32 Sounds: The Oscar-Shortlisted Documentary That Will Change the Way You Listen
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The post 32 Sounds: The Oscar-Shortlisted Documentary That Will Change the Way You Listen appeared first on Consequence.
It’s tempting to describe the documentary 32 Sounds as a singular experience, since it’s really not like any other documentary out there — it certainly stands apart from the other docs on the 2024 Oscars shortlist for Outstanding Documentary. However, the word “singular” doesn’t quite work, because the innovative film directed by Sam Green exists as more than one experience. “There are way more versions than any other movie,” he explains to Consequence.
Inspired in part by the film Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, Green collaborated with musician JD Samson and sound expert Mark A. Mangini, as well as other artists, to explore the nature and meaning of sound as a concept and as a vibe. The resulting piece is a deeply intimate and yet also universal journey through the noises we take for granted as well as auditory moments few have experienced before, crafted with exceptional technical precision and innovative techniques — including moments of spatial sound, depending on how you watch it.
One of the film’s most intriguing choices is that not every number between 1 and 32 appears on screen — which wasn’t the case, initially. “Early on, I numbered every single sound,” Green says. “And it was horribly boring because people would be like, ‘Oh my God, we’re only at 14, this is terrible.’ So it became clear you can’t do that. And then I got rid of all the numbers and it was a formless mess.” So Green settled on numbering some, but not all, of the sounds — “as little as you can to hold it together.”
The initial inspiration for the project came from the fact that Green “had made films where I had thought about sound, but I didn’t really feel like I knew a lot about sound, either technically or conceptually, or even poetically.” Fortunately, he adds, “I love research and learning about something. And a lot of that comes out of conversations with people. I like talking to people. I like asking people questions.”
Along those lines, Green initially connected with Mark Mangini because a mutual friend said (in Green’s words), “Oh, I know this person who’s really smart about sound.” Maybe a bit of an understatement — Mangini is a six-time Oscar nominee for his sound editing work, winning for 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road and 2021’s Dune: Part One.
“With Mark it ranged from everything like ‘How do you use a binaural microphone?’ to ‘What is the sound of snow falling? It’s such a elusive sound. How could one make that experience with sound in a movie?'” Green says. “Tons of things like that.”
While Mangini was originally brought on as a consultant, he and Greene were talking regularly during the production process, and eventually he came on board as sound designer. “When I came on, he was still exploring,” Mangini tells Consequence. “It seems like madness in the narrative world — Sam decides to make a documentary about sound and he just goes and explores it, but he’s not quite sure where he is going with it. It’s a discovery process, and I just felt thrilled to be going along for that ride.”
There are at least three versions of the film, beginning with how it began — as a “performance documentary,” a format Green began exploring over a decade ago. “I just bumbled into this form of talking and showing things with live music, showing film clips,” he says. “People say like, ‘Oh, that’s a performance or a lecture.’ You can call it whatever you want — I think of it as expanded cinema, and I really like it. I made a number of these kinds of works that were documentary, but have live narration and live score, and I realized you can tour all over and have fun and work with musicians in this collaborative way.”
Thus, enter JD Samson, a Le Tigre and MEN band member who had previously collaborated with Green on another performance documentary piece. Just before the beginning of the pandemic, the two of them began working on the idea of “a movie about sound,” making several iterations they called, at the time, 7 Sounds.
Because of the live performance element, Samson developed a score that she says originally “was actually made initially for me to just play by myself live; I ended up adding another player to play just guitar. There was this interesting ceiling on what I was giving myself room to create with.”
Adds Samson, “It was about minimalism, especially with the headphones,” she says. “The sonic frequency limitations of the headphones are really different than what it’s like to play live in a venue, so thinking about how to support the sounds, the 32 main characters, without overpowering them was really challenging, but also really fun. Like, how can you feel with one note? How can you use a synthesizer to make something active, but very small?”
For the performance documentary experience, Green accompanies the film with live narration, while Samson and a guitarist perform the score. Meanwhile, the audience wears headphones, which receive all the different audio tracks — the film sound, the narration, and the live music — as they’re mixed live by someone at the back of the theater. “There’s a choreography with the house PA that only comes in at very specific moments,” says Samson.
“To augment the headphones,” adds Green. “If people take the headphones off, it’s pretty silent.”
32 Sounds (courtesy of the filmmakers)
The live version is the most ephemeral, as live performance often is — and screenings where the entire film is played on headphones are also logistically tough to orchestrate. However, there are other options available. “I’d assumed we’d never do it without headphones in a theater. I didn’t think it could work,” Green says. “And then Film Forum in New York City, a great theater, got in touch and wanted to show it, and I said to Mark, ‘Could we ever do this without headphones?’ Mark pretended to think deeply about it — because he’d already figured out that we were going to do that — and was like, ‘Hmm, I dunno… I think it can be better in some ways, not quite as good in some other ways, but overall better.'”
The 7.1 surround sound theatrical mix, Green says, is “a little different and you don’t have the spatial moments, but the mix is bigger. There’s more bass, and the higher things, you get a lot more presence. So I think they’re just different, really.”
Mangini agrees, adding that “it’s a real even mix of preferences. A number of people have seen all three versions and it’s really split down the middle. It just depends on what your thing is.” For the record, this writer saw the 7.1 headphones-free theatrical version, which was screened in a mixing stage well-equipped for the experience. Even without the spatial element that good headphones offer, it was magical.
The third choice is for people to watch at home, with headphones, an experience the team feels works really well. “I’ve been in narrative cinema my entire life,” Mangini says, “That’s all I’ve done for 49 years, is movies stuck on a screen. The thought of producing sound for headphones was terrifying to me, and Sam was willing to take that risk with me and say, ‘We’re going to learn how to do this together.’ Here in Hollywood, you don’t hear those words very often, so it was deeply reassuring, and made me feel really safe and comfortable. We bought matching headphones, and we sat in my traditional film-mixing studio with headphones, and proceeded to find it together. That was really fun.”
Talking about 32 Sounds on a technical level is in some ways easier than trying to dig into its deeply human approach, one that reveals a lot about the people featured in the film — as well as the filmmakers. Mangini hopes it gets the consideration it deserves, as we speak just before the Oscars shortlist is revealed. “It’s so hard to compete against the blockbusters, which get millions and millions of views for months at a time,” he says. “It’s pretty hard to get to enough ears to convince people that what we did was something pretty revolutionary.”
Adds Samson, “I do wish that people would experience the live performance, because I think that is one of the most innovative parts about this film. And I think the shortlist nomination would say a lot about the medium of film in general. That’s part of what is so special about the experience of working on it and watching it.”
Mangini agrees. “What JD just said is so important. We’ve done something that’s really, if not revolutionary, evolutionary. And if nothing else, this is what awards should be given for. We’ve done something really novel and unique, and, I think, worthy of paying attention to.”
32 Sounds is currently screening in various locations around the world. Click here to learn more.
32 Sounds: The Oscar-Shortlisted Documentary That Will Change the Way You Listen
Liz Shannon Miller
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