Listening to Vincent Moon — Introduction
This is the music you hear; but can it be called music? From every shard of sound you continue to gather signals, information, clues, as if in this city all those who play or sing or put on disks wanted only to transmit precise, unequivocal messages to you. Since you mounted the throne, it is not music you listen to, but only the confirmation of how music is used: in the rites of high society, or to entertain the populace, to safeguard traditions, culture, fashion. Now you ask yourself what listening used to mean to you, when you listened to music for the sole pleasure of penetrating the design of the notes.[1]
In one of his last stories before passing away, Italo Calvino wrote about a king living in a palace that resembles an ear.[2] Frightened in having his power usurped he never leaves his throne, where he stays day and night hearing the sounds that reach him from all his reign. The king identifies each sound and must continuously pay attention to what the faintest noise might mean; the slightest change in how the pots bang in the kitchen an indication that someone might poison him, an extra pause in the guards steps a sign that a coup might be taking place, the tanks passing over gravel without a creek a hint that it was recently oiled in preparation for battle. His paranoia is broken when he listens to a woman singing somewhere in the city. Her voice impels him to stop searching for indexical meanings of sound and instead listen to it and be delighted by its unique possibilities. The unknown and disembodied voice opens in the king the desire to interact with it, but he is not sure if he is physically capable. Has he forgotten his own voice? Can he answer back by joining in a duet?
This is the introduction of my PhD thesis entitled “Listening to Vincent Moon: Musical Encounters and the Cinematic Diagram.” For citations and references please use the full item record which can be found at Universitat Pompeu Fabra’s database.
To navigate through all the chapters please go the index. More information on my work can be found at http://matheussiqueira.com
The quest, forces Calvino’s character in A King Listens to discard everything that certified his power, to shed all appearances so he could find his voice. The outcome though, as the story ends, doesn’t seem to have succeeded. The reader is left confused. Did he manage to find the voice? Has his reign been usurped? Was his voice heard by the woman after all? Could it all have been a dream, something that happened purely inside of him?
While Calvino leaves it open, the king’s fictional endeavor seems analogous to the work that filmmaker Vincent Moon has been carrying out since 2006. Both — the unnamed king and Moon — are enticed to explore new models of listening. Both discovered that to interact with sound one cannot be in full control (the king of his reign, Moon of his films); that their notions of music need to be reconsidered; that to listen is also to fold between the inside and outside; and lastly, both are forced to reconfigure the relation between aural and the visual.
At the core of this improbable connection is the concept of listening. In Calvino’s story, as with Moon films, a new form of listening emerges. One that is not focused on finding meaning, and not in passively hearing sounds. Listening is a call for interaction both for the king and for Moon. To listen is to look beyond meaning, to search for the inexplicable. The act of listening, as Jean-Luc Nancy develops in his homonymous book Listening (2007), is a model of thought that subverts traditional western philosophy. An anti-ocular method of interaction that circumvents knowledge and instead seeks acknowledgment.
Calvino magnifies the treacherous aspect of sound once it is genuinely listened to. The narration, always in the second person, starts by circumscribing the king into the realm of the image. A series of rules is put forward where the power of the king is intimately connected with how he is presented — “it would hardly be a pretty sight to see a king stretched out on the floor”;“you must maintain the regal composure”;“it is a good idea to have the curtains of the baldaquin drawn, to remove the king’s intimacy from outside gazes”.[3] To keep the throne is a game of appearances, one where the king is exposed to everyone but is blind towards what is happening, he is left merely with his palace-ear. Nevertheless, at the outset, his sense of hearing is subservient to his sight, it allows “the sounds themselves to prompt the images.”[4]
Only when he’s unable to catalog an unknown sound coming from the basement of the palace, incapable of deciphering its meaning, is when the king begins to break his initial stance of hearing. A change that is fully completed after the woman’s voice finally reaches him. The voice doesn't prompt an image; it doesn't elicit the king to fantasize about the body that is producing that voice and what it means. It’s a pure appreciation of sound, of the miracle of a throbbing “throat of flesh [la vibrazione d’una gola di carne].”[5] Once the king listens, a desire grows from within him to also interact sonically, to have his voice acknowledged.
The work of Vincent Moon, in juxtaposition, is driven by the same fascination with the aural and how listening opens to interaction. The seditious elements of sound — the innate anti-ocular rebellion in listening — are also present and responsible for intriguing twists throughout his career.
Some critical differences, though, emerge between Calvino’s king and Moon. The king’s dive into the sonic is one of chaos and confusion. His reaction to listening to the singularity of the sonic is a plunge into disarray and uncertainty. The king’s hunt to interact with the woman’s voice explodes the city into flames and shouts. Moon’s approach to pursuit the sonic interaction is, in contrast, a controlled descent into chaos. A set of parameters that incentives the unknown but that aims to balance itself at the edge of chaos.
The king, who initially had a limited vision and could only see what was in the throne’s room, loses all traces of sight in his chase to interact with the voice. In pitch black darkness, he touches the wall in front of him to discover it’s covered with moss; he receives back the echo of his voice guessing that, perhaps, he is in a cave.
Where the story in A King Listens ends, is where my research with Moon begins. The second person narration, which in the conclusion seems to have relocated to inside the king’s mind, for the first time instigates the use of vision — “If you raise your eyes, you will see a glow. Above your head the imminent morning is brightening the sky: that breath against your face is the wind stirring the leaves.”[6]
As the last paragraph continues, though, something is different. Sound and image not only interact — “the dogs are barking, the birds wake, the colors return on the world’s surface, things reoccupy space, living beings again give signs of life”[7] — but ultimately it seems that now the optical has been reborn from the aural. Sight is no longer higher in the hierarchy of senses. Announcing that the sonorous insurgence has been fully carried out, the story ends with the space of things and the signs of life being inundated by the sonic world — “Now a noise, a rumble, a roar occupies all space, absorbs all sighs, calls, sobs…”[8]
Calvino’s story ends with the vision subjugated to sound. The sound no longer “prompt images” but now, in reversal, it is the images that prompt the sounds. With the king being able to see once again, the signs of life are the sighs that are heard. The sight of the city reawakening is the creaking and hammering that grows louder. A King Listens finishes giving a glimpse into the birth of an anti-ocular image, or maybe a better term, an otocentric vision.
Moon, unknowingly writes in this space left by Calvino’s final ellipsis — what is an image born out of sound? What is a film practice innate to listening? These are the two central questions that guide my research, simple in form but with endless unfoldings.
My interest in Moon dates back to 2006 when, as a teenager, I first came in contact with his series the Take Away Shows. I accidentally stumbled upon it when browsing the video podcasts section in iTunes and became mesmerized with the naïve but effective format of how music was recorded. It was just a single camera following the musician around Paris while he played and sang, but there was something in the raw intensity of that moment that I couldn't exactly figure out.
In parallel, Moon’s practice symbolized the freedom brought by the newly created digital platforms and affordable digital cameras. Releasing almost a film a week, his blind belief in shooting without excessive thought, sharing it as soon as possible, and that everything else would work fine, epitomized the general sensation at the time I was learning the ropes of filmmaking. It was partly inspired by his practice, that my first more extensive project in 2009 (a fictional web series shot between São Paulo and Beirut), was funded through Kickstarter and distributed under Creative Commons.
As I moved into directing commercials, his path continued to intrigue me. He left the Take Away Shows, at a time when the New York Times was claiming that he “reinvented the music video,” to start traveling and documenting local musicians from all around the world in his series Petites Planètes. His sudden shift a reminder, that maybe in this new online world a filmmaker can exclude any middle-man between the creation and distribution and live exclusively through the community that is generated around his work.
In 2013 I decided to examine more systematically Moon’s work. Without a clue on how to pinpoint the experience I felt in that first encounter with the Take Away Shows, I focused my master thesis in mapping how his series Petites Planètes used new technologies to alter and delegate to the viewer/user the search for a narrative within its database.
My practice as a filmmaker also shifted during this period. I drifted towards directing music videos, preferring to carefully plan, produce and work extensively on each video in post-production. For all my interest in how Moon works, my work took an opposite approach. To abolish your power as a director is not an easy task, and in most cases, not a desirable one. The figure of the filmmaker (or the autheur) is more commonly associated to the paranoid king at the beginning of Calvino’s story. It’s Truffaut’s self-depiction in La Nuit Américaine (1973) where each gesture, from the fake snow to the position of the hands, carries the intentionality of its creator.
Since the research for this thesis started, I tried applying more developed and mature methods of film analysis only to reach dead ends. A purely comparative media approach, as was done to a smaller spectrum of his work in my master’s thesis, would further help to delineate his unique approach to technology but wouldn't take me any closer to finding the source of my initial attraction. To exclusively focus the study on a specific element — like semiotics, structure, imaginary, narrative, mise-en-scène, film space, film time, and even film sound — didn't yet encompass the impression that the film itself is but a consequence to “something else” in Moon’s practice. Hence, a different procedure was needed, one that could invoke these methods when needed but that had the flexibility and freedom to go beyond the object of the film.
To venture into unveiling this “something else” I restarted my investigation. This time, retracing the director’s steps and establishing a research that stems from the same origin point that the works of Moon — listening. An idea that I’m indebted to Greg Hainge and his book Philippe Grandrieux: Sonic Cinema (2017), where he initiates such a revisioning by exploring a sonic approach to cinema. As Calvino’s king, who is profoundly changed by the woman’s voice and searches for a way so that his voice may interact, this thesis seeks to open its own voice so that it may dialogue with Moon’s works.
Methodology and structure
Before moving forward to the research itself, it’s important to clarify that this thesis does not aim, in any occasion, to be an exhaustive analysis of all of Moon’s films, but instead, to provoke a listening of his films; to further incite a mode of interaction that breaks the ocular-centric film theory, that plunges into the chaos and darkness of the king’s underground caverns and finally resurfaces with sound and image reconfigured anew.
As such, the examples that were selected are the ones that best envision and epitomize the aspects central to Moon’s career. The reasoning behind which films were chosen within Moon’s 538 pieces of audiovisual works released to date (approximately 156 hours of material), was not about a difference in kind but a difference in intensity. Which film embodied aspects of Moon’s work most evidently? Did the work in question instigate an inflection point in his artistic practice? Was there intentionality and awareness in structuring and developing these traits? These are some of the questions that guided which films were selected to be studied within Moon’s oeuvre. Furthermore, the sequence in which the films are considered throughout the thesis aspire to keep the chronological arrangement in which they were created (albeit loosely).
Vincent Moon’s work provides the skeleton for this research. To flesh out and create the body the methodological focus stems from the transposition of sound theory and philosophy into the realm of cinema and image. In addition, I’ll draw on literature, paintings, art installations, and cinema, so that Moon’s cinematic body may fully resonate. This is not a new approach, and I will rely on previous works that already made great strides towards this objective, which I’ll briefly introduce in subsequent paragraphs.
The first part is an introduction to Moon’s work, a requirement for a director whose career was created at the margins (and intersection) of distinct areas: self-exiled from the music industry, a vagrant in the ethnographic circles, and an outsider in the cinema and art circuit. An overview is given together with the main moments that indicated essential shifts in his career. To better visualize his body of work, the chapter includes a table that helps contextualize the 538 films that he released so far.[9]
Next, in the second segment Theoretical Framework, the grounds of listening is provided as I explore Jean-Luc Nancy’s book and the various implications that it has in positing an otocentric mode of thought. The term listening is submitted here, to extensive analysis and is imbued with a very specific denotation that will be carried throughout the thesis. Other vital terms, like renvoi and sens, are also defined in this chapter. Additionally, The Cinematic Diagram, is an answer to the king’s descent into chaos and confusion. In Moon, to allow chaos is part of his practice, but it is controlled so that it doesn't flood the work into meaningless sensations. Nancy’s proposal of listening as balancing at the edge of meaning is here connected to Deleuze’s concept of the diagram in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2017). Bacon exemplifies how listening can be practiced in the visual realm, how to be positioned at the fringe of the abyss. The diagram, thus, becomes the link for a practice that repels signification and meaning while also avoiding falling into chaos. To distinguish between the diagram in painting, I appropriate and expand the term “cinematic diagram” as a form to enter into the discrete aspects of Moon’s practice.
To start discussing what is a film practice innate to listening, the third part dives into his films to sketch the aspects of Moon’s cinematic diagram. The first is Accompaniment, a musical term that Greg Hainge transposes to cinema when talking about Grandrieux’s documentaries. It unfolds an alternative narrative in Calvino’s story where the voices encounter each other. To accompany severs the traditional relationship between director and subject, he abdicates control but still maintains an active interaction with the soloist.
Subsequently in his cinematic diagram, is Voice, Music, and Noise. Analogous to when the king descends into the purely aural and started questioning his capability to listen while the city explodes in fire and shouts, Moon at a specific moment became engulfed in sound and started questioning the what and who of a voice and the what and why of music. This period in his career stresses the relations between sound and image to its extreme, at times breaking the thin line that kept him balancing at the edge of chaos.
In, Voice, Adriana Cavarero and Sara Nadal-Melsió supply the premises to tackle the questions of uniqueness and singularity raised by Moon. Subsequently, Music debates Moon’s evolving conception of what is music through John Cage’s critique of music as a “time-object” and Murray Schafer’s concept of the soundscape. Noise, will study the power at play when regarding the aural, and analyze how Moon appropriates it when necessary.
The fourth chapter focuses in opening the cinematic diagram to beyond the film itself and question its implications. In The Encounter-Image, I address the question of what is an image born out of sound? What happens when the king surfaces back and opens the eyes with a new vision born in the depths of sound? Stitching all the other previous aspects of the cinematic diagram with Deleuze’s concept of becoming, here it’s proposed that Moon’s unique path from aural to optical resulted in a peculiar and unique type of image. To delve into the encounter-image, the process of becoming is scrutinized and tied to how the diagram alters the production of sense. In The Fold, how Moon uses Neo-Baroque ideals to invite the viewer to listen, to search for an interaction where his voice can be acknowledged; exploring the second kind of production present in Deleuze’s late work, the production of beings. And lastly, in What is there to experience? I’ll seek in Benjamin’s notion of aura an opening to grasp the important of experience to Moon.
Before continuing, some last explanations to help guide the reading. My use of the term film can be seen as controversial, for all of Moon’s work discussed in the thesis was recorded using digital cameras. Apart from the ontological debate film/video/digital, I regard that the dispute has been transposed into the field of practice. What is a film practice? A video practice? A digital practice? In last year’s Cannes (2018) only eight of the 21 films in competition were shot on film. From all the theatrical releases in the United States in 2017, only 31 movies used film partially or integrally, many counting with post-production done digitally. To linger on this debate seems productive only when the artist himself tensions between the diverse mediums, bringing the stress between film vs digital to the foreground. As such, I stand by my use of the term “film,” for its how Moon calls and defines his work.[10] Also, when referring to the person who interacts with the films of Vincent Moon, I’ll use the term listener, instead of viewer. As will become clearer throughout the thesis, the reasoning behind this is how his films elicit a different type of perception than that of someone who merely “views”.
To visualize sound is a counter-intuitive task that goes against the whole purpose of this thesis. Nevertheless, when writing about sound the problem of how to describe what is being studied always presents itself. Therefore when possible I embed the film together with the text and when merited, I used spectral analysis, soundwaves, and phase analysis, to provide vestiges of what is occurring sonically in Moon’s films. The experience, though, is vastly inferior, to which I admonish the reader to take time and listen to the films.
Lastly, I would like to note that Moon’s career is still relatively young. At the time of this writing, it has been little over a decade since he started his experiments in film. Such a short time-span, rather than being viewed negatively, is an invitation to further follow which directions his art practice may take and to grasp his work within the words that Miriam Hansen proposes to the emerging new transformations of cinema at the start of the 21st century:
The reframing of cinema by the new media does not just replay that of the traditional arts by the cinema; rather, it makes for a constellation in which the cinema relates amphibiously to both old and new terms. Perhaps we should defer cultural pessimism about the digital transformations of experience and publicness for a while and give the generations growing up with these technologies a chance to incorporate them into cultural memory and, along the way, to rediscover and reinvent cinema.[11]
Continue reading 1.VINCENT MOON, THE TRAITOR or go the INDEX.
[1] Calvino, Italo. 1998. Under the Jaguar Sun. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, pp. 51–52.
[2] The name of the story is A King Listens [Un re in ascolto] and was first published in English in the book Under the Jaguar Sun, 1988.
[3]Ibid., pp. 33–36.
[4] Ibid., p. 42.
[5] Ibid., pp. 53–54.
[6] Ibid., p. 63.
[7] Ibid., p. 64.
[8] Ibid., p. 64. The story ends with this phrase and with the ellipsis.
[9] As of June 2018, his website lists 538 films. Many films, though, have outtakes, and extra segments that are released (his Vimeo account lists 746 videos). I opt to use throughout the thesis what Moon denominates as “films” in his website and interpret these outlying materials as the “extras” of a DVD. In total there is approximately 156 hours of content that was published.
[10] For a deeper discussion on how cumbersome some key words in film theory have become and the need to reinvent them I suggest Jonathan Rosenbaum’s article End or Beginning: The New Cinephilia in the book Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema (2012).
[11] Hansen, M. B. (2012). Max Ophuls and Instant Messaging. In G. Koch, V. Pantenburg, & S. Rothöler (Eds.), Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema. Vienna: Synema Publikationen, p. 29.
