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Philippa Lovatt

University of St Andrews, Film Studies, Faculty Member

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Dr Philippa Lovatt is a Lecturer in Film Studies at University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on artists’ moving image, sound, ecocriticism, and independent film and video cultures in Southeast Asia and she is currently working on two books: a co-authored book project with Jasmine Nadua Trice titled Practices of Futurity: Spatial Transformation in Southeast Asian Film Cultures (with case studies on Forum Lenteng, Los Otros, Hanoi DocLab, and Anti-Archive). Drawing from interviews with film practitioners and analysis of film texts, we are focusing on groups that have evolved aesthetic, curatorial, and pedagogical film practices through critical engagements with recent spatial transformations such as urban development, migration, and ecological crisis. Philippa is also writing a monograph on sound in artists’ film: Reverberant Histories: Expanded Listening in Artists’ Film in Asia. Philippa has previously published her research in Screen; Sound, Music and the Moving Image; The New Soundtrack, SoundEffects, Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia and Antennae: the Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. She has also written for various film programmes and curatorial projects including with the Asian Film Archive in Singapore, The Factory in Ho Chi Minh City, Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival and CAMPLE LINE in Dumfriesshire. Philippa is on the editorial board of the journal Sound, Music and the Moving Image, was previously on the editorial board of The New Soundtrack. She is also a member of the Association for Southeast Asian Cinemas and is a Film Programme Associate for CAMPLE LINE artists' film screenings in Dumfriesshire, Scotland.
Address: https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/film-studies/people/pcl2

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Duncan Caillard

University of Melbourne

Singapore University of Social Sciences

Natalie Boehler

University of Zurich, Switzerland

Chung Ang University

Bowdoin Journal of Cinema

Bowdoin College

Utrecht University

Universidade Nova de Lisboa

University of Amsterdam

Nenad Jovanovic

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Papers by Philippa Lovatt

‘Every drop of my blood sings our song. There can you hear it?’: Haptic sound and embodied memory in the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul

The New Soundtrack, 2013

Frequently drawing on avant-garde formal strategies, bringing together personal, social and cultu... more 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 KEYWORDS sound haptic phenomenology affect memory Thai cinema Apichatpong Weerasethakul spectatorship embodiment

Reflections on โลก(ไร้ )รู ป (Im)material worlds: Tracing creative practice, histories and environmental contexts in artists' moving image from Southeast Asia and the UK

Moving Image Review Journal, 2022

estates, the films within the programme share critical and pressing concerns that include land pr... more

Introduction: Sound and Vision

Feminist Media Studies, 2016

Feminist analysis of media is a field that has arguably been dominated by the visual. From selfie... more

Tracing the Anthropocene in Southeast Asian Film and Artists' Moving Image

Screen, 2021

Stoermer had been using the term 'Anthropocene' since the 1980s, but it was not until the publica... more

Foraging in the ruins: Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s mycological moving-image practice

Screen, 2021

Sensing a connection between her creative practice and Agn es Varda's The Gleaners and I (2000), ... more Sensing a connection between her creative practice and Agn es Varda's The Gleaners and I (2000), a film about people who make use of items that have been discarded by others, Vietnamese moving-image artist Nguyẽn Trinh Thi has described herself as a 'gleaner' by virtue of her ecological approach to producing moving-image works. 1 Nguyẽn uses montage to explore processes of historical erasure through found materials mostly sourced from the internet, due in part to the difficulty of accessing such materials via Vietnamese institutional archives. 2 Collectively, these materialsincluding press photographs, tourist and colonial postcards, archival newsreels, drone footage, ethnographic film, popular and art house cinemaenvisage the history of Vietnam through colonial, state and cinematic imaginaries. Nguyẽn brings these found objects into dialogue with her own video and audio recordings in her non-linear, experimental documentaries, essay films and audiovisual installations. This essay focuses on Nguyẽn's Landscape series-Landscape Series #1 (2013), Letters from Panduranga (2015), Fifth Cinema (2018) and How to Improve the World (2021)and explores how the interrelated and shifting macro-histories of global and national politics, colonialism and the Cold War are made visible and audible through the micro-ecologies and environments that these works depict. One crucial episode that draws together these political and environmental histories is the use of the chemical herbicide Agent Orange as part of the US military's ecocidal 'Operation Ranch Hand'

'Where deep time meets the age of capital: Le Giang’s Future Perfect', exhibition catalogue essay (in English and Vietnamese), Vincom Centre for Contemporary Art (VCCA), Vietnam, June 2022, pp. 70-78.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/131Cm2nJPijRCZh8oj4AiGaeAZ2OKtfOi/view

(Im)material Histories and Aesthetics of Extractivism in Vietnamese Artists' Moving Image

Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia

Guest edit of Journal: UNCONTAINABLE NATURES Vol 1. Southeast Asian Ecologies and Visual Cultures

by Lucy Davis, Nora Annesley Taylor, Stéphane RENNESSON, Faisal Husni, Philippa Lovatt, Huiying Ng, and thi nguyen

ANTENNAE Journal of Nature in Visual Culture Issue 54, 2021

See www.antennae.org.uk Guest edited by Kevin Chua, Lucy Davis and Nora Taylor, Uncontainable Nat... more See www.antennae.org.uk
Guest edited by Kevin Chua, Lucy Davis and Nora Taylor, Uncontainable Natures Southeast Asian Ecologies and Visual Cultures volumes 1 and 2 gathers thirty-two articles, including artistic contributions, interviews, fiction, and academic essays that contest the extractive regimes and logics of containment that have re-emerged in SoutheastAsia since the 1970s in which a recursion of colonialism has brought an evacuated and homogenised image of nature in tow. The two volumes have been organized into themed sections that reflect the compelling and provocative responses of our contributors to the questions we are asking about the dynamics of containment/uncontainment.

Breathing Bodies

Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 2016

War is fundamentally embodied. The reality of war is not just politics by any other means but pol... more War is fundamentally embodied. The reality of war is not just politics by any other means but politics incarnate, politics written on and experienced through the thinking, feeling bodies of men and women. (McSorley 2012: n.p) War films celebrated for their use of sound such as Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979),

Ghost Tapes: Sonic Affect and Spirituality in Sung Tieu’s No Gods, No Masters

Ute Meta Bauer (ed.), Climates, Habitats, Environments (MIT Press).

'Ghost Tapes: Sonic Affect and Spirituality in Sung Tieu’s No Gods, No Masters' in Ute Meta Bauer... more

The Acoustics of the Archipelagic Imagination in Southeast Asian Artists’ Film

Journal of Cinema and Media Studies , 2021

How do we conceptualize films in relation? As we seek to trace the connections and affinities we ... more 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.

In Focus: Theorizing Region: Film and Video Cultures in Southeast Asia Edited by Philippa Lovatt and Jasmine Nadua Trice

Journal of Cinema and Media Studies , 2021

A construct that works both above and below the nation, region is often an implied rather than ex... more 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.

Cinema's Spectral Sounds: Memory, History, and Politics

PHD THESIS, 2011

Expanding on Robert Stam’s idea that sound and image tracks in film can ‘mutually jostle, undercu... more 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.

Bromocorah and the "unfinished scene": Ten Years Thailand (2018)

Arkipel bromocorah, Forum Festival 2019: 7th Jakarta Documentary and Experimental Film Festival , 2020

Sound, Music and Memory in Jia Zhangke’s ‘Hometown Trilogy’in Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks, London: Palgrave, pp. 229-244.

Music cannot exist in isolation from a broader geography of sound and the very idea of music as a... more Music cannot exist in isolation from a broader geography of sound and the very idea of music as a separate category of sonic experience depends on this cultural politics. The struggle between authorised and unauthorised sound constantly raises these issues as spatial questions. Such issues include the subversive role of sound to create alternative and semiautonomous spaces, as well as the sociopolitical mechanisms for enforcing silence. (George Revill, 2000 , p. 602)

‘Breathing Bodies: Sounding Subjectivity in the War Film’, Music, Sound and the Moving Image (2016).

War films celebrated for their use of sound such as Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), ... more 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.

‘Carceral Soundscapes: Sonic violence and embodied experience in films about imprisonment’, SoundEffects (2015) 5.1: 25-39.

Post 9/11 the 'invisibility' of political prisoners as part of the 'war on terror' has had a dire... more Post 9/11 the 'invisibility' of political prisoners as part of the 'war on terror' has had a direct correlation with the concealment of abusive treatment of detainees in the detention camps at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Details of these abuse scandals have indicated that there has been a notable shift away from the optical towards the sonic as a form of punishment and torture, with accounts of detainees being subjected to rock music played for prolonged periods at excruciating volumes (Smith, 2008). Addressing a number of key concerns -sound and phenomenology, sound and the ethics of spectatorship, sound and the experience/intensifi cation of confi nement, sound as a (potential) mode of resistance/control -this paper will investigate the use of sound in cinematic depictions of imprisonment including A Man Escaped (Bresson, 1956), Hunger (McQueen, 2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow, 2012. The aim is to explore how an auditory perspective might complicate previously held ocularcentric conceptions of power in penal institutions and to examine how this experience of sound is represented on screen. The essay also considers how sound design can bridge the distance between self and other, and align the spectator emotionally, ethically and politically with a fi lm's characters. The essay thus proposes that an ethical spectatorship may require cinematic auditors to listen more critically, and it claims that a better understanding of the fundamental role that sound and listening play in the articulation and recognition -or indeed, disavowalof the subjectivity of prisoners within these narratives may lead to an increased awareness of the politics of aesthetics of individual fi lms. The essay concludes by suggesting that the fi eld of sound studies creates further opportunities for research that explores these important questions about representation, spectatorship and ethics from a range of disciplinary perspectives.

'Slow sounds: Duration, audition and labour in Liu Jiayin's Oxhide and Oxhide II' in Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge (eds) Slow Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 192-203.

‘Life is Cheap: Chinese Film Noir and the Aesthetics of Disenchantment’ in Chi-Yun Shin and Mark Gallagher (eds.) East Asian Film Noir: Transnational Encounters and Intercultural Dialogue (I.B. Tauris, 2015), pp. 179-196.

'Every drop of my blood sings our song, there can you hear it? Haptic sound and embodied memory in the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul', The New Soundtrack (2013) 3.1: 61-79

Frequently drawing on avant-garde formal strategies, bringing together personal, social and cultu... more 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.

‘Every drop of my blood sings our song. There can you hear it?’: Haptic sound and embodied memory in the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul

The New Soundtrack, 2013

Frequently drawing on avant-garde formal strategies, bringing together personal, social and cultu... more 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 KEYWORDS sound haptic phenomenology affect memory Thai cinema Apichatpong Weerasethakul spectatorship embodiment

Reflections on โลก(ไร้ )รู ป (Im)material worlds: Tracing creative practice, histories and environmental contexts in artists' moving image from Southeast Asia and the UK

Moving Image Review Journal, 2022

estates, the films within the programme share critical and pressing concerns that include land pr... more

Introduction: Sound and Vision

Feminist Media Studies, 2016

Feminist analysis of media is a field that has arguably been dominated by the visual. From selfie... more

Tracing the Anthropocene in Southeast Asian Film and Artists' Moving Image

Screen, 2021

Stoermer had been using the term 'Anthropocene' since the 1980s, but it was not until the publica... more

Foraging in the ruins: Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s mycological moving-image practice

Screen, 2021

Sensing a connection between her creative practice and Agn es Varda's The Gleaners and I (2000), ... more Sensing a connection between her creative practice and Agn es Varda's The Gleaners and I (2000), a film about people who make use of items that have been discarded by others, Vietnamese moving-image artist Nguyẽn Trinh Thi has described herself as a 'gleaner' by virtue of her ecological approach to producing moving-image works. 1 Nguyẽn uses montage to explore processes of historical erasure through found materials mostly sourced from the internet, due in part to the difficulty of accessing such materials via Vietnamese institutional archives. 2 Collectively, these materialsincluding press photographs, tourist and colonial postcards, archival newsreels, drone footage, ethnographic film, popular and art house cinemaenvisage the history of Vietnam through colonial, state and cinematic imaginaries. Nguyẽn brings these found objects into dialogue with her own video and audio recordings in her non-linear, experimental documentaries, essay films and audiovisual installations. This essay focuses on Nguyẽn's Landscape series-Landscape Series #1 (2013), Letters from Panduranga (2015), Fifth Cinema (2018) and How to Improve the World (2021)and explores how the interrelated and shifting macro-histories of global and national politics, colonialism and the Cold War are made visible and audible through the micro-ecologies and environments that these works depict. One crucial episode that draws together these political and environmental histories is the use of the chemical herbicide Agent Orange as part of the US military's ecocidal 'Operation Ranch Hand'

'Where deep time meets the age of capital: Le Giang’s Future Perfect', exhibition catalogue essay (in English and Vietnamese), Vincom Centre for Contemporary Art (VCCA), Vietnam, June 2022, pp. 70-78.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/131Cm2nJPijRCZh8oj4AiGaeAZ2OKtfOi/view

(Im)material Histories and Aesthetics of Extractivism in Vietnamese Artists' Moving Image

Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia

Guest edit of Journal: UNCONTAINABLE NATURES Vol 1. Southeast Asian Ecologies and Visual Cultures

by Lucy Davis, Nora Annesley Taylor, Stéphane RENNESSON, Faisal Husni, Philippa Lovatt, Huiying Ng, and thi nguyen

ANTENNAE Journal of Nature in Visual Culture Issue 54, 2021

See www.antennae.org.uk Guest edited by Kevin Chua, Lucy Davis and Nora Taylor, Uncontainable Nat... more See www.antennae.org.uk
Guest edited by Kevin Chua, Lucy Davis and Nora Taylor, Uncontainable Natures Southeast Asian Ecologies and Visual Cultures volumes 1 and 2 gathers thirty-two articles, including artistic contributions, interviews, fiction, and academic essays that contest the extractive regimes and logics of containment that have re-emerged in SoutheastAsia since the 1970s in which a recursion of colonialism has brought an evacuated and homogenised image of nature in tow. The two volumes have been organized into themed sections that reflect the compelling and provocative responses of our contributors to the questions we are asking about the dynamics of containment/uncontainment.

Breathing Bodies

Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 2016

War is fundamentally embodied. The reality of war is not just politics by any other means but pol... more War is fundamentally embodied. The reality of war is not just politics by any other means but politics incarnate, politics written on and experienced through the thinking, feeling bodies of men and women. (McSorley 2012: n.p) War films celebrated for their use of sound such as Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979),

Ghost Tapes: Sonic Affect and Spirituality in Sung Tieu’s No Gods, No Masters

Ute Meta Bauer (ed.), Climates, Habitats, Environments (MIT Press).

'Ghost Tapes: Sonic Affect and Spirituality in Sung Tieu’s No Gods, No Masters' in Ute Meta Bauer... more

The Acoustics of the Archipelagic Imagination in Southeast Asian Artists’ Film

Journal of Cinema and Media Studies , 2021

How do we conceptualize films in relation? As we seek to trace the connections and affinities we ... more 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.

In Focus: Theorizing Region: Film and Video Cultures in Southeast Asia Edited by Philippa Lovatt and Jasmine Nadua Trice

Journal of Cinema and Media Studies , 2021

A construct that works both above and below the nation, region is often an implied rather than ex... more 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.

Cinema's Spectral Sounds: Memory, History, and Politics

PHD THESIS, 2011

Expanding on Robert Stam’s idea that sound and image tracks in film can ‘mutually jostle, undercu... more 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.

Bromocorah and the "unfinished scene": Ten Years Thailand (2018)

Arkipel bromocorah, Forum Festival 2019: 7th Jakarta Documentary and Experimental Film Festival , 2020

Sound, Music and Memory in Jia Zhangke’s ‘Hometown Trilogy’in Liz Greene and Danijela Kulezic-Wilson eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media: Integrated Soundtracks, London: Palgrave, pp. 229-244.

Music cannot exist in isolation from a broader geography of sound and the very idea of music as a... more Music cannot exist in isolation from a broader geography of sound and the very idea of music as a separate category of sonic experience depends on this cultural politics. The struggle between authorised and unauthorised sound constantly raises these issues as spatial questions. Such issues include the subversive role of sound to create alternative and semiautonomous spaces, as well as the sociopolitical mechanisms for enforcing silence. (George Revill, 2000 , p. 602)

‘Breathing Bodies: Sounding Subjectivity in the War Film’, Music, Sound and the Moving Image (2016).

War films celebrated for their use of sound such as Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), ... more 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.

‘Carceral Soundscapes: Sonic violence and embodied experience in films about imprisonment’, SoundEffects (2015) 5.1: 25-39.

Post 9/11 the 'invisibility' of political prisoners as part of the 'war on terror' has had a dire... more Post 9/11 the 'invisibility' of political prisoners as part of the 'war on terror' has had a direct correlation with the concealment of abusive treatment of detainees in the detention camps at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Details of these abuse scandals have indicated that there has been a notable shift away from the optical towards the sonic as a form of punishment and torture, with accounts of detainees being subjected to rock music played for prolonged periods at excruciating volumes (Smith, 2008). Addressing a number of key concerns -sound and phenomenology, sound and the ethics of spectatorship, sound and the experience/intensifi cation of confi nement, sound as a (potential) mode of resistance/control -this paper will investigate the use of sound in cinematic depictions of imprisonment including A Man Escaped (Bresson, 1956), Hunger (McQueen, 2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (Bigelow, 2012. The aim is to explore how an auditory perspective might complicate previously held ocularcentric conceptions of power in penal institutions and to examine how this experience of sound is represented on screen. The essay also considers how sound design can bridge the distance between self and other, and align the spectator emotionally, ethically and politically with a fi lm's characters. The essay thus proposes that an ethical spectatorship may require cinematic auditors to listen more critically, and it claims that a better understanding of the fundamental role that sound and listening play in the articulation and recognition -or indeed, disavowalof the subjectivity of prisoners within these narratives may lead to an increased awareness of the politics of aesthetics of individual fi lms. The essay concludes by suggesting that the fi eld of sound studies creates further opportunities for research that explores these important questions about representation, spectatorship and ethics from a range of disciplinary perspectives.

'Slow sounds: Duration, audition and labour in Liu Jiayin's Oxhide and Oxhide II' in Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge (eds) Slow Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 192-203.

‘Life is Cheap: Chinese Film Noir and the Aesthetics of Disenchantment’ in Chi-Yun Shin and Mark Gallagher (eds.) East Asian Film Noir: Transnational Encounters and Intercultural Dialogue (I.B. Tauris, 2015), pp. 179-196.

'Every drop of my blood sings our song, there can you hear it? Haptic sound and embodied memory in the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul', The New Soundtrack (2013) 3.1: 61-79

Frequently drawing on avant-garde formal strategies, bringing together personal, social and cultu... more 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.

Review of Kristi McKim, Cinema as Weather: Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change. New York, NY: Routledge, 2013, 234 pp. in Screen, 2015, 56 (3): 387-390.

Review of Alan Grossman and Àine O’Brien (eds), Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice. London: Wallflower Press, 240 pp. in Screen, 2008, 49 (4): 491-494.