DECADES 1970s

2017

This trailer features a short excerpt from the 6-hour 1970s installment of DECADES, a ongoing, durational film-essay that traces the history of a decade using film sound, noise, and score. This particular clip is from a 47-min section that focuses on demolition, eco-disaster, mechanization, and the elements—in particular, water. The film is part of an on-going series and will be released in installments, by decade. The 1970s was completed in July, 2017.

More information about the project:

A decade is a 20th century measurement and bracket of time that ended with the arrival of the 21st century, whose time is no longer quantifiable in the same way. Using the found material of film scores and diegetic sound to build a score for an entire decade, DECADES, a durational sound history, sound-essay, and portrait of time, proposes that the way we experience cultural shifts is not simply visual or narrative, but tonal.

Like LOVE SOUNDS (penny-ante.net/title/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 and film sound to produce a score 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, tone, and theme? 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?

Using editing as a tracking and analytical device, DECADES listens 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 film visuals, producing a new narrative chronology and cinematic sound history. The musical composition will reveal the visual narrative—the sound determines the cut. By listening intently to the sounds a decade makes, the sounds it keeps making, across genres and cultures, the instruments repeatedly chosen to signal a particular time, place, and mood, we can begin to understand something about the progression and treatment of time, and how a decade voices itself through sound.