Seeing a film in blindfolds: cinema experience with EarFilms

ABSTRACT

To Sleep to Dream is an EarFilm, that is an audio-only film that combines live narration and an advanced 3D sound system and relies on a half-dome-shaped arrangement of over twenty speakers that surround the blindfolded audience members who sit in the middle of a darkened room. In this paper, I analyse how the mental visual imagery that audiences form during their experience of an EarFilm involves a complete sensory immersion and erases the spatial boundaries of the cinematic apparatus that has been theorised since the 1970s. As one of the contemporary apparatuses, an EarFilm demands that we revise our terminology to address the spatial dispositif in relation to new technologies of ambisonics. In the specific example of an EarFilm, darkness-turned-all-immersive spectacle is an avisual depth of personally-created visual and yet invisible spaces. Utilising Akira Lippit’s concept of “avisuality”, I explain how EarFilms epitomise cinematic visuality by generating personal spatial abysses in total darkness filled with sounds. Earfilms problematise the Western tradition of a hierarchy of the senses and offer a more inclusive art form that both people with and without visual impairments can enjoy.

KEYWORDS:

• EarFilms
• spatial audio
• film sound
• visual immersion
• apparatus theory
• avisuality

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Tom Gunning for his invaluable questions following the presentation of an earlier version of this article in the XXIV International Film Studies Conference in Rome, Italy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See Zhang and colleagues (2017) for an overview of the recording and reproduction of various technologies for spatial audio that are now common practice in virtual and augmented reality technologies.

2. Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece (2016) traces the unrecognised role the chair has played in the theatrical setup of the cinematographic apparatus that relies on an experience of stillness, focus, and immersion, with a particular emphasis on the mid-century shift from movie palace luxury to physical comfort that enables immersion in the film.

3. Even beyond its apparatus, To Sleep to Dream also resonates with Barjavel’s predictions insofar as Barjavel thought total cinema could be used by totalitarian regimes to control the masses and the plot of To Sleep to Dream involves a future in which a totalitarian government has outlawed dreaming (ibid., 378–379).

4. See footage from a recent EarFilms Lab that explains narrative communication through sound. https://vimeo.com/45767117.

5. Jason E. Summers (2008) has tracked the history of the usage of “auralization”. He found that the term was first used in 1913 as a comparison with visualisation and has been recoined over the years (2008, 697). Reappropriating the term from Kleiner, who recoined it in 1993, Pauline Oliveros (2011, 162–163) describes it as “inner sound and sounding, or, sounds and sounding perceived subjectively through inner listening”. Moreover, Chion rightfully connects film and dream by referring to the imagination of silent film audiences: “Voices in silent film, because they are implied, are dreamed voices. Garbo in the silent era had as many voices as all of her admirers individually conferred on her” (1999, 8).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Faculty of Color Equity Fund from Center For Faculty Excellence at Ithaca College.

Notes on contributors

Arzu Karaduman

Arzu Karaduman is visiting assistant professor at Ithaca College, NY. She is currently revising her dissertation, “Sounding Anew: Anasonicity in Contemporary Global Cinemas”, into a book. Conceptually modelled on Akira Lippit’s Atomic Light, “Sounding Anew” devises anasonicity as a new theory about sound in cinema and generates other terms to address sound techniques that disrupt synchronisation in radical ways in contemporary global cinemas. Her research interests focus on film sound, film philosophy, contemporary global art cinemas, and questions of race and gender in cinema.