Review of the movie “Memoria”, written by João Marcos Albuquerque during the coverage of the 45th São Paulo International Film Festival.
“We gestate in Sound, and are born into Sight. Cinema gestated in Sight, and was born in Sound.” Walter Murch
The legendary editor Walter Murch says that, whilst in the womb, the main sense is hearing. The baby captures the sounds within the womb, the interior noises of their mother – the constant and muffled beating of the heart, the roars of the intestine, the pace of the organism at work. The other senses perceive little. Therefore, before we come into the world, inside of those who made us, we already listen and work on hearing, to the detriment of the other senses, which are almost in suspension mode, awaiting the arrival of light.
Cinema follows the opposite path to human birth. It comes first as an image, as a device accessible through sight. And only later, with technological advances, does sound emerge. I won't go into details, but the reception of sound in cinema by many filmmakers, including Eisenstein and Chaplin, was rather conflicting. They believed that Sound was redundant and turned cinema into a copy, a double of reality, and that sound, if and when used, should be applied differently, without coinciding sound with image, so as not to subdue sound film to theater. Therefore, these filmmakers advocated a use of sound completely different from the use that has prevailed in the history of cinema since then – sound as a shadow of the image, as an addendum, an accompaniment to what we see on the screen. Throughout history, we naturalized this understanding of what sound should be. No wonder we say that we see a movie, reducing the cinematographic experience to vision. This has been the trajectory of sound in cinema, in general, up to the present day – sound is always represented in the image, the source of sound is always apparent, the meaning of sound is always available – with rare exceptions.
Memoria, the last movie directed by Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, is one of these exceptions. In Memoria, sound is the main element of the narrative. The plot is nothing more than a woman searching for the source of a noise she hears. This noise, which we hear along with the character, is her leitmotiv, as well as the element to be deciphered, decoded, examined, pursued. It is the characters' raison d'être in the short time we follow her on screen. In the beginning, we don't know if the noise is external to the character, something that comes from the environment, but as the film unfolds we understand that the noise is internal, subjective. Here, we have one of the first breaks with the common use of sound in cinema: we do not find, in the image, the representation of sound. There are no visual clues to understand its origin, its source.
The absence of a representation of the sound in the image causes great strangeness – for me, even a certain tension, which escalated as the intervals between the noise shots became shorter. We enter the mystery together with the character. The sound afflicts us, the spectators, differently than it afflicts the character. For her, it is an investigative question, of psychic and existential health, whilst for us, it is also a cinematic question, of shock with the unusual. We are not used to seeing and hearing a film, only to seeing. We do not know the source of the sound, nor can we imagine it.
Michel Chifon, a great theorist of sound in cinema, says that there are three ways of listening. The causal way consists in hearing a sound to collect information about its source using context to comprehend it – when you hear a barking coming from your living room and associate the barking with Max since he is your only dog. The semantic way consists of sound being the vehicle of a message interpreted through code or language. The reduced way would be apprehension and analysis of the sound per se, as an element without relation to its source, meaning, or context. Sound as an object. In Memoria, we use the three ways of hearing throughout the journey of the main character. The studio scene in which Jessica (Tilda Swinton) tries to describe the sound she, and only she, hears, to Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego), the sound technician, is memorable. Jessica's difficulty in describing a subjective sound through objective words is immeasurable. How to describe a sound, how to describe a pain, how to describe something from the dimension of subjectivity? Jessica describes the sound attaching it to a hypothetical cause. She first describes the sound as “a huge ball of concrete falling onto a metal surface, surrounded by sea water”. Then, she says it is a metallic sound. Or an earthy sound. Towards the end, she says: “[the sound] is like a rumble from the Earth's core”. In her attempts to describe the sound to Hernán, we have the usage of causal hearing and semantic hearing. When she tries to represent the idea of sound through objects that collide, imagining what the sound of a concrete ball falling on a metal surface would be like, she invokes the use of causal hearing, as it gives a cause to the origin of the noise. Then, through the use of earthy and metallic adjectives, she tries to send a coded message to Hernán, making use of a semantic approach. Hernán, as Jessica progresses through the description, tries to create the sounds in his technological device. In a future scene, we see Hernán introduce to Jessica a piece of music he composed, since, in a way, he became obsessed with sound as an object, appreciated now because of its texture, vibration, etc. (reduced way of hearing).
Although the three listening modalities come into play, we still have no idea what that sound is. Our hearing only makes us more tense. Like Jessica, we remain adrift, with no explanation as to its source, its origin, its meaning. But, mainly, we still haven't been able to execute what we are so used to doing in our daily practice and cinephiles, we are not able to paste the sound into an image, and this leaves us perplexed, intrigued, suggested and desirous of a conclusion that will inevitably satisfy our immense difficulty in listening to a sound without an image representation.
Not to mention that it's awful not to be able to pinpoint the cause of something we feel. I remember when I was diagnosed with depression. What made me reach that diagnosis was a constant urge to urinate. I would go to the toilet and that feeling persisted. I went to several urologists, but none of them could find a cause. I would hope to find some bactéria, some biological cause, but after every exam, nothing would be found. And the urge to urinate persisted. Until one of the doctors suggested it could be depression. My worst fear was a subjective cause of a physical feeling. The cause of what I was feeling was subjective, psychological, my pain was not linked to a material cause. Just like the noise Jessica hears, at first.
My identification with Jessica was quick. And just like her, I sought an explanation for what afflicted me. But if my problem was caused by an illness, a psychic and physiological disorder, treated with medication and therapy, Apichatpong turned what was causing Jessica's problem into a fascinating event by the end of the film (we'll get there). Apichatpong suffered from Exploding Head Syndrome, which is what is portrayed in Jessica. Therefore, Apichatpong is inspired by this syndrome, messes it up, subverts it, and transforms it into a poetic material whose functionality is to be the gravitational field of the narrative. Just like Jessica and me, he does not know what causes his syndrome. However, unlike me and Apichatpong, Jessica discovers what is the source of the sound she hears.
Throughout the history of cinema, on few occasions, we deal with what the French musician and theorist, Pierre Schaeffer, calls acousmatics. A sound is acousmatic when we hear it without knowing its cause. Michel Chifon borrows this idea and creates the concept “Acousmêtre”. Acousmêtre is a character that we can only hear but never see them. From this characteristic seems to come enormous power. This is the case of the characters HAL, from the 2001 film, A Space Odyssey, and the character of the mother, in Psycho. In both cases, there is a voice that comes from a place we do not know exactly where. This connection between hearing-without-seeing and potency is the Acousmêtre that Chifon suggests.
This effect on the spectators depends on how long the film delays the fusion between sound and image. Until then, it is up to the spectator to imagine, speculate, create – which only adds to the tension and power emanating from the character. However, at the moment of fusion between image and sound, there is a vertiginous drop in the power of the character. The revelation of the sound's origin puts an end to speculation and gives a mundane aspect to what was once ethereal. And here we have another paradigm broken by Memoria. The moment of revelation is disconcerting. Its power is even stronger when we deal with its physical manifestation. And more questions arise. The revelation of the cause, of the origin, explains nothing to us. The answer given to us is not satisfactory, giving space to new questions. We are facing a new enigma. And the feeling that remains, in me, is one of complete and total stupefaction. I was flabbergasted.
When we leave the womb to our mother's arms, in this primordial contact, we begin to establish the first connections between what we hear during pregnancy and the source of those sounds, unconsciously. Our mother is not only the source of our lives, but the source of the first materials our senses come across, as well as the first fusion between sound and its origin. When Walter Murch says that cinema gestated in sight, and was born in sound, he sums up what I experienced when I watched Memoria: that birth of life that takes place, first, through sound. Murch had in mind a classification of sound elements and qualities that justify his idea of the birth of cinema through sound – a new temporality, continuity, possibilities of making and feeling cinema – I have in mind, only, the idea of birth, pure and simple, of a new kind of cinephilia, now that I have experienced cinema in this way. Memoria made me feel like a newborn to cinema due to the wonder of the interplay between sound and image.
I heard and saw Memoria. Apichatpong, first, led me to the origins, to the elementary life of gestation, when we hear without seeing, and then he led me to my birth again, when I could see what I heard. Now, I see/listen to cinema in a completely different way.
Article by João Marcos Albuquerque during the coverage of the 45th São Paulo International Film Festival.
MEMORIA
Written and directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul Colombia, France, Thailand - 2021 - 2h 16min
Rating: 5/5
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