Stories of a ruined space: filmic and sonic approaches to practice-as-research

ABSTRACT

This article reflects on the authors’ work in investigating how audiovisual practices might represent the experience of disused or ruined structures. With backgrounds in visual and sound practice respectively, the authors have, in their most recent experimental film project Coccolith [UK: Coccolith Productions], conceived the Ramsgate wartime tunnels in Kent as a point of collision for divergent artistic approaches to the representation of space. Challenging the site’s association with wartime mythology, the project sought to reconfigure the relationship between film and sound practice in order to articulate an alternative representation of the tunnels’ history, heritage and temporality. The article reflects on the role of the sound designer in developing soundscapes that embodied the ruined space, and on the role of the director in visually conceiving a spatial experience of the tunnels characterized by the absence of sound – silence. We argue that in conceiving an audiovisual project in terms of texture and gesture, it is possible to reconceptualize both the role of the soundtrack in relation to a film’s diegesis, and the role of the director in relation to sound design.

KEYWORDS:

• Space
• audiovisual
• texture
• gesture
• Ramsgate
• Coccolith

Notes on contributors

Christopher Brown is Senior Lecturer in Filmmaking at the University of Sussex. Chris is a filmmaker, screenwriter, and researcher. His psychological thriller Remission (2014) was distributed by Peccadillo Pictures on their Boys on Film DVD collection and is also available to rent on BFI Player and FilmDoo. His experimental comedy Soap (2015) screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival and won an honourable mention at the New Jersey International Film Festival. As a screenwriter, Chris's awards include Best Screenplay at the 2013 London Independent Film Festival for his feature script Knock-Out. As a researcher his articles have appeared in journals such as The Quarterly Review of Film & Video, Asian Cinema, Film Criticism and Senses of Cinema. In 2014 he edited with Pam Hirsch a collection of essays entitled The Cinema of the Swimming Pool.

Andrew Knight-Hill is Senior Lecturer in Sound Design and Music Technology at the University of Greenwich and programme leader of the BA Sound Design. Andrew is a composer of electroacoustic music, specializing in studio composed works both acousmatic (purely sound based) and audio-visual. His works have been performed extensively across the UK, in Europe and the US, including performances at Fyklingen, Stockholm; GRM, Paris; ZKM, Karlsruhe; New York Public Library, New York; London Contemporary Music Festival, London; San Francisco Tape Music Festival, San Francisco; Cinesonika, Vancouver; Festival Punto de Encuentro, Valencia; and many more. His works are composed with materials captured from the human and natural world, seeking to explore the beauty in everyday objects. He is particularly interested in how these materials are interpreted by audiences, and how these interpretations relate to our experience of the real and the virtual.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Christopher Brown http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1875-2089

Andrew Knight-Hill http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1521-0396

Notes

1 Our previous work addressing these themes includes Remission (Brown 2015), a reimagining of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale shot in crumbling wartime installations on the Dartford marshes, and Sounds of the Cultural Quarter (Hill 2014a), part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Affective Digital Histories project, which explored the forgotten history of Leicester’s industrial and post-industrial pasts through interactive sound maps.

2 For more on the Ramsgate tunnels, see Catford (2005).

3 The cast are Eugenia Caruso (Disco Woman), Matthew Harvey (Liam), Kazeem Amore (Surveyor), Emily Outred (Postcard Woman), and George Naylor (Smoking Man).

4 Original emphasis. See also 424–455.

5 Of course, these distinctions are not absolute binary states, a continuum flows between the two. Smalley (1986, 83) describes sonic materials as being either ‘gesture carried’ or ‘texture carried’.

6 This built on previous research projects and commissions exploring the dramatic and representational possibilities of musique concrète approaches, such as Abstracted Journeys (Hill 2013) developed as part of the EU-Funded Compose With Sounds project, and Stille Lyd (Hill 2014b) developed thanks to a grant from the British Council and Arts Council England.

7 Reynaud (2001, 75) notes that ‘silent cinema’ was a retrospective term, arguing that the era was characterized not by actors imagining a silent storyworld, but instead by ‘hearing spectators, who temporarily lose our ability to hear’.

8 When developing this character, we looked at the Finnish documentary Into Eternity (Madsen 2010) about the construction of an underground nuclear waste repository.