SWF-31
	Incongruous Sight and Sound in SWF-31
	The spectator's relationship to a documentary film is largely defined by the film's content; the subject matter is the key attraction, and one's response to the film is usually synonymous with one's response to the topic. For instance, a spectator's reception of Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922) can be determined by that spectator's opinion of the Inuit in the early twentieth century, without regard to the film's form. Nanook's form encourages one to relate to the content, as the filmmaking techniques are objective (long takes and wide shots with uninterrupted action), even journalistic (despite some events being re-enacted). But some documentaries force the spectator's attention to their form, so that one has a palpable, urgent response to both the content and structure: Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera (1929) is as much a documentary about film technique as it is about Kiev. Man With a Movie Camera, Getino and Solanas's The Hour of the Furnaces (1968), and Clément Perron's Day After Day (1962) are only a few of many films that straddle the classifications of documentary and experimental film. The content is not particularly avant-garde -- a day in Kiev, political and economic unrest in post-colonial Argentina, life in a Québec paper-mill town -- but the form utilises all manner of film grammar and technique. Day After Day's images are objective documents of factory workers and their town's bleak environment, but the sound is strikingly unexpected: the narration is free-verse poetry and rarely addresses the images or subject. The female narrator's monotone reflects the monotony of the industry, but her voice also lulls, counterpointing the machines' sharp blows of steam and racket of gears. The effect of incongruous image and sound is alienation. The formalistic sound removes the spectator from the world of the subject, forcing one to evaluate his/her relationship to both the content and form. My film SWF-31 (2006) explores alienation within the world of the subject and between the spectator and the film; the audio is key to the distancing. The premise of the diegetic world is simple, even banal: a lone woman reads by the window, occasionally peering at the life outside separated by glass. On one level, SWF-31 is a documentary about a woman reading a book. The exterior shots document vacant urban spaces and passers-by on a busy Toronto street. There is no fiction in the content of the images -- the subjects were hardly manipulated or staged, save the sole instruction to the woman to read the book. Formalistically, aspects of the camera and film medium are engineered to alienate. The woman remains a mystery, captured out of focus and in high contrast to obscure her details. The shots progress from wide to medium to close-up and become more focussed, but ultimately remain blurry enough so that the woman's identity stays unknown. The spectator's relationship to the woman remains unclear. The storm of scratches and nicks from the hand-processed film illustrates the woman's state of mind: she sits still reading, but her thoughts are manic. Perhaps the book is stoking her imagination. Perhaps she is distracted and cannot concentrate on words and must peek out the window. The scratches suggest psychological conflict or activity in the otherwise sedentary woman. Graphically, the scratches offer counterpoint to the languid actions. Practically, the scratches distract the spectator from the woman, furthering alienation. The audio of SWF-31 has seemingly no relation to the picture, creating distance in its application. The audio is a documentary unto itself, with one track of sound being field recordings: a boy shouts as his father parks his beeping truck, children squeal while playing in a Vancouver park, a mother sings while she sews (unaware of the recording). This track evolves from exterior (boy shouting, children squealing) to domestic (mother singing) to intimate (baby crying) to elliptical (heeled boots shuffling). While this audio progresses, so too do the images -- in opposition. When the images are indoors, the audio is from outside. When the images move outdoors to anonymous pedestrians, the audio turns inward to the intimate world of a baby. Does the woman hear in her mind the exterior world while she is imprisoned in her home? If she were to step outside, would she become lost, anonymous, vacant? The personals ads are a more literal, intellectual meditation on alienation. They were transcribed from a telephone dating service and spoken for SWF-31 by non-actors. The non-actors are not the original speakers, so they have no ownership of the words. In fact, the non-actors have perhaps no relationship at all to the words they are speaking -- they are removed from the content of the words. The original speakers themselves -- the ones on the telephone -- might not be telling the truth, perhaps altering details for the sake of advertisement. They themselves might be removed from the content of their words. And to further the distancing, both the non-actors and original speakers remain faceless, anonymous voices. Yet the words themselves are deeply intimate and confessional. The words spoken in SWF-31 are many degrees removed from the truth. There are multiple layers of alienation between the original speakers' true identity and the words spoken/heard in the film. The anonymous personals ads complement the mystery and loneliness of the woman at the window. The sexually explicit ads assert the alienation between spectator and film. The sex ads were taken from pornography websites and spoken for SWF-31 by non-actors. The ads are likely fictitious, with grand exaggerations and carefully constructed personae. The words are likely well removed from the true identity of the website women, and when spoken by non-actors in SWF-31, layers of insincerity abound. The words' original intention on the website is to arouse and attract the computer user. In SWF-31, the words are taken out of context and possess new potency. They may indeed arouse and attract certain spectators, but they may also repel and disgust. What place do these words have in this film? How should the spectator react to such graphic (spoken) imagery? If the spectator is aroused or repelled, why is he/she aroused or repelled? If any questions like these are asked by the spectator, then SWF-31 has achieved alienation. The inclusion of sex ads in SWF-31 is not arbitrarily for the sake of distancing -- they have a similar effect of mystery and loneliness to the personals ads, but yield a more visceral response. Perhaps the woman at the window is reading erotica. Perhaps she is both lonely and sexually unfulfilled. The formalistic audio has a relationship to the images by mere juxtaposition, regardless of how inappropriate or incongruous one is for the other. The thesis-antithesis-synthesis model stands: juxtapose any sound to any image and the spectator will sort it out. Absence of sound can be just as alienating as its presence. Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1971) is silent, and one can only imagine the gruesome sounds of an autopsy. By omitting sound, Brakhage is manipulating the spectator's relationship to the film; his desired effect is for the viewer to concentrate on seeing. He removes the sense of hearing, forcing the spectator to see while imagining the sounds (or be thankful that the film is silent). Any time that the spectator is taken out of the diegetic world to reflect on the film's form and technique is alienation. Brakhage achieves the distance with silence, but select audio could have profound influence and produce immeasurable alienation: To accompany Brakhage's images of cadavers being carved open, Day After Day's monotonous verse would complement the day-in, day-out routine of the autopsy workers. The Hour of the Furnaces's oral diatribe against America would take brutal effect. SWF-31's spoken sex ads would be perversely macabre. -- Norman Lup-Man Yeung February, 2006
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