Abstract
Resonant Bodies in Contemporary European Art Cinema (2022) is Emilija Talijan’s first monograph and comprises an attempt to move beyond both visually and haptically oriented spectatorships by attending closely to the sonic dimension of film. It should be noted right away that Resonant Bodies is positioned within (or at the boundary of) film studies. Despite engaging in an expanded form of audiovisual analysis – that is, enfolding social and philosophical critique into discussion of the respective film’s formal elements – the book should not be read as positioning itself within the growing research area which has been termed ‘audiovisual studies’, typified by the writing of scholars such as Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers, and Lisa Perrott.[1] Whereas these scholars too draw our attention to the visual and sonorous, they are interested in how new patterns of dissemination, media forms, and modes of reception inform how meaning is articulated in the realm of the audiovisual. Talijan, by contrast, is focused primarily on cinema and as such imagines a kind of ideal spectator/auditor, who is assumed to behold the film in a sound-isolated, dark, and distraction-free auditorium. For many readers, this might not be their viewing situation: the near-infrasonic sound Talijan discusses in Chapter 2 (about Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (2002)) is likely inaccessible to readers as the film is seldom shown in cinemas. Most readers therefore will not be able to experience ‘organ resonance’ which the author considers in her argument about the film (51).
Resonant Bodies in Contemporary European Art Cinema (2022) is Emilija Talijan’s first monograph and comprises an attempt to move beyond both visually and haptically oriented spectatorships by attending closely to the sonic dimension of film. It should be noted right away that Resonant Bodies is positioned within (or at the boundary of) film studies. Despite engaging in an expanded form of audiovisual analysis – that is, enfolding social and philosophical critique into discussion of the respective film’s formal elements – the book should not be read as positioning itself within the growing research area which has been termed ‘audiovisual studies’, typified by the writing of scholars such as Carol Vernallis, Holly Rogers, and Lisa Perrott.[1] Whereas these scholars too draw our attention to the visual and sonorous, they are interested in how new patterns of dissemination, media forms, and modes of reception inform how meaning is articulated in the realm of the audiovisual. Talijan, by contrast, is focused primarily on cinema and as such imagines a kind of ideal spectator/auditor, who is assumed to behold the film in a sound-isolated, dark, and distraction-free auditorium. For many readers, this might not be their viewing situation: the near-infrasonic sound Talijan discusses in Chapter 2 (about Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (2002)) is likely inaccessible to readers as the film is seldom shown in cinemas. Most readers therefore will not be able to experience ‘organ resonance’ which the author considers in her argument about the film (51).
Nevertheless, the argument Talijan threads through Resonant Bodies is captivating. Organised neatly into three sections, each with two analytical chapters, the book expands on conventional modes of cinematic spectatorship through the philosophy which Jean-Luc Nancy forwards in Listening (Á l’écoute, 2007). Answers to Talijan’s opening question – ‘what does it mean to exist according to listening?’ (a quotation from Nancy) – are glimpsed over the course of the analyses, which enlist a wide bibliography necessitated by such interdisciplinary research (1). The metaphor with which she concludes is illuminating: a film is like a seashell at the beach, whose interior conjures representations of the outside sea when put to the ear. But these sonic evocations are merely resonances of our own bodies, the blood moving in the head and the turbulence of air in the ear canal (174). Sound, in both cinema and the seashell, renders the boundaries between the body and the object porous, resonating into each other and constructing the body as ‘responsive’, existing ‘always in relation with the space into which its soundings emit’ (171–2). By conceiving the body as resounding with the sounds and textures of film, she heralds a mode of analysis which opens out onto the visual and the sonorous, the spatial and the temporal, and the human and the non-human.
Each case study fleshes out Talijan’s hypothesis from a different angle; they cover sex/sexuality, violence, exilicism, the stranger, the living nonhuman (nature), and the inanimate, respectively. Even though the films fall under ‘contemporary European art cinema’, have many stylistic commonalities, and were released within ten years of each other, Talijan manages to extract wide-ranging interpretations which efficiently puts her analytic into practice whilst validating its scope. The three sections are titled ‘The Unlistenable’, ‘Migratory Noise’, and ‘Nonhuman Noise’, which progress outwards from the body itself, through the world of social, and into the realm of ‘things’ (2). Through this structure, the sequence of case studies traces the contours of Talijan’s analytic while leaving space for further development and new directions. An extended theoretical introduction establishes Talijan’s critical position – for the most part, more on this later – and the brief conclusion poetically recentres the necessity for a multimodal approach to film analysis. In spite of the book’s brevity (a mere 186 pages), Talijan’s prose is dense with insights, both about the individual films and the phenomenon of spectatorship more generally.
Her first section studies two films associated with ‘New French Extremity’, a style of cinema which relishes in its unabashed portrayal of sex, violence, and otherwise off-limits images. Most of the scholarship on these films focuses on the ‘unwatchability’ of their visuals and ignores the soundtrack. Taljian builds upon Michel Chion’s famous example from Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1967), in which he argues that without sound, the film’s shocking images are merely abstract rather than affecting (2019 [1990]: 2). The ‘unlistenable’ sounds Talijan identifies range from the almost silent grazing of the skin to the panting breaths of male sexual pleasure (40–41); the not-quite infrasonic rumble, to the gunshots so loud that they tear at the film’s own body (56). Catherine Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell (2003), Talijan’s first case study, follows a woman who employs a gay man to watch her lie naked on her bed. Breillat’s attention to the volume of sexual and anatomical noises causes the audience to strain their ears towards the film and against the performative sounds of hardcore pornography, orchestrated for male pleasure (49). While Breillat draws the audience in, Gaspar Noé, in Irreversible (2002) attacks them with sonic violence. Particularly successful is Talijan’s inclusion of key thought on sonic warfare from sound studies, such as the writing of Suzanne Cusick (60–62) and Steve Goodman (52), which demonstrates in clear sonic terms how Noé weaponises he soundtrack. This brings into focus a number of ethical questions around the position of the spectator as a ‘resonating body’ who must watch the ‘unwatchable’ and listen to the ‘unlistenable’.
Resonant Bodies’s second section, on ‘Migratory Noise’, moves to focus on the geopolitical themes of displacement and the ‘world of strangers’ (100-101). Both films present narratives of migration between France and Algeria: while Tony Gatlif’s Exiles (2004) traces the journey of a first-generation Algerian expatriate couple as they travel back to a home they never knew, Arnaud des Pallières’s Adieu (2004) contrasts the story of an illegal immigrant attempting to remain in France with an episode from the lives of wealthy French pig farmers. In Exiles, Talijan explores how sound exists in between states – neither diegetic nor nondiegetic; neither in one character’s point of audition nor another’s; neither expressing the character’s interiority nor their outward presentation – to reflect the central couple’s feeling of rootlessness. Although Talijan’s exploration of resonance between sound and image are thought-provoking (especially with her emphasis on the corporeal), such ideas have been extensively explored in film music scholarship, to which the author makes no reference. For instance, notions of audiovisual resonance inhere in Chion’s notion of ‘empathy’ (2019 [1990], 8–9), and discussion of the gap between diegetic and nondiegetic states could be expanded by including Robynn Stilwell’s notion of the ‘fantastical gap’ (2007). The following chapter does not run into these problems as it primarily considers sound design in Adieu. The two narratives are visually distinct throughout but sonically, Talijan postulates, the stories ‘collapse in on one another’ (106–107), the abstract sound design of Ismaël’s story as he flies from Algeria seeps into the originally hyperrealist rendering of farm sounds. Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s notion of the écho-monde (a relational ontology derived from the experience of the Middle Passage, to put it simply (77-78)), Talijan constructs a nuanced reading of Adieu which both approaches the challenging film on its own terms and extracts broader incites on cinematic portrayals of relations between the Global North and South.
The book’s final section focuses on two films which explore sound beyond the human. Lars Von Triers’s Antichrist (2009) is a shocking film in which brutal violence follows a couple to a remote forest as the nameless husband attempts to rid his wife of her anxiety following the death of their child. A great deal of attention is given to the sound design of the forest, which seems to have a mind of its own. The film, for the author, examines the possibility of hearing the sounds of nature on their own terms, concluding that – at least on film – natural sounds will always be heard through the filter of the human. This is embodied by the bizarreness of the talking fox (142). Unfortunately, while the author’s observations about approaching images as we do sound are fascinating, this chapter’s arguments are obfuscated by a large number of different ideas from diverse philosophical and critical fields. Her passage on cinephelia, for instance, departs from the prevailing investigation of human/nature interaction and therefore appears somewhat confusing. The final analytical chapter presents an extended theoretical discussion of Foley with a shorter exegesis of Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012). Woefully underexplored in the literature, Taljian’s study of Foley is captivating, especially in bringing contemporary ontology into discussion with Michel Chion’s notions of the ‘real and the rendered’ in film sound (152-153). This leads to an equally captivating discussion of Strickland’s film, in which the attention to the sounds of inanimate objects – and the bodies which invisibly produce them – destroys the distinction between the film’s production and its presentation.
As alluded to previously, certain gaps can be found in Talijan’s introduction which, although not posing a threat to the coherence of her argument as a whole, restrict the potential of the book to disrupt film sound discourse as it stands. Most prominently, Talijan includes the notion of ‘noise’ throughout to refer to the cinematic sounds she considers. Despite delimiting noise conceptually from sound in general, it is unclear how Talijan distinguishes sound and noise in sonic terms. In the introduction, noise seems to refer to unwanted, unpleasant, and unknowable sounds (12–18), but the music which seems also to fall under this purview in Chapter 3 (on Tony Gatlif’s Exiles) is most often thought of as anathema to noise. Likewise, the highly skilled craft of Foley is not redolent of the ‘unpleasant or unidentified’ (13). Without a clear delineation of what separates a film’s sounds from its noises, at times it becomes difficult to ascertain why certain parts of the soundtrack are engaged with and others fall to the background. Kristian Eidnes and Lars Von Triers’s unnatural rumbling, screeching compositions heard throughout Antichrist are not considered, for instance. Although perhaps merely a semantic issue, this example belies the need for a greater attention to contemporary debates in sound and film music studies for this book to be truly ‘essential reading within both film and sound studies’ as Sarah Cooper’s review on the back cover attests (my emphasis).
Overall, there are many commendable, interesting and incisive qualities to Talijan’s Resonant Bodies, but for readers well-versed in film music studies or sound studies, the book does not greatly expand on issues discussed elsewhere. Resonant Bodies feels like an expansion of film studies more than a forward-looking contribution to discourse around audiovisuality. Of course, this might not be the book’s objective, but the central notion of the resonant body is certainly an exciting lens through which to theorise new multimodal spectatorships far beyond European art cinema. For instance, how might Talijan’s conclusions about the bodily sounds in Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell be brought over to spectatorship of porn as an audiovisual form in itself? Or how does the resonant body change when experiencing film outside the dark, acoustically isolated realm of the cinema? Nevertheless, read as a set of studies on the philosophical implications of film sound and its corporeal resonances, Talijan’s monograph is certainly a stimulating addition to scholarship on the auditory in cinema.
References
[1] For a comprehensive introduction to this field see John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
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