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sublimity
When E.B. was here, we went to go see a screening of Jemaa-El-Fna : Morocco's Rendezvous of the Dead, one of the DVDs recently released by Sublime Frequencies.
This documentary struck me as nearly unique among documentaries, in that it provided no contextualizing information whatsoever for the images we were seeing and the sounds we were hearing. No interviews with ethnomusicologists or other talking heads, no narration, no subtitles, no identification of any of the people onscreen, just edited-down footage of various musicial performances. None of the information included on the film's website is incorporated into the film in any way, other than what could be directly discerned from observation of the footage, which can be summed up as essentially "in some fire-lit urban square, these people are making this music."
We tend to think of a documentary as something that's going to be illuminating, something that will help to make sense of some certain portion of the world. But, if anything, this documentary lifted the veil on this pocket of mystery just enough for us to become aware of its existence: it introduces us to questions but does not answer them. Where is this happening? What are those instruments? Is this music supposed to be happy or sad? Who are these people performing it? Are they related to one another? Do these people feel that they're "musicians" in the same way people in an American band feel, or do they feel more like how people singing in an American church feel? The sum total is more mystery in the world, not less.
I felt this most pronouncedly in the sequence of the film where one individual is excitedly showing off his record collection for the camera, taking records out of their tattering sleeves and playing them on a cheap turntable. The result is a pure gem of amalgamated cryptodata: a person who's face we don't see is using a turntable which may or may not be properly functioning to play us a record which has been recorded with poor fidelity and which archives music that belongs to a tradition that we aren't familiar with, and the only contextual clue available is the corroding cover art which features a bad reproduction of a photograph of a person who we don't recognize, coupled with text in a language we can't read and images from a semiotic system that we can't decode. Beautiful!
Around the same time I received a package from an associate which contained copies of a number of the Sublime Frequencies CDs. Since these were burned CDs, sent to me without liner notes, I'm not sure how much contextualizing data might be missing, but, like the DVD, these discs also seem to be interested in awakening the listener to the experience of unknowability... this can particularly be felt on the Radio Java disc, which collages together material recorded from Javanese radio in 1989:
"Among many other oddities, you'll hear several examples of Javanese pop (from Dangdut and Keroncong to Hard Rock and Disco), news snippets, folk music, radio commercials, Jakarta DJ's, The west Java Sundanese sound, spooky theatre extracts, and high-octane Jaipongan variations that are completely over the top."
Everything you hear on this disc bears some family resemblance to U.S. radio, but the system of signification is substantially skewed, so you can't always tell (for instance) whether the audio data you're listening to is a commercial or a pop song or something else entirely.
Some might complain that emphasizing this unknowability has the tendency to "exoticize" the other, but I think it's equally dangerous to downplay the unknowable aspect of the other's "otherness." The assumption that alien subjectivities are essentially simple variants of our own points the way towards monoculture, just as certainly as the assumption assuming that alien subjectivities are degraded or primitive versions of our own did. Labels: media commentary |
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
4:46 PM
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