The first things
The first thing you hear in No Home Movie is the sound of wind blowing through a tree and across a valley. The first thing you hear in No Home Movie is wind distorting the sound of wind. The first thing you hear in No Home Movie is wind distorting the sound picked up by the microphone. The first thing you hear is the microphone, which is part of a camera. The first thing you hear is the camera.
The first thing you hear in No Home Movie is the impact of wind on a hand-held camera. But is it on the camera, or in, or both: “it may also be possible for wind to leak through holes cut for switches and generate noise inside the body too,” an instructional PDF downloaded from the Microphone Data website warns the recordist. The first thing you hear is the hand holding the camera. The first thing you hear is the body.
The Microphone Data info sheet says, “Air is a much more turbulent and knotty fluid than we usually imagine it to be.”
In these exterior sequences of the film, the air is tied in knots: intransigent clumps made up of a low ragged thudding sound that is round but doesn’t bounce. A knotted fluid, an impossible hybrid element, an impossibility, an impasse. Through or behind or above this sound, the rattle of the tree’s few papery leaves can be heard.
(“Attach strips of paper to the air vents. At night it sounds like the rustling of leaves,” Dr Snaut advises Kelvin in Solaris. In the controlled atmosphere of the space station the paper strips flapping in the artificial breeze are an aural reminder of Earth; close enough to the real thing to help you sleep.)
Manhola Dargis, reviewing No Home Movie, describes the opening sequence. She notes that it is long enough that the viewer has to take in all the features of what looks like a featureless space: the distant road, the blank sky, a telephone wire. “Mostly, though, there is this resolute, trembling tree perched on what looks like an abyss. How, you wonder, does it survive?”
“On my mother’s side, few had survived,” says Chantal Akerman in the trailer for I Don’t Belong Here: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman. No Home Movie was Akerman’s last film. It was premiered just a month before her death in October 2015. It is a film about her mother, Natalia, who was born in Poland and escaped to Belgium at the start of the Second World War. She was deported back to Poland and sent to Auschwitz, where both her parents died. After the war she returned to Brussels, where Chantal Akerman was born in 1950. Natalia died shortly after No Home Movie was finished, in April 2014. Survival is a central fact of No Home Movie. What is the character of this survival? It is hard to read, hard to hear. It has to be. It has its own complex system of knots and turbulence, interference and static. Sometimes I think it takes sonic form in these blocks of noise that any device would struggle to record clearly, not just the handheld cameras and Blackberries that Akerman uses throughout the film.
To reduce the possibility of wind sounds, the Microphone Data info sheet says, you can place a fine mesh between the mic and the sound source you wish to record. There are many professional and DIY ways in which you can do this but on YouTube my searches for ‘reduce wind noise’ frequently bring up hacks for GoPro users who want to show how fast they are going without obscuring the sound of the engine of whatever it is they are going fast on. Put half a washing-up sponge in the GoPro casing so when you record yourself on your motorbike it sounds so much better. Put a sock on the sponge. Now you can even hear me talking. I like the GoPro tutorial makers. They are not audiophiles. They are more excited about speed and being outside and how half a sponge can take the slap of the air on the camera down to a rumble.
I’ve called these ‘exterior’ sequences, the parts of No Home Movie that show the outside. This is mainly to distinguish them from the majority of the film, which shows the inside of Natalia Akerman’s flat in Brussels; you see some other interiors, of hotel rooms that Chantal is staying in, but not in any detail. The hotel rooms are spaces that contain another interior, that of the laptop and Skype window in which Chantal and her mother talk to one another, in which we see Natalia’s flat again, but now on another screen in a room far away from it. In the so-called exterior sequences the relationship between inside and outside is also layered and mediated. Much of the outside is seen from an inside, shot from a moving car through a window. If this is not obvious from the speed of the camera, it’s also clear from the sounds it picks up of tires on ground, engine, wind, and an insistent small plasticky tapping that suggests something knocking against the window or door when the car hits uneven patches of road. A mistake-sound among mistake-sounds. From the window dune-like hills blur and bump past. Some concrete buildings and a section of long black plastic pipe curving up and over a hill like a snake so long its head and tail can’t be seen.
I read afterwards that Akerman shot this footage in Israel. I wondered why I had not thought about this while watching the film, but instead had placed these moon-like landscapes somewhere simply ‘unknown’. No, I didn’t wonder, I don’t wonder, because it is obvious, and not just because I have seen only a fraction of Akerman’s huge body of work and have not read enough about her life. It is easy and seductive to think about The Desert as a metaphor rather than a real space, and to abstract a bleak and awe-inspiring terrain into something literally unearthly, by comparing it to a satellite or even another planet. It’s easy to empty a space of people and history in order to fetishize its emptiness. It’s so easy and so seductive that I find myself trying to do this even when I am forcefully deterred from doing so by all the sonic reminders of the presence of the filmmaker – the recordist – and her own refusal of or inability to be subsumed into this landscape.
There is nothing peaceful about these empty spaces. There is nothing empty about them. Is there ever an empty space, and if there was, could it ever be recorded? It is never empty of the recordist and their recording device. One of the cliches about travelling is that you can’t escape yourself, however far you go to get away from problems or heartbreak or whatever. That ‘you’ will always be there, waiting for yourself in whichever wilderness you get to. I can never work out whether it means you should stay at home until you feel better, or just not expect too much from the wilderness, but it is clear the warning is made with the assumption that the person is travelling by choice and that they have a home to return to, and Akerman’s furious, blunted travelogues are disturbing most of all because no such assumption underlies them. There is a home – the mother’s house – and a choice – to make this film, to travel to make it – but such concepts are shaken and bruised, buffeted, knocked around in the passenger seat, blown sideways.
(In an article called ‘Femme Vérité’, Michelle Orange writes, “Throughout her work, Akerman enacts a formal reckoning with an inexorable problem having to do with time, space, and distance—which is to say a problem of home.”)
In the space of the cinema where I watch No Home Movie the extraneous artefacts of time-based recording technology are magnified, visually and sonically, and they call attention to other kinds of extraneity – other things that get in the way of communication or recording or representation, or that are supposed to be invisible or inaudible. But when Akerman forefronts these artefacts, especially those that sound, I think she goes beyond the aims of cinema vérité, at least as I understand them. Those artefacts – the distortion, glitch, interference, light bleed and so on – are not left in to make the film more truthful exactly. They are part of a wider consideration of how intimacy is both transmitted and frustrated by technology. How technology not only enables but creates intimacy.
No Home Movie includes a number of Skype conversations between Chantal and Natalia in which technical and operational glitches happen and long goodbyes leave uneven edges. The Skype call, with its drop-outs and time-lags and weird overdriven bursts of noise, equates neatly with the characterization of digital media as atomizing and alienating, the implication being that these unnatural communications, mediated through screens that flatten affect, are not only inferior but detrimental to ‘real’ relationships. In these fluid, often passionate conversations between mother and daughter, Akerman shows that connection can be made not despite but because of or even through glitch, and that the screen is a fine mesh that in fact clarifies, sharpens rather than obscures emotion.
(On the afternoon I watch the film, between working and caring for my mother, who was born just a decade after Natalia, the cinema screen creates another mesh between me and my thoughts, making audible that which I find hard to hear. Later that day I tell my mother about some aspects of the film (Natalia’s flat) and not others (Chantal’s suicide). Afterwards it occurs to me that it has created another mesh, one through which we can talk about some of our fears and avoid others.)
The more formal discussions that Akerman films at Natalia’s kitchen table flow less easily. This is because they are about the past, a past which Natalia will speak of only sparingly. The interference here isn’t something hitting the mic or the wifi cutting out but it feels akin to that. Something too loud, or too absent, or an absence too loud to be voiced, has broken the conversation. Sometimes the wind brings sound with it; mostly, though, it blocks it. Akerman stays with the block, films the block, sounds out the block.
Here is one. “I don’t want everyone to hear the things I want to say to you”, says Natalia during one of the Skypes. As if the viewer – the everyone – will hear not just the things that are said but the things that are not said but desired to be said. As if the things that are said aren’t exactly the things she wants to say.
Chantal, in I Don’t Belong Anywhere, on her mother’s story. “I thought for a while I was speaking on her behalf, and then sometimes I’d think I was speaking against her.”
(Distortion mingles and confuses signal and noise, intention and action, sound and air, machine and body.)
“The draught across the cold stone floor of a quiet church may produce more serious ‘wind noise’ than the gentle breeze outside.” Microphone Data, again.
Air is unpredictable. In Chris Marker’s One Day in the Life of Andrey Arsenevich the narrator talks about the presence of the elements in Tarkovsky’s films, in particular how fire and water are brought together at key moments. On the one hand, Marker draws your attention to the heavy symbolism and significance of the elements: they appear not just because they are photogenic – they are there “as a last resort, the answer to a prayer”. On the other, he seems to imply, they challenge the idea of such significance, appearing to manifest beyond cause and effect. And it’s here where he talks about wind and air:
“As [Tarkovsky’s] oeuvre advances, it throws off the ballast of pretext and excuses. Even the director steps free of his own pretext. The whirlwind of grass at the outset of Mirror serves to avoid a cliché, that of a man looking back at the woman he had just met. Something unusual had to happen. In Stalker it’s the fiction of the Zone that makes the grass move. There’s nothing to be explained: it’s autonomous.”
In fact these are not two opposing interpretations, but different ways of saying the same thing. A prayer, a last resort, something unusual, nothing to be explained: in this view, there is life and meaning in every image or action, even in phenomena that can’t be explained. (Marker does not mention the fake wind in the fake trees of Solaris.) In Marker’s loving portrait of an animistic cinema, these elemental last resorts precede redemption.
In No Home Movie the last resort is the wind on the mic. The last resort is the muffled, curtailed roar of the cheap mic shaking in its casing. The last resort is the hand holding the camera. The last resort is the body. It has to stop somewhere.
(In Akerman’s 1980 film, Tell Me, in which she interviews a group of elderly Jewish women, like her mother survivors of the Holocaust, one of her subjects interrupts the story she is telling. “I have so much to tell you, we could stay eight days and not finish all of it.”)
Within sound by Frances Morgan
― xyzzzz__, Sunday, 7 August 2016 10:23 (seven years ago) link