Aiming for the Authentic: The Aesthetics of Sound in Documentary and Ethnographic Cinema (original) (raw)
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Composing with Reality: Digital Sound and Music in Documentary Film
Zurich School of Film, 2013
As creative sound design becomes an increasingly important part of digital documentary, questions of authenticity, authorship and reception have been pushed into the foreground. Digital technology presses at the fragile boundary between the fantasies of fiction film and documentary's "creative treatment of actuality" (Grierson), a boundary that has received much critical attention from both filmmakers and film theorists. 1 Often, music and the use of creative sound design can help to create, or blur, this distinction. While observational doc umentarians and many other nonfiction film makers strive for an unmediated representation because, as director Barry Stevens explains, we must "be re spectful of facts", others believe that the difficulties of producing a truly unguard ed view paves the way for imaginative responses. 2 Nonintervention, even in the flyonthewall style, is always compromised: the choice or shot, angle, focus, pointofview; the lingering camera; the ways in which those being filmed change their behaviour when confronted by a camera; and the creation of dramatic trajectories and character development in the editing room. Such inter ventions belie, at various levels, a creative directorial presence. When a documentary includes creative sound design, or music, things become even more complicated. What happens when sounds from the shoot location are digitally enhanced, extended or developed? When does sound end and music begin? And where does the notion of the profilmic-or the authentic-sit on this sliding sonic scale? Discussions of the relationship between authenticity and the documentary aes thetic are often conflicting. While many working in observational film or Cinéma vérité aim for minimum intervention, others consider an objective viewpoint impossible to achieve and aim instead for a more poetic relationship with their subject matter. From the selfreflexive, essaystyle of modernist documentary, through to the performative, interactive and democratised phase of digital non fiction work, the subjective has become a more welcome and established part of
Sound in documentaries as a tool of expression instead of representation
ACTIO Journal of Technology in Design, Film Arts and Visual Communication
The concept of reality in the context of documentaries has always been a focus of controversy, with manipulation of captured material during the filmmaking process being disallowed or labelled inauthentic. Nonetheless, some documentaries have approached the filmmaking process in an experimental way and are using a different approach to represent reality. At the same time, sound in documentaries is still usually misunderstood as a medium in which manipulation, processing – or even more radically – the creation from scratch, is not encouraged or not properly understood. This article proposes to portray the production of sound in films as a collaborative process that enables the director to think of sound as an element of expression – a tool with which to describe reality from another perspective, capable of creating possibilities for the sound director to translate emotions and feelings into sonorities due to the versatility of human sound perception. The usage of sound should take ri...
Toward a New Truth in Sound: Expanding the Boundaries of Direct Cinema
Since the emergence of Direct Cinema in the late 1950's, documentary films have presupposed a more accurate “claim of truth” over their subject matter. Advancements in portable recording technology after World War II allowed documentarians to dissolve the line between subject and object using un-obtrusive camera and sound recording techniques, often regarded as the “fly on the wall” style. From the Arriflex 35 and Nagra III audio recorder to the advent of the GoPro, direct cinema has evolved in concordance with the capabilities of new technology. Direct cinema's attempt to display “reality” through a strict code of aesthetics not only relies on the visual “outside observer” model, but must also take into account an accurate representation of sound and soundscape. What role then does sound play in constructing reality where verbal narration and non- diegetic music is absent? The latest ethnographic film of Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab, Leviathan (2012) will be examined as the forefront of the new direct cinema style. This immersive film provides a heightened sense of reality remarkably without the aid of traditional sound design. Since the idea of film-truth is debatable, can artistic integrity outweigh the actuality of events, or is the concept of truth supplanted by a more visceral, experiential understanding through stimulating new camera techniques and rich soundscapes?
Sonic Elongation: Creative Audition in Documentary Film
JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies
This paper investigates documentary films in which real-world sound captured from the location shoot has been treated more creatively than the captured image; in particular, instances when real-world noises pass freely between sound and musical composition. I call this process the sonic elongation from sound to music; a blurring that allows the soundtrack to keep one foot in the image, thus allowing the film to retain a loose grip on the traditional nonfiction aesthetic. With reference to several recent documentary feature films, I argue that such moments rely on a confusion between hearing and listening. Paper Imaginative sound design that stretches into musical texture can press at the fragile border between the fantasies of fiction film and documentary's fraught engagement with real-world footage. In narrative fiction film, the creative blurring of sound and music can suggest fictional worlds and question our reading of an image; it can form complicated and
The Sonic Summons: Meditations on Nature and Anempathetic Sound in Digital Documentaries
The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media
Over the last two decades, documentary has significantly benefited from the offerings of digital technologies. The emergence of new amateur and professional technological devices, interfaces, and platforms made documentary filmmaking more accessible and center stage amongst mainstream media practices by granting it further mobility, ubiquity, and connectivity. They also paved the way for enabling user participation, database and feedback integration, expanded means of archiving and transmission, and broader forms of inter-medial as well as re-mixable storytelling. However, despite all the interest in fulfilling digital documentary's new promises, filmmakers like Abbas Kiarostami and Aleksandr Sokurov, who are known for their frequent crossovers between fiction and nonfiction, seem to have channeled the new documentary's energy elsewhere. Coupling the aesthetic strategies of long-take cinema with abstract, eremetic meditations on nature, the works of these directors shift the focus from increased connectivity in documentary narratives to re-imagined connections among humans, technology, and nature in the digital era.
The Auditory Setting: Environmental Sounds in Film and Media Arts
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021
The Auditory Setting introduces and investigates how narrative and a sense of place are constructed in film and media arts through the reproduction and mediation of site-specific environmental sounds, or ‘ambience’. Although this sonic backdrop acts as the acoustically mediated space where a story or event can take place, there has been little academic study of sound’s undervalued role in cinematic setting and production. Drawing on theories of narrative, diegesis, mimesis and presence, and following a varied number of relevant audio-visual works, this book is a ground-breaking exploration of human agency in mediating environmental sounds and the nature of the sonic experience in the Anthropocene.
The Documentary Real: Thinking Documentary Aesthetics
Foundations of Science, 2016
In this article we consider the growing interest in recent years in the use of documentary strategies in the wold of contemporary art, film and performing arts and explore some of the central epistemological assumptions underpinning the persistent idea that the documentary should be equated with 'non-fiction'. Following Stella Bruzzi we argue that if documentary theory maintains objectivity as the primary measure of value, it will inevitably and continuously arrive at the conclusion that the documentary genre is fundamentally flawed. Instead, we propose to move beyond the 'realist epistemology' of documentary theory and focus on the 'documentary real', i.e. the specific performativity of the reality constructed in and by the documentary genre. In the last paragraphs, we introduce the various articles that address the ''documentary real'' in this special issue.
Mapping Spaces, Sounding Places: Geographies of Sound in Audio visual Media, 2019
Scholarly writing on Documentary film often prioritises the image over sound, as is the case with scholarly film analysis in a more general sense. The art of location/field Sound Recording, as opposed to music, scores and post-production Sound Design has been even more neglected as an area of academic research. This piece seeks to address this gap by drawing critical attention to the intricacies and skills involved in location/field Sound Recording within Observational Documentaries. It will seek to show how this art has an integral and vital function within the creative process of production, and in driving the narrative and the shaping of the text’s shaping of the filmic space. I will also consider the future of Sound within the Observational Documentary genre and its place in a new multi-platform, multi-screen consumption space. Through examining several case studies, I will seek to develop and define a new working methodology and aesthetic for the craft and art of location/field Sound Recording techniques, predicated on an anticipated resurgence of the genre, centred around opportunities afforded by the emerging technologies of immersive sound: ambisonic microphone arrays being a vital part of that development. Ambisonics is a method for representing a full three-dimensional sound field, and its genre-bridging adaptability means it can be converted to a dynamically steerable binaural format. Opportunities afforded by deploying an ambisonic-centred location/field Sound Recording methodology, utilising the craft and art of recording unscripted actuality Sound within the pro-filmic geographic event space, will have profound prospects for Observational Documentary makers and crucially, tomorrow’s Documentary audiences. Offering audiences an exciting new ability to experience the sense of geographical places and physical spaces that immersive audio delivers, bears the potential, I argue, of re-invigorating a content-driven Observational Documentary market, and foregrounding the primacy of neglected storytelling capabilities.