32 votes, the best documentary you’ve ever heard in your life

Sam Green He wants you to stop and listen for a second. In other words, really listen. The documentary filmmaker from California wants you to take in the world around you, and identify the noise separately. It could be church bells, cicadas, air tubes, or air currents. He can also throw some stun grenades at you – violins can turn into explosions or Philip Glass Quietly playing the piano might suddenly give way to the buzzing of a fly. From time to time, Green will ask you to close your eyes to listen better. And any audio snippet you chose will play on the blank screen, so you don’t get distracted. But you don’t have to shut down your other senses. All you want is to prioritize your ears for just over 90 minutes.

Mix audio story and ASMR therapy session, 32 votes is Greene’s attempt to chart what sound means to us as a species: how it shapes our perceptions, what it triggers in our memories, and the way it can bridge the gap between past and present.

There are several points along the audio-visual tour of this article: A montage of musicians interpreting a 4’33” from John CageA concert in which not a single note is played: prof Edgar Choueiri rendering 3D spatial rendering of recordings through dedicated headphones; His name is Noise Maker Joanna Fang explaining why the art of making fake movie sounds “can suggest a truth about what’s going on”.

But more than anything, Green and his co-star on this project, multi-instrumentalists from Tiger JD SamsonThey want to give you an immersive experience that forces you to rethink something most people take for granted on a daily basis. As a narrator, the filmmaker adopts a whimsical but never clichéd tone, and while Green has already shown his skills as a documentary filmmaker (just look at his final profile… underground weather 2002), this last project was designed to be free-flowing, sensual rather than erotic. Green and Shamson may invite you to sing in a Zen-like spiritual choir. There will also be a dance interlude with disco music.

However, Green treads on the philosophical and emotional territory of sound, and for every avant-garde artist shown contemplating the aural realm, other moments in the film creep up and strike you sideways. A left-wing activist living in exile in Cuba listens to an excerpt from McFadden & Whitehead’s “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” and is instantly transported to Harlem in 1979. The quiet of a country night in upstate New York is the soundtrack to a woman’s grief. Old telephone message tapes from the same director became a ghostly monument and a reminder of a truly immeasurable loss. This is the only movie that has turned the mating call of the nearly extinct bird, Mould braccatus, into something that can make you cry.

32 votes I’ve played several festivals in the past year, including a week on the BAM Billboard in Brooklyn. For such occasions, the duo has been turning shows into multimedia events, complete with headphones for attendees, live narration, and built-in musical accompaniment (the performance I saw at the San Francisco Film Festival is one of the most amazing movie experiences of my life). ). The movie works just as well as a group viewing experience and as a performance. Green has given us a real gift, something designed not so much to satisfy New Age silliness as to stimulate us neurotically, an exercise that reshapes the idea of ​​passive listening into a form of active appreciation and attention. The sounds are limited, but the benefits of tuning film wavelengths are endless. For all that, this is the best documentary I’ve ever heard.