What the Water Said 4-6 is a piece that clearly uses the relationship of sound and image to create a thought or question. Without knowing what the background of the project, or what the images and sounds are, the piece would loose its mystique and not be interesting anymore. What the Water Said 4-6 is a collection of short films by David Gatten made by plunging film and audio reels into the ocean off the coast of South Carolina. After a period of time, both the film and the audio reels are brought up and played simultaneously.
Without that background, the film would suffer, but with it the film evokes many images and questions. The relationship of the audio to the image is very clear in the film. When the film looks more battered, resembling static, the audio reel sounds like deep static. When scratches are sparse and the film looks largely untouched, the audio is soft and calm. The sound and image work rhythmically together at times, sparking ones imagination as to just what the water must have been like at that time. A picture of nature begins to appear in the viewer’s mind of the water and what it must have been doing to create the sounds and images it creates.
The final roll, #6, was a unique and wonderful display of color and sound. The film stock turned out very blue, with lots of deep scratches revealing white behind the blue. The scratches were very round and were so frequent and fast they resembled fireworks. The audio was just the same, sounding like a never-ending stream of fireworks that popped and hissed. For a film made completely of scratches and bumps, the aesthetic quality of that experience was amazing.
With that said, it was interesting to see the relationship between sound and image in an unmanipulated way. By knowing that the scratched and tears in both reels where made by the ocean, and not the filmmaker, the cohesion that the two share feels much more incredible. The uninhibited abuse of nature on the reels, especially when the intensity of sound and image parallel each other so closely, serves to provide the viewer with a look at nature and its power.
Three hours, fifteen minutes before the hurricane struck was a completely different experience. It took quotes from victims of Hurricane Katrina three hours and fifteen minutes before the hurricane struck. Diorama figures are faded in between the quotes, with no sound. The intense emotion that Hurricane evokes is the catalyst for this films emotional pull. Without the deep feelings toward the subject, the film could not be silent, and would lose a lot of attention.
The silence in the film does a number of things. It forces the viewer to concentrate on the images and quotes rather than sound and image. If there is no sound to back up your images, the images stand alone, almost naked, so their quality and the message that the filmmaker is trying to convey must be that much clearer. By not having sound, the images popped out of the frame more, and were viewed as displays of art featured in film, rather than a traditional film.
Another thing silence does is create tension. In our world today, especially in an urban area, silence is hard to come by. To show a silent film at all creates tension in the viewer because they are not used to silence, especially in a group of people. The tension created by this film served wonderfully to bring the thoughts of that time back into the viewers mind.
The term “calm before the storm” comes to mind in respect to the silence in the film. The quotes were taken from before Katrina hit. The calm before the storm is a pretty usual saying. To have sound before a major event such as a Hurricane would only make the film seem small in comparison to the booming and crashing of Hurricane. Instead of sounding small, the lack of sound provides and ominous and tense precursor to what we all know to be a terrible disaster.
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1 comment:
Noah,
Both of these films seem to need some prior knowledge of there making, right? This is probably more necessary in the case of Gatten's film, as one might need to understand the process to understand it as a journal, or a biography/autobiography. He revisits a certain location and listens, to some degree, what the water says, or actually, what it does. And to clarify, he does not use audio reels for the creation of the sound. What we hear is drawn directly from the source of the film stock; the scratches, tears, salt, etc., as it has affected the film in the area of the soundtrack and how it is played back by the projector.
"three hours" uses a more widely considered/understood knowledge of sorts, and I think that the pacing and structure rely on our imagination to a large extent. Silence and simple text provoke us in a different way when considering the devastation of the hurricane. Its simplicity is the strongest element of it, in my opinion, and I think that you touch on that in your description of the urban cacophony we have come to expect (though Milwaukee is pretty quite in my experience).
R. Nugent
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