Listening to Vincent Moon — Conclusions
This is the conclusion 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 cinematic diagram, as mapped out through this research, is a mutable point in time subjected to the endless transformations of the renvoi of Moon’s work. To write an explanation of his diagram is parallel to freezing the proposition circle and excluding the possibilities that can still arise through his practice. With this in mind, it’s noteworthy to recap the main contributions of Vincent Moon during this first decade (twelve years to be more exact) of his career. In this research the key aspects that I defend that make Moon a relevant subject to film and audiovisual studies are:
- The incorporation of a non-ocular stance to filmmaking (Nancy’s listening) opens new paths to what a music video can be at a critical time where new technologies and platforms were emerging.
- Moon’s cinematic diagram further expands and exemplifies how to integrate a sonic approach to cinema. This attempt to balance at the edge between meaning and chaos is one that subverts understanding and favors sensory acknowledgement.
- His enthrallment with experience unfolds into an investigation on how film can carry an unrealized latent interaction for the listener to unlock and create his own experience (in Benjamin’s words, to find “fragments of oneself”).
- An unusual phenomenon emerges in Moon’s work — what I call the encounter-image. His determination to rethink cinema exclusively as a medium to experience unearths an image made anew; one that is more worried with the process of becoming (of how sense is expressed into existence) than with what will insist and last in the work itself. As such, the film becomes ephemeral. A one-time encounter that dies as soon as it is experienced.
- This ephemeral nature, in turn, impels Moon to accumulate and comprehend each film as a mutable part of a larger database of experiences. Concepts like interaction and subverting hierarchy, present in his cinematic diagram, are extrapolated to the larger sphere of how his work is distributed. To navigate through this database one has to fold/unfold a unique path in unison with folding and unfolding the experiences contained in each film.
Questions for a future research
The concept of the encounter-image can be extended to a broader range of pieces that also focus foremost on opening an experience rather than implanting the object with layers of meaning and signification. The format of the cinematic-diagram, as I have transposed to Vincent Moon can also be converted to other artists. Such a format can even be extended to embrace other senses like touch, smell and taste as long as the artist in question is preoccupied with finding how to balance at the edge of chaos.To further progress this thesis it would be interesting to also inquire into the transient aspect of the encounter-image. Something that only in the last months of this research has started to surface into the methods that Moon is currently investigating. The film, relegated as the instigator that opens the encounter, quickly becomes ephemeral, for once the proposition is unfrozen, and the listener experiences the encounter between the multiple voices (film, subject, listener, director) the encounter-image loses its allure. To find new forms and create new experiences with previous encounters becomes as essential as creating the films itself, hence, incentivizing forms, like the database, where a new sens can arise and new beings can be produced.
Since the release of Híbridos in 2017, Moon, in inquiring a solution for the ephemerality of the encounter-image, has focused in live-cinema presentations. The task, which currently Moon is occupying himself with, is how to give his archive of films an after-life. To seek ways to create new experiences for a film whose sole purpose is accomplished when it opens the first unrepeatable encounter. In these live-performances, the shots of the film are simultaneously mixed with the music created by an accompanying DJ or by live musical performances. Is this the destination for the encounter-image? To be in a constant changing flux of interactions, being made each time anew? Producing new experiences without having to shoot a constant stream of new material?
This new moment, of live-cinema, is still in its foundational moments in Moon’s career. It gained more of his attention in 2017, and so far, it resembles Moon’s initial experiments back in 2006 when he was still trialing with more experimental aesthetics. In his live performance’s images are superimposed on top of each other, effects that invert the colors are applied, specific channels are made transparent, images merge and distort. At a quick glance, it would seem that he threw away all his cinematic-diagram that he worked for over a decade. Nevertheless, looking closer reveals the director’s desire to recreate that first encounter that he felt — “I’m working on this form of ‘live cinema’ as a way of returning to the intuition I experience when I’m filming.”[1] Creating a fleeting encounter, opening the renvoi, listening to a new self, they all are transposed to the concept of performing live the creation of a new experience. The fold/unfold of the database returns to Moon, as he now navigates and unfolds his own database each time he performs, surfacing new beings in front of an audience. Unlocking at each presentation, through the randomness of how the aural and visual will be uniquely reconfigured, the proposition circle so that a new unknown self can emerge and an auratic experience may take place.
Lifting the eyes
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. You are outside again, 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. And surely you are also here, in the midst of it all, in the teeming noises that rise on all sides, in the buzz of the electric current, the throb of the pistons, the clank of gears. Somewhere, in a fold of the earth, the city is reawakening, with a slamming, a hammering, a creaking that grows louder. Now a noise, a rumble, a roar occupies all space, absorbs all sighs, calls, sobs…
August 1, 1984
Rome[2]
What happened to the king at the end of Calvino’s story? It appears that sound overtakes everything, that noise fills all space, that the reborn vision attempts to gain a life of itself but ultimately is subjugated and drowned in noise. The king that started the story alienated from the outside world in his throne due to the supremacy of vision ends alienated in the world where noise absorbs all sight. Moon’s concept of his cinematic diagram comes as an answer to avoid the same faith of the king, to keep a balance at the edge of meaning, to create a site where voices can interact and experience finding fragments of one’s existence. If the king’s story followed the principles of Nancy’s listening, the ending would have been one where there is no concept of crown anymore; the sonic interaction would have eliminated all appearances of authority, no longer remaining any hierarchy within the sonic bodies that now interact free from a power that “sees” all sounds and assigns significations and menaces to each noise.
Calvino’s story was originally an opera piece that he wrote for the Italian composer Luciano Berio, only later it was adapted to be included in a book. In its format of inception, Berio would reveal to Umberto Eco that “it’s the musical processes that are primarily responsible for the narration.”[3] To have this sonic basis also influenced how the work was structured:
My concern was not to create a “system of expectations”, but (and maybe you’ll tell me it’s the same thing) to control developments and relationships between the various musical characters, their conflicts, and the polyphonic density of the whole. The spectator, your “theatrical consumer”, can select his “system of expectations” for himself from the expressive range that I offer him. So I would say that Un re in ascolto elaborates various levels of reading, the simplest of which is perhaps that of opera.[4]
The link between how Calvino’s and Berio’s Un re ascolto was conceived recalls the writings on the database and the production of beings; creating the possibility that each interaction is as unique as the body that is encountered. Equivalently to Moon, a practice that is based in listening transforms not only the work of art but also how the work itself interacts with the bodies that it meets, each experience grafting singular traces and fragments. Berio assimilates the function of the listener of his opera to that of a detective:
(The same sort of thing happens in a book with which you’re not unfamiliar which, on its most immediate level, can be read here and there as a detective story.) I would really hardly know what name to give to the more complex modes of reading, nor do I intend to try. I’m all too well aware that the problems raised by Un re are on such a scale that they won’t easily lend themselves to being pinned down verbally. As well you know, what is linguistically evident is not necessarily what is made evident by things themselves, especially when music is involved.
Music becomes an object for the listeners to investigate, for an unnamed interaction, one that, as Berio notes, is not focused on understanding, since many ideas cannot be evidenced linguistically, but to be experienced. The composer assumes the position of creating a puzzle for his listeners to unfold and interact with. Moon take this a step further, by abdicating his position as the all-powerful dictator (the king at the “ear-palace”) for an unrehearsed collaboration to take place, but most importantly, to attempt a self-alienation through cine-trance, so that an unconscious raw interaction can be preserved untouched in his films.
Creation becomes enabling an experience, an interaction, that in turn, shadows the object produced to the background. Image and sound become the medium for an interaction that lives only in the present. Paraphrasing Berio, Vincent Moon elaborates various levels of reading, the simplest of which is perhaps that of film.
