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Programme notes:

In each film: what is the relationship between sound and image? 

And of both sound and image in turn to ‘the archive’?

What aspects of each film do you like (and dislike)?

 

Jumana Manna, 2015, Palestine, 70 mins

Arabic with English subtitles

 

Jumana Manna is a sculptor and filmmaker whose work addresses how power is articulated through relationships, and the body’s relation to narratives of nationalism, and histories of place. A Magical Substance Flows into Mecontinues Manna’s exploration by drawing on the radio programme Oriental Music, made by the German-Jewish ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann for the Palestine Broadcasting Service. Travelling across Palestine, Manna meets groups Lachmann studied for his 1936–7 radio show, all while making new recordings of her own. The artist’s engaged conversations with Kurdish, Moroccan and Yemenite Jews; Samaritans; members of urban and rural Palestinian communities; Bedouins; and Coptic Christians in their homes and places of work and worship are interspersed with scenes of her parents in the family home in East Jerusalem, entangling Manna in the complex history of the city. Over 70 minutes, A Magical Substance Flows into Me attempts to challenge the logics of partition and segregation, and the colonial discourses that undergird them, to reimagine Palestine through the possibilities of sound and listening.

 

 

Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, 2013, Germany, 18 mins

Installation with Super 16mm film / HD

Performance: Rachel Aggs, Peaches, Catriona Shaw, Verity Susman, Ginger Brooks

Takahashi, William Wheeler; Sound Design: Rashad Becker

 

Six performers are following the score To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation which the composer Pauline Oliveros wrote in 1970 after reading the text SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas (who is also known for shooting Andy Warhol). Oliveros‘s composition asks the performers to choose five pitches each and to play very long tones, modulated or unmodulated. In the middle section of the piece the performers are invited to imitate each other‘s pitches and modulations. The cues in this piece are given collectively through light - a red section is followed by a yellow and a blue section, and there are two additional cues given by strobe light. The piece To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation values the unpredictable and unknowable possibilities that might be activated by not specifying pitches and rhythms. Nothing is known in advance of making the music. The instructions are chosen in order to insist on “a continuous circulation of power“ (Oliveros) between listening and sounding - a give and take that requires, as Oliveros says, an unusual attention to the relationship between oneself and others. The work poses the question of the possibilities and limits of a politics of musical and filmic forms. Can sounds, rhythms and light produce queer relations? Can they becomerevolutionary?

 
NB see 'bonus materials' below!

 

Natasha Lall, 2019, UK, 15 mins

 

The low-budget, science-fictional trilogy was created primarily as a form of escapism. It was a fun, cheap way to escape anxieties, mainly gender troubles. The realm explored is not wholly fictional. It references obsolete media and music from the 90s and 00s, namely SD cards and Eurotrance. The 20-year period covered is basically that of Lall’s whole life. Music technology is progressing at an increasingly fast rate and this satirical film mocks her inability to keep up with such progressions. These rapid changes to music technology parallel changes in regards to her gender and sexual identity. In real life, she feels a strong disassociation with her past gender identities spanning over the past 20~ years. In the films, she misunderstands the workings of past technologies from the last 20~ years. She naively attempts to understand the workings of recently obsolete technologies and admits defeat. Despite her young age, she already feels as if she has embarked on a long journey of exploration into her gender and sexual identity. She feels a sense of overwhelm at the rapidity of changing societal views and technologies in the digital age. She segues her personal gender troubled feelings into a trilogy that explores changes in music technology. The films are used to distance herself from crippling anxieties without completely removing herself from the situation.

 

This week, we are discussing important issues raised by Dylan Robinson in his book, Hungry Listening (2021). I have already sent you the text. Please contact me if you have not received it. 

 

Once in class, we can discuss together issues around

 

 

This is not an exhaustive list, but if you could all make a few notes under each heading and bring them to class, that would be much appreciated. You would be most welcome to bring soundtracks/soundworks etc that we can listen to with these ideas in mind.

CRiSAP UAL is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: MA Reading group 3 (Louise)
Time: Nov 10, 2021 10:30 AM London

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It’s over to you for the last texts and sounds of this session, which will be the final Reading and Listening group of term.

I have created a Padlet page for us to use – The Sound Gradually Dissolves; here is the link: 5epxcwn3eh2qj331

Following on from our Hungry Listening reading in which we considered the complexities of positionality in terms of reading, writing and critical listening, for this session, there are two tasks: 

In this way, I hope that we can think together about sound as a connecting mechanism; specific sound; unspecific sound; the life cycle of sound and much more.

Please come prepared to talk! For students in London, I would appreciate it if you could attend class in person unless there is good reason not to.

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