard of comparison - would not only have been useful during the viewing of any given redestructivish movie, but also later on when that movie itself became a memory. The human mind would be able to categorize these remembered movies more easily due to their consistency of appearance: had Nanneman's characters, colours and sounds been adopted as industry standard, the problem of wondering whether a memory was your own or stolen from a film you’d seen would have been phased out as memories of pre-Catalogue movies faded away.

Nanneman referred to this process in the Catalogue and in arguments as Mnemonic Control Effect.

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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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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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