One of the most engaging talks from a visiting practitioner we’ve had recently was from Amy Cutler, a filmmaker and sound artist who explores themes of “geography and nonhuman others”. Whilst these themes are not directly related to the piece I aim to make for my portfolio, I found the methods in which she tells stories through sound very captivating and there is definitely some inspiration to be taken. In this blog post I will look at two of her works – Black Hole Cinema and Leave Me On a Rainy Afternoon.
Black Hole Cinema
https://amycutler.net/black-hole-cinema
Black Hole Cinema was a gallery installation project made in 2022 exploring the idea of representing black holes using film and sound, and incorporating the research carried out by Dr. Adam Brown on black hole ‘fishing’ – a hypothetical future process of extracting energy from a black hole once Earth runs out. Cutler was interested in exploring the desire to “exploit the least exploitable thing in the known and unknown universe” and to reflect this through cinema, as black holes seem to be fundamentally the opposite of this medium; cinema can be said to be a science of light, whereas black holes are dark anti-spaces where no data can enter or leave. In making the piece, Cutler decided against going for any kind of voiceover narration, and instead used samples that fade in and out of silence/darkness to tell the story – personally, I find this to be a much more engaging way of storytelling through sound in this instance. Having narration would feel a little on the nose, and allowing the texture of the sound to speak for itself is effective as the fading in and out of the background creates an atmosphere that works well with the dark atmosphere that is presented in the visual accompaniment. Pitched down samples that weave in and out throughout the piece make the film feel as though it is slowing down and fading away, sort of like a movie soundtrack that is disintegrating. As I am interested in using samples to tell the stories of various Hollywood celebrities in my own piece, this was a particularly interesting example as to how it can be done effectively.
Leave Me On A Rainy Afternoon
‘Leave Me On A Rainy Afternoon’ is a film made by Cutler in 2018 – it is, as she puts it, “a love letter to the dazed atmospherics of cloud systems, 1970s geography trips, the observation/notation of clouds, and their links to emotion and pathetic fallacy”. The film is a compilation of shots of the sky from various sources from early meteorological archives to U.S. databases and many more – the accompanying soundtrack to the film is particularly of note to me here. It is a mix of slowed-down and washed-out samples of songs to do with the rain, mixed in with other elements of soundscape and also AI. I find this particularly useful to look at as whilst I want to use some samples for my installation, and I am also thinking of using AI technology to recreate celebrities’ voices to give them an uncanny effect. For part of this piece, Cutler asked an AI to generate rain sounds which she then used as part of the soundtrack for the film – it was interesting to learn this only after hearing the piece for the first time, as I hadn’t been able to tell some of these rain sounds were AI-generated.
When the film was played to us in the lecture the washy nature of the piece really connected with me, it felt like looking at heavy rain through a window in a cosy house on a winter’s day. This has definitely been a good example to see of tying sound up with aesthetics. Something else Cutler also mentioned about the piece which I found interesting was the idea of medley. This film is a medley of a variety of media, both in the sonic and visual elements, however Cutler also mentioned the etymology of the world medley, and how it is related to act of meddling – i.e. changing around the order of something that is not necessarily yours to change the order of, which in a way is what has happened in this piece. Listening to it I felt as though this is a particularly good example of world-building and storytelling through sound without narration.