In the past few days, I’ve been working on a film called The River Woman, directed by Beatriz Santos, a former LCC student. This is her major project. However, she was unhappy with her first cuts and decided to go back into postproduction to fix the mistakes she sought to be reversible. In this film, I’ve a team of people working for and with me to accomplish a good mix. They are Jack Centro, who works as Foley Artist; Dereck de Abreu Coelho, who mixes the foley; and Harry Charlton, who composes music.

This project is way more demanding than Entre las Rocas, which will most probably be one of the pieces for my portfolio. The reasons why rely on the outcomes they have. The River Woman is not a micro-production – it lies between small and medium-sized production. It had 4 shooting days on location outside of the UK; during the pandemic in 2021, it had about 20 people working and about 4 actors; it has 3 composers working for the film (a famous fadista Beatriz Silva, her producer, a Catalan film composer, and my partner Harry Charlton); it was crowdfunded and funded by institutions inside and outside of the UK, and its most likely to hit the 2022 Film Festival Season, including the Berlin Film Festival, Malaga, Donosti, Curtas, Estoril and many others. Entre Las Rocas is an arthouse film shot by the film director with the help of a DoP, edited by him and co-edited by Miguel Frieiros; the main character is played by Javier Fleitas, his uncle and a non-actor; the other co-actor is played by himself; there’s no location sound. However, the sound team for ELR is more significant than any other team that worked on the film. Again, the people working on this film are the same partners working on TRW, besides Iñaki Romero Martinez, the music composer and designer.

What is the difference between TRW and ELR, and why did I pick ELR for my portfolio piece?

I’m a sound supervisor in both films, requiring the same attention. TRW requires a different type of concern, considering I’m being paid for that one. What that entails is the sort of approach the Director wants me to have towards the film – the final decision is always hers. In terms of creativity TWR is less creative. It doesn’t mean there’s no creativity, but it lacks artistry. The creativity TWR is more related to problem-solving. ELR, however, gets me to write sound onto the film. I get to decide what will sound, how it will sound and how that affects the narrative. All these ideas will be presented in a dossier to Jesus F. Cruz. It would be as if I was part of the screenplay writing process.

In my opinion, and no matter how good the sound designer is, the best sound is always the one that is written in the screenplay.

The more I work on this format, the more I understand that the best role to decide stuff related to sound, apart from being a sound designer, sound editor, or supervisor, is to be the Director itself. Directing, obviously screenwriting. So, having the chance to participate in sound writing is more valuable for me as an artist.

The influence of sound design on Lucretia Martel’s films is credited to her and not the sound designer. Not to say that in La Ciénaga, for example, the work of Hervé Guyader, Emmanuel Croset, Guido Berenblum, and Adrián De Michele didn’t have value at all. In fact, they were the ones who were awarded for best sound at Havana Film Festival in 2001. They indeed mixed and edited the film really well. However, who wrote and thought about the sound was Lucretia. Same case scenario for Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria – a film that I will later read about.

With ELR, my portfolio would be complete in two ways:

1. Technical Sound Design: everything that concerns editing, designing, recording, mixing, and supervising, will be covered in this film.
2. Conceptual Sound Design: everything that concerns the planning, pre-production, screenplay, and narrative sound will also be covered.

What would be The River Woman for?

Besides my demands from the Director, TRW will also allow me to practice and experiment. Many aspects are being put onto practice with this film:

1. All technical sound design.
2. How to supervise a team of artists.
3. How to deal with clients and satisfy the Director.
4. How to adapt.

For these reasons and many more, I will consider TRW as my tool to practice my skills before I start working seriously on ELR.

ELR / TRW screenplay and genre comparison.

Entre Las Rocas (trad. Inbetween the Rocks).

In terms of style, Entre Las Rocas resembles a retro psychedelic horror film from the 70s, such as House (1977) by Nobuhiko Obayashi, Suspiria (1977) by Dario Argento or The Holy Mountain (1973) by Alejandro Jodorowsky. When talking with Jesus F. Cruz, he also mentioned films such as Mandy (2018) by Panos Cosmatos, which is a referent of this style. In terms of acting, it resembles a lot of the overacting usually found in Argento’s films – exacerbated emotions and reactions. The film is shot 100% with a VHS camera, a format that is being brought back to the mainstream cinema – i.e. No (2012) by Pablo Larraín. It also counts with countless colourful imagery overlapping when conveying dreams and nightmares.

In terms of plot, it reminds me a lot of films like Alien (1979) by Riddley Scott or The Thing (1982) by John Carpenter in the sense that he touches a lot on the mythical story of Icarus. In both films, the character’s ambition leads them to disaster. Entre las Rocas is an adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness (1936) by H. P. Lovecraft – a story about a disastrous expedition to Antarctica, where two explorers find more than they had expected to find and handle. ELR is about a middle-aged male named Javi, who dreams of the mountains he lives next to and a supposed creature named Deu that lives inside a monastery – meaning God in Catalan. When he wakes up from that dream, his only goal is to find those mountains and meet Deu. Once he finds the monastery, Javi is possessed by Deu, and the film ends without opening more windows or giving more information.

In terms of sound, as previously mentioned, the film has no location sound, but it also hasn’t any dialogue. Dialogue is meant to be treated as texture or a hermetic form of communication unknown to the spectator. In fact, dialogue is treated as a sound effect. This will be perfect for contextualising with Michel Chion’s The Voice in Cinema. Additionally, it depends massively on sound design, music and foley. Without it, there will be no way of bringing the characters to life.

The River Woman

The River Woman is antagonistic in terms of genre. It’s a slow drama in Northern Portugal about a young woman, Sofia, who just lost her grandmother, Salomé, and is going through complicated grief at her house. While there, Sofia reflected on specific memories and recalled her grandmother’s first dive in the river, as she had been scared of swimming before. This works as a leitmotif for overcoming one’s fears and struggles in life, as the main character also suffers from insecurity.

The way the film was shot resembles films like Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), but the genre connects more with films such as Guadagnino’s Call me by your name (2017), with a ruralist twist that could be related to Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005). It also showcases some interest in traditional Portuguese revivalism.

This film, however, doesn’t have much sound writing. I would say its approach is more “Academy friendly” – sound is used as a prop, and sound design is not evaluated in terms of scriptwriting but by the quality and mixing of it.

I had this film on my watchlist for a long time, and it was recommended by a distant friend. Lucrecia Martel is an Argentinian filmmaker who debuted with La Ciénaga and won 2001 the Alfred Bauer Prize (as part of its Silver Bear series of awards to a film that “opens new perspectives on cinematic art”) at the Berlin Film Festival. Martel was part of an Argentinian New Wave that began in the 2000s. She treats her films away from standard filmmaking modus operandi, as she puts the sound first before thinking about the image. In fact, one of the trademarks of this new wave was related to the way dialogue – “(…) as soundtracks, and many times their sound texture is equally or more important than the meaning of the words.” (Aguilar, 2008).

Lucrecia Martel’s first three films are a trilogy entitled Salta, which relates to the Northern Province the director is from. La Ciénaga (2001) is the opening title, followed by The Holy Girl (2004) and The Headless Woman (2008). Her films opened an ongoing debate about Film Sound and the politics of women, class, race and gender.

La Ciénaga is a film about a miasmic family spending their summer vacation in a country near a jungle. It’s a portrait not only of young women but also of the ambiguous middle-class personalities in Argentina.

My First Impression

La Ciénaga, besides being the only way to be introduced to Martel’s cinema – for it being her debut and the beginning of the Salta Trilogy – is also the most challenging way. Watching this film relied on my all attention – one that I was probably not expecting to use. It opened my eyes to new ways of filmmaking, and my brain was trying to go through these virginal ideas without fearing missing out on any information.

It is a challenging film to watch, especially to listen to, considering that Lucrecia only thinks about framing once she gets on set. Sound is at an equal level as cinematography, and it feels like, as an avid film spectator, I have been indoctrinated into image-centric cinema. It feels contra natural. The image is fragmented – very few wide shots – and the sound is so expansive. It feels like it goes and never stops expanding. The sound picture is so complete that it is hard to understand. But subconsciously, I understood everything.

I am a native Spanish speaker, so I didn’t have the need to use English subtitles, but mid-way through the experience, I had to add them because I couldn’t understand a word of what the characters were saying. Not because of their accents but because of the way dialogues were treated. To be clear, this is not a technical issue and is far from a problem. This is an aesthetical decision.

This characteristic is something that goes against what Michel Chion defends as what cinema status quo is concerning sound:

(…) in voice recording what is sought is not so much acoustical fidelity to original timbre, as the guarantee of effortless intelligibility of the words spoken. Thus what we mean by vococentrism is almost always verbocentrism. Sound film is voco- and verbocentric, above all (…).

Chion, Michel – Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen

I could say that 30% of La Cienaga is more voco- than verbocentric.

Also, the acousmatic. What goes off-camera is far from a depiction of reality – it’s emotion itself. What I couldn’t see just made the meaning and the imagery stronger. Often, it happens the opposite when cinematography is the leader and sounds are props.

Posthumous Thinking

After watching the film, I found it hard to catalogue what I had just heard. The nature of the film takes some time to process and sink in. It often happens to me when I watch a movie, and it takes a least one night for me to speak about it. It took me a couple of interviews, articles and reviews to understand what was happening with sound.

As I started looking for more specialised information about the film, I realised the following things:

Many of these scholars are also profoundly researching Film Sound and ways of applying better practices and ideas in films. I read roughly 5 academic essays about La Cienaga, and I particularly enjoyed Jay Beck’s and Liz Greene’s analysis.

Jay Beck – Submerged in Sound: Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga (2008)

Jay Beck’s article is a well-referenced analysis. It merges many of the scholars mentioned above with interviews and masterclasses Lucretia Martel gave throughout the past 20 years. Interestingly, the article begins with one of Martel’s quotes which is very similar to how Michel Chion begins his book.

The space you see on the screen is an (…) optical illusion (…) called “perspective”.

Voice-over narration from Martel’s “la pileta invertida”, in Francisco Gutiérrez, “Siete notas sobre cine.” DVD/BluRay supplement, “La Ciénaga” Criterion Collection, 2015

This book is about precisley this phenomenon of audiovisual illusion, an illusion located first and foremost in the heart of the most important of relations between sound and image (…)

“Projections of Sound on Image” (2019) in Audio-Vision: Sound on screen. Columbia University Press, p. 5.

However, Martel ends up saying that “sound waves touch the viewer” and that experience can be haptic (“sound is the tactile and three-dimensional component of cinema.”). Martel’s emphasis on sound is profound and exclusive, as it does not relate to scoring music or cinematography. As Beck refers, the Argentinian invites the spectator to become an active listener: preparing to listen, observing what verbal and non-verbal messages are being sent, and then providing appropriate feedback to show attentiveness to the message being presented. This listening, however, doesn’t refer to understanding the intelligibility of the voice. In fact, voice, according to Martel and dialogue should be deconstructed – demystifying language and its intelligibility and using voice as a texture. A sound effect. Concerning dialogue, another characteristic of Martel’s style is the overlapping dialogue and speech patterns, which is also a trademark of Argentinian New Cinema.

(The dialogue’s) sound texture is equally or more important than the meaning of the words.

Gonzalo Aguilar in Other Words: New Argentine Film

Jay Beck makes many other reflections on Martel’s use of sound in his article for The Cine Files. One last point he makes is using Aural Objects – “objetos sonoros”. This term (Aural Objects) is used by Christian Metz to describe sounds in films that function as objects onto themselves – the sounds that resist without linkage.

Liz Greene – Swamped in Sound: The Sound Image in Lucretia Martel’s La Ciénaga/The Swamp

In the previous article written by Jay Beck, the same refers to Liz Greene to be one of the experts on Martel’s Sound:

The Interplay among voice, sound effects, and ambiences in the opening sequence has been explored in depth, most notably by Liz Greene (…)

Jay Beck – Submerged in Sound: Lucrecia Martel’s La Ciénaga (2008)

In Liz Greene’s article, there is another type of analysis. While Jay Beck goes in-depth and catalogues the many aspects of La Cienaga‘s sound, Greene enlarges her perspective onto a more general view of its impact in terms of narrative and message. The sounds in the film go beyond their ontological meaning concerning their parent object.

The researcher mentioned something that astounded me:

We’re not allowed into the head of any of Martel’s characters; instead we are kept at a distance.

In other words, the comprehension of La Ciénaga’s sound world isn’t done by analysing the point of view or the point of audition. Instead, the whole integrity of the soundtrack – is a non-naturalistic sound full of exacerbated, loud hyper-real sound. Greene states that the soundtrack is so powerful that the Sound Image – the image created in the audience’s minds through these aural cues – shades the mise-en-scene. This was explained by Jay Beck when he stated that sound was the carrier of linkage of shots as this was framed very closely.

In this blog post, I will brainstorm my current portfolio project ideas. I will highlight the necessary research and creative practices to undertake them. Firstly, and to help this breakdown, I will write down what is demanded from the assessment.

The Assessment

The Unit is split into two parts – Element 1 & 2.

Element 1 is focused on all the pre-production steps necessary to develop the projects. 

“Anticipates the long duration and process of your portfolio and provides the platform, experimental support and contextual environment needed to craft and prototype your individual projects.”

It’s an excellent time to develop questions and explore new techniques.

By the end of the assignment, I must hand in 20 entries in my research blog documenting the process, a 10 min presentation relating to one of the guest lecturers, and a proposal with 2 portfolio pieces.

Element 2 is focused on producing the ideas and later presenting, testing, critiquing, and showcasing them at the highest standard possible.

I am expected to hand in 2 portfolio works –  “These works will be fully articulated, staged and documented to the best of your ability for the hand-in date.” – accompanied with a written document of 2500 words.

This document should be structured in the following manner:

A) An overview of the portfolio (500 words): introduce the titles, overarching aims and questions your portfolio engages with. State the media use employed for both works and list specific durations and formal specifications. 

B) Press release/programme note for each piece (x2, 250 words): please write this with a public audience in mind, e.g., as if the text would go on a gallery wall or programme note. Make it exciting, transparent and communicative. Ensure you have the project title at the top of each project. 

C) Indication of the research undertaken (500 words): demonstrate your process by reflecting on the trials, experiments and any public presentation of the works. You can include (web-sized) images but embed them into the document rather than keeping them separate. 

D) Critical appraisal of one of the pieces of work (1000 words): you should select one work from your portfolio to analyse in greater depth. This appraisal should interrogate your work concerning its practice-based and theoretical contexts. You should discuss your work within its relevant sound art contexts and articulate the aims, achievements and findings of your work and process. 

My Portfolio

Audiovisuals and/or audio for visuals. For this Unit, I want to focus on the capabilities of sound when put together with visuals. In my professional and artistic future, I want to explore traditional audiovisual formats – such as feature films and short films – but also ways of applying audio and sound to different “visuals” – paintings and photography.

This choice of topics makes sense in my practice due to my prior relation to the moving image. For more than five years, I’ve been studying and working with films, reading a lot of film sound theory and participating in different positions in movie production.

This portfolio will allow me to continue researching the practice and expand the notion of implementing audio in visual art. By following the literal meaning of the format – audio + visual – I will work in unusual scenarios. It will be an exciting journey where I will also try to apply notions of practice as research, previously introduced by the tutor Mark Peter-Wright.

Piece no.1 – Sounding a Short-film

For Element 1, I will write, record, edit, design, and mix sound for a short film directed by the Canarian Jesús F. Cruz. This young director, which whom I have the pleasure of collaborating, has a distinctive film style. He graduated in 2021 from ECAM (School of Cinematography and Audiovisual of the Community of Madrid), where he studied Documentary Film. However, most of his films are fictional dramas with experimental aesthetical backgrounds. I will be working with him on a movie he recently shot and co-edited entitled Inbetween the Rocks (translated from the Spanish Entre Las Rocas), starring Javier Cruz Fleitas. On my side, I will supervise Jack Centro and Dereck de Abreu Coelho to assist me with the process of foley recording, and also Iñaki Romero Martinéz, who will do music design and composition. It is a film shot on VHS but has no location sound. The screenplay has little to no dialogue. It will be interesting to work around this project, knowing that most sounds need to be created from scratch. 

The plot: In a Lovecraftian-inspired scenario, Javi, the protagonist dreams of a monster, Deu, that lives in a monastery up in the mountains where he lives nearby. He wakes up and follows the exact location where he thinks Deu lives through paintings of those same mountains. Once he gets there, his curiosity dies with him. In the end, it is inclusive whether Javi breaks, but the spectator knows Javi’s spirit is possessed by this creature. 

Piece no.2 – Sounding a painting

Since painting is a visual art form, I will give it sound the same way one designs sound for a moving image. However, the process will only have something related to editing and designing sound for film.

Firstly, the paintings still need to be made. For that, I will collaborate with the painter Marta Paula, finishing her BA in Fine Art at Camberwell College of Arts (UAL), who will guide me through this process I’m yet to learn. I’ve never painted in my life. I need to figure out what tools to use or how to start. Marta will try to teach and guide me through the world of paintings. My goal is to paint a frame by the end of next term. 

For this matter, I will apply methods of practice as research. It is a challenging and risky goal, but something, either good or bad, will come out of this process. I am already in talks with Marta, and she is happy to help and collaborate.

Additionally, I will help Marta help me create a sound piece, finishing the circle of reciprocal learning. Therefore, I will introduce her to sound art and teach her how to make sound pieces.

Thoughts

The portfolio layout makes sense regarding my professional and artistic future objectives. I want to work, explore and challenge visuals through sound. It will also allow me to explore and expand my horizons. It will allow me to challenge myself as well.

Some questions that come with Piece no.1:

1. How will I record ADR voices?
2. How to be a Sound Supervisor?
3. How can I submerge the spectator in sound?

Some questions that come with Piece no.2:

1. Which styles will I be aiming at?
2. Will it work?
3. Are there existing practices that relate to painting and sound?
4. How can I transcend the painting itself with sound implementation?

In the next blog post, I will answer the questions.

Problems of Begining

In the context of my practice, beginning a project is rather daunting to think about. “The blank slate might be the most intimidating place in a creative environment.” (DeSantis, 2015). I usually surround myself when the “whys” of making and, later “how”. I also find myself stuck in unrealistic scenarios, which subsequently cause a lack of motivation to accomplish any work.

Dr J Milo Taylor, in his first lectures, encourages students to engage their work under the ideas of the composer and educator Dennis DeSantis. In 2015, he wrote a book entitled ” Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers”, which became very helpful for this class.

Despite the target being electronic musicians, the book suits any practice. I don’t identify as an electronic musician but as a sound artist and designer, and not all the examples in the book relate to my practice. However, right in the first chapter, Problemas with Beginning, DeSantis suggest that one of the ways to commence any project is to start with what you know: the writer suggests that a “real instrument” might be easier to work with rather than a MIDI or DAW focused instrument, but I saw it the other way around. Once I started uploading my field recordings onto the DAW, ideas began to flow, and that energy extended as soon as I got myself practising and making ideas work. Before that, I had my field recordings in a folder without playing them and without a clue how to use them creatively.

The Piece – No te muevas, mira, escucha.

In the same chapter, DeSantis states that the only way of producing is by just doing. And that’s what I precisely did. Without thinking of any pre-established idea or concept, I placed the field recordings in the daw and started playing with them. After 20 minutes of listening, a structured idea began to form, and as soon as I got it clear, I stuck to it and explored ways of enhancing it.

Before starting, I thought of something that kept me reluctant – what material I should use. I didn’t have immediate access to any instrument or tool to record sound. I did have internet, but I didn’t have a vital subject. Therefore I used field recordings of a colleague of mine – Gonzalo Vergara. He is a sound recordist for films and significant events, and days before, I asked him for a sound he had recorded on set that he found particularly interesting. The folder he sent me had at least 7 files, which contained audios of particular sounds – the sound of a bird that could be heard from afar, the sound of a cat licking a microphone, the sound of an old boiler, and similar noises.

While playing around with the sounds, I remembered Francisco Lopéz paper Environmental Sound Matter, where he mentions the impossibility of hiding oneself from a field recording without adultering the file (Lopéz, 1998). Gonzalo’s recordings were filled with rustles and microphone noises, so I decided to work around that idea and created a wall of layered noises resembling a visceral and disturbing percussive drone.

The piece’s name is “No te muevas, mira, escucha”, meaning Don’t move, look, listen, which was what one of Gonzalo’s colleagues was saying while recording the boiler. It is interesting to relate the piece’s name with the music itself. The piece has a lot of movement and works around non-quiet soundscapes.

Conclusion

I found this experience to be very liberating. It freed me from regular preassumptions about art making and its fundaments. This piece could also be the beginning of my portfolio idea. What will come after this? An album? An installation? And audiovisual piece?

References

DeSantis, D. (2015) Making music: 74 creative strategies for electronic music producers. Berlin: Ableton.

Lopéz, F. (1998) Environmental Sound Matter. V2.