Philippa Lovatt

How do we conceptualize films in relation? As we seek to trace the connections and affinities we see, hear, and feel across a regional cinema, what kinds of alternative cartographies (affective, aesthetic, cultural, or industrial) emerge? How do we think through and with the aesthetic practices of artists and filmmakers in a way that enables us to avoid both re-inscribing arbitrary lines across territories and disavowing the specific historic and lived conditions of the nation? Drawing from Trinh T. Minh-ha’s writing on the acoustic experience of diaspora and Édouard Glissant on the poetics of relation, this essay discusses Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s Everyday’s the Seventies (2018) and Shireen Seno’s Nervous Translation (2017), and reflects on how we might consider regionality through the acoustic, affective, and emotional cartographies depicted in these works, both of which explore experiences of migration in and out of the region during the 1970s and 1980s.

A construct that works both above and below the nation, region is often an implied rather than explicit critical framework in cinema and media studies. This In Focus dossier mobilizes post-millennial Southeast Asian film and video cultures to conceptualize the place of region in the field. Across five essays, contributors theorize region as both a supranational space of collectivity and a subnational sphere of minoritarian and indigenous film practices. What kinds of networks can regional thinking engender? What histories does it unearth, and which might it obscure? How have states, industries, and institutions enabled or obstructed these exchanges? In what ways might parallel themes, aesthetics, and modes of production and circulation constitute a regional cinema? With these questions as a starting point, the essays cover a wide range of topics and approaches: filmmaking within contexts of authoritarianism, trans-regionalist aesthetics, industry studies, and ecocinema studies.

Expanding on Robert Stam’s idea that sound and image tracks in film can ‘mutually jostle, undercut [and] haunt…each other’ creating what he calls a ‘heterochronic… cinema , this thesis argues that close analysis of a film’s sound design can sometimes reveal a break in the seamlessness of a film’s narrative and formal structure when sound and image are used asynchronously. Synthesising Stam’s formal approach with the theoretical framework of temporal critique put forward by Bliss Cua Lim in her study of the ghost film, this study demonstrates how, like the ghost figure, this use of ‘unruly’ sound can similarly disrupt the concept of time as linear and the nation-state as a stable, homogenous entity. Analysing the use of ‘spectral sound’ in a group of important films produced in cultures of censorship by Bahman Ghobadi, Jia Zhangke and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the thesis argues that film form can itself be political – creating a sense of temporal dislocation that ‘makes the present waver’.  Alert to the ethical possibilities of listening to film, ‘Cinema’s Spectral Sounds’ argues that film sound can also play a crucial restorative role in that it can reposition oppressed memories and experiences centrally within the discourse of the present.

War films celebrated for their use of sound such as Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998) and The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008) have tended to focus on the subjective and phenomenological experience of war from the perspective of soldiers, whose agency and placement within the very centre of the action drives the film’s narrative. By contrast, the two Iranian films I will discuss here, Bahram Beizai’s Bashu, The Little Stranger (Bashu, gharibeye koochak, 1990) and Bahman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly (Lakposhtha parvaz mikonand, 2004) record the experience of war from the perspectives of those whose lives have been radically and violently disrupted by it, but who have had no active role in shaping its outcome. Focusing on the experiences of children, both films use sound design to articulate a sense of their characters’ fragmented subjectivity and powerlessness through techniques such as point-of-audition, close-perspective miking, and non-synchronous sound and image. In both films, characters rarely speak about their trauma. Instead, embodied sounds and vocalisations are heard on the soundtrack at key points in the narrative to align the spectator with their perspective while at the same time emphasising their characters’ vulnerability at the centre of the larger, global ‘sensate regimes of war’ in which they have no voice or control (Butler 2012, 110). In this way, the films discussed have strong affinities with other ‘anti-war’ films such as Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci, Jan Němec, 1964) and Come and See (Idi I smotri, Elem Klimov, 1985) that also feature children as their central protagonists. Through close, comparative analysis of the sound design in these films, I argue that sound can play a crucial restorative role by articulating a sense of characters’ agency and subjectivity so often denied to civilian victims of war both in official records and in their cinematic representation. As such I claim that the films offer a radical alternative to dominant conceptualisations of war as depicted in Hollywood cinema, challenging and broadening our understanding of the genre, as well as potentially deepening our understanding of the impact of war on the lives of civilians and refugees.

Frequently drawing on avant-garde formal strategies, bringing together personal, social and cultural memories in a cinematic collage, the films of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul recreate what Richard Dyer has called ‘the texture of memory’ (Dyer 2010). Using narrative techniques such as repetition, fragmentation, and convergence (as different threads of a narrative resonate uncannily both within and across the films), the work expresses what the process of remembering feels like, how the warp and weft of the past continuously moves through and shapes the present just as the present shapes our memories of the past. While sound design in classical cinema often privileges the voice, lowering ambient sound in order to ensure intelligibility while creating an illusion of naturalism, in these films ‘natural’ ambient or environmental sounds are amplified to the extent that they become almost denaturalized, thus heightening their affective power. In Blissfully Yours (Sud sanaeha, 2002), Tropical Malady (Sud pralad, 2004), Syndromes and a Century (Sang sattawat, 2006) and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Loong Boonmee raleuk chaat, 2010) the sound of the environment is often so dominant that it dismantles our reliance on the verbal or the linguistic to ground our understanding of what is happening in the narrative, and instead encourages (or rather insists upon) an embodied, phenomenological, engagement with the sensuality of the scene. This use of sound and textual synaesthesia foregrounds sound's materialism and its relationship to touch, sight, and taste, creating a feeling of sensory immersion on the part of the spectator where the senses seem to become indistinct. Alongside frequent bursts of pop music (expressing jouissance), the films’ sound designer Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr uses these environmental sounds to create rhythmic ‘sonic sequences’ that have themselves an almost musical quality reminiscent of experimental avant-garde compositions from the 1950s and 60s made up of single or multi-tracked field recordings. This essay examines these moments in Apichatpong's films and argues that they enable a sense of connection and intersubjectivity by appealing directly to the audio-viewer's shared knowledge of how we remember.

In recent years, there has been an increasing fascination with the nature of time and the motif of haunting in Asian cinema, as authors such as Bliss Cua Lim have explored how films can offer a critique of the dominant conception of time as homogenous and linear. Asserting that ‘fantastic narratives … [unhinge] the unicity of the present by insisting on … the jarring coexistence of other times’, she offers a way of thinking about cinematic temporality that is concerned with ethics and a Derridean sense of accountability. While Cua Lim argues that the cinematic apparatus ‘links vision to rationalized time’, this essay explores how film sound (like the ghost narrative) might similarly be able to create a sense of multiple, even divergent, temporalities. By creating a perceptible ‘gap’ in the seamlessness of a film's narrative and formal structure, sound can be an unruly force in its own right, acting like a mischievous or even belligerent ghost that exposes the progress narrative's conception of time as a myth. This essay explores this use of sound in the recent films of Jia Zhangke to investigate how they reconceptualize lived space-time in postsocialist China as heterochronic, both formally through the disjunctive use of sound and image, and thematically through their exploration of the heterogeneity of subjective and/or cultural memory. In doing so, I hope to be able to provide a useful analytical framework that can be productively mapped onto different cultural and historical contexts.