Wavelengths 1: Eye and Ear Control
(Austria/Lebanon/Chile/France/Canada/Australia, 90 min.)
Dir. Johann Lurf, Christina Jauernik, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Francisco Rodríguez Teare, Rhayne Vermette, Malena Szlam
Programme: Wavelengths
This year’s Wavelengths 1 program derives its title from Michael Snow’s short film New York Eye and Ear Control (1964). A commission from a Toronto concert organization, Snow was tasked with making a film using jazz, assembling a sextet to record an improvised soundtrack for his images. In the black-and-white film, silhouette cutouts of a woman traverse forested, seaside, and urban landscapes beside the voice of heavy, cacophonous trumpets and saxophones. At times, the camera drifts to environmental details or spins out of control to introduce abstract shapes and shadows. Of his title, Snow has said, “It’s like the music is a particular kind of experience, and the film is something quite different that you see simultaneously.”
Indeed, images and sounds from works in this collection of shorts are placed on full display, alternating between degrees of emphasis on visual and aural dimensions. In The Diary of a Sky, for instance, Lawrence Abu Hamdan presents audio recordings as evidence of airspace violations by Israeli fighter jets and drones flying over Lebanon. Though accompanied by crowdsourced smartphone footage, the film demands that we yield to an auditory-forward experience. Terror, he demonstrates, can be carried out through immaterial means, an unceasing “symphony of violence” that enlists the ears of citizens to produce a constant state of fear and instability. Given the visual dominance in our society—think of the way videos automatically play without sound on social media or how we colloquially “see” a concert act despite the musical focus—Abu Hamdan asks us to consider the politics of the unseen, that which cannot be easily conveyed, and how aggressors exploit this gap as a means of escape.
On the other end, Revolving Rounds, a 3D film by Johann Lurf and Christina Jauernik that opened the program, is organized by visual display by virtue of the stereoscopic accessory required for proper viewing. First, we begin in an agricultural field with a row of greenhouses in sunlight. Shifting in focus, the images bring to mind the memory of sitting for an eye exam, where one is instructed to look at a barn before we’re startled by a puff of air. As if at the optometrist’s office, our eyes seem to be seized by the filmmakers. With a series of abrupt cuts, we’re brought inside the structure to view its botanical contents in increasingly closer detail at varied hours of the day. In the second half, through the mechanism of a cyclostéréoscope apparatus, the film presents an exquisite coupling of the cellulose of plants and the celluloid of film strips, bouncing between scales of the macro and micro to pulsing sounds. Hypnotic and spectacular, Revolving Rounds employs the use of an early cinematic device to great effect, bridging modern technologies of cinema and agriculture in an exhilarating fashion.
Between these polarities, Francisco Rodríguez Teare’s October Noon examines the haunting quality of sound waves to interrogates the fallibility of memory; Rhayne Vermette charts a path for a filmmaking practice that can be simultaneously generative and destructive with the explosive, kaleidoscopic A Black Screen Too; and the brilliant double exposures of flora and fauna in Malena Szlam’s Archipelago of Earthen Bones — To Bunya gradually build towards revealing multiple temporalities of solar time, geologic time, biological time and, certainly, runtime. What results, then, from this diverse arrangement of films spanning five continents is a showcase for the vital potentiality of sound and image, an invitation to heighten our senses of attunement within this context and beyond. Snow would be proud of such an experiential homage.
Get more coverage from this year’s festival here.
