Walking
With Dinosaurs
Faux Acoustica
published in Real Time No.35, Sydney,
2000
Ever
since Mickey Mouse turned the tail of a cow to generate
music like an organ grinder in numerous silentSilly Symphonies
(c.1921-23), animated imagery of animals melded with forced
musicalization of their movement has proved a crux of audiovisuality
in the cinema. The intense hybridization of inappropriate
matchings of sono-musical moments with squiggles which reference
iconic ideograms of nature has consistently presented us
with a complex accounting of how we chose to reconcile the
synchronism of sound with image. Each strike of a cow-bell
when Mickey dongs the head of a cow is a testimony of our
belief in Euclidean physics and its time-space fixity. Each
throb of Mickey bobbing up and down to a boogie-woogie piano
is a doctrine on physical entrainment and our susceptibility
to bodily co-ercion. And each blink of Mickey's eye timed
to the clonk of a xylophone is a statement of our inability
to accept a non-human logic of audiovisuality which governs
nature. All those cute animals are that which we wish to
control. And all the music and sound we synchronize to them
is the means by which we compose that control. Conservatism
in audiovisual media is rooted in this unspoken desire to
link sound to image so as to grant us the power of the snake
charmer, the siren, the ventriloquist, the svengali, the
demigod.
In
short, all depictions of nature - all the renderings of
its surfaces, the capturing of its movement, the recording
of its emissions - are feeble attempts to impose a specious
logic of 'how the world is' upon an artificially constructed
environment. And the more you align yourself with 'nature',
the more bankrupt your depictions are bound to be. Paint
an oil landscape to justify your perspective of land. Compose
a pastoral symphony to prove your relation to air. Sample
a pygmy to locate your presence on the globe. Or produce
a documentary about dinosaurs compositing hi-end computer
graphics into filmed locations to substantiate your concept
of the evolution of life.
The
BBC's Walking With Dinosaurs (screened late 99 and now available
on sell-thru video) is a marvellous document of such bankrupt
mimeticism. Lauded for its evocative power ('those dinosaurs
are so real') and praised for its educational value ('our
little Johnny now actually uses the Encyclopedia Britannia
on CDR we bought 3 years ago'), the series is perversely
antithetical to nearly all accepted norms of documentary
form. Far from being a 'document' of any sort, it lives
a shadowy narrative life as a phantasmagorical mockumentary,
pock-marked and pancaked with a thousand and one layers
of a mortician's audiovisuality. Composited, edited, transformed,
rendered, morphed, cross-faded, filtered, panned, encoded,
mapped and mixed into a virtual miasma of tricked-up conjecture
and insidious persuasiveness.
Far
be it from me to disprove anything claimed by Walking With
Dinosaurs (I for one don't give a damn where 'we' came from
or where 'we' are going) I remain amazed by the blatant
yet powerful multi-levelled distractions which operate subliminally,
phenomenally and psycho-acoustically in such media. While
each episode flaunted its digital machinations, it did not
celebrate the mythical 'hyper' so celebrated by digitalists
the globe over, as much as it revealed its inability to
homogenize all the reproductive processes central to its
creation. In other words, every visual moment was formally,
stylistically and technically in conflict with every sonic
moment, creating less a sensory overload and more a synaesthetic
black hole. For it is in the conflation, contradiction and
cancellation of audio-visual modes (approaches to combining
sound and image) with audio-visual codes (doctrines of combining
sound and image) that one can perceive the irreconcilable
differences which define our senses. By this I mean that
for every instance where sound 'should' do this or that
with/to an image, (a) the relevant convention was historically
spawned by an invention which broke preceding conventions,
and (b) the very attempt to abide by a perceived convention
inevitably contradicts issues of phenomenological reality
through attempting to generate a sense of 'realism'.
All
audiovisual media is snared by these fatal flaws enacted
by reproduction. Wherever one resorts to a convention to
convey a sense of sight, one is likely to inventively convey
a sense of hearing which could not possibly co-inhabit the
one physical subject. How we hear while how we see is never
captured in any audiovisual medium. How we hear while we
see that which is and would be impossible to see: that is
what makes Walking With Dinosaurs hallucinatory. The gross
beauty of the series lies in the dumbness of it speculative
historical-realist project: to make you feel like you are
'walking with dinosaurs'. Like, wouldn't they crush us anyway?
Or eat us? Of course, it would be ridiculous for me to pose
such questions - but it remains equally ridiculous to bother
pondering what it would be like to walk with dinosaurs.
The preposterous impossibility of this supposedly imaginative
exercise cannot help but collapse under its own Jurassic
weight, giving us a document with better suited for pondering
the materiality of film making than suppositions of evolution.
Yet
the BBC has quietly promoted audiovisual deceit for over
20 years, consequently determining many codes of laying
sound against image in order to actualize, authenticate
and animate. Walking With Dinosaurs draws well upon this
lineage. The classic BBC documentary lie comes when you
see the flickering footage of turn-of-the-century silent
film - combined incongruously with the sound of a projector
and the sound of the scene originally filmed. A bizarre
logic, indeed. My favourites are shots from WWII bomber
planes as bombs drop the plane and detonate on the ground
below. The guy who held the microphone through that trap
door was a legend. And the guy who recorded all those atomic
bomb blasts really deserves a medal. Then there is the dilemma
of how you site the quotation on non-English letters and
other correspondence on the soundtrack. Well, if you're
the BBC, you get in pommy actors to fake German and French
accents, and have them over-act the content of the letters.
Perfect dramatic naturalism for documentaries. Now, if I
wanted to overlay tractor sounds for a busy urban street
scene, and have the voice-over narration of a young girl
remembering her past in that city portrayed by a 50 year
old Turkish woman, I would be laughed at. But even as I
wrote those words, I could see more potential dramatic plausibility
in a Robbe-Grillet and Duras tradition of psychological
resonance than I can accept sound effects libraries and
paid voice-over actors clogging up a documentary soundtrack
in the name of veracity. It is no surprise that these type
of productions are now aligned with the term 'Natural History',
because the only truth they impart is the conditions of
their Unnatural Present.
One
of the BBC's sublime sonic defects (foregrounded throughout
Walking With Dinosaurs) is the foley performance and recording
of sounds which clearly were not or could not be documented
synchronously on location (eg. underwater occurrences, microscopic
activity, telescopic events - or even close-miced sounds
of tigers or pterodactyls who would kill a sound recordist
so near). People little realize how performative foley is,
whereas all foley artists are well aware of the character
of footwear, the personality of weight, the mood of fabric,
the psyche of space. Performing foley in fact is like drumming
in an improvized fashion in direct response to another performer
(your on screen 'other'), but with a totally re-invented
drum kit: a sheet of aluminium, a leather jacket, a ring
of keys. The foley-trained ear can spot these performative
tropes a mile away, and while these sounds can imbue drama
with a deepened acoustic dimension, in documentaries they
constitute a 'fauxcoustica'. The sound field of their mismatched
minutiae not only seems 'unnatural' (which of course is
never a bad thing in itself), but one gets the sense that
the on-screen bodies are puppets to an unseen master. The
foley activity is like sonic string, tied to controlled
machinations beyond the visual plane. For deaf and dumb
optical folk who read books and watch movies, this is never
a problem. For anyone with ears, it forges yet another unsettling
schism in the supposed sanctity of the realist/naturalist
audiovisual text book.
Walking
With Dinosaurs is the most hollowed-out, decimated, collapsed
text book on audiovisuality to date, resplendant in its
digital sleight-of-and, musical mush, flagrant 'fauxcosutica'
and benevolent sage voice-over narration. Ultimately, it
is a testament to the delusion of synaesthesia which seems
to be terminally in vogue: that archly romantic dream that
for every encoding of one sense there is a conciliatory
encoding of another sense, so that one might make the penultimate
symphony of the senses. The sad reality is that to embrace
that dream is to desire to be a demigod of reproduction:
to control, compose and orchestrate audiovisuality, tactility,
psychotropicality and whatever else into a thin and withered
piece of digital video that pathetically tries to convince
me that 'I am there' in your world. The happy reality is:
no, thankfully, I am not there.
