"32 Sounds has its Moments but Lacks Direction"

32 Sounds
Directed by Sam Green
Runtime: 98 minutes
In select theaters April 28

by Stacey Osbeck, Staff Writer

The Moho braccatus bird was ravaged by development in Hawaii. By the early 1980s, of the entire species only two remained, one male and one female. Then a hurricane hit. No one ever saw the female again. Come mating season the male sang out, not knowing the call would never be answered. The recording of the very last Moho braccatus’ birdsong is one of many sounds highlighted in director Sam Green’s feature documentary 32 Sounds.  

For another region-specific auditory experience, the film explores the “In the Air Tonight” Guy. This man drives around the Village in Lower Manhattan blasting a song, one song, from his car so that some nights this area has its own theme music. If you're going to play one tune ad infinitum you couldn't do much better than Phil Collins. 

The experimental song 4’33’’, silence for 4 minutes 33 seconds, shows different musicians performing it, their instruments nearby on the ready, but does not explain the song’s intention. Is it to hear our own breathing and turn our thoughts inward? Should it foster a sense of community with the other members of the audience? It turns out if you don’t know, the filmmakers aren’t going to explain it to you. Wikipedia was able to though (you’re supposed to take in the ambient soundsof the space where it is being performed). This was one of a few frustrations I had with this film.

Too often the documentary lingers on banal sounds without breathing new life into them: a cat purring, hockey skates on ice, a Whoopi cushion. A stronger sense of how sounds effect us when juxtaposed against others would have added quite a bit. We watch the recording of crickets then in a different section cicadas click. I wish they put these two back to back to hear both the similarities and distinct differences of these insects. But with them placed in different spots I couldn’t immediately distinguish and it felt like a lost opportunity. Also giving us a heavy dose of the mundane and then introducing us to something that may have profound implications, such as 4’33”, and not filling us in also seems sloppy.  

This film may have benefited from a sense of the directional: starting with silence, moving on to noises and tones and building to sounds pleasingly arranged into music. Or the reverse, but the hopping around didn’t offer a sense that the film was building on itself to create a whole. Some of the more interesting parts involved music which at times upstaged common sounds. 

A few topics the film presents early and returns to over the course of its runtime, like the concept that sound never dies. It’s still echoing out there just beneath our ears’ detection. A large evergreen being felled in the forest is revisited more than anything else, which acts as a connecting thread throughout the film.  We watch the timber fall with sound and without. Later a foley artist shows the tools of her craft. The tree clip requires an auditory layering: the creaking of wood, brushing past other pines on the way down, snow falling from the branches to the ground and the ultimate crashing on impact. Answering the age old question: if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no foley artist does it make a sound?