HOW | SHOWING THE MAKING: SOUNDING PICTURES

The mercurial movements of an octopus play out before us, backed by an emergent score – gentle percussion, low, tempestuous synthesiser, live narration and more. This is a dramaturgy of sound in process, and is a snapshot of the key explorations and methodologies at the heart of Sounding Pictures.

On Saturday 2 November, as part of the COLLATION 2 programme, The Centre presented HOW | Showing the Making: Sounding Pictures, led by Neo Muyanga.

By inviting the audience into the process of Sounding Pictures: Live Scores to Short Silent Films, Muyanga and members of the Sounding Pictures ensemble, namely DAPHNE, Aragorn Eloff, Billy Langa, Arnaud van Vliet, Pertunia Msani, Micca Manganye and Stompie Selibe, provides the audience with the opportunity to witness the Sounding Pictures process and gain insight into the thinking, inspiration and techniques that shape it.

The same film twice, with different scores

Following a brief introduction by Muyanga, who contextualises the film, Obscure White Messenger, as a pre-existing work by the visual artist Penny Siopis, we watch the film again, this time with a different score.

This time, the tone of the film shifts. It is somehow slower, more haunting than before. In the absence of Langa’s spirited narration, there is Msani’s crooning vocals and DAPHNE’s eerie viola. In this simple act of viewing the same film twice, with two different scores and two different sonic, conceptual and emotional readings of the film, one is able to get to the heart of the Sounding Pictures project, listening deeply and responding collaboratively, intuitively, to hugely generative ends.

Collective viewing, collaborative interpretation

There is an inherently participatory nature to the silent film. In the absence of sound, the audience member is called upon to bring their own interpretation to each scene, each action playing out before them. In Sounding Pictures, this participation takes on a new form.

As the ensemble watches and responds musically to what they are seeing, live, so too does the audience who watches along with them. Only now, there is the activity of watching with the ensemble and also listening to their improvisatory score, ultimately filling in the gaps between intention and interpretation on the part of the filmmaker and the performer alike. It is a process of both deep listening, and collective viewing.

Experimental composition and the role of the body

While many of the films in Sounding Pictures are seen by the musicians for the first time during the live performance, there are also a few instances of films being seen by selected composers, in this instance, DAPHNE who composed for Milisuthando Bongela-Davis’ Ingqumbo, Aragorn Eloff who composed for Penny Siopis’ Events on a Timeline, and Arnauld van Vliet who composed for Naomi van Niekerk’s An argument against an ordinary life.

While for DAPHNE, composing means drawing on the emotional tones and themes of the film, Van Vliet thinks carefully about pairing certain instruments with specific imagery, and Eloff takes his lead from the environment in which the film is being seen. All of them, though, speak to the need to bring the process of composition, and of deep listening, into the body. Whether this is a way of eschewing a distant intellectual reading of the film, or allowing for more intuitive moments to emerge amongst an ensemble who is witnessing these films for the first time, the body as a deeply instinctual compositional tool.

Similarly, Billy Langa, who was Orator to many of the films, speaks to an intuitive knowing that emerges from the body – how language emerges from a place of responsive physicality, and also how silence can become an embodied state. For Eloff, the meeting of the body and technology as collaborative instruments and tools allows for an affective, visceral engagement with the sonic and visual material. A heart sensor attached to his ear and fed into a modular synthesiser equipped with a module to measure the parameters of atmospheric pressure, temperature and more, provides him with a live, organic sound determined by his body’s response to the immediate environment.

Altogether, these compositional approaches and ensemble responses provide us with an early, emergent methodology around the idea of responding, musically, to a silent film. It is as much about engaging or resisting the film as it is about listening to the image, the room, and one’s fellow musicians. In this way, it’s not necessarily about listening in the most correct or directly responsive manner, but rather in a way that resonates the most in the collective process.

CREDITS

CONCEPTUALISER | Neo Muyanga
MUSICIANS & PERFORMERS | DAPHNE, Aragorn Eloff, Billy Langa, Arnaud van Vliet, Pertunia Msani, Micca Manganye & Stompie Selibe
MOMENTEUR FOR THE SO ACADEMY | Athena Mazarakis