Part 2 of 2
In his first film Kobarweng (The Sound of the Helicopter), about the first encounter of people in a remote New Guinea village with the outside colonial world, Johan Grimonprez already chose sound as an entry to its storytelling. To the Sibil-min people the rainforest of Irian Jaya is foremost a reality of sound instead of sight. So, it made sense to cast the sound of the helicopter (dropping down anthropologists) as the harbingers of colonial empire.
In his most recent film Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (2024), the music emerges as the lead character of the film, cast as a historical agent of change.
The soundtrack, the overall jazzy film rhythm, the polyphony of voices, the evocative use of sound and silence and the elaborate compositional editing that fully involves the audience in the film, will all be discussed in this 2-lecture series.
During the 2 sessions we will focus on
– film as an audiovisual composition
– the use of voice in the telling of a history. ( timbre, mediated voices ( radio and TV), voices as members of an ‘orchestra’, voice as a witness)
– music as the main character versus film music: the use of Jazz in this film, music and politics, music and historical facts)
– sound in documentary with the use of found footage
– the importance of silence and different kinds of silence
– the importance and use of rhythm and movement in a very informative film inviting its audience to actively participate.
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat will be available for streaming from 21 November to 19 December to all those who register for either talk.
Trailer and review of Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat
Download links to Johan’s films, texts and other materials for further research
JOHAN GRIMONPREZ
Who owns our imagination in a world of existential vertigo where truth has become a shipwrecked refugee? Is it the storyteller who can contain contradictions, who can slip between the languages we have been given to become a time-traveler of the imagination? Johan Grimonprez’s critically acclaimed work dances on the borders of theory and practice, between art and cinema, beyond the dualisms of documentary and fiction, other and self, mind and brain to weave new pathways and stories, emphasizing a multiplicity of realities. Informed by an archeology of present-day media, his work depicts intimate stories that brush up against the bigger picture of globalization. It questions our collective imagination and the contemporary sublime, one framed by a fear industry that has infected political and social dialogue.
Grimonprez’s curatorial projects have been exhibited at museums worldwide, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; and MoMA. His works are in the collections of Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; and Tate Modern, London. His feature films include dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997, in collaboration with novelist Don DeLillo, selected by the Guardian as one of the “30 great works in the history of video art”), Double Take (2009, in collaboration with writer Tom McCarthy) and Shadow World (2016, in combination with journalist Andrew Feinstein). Traveling the main festival circuit from the Berlinale, Tribeca to Sundance, they garnered several Best Director awards, the 2005 ZKM International Media Award, a Spirit Award and the 2009 Black Pearl Award at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival, and were also acquired by NBC Universal, ARTE, and BBC/FILM 4.
He published several books, including Inflight (2000), Looking for Alfred (2007) and a reader titled It’s a Poor Sort of Memory that Only Works Backwards (2011) with contributions by Jodi Dean, Thomas Elsaesser, Tom McCarthy, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Slavoj Žižek.
He lectured widely, among others at the University de Saint-Denis (Paris 8), Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics; Tate Modern; MoMA (New York); Columbia University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); the Parliament of Bodies of Documenta 14, and he participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and is now on a research grant at HOGENT/KASK , Ghent.
His film project (with investigative journalist Andrew Feinstein), Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, was awarded a production grant from the Sundance Institute, premiered at the 2016 Tribeca IFF (New York). It went on to win the Best Documentary Feature Award at the 2016 Edinburgh International Film Festival, and premiered its US broadcast on Independent Lens on PBS in 2017.
Grimonprez’s latest feature Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat just premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Cinematic Innovation Award and further garnered the Persistence of Vision Award at SFFilm and the Audience Award at Thessaloniki Film Festival.
MARTINE HUVENNE
Dr. Martine Huvenne retired after a career teaching and researching in the audio-visual field. She was a senior lecturer in Sound and Music for Film at the Kask – Conservatorium School of Arts, Ghent, where she developed a phenomenological approach to music and listening. She graduated from the University of Amsterdam in 2012 with a dissertation on sound in film, “The sound in film as an inner movement in the transfer of an experience in film: a phenomenological approach.” Her research and teaching focuses on the auditory aspect of the creative process of filmmaking. Huvenne was curator and co-organizer of the Film Fest Gent annual Seminar on Music and Sound in Film. She coordinated the curriculum development of the European Postgraduate in Arts in Sound (EPAS).
Martine’s new book, The Audiovisual Chord: Embodied Listening in Film, published by Palgrave Studies in Sound, 2022, is available online.
Read her essay, ‘Transmitting an Experience’, in the TEACHING section of this website.