Voices//\\Ghosts

"As John Cage has insisted "there is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound....Similarly, there is no such thing as empty space. As long as a human eye is looking there is always something else to see. To look at something that's "empty" is still to be looking, still to be seeing something -- if only the ghosts of one's own expectations." 

-- Susan Sontag, 'The Aesthetics of Silence'

‘Realised Mysticism’: The Use of Voice in Two Films by Carl Th. Dreyer

by Dalia Neis (taken from www.closeupfilmcentre.com):

"The American composer John Cage defined a new level of listening to sounds through the simple observation of the sound process: “New music: new listening. Not an attempt to understand something that is being said, for, if something were being said, the sound would be given the shapes of words. Just an attention to the activity of sounds” [10]. The Passion of Joan of Arc operates through a similar process; through the inconsistency of the intertitles, the spectator is forced to readjust to a new kind of aural experience. We watch out for the intentions and particular tones of the voice, rather than the literal meaning of the spoken and written words. [11]   The contrast of the interrogators’ physical gestures to those of Joan of Arc are extreme: Her mouth does not move, it remains fixed, what moves is her hands. Her reaction to the horror that her interrogators impose on her is to clasp her mouth, grab her neck and cover her ears. It is these gestures that on one level can be read to express her muteness, her lack of voice in contrast to her interrogators. (In fact, it is this reading which governsMark Nash’s and David Bordwell’s understanding of the voice.) Yet on another level, it could be read as her last desperate plea for the internal, visionary voice to transcend and prevail over the authoritative voices of her interrogators. Through pointing to her throat, her mouth and ears, she touches and alludes to the mechanism of voice, the limits of these external organs to articulate a voice, and to the limits of her interrogators’ voice. She points to the inner voice which will never surrender to the voice of authority and law. Dreyer writes about ‘realized mysticism’, referring to the gestures behind the look, the soul that is turned inside out. Through holding her mouth and holding her ears she becomes deaf and dumb to the outside external world and reaches within, concentrating on evoking the internal voice. Her gestures also seem to take on the archetypal and familiar image of the scream, associatively referring us to the infamous Munch painting of same name."

from ‘Realised Mysticism’: The Use of Voice in Two Films by Carl Th. Dreyer

by Dalia Neis (taken from www.closeupfilmcentre.com)

'I'm too sad to tell you' by Bas Jan Ader (1971)

"Although the work is silent, there are moments when we might hear his crying -- it is there, like a lost soundtrack that comes to ghost the image......The shouts traced above- and all shouts, songs, and cries in general -no doubt have as their ultimate horizon that of the scream. To return to Edvard Munch's The Scream, the mouth in the midst of such gaping emptiness opens the way toward hearing what is so often unable to be spoken of" 
 -- Brandon La Belle,  Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary

Laocoön and His Sons [detail]

"The hyper-violent ending of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo (1976) is most savage due to its removal of screams from the soundtrack. As young men and women lie stomach down in a sandy courtyard and have their tongues cut out and scalps pried back, the soundtrack indifferently hisses with recorded silence and optically encoded crackles. We see their mouths open wide in screams we do not hear. The voyeuristic distance we enjoy from the spectacle is contracted and thrust inward to us as we are refused the pleasure of the scream as both aural cum shot and iconic softener for the extreme actions visually depicted. Due to the cinema's incessant employment of the scream as a sonic simulacrum for that which cannot be shown, the atypical apparition of a silenced scream on the soundtrack presents the cinematic apparatus as an inverted audiovisual machine, here psychologically amplifying the scream by muting it in the mix. The machinic effects of the cinematic apparatus are painfully apparent in Salo's finale: it is like the cinema itself has been technologically short-circuited, blowing out the speakers and upsetting any intended audiovisual normality. Silent footage and extreme violence tend to go hand in hand 2, and have established a semiotic effect of morbidity which cinema usually avoids. Stan Brakhage's The Act Of Seeing With One's Own Eyes (1972) unsettles the stomach as a coroner operates on a range of bodies in total cinematic silence. The withholding of the expected squelching creates a vacuum of clinical silence in the morgue. As hushed witnesses we are refused all form of bodily and psychological catharsis through psychoacoustic triggers: breath, voice, scream, music, etc. Instead we must stare blankly as the scalp of a patient is rolled down the front of his face and clamped in his mouth while the skull is sawn open to remove his brain. The image is most disorienting; its silence most disquieting"

-- 'I Scream in Silence' by Philip Brophy

"What he shares with Mahler is the tone of remoteness from the world, the gesture of fighting a losing battle, despite the contrast between Mahler's vast canvases and his own minimal ones, between the threefold fortissimo and the threefold pianissimo. This pianissimo should not be taken as it sounds, in other words as the reflex of the most delicate stirrings of the soul, even though it is that as well.  Frequently, and especially in the Orchestral Pieces but also in some passages of the succeeding Pieces for Violin and Piano, Op.7, and the Pieces for Cello and Piano Op. 11, this threefold pianissimo, this almost inaudible sound, is nothing but the threatening shadow of an infinitely remote and infinitely more powerful din. This was the sound of the rumble of artillery from Verdun in 1916 that carried as far as a forest avenue near Frankfurt. Here Webern comes close to Georg Haym and Georg Trakl, the prophets of the war of 1914; the falling leaf becomes the harbinger of catastrophes to come. " - Theodor Adorno 'Anton Webern' in Sound Figures

Anton Webern, Six Pieces for Orchestra, Op.6

" A last iteration of the ten note-collection occurs in measure 30, and percussion crescendo through measure 41 - torn of in silence after the triple forte is reached. This is the stifled, musical scream to which the entire work builds....

...

I would like to suggest that the piece of music under discussion embodies a traumatic dimension. .... The pervasiveness of mutes is crucial in the work at hand; it is as if the entire content of the piece were heard in an interior space blocked from open expression. And although fortissimo, not all instruments of the penultimate cluster are playing; it is an interior scream" - David Schwarz on Webern, Opus 6, No. 4 "Marcia funebre"

 The Death of Anton Webern

 I

b. December 3 1883
Brown dominant, cigars, mahogany,
sepia afternoons with umber shades.
Contralto darkness of sentiment, Love
leads to marriage, and mahogany, cigars.

The evening shadows in the forest spread
as the fated couples move side by side
to the cadence of appropriate resolution

In the half light of the middle distance
someone is preparing to scream

II

yaaaaaaaaaereeooobhbhbh
uuuuuuuuuh
unh unh aauaugh
ohhoooooooooheeee
ggggggggghaaaeee
aaaahuaaaahuaaaahuaaaa

III

The men and women enter the streetcar
multiple as statistics, paticular as portraiture. Factories
turn them out at the end of the day,
and in the morning they rise from bed
to take their places at the machines.

The wheels follow the inevitable tracks
as evening performs its metamorphosis.
A boy enters the car, an old man leaves
The crowd inside the glass observes the faces
that move along the darkening street outside.
A hundred strangers going home together

-- David Helwig

"And I saw that my face had abandoned me"

" I want to walk by the forest hem, a thing of silence from whose speechless hands the sun has slipped with his bright hair, a stranger on the hillside of evening who weeps and opens his eyelids above the stony city, a deer that stands still in the peace of the ancient elder. O the darkening head lies listening without repose, or the hesitant footsteps follow the blue cloud on the hillside, follow also its solemn stars. At my side the green seed escorts me in silence, the deer is my companion on mossy forest paths. The huts of the villagers are dumbly shut and the wail of the brook brings fear in the windless blackness. But when I went down the rocky path, madness took me and I screamed aloud in the night. And when I bent down with silver fingers over the silent waters, I saw that my face had abandoned me. And the white voice said to me: “Go kill yourself.” With a groan the shadow of a boy rose up within me and looked at me with radiant eyes so that I fell down weeping under the trees, under the mighty vault of the stars." 

-- from Offenbarung und Untergang [Revelation and Apocalypse] by Georg Trakl, 1914/1915  (trans. Max Wickert)

'Untitled 3' from Offenbarung und Untergang by Georg Trakl, by Etant Donnés and Michael Gira

 

Coil - 'It's In My Blood' from The Ape of Naples (2005) - published posthumously after the death of John Balance in November 2004; the album was originally to be named 'Fire of the Mind'. Artwork by Ian Johnstone.

 "Now we say 'plants' and sound fills the air. But in the future epoch man will say 'plants' and this will cause their growth." - Rudolph Steiner



"When it was becoming unbearable - once toward evening in November and the sight of the lit-up street, then turning to the interior of the room found a new goal in the depths of the looking glass and screamed aloud, to hear only my own scream which met no answer nor anything that could draw it, force away, so that it rose up without check and could not stop even when it ceased being audible, the door in the wall opened toward me, how swiftly, because swiftness was needed and even the cart horses down below on the paving stones were rising in the air like horses driven wild in a battle, their throats bare to the enemy" - Franz Kafka, Unhappiness.