Author: Raul Azevedo Ramos

We need to talk about Kevin, a film directed by Lynne Ramsay and released in 2010 in a British-American co-production, starring Tilda Swinton, John C. Riley and Ezra Miller. Sound design was conceived by John Davies, who had already collaborated with Ramsay on We were never really here. The film talks about Eva Khactchadourian’s awful experience raising a child, which undertook to the toxic relationship between both and consequently ended up in a tragic and horrific scenario.

The film could be separated into three parts:

1st – in the first minutes of the film, we get to know Eva Khactchadourian’s current state: she’s emotionally affected by one happening in her life; she is living by herself and just moved into a new neighbourhood; Eva doesn’t have a good relationship with her neighbours; she’s looking for a job.

2nd – raising Kevin, from the fecundation to adolescence. It explores Eva’s emotional relationship with her son, with her past, present and future. We get to know how badly she thinks her life is over after the birth of her first child. It is more abstract and surreal. The spectator understands Eva’s perspective on how fleeting was her life when she was happy and how ambiguous it became after Kevin’s appearance. This part builds up to the bigger reveal: the massacre.

3rd – rationalisation of Kevin’s crime; the conscious perspective of reality and present; The film no longer goes under a post-modern veil. Actions develop more avidly and consciously. Both Eva and the spectator know what is about to come. 

4th –  the massacre; ending. The film goes back to step 1, and the spectator goes again through Eva’s lucid realisations of her past and present self. It has all the information needed to understand Eva’s struggle. The last scene could be considered the dismantling of all this anxious belief that she held till that final moment.

As Brett Ashleigh states in her article A Feminist Approach to sound in ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’, the film is a multidisciplinary audiovisual piece. It tells the main character’s story through all the different stems. In the first 30 minutes, the film goes through Eva’s flashbacks, which mix both emotional, sensory, and psychological. It was a pure audiovisual piece where sound and image communicated perfectly, giving the storyline a lot more intensity. The sound design exists almost separately from the visual narrative, as though the same story were told from divorced perspectives. Ashleigh also separates the different speeches present in the film: the female narrative and the patriarchal linearity. This idea is reinforced by the book The Laugh of the Medusa, written by Helen Cixous, which explains that l’ecriture féminine “is the practice of writing in spiralling compositions to move the writing outside the sphere of patriarchal linearity to alter the narrative structure. The use of non-vocal or non-linguistic sound elements representing feminine cinematic art is predominant throughout the film. 

Nevertheless, this type of language could be resumed as the point of view, which assumes in We Need to Talk About Kevin an essential role to demystify the world from Eva’s perspective. In this case, it could be the point of audition: “In films and television, a diegetic sound that is perceived by a particular character. The aural equivalent of a point-of-view shot: e.g. if a person is hiding under blankets, the sounds heard by them, and the audience is muffled. (Oxford, 2021). 

point-of-audition sound. Oxford Reference. Retrieved 23 Oct. 2021, from https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100333623.

The Nine Muses, directed by John Akomfrah, is a 90-minute experimental documentary with traces of essay film that resumes the departure of many African-Caribbean people to the United Kingdom in the 60s and 70s. The film is composed in remembrance of Homer’s Odyssey. It is divided into nine chapters, each dedicated to one of the nine Muses, the daughters of Mnemosyne, the personification of memory in Greek mythology. Akomfrah uses an amalgam of visual sources, either recorded on location or from archives, and it is sonically defying as it comprises texturised noise sounds, with archive sounds and recorded music from Paul Robeson, Arvo Pärt, Leontyne Price, Handel, and his collaborator from BAFC (Black Audio Film Collective) Trevor Mathison. It also has an ongoing speech with quotes from Nietzsche, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Joyce, Emily Dickinson, Cummings, and Samuel Beckett. It is a difficult film to swallow, not because of its imagery but from the constant content conflict in the movie. Each part makes expositions through metaphors and riddles that force the viewer to comprehend the migrants’ reflex immediately.

It wasn’t straightforward for me to follow its pace, realising that the spectator needs to be prepared and energised to be as quick as the film goes. Its audience must be literate and knowledgeable, which is not very inclusive. Bringing complexity, in my opinion, is a misuse of the format because it is overloading the eyes who sees it with too much information. Despite the excellent montage, the images weren’t coherent to the overall aesthetics. A 1 minute long shot with a Dutch angle and a sepia filter with a terrible composition? However, this shot is inserted in the middle of really well-composed images of the Alaskan landscape and the man standing contemplating them. I’m expecting more avantgardism for a 2010 experimental film. Maybe I expect too much from artists as Alexandre O’Neill once said in Periclitam os grilos. I believe in a more modernised definition of cinema, similar to Ricciotto Canudo, where apart from being a compilation of all the other arts, it is also its balance, and I am afraid The Nine Muses isn’t. I feel that it has powerful research and critique behind it, but the concept is not everything, and in this case, it lacks artist consistency and coherence.

Takhté Siah or Blackboards is a late neorealist film with snippets of doc. and post-modernist features. Samira Makhmalbaf gives us a face-to-face reality, driving the spectator towards the paths of refugees and poverty at the same time she explores metaphorical and surreal scenarios as a way to describe the social reality of the Kurdish people. It was, indeed, an aesthetic purpose quite obsolete for its time. For a late neorealist attempt, it didn’t derive much from L’albergo degli zoccoli (eng.:The Tree of Wooden Clogs) directed by Ermanno Olmi in 1978, also considered late for the movement, which surprises me because Takhté Siah was released in 2000. However, this cinema must have been needed for the time it was released, because of its protesting and social awareness qualities.

Samira doesn’t want to drive the spectator away from the action itself. There was little time to rest your eyes over those border’s hills. She gave herself entirely to the refugees and the picture was dilated to them exclusively. No time for reflection. I believe that most of those intervenients were non-actors, which thrived and erupted neorealistic vibes from the 40s. A very crude and raw cinema purposely made for the people and to give them a voice, using them as a way to evoke reality itself speaking to itself and educate the masses. Nevertheless, in the middle of that whole intense scenario, there was space for exposition and comprehensiveness: the very first shot with all those blackboards dispersing in a different path, the mules avoiding the teachers, a wife that doesn’t have the headspace for teachings and love at a very critical episode of here life – all metaphors that caricature the film’s subject.

The sound was as true as the images were to reality. There were clear signs of doc. microphoning techniques, and, again, there was no time to do second perfect takes. The boom operator was currently trying to accompany the acting voices, even tho he/she missed a few times, but that was part of the process and was indeed rationalised and intentional – naysayers say it was a low-budget film (when in reality it was an international co-production). Improvisation was part of the creative and acting process. To interrupt it would be a crime against the whole purpose of the film. Apart from that, I consider that there was little editing, and it must have been very difficult for the sound editor. I believe this was the type of production where the director is annoying every single department and trying to impose their own aesthetic and ideas like a show-runner.