Manakamana, Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez |
While musicologists work similarly to televisual and documentary ethnographers and anthropologists, musicians and their audience rarely work this way. From Ska to Electro to Rai to Jungle to Reggaeton to Congotronics (to name obvious contenders), music has not once stopped performing as a living language, born of local conditions, shaped by transformative confluences and completely conscious of its shape-shifting identity. When industry and culture clash, it’s the stuff of people getting together and making noise despite the determining semantics of their chosen tools, instruments, processes and sounds. The resulting music dictates its own hybrid identity with its own voicing, no matter how incorrect, contradictory or unsuitable its appearance.
So what happens now when music-making and documentary practices intersect? Mostly, it’s the same old post-colonial lip service being voiced despite the styles employed. Openly problematising freshness comes from the efforts of the Sensory Ethnography Laboratory, an experimental yet institutional filmmaking venture and program established in 2007 at Harvard University. Its varied results are linked by a willingness to explore cine-doco-televisual modes of encoding and inscription which forward an excess of documented data (visual and/or aural) while attempting to refrain from narrational, discursive and/or determining modes of address and commentary. It’s a utopian impulse for sure—one born of the power of poetics overcoming didacticism—yet the after-effect of this slant on documentary practice has enhanced and accentuated how sound (and by inference, music) shapes the end results.
Manakamana, Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez |
Now, many critics have interpreted Manakamana in terms of ‘honesty,’ ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ due to the nature and conceit of its production. But I wonder if such knee-jerk support for ‘keeping-it-real’ documentary tropes misses the greater audiovisual complexity of the film. For many people, the absence of music and the removal of a narrational voice-over can create a ‘shock of the real’ while preventing them from realising how a documentary’s codes can determine their experience. In line with the SEL’s codes of practice, Manakamana is intent on exploring how an audience’s experience can be reconfigured by engaging with the documented material in a new and expanded way. And the locus of this activity is on the soundtrack.
Manakamana, Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez |
Secondly, inasmuch as the cable car is a camera obscura, it is also a recording booth. Its domain centres the spherical immersive experience of sound all around—especially in a suspended cable car high off the ground— and translates to us a similar ‘other-worldly’ experience of the depicted environment as one which floats the listener in sound’s totality. This is a supremely ‘non-screenic’ effect. The bulk of all cinematic effects is predicated on an illusory window-on-the-world, which in turn is derived from the sensation of situating an audience in a black void box to witness images which appear to come from a zone beyond/behind the screen. Conversely, Manakamana documents its sensory environment by situating the imaginary ear smack in the middle of the world it visually captures.
This ‘non-screenic’ effect is highlighted by the thunderous shuddering clackety-booms which intermittently occur when the suspension cable passes through the structural towers dotted along the cable car route. Rather than mute these moments or mix them down, the film fully captures the sensation of being jolted by these markers of the film’s cyclical journey. Sharp transients, whelps of bass and peaks in volume shake everything: the car, its inhabitants and the cinema itself, as the booms erupt the otherwise pastoral appearance of the film’s contemplative tone. But soon enough, one is accustomed to these jolts just as the on-screen passengers appear inured to their disruption, and the film synchronises to the inhabitants’ relaxed relation to their environment.
Manakamana, Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez |
In a contemporary climate wherein everyone and everything is desperate to humanise, well, everyone and everything, Manakamana doesn’t simply provide momentary respite from this pathetically saturated realm of utopian well-wishing: it actively, materially and formally foregrounds how a commitment to an informed aesthetic practice can unleash a broader and more encompassing politics of representation. Watching the movie will only reinforce limp leanings towards the very humanism the film potentially combats. Listening to it subjects us to audiovisual incidents and environments that circumnavigate illusory humanism by instilling one with a breathtaking sense of our own insignificance.
Manakamana was the winner of the Golden Leopard award, Filmmakers of the Present, Locarno Film Festival.
Stephanie Spray & Pacho Velez, Manakamana, 2013, 118 mins, Melbourne International Film Festival, 7, 10 Aug
RealTime issue #123 Oct-Nov 2014 pg. 17
© Philip Brophy; for permission to reproduce apply to [email protected]