Deep Listening: Recent Short Films by Marco Joubert
Deep Listening: Recent Short Films by Marco Joubert
Over the coming weeks, I have been writing about some films which I enjoyed at the festival Instants Vidéo in October 2023. This is the final article in the series.
Two recent shorts by Montreal-based filmmaker Marco Joubert depict heightened modes of listening. In Symphonic Distress (10 minutes, 2022), pianist Pamela Reimer plays a work by Yuliya Zakharava, in which she performs triggered electronics, percussion and vocalizations in addition to piano. Sequences of Reimer playing the piece are intercut with poetic imagery depicting the emotional world of the music. In The Primordial Impasse (3 minutes, 2022), Jean Marchand plays a podcaster, broadcasting his meditations on life, birth and death. (The text is by Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran.) Several listeners follow his thoughts with transfixed, rapt attentiveness.
In Impasse the act of listening is depicted directly, and is the explicit subject matter. The listeners are deeply involved with what the podcaster is saying; they’re hanging on every word. The gist of his philosophy, as I understand it, is that the state of non-being we enjoyed prior to birth was one of “freedom and happiness,” and that being born as a human being is a “great tragedy.” His philosophical insights seem to provide something crucial for his listeners. His ideas seem deeply explanatory; they make life more comprehensible and meaningful, and even provide a strange kind of comfort, despite the extreme hopelessness of his vision. The listeners’ devoted contemplation of his words is particularly striking to me because I don’t react to his philosophy that way. I’m not a big theory or philosophy person in general, but his philosophy, in particular, didn’t feel insightful to me, or helpful to me in navigating through life, so I was fascinated by the film’s depiction of a group of individuals so drawn to his voice and thoughts.
Marchand is a lone figure in his recording studio, illuminated by a single bulb. The listeners are likewise depicted as isolated. All the figures are presented as if listening in the middle of the night, cocooned inside their headphones. They listen to his voice as if he is the only other human being on earth, addressing them directly and personally. Their faces are occasionally intercut with visual sequences which refer to the text more abstractly, such as a shot of a lit match, going out.
Marchand’s embodiment of Cioran’s thought is truly remarkable. The human compassion and suffering mixed with tender affection in his voice and face are mesmerizing. He, too, is a listener. Since his philosophy is about a man, in the middle of life, confronting the void of non-being, in a way he is attempting to “listen” to the energy of the void, of the state-before-life. This is a universal human concern, and in a way, he is addressing the universe itself with his discourse, so it is appropriate that he is creating a podcast, a medium which addresses the universe at large, rather than sitting at a table and talking to individual people. Podcaster and listener are mutually interdependent. He needs listeners, at least the idea of listeners, for his philosophical work to become meaningful, and they appear to need him just as much, perhaps because he is daring to speak of things that are almost never discussed.
Symphonic Distress is a multi-faceted exploration of listening. The (black and white) footage of Reimer performing the piece reveals the process of playing music as one of listening, even more than expressing. Reimer’s concentrated facial expressions show her as fully immersed in her inner experience of the music music as a bodily, emotional human experience, because this is the source of the actual music, which is not a collection of dots on a piece of paper, but a lived human experience.
The music generates a sense of restless, circulating anxiety and anticipation, and Joubert intercuts the footage of Reimer with a montage of color images which embody this anxiety. An older woman (Marie Tifo) appears to be consumed with fears. We see icicles dripping, shards of glass, a close-up of a watchful animal’s eye, even a marionette who appears to be in acute distress.(There’s an interesting subliminal suggestion that the puppet is like the piano, in the sense that both puppet and piano are lifeless objects which the performer can magically bring to life.)
The figures in the film are connected to the music, but they aren’t merely listening, like the podcast fans in Impasse. The woman and the puppet in Distress are an embodiment of the emotional world of the music, the anxiety, anticipation, foreboding. This necessarily means that they appear to be listening, because they are listening for whatever is the next awful thing is that’s going to pop up in front of them, for signs of the whatever-it-is that is making them so anxious. The more abstract visual elements, luridly lit, are also expressions of this anxious anticipation. The music expresses an emotional state which encourages a paranoid mode of listening. Collectively, these illustrative sequences express Joubert’s imaginative response to the music: they are the visual record of how the music affects the filmmaker. As such, the making of the film embodies an act of deep listening.
Zakharava’s music is excellent for film, because it creates a distinct sequence of episodes, each episode with a complex, yet clear texture and mood. This sequence of musical episodes also seems to hint at a narrative, a certain way of gradually working through the experience of “distress.” This is exactly what a filmmaker needs music to provide; it’s a perfect launching pad for a sequence of images.
Both of these films center on the experience of deep listening, which makes them particularly valuable for our time. Listening skills are in sharp decline in our world. Social media encourages us to express ourselves non-stop, without particularly pausing to care who’s listening, or even whether or not anyone is listening, and definitely not concerning ourselves with whether or not we’ve been understood, or whether or not our utterances are of any value to others. Without face-to-face interactions, listening goes out the window. I see groups of teenagers, all talking simultaneously, not one of them listening, and all perfectly satisfied that what they’re doing is “having a conversation.” In this context, films like these can be life-saving.
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