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The Ecology of Listening while Looking in the Cinema: Reflective audioviewing in Gus Van Sant's Elephant

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 January 2012

Randolph Jordan
Randolph Jordan*
Affiliation:
Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve blvd. West, FB 319, Montreal, QC, H3G 1M8 CANADA
*
E-mail: rj@randolphjordan.com
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Abstract

This article argues that the state of spatial awareness engendered by the art of soundscape composition can be productively extended to the act of listening while looking in the cinema. Central to my argument is how Katharine Norman's concept of reflective listening in soundscape composition can be adapted to reflective audioviewing in the audiovisual context of film. Norman begins the process of intersecting film theory and the discourse of soundscape composition by appealing to famed Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's theories of montage to illustrate how soundscape composition enables active listener engagement. I extend her discussion of Eisenstein to demonstrate how this filmmaker's thinking about sound/image synchronisation in the cinema – and R. Murray Schafer's own predilection for Eisensteinian dialectics – can be understood as a means towards the practice of reflective audioviewing. I illustrate my argument with an analysis of how the soundscape compositions of Hildegard Westerkamp have been incorporated into Gus Van Sant's film Elephant. Attention to the reflective qualities of Westerkamp's work open up new dimensions in our experience of the audiovisual construction of space in the film. Ultimately I argue that the reflective audioviewing prompted by Elephant can be carried into considerations of all films that make use of sound design for spatial representation.

Type
Articles
Information
Organised Sound , Volume 17 , Special Issue 3: Sound, Listening and Place II , December 2012 , pp. 248 - 256
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

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Discography

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