The Ecology of Listening while Looking in the Cinema: Reflective audioviewing in Gus Van Sant'sElephant

Abstract

This article argues that the state of spatial awareness engendered by the art of soundscape composition can be productively extended to the act of listening while looking in the cinema. Central to my argument is how Katharine Norman's concept ofreflective listeningin soundscape composition can be adapted toreflective audioviewingin the audiovisual context of film. Norman begins the process of intersecting film theory and the discourse of soundscape composition by appealing to famed Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's theories of montage to illustrate how soundscape composition enables active listener engagement. I extend her discussion of Eisenstein to demonstrate how this filmmaker's thinking about sound/image synchronisation in the cinema – and R. Murray Schafer's own predilection for Eisensteinian dialectics – can be understood as a means towards the practice of reflective audioviewing. I illustrate my argument with an analysis of how the soundscape compositions of Hildegard Westerkamp have been incorporated into Gus Van Sant's filmElephant. Attention to the reflective qualities of Westerkamp's work open up new dimensions in our experience of the audiovisual construction of space in the film. Ultimately I argue that the reflective audioviewing prompted byElephantcan be carried into considerations of all films that make use of sound design for spatial representation.