The Two-Fold Commitment: entanglements of sound and image at the play_station Film Festival

In The Two-Fold Commitment, filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha writes that the decoupling of sound and image in artists’ film enables one "[t]o forget, so as to remember more intensely how, ultimately, every sound-image on-screen is actually an image of memory."⁽¹⁾ As for the image, as soon as sound is heard, it becomes part of the topography of memory. For Minh-ha, this friction between remembering and forgetting is not binary; lapses in memory are the very things that provoke the creation of new ones. To perceive sound untethered from its image is to generate a series of connections between time and place that destabilise a singular perception of a social or political reality.

Screening at various locations across the motu over October and November, the play_station Film Festival brought together existing and new works by six artists: A.J Manaaki Hope, Tom Denize, Quentin Lind, Dilohana Lekamge, Christopher Ulutupu, and Yumoi Zheng, all of whom are attentive to the entanglement of sound and time. Though each work is underpinned by a distinct set of concerns, all actively use audio to trouble the hierarchy of the visual and excavate additional layers of meaning.

A.J Manaaki Hope’s work i te mutuka o te Haeata (2024) begins in near silence. Three screens of text open the film:

I WOULD COME TO THIS LAND OF MINE AND I WOULD SAY TO IT:

EMBRACE ME WITHOUT FEAR…

AND IF ALL I CAN DO IS SPEAK, IT IS FOR YOU I SHALL SPEAK

This invocation sets forth the promise of voice. A single taoka pūoro note plays for each line. The title—meaning "at the end of daybreak"—suggests a passage over a threshold, that moment after nightfall is shed but before the world comes fully into focus. There is no going back once sound has been uttered.

The first image we see is of a lone brick chimney against blue sky, still standing upright in the whistling grass paddock after all the other parts of the house have disappeared. Spare birdcall and the low roar of wind across exposed land score the opening frame. The second image is a white ute coursing through a mob of sheep being shifted down a tarseal country road. Radio broadcast drifts out the window, playing something that might be 'So True' by The Black Seeds, but it’s hard to tell for sure. Then, a boat moored at the edge of a reedy lake, still in the half-light, layered with the mirage of a different scene—strainer posts jutting upwards, washing into tidal patterns rubbing over the sand. A line of text appears in subtitle; he tangi te tītī. The cobbled roadside splits the frame in half, echoed by the hill crest, the shoreline, that chimney again, seedhead blades.

i te mutuka o te Haeata was filmed across Te Akau Tai Toka, Murihiku, and Dùthaich Mhic Aoidh on the northwest coast of Scotland, and the differences between each site are hard to discern. Though there are signs of Aotearoa—the writhing tuna that appear, for example—I second guess myself. Is that river here or elsewhere? This is the heart of Hope’s work. Markers of places continuously shift and transform, for as the artist notes, "home is not a fixed place but a continuous physical and emotional process of construction and deconstruction."⁽²⁾ The work makes this visible through the doubling of rural scenes and ecologies. Scottish landscapes appear both in their own image and its double, in the architectural and other traces in those southern parts of Te Waipounamu that endure as records of Scotland’s involvement and complicity in England’s colonising project.

I te mutuka o te Haeata is lo-fi, perhaps shot on a handycam. There is a nostalgic dimension to this image quality, recalling turn of the millennium television production as well as its contemporary adoption. Hope absorbs some of the visual traits of a programme like Country Calendar (1966–), and hints at its role in yoking the cultural identity of Aotearoa to farming, specifically, to a British agricultural model. Beyond the image, however, a taoka pūoro composition wrenches i te mutuka from the pastoral. This is the vow of voice that we started with. The sonics of nature breathe through everything. From the moment the wind shakes the grass, or the hum of hooves hits the road, these sounds are inseparable from the breath that meets the taoka pūoro. As poet and composer Ruby Hinepunui Solly emphasises, "if we pick up our kōauau and blow with all our might, it will refuse to sound. If we move too far from its breathy oro, then again, it will give us only silence. We have to work together and sing together in order for our relationship to be fruitful."⁽³⁾ In i te mutuka, gently and brutally, Hope shows us that equilibrium is destroyed by the will for too much territory. Breath and oro, oro and te taiao, Aotearoa and Scotland, all are interconnected in ways that cannot be undone.

"Cinematic" has become shorthand for a mélange of emotion and desire, as if because of its scale the cinema has jurisdiction over the most encompassing forms of image and sound. Tom Denize’s Involuntary Body (2023) takes on these conventions as a shortcut to that perfect kind of desire only ever realised on the big screen. Involuntary Body begins with a close shot of two figures wearing motorcycle helmets, their fibreglass heads locked together in an extended kiss, lithe bodies in white tank tops wrapped around each other. The score is lush and blooming as the sun sets in the background; their bodies are in motion, an endless hook-up from the back of a pick-up. To return to Minh-ha’s thinking around the way every sound-image forms an image of memory, here this coupling incises the way that memory is mostly an impossible and irretrievable set of things. It relies on these two axes—sound and image—to pair together in unfamiliar ways, to drive a deeper and deeper chasm between what really happened and the fantasy that could have been.

And then Involuntary Body detonates. With a compilation of motorcycle wipe-outs ripped from a platform like YouTube, the work’s initial composure gives way to equivalent but degraded spectacle. Though radically opposing on the surface, the two kinds of footage that knock together here both realise the onscreen demand for heightened emotion. Denize is attentive to these mechanisms and yet surrenders himself to them at the same time. Within the bounds of the image, you can die over and over again and restart and play things anew, unlike the rubble of a relationship. Involuntary Body captures the way desire is a thing that is dispersed, and that when it is subjectified, it diminishes. Its power is in the perfect sunset kiss, even when you know the crash is coming.

The ability to restart, or perhaps relive, frames from a life propel Scenes Around Palmerston North, Quentin Lind’s 2020 film. His grandfather, Barry Searle, a lifelong filmmaker and farmer in the Manawatū, produced a promotional reel for the town around 1969, a kind of municipally-commissioned campaign. Lind juxtaposes footage from Searle’s archive with his own, a rough videography of skuxx-era teenagehood. Scenes Around Palmerston North opens with a burst of 60s era music, ‘Pride of the Manawatū’ lettered in white crackling triumphantly, and a cocky voice hollering "let’s get more wasted." This negotiation between Searle’s pastiche of a regional dream, inhabited by rolling hills and rosy-cheeked boys, and Lind’s own record of all the daring, trolley racing, drunk and stupid stuff that goes along with coming of age in a small town, ebbs throughout the work.

On the face of it, Scenes Around Palmerston North might function to contrast then with now. The soundtrack from one frame blurs into the other, as though those same bonny children grew up to be lanky pyromaniac teens—and, effectively, they did. Yet, those teenagers are already in the distant past, grown up; Scenes from Palmerston North trades in nostalgia twice removed. Lind’s disturbance of what the history of a place looks like creates a duality of then and then, and now and now. Aesthetically, the work crystallises a provincial inheritance; that is to say, an understanding that then is also now. Forces of cultural identity and economics that are visible in, and produced by, Searle’s earlier film are recapitulated in Lind’s, albeit on different terms.

In the few times when voice and body synchronise, time is recalibrated. As Searle’s frame fades out, Lind’s document of a boy, probably 15 or 16, lingers. The camera is set up to frame the breeze-block garage, the distinct blue logo of an Absolut bottle, the boy with a mullet and the mirror he props up against the wall, a string of profanities uttered just out of shot. Then, in perfect tune, he sings a heartfelt refrain, and Scenes from Palmerston North closes.

The body from which the voice in Dilohana Lekamge’s A well-told lie (2024) comes is not seen. Instead, scenes of a vacant house are overlaid with a narrative that speaks of a misplaced copy of Michael Ondaatje’s memoir, Running in the Family (1982), a line from which lends the film its title. In one version of the truth, the copy of the book was a gift. In the narrator’s eyes, though, the book was taken in bad faith, a loan never returned, even stolen. In her work, Lekamge folds together Ondaatje’s belief in the value of a fictionalised account of one’s life with the material slipperiness of the book’s detours.

If one’s moral trespasses are at the conceptual core of A well-told lie, Lekamge takes this as a physical schema for the work. It begins with a foggy hill view, the contours of the land invisible behind heavy cloud. Next, a vacant living room, with a dated light fixture and landscape painting hanging on the wall. Lekamge’s camera continues through this house, each room or hallway spare and cold, like the family that once lived there left long ago, though some possessions and packed boxes still stray into view. The emptiness of the rooms and the dislocation of the voice from the shots tells us that we are out of bounds. The pairing of voice and interior does not imply that it is the building that speaks, but rather draws attention to the way lies themselves tell a story in two places at once. By splitting A well-told lie across aural and visual registers, Lekamge realises the ability of the acousmatic to proliferate open-ended relationships between what is "seen and unseen, heard and unheard."⁽⁴⁾

Ondaatje’s postmodern approach to truth is a vessel for Lekamge’s own interrogation into the multifarious way that truths congeal around certain places. More than being about the mislaid book, or even about fictions, A well-told lie drills to a fundamental question about who has licence to revise or stretch the story. Namely, it is hierarchies of race and class that intersect with histories, and that decide which revisions are permissible and which are falsehoods.

"People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them," writes James Baldwin in his 1953 essay 'Stranger in the Village.'⁽⁵⁾ This text was a point of reference for Christopher Ulutupu’s work The Pleasures of Unbelonging (2023), itself catalysed by an encounter at the Mt Lyford Ski Area in Canterbury. Filming another work, Ulutupu observed the mostly white and middle-class recreational skiers discomfited by the presence of a Pacific crew and actors, making it clear that they were an anomalous demographic at the park. This is Ulutupu’s own parallel to 'Stranger in the Village,' Baldwin’s account of living in a remote Swiss village for some time, where his Blackness was a source of fascination and cruelty to a population who were committed to hostility toward any outsiders.

A woman leads a group of children into the woods. They’re dressed in soft, historical-looking garments, crackling through sticks until they reach a clearing where the children are ushered into a hut, maybe a home. A sense of isolation from the rest of the world pervades the film, as if to articulate the way time is not experienced consistently everywhere.

To show The Pleasures of Unbelonging in Ōtautahi is to hold up a mirror to the city. The play_station film festival screened at the Arts Centre Te Matatiki Toi Ora, a Gothic Revival complex of buildings that have become the poster child for post-earthquake restoration. It is an architecture that epitomises the remaining romance for an anachronistic and amnesiac version of history. Because this is a sentiment propelled by delusion; looking back, there is nothing there. The notion of a time "before" is, at its core, a white supremacist myth. One need only scrutinise Donald Trump’s deployment of the word "again" to understand how prejudice is bolstered by an imagined past.

There’s a long cut of black after the children are ushered into the shelter. When the image reappears, a microphone is, strangely, atop a cliff, the vast and forested valley below and inclement sky above. The woman walks into the frame and throws off her grey robe to wear only a billowing white dress. Her long absence from the screen is a moment outside of scrutiny. Now, the microphone, like a punctuation into the otherwise unplaceable era of The Pleasures of Unbelonging, shifts the register from one of being looked at, to one of talking back. There is silence for a long time, as if she is searching for words, as if waiting for the audience. In this pause too, there’s a latent retaliation to the racism that occurred at Mt Lyford. The actor and Ulutupu converge in this scene, in the place where no words are left.

A single vocal gesture has the capacity to express the violence of exile via perception. Only a scream, reverberating from the lungs of the woman on the hill, can communicate what Ulutupu describes as the "drama of encounter with the white gaze."⁽⁶⁾ This final scene evinces the possibility of rage to effect history, as Baldwin observes, in a way that is otherwise impossible for an outsider.⁽⁷⁾ Central to 'Stranger in the Village' is Baldwin’s recognition that this cannot be the first time, nor probably the second or third, that the town’s population had seen a man of colour, because of its geographic location, touristic value, and relatively close connection to metropolitan areas. His strangeness to them, then, is a symptom of their own blindness towards a European inheritance of the Afrodiasporic. Scholar Rizvana Bradley expands this idea in her essay 'The Time of Descent,' in which she observes the way bodily gestures and pain constitute a substitute genealogy for an imperial archive that has disavowed vital links between those who were present for history and those who, ostensibly, were not. At the climax of The Pleasures of Unbelonging, then, forgetfulness transforms into memory through the scream. When it ricochets through the cinema, we realise it has been heard before, that an affective history of Black and brown resistance is held in this sound. Quoting M. NourbeSe Philip, Bradley summons, "decades later the child will learn the signs of grieving."⁽⁸⁾

Yumoi Zheng’s Tea (2024) is the festival’s closing work and is structured in four parts—two old ladies gossiping over tea, a dream typed out in the iPhone Notes app, an exchange in a massage parlour, and an ethereal music video of a translucent nymph dancing in a rainforest. The dialogue—the tea—that propels this work is never heard aloud. Instead, Zheng uses subtitles and phone text to hold a series of conversations through non-sonic means. The scenes that accompany each section of the work are also unmoored from what is being said. In the first, still frames of snails take the place of the aunties supposedly sharing gossip; in the massage scene, dough being kneaded is the visual complement to a deadpan erotics. Almost everything in Tea takes place off-screen, which has the absurd effect of making the speakers porous figures in the work—it might be the snails talking about their unmarried son. In this way, the viewer becomes both an eavesdropper and a participant. The displacement of image and sound transforms the text from a layer of distance to one of intimacy, something of a shared act. In the dark of the cinema, Tea performs a queer confessional through manifold modes of communication.

Zheng’s refusal to fix the speaker in a form, time, or place, allows for the unrestricted profusion of identities and narrative. In shifting the location of the film out of conventional registers, Zheng reminds us that cinema is not the domain of the eye, but that it occupies all senses—and senses, as part of the body, are neither linear nor logical.⁽⁹⁾ The final segment of Tea behaves like a coda. It is essentially a music video for a song that Zheng has composed, a glistening chorus beginning as spoken word and intensifying as the lyrics repeat. A translucent being dances in the forest as a femme voice intones: "laughter, strolls, intertwined hands, faggot, tranny, whispers of gossip, vape, red wine sips." Like an inventory of sites where secrets enter the world, the song and gossamer entity embody the concept of sensual metamorphosis.

Tea somehow exists outside of time at all, suspended in the private cache of memory. This refusal to adhere to synchronous temporality threads through all of the works shown in the play_station Film Festival. However, time and history have not been dismissed. They appear and reappear as sonic images of memory, affirming the artists’ responsibility to consider how inherited histories manifest in the present; how, in fact, plurality is bound to every story.

Jane Wallace is a writer and curator, currently working at The Physics Room in Ōtautahi.