Anempathetic film music

Last week I saw Eisenstein's Strike (1924) screened at Toronto's Gladstone Hotel as part of Early Monthly Segments' celebration of Worker's month. Given the global age of austerity we are now entering the choice couldn't of been more apposite. The film was accompanied by a live score performed by Canadian composer and experiemental muscian Allison Cameron. Cameron used a range of different instruments and sound making machines – guitar, thumb piano, effects pedal, record player, wireless radio – to create a sparse and abstract sound world - isolated notes pierced unevenly textured sheets of radio static and a broken record skipped relentlessly, its pops and crackles repeating in a rhythmical pattern that partially masked the original orchestral content. This foreboding mechanical monotony, which drove the piece forward, was accentuated by something beyond Cameron’s control - the basso continuo for the entire work was the film projector's whir. Its light, flitting drone underscored the haunted feeling evoked by the music.

The music didn’t take on the scene’s rhythms or express its emotional core. There were accidental points of convergence where sound met vision; moments where that heard could conceivably have been the sound of events seen. But for the most part the score was, in Michel Chion's term, anemapathetic, meaning it proceeded, like the broken record and vintage projector, ineluctably, undaunted and almost oblivious to the film’s unfolding narrative. There’s a dramatic scene early on in the picture: a factory machinist is wrongly accused of stealing a company micrometre. The cost of replacing the lost tool, which management cruely demands, stands to financially ruin him. His shame in unfairly shouldering this accusation and his frustration and anger at not being believed were almost unbearably intense emotions to share. This unusually ferocious intensity was, I would argue, the result of Cameron’s skilful positioning of the scene against a backdrop of profound sonic indifference. This is for me where the power of her score lay – it made you feel more strongly.

'eavesdropping on what isn't there'

David Toop in conversation with Geeta Dayal -

I think that the point is – and this is the main thread of the book, if you like – that sound has this characteristic of the uncanny, that sound is to some degree a ghost, and hence this expression in the mediumship of the listener. Sound is transitory, ambiguous in its location in space, and it’s uncertain; it lends itself to representations of uncertainty. It lends itself to feelings of dread and fear and loss and these emotional states, these extreme psychic states. It lends itself to mysticism, all these ineffable experiences. These sensations of immateriality. And so it’s a very powerful tool for musicians, but at a certain level, in social functioning or whatever, it’s perceived as being unreliable.

The way we describe reality is always through seeing and touch; seeing is believing. So listening has this negative quality, which is of course tremendously interesting. It can always have this sense of the uncanny. You can never be quite sure of what somebody has said to you. You can never be quite sure of the source of a sound, particularly when the source of the sound is hidden from you, which is often the case. We make suppositions all the time about what we hear. For that reason, sound is very important in, for example, supernatural fiction. One section of the book is focused on ghost stories and horror stories particularly from the 19th century beginning with Edgar Allan Poe, going through to all these late 19th century and early 20th century writers like Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood and Wilkie Collins, and onto 20th century writers like Shirley Jackson. Sound is often a kind of portent; it’s a sign that something bad is about to happen. Very often there’s a silence, and then there's a strange sound and the bad stuff begins. It’s almost like sound is the presence of a ghost, because sound has the quality of a ghost. You know, that the sensory quality of the uncanny is mentioned by Freud in his famous essay on the uncanny. He doesn’t elaborate on sound; he just makes the point that we have these deep childhood fears. In that sense for me, the book is personal. I went back to my first memories of sound, and they tended to be very fearful. Things that go bump in the night. These hyper-acute experiences of listening – which I tend to think of as paranoid listening – in a way you’re eavesdropping on what isn’t there. It’s manufactured in the imagination but it becomes very real, in an experience of terror.

The rest of the interview is here.