DECADES
Ongoing

"Sounds are reborn through times without memory."
—Pierre Schaeffer

"Any chance I can replace an image with a sound, I do. And I do it more and more."
—Robert Bresson

A decade (from the Greek déka--δέκα--meaning "ten") is a 20th century phenomenology and a bracket of time. The decade ended with the arrival of the 21st century, whose time is presentist and no longer countable in the same way. Using the found material of film scores and diegetic sound to build a unique soundtrack for an entire decade, DECADES, a durational film essay, is a portrait of time that proposes that the way we experience cultural shifts is not simply visual or narrative, but tonal. Like LOVE SOUNDS, a 24-hour film which used audio (dialogue) from movies to compose a spoken history of love in English-speaking cinema, DECADES utilizes film score, film sound, and source music to produce an account for every decade of the 20th century. Unearthing each decade’s particular sound patterns and cultural progressions--its themes, politics, anxieties, moods, recurring notes--DECADES asks: What sounds does a decade make? What is each decade’s mood and tone? Why do sounds repeat and return? How do sounds accumulate and accrue into a system of information? What do the sounds we hear tell us about what we are seeing, what we have seen, and what we expect to see in the future? Finally, what new narratives emerge if we use sound as our organizing principle for images rather than the other way around?

In Present Shock, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff writes: "Our analog technologies anchored us temporally in ways our digital ones don't." Because sound is only audible over time, "as it decays," durational formats are essential to both reclaiming and investigating time. Using editing as an analytical device, DECADES uses the durational format to listen to the way images sound—or rather, to the sounds images make. After composing a score for each decade, the audio fragments are correlated to their corresponding visuals, producing a new narrative chronology and cinematic history. The musical compilation reveals the visual narrative. By listening intently to the sounds a decade makes, the sounds it keeps making—across genres and cultures—we can begin to understand something about the sonorous progression of time, and how a decade voices itself through sound. 

DECADES: 1980s
2019, 6 hours, 19 minutes
Trailer
Excerpt
A 90 min excerpt + essay in CALIGARI

DECADES: 1970s
2017, 6 hours, 51 minutes
Trailer

Article
Article