Listening to Vincent Moon — Chapter 3: Passing Through the Diagram(Part 1)
This is the third chapter 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
Accompaniment: becoming the coadjuvant
Moon’s first task is to find a procedure to remove the indexical relations of what he is shooting. To asignify what is being shot is not easy. Moon’s early films for La Blogothéque, shows that it took years for him to be able to aptly handle music not as an indexical sign to a story, narrative or even to the body of work from the bands being recorded, but as sound itself, a space for resonance.
In the Take Away Shows such intentions were a point of tension, for while Moon was in a constant endeavor to test and figure out ways of stripping music to its core, the heavyweight bands and even the producer and owner of La Blogothèque (Christophe Chryde) had more commercial objectives in mind that became clearer as the years progressed.
Nevertheless, while being unable to dismantle the music video logic completely, Moon developed and improved what Hainge calls in Grandrieux’s work as accompaniment, a concept that is worth investigating how it originated:
To accompany is then to move, with somebody, in harmony with that person without a need for there to be an absolute confluence of perspectives or knowledge. It is, like the idea of a harmonic relation, to open oneself up to a relation with the world that is not entirely one’s own, to allow oneself to resonate in harmony with a different way of being in the world and thus to understand one’s own positionality in the very moment that it is rejected as essentially arbitrary.[1]
This is a considerable shift from viewing the director as someone in control of his creation to instead someone who interacts with an existing world, vibrates in it, but that is no longer dictating what should happen. It is essential to differentiate from, for example, cinema-veritè where the filmmaker attempts to capture what is happening but is mainly marginal in its participation or, on the other side of the spectrum, documentaries where the filmmaker takes an active participation and become the center of the film. To accompany is to create a tension where the director is inserted in the scene, vibrates and enters into an encounter with those around him without being the hero of the story. It is to enter the renvoi, to be at all times attentive. To find, once again, “the edge of meaning.”
In Grandrieux to accompany has many approaches, let’s start with his film Place de la Bastille (1996).[2] While recording Jean-François Deniau in France’s National Assembly, Grandrieux refuses to give a full view of the room instead opting to start with an already fully engaged zoom. Reacting to what is happening, Grandrieux pans and zooms between Deniau and the others present so that all that is visible is specific gestures while any camera movement is turned into blurs of color and light. By doing so, the camera enters into a dance with them instead of giving a faithful recording of what is happening. Here, Grandrieux accompanies his environment, dancing together with what is happening through the movement of his camera. The camera also assumes this musical function of being the instrument that harmonizes Grandrieux with those around him. And even though, in this case, it is the framing that is being studied, image takes the form of sound, the characteristics of each one transposed into the other and finally merged into one.
To accompany is hard, Grandrieux notes that documentary forms trained him to be “extremely attentive to everything around.”[3] And this attentiveness is not that of merely being able to follow a subject, to have the technical ability to keep a moving object in frame, as, a camera following a player in a football match. It is instead, to be inserted in the renvoi, and to resonate within it:
Framing is a way of being there in the ontological sense, an inscription in the world, a presence, it’s a way of inhabiting the world, occupying it, feeling it, perceiving it and then retransmitting it, letting yourself be touched by it, letting yourself be imprinted by it.[4]
In Moon, it takes an even more central aspect in his diagram than with Grandrieux. Opening himself up to the world and accompanying it with his camera, quickly responding to whatever happens and developing an extreme attentiveness becomes a central characteristic to his films. He doesn’t shy away from fully entering with his body into the scene he is recording and interprets this movement as being his way to be welcomed inside the world of his subject. When asked how he breaks the barrier to enter the rituals that he filmed, Moon answered:
I think you break it with your body, more than with your knowledge. That’s what it taught me to travel, to trust the memory of the body more than the memory of the brain. The respect is stepping forward, not stepping backward, and I really think that by engaging your body in the moment, in the ceremony, in the places, people welcome you and understand your energy.[5]
Moon doesn’t shy away from fully entering with his body into the scene he is capturing. He’s inscribed in the shot even though we do not see him. The impression is that those being filmed are too involved to care about his camera that dances very close to their bodies and faces, as Grandrieux’s presence in Jogo Du Bicho (1994) and Retour à Sarajevo (1996).
In Jogo Du Bicho, a film exploring the Brazilian lottery game that even though outlawed still has firm roots within a big part of the society, he accompanies the game’s players and workers that talk about how attentive one has to be for the signs indicating which numbers one should play in the game.[6] For these players any sign (like the number of a car, an animal they crossed or that they dreamed of, the telephone of someone who called them, etc.) is an indication from an elsewhere that in turn will influence the outcome of the game. They have to live in an extremely attentive state where everything will help them place the “right” bet. The key for this scene is that this sort of extreme attentiveness, of opening oneself up to chaos and looking for something undefinable, a sense of something, is akin to what Grandrieux is also, in parallel, doing in accompanying these people.
To accompany is to enter into this chance of an encounter, without knowing what to look for. By opening the creation to this chaos, to the random, and expecting not a perfectly understandable code, a precise meaning, but sens. It started with the accompanying made by the camera in Place de Bastille (and in his other films from the series Brut), but here it evolves into entering this resonance with his full body, moving in the scene together with his subjects.
This is consolidated in Retour à Sarajevo, where Grandrieux films a small group of women returning to their families in Sarajevo six months after the Bosnian war ended. Throughout the film, Grandrieux uses extreme close-ups that, this time, are not done with zoom lenses but by moving in between this group of women. For all the physicality of the camera, the group of women seamed unphased and didn’t really seem to be interested in this undeniable body that accompanies this journey and is moving within the very close personal space of each one being filmed.
The impression is, simultaneously, that of trust on the filmmaker and of authenticity, a somewhat contradictory feeling seeing how the presence of Grandrieux is inscribed. Hainge interprets this impression with the harmonic relations set forth in accompaniment:
The notion of harmonic relations is intended, firstly, to figure the space and relations taking place in that space as resonant, not having a fixed or pure form that could ever be said to pre-exist and thus be objectively represented from a distance but, rather, constantly exceeding the impression of any fixed form, going always beyond the limits that vision imposes on the world and extending always into that which lays beyond that impression of form.[7]
Accompaniment in the cinematic diagram, therefore, is seen as a way to go beyond the ocularcentric philosophy of understanding (entendre) into an otocentric world that opens itself to the random encounters so it may oppose the notion of meaning. If in Bacon’s diagram the free-mark is his way of opening painting to the outside so that chance may dictate his hand, in Grandrieux it’s accompaniment that does this function.
Accompaniment is opening oneself up to the unexpected, Moon reinforces this by not planning anything in advance. Throughout his work he positions the musicians in places where chaos and randomness are bound to invade the image and sound. The perfect staple, of which these films became known, are the streets of Paris — where both musicians and director must be on constant alert to the cars passing by, the honks, people interrupting, shouting, following them, etc. The street is the materialized place of encounters, both physically and sonically. It is the foremost site for Moon to exercise extreme attentiveness by always being forced to be aware of everything around him and using his body together with the camera to accompany the subjects and what is resonating around and within them.
It is important to underline how disparate this way of filming is from the safe and controlled environments of studio shooting for commercial cinema and most music videos. Even La Blogothèque’s latest music videos, the ones I analyzed previously, are eliminating any variables that can interfere with the final output.
I suggest that Moon is a virtuoso in accompaniment, an aspect that he unequivocally worked hard to improve. What I mean by this term is that firstly his stance of listening to everything around him and responding, interacting with the renvoi, resonating together with all the bodies set in motion, is something learned and developed. Secondly, his virtuosity is also a physical aspect regarding the technique to be able to masterfully move the body together with the camera (and control it).
The technical aspect isn’t to be taken lightly. Jean Rouch regarded camera movement so important to his films that he even took classes with Marcel Marceau, the famous French mime, to improve the way he interacted and moved when he was shooting his documentaries.[8]
Comparing Moon’s films from different periods of his work clarifies this evolution. Moon’s first film for La Blogothèque in 2006, called The Spinto Band, already had the concept of accompaniment — Moon responds to what he is filming in a single take with a handheld camera. It is still very crude though, Moon seems to falter and not know exactly how to behave and where to point the camera. The difference between the early films and Moon’s work a couple of years later is evident. After seven years and more than 300 films using the same technique, what was a shaky, same perspective and utterly dull camera is now an extension of his vibrant and energetic body.
a) OKO • LES FEMMES DE LA TERRE NOIRE (ensemble Volya) (2013)
OKO • LES FEMMES DE LA TERRE NOIRE (ensemble Volya) is the first of a small series within Petites Planètes that portrays the female ensembles and voices from a southern part of Russia known for its black soil or Terre Noire in French. As is typical with the Petites Planètes series, the movie consists of diverse locations where traditional songs from the region are recorded and intercut with scenes relating the present reality to the ruins of a glorious past.
Moon opens the film with some seconds of silence while the title is shown, following to jump straight into the music being sung with five quick shots of photos and paintings on the wall depicting the ensemble. Cutting to show where the sound is coming from, he slowly circles a closed room where six women are kneeled singing. The camera slowly moves around and inspects the scene seamlessly. In a single take, it scrutinizes the details, from the macro of a headscarf that examines the pattern of the textile, to a wide shot showing all the group.
The singing only stops when they are ready to move to the next location, an outdoor park with concrete buildings in the background. The brief moments without the music is filled with sonic details (the swing of the gate and the steps of the women). A single voice opens the next song, to which the ensemble will join in sync with the film cutting to showcase the size of the full group.
In the last performance, the singing gets faster, and the women stomp their feet on the floor to create the rhythmic percussion. Moon takes the opportunity to demonstrate his virtuosity with the camera — swiftly and without any loss of focus — the image goes from the ground level showing in detail the type of shoes and their dance movements to a wide-open shot of the group. After presenting the area, he closes in again to admire the face of a young singer before being impelled to one of the elderly ladies that compose the group. The camera pans downwards to carefully analyze the colorful robes before being leveled to the ground stressing the rhythm of the song that is being given by their feet.
With his camera, Moon dances around the group while inspecting the smallest details. The camera movements contrast youth/maturity, past/present, without explaining or elucidating anything that is happening, there is a sense of a time long gone and the nostalgia of something that the listener is not fully aware of. The way Moon moves and operates the camera recalls Angela Ndalianis words on virtuosity as a key trait of the Neo-Baroque aesthetics — “The virtuosity of science and technology is, in the hands of the virtuoso artist and filmmaker, transformed into something that is both magical and akin to the spiritual.”[9]
b) Take Away Show_DAKHA BRAKHA (2012)
Another film which epitomizes his consolidation as a master of accompaniment, is the Take Away Show_DAKHA BRAKHA.[10] The film, composed of two songs from the Kievian group, bridges Ukrainian folkloric music with contemporary styles. The band’s name refers to this exchange as it derives from the Ukrainian verbs “give” and “take.” The film, shot in 2012, was the first to give a global audience to a band that a couple of years later would go on to major festivals like Glastonbury and appear on BBC, NPR’s Tiny Desk, KEXP, and even have a track on the American television series Fargo.[11]
Moon’s film starts with the sound of a muffled car motor while images of the horizon seen from the inside of a car quickly pass by. Old Soviet icons like the Motherland statue mix and swirl with the blurs of colors on the road. An a capppella song of DakhaBrakha starts in the background while Moon takes us to the destination of the film by slowing down the velocity of the pan to show the car pulling into a smaller road. In the film there is no indication of what this place is and where it is. Up until now, it has only been briefly glimpsed that it’s on the side of a river and throughout the whole film the only clarifications are small flashes of the place. An old outdoor gym is shown, a bridge is under construction, and people are sunbathing on the other shore of the river, all while the a capppella song continues in the background.
It took me some time searching online with various terms in English (“open gym Ukraine river,” “river beach Kiev”, etc.) to finally find the place. The chosen location is curious, known as Hydro Park, it’s a river island on the outskirts of Kiev where the beach and a Soviet-era hand-made gym from metal scraps are the main attractions. Moon describes the conversation with Eugene, the person that was helping him in Kiev and that suggested filming there:
- The place is a bit like a gym. But in an impoverished Soviet style, in an open space with parades of proud biceps and bad homemade alcohol.
- Can we go film there?
- I don’t know, but it is pretty populated as you like it. The main beach on the Dniepr is just next to it, full of fat chess players and outdated orthodox churches.
- We will do that tomorrow. DakhaBrakha, in the best theater in the Ukraine.[12]
As the a capppella song ends, Moon discloses the members of the band putting on their outfit and setting-up, tuning and getting ready for the shooting. In the background the noises of the rusty metal gym equipment get louder while the film cuts to shots of the man working out. The sound is that of a rusty swing going to and fro, taking and giving. With the image of the people working out, the song Sho z-pod duba starts and slowly (in a single take) Moon travels backward with the camera, moving from the muscular men on the gym equipment to a close shot of a hand playing the cello. The rusty swinging sound of the gym fades out. Still, with this tight framing, he wanders around focusing on the details of the hands playing the drums, and on the mouth of the singer. During this movements, we still see in the background the men in their regular workout routine.
In the same single take, while drifting between the two singers, Moon slows down to focus on the gym. There is a friction between the performance and what is present in the environment. How the bodies that surround the band responds by being traversed or bothered by the sound and music that changed the natural soundscape of this old gym.
Moon is in the middle of the band, spinning in circles, dancing together with the camera in a tight zoom focusing and framing whatever interests him. He reacts back to the forces around him. A kid stops right in front of the performance curiously staring at the musicians and at the camera, to which Moon replies with a close shot of the kid’s eyes and whirls around to capture the point of view of what the boy is seeing. In doing this, he opens-up to a broader framing where, for the first time, we can finally have a scheme of how they are positioned and where they are located. Still without cutting, the camera swings back to the tight close-ups of the instruments being played soon drifting to a man that paused for some seconds to hear the music in-between his exercise.
As Sho z-pod duba ends Moon reveals that some people gathered around,, stopping to listen to the impropmtu performance that was happening. The rusty swinging sound becomes audible once again. This time, singer Iryna Kovalenko answers to the sound by singing in harmony with it and transforming this annoying metallic sound into an angelical duet.
The film cuts to the next location. People swim in the Dnieper, a jet ski passes by, and a couple sitting at the edge of the river turn around with an inquisitive expression to check what is happening. When the music Yanky! starts, Moon repeats the initial movement of walking backward to transition from the environment to close-ups of the musicians now playing at the opposite side of the river where the gym was. They are right next to a bridge that is being built. All the bridge workers stopped the construction to sit on the ledge to look down and listen to the music. This time Moon opens faster to an establishing shot, positioning the band against the small audience that stopped what they were doing to appreciate the pop-up show.
Once the surroundings are shown, he swiftly closes in to the gestures of the musicians, syncing the camera movements with the beat. Each beat a cue to swoop the camera to the next point of interest. He goes back and forth between a wider view where DakhaBrakha is positioned against the river and the extreme close-ups of the sources of sound — hands, instruments, the body, the mouth. Next, he cuts to how those who gathered around are reacting. These unpredictable reactions are important for Moon and are present in many of his films. It is the visual sign of an exchange of resonances taking place (renvoi). It doesn’t help elucidate or make it more understandable but instead helps strengthen the sensations provoked by music and sound. The critic and film theorist Bela Balázs explores this mechanism in the chapter Sound in his book Theory of the Film:
The face of a man listening to music… may throw light into the human soul; it may also throw light on the music itself and suggest by means of the listener’s facial expression some experience touched off by this musical effect. If the director shows us a close-up of the conductor while an invisible orchestra is playing, not only can the character of the music be made clear by the dumbshow of the conductor, his facial expression may also give an interpretation of the sounds and convey it to us. And the emotion produced in a human being by music and demonstrated by a close-up of a face can enhance the power of a piece of music in our eyes far more than any added decibels.[13]
Perhaps by contrasting the same song being played by DakhaBrakha recorded elsewhere can help establish Moon’s unique use of accompaniment. In 2015 the band appeared in NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert, a project greatly inspired by the Take Away Shows. In the Tiny Desk Concert, the musicians are crammed behind a desk in the music department offices of the American National Public Radio as if it was a stage, where they are recorded playing their songs to the NPR staff (that although off-camera can be heard).
The same music Sho z-pod duba that was recorded by Moon is played here and captured in a three-camera set-up. One front camera that remains static and wide-open to show the whole set, and a left and right camera that mostly does close-ups and a few pans. The result is drastically different from Moon’s films. NPR’s video focuses on the music being played, which assumes center stage while the image is a bystander helping to give the music some visual appeal. The image bears witness to the live aspect of the performance as dryly as a witness in a courtroom.
In Tiny Desk Concert, being crammed in a small place behind a desk is only a gimmick to justify an uninterrupted live performance. There is nothing else but the music, in a setting that is meant to convey it with as little interference as possible, so it doesn’t get in the way of what is being sung and played.
The same can be said about DakhaBrakha’s performance of the same song on a late-night show on BBC Two.[14] The elaborate stage, whimsical light design, and fancy camera movements on a crane are in function of the music. Delivering the performance as interference-free as possible is the goal.
So what sets Moon apart from the other recordings of the same song? Precisely that Moon enters into an exchange with the music, not only recording it but being shaped by it, and in turn, shaping it back.
Take Away Show_DAKHA BRAKHA affirms his argument when choosing the location — the best theater is that where life is happening. Music is integrated into a place full of people that without any previous knowledge will be confronted with the performance and in return will enter into a resonance between the musicians, director, camera, and the environment. Setting in motion the renvoi, Moon will join as an integral body that listens and reacts by searching for something beyond-meaning, beyond the music that is being played, something precisely in this exchange, in this encounter. It’s through such an approach that the random, the chaos is inserted inside the film. Accompaniment acts like an updated version of Bacon’s free marks in the director’s cinematic diagram. It is opening-up, searching, and listening for sens.
The ending is symbolic in representing this active stance to search for sens that is present in accompaniment. In a unique sequence within Moon’s filmography, as the music Yank! is about to reach its sudden end, shots of an eye frenetically searching are intertwined with reverse shots of constantly changing subjects. As if the gaze is never fully satisfied with what it’s seeing and must keep moving, searching for something that is not visible. The eye isn’t looking for comprehension or explanation, but it is one that hears, an eye at the edge of meaning.
For Moon though, sens is not only present in the interaction between him and the subject, or the listener and the film. The last shot of the eye looking to beyond the film, towards the blank space, is the inquiry towards the deeper labyrinthic database. A call for the spectator to continue interacting not only in the film itself but also in the endless operation of folding/unfolding that is the trait that I’ll explore in the last segment of this thesis, The Fold.
Voice: searching for uniqueness in the what and the who
The next aspect of Moon’s cinematic diagram is the voice. In A King Listens it is the voice that breaks the king free from his constant paranoiac relation to sound. Moon, as with the king in Calvino’s story, is fascinated with the voice itself, and uses it in his diagram to deconstruct any meaning it may provide, to set free the voice from any relations so that it may enter the renvoi as a sonorous body.
The voice of his subjects rarely are responsible for synthesis; it doesn’t give information that provides any knowledge or context.[15] How he does this is in a constant tension between the what of a voice (its sonorous characteristics and its relations to the world surrounding it) and the who of a voice (the singularity of each voice that can only be sensed).
This tension in how to approach a voice beyond the signification of its words is already present in the Take Away Shows. At times the voice is interrupted, overpowered by other sounds getting lost and merged into the soundscape; at other times the focus on the voice is so close and extreme that one cannot resist but to listen to its uniqueness.[16] Another early indication of Moon’s low regard for meaning is how rarely he uses subtitles. In his Take Away Shows he had already recorded musicians singing in English, French, Spanish, Swahili, Czech, Dutch, Danish, Greek, Portuguese, Japanese, Maori, Arabic, Icelandic, Polish, and Lithuanian, all without subtitles. In Petites Planètes he sparsely used subtitles in some of the first films of the series, to soon abandon it completely.
This tension between the what and the who of a voice replicates the differences between Nancy’s listening and Michel Chion’s reduced listening (informed by Pierre Schafer’s writings). In Audio-vision, Chion discusses three modes of listening: causal, semantic and reduced. Causal is what is heard without paying any attention, semantic is listening to find meaning, and reduced, is a mode of listening that pays attentions and tries to scrutinize the characteristics of the sound object.[17]
Moon, at times, is worried in exploring the voice as a sonic object and how it relates to its environment. Reduced listening here serves for his purpose to question the what of a voice. When questioning the who, though, Moon breaks free of Chion’s (and Schafer’s) three modes of listening to enter Nancy’s listening to a sens. This dualism can be grasped as perceiving sound as a sonic object vs perceiving the sound as a sonic body.[18] As an object the inquiry is about its traits, as a body it becomes probing its singularity.
What is a voice?
a) Mezzo Morra • i suoni della Sardegna (2012)
I’ll start on how he approaches the what of a voice by studying Mezzo Morra • i suoni della Sardegna (2012). Moon’s film, shot in 2011 in partnership with the Milano Film Festival explores the “canto a tenore,” a style of polyphonic folk singing characteristic to the island of Sardinia. In this traditional form, each singer of the quartet plays a distinct role that is connected somehow to the sounds of the island. The “bassu” (bass) imitates the cow mooing, the “contra” (counter) a sheep bleating, the “mesu ‘oche” (half voice) the sound of the wind, while the “’oche” (solo voice) leads the others on when to join him.[19] It is a fascinating vocal style that immediately sounds strong and primitive.
The opening of Moon’s film recognizes this ancestral connection to nature by starting with the sound of bleating sheep while slowly panning around the mountainous landscape. As if arising from the wind, gradually the sound of the voices gain body opening in a polyphonic harmony for the “oche” to start his solo. The song continues while Moon slowly cuts between the landscapes, from the mountains to the sea, to the hills, to the clouds. After a couple of minutes, the voices dissolve into the sound of the ocean; the image fades to black to introduce the title of the film.
This intro sequence posits these voices as the natural expression of the soundscape of Sardinia, it arises from the earth, from the wind, the animals, and returns to the sea. The images of the landscape help establish these sounds as ancient as the earth itself. A connection between the materiality of the natural elements with the sonic properties originated from them. What is the voice of each of these singers? Moon answers that they are the organic elements and the history of Sardinia.
The title is followed by a rare explanation in Moon’s oeuvre of how the tenores function while countryside images from inside a car quickly pass by. After a sequence of a musician playing a unique modified guitar — intercut with shots and sounds of a small village preparing itself for local festivities — Moon cuts to another critical sequence in the film.[20]
At dusk, five boys are in front of a small church in the village’s square. Multi-colored flags form garlands that are strung across the top of the piazza. They are playing “morra,” a millennial old hand game that dates back to ancient Roman and Greek times. One boy acts as the referee while the other four shout monotonously their guesses of what the combination of the fingers will be.[21]
The quartet playing “morra”, sound in their non-stop fast-paced shouts of numbers, almost as the tenores that were previously singing. The voice of these boys, casually grouped to play are turned into music, the rhythm of their game dictating the vibrations of their voices. The importance of this scene shouldn’t be overlooked, after all, the title Mezzo Morra gives equal importance to the tenores (in Mezzo) as to the game (in Morra). Both are integral in setting-up the acoustic encounter between the voice and the surrounding elements. The voice of the tenores is transfigured into soundscape, while the voices of these boys are mutated into song.
Cutting to the garlands on top of the boys and following the colorful flags, Moon pans to a small stage where a group of tenores perform. The voices of the boys playing morra merge into the polyphonic tune of the tenores. Moon asks — can it even be heard differently?
The film continues exploring the sounds around the festivity before introducing the last element to interact with the soundscape, the Launeddas. A polyphonic instrument made of three pipes, a larger one that delivers the continuous base and two smaller pipes that play the melody in thirds and sixths, a similar arrangement to that of the “bassu,” the “mesu ‘oche” and the “’oche” in the formation of the tenores.
Furthermore, the Launeddas require an elaborate technique of circular breathing as it needs to resound continuously and there is no bag as in its more known cousin the bag-pipe. Breathing and blowing then take a central part in playing the instrument, for its necessary to continuously inhale air through the nose and expel it through the mouth.
The film overlaps the images and sounds of the Launeddas being played with the game of morra, this time being played by a group of adults. The sound is overlaid. The shouts coming from the mouths of the players guessing numbers are mixed in with the sound from the Launeddas.
In the final sequence, Moon closes the circle mixing and fusing all sounds. The air expelled in the shouts flow through the Launeddas pipes. The wind from the pipes shakes the trees in the landscape. The kids play their numbers while the morra is played on the stage.
The film ends with the soundscape of this small village graciously wavering in the shot of the main church sitting quietly while the garlands full of flags vibrate in the wind on a peaceful sunny day. From sounds and images of the untouched nature to the daily life of this small Sardinian town, a millennial journey where all sounds are equally responsible in giving life.
The voice in Mezzo Morra expands what Serge Daney called “through voice” in a piece where he criticized the common terms of film theory when talking about voice:
…a through voice is a voice that originates within the image but does not emanate from the mouth. Certain types of shot, involving characters filmed from behind, from the side, or in three-quarter view or from behind a piece of furniture, screen, another person, or an obstacle of some sort, cause the voice to be separated from the mouth. The status of the through voice is ambiguous and enigmatic, because its visual stand-in is the body in all its opacity, the expressive body, in whole or in part.[22]
This concept is handy to grasp Moon’s different approaches to voice. In Mezzo Morra the voices are emanated from a body, but they started elsewhere and will also soon move on, continuing in the landscape, the culture and nature. The launeddas become a visual stand-in for the voice, as do the trees, the sheep and the waves of the ocean. In the pursuit of what is the voice, Moon arrives in this film, to the “passing through voice” — the body as a temporary repository of a voice that perdures. Right now it is a more abstract concept that will later, through his explorations of possession, develop into a more literal “passing through voice.”[23]
Mezzo Morra is the film that better embodies how Moon explores the question of the what of a voice, but this is visible to a lesser degree in many of his films, from the Take Away Shows to his series in Vietnam, like his movie VIET≈NAM ≈ NORTHERN TRIBES (2006).
In doing so, Moon questions what Michel Chion calls vococentrism, the tendency where the human voice naturally hierarchizes perception. As Chion states, “the presence of a human voice structures the sonic space that contains it.”[24] It’s not that Moon succeeds in breaking this inherit order, but he contextualizes the voice differently in relation to the image and signification. In deconstructing the voice and removing its meaning to investigate the origin of its sonic properties, Moon reconfigures the voice as something to sens rather than to understand.
A move that, as a comparison, also happens in Werner Herzog’s film How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck (1976) where the voices of the cattle auctioneers are so fast, full of rhythm and intonation that it surpasses the words to become an extension of countryside Pennsylvania. A sensation that is reinforced by interrupting the voices to insert John Denver’s song Take me Home, Country Rode with images of the landscape passing by. In this interruption the banjo strikes as remarkably similar to the trained voices that will compete in the following auction.[25] Herzog’s words on what incited him to do this movie can also be transposed to Moon:
The auctioneers not only speak very fast. It is almost like a form of invocation and ritual. There is a common border with the last form of poetry that is within our grasp, and also, it’s very close to music.[26]
Searching for the who of a voice
The other side of how this constant tension regarding the voice appears in Moon’s cinematic diagram is in how he searches to find the who of the voice. I initially found confusing to comprehend that both aspects are present in his work, but during Moon’s development throughout the years, it became clearer that in his practical approach to film making what guided his attention was a sense of curiosity to find new experiences. At times this curiosity was about cultural practices and rituals, where exploring what a voice is opens for exchange and encounters. Other times, the interest is about a specific person or group, where the who of the voice becomes the gateway to enter into a relationship with the subject and find its own singularity. This acoustic tension also reproduces what has been said before in trying to find a balance between the figurative and pure chaos, at being at the edge of meaning without falling too deeply into an uncontrolled anarchy of sensations.
Three films of Vincent Moon stand-out from the rest in his inquiry into the who of the voice. I imagine these films as a kind of trilogy of the voice for there are many links between them. The three of them were recorded between the two months of December and January (2010–2011) in Brazil.[27] They are somewhat minimalist in their approach, mostly happening inside the apartment of the singer, with the songs being either a capppella or with just another instrument following it. The three subjects have very distinct life stories but coincide in marking a specific period of Brazilian music in the 60s and 70s and that are still actively singing, performing and releasing new material. The films are collection Petites Planètes volume 1 • TOM ZÉ (2010), volume 15 • ELZA SOARES (2011), and volume 10 • Ney Matogrosso (2011).
a) Petites Planètes volume 1 • TOM ZÉ (2010)
The first film, about Tom Zé, is his “pilot” film for the Petites Planètes series. The first film released that inaugurated his Petites Planètes label. It starts with an electrical buzzing sound, soon cutting to display that the source of the sound are some Christmas lights strung around tropical palm trees. A woman’s voice breaks the scene to announce, through what sounds like an interphone, for Moon to wait. The film jumps to inside an old elevator going up, the floors quickly passing by. Together with the sound of the elevator, a voice starts to sing. Before seeing the source of such voice its characteristics are already conveyed (one may think here of acousmêtre). The voice sings slowly, in a capppella, it crackles and faults at times but nevertheless its firm as it carries on with a slow tempo as though listening to its echo. The elevator reaches the top floor. As the door opens, Moon cuts to a figure in a far-away window to slowly pan to Tom Zé against the foggy gray skyline of São Paulo.
The singer moves slowly while singing an ode to the northeast region of the country, the place where he was born and grew-up. The song is a Greek tragedy of sorts, where a shepherd is searching for a lost herd in the sertão and calling for help to anyone who has seen them.[28]
Moon slowly “floats” around him, he cuts to the skyline when Tom Zé finishes his song and lingers at this hazy day before going back to Tom Zé who already started singing about the death of a famous cangaceiro.[29] His performance becomes more physical, the voice becomes bolder, faster and with a stronger attack. Tom Zé moves around more aggressively mimicking with his arms the weapon of the cangaceiro. As he moves, his breath gets heavier; each inspiration becomes more sonorous as the movements are intensified. He turns his lack of air (at the time of the recording he was 75 years old) into part of the song, reaching its apex as he describes the cangaceiro’s death. Afterwards, calming down, he gently sings about the legacy that was left in the heart of the people.
In this sequence, on the one hand there is the sonic quality of Tom Zé’s voice — the grain, the harshness, tonality, the fleshy throat that produces the sound. On the other, you have the symbolism of what is being sung, the socio-cultural context of racism against the northeastern immigrant, Tom Zé’s personal background as someone who fled poverty, the “enfant terrible” of the tropicália movement who went into obscurity and regained attention when David Bryne discovered him.
The film, then, carries the questions if the voice is something purely semantical? Does it go beyond and carry an inner hidden-self as many philosophers based on Lacan will defend? Is it pure exteriority? Another sound with its unique properties for Moon to deconstruct? So far, some of the traits that Tom Zé’s voice has revealed is where he’s from, and maybe an age approximation. The difficulty arises when the who is questioned in the voice. In Chion’s book The Voice in Cinema he starts with this dilemma, can the voice be broken down as a separate element from its source?
The voice is elusive. Once you’ve eliminated everything that is not the voice itself- the body that houses it, the words it carries, the notes it sings, the traits by which it defines a speaking person, and the timbres that color it, what’s left? What a strange object, what grist for poetic outpourings…[30]
Chion’s answer though is problematic, for him the way forward is to interpret the voice through Lacan, “when he placed the voice-along with the gaze, the penis, the feces, and nothingness in the ranks of “objet (a).”[31] In his attempt to neither be fascinated by the voice and neither reduce it only to speech and language, his proposition of the voice as an object is essentially one that is connected to the visual. Voice becomes the possibility of an indexical relation to the imagetic body, the acousmatic voice is one that only exists due to the visual tension to which body it pertains:
Everything hangs on whether or not the acousmêtre has been seen. In the case where it remains not-yet-seen, even an insignificant acousmatic voice becomes invested with magical powers as soon as it is involved, however slightly, in the image. (…) Being involved in the image means that the voice doesn’t merely speak as an observer (as commentary), but that it bears with the image a relationship of possible inclusion, a relationship of power and possession capable of functioning in both directions; the image may contain the voice, or the voice may contain the image.[32]
In Moon this tension is eliminated, the voice is always intrinsically connected to its source, or it can be said, the body is always contained in the voice. Focusing on what has been said so far regarding sound, the basis to comprehend Moon’s films start in configuring the world through a sonic perspective. The uniqueness of an otocentric approach relies on embracing that, in sound, difference is the normative. The would of sound is the world of the singular.[33]
To further understand how this uniqueness is at the core of Moon’s questioning the who of the voice, Adriana Cavarero’s For More Than One Voice comes in hand. In her book, Cavarero deepens this concept finding in the voice markers of uniqueness and using this to revise the universal and abstract categories of philosophy based on singularity already being imbued into all living things. Cavarero reasons that each woman or man has “an identity that consists in an embodied existing being, unique and unrepeatable.”[34]
By asserting such a radical revision of singularity (through voice) what would be otherwise merely physical proximity is turned into a space of relation, conversation, and encounter. Voice is not the projection of a hidden-inside but a model to be in the world together. It indicates that someone is there to be seen and heard.
Relating back to Moon, Cavarero distinguishes what someone is from who someone is. In practical terms, what a voice is changes, it is subject to transformation. It may reveal some aspects of the person, but none of them finds the who in question. For her, the who, stemming from her political concept of the uniqueness through encounters, is not what Tom Zé is, neither the sonorous characteristics of the voice, but is the singular path of someone’s life as recounted by others. In this sense, the who requires an outside interaction to be found. It is the result of an encounter, an exchange.
Ryan Dohoney synthesizes well the process, these external voices in communication with one’s own “do not access anything secret or hidden in the innermost depths of subjectivity but instead open up a relational space — a plurality — through which uniqueness is communicated by a polyphony of other singular voices. The uniqueness of some woman or man is told as it existed in the world, experienced by others.”[35]
b) Petites Planètes volume 15 • ELZA SOARES (2011)
The film ELZA SOARES (2011) is exemplary in how this operates throughout Moon’s work. Elza Soares is an intriguing figure that throughout her whole life has been able to persevere even after extreme tragedies. Forced into marriage at the age of 12, a year later, without any money to buy medicine for her son she went on a national radio competition to sing. She was laughed by the audience due to her condition, and the presenter mockingly asked her from which planet she had come from, to which she promptly answered — “Planet hunger.”[36] Her life even after success was marked by deaths of loved ones, despair, and even an almost national hatred towards her due to the relationship with the sixties football phenomenon Garrincha. All of this, like in Tom Zé, is nowhere to be found in the film. There is one sequence towards the end where Moon shows the posters and pictures that are hanged on her living room’s wall. A shot that without any previous knowledge of her career seems to be only another typical sequence where Moon directs the camera to explore the environment in which they are.
Instead, Moon focuses on her husky voice. The songs she chooses to sing has herself as the poetic persona and infers to be heavily autobiographical. They are songs of resisting adversity and in the process being trespassed by a range of emotions that change and affect her. The first is sung in a capppella and is Noite do meu bem, originally sang by Dolores Duran.[37] The second part is a sort of medley with the accompaniment of a keyboard where her soliloquies connect the different music that she sings. In these spoken parts — referring to herself in the third person — Elza Soares enunciates a series of characteristics that defines her story. Moon mostly frames her face in a tight shot, occasionally opening up the frame and circulating to disclose the singer in an extravagant wooden chair. A throne in which she sits looking outside her apartment to the beach of Copacabana.
In this film, the singer is adamant in explicitly defending her uniqueness. Even so, for her voice to reveal the who, there needs to be an exchange with someone else, an encounter with other voices. Her use of the third person as an imaginary other is a mimicry of what Moon is simultaneously doing with the camera, the outside self that finds the uniqueness.
The film seems to have caught an inflection point in Elza Soares career. It captures the seed of resilience, the will to provoke what is expected of her at that age. A drive originated in her voice, as the method to open herself to an encounter where the who can emerge. She is aware of how the voice is in play as a couple of years later in the album A Mulher do Fim do Mundo (2015), she would sing that she is “a woman at the end of the world, who will sing till the end.”[38]
Nevertheless, her voice says what Elza Soares is but for it to express the who it needs to enter an exchange, that happens in this film through Moon (and the pianist). Her singularity depends on its relations with the other singular voices around her. Moon by listening (écouter) to a voice opens this renvoi where the who can be found. Nadal-Melsió’s connection between Levinas and Nancy comes in hand here to properly interpret Moon’s stance:
I will be expectant in my listening, ready for the sound to reach my ears. I will wait for the emergence of something outside myself, for another to approach me. I will be attuned to another’s existence before my own.[39]
In listening the who is found at the edge of meaning, it opens up one’s own existence as an echo-chamber to resound and affirms its singularity. At this edge, the what of a voice turns into a byproduct to the unique who that can only be sensed. The film becomes the propulsor and motivator for this exchange where both the who of the subject and the who of the director is affirmed through this sonic encounter. To make a film is to create the physical space of encounter that Cavarero proposes in her theory of voice and that Moon unknowingly seeks: “Making a film is like putting myself in a situation that I would not be able to do if I did not have the camera and if I didn’t have the project of filming music.”[40] The process of filmmaking becomes an excuse to enter into a physical space where he can vibrate with these voices. In the three films that I’m analyzing here, this space is the living room of each artist that he is shooting.
Nadal-Melsió expands how this encounter happens even beyond the physical interaction. The listener of the film doesn’t need to be physical present before the artist, for now it is possible able to enter into the renvoi by being all ears, to closely and attentively listening — “the singularity of my voice only emerges as a response to the other that precedes and exceeds me, and of the world that we share in this game of call and response.”[41]
If such a game sounds familiar, it’s not a coincidence, for Nancy’s summon to listen is precisely a mode of living that finds one’s uniqueness through its interaction with others and in doing so encounters sens — an acknowledgment of the who of a voice instead of the knowledge of the what. Listening to a voice in Moon’s films is a sensuous apperception that opens the listener up to interact with it, to resound and refer back, finding one’s own voice in the process.
c) Petites Planètes volume 10 • Ney Matogrosso (2011)
The last film in this trilogy of voices is Ney Matogrosso, a film where the erotic and energetic countertenor voice of Ney Matogrosso takes the central stage, while a cello provides a counterpoint to a dialog created between voice and instrument. Compared to the other two films the accompanying instrument here is sonically more evident and also foregrounded in the image. Also, Ney Matogrosso is holding a microphone very close to his mouth. If this is a technical decision to capture the smaller nuances of his countertenor voice or an artistic choice for him to feel more relaxed (in his shows the microphone has an integral part in the performance) is hard to know. What matters is that effectively the delicate variations of his voice seem to be indeed better recorded. It also becomes a source of interest for Moon as he frames the mouth and the microphone many times more than only the mouth with Tom Zé and Elza Soares.
Ney Matogrosso starts to take Cavarero’s ideals to the limit. The voice is only fully revealed because it’s intermediated by a microphone that amplifies the subtler characteristics that would otherwise remain hidden. A question regarding the electronic intermediation of voice that Cavarero doesn’t regard as appropriate, for it contradicts her political reasoning of the physical encounter. Furthermore, in Ney Matogrosso the voice tensions this balance between the physical pleasure in listening to a song to the pleasure of finding the uniqueness (this is Cavarero’s notion of the pleasure of the voice). But can there be such an intensification of sensations that maybe something else can also appear? How to connect this pleasure in the singularity of a voice to how it functions inside a song? To the voice in music?
The listener takes pleasure in Ney Matogrosso’s voice, to find the who that is captured in the film. There is pleasure also in how the sounds of Rio de Janeiro are inserted in between the sequences, giving life outside his voice, and how in contrast to his countertenor the cello being played escalates the impression of listening to a voice but also to an instrument that at times sounds like a gracious bird (like in the chorus of his second performance Fala). An impression that Moon accentuates with the birds singing in the background, by framing him against the trees and finishing with him against the sky before flying away to the next shot from a higher view down towards the city.
It’s when relating the voice to a song that Cavarero’s work shows its deficiencies and by exploring these limitations, in turn, further elucidates the purpose of the voice in Moon’s cinematic diagram. When reading For More Than One Voice it is striking that all her elaborations on voice are always based in metaphorical or literary voices, nowhere she concerns herself with a real voice connected to a real body. The fleshy throat, the weightiness of a body, the physicality responsible for the reverberance that gives life to the exhaled air are all absent. The nonappearance of any connections to a real voice affects her idea of music for she sees it as a purely abstract concept of a place for voices to interact while carrying the danger of the voice uniqueness being absorbed, dissipated and finally lost.
The voice inserted inside a musical context, unconnected to any real sonic experience loses its spontaneity of conjuring unpredictable situations. Dohoney acutely rebates Cavarero’s strict perspective on song:
To overdetermine the experience of song — as Cavarero does — as a source of pleasure is to miss those moments when musical performance acts otherwise, when it sets up unexpected situations that go somewhere (affectively, politically) we weren’t expecting, in short, when music gives birth to something new whose circulation and mediation can’t be foreseen.[42]
As I hope, has become clear so far, to create an environment for the unforeseen, the unexpected, is one of the primary goals of Moon’s cinematic diagram. The who of the voice is an integral part; it stimulates the film to happen, it impulses the creation of a physical space of encounter between the director and the subject where both will interact in finding and defining the singularity of each other. It’s also an invitation to listen attentively and in the voices present in the film find the opening of one’s own voice to resound. Moon is interested in discovering this unique who in Tom Zé, Elza Soares, Ney Matogrosso, and all the other subjects he recorded. However, his fascination seems to go beyond. Finding the uniqueness of a voice is but the beginning to see how, together with the artist, they can compose an experience that goes somewhere unexpected.
Each of these three artists has feature-length documentaries that explore the who of their voice that would fit into Cavarero’s philosophy.[43] They successfully recount their life stories and find their uniqueness. But none use this singularity of the voice as the platform for an inimitable and unpredictable composition to blossom. Does it always work? No. Dohoney adds, when regarding music and voice, that “Music does not always destabilize meaning; it is not always that drastic or enjoyable. Sometimes music is boring; sometimes it fails.”[44] The same also applies to Moon, his films not always manage to give birth to the unpredicted. But the impulse to create a fertile ground for it to happen is always there.
Cavarero’s notion of vocal expression emerges from a phenomenological perspective; each individual is naturally born unique, the voice is the form through which an interaction that finds this uniqueness within the other occurs.[45] Nancy, in contrast, conjectures a post-phenomenological conception where the focus is shifted to a self that exists outside the subject/other paradigm, one that subsists in the renvoi (the endless referral between the sonic bodies). This doesn’t negate the singularity of each voice, and similarly to Cavarero, it is through listening that one interacts with the other bodies and finds its uniqueness.
But, Nancy, in surfacing this third entity, the self in the renvoi, opens the interaction to beyond the human, one’s uniqueness can be found in the encounter with this third self. It no longer requires the physical presence of another human so that two voices can interact. With Nancy, singularity is affirmed with the body participating in the renvoi, be it between two people, or with any other type of sonic body.
As such, this self is what opens one’s singular voice/timbre to participate transforming and echoing back to its surrounding. Cavarero helps explains Moon’s fascination with the voice, in exchange Nancy helps understand how the voice is set in motion and what he hopes to achieve.
In this “trilogy of the voice” Moon and the singer listen to each other, become echo-chambers with unique singular voices/timbres that resonate with each other and with what is around them, creating and entering the renvoi. Nancy’s post-phenomenological concept also means that anything that resounds, that echoes, that exists in the sonic world also becomes part of the renvoi. The interaction is no longer between director x subject, but their voices are part in affirming the singular difference of everything that reverberates (remembering Nadal-Melsió’s that in the living everything is singular). In this grand sonic encounter, the listener listens to himself, to the otherself but most importantly to the self in the renvoi.
As another entity is added to Cavarero’s ideal physical space; the voice is no longer only a linear force in her metaphoric and literary conception. In considering how sound functions, when a voice interacts with another, it resounds, bounces, echoes back and forth in an endless reconfiguration, each time slightly changing as it is transformed by the subject, the other and whatever is around it. This doesn’t negate uniqueness, but it creates a third self, one that is in constant change. It can’t be understood what this other self is, but one can listen to it and acknowledge that something unrepeatable and unique is happening in the exchange, what Nancy calls sens.
In the renvoi, Tom Zé’s voice reveals the uniqueness of that body converted into an echo-chamber. The mouth becomes the escape route of this organon to affirm and expresses his singularity beyond any words. It is not coincidentally that Moon often frames extreme close-ups of the mouth, a move that Brandon LaBelle unravels in his book Lexicon of the Mouth:
The mouth is thus wrapped up in the voice, and the voice in the mouth, so much so that to theorize the performativity of the spoken is to confront the tongue, the teeth, the lips, and the throat; it is to feel the mouth as a fleshy, wet lining around each syllable, as well as a texturing orifice that marks the voice with specificity, not only in terms of accent or dialect, but also by the depth of expression so central to the body.[46]
Tom Zé, on the terrace of his building, sings to the cars passing by below, to the towers that surround him, to the birds that fly above, to the mountains that envelope the city, to the neighbor that was previously shown in the window, and to Moon with his body and camera almost touching Tom Zé’s mouth. All these sonic bodies resound back their singular existence, echo the singer’s rough and tired voice, which in turn resounds back each sonic wave. Moon films this intricate continuous sending back and forth of sounds where the self in the renvoi emerges, where anyone can enter to affirm one’s own voice.
Continue reading Passing Through the Diagram: Music & Noise or go the INDEX.
[1] (Hainge, Philippe Grandrieux: Sonic Cinema, 2017, p. 71)
[2] Due to the difficulty in finding Grandrieux’s early documentaries I’m using here Hainge’s description of Place de la Bastille, Jogo Du Bicho, and Retour a Sarajevo.
[3] Ibid., p. 59.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Vincent Moon and Nana Vasconcelos: The world’s hidden music rituals (2014). [YouTube Video]. TED. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nZqiPLCvM4
[6] There are a lot of ways of playing, either by selecting four numbers or by choosing one of the 25 animals and their respective numbers.
[7] Grandrieux, quoted in (Hainge, Philippe Grandrieux: Sonic Cinema, 2017, p. 67)
[8] Baugh, B. (2005). Jean Rouch: A Tribute. Retrieved August 18, 2013, from Documentary Education Resources: http://www.der.org/jean-rouch/content/index.php?id=der_marshall
[9] Ndalianis, A. (2005). Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge: The MIT Press, p. 241.
[10] The title of the film is introduced a space referencing to each verb (give and take) as there is no space in the name bands name DakhaBrakha.
[11] The song Sho z-pod duba was used in the second episode of the season three of Fargo.
[12] Moon, V. (2012). Dakha Brakha. Retrieved July 10, 2017, from La Blogothèque: http://en.blogotheque.net/2012/11/13/dakha-brakha-2/
[13] Balázs, B. (1989). Theory of the Film. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 120.
[14] Later… with Jools Holland. BBC Two. 29 September, 2015.
[15] I say rarely because in Petites Planètes there are some exceptions where a certain cultural tradition is explained as in Mezzo Morra • i suoni della Sardegna (2012) and in KANGË E DEFA ◉ Female Rhapsody in Kosovo (2017).
[16] A good early example for the music being taken over by sound is Au Revoir Simone — Stay Golden (2006) and for the extreme focus on the voice My Brightest Diamond — Hymne à l’amour (2006) and Take Away Show #93 _ BON IVER (2008)
[17] (Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, 1994, pp. 25–34)
[18] “Reduced listening takes the sound — verbal, played on an instrument, noises, or whatever — as itself the object to be observed instead of as a vehicle for something else.” Ibid., p. 29.
[19] As explained in https://styriarte.com/en/artists/tenores-di-bitti/ (10 May, 2018)
[20] Moon doesn’t introduce the musician only giving his name, Paolo Angeli, at the final credits.
[21] The game consists in two players guessing a number between 1 and 10 to simultaneously draw their hands showing how many fingers they are playing, the first to guess the right number gains a point. In this scene a variant with four players is shown where each time someone loses the winner quickly jumps to the next person to continue the game uninterrupted.
[22] Daney, S. (2013). Back to Voice: on Voices over, in, out, through. Cinema Comparat/ive Cinema, 1(3), p. 20. Within the context of this chapter, his text comes as a direct answer to Michel Chion’s reliance in seeing the voice as an object that is to be interpreted visually. Dany offers in his text an alternative, where the voice becomes the center to which the image needs to be decoded.
[23] The passing through voice will gain specific relevance in the sub-section of cine-trance.
[24] Chion, M. (1999). The Voice in Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 5.
[25] In the sparse interviews that are in the film, one of the competitors says that he had professional training by an opera singer on how to control his breathing to become a better auctioneer.
[26] Herzog, W. Quoted in Anguiano, F. A. (2010) Lo irónico-sublime como recurso retórico en el cine de no-ficción de Werner Herzog. El caso The Withe Diamond, Grizzly Man y The Wild Blue Yonder. (Doctoral dissertation) Retrieved from https://www.tesisenred.net/handle/10803/7266
[27] From the many countries that Moon recorded, Brazil is one of the most prominent. A possible explanation on why Brazilian music particularly interested Moon can be found in Albert Elduque when he comments that “most of Brazilian music contains contains a potential, latent image. It is an image that precedes its use in movies and documentaries, and may be inspired by the lyrics, the structure, the melodies or the chords of the song.” Elduque, A. (Ed.). (2017). Contemporary Brazilian Music Film. Reading: University of Reading, p. 14.
[28] For the Vincent Moon follower there’s something new here. He is inserting subtitles to the song lyrics, a practice that during the first year of Petites Planètes he occasionally did depending on the availability of someone to translate the lyrics and on the time to edit the film. The subtitles are far from perfect, at times slowing-up or disappearing completely. I understand, although there isn’t a source for this, that subtitling was an afterthought and focusing on translating wasn’t of real interest for Moon. In the Vimeo comments of his film Volume 6 • ZAR (2010) a viewer asked if he could add subtitles to which he responded — “Sure, can you send me the translation?”
[29] Cangaceiro is the name of the bandits that roamed the region in late 19th, early 20th century. Glauber Rocha made them internationally famous in his films (particularly Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol).
[30] (Chion, The Voice in Cinema, 1999, p. I)
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid., p. 23.
[33] (Nadal-Melsió, 2018, p. 26)
[34] (Cavarero, 2002, pp. 92–93)
[35] (Dohoney, 2011, p. 77)
[36] An in-depth recount of her life can be found in the archives of O Globo: http://acervo.oglobo.globo.com/em-destaque/com-voz-suingue-elza-soares-deixou-planeta-fome-para-conquistar-mundo-21486028
[37] To sing a cover from another artist in this moment is an intriguing choice by Elza Soares. Albert Elduque, comments on the importance that re-peforming takes in the Brazilian tradition of music films, which in this case can be applied to Elza’s effort to rethink and reframe her past — “As a matter of fact, the re-performance is an enduring feature of the Brazilian music documentary, probably because it is an effective, condensed way of rethinking the history of the song through a single, present image which evokes a remembered past.” (Elduque, 2017, p. 9)
[38] Pitchfork’s review of the album invokes the same feeling that is present in the film: “She sounds exhausted, worn out, run into the ground by sorrow. But in every click in her voice, in every catch in her throat, there is also defiance.” https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22173-a-mulher-do-fim-do-mundo-the-woman-at-the-end-of-the-world/
[39] (Nadal-Melsió, 2018, p. 24)
[40] Moon, V. (2012, March 7). Vincent Moon has a Vision. (D. Feather, Interviewer) Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdHiZRChxkc
[41] (Nadal-Melsió, 2018, p. 25)
[42] (Dohoney, 2011, p. 80)
[43] They are Fabricando Tom Zé (2006), My Name is Now, Elza Soares (2014), and Olho Nu (2014). In an additional note, as Albert Elduque notes there has been in the past two decades an intense interest and production of Brazilian cinema with interest in music. More details on this movement can be found in the (Contemporary Brazilian Music Film, 2017)
[44] (Dohoney, 2011, p. 80)
[45] She will apply this notion into a feminist theory that breaks down the western philosophical history of ignoring this uniqueness.
[46] LaBelle, B. (2015). Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral Imaginary. London: Bloomsbury, p. 1.
