With ‘VIFF Live,’ Cinema Transcends the Screen

The Vancouver International Film Festival closes this weekend, and some of its most anticipated, innovative work will be on offer. Of particular note is VIFF Live, a joyful series of live performances curated by Norman Armour, the founder of Vancouver’s PuSh Festival.

Armour has curated a special solo performance by celebrated Indigenous punk cellist Cris Derksen, a stirring history of public-access television in Winnipeg and a performance by VIFF resident artists Sammy Chien and Miwa Matreyek.

My top pick of VIFF Live: 32 Sounds, a documentary by Sam Green that features the music of JD Samson from the electronic rock band La Tigre. Sampson is Green’s collaborator and fellow enthusiast for all things auditory. As a musician, sound is Sampson’s living, but they are also a lively and very funny presence throughout the film.

To fully experience the 32 sounds explored through the film, the audience dons noise-cancelling headphones, which prove a participatory instrument through which to both feel and hear the action on screen. The reverberation and meanings echo through your physical being like someone hitting a gong inside your soul.

A curious sensation occurs when you close your eyes and try to ascertain from which direction a sound is coming. My heart stopped when I heard the mating call of the last remaining Moho braccatus. The tropical bird was last recorded by a biologist in 1987. The bird’s female mate was killed in a hurricane, and the recording depicts him singing to his lost love, the sound becoming the very embodiment of extinction.

As Green explains at the outset, sound has long held a deep interest for him. It conveys emotion, but more importantly, sound can stop time and even resurrect the dead, in a manner of speaking. Voice recordings of people long passed can conjure folks in ways that belie logic and reason. In 32 Sounds, this phenomenon is vividly demonstrated through a collection of old cassette tapes with answering machine messages.

The answering machines are introduced at the beginning of the narrative. Before we return to them, the film covers beguiling ground. We step into the world of avant-garde composers like John Cage, whose iconic 4’ 33” revealed a world of ambient sound to new audiences.

Another, even more curious character is composer Annea Lockwood. Infamous for lighting a piano on fire just to hear what the conflagration sounded like, Lockwood met her partner Ruth Anderson when the two were both young women. As she says in the film, within a day or so of first meeting, they were “joyfully entwined.” Forced to endure a long-distance relationship, the pair talked for hours on the phone. It is these exchanges, stippled with laughter and intimacy, that formed the basis of Lockwood’s seminal piece, Conversations ’74.

In 32 Sounds, Lockwood is an ebullient presence, busily recording underwater sounds, sharing them with Green’s camera crew and expounding upon the wonders of the natural world. She is joined by a cast of equally fascinating folk, including sound artist Christine Sun Kim.

The most emotionally profound moments in the film are also the most deeply personal, as one of the people interviewed receives an old reel-to-reel tape recording of his childhood self, as well as Green’s own recorded phone message from his late brother.

If you can nab tickets to this wonderful show, do it in heartbeat — which, curiously enough, is the very first sound we humans ever encounter in utero.

The immersive documentary 32 Sounds screens at VIFF on Oct. 5 at the Vancouver Playhouse.