Constructing and Deconstructing Cinematic Worlds: Sound design and urbanism in Playtime and Themroc

Here follows a quasi-academic essay I wrote in 2015. I hope that somewhere within the bap of my ignorance, amongst the void where the burger of knowledge and understanding should be found, readers might at least stumble upon a gherkin of curiosity. It's a bit over 3,000 words, or a 12 minute read.

Two films either side of May ’68, two visions of an alienated post-war Paris détourned, deconstructed and destroyed by its inhabitants.

Playtime (Jacques Tati, 1967) is an ironic modernist utopia, the city as a machine for living in, unwittingly exploited by Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot. His casual clumsiness reshapes Paris as a playground in which human connections can be made in spite of the passive-aggressive urban engineering of his time.

The eponymous anti-hero of Themroc (Claude Faraldo, 1973) lives in a post-’68 Paris where the illusion of a progressive utopia is no longer maintained. As a construction worker in a palpably bricks-and-mortar society, Themroc represents the very fabric of the city – a fabric being pulled to ripping point by inhuman corporate and political forces.

They are fascinating for their contrasting critiques of modernist/post-industrial urbanism, the state of mid-twentieth century western capitalism, and the effect of both on the individual and on groups. Set in Paris at almost the exact same point in history, the city is nevertheless unrecognisable from one movie to the other.

The third key text, from which I will take my cue to interrogate these movies, is Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life – published in the year of Playtime’s release and six years before Themroc. Vaneigem was part of a group known as the situationists (although he notes that “situationism is an ideology that the situationists were unanimous in rejecting. The term “situationist” was ever only a token of identification. Its particularity kept us from being mistaken for the throngs of ideologues.” (Obrist, 2009)) 

Vaneigem was critical of existing economic powers but specifically their complex entanglement with cultural customs, rituals, and artefacts – ways of life the common individual regards as ‘natural' but which are in fact the building blocks of our oppression, shaped and guided by living history, vested interests and complacency. He notes that dystopian literature such as Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984 alienate us from meaningful critique because they relocate today's oppression into fears of the future: "Compared with my present imprisonment," he writes, "the future holds no interest for me." (Vaneigem, 1983: 34)

Intriguingly, both Playtime and Themroc operate on the borders of speculative fiction (if not science fiction), although both are set in contemporary Paris. Playtime does it by pushing existing technologies and infrastructures to absurd extremes; Themroc, by positing an alternative dimension in which Parisians speak to each other only in grunts, and physical laws are subtly different to our own. For example, the antihero Themroc gains superhero strength after he revolts and, likewise, the other revolutionaries find themselves immune to tear gas (characterized as ‘HASH PROLETARIEN'). But both movies essentially locate their critiques in an identifiable here-and-now and offer semi-serious strategies for the subversion and overthrow of an everyday life that is easily taken for granted.

The tension of the situationists’ outlook was in the ambivalence of its protagonists’ desires. On the one hand, our way of life is fundamentally flawed, and we would ideally start from scratch. On the other, the bricks of our new society are to be retrieved from the rubble of the existing one. Vaneigem’s text is presented as political philosophy, but it is just as sad as it is angry. The predominant emotion is despair, but its being written was an act of hope.

Look at the names of two situationist exhibitions held in Denmark in the 1960s: ‘Destruktion af RSG-6' and ‘Operation Playtime.' One fantasized about nuclear war; the other hints at situationism’s ludic tendencies (Rasmussen, 2015: 14). Situationism appeals to the guts and to the intellect. Everyday life is not to be considered from a purely political standpoint: it is animal, absurd, physical and ritualistic.

This is what makes cinema, with its multiple forms of sensory communication and invocation, a suitable instrument with which to dissect it. Cinema can look and sound like everyday life, but with unfamiliar perspectives, structured narratives and re-configured physicalities (for example, Hulot's characteristic walking style, which expresses his childlike innocence while inspiring the audience to consider how each of us actually walks around the city. It is a form of Brechtian alienation). 

Where Playtime and Themroc excel in this pursuit is their respective use of sound design, framing, and minimal narrative to jerk the viewer from a complacent reading of each movie and reconsider it in the light of their own political circumstances.

The soundscape of Themroc is murky, unpretty – but not imprecise. Playtime – or the first half, before the extended restaurant sequence, at least – is composed of isolated, laboratory-fresh foley objects.

Both films begin with journeys: Themroc rises, gets ready for work and takes the commute; the figure of Hulot, on his way to and from an important meeting, is juxtaposed with a gaggle of tourists on their way from the airport to their hotel. 

The key sonic motifs of each of these sequences are opposite in approach but equally dehumanizing. Workers leave Themroc’s apartment block whistling indecipherable tunes, mount their squeaking bicycles and lean on each other for support, already becoming an indistinguishable mass. By the time they reach the Metro, their footsteps begin to mingle together. This is not a march, though it is drilled in: the daily shuffle, ingrained in muscle memory. The roar of the footsteps mingles with the roar of the trains, mechanized, impersonal, a mass tragedy. This roar echoes the opening title sequence in which animalistic human growling is echoed by growling engine sounds. Our economy didn’t become industrialized: people did.

Footsteps are essential to Hulot’s sonic journey, too, but are kept in the realm of the absurd. Where Themroc’s Paris is post-industrial, Playtime's is modernist. The clean, sterile surfaces of the airport and office buildings invite the individual click-clacking of shoe heels. Silenced by their steel glass exteriors, these structures seem robot-built for comfort and security, but this only makes them isolating. They create the illusion of wealth, are revealed to be both economically and socially inefficient when it takes several minutes for two characters to meet in a long corridor (click-clacking all the way). 

And of course what we don't see, is the inversion of this urbanism: in a city where space is at a premium, such luxurious (if alienating) use of space comes at the expense of the banlieues that are only hinted at by the presence of assorted misfits loitering around the city, unattributed to any structure (the rockers who disturb Barbara’s photo opportunity, the kids who whistle at the glaziers). For whom was such a city built?

Hulot finds his voice in the restaurant scene: the first time we really hear him talk is amidst the party, in English, as he gives street directions to a drunken foreigner who then mistakes the veins of a faux-marble pillar for the continuation of a tourist map. Running his finger along the abstract ‘roads,' the tourist cannot know where he is pointing, but he points nonetheless rather than just staring: he is following some emotional or aesthetic instinct rather than the practical, economically-motivated routes advised on the dropped tourist map. 

Intentionally or not, Tati calls to mind the dérive (drift), the situationists' ‘psychogeographic’ technique of wandering around the city in ignorance or subversion of prescribed routes (or laws) in search of currents of feeling. Among situationist practitioners of the dérive, techniques included intentionally using the wrong map (i.e., for a completely different city) and creating new maps based on emotional (psychogeographic) responses. 

But how to interpret this clearest incidence of Hulot's voice in the movie – in English? Perhaps to hear Hulot speak in French would make him too identifiable to local audiences. To finally hear our French hero speak, only in English, is to play down his importance: he might as well whisper, or be drowned out by passing traffic.

Themroc finds his voice in the crowd. Not a leader by hierarchy but by example, the first hint of his calling occurs when his cough, a city cough that has troubled him since the opening of the film, evolves into a primal scream. Others, although apparently out of earshot, are all the same inspired to growl along. Later, when his neighbours gradually follow Themroc’s lead and demolish the outer walls of their homes, feelings of outrage, jealousy and fear give way to a swell of solidarity and liberation.

Another key vocalisation in Faraldo's movie is the hiccupping of Themroc's mother. From the moment that Themroc cups his sister's exposed breast – the realization of a previously latent mutual attraction – their mother, whom they are taunting, begins to hiccup, and the camera will return to her at odd moments throughout the remainder of the movie to show how her hiccupping continues as the days pass.

The rhythm of her hiccups evokes the hourly rhythm of the family's cuckoo clock, at once equating the conformist mother with the mechanics of capitalism and evoking the idea of the hiccup as a natural rhythm, a fundamental feature of the human animal that she keeps locked up in her apartment while her children revert to primitivism. While Faraldo is not literally condemning the taboo of incest as a tool of social repression, this reaction represents another visceral, necessarily irrational scream of frustration at the social conditioning that forms the very fabric of our day-to-day relationships.

We never see Hulot’s home, but we can assume he continues to live in the run-down but charming suburban dwelling the character inhabited in an earlier film, Mon Oncle (Tati, 1958).

We see and hear what a home is for a certain class of Parisian in Playtime’s universe primarily through the ‘ideal home’-style exposition into which Hulot unwittingly stumbles near the beginning of the film. (The glass-fronted modules that form an apartment block he later visits echo the absurd idealism of the expo, and by chance form an ironic counterpoint to the open-fronted apartments of Themroc’s world – open-fronted, in this case, because Themroc and his neighbours have demolished their walls with sledgehammers).

Central to the expo’s ideal domestic life is the concept of cleanliness. The slogan “thro out greek style” is pasted above a display of flip-top rubbish bins shaped to look like ruined Greek pillars. The mechanics of the bin, all the same, surprise us by creating the same familiar metallic clatter associated with an ordinary kitchen bin. It is a subtle way to draw attention to a disconnection in modernist culture: we cannot acknowledge, and will not take full responsibility for, our own shit. A bin is a bin, no matter what aspirations the marketing companies pin to it.

This sonic joke is reversed when Hulot becomes embroiled in a misunderstanding at a display of domestic doors. This time, the slogan reads ‘Slam your Doors in Golden Silence,' and again the message is about the social awkwardness of shit – this time, our emotional shit. The irony emerges when the display's own representative finds himself unable to express his anger – he slams the display door, and the viewer has the strange cognitive experience of seeing it shut silently.

This type of silent – silenced – frustration is at the core of Themroc. But Themroc’s domestic situation is not clean-lined, the innovations (cuckoo clock, coffee grinder) are outdated and failing. The camera stays in the kitchen as Themroc prepares his breakfast (coffee and crumbs falling everywhere, compounding the Sisyphean struggle of ‘keeping up’ a home). He goes to the bathroom and the flush is exaggerated even from a distance, a grotesque echo of Playtime’s deluxe metallic bin. But when he eats, the sound of him chewing is eerily silent. When he spies on his naked sister, we hear just the low ambient sounds of the apartment; and later, Themroc’s flashbacks (as he works) to previous iterations of his daily routine are in complete silence. 

These are somehow Themroc’s most personal moments: his sensual pleasure, his delight, and his despair. And like the silent-door representative of Playtime’s ideal home expo, they go unannounced: of no economic value, they are oddly muted into a sonic invisibility.

Here we locate the crucial fissure between Hulot’s world and that of Themroc. Hulot has made the decision – or, perhaps like the great mass of western capitalist society, defaulted to the decision – to live, to play by the rules, to work and be fed. That he frequently subverts these rules, resulting in joy and astonishment (both for Hulot and the audience) is a result of his clumsiness and the inherent absurdity – disharmony – of the mechanized world in which he lives. 

Hulot prods innocently at the fabric of society. It is his childish curiosity that inspires an (everyday) revolutionary fervour in the audience. We trust Hulot. A leading man in the mould of, for example, the situationist Guy Debord, would be less effective: we would sense his agenda.

Debord chose a more suitable form of cinematic expression for himself: détournement, essay, tirade. Manifestly political works, we accept them critically because there is an agreement that we are giving audience to an activist. Hulot, like Debord, is a flaneur, only Hulot has probably never heard of the word. Debord provokes revolution. Tati inspires it.

Themroc chooses to become a revolutionary, not the revolution of everyday life, but something more total: the destruction of our way of life. Like Hulot, his rebellion is not intellectually motivated; but whereas Hulot’s subversive curiosity seems innate, Themroc’s violence has been cultivated by years of everyday oppression.

Tati's Hulot, although a rebel, by no means realizes Vaneigem's full program. He is neither martyr nor activist: Hulot does not "raise his desire to achieve unity with the world and himself to the level of coherent theory and practice" (Vaneigem, 1983: 43). 

But Tati, the filmmaker, does indeed offer this ‘coherent theory,' and his sonic and visual aesthetic forms a tool by which the audience can begin its practice. Tati's isolation and caricature of everyday sounds, his de-familiarization of everyday objects, redefine our relationship with the world around us. Each 'thing' loses its status as mere furniture and becomes an artefact to be reconsidered, renegotiated, repurposed for our own emotional, physical and economic needs – to return to Vaneigem's disdain for science fiction, this would be ineffective within an alien time setting. Shoes, rubbish bins, chairs, doors, corridors, buses, and streetlamps assume a negotiable identity thanks to the undue aesthetic focus and subversive repurposing that Tati affords them.

Faraldo's theory lacks – rejects - coherence. While he genuinely seems to call for a revolution more physically violent and complete than Tati's, the fact that Themroc's revolution is physically impossible (i.e., without the superhuman powers the rebels develop, they would quickly be crushed by the authorities) is a bitter acknowledgement of the flawed idealism of Faraldo's freedom fighters. 

Rather, Faraldo's aesthetic is angry: a dirty, free, messy explosion of camera movement and editing, with a rumbling, guttural soundtrack. It is not meant to be a guidebook to the revolution, but a visceral urge to break from one's routine and question the structures that inhibit us. 

Vaneigem refers to the ‘dangerous charm' of such fantasies (1983: 47). But however wild it appears, the film is not undisciplined, and Faraldo leaves clues for the audience to interpret the movie: the silences and surrealisms and of course the non-language of the characters, all of which echo Rivette's call to reject bourgeois aesthetic clichés, legitimize Faraldo's text without canonizing it.

In both cases, these are movies and filmmakers of supreme personal integrity and individuality utilizing that most overlooked – or tastefully assimilated – of filmmaking tools, the sound design, to express outrage at the insidious materialization of oppressive economic powers in the environments of our everyday lives; and to inspire hope, responsibility and subversive action in defence of the audience’s emotional and economic freedoms.

References:

Chion, Michel “The Voice In Cinema” Columbia University Press, 1999.
Hester, Diarmiud “Somatic Geometry” One+One Filmmakers Journal Issue 7: 2011
Hiller, Kim (editor) “Cahiers Du Cinema 1960-1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood” Harvard University Press, 1986
Obrist, Hans Ulrich “In Conversation with Raoul Vaneigem” e-flux: 2009
Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt & Jakobsen, Jakob “Cosmonauts of the Future” – Nebula, 2015.
Vaneigem, Raoul “The Revolution of Everyday Life” – Second Revised Edition, London, Left Bank Books and Rebel Press, 1983.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 30

Sometimes you just need to get stuck in. In the A.M., Leray and I finally build the nerve to experiment with the effects for our 'holographic floor' scene - a routine in which heroic Harley Byrne becomes trapped in a form of 'liquid hologram' known as quicklight. With a bit of lens trickey, an old net curtain, and plenty of goopy light, the effect is far simpler to achieve than we had feared.

The afternoon is mostly costume fittings and video tests with the actors, who have a similarly 'getting stuck in' sort of attitude, with one after another of them seeing the studio for the first time before sighing and saying something along the lines of, "I did say I'm doing it for a new experience...". Anyway, every one of them is amazing as I force them to perform isolated emotions from the toes up. Niemczyk and Decerle are fast becoming toga virtuosos in the costumes department. And either the hats are getting bigger or everything else is getting smaller.

Queissner, our soundist, is similarly game; she has already begun foley for the film not yet shot, mostly with an analogue modular synthesizer, which is admirably panelled in cardboard. Now, if only we can find her some microphones to record Saturday's opening scenes...

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 21

We lived the movie twice today. This morning, following a ‘show-and-tell’ of our respective photo tours of last week’s visit to the Palais Jacques Coeur - each photo set being almost identical since we walked the same route and were essentially on the look out for tympanums, cheeky sculptures and fancy colours - Yuan and I sat down with our new sound recordist Nina Quiessner in order to create a foley list by combing the script for sonic potential. Items such as ‘howling landscape of despair’, ‘awkward silence’ (“we should at least consider it”) and various thrums and thuds prove it a rich hunting ground.

In the afternoon, Niemczyk’s Tangibles squad take a break from rebuilding the city out of cardboard in order to step into the limelight, 'volunteering' to take starring roles as we video an entire script-reading of the movie. One of the key aims of this exercise is to physicalise the dead leaves of the screenplay to get its rather wordy thematic and visual potential out in the air (particularly important since the words are tough enough for a native English speaker to get their head around, let alone our Polish-French-Chinese-German crew).

The 'Curse' plot in a nutshell.

The women (for everyone in the studio except for me is one) have fresh-toasted printouts of the screenplay, while I work from the latest shotlist; the inconsistencies between the two soon lead us into chaos. We also run out of readers, or become confused as to whether we have enough people around to see the show through, since the story contains multiple cross-identities and layers of disguise and even physical properties (some characters are made of light, or metal, or flesh, or glass; at least one is history disguised as flesh disguised as stone).

The endeavour becomes not so much about carefully staging the shots so that I can cheat by pre-editing the finished movie, as about just getting through the dummy-shoot: we rush on to the end without even stopping the DV camera between shots; a cruel parody of next week’s proper shoot when we’ll likewise allow just one take per shot but will urgently stop the camera as soon as or even before each character finishes speaking, such is the premium on the Super 8 film stock through which we’ll be burning.

Afterwards, thankfully, the crew claim to have a better understanding of the potential movie. There’s nothing like a shared perilous experience to tune folks in to the precise frequency of their situation.

At our digs, where Niemczyk and I are currently holed up with Yuan and Bandits-Mages associates David Legrand and Julien Record and an artist called Pierre, a partial electrical outage has caused us to huddle together in the kitchen around a warm circle of Wi-Fi, when otherwise we might have kept to our rooms. With only wine and eco-detergent and brief flickers of Facebook to sustain this awkward pack of strays, who knows what frequencies we might tune into or into which layered personae we might lapse. If I don’t tweet by tomorrow noon, please send somebody to shoot this damned movie for us, since we will be lost.

The 'Curse' plot in a different nutshell.

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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Indirection

An entry in the Glossary project

The deliberate withholding of audio or visual information, usually by obscuring it with other matter (sound, set) or out of frame or hearing range, but with its properties hinted at by that information which remains. For example, the physical goings-on in a foggy sauna may only be suggested by the screams of unseen participants, the facial expressions of a foregrounded attendant or the peculiar movement of the steam.

Nanneman’s guide to the appropriate use of indirection is here paraphrased in lieu of his original text:

What you know that you can’t see makes what you can see hilarious; what you don’t know that you can’t see doesn’t bother you. What you suspect is being hidden from you makes you resentful towards a movie, while the showing of that which needn’t have been shown provokes disdain. The revelation of that which was previously hidden brings catharsis, the hiding of that which was previously visible brings disorientation. Summed up: while its excessive or insensitive use may compromise the intended effect on a movie’s audience, indirection can be a great boon to the filmmaker on a budget.

See also: Implicit, the

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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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Sounds

An entry in the Glossary project

On learning that all complex sounds have as their basic unit or building block the 'sine wave', Nanneman was enticed by a city council colleague into purchasing a "bundle" of sine waves with which he intended to construct the Catalogue's sound library. Although a conscientious canteen assistant intervened in the sale, Nanneman was evidently wounded by the attempted fraud as, rather than building his sounds bottom-up, he now stated his intention to carve them from pre-existing noise. (He played down this change in approach, commenting that it "[made] sense given that we’re at the noisy end" - though whether he was referring to the "noisy end" of creation at which point any naturally occurring pure tones had surely already been merged into complex sounds or to his Town Hall lab at the comparably noisy John Dalton Street end of Manchester's Albert Square is not clear).

In fact, there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that, in the event, Nanneman assembled his various sounds any which way he could: bottom-up, top-down, cobbled together, found, stolen, hummed etc. His contemporaries, however, could only speculate about the process, which was hidden from them by the temporary suspension of an interlaced membrane of tarpaulin around Nanneman’s lab, covering walls, ceiling, windows and doors and through which only the initiated might find their way before becoming consumed with panic. The purpose of the tarpaulin was and remains a case for speculation: was it hung, for example, to soundproof the lab, to replicate the circus tents of Nanneman's youth for his own comfort, or to replicate same in order to create the familiar sense of aural 'interiority' he required for his sounds? There was even talk at the time of his using the tarpaulin as a sheath to contain such emissions as might occur as a by-product of his attempts to identify and harness the "smell waves" which, so his colleagues had it, Nanneman was far more familiar with than the sonic variety and which he might therefore be attempting to synaesthesiatize into more manageable sounds using such digital alchemy as was at his service. The chief result of the tarpaulin, whether intentional or not, was then to have kept the precise materials used to generate the 131,072 discrete audio files* that comprised the Catalogue's sound bank a secret.

Each sound had the qualities of being both familiar, in having been sculpted from pre-existing noise, and disorienting for having been chosen and categorised according to Nanneman's own lonely agenda. Furthermore, as he neglected to provide compatible tools (EQ, reverb) with which to modulate these sounds according to the contexts in which they appeared, any given sound would at each occurrence sound identical to its previous use. Thus the single noise created, for example, to represent a mobile phone hitting the floor, would sound nothing like that particular event might sound in reality, yet 'rang true' through some obscure chain of association (the audience would 'get it' without quite knowing why): and should several mobile phones hit several floors in several acoustic spaces over the course of the same movie they would all sound exactly the same. Any effort to place the sound in its environment or to differentiate each event from its predecessor would have to take place in the audience's own minds. An over-used sound, lacking environmental nuance, would effectively fade with use in the passive moviegoer's mind in the same way that we gradually blank out supraliminal awareness of any repetitive alert that contains no new information. Nanneman had inadvertently hit on a way of degenerating a digital signal in a manner comparable to the degradation in quality of successive generations of tape-recording or photocopying, albeit in this case at the receiver-end. Sound engineers were reported to be "astonished and dismayed" and Nanneman himself was never satisfied with his accomplishments in the field of sound. "If only," he wrote in one of many unfiled reports to his seniors, "there hadn’t been something fishy about that sine wave deal".

*(including silences, but not ambience, dialogue or music)

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