James Batcho, Ph.D., teaches and writes about filmmaking, sound and hearing, aesthetics and storytelling. He is the author of three books and numerous peer-reviewed academic essays. Currently working independently on a new book series on "creative philosophy." www.jimbatcho.com Address: Seoul, Korea
Stanley Kubrick is regarded as a filmmaker of complex imagery. Yet the vitality of his more metap... more Stanley Kubrick is regarded as a filmmaker of complex imagery. Yet the vitality of his more metaphysical works lies in what is unseen. There is an embodiment to Kubrick’s films that maintains a sense of subjectivity, but one which is unapparent and non-visual. This opens another way into Kubrick’s works, that of conditions of audibility (hearing/listening), affectivity, and signs. To think of embodiment from such an audible perspective requires one to subvert film spectatorship (the frame) and instead enter the reality of the film’s immanent, borderless unfolding as itself. This essay applies Gilles Deleuze’s semiotic concepts of cinema, metaphysics, and subjectivity to conditions of audibility and unseeing, a connection Deleuze largely ignored in his writings. These dual concepts of audibility and unseeing break prevailing analytical norms in cinema discourse that affirm limitations via material, visual, textual, and spatial reification: subjective-objective delineations, the body and the gaze, sound as necessarily spatial/material, and the dominance of images in regard to aesthetics, surveillance, and evidence. Instead, this essay moves through Kubrick’s constructions of milieu that are unseen in the midst of an otherwise visual unfolding, and audible in the midst of an otherwise sonic unfolding. To consider Kubrick’s films through their audible embodiment, one must detach (1) the microphone from its adherence to space, (2) the body from its visual gaze. Here, sounds, images, and objects become secondary to hearing and signs in a temporal unfolding, resulting in a cinema that is experiential rather than representational. This opens to an actuality of spirit within the world of the film, offering new opportunities for creativity in the cinematic form.
While the previous chapter was an overview of Malick’s temporal shift, this chapter explores his ... more While the previous chapter was an overview of Malick’s temporal shift, this chapter explores his post-Days of Heaven films in depth from the standpoint of unseeing. Shifting states of listening resonate an ethics of openness in The Thin Red Line, The New World, and The Tree of Life. A more hopeful chapter than the audible failures of Chap. 4, listening becomes a re-engagement with lost time through acts of recollecting and imagining. Malick presents a listening that resonates hearing and moves toward new durations: listening-for, listening-to, listening beyond, and answering the call of new thinking. Moving through deep unseeing expressions in Malick’s work, it brings Kierkegaard, Deleuze, and Heidegger together to unfold themes of love, family, redemption, and the desire to reconnect and ultimately reform a lost unity.
ABSTRACT The wonder of animation lies in its ability to create entirely new worlds that exist onl... more ABSTRACT The wonder of animation lies in its ability to create entirely new worlds that exist only in the imagination. Much care is taken to render these worlds visibly in great detail. Sound, however, is grounded in everyday reality in order to legitimize our expectations of experiential logic and continuity. This paper argues for new ways of thinking about how sound might move beyond this strict adherence to the visual by going beyond the rational. The problem of sound design is that it is an exercise in satisfying modes of Cartesian dualism, which separates the outside world of extension from the inner world of consciousness. Sound design should instead be conceived phenomenologically, as modes of disclosure and nondisclosure to consciousness. I propose new ways of thinking about the sonic connection of character to lifeworld, and in the process offer a critique of prevailing notions of film theory as related to the hearing and listening subject.
Moving to The Thin Red Line and beyond, both Malick’s cinema and the prose of the book move into ... more Moving to The Thin Red Line and beyond, both Malick’s cinema and the prose of the book move into an ethics of recollection and repetition. Malick’s increasingly vertical temporality is evident in shifting states of simultaneity (shared time) and coexistence (shared times). Memory is explored particularly through Kierkegaard and Deleuze, but also Heidegger, Bergson, Arendt, Salome, Silverman, and Bachelard. Layers of cinematic temporality are expressed through fragmented hearing, a multiplicity of voices, and a loss of object/sonic causality. Malick’s temporal leaps and crystalline audibility break the sensory-motor condition and express the thought of his characters. His logos reconnects fragmentations of loss and forgetting through recollection, repetition, dreaming, and reverie. Audibility breaks the spatial/material concerns of sound, as hearing shifts through questions of immanence, transcendence, spirit, eternity, and infinity. Malick’s withering logos is also addressed, proposing that his films after The Tree of Life were a slip into habit and failures to take account. Narration is given particular attention, not for its syntax but as gatherings of thought and its ability to utter the unspeakable.
This chapter is a deep exploration of present unseeing in Malick’s Days of Heaven—a film about a ... more This chapter is a deep exploration of present unseeing in Malick’s Days of Heaven—a film about a failure to listen. The film applies Peirce’s and Deleuze’s semiotics to audible relations: firstness (hearing), secondness (listening), and thirdness (nomos). The film’s release corresponds with the emergence of mixing as an art form, which is a means of establishing relational modes of hearing and listening. It anticipates the film’s twin conflicts through the ambience of the locusts and the characters’ lack of audible openness. Both elements become knowable only in sight and by then it is too late. Without hearing, listening does not occur; without listening, secondness never gains its thirdness (nomos). Plato’s Myth of Er, Aristotle’s Poetics, Nietzsche’s readings of Heraclitus, and major Deleuzean concepts are all addressed in the context of the film.
This article is not about new scientific understandings of physiological hearing. Instead it prop... more This article is not about new scientific understandings of physiological hearing. Instead it proposes that within any act of hearing listeners fall back on existing fields of understanding or they ...
This paper builds upon concepts of simultaneity and coexistence offered by Bergson and Deleuze to... more This paper builds upon concepts of simultaneity and coexistence offered by Bergson and Deleuze to explore new and interrelated approaches to cinematic audibility. Synchronization and synchresis , widely used in film sound studies, approach sonic time from the distance of audioviewership, taking film as a transcendent work of art whose meaning is understood through audience observation. This paper moves the experience inward, asking what is audible within the film world itself. Simultaneity and coexistence penetrate cinematic time to unravel an immanent multiplicity of audible layers or threads that occur in concert with and independent of image-events. Although he wrote about music and voices, Deleuze had little to say about non-systemic sound, nor an immanent audibility. Therefore, rather than strictly adhering to Deleuze’s concepts of cinema, this paper modifies simultaneity and coexistence for the audible dimension. Simultaneity is a multiplicity of events that share a single time (duration) independent of any one visual space, while inseparable from some mental connection to spaces. This is the hodological aspect of time, the conjoining of virtual and actual in the present. Coexistence is a multiplicity of events that share multiple times (durations) independent of any one visual space, while inseparable from some mental connection to spaces. Coexistence is the crystalline aspect of time, the layering of virtual and actual as distinct—a present-time plus thinking-time that opens to new lines of flight in cinematic sound and imagery. It is the mode that sees beyond seeing to another seeing not based on familiar or habitual associations. This paper addresses specific limitations in film sound theory, which poorly account for a multiplicity of time. It instead situates synchronization, synchresis, simultaneity and coexistence as various sonic/audible states with different creative potentialities. Films engaged include works by Antonioni, Gondry, Lynch, Malick, Pakula, Wenders and others.
Sound in television news broadcasting is dominated by perceived authoritative voices, resulting i... more Sound in television news broadcasting is dominated by perceived authoritative voices, resulting in a narrowing of ideas and a restriction of experiential and cultural representation. Television news offers audiences selective access to events through a suppression of environmental ambient sound. It thereby actively removes the context of an event and denies the public a broader sense of the event’s present significance. This article is a critique of the way in which media institutions and their practitioners wield the tools of their industry to manipulate audible content in order to preserve their own interests over those of the public. It begins with a brief historical examination of technology and the institutional practices that developed through the emergence of radio, sound films, and television. I then argue that through such technology and practice, television news decontextualizes the sound of events in order to overwrite them with authoritative analysis. As my main example, I offer two versions of the Howard Dean “scream” – one as presented through the broadcast institution and the other as presented through independent media and the internet. These two versions of the same event reveal how audible misrepresentation threatens news as public good and the documentation of history.
This essay centers on the question of political action in a technologically mediated abundance of... more This essay centers on the question of political action in a technologically mediated abundance of political possibility. It argues that from the election of Trump through the politicizations of Covid, tech-enabled discourses exacerbated an intransigent rhetorics of opposition and division. This atmosphere is and continues to be fueled by mimetic reproductions of capitalist news media strategies acted out by individuals on social media platforms. The liberal/enlightenment tradition of dialectics — opposition, contradiction and negation — emerges as religious struggle of good versus evil. For politics to change, strategies must change. To shake the resentment of our time, we must, as political voices, embrace an ethics of difference and engage in viral expressions of creative action. At issue is not side against side, nor even power against power, but an affirmation of living in an age that demands survival.
Stanley Kubrick is regarded as a filmmaker of complex imagery. Yet the vitality of his more metap... more Stanley Kubrick is regarded as a filmmaker of complex imagery. Yet the vitality of his more metaphysical works lies in what is unseen. There is an embodiment to Kubrick’s films that maintains a sense of subjectivity, but one which is unapparent and non-visual. This opens another way into Kubrick’s works, that of conditions of audibility (hearing/listening), affectivity, and signs. To think of embodiment from such an audible perspective requires one to subvert film spectatorship (the frame) and instead enter the reality of the film’s immanent, borderless unfolding as itself. This essay applies Gilles Deleuze’s semiotic concepts of cinema, metaphysics, and subjectivity to conditions of audibility and unseeing, a connection Deleuze largely ignored in his writings. These dual concepts of audibility and unseeing break prevailing analytical norms in cinema discourse that affirm limitations via material, visual, textual, and spatial reification: subjective-objective delineations, the body and the gaze, sound as necessarily spatial/material, and the dominance of images in regard to aesthetics, surveillance, and evidence. Instead, this essay moves through Kubrick’s constructions of milieu that are unseen in the midst of an otherwise visual unfolding, and audible in the midst of an otherwise sonic unfolding. To consider Kubrick’s films through their audible embodiment, one must detach (1) the microphone from its adherence to space, (2) the body from its visual gaze. Here, sounds, images, and objects become secondary to hearing and signs in a temporal unfolding, resulting in a cinema that is experiential rather than representational. This opens to an actuality of spirit within the world of the film, offering new opportunities for creativity in the cinematic form.
While the previous chapter was an overview of Malick’s temporal shift, this chapter explores his ... more While the previous chapter was an overview of Malick’s temporal shift, this chapter explores his post-Days of Heaven films in depth from the standpoint of unseeing. Shifting states of listening resonate an ethics of openness in The Thin Red Line, The New World, and The Tree of Life. A more hopeful chapter than the audible failures of Chap. 4, listening becomes a re-engagement with lost time through acts of recollecting and imagining. Malick presents a listening that resonates hearing and moves toward new durations: listening-for, listening-to, listening beyond, and answering the call of new thinking. Moving through deep unseeing expressions in Malick’s work, it brings Kierkegaard, Deleuze, and Heidegger together to unfold themes of love, family, redemption, and the desire to reconnect and ultimately reform a lost unity.
ABSTRACT The wonder of animation lies in its ability to create entirely new worlds that exist onl... more ABSTRACT The wonder of animation lies in its ability to create entirely new worlds that exist only in the imagination. Much care is taken to render these worlds visibly in great detail. Sound, however, is grounded in everyday reality in order to legitimize our expectations of experiential logic and continuity. This paper argues for new ways of thinking about how sound might move beyond this strict adherence to the visual by going beyond the rational. The problem of sound design is that it is an exercise in satisfying modes of Cartesian dualism, which separates the outside world of extension from the inner world of consciousness. Sound design should instead be conceived phenomenologically, as modes of disclosure and nondisclosure to consciousness. I propose new ways of thinking about the sonic connection of character to lifeworld, and in the process offer a critique of prevailing notions of film theory as related to the hearing and listening subject.
Moving to The Thin Red Line and beyond, both Malick’s cinema and the prose of the book move into ... more Moving to The Thin Red Line and beyond, both Malick’s cinema and the prose of the book move into an ethics of recollection and repetition. Malick’s increasingly vertical temporality is evident in shifting states of simultaneity (shared time) and coexistence (shared times). Memory is explored particularly through Kierkegaard and Deleuze, but also Heidegger, Bergson, Arendt, Salome, Silverman, and Bachelard. Layers of cinematic temporality are expressed through fragmented hearing, a multiplicity of voices, and a loss of object/sonic causality. Malick’s temporal leaps and crystalline audibility break the sensory-motor condition and express the thought of his characters. His logos reconnects fragmentations of loss and forgetting through recollection, repetition, dreaming, and reverie. Audibility breaks the spatial/material concerns of sound, as hearing shifts through questions of immanence, transcendence, spirit, eternity, and infinity. Malick’s withering logos is also addressed, proposing that his films after The Tree of Life were a slip into habit and failures to take account. Narration is given particular attention, not for its syntax but as gatherings of thought and its ability to utter the unspeakable.
This chapter is a deep exploration of present unseeing in Malick’s Days of Heaven—a film about a ... more This chapter is a deep exploration of present unseeing in Malick’s Days of Heaven—a film about a failure to listen. The film applies Peirce’s and Deleuze’s semiotics to audible relations: firstness (hearing), secondness (listening), and thirdness (nomos). The film’s release corresponds with the emergence of mixing as an art form, which is a means of establishing relational modes of hearing and listening. It anticipates the film’s twin conflicts through the ambience of the locusts and the characters’ lack of audible openness. Both elements become knowable only in sight and by then it is too late. Without hearing, listening does not occur; without listening, secondness never gains its thirdness (nomos). Plato’s Myth of Er, Aristotle’s Poetics, Nietzsche’s readings of Heraclitus, and major Deleuzean concepts are all addressed in the context of the film.
This article is not about new scientific understandings of physiological hearing. Instead it prop... more This article is not about new scientific understandings of physiological hearing. Instead it proposes that within any act of hearing listeners fall back on existing fields of understanding or they ...
This paper builds upon concepts of simultaneity and coexistence offered by Bergson and Deleuze to... more This paper builds upon concepts of simultaneity and coexistence offered by Bergson and Deleuze to explore new and interrelated approaches to cinematic audibility. Synchronization and synchresis , widely used in film sound studies, approach sonic time from the distance of audioviewership, taking film as a transcendent work of art whose meaning is understood through audience observation. This paper moves the experience inward, asking what is audible within the film world itself. Simultaneity and coexistence penetrate cinematic time to unravel an immanent multiplicity of audible layers or threads that occur in concert with and independent of image-events. Although he wrote about music and voices, Deleuze had little to say about non-systemic sound, nor an immanent audibility. Therefore, rather than strictly adhering to Deleuze’s concepts of cinema, this paper modifies simultaneity and coexistence for the audible dimension. Simultaneity is a multiplicity of events that share a single time (duration) independent of any one visual space, while inseparable from some mental connection to spaces. This is the hodological aspect of time, the conjoining of virtual and actual in the present. Coexistence is a multiplicity of events that share multiple times (durations) independent of any one visual space, while inseparable from some mental connection to spaces. Coexistence is the crystalline aspect of time, the layering of virtual and actual as distinct—a present-time plus thinking-time that opens to new lines of flight in cinematic sound and imagery. It is the mode that sees beyond seeing to another seeing not based on familiar or habitual associations. This paper addresses specific limitations in film sound theory, which poorly account for a multiplicity of time. It instead situates synchronization, synchresis, simultaneity and coexistence as various sonic/audible states with different creative potentialities. Films engaged include works by Antonioni, Gondry, Lynch, Malick, Pakula, Wenders and others.
Sound in television news broadcasting is dominated by perceived authoritative voices, resulting i... more Sound in television news broadcasting is dominated by perceived authoritative voices, resulting in a narrowing of ideas and a restriction of experiential and cultural representation. Television news offers audiences selective access to events through a suppression of environmental ambient sound. It thereby actively removes the context of an event and denies the public a broader sense of the event’s present significance. This article is a critique of the way in which media institutions and their practitioners wield the tools of their industry to manipulate audible content in order to preserve their own interests over those of the public. It begins with a brief historical examination of technology and the institutional practices that developed through the emergence of radio, sound films, and television. I then argue that through such technology and practice, television news decontextualizes the sound of events in order to overwrite them with authoritative analysis. As my main example, I offer two versions of the Howard Dean “scream” – one as presented through the broadcast institution and the other as presented through independent media and the internet. These two versions of the same event reveal how audible misrepresentation threatens news as public good and the documentation of history.
This essay centers on the question of political action in a technologically mediated abundance of... more This essay centers on the question of political action in a technologically mediated abundance of political possibility. It argues that from the election of Trump through the politicizations of Covid, tech-enabled discourses exacerbated an intransigent rhetorics of opposition and division. This atmosphere is and continues to be fueled by mimetic reproductions of capitalist news media strategies acted out by individuals on social media platforms. The liberal/enlightenment tradition of dialectics — opposition, contradiction and negation — emerges as religious struggle of good versus evil. For politics to change, strategies must change. To shake the resentment of our time, we must, as political voices, embrace an ethics of difference and engage in viral expressions of creative action. At issue is not side against side, nor even power against power, but an affirmation of living in an age that demands survival.
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