Bklyn Sounds 4/26/2023 - 5/1/2023 + ‘32 Sounds’ and the Power of Sonic Memory

On Sam Green's essay-film + Other Shows: Moor Mother / Ahmed Abdullah’s Diaspora Meets Francisco Mora Catlett’s AfroHORN / Tommaso Cappellato / "All Hands on Deck: A Fundraiser for Delano Smith" +...

Apologies for the late delivery. I am working on a time intensive project due this weekend, and my last couple of days were eaten alive. Back to Tuesday delivery next week.

Around the time I first saw 32 Sounds at BAM in March of 2022, I was reading In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova. It’s a wonderful if complicated book about trawling through one’s family archive, securing drips of meaning from fading photos, relational connections from century-old postcards and receipts, somewhere between a desire to get one’s lineage just exactly right and holding “a wake for the disappearing world.” (Specifically, for life in pre-revolutionary Russia and Ukraine, as well as the USSR — and yes, the dissonances in the reading were increased exponentially by the war and by my own history.) Personally, it was also fascinating how the cues and the clues that Stepanova kept using to unlock the past were visual. Only towards the book’s end does an anecdote with an aural trigger come to light, and it has immense power. The narrator recounts observing a doddering grandfather who’d been asked about events he’d rather forget, begin to channel his memory through song, “in a quivering tenor, closing his eyes and rocking slightly, as if he was using his body to inch his way down into a dark and seemingly bottomless well….In his stumbled phrasing, and shorn of its upbeat, romantic qualities, the simple song was a horrifying spatter of sound…as if something very ancient had fought its way back to life and stood in the middle of our room, twitching and blinking.” Here, song (and sound) serves as the ultimate time machine, a resuscitator, tapping into emotion so precisely that decades fall away, the past ascending into a future, bypassing the question of now. It felt like A Lot, especially considering how much the pandemic and lockdown had already messed with my (our?) conception of linear timelines, and emotional remembrance. 

Now imagine adding recordings to that. There’s a variety of ways that the interlocking threads of Sam Green’s excellent essay-film experience 32 Sounds drill deeply, powerfully into the faculty of sound, using both traditional narrative structure and audio design I’ve never encountered in a movie-theater before. The stories Green tells — about homemade recordings, about artificial sounds and bird songs, about professional listeners and creators of aural ephemera, about casual engagements with the acoustics of everyday life, and about the meanings that all these acquire — blend wonderfully into a collaged tale. All on its own, the narrative makes it an exceptional movie-going experience. But then there’s how that traditional experience is subverted, forcing audiences to engage theirs ears as much as, if not more than their eyes. There’s an orthodox film-screening presentation of 32 Sounds, which finally comes to New York for an extended run at Film Forum starting on Friday. But it was originally shown with a mix that involved all audience members wearing noise-canceling headphones, for optimal aural clarity (select Film Forum screenings will use this too), as well as a live accompaniment with Green as a narrator, and JD Samson performed the largely electronic score. Sound presentation and new ways of hearing aren’t simply folded into the plot of Green’s film, they’re also separated, framed as an alternative way to connect to a broader world — maybe even providing a sense of the universe’s inner working that other senses are incapable of spelling out.

This is especially true in how 32 Sounds presents sound recordings as access to memories — and for those aurally extra-attuned, a short-cut to feeling. My long COVID symptom seems to be the ease with which I access my tears, welling up at the slightest provocation, and few elements are more triggering for me than songs. Here then is a film partially about mapping how that happens. How hearing something potentially innocuous but embedded with feeling and intention and history — regardless of whether you are aware of that history and intention, when you listen — can so quickly bring about a philosophical state about your own being, and about your place in the world. Love, mortality, hope and despair. These are some of the “sounds” that Green’s great film brings to mind. Prepare yourself accordingly.          

A few of the opening weekend’s screenings will include conversations between the filmmaker Sam Green, and composer/film subject Annea Lockwood, physicist/film subject Prof. Edgar Choueiri, and film score composer J.D. Samson. Check the listings. (32 Sounds opens on Fri 4/28 @ Film Forum 209 W. Houston St. Manhattan - $9members/$15)

THIS WEEK’s OTHER SHOWS: