The Aural Point of View in the Early Films of Rolf de Heer

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D. Bruno Starrs holds masters degrees from Bond University and the University of Melbourne. He is completing a Ph.D. on the films of Rolf de Heer at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. He has published numerous academic articles, as well as several stage plays, and a novel, I Woke Up Feeling Thailand, Hartwell, Vic.: Sid Harta Publishing, 2004. He co-edited, with Sean Maher, the “Equal” issue of M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture in May, 2008.

Notes

1. The author recognizes that sound has been experimented with since it first became available to filmmakers, most obviously in avant-garde, art, and animated films, but also in feature-length narrative films, including mainstream studio films; and that this work has, also from the inception of sound, been the subject of a continuous stream of critical and theoretical writing. This essay is particularly interested in exploring the specific notions of “aural point of view” and “the aural construction of subjectivity” in de Heer's work.

2. It must be noted that the original script by Marc Rosenberg fails to suggest that the music Dingo apparently hears should be heard by the audience, let alone before the jet itself is even heard or seen (see Rosenberg 1992, 3). This APOV-oriented inclusion of the audience into the headspace of the young Dingo is entirely de Heer's invention.

3. de Heer elucidates on the motivation for this: [The Quiet Room] was another case of “How do I pay the rent next month […] and so I thought, “What do I know well?” […] So I decided to cast my seven-year-old daughter and having done that, I couldn't not cast my three-year-old because of the potential psychological damage she might suffer. But by this time I was thinking the character was an only child. So what do I do about that? Ah … if I cast the younger one as the same character but four years earlier, that would work because my daughters sort of look alike. Having cast my seven-year-old daughter, I now had this huge problem because she’d been in one small scene of my previous film and had been very self-conscious, not fluid like kids normally are. […] “Maybe if she doesn't talk I can get away with it. So why doesn't she talk? Well, maybe she was born that way. Or maybe she's decided not to talk. If she's decided not to talk, maybe I can hear her thoughts, and that's really what I’m interested in—what do seven-year-olds think? Why has she decided not to talk? Maybe because her parents were fighting and this is her protest (de Heer, 2005).