"They shall not grow old" and "Mimesis: African soldier"

This paper will examine and compare two recent visual explorations of the experience of soldiers in World War I. Director Peter Jackson’s documentary They Shall Not Grow Old has been called an immersive, haunting and often transcendent experience that’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. By using modern digital film technology, he has restored the visuals and added sounds and speech via Automatic Dialogue Replacement, colorized, changed the speed, and brought 3D depth to the old footage from the Imperial War Museum. Jackson has either, using the terminology of William Guynn (Unspeakable Histories: Film and the Experience of Catastrophe), employed this technology to trigger “moments of heightened awareness in which the reality of the past may be recovered in its material being”. Or, do these computer generated technological affects, “….stand in for the ‘truth’ and obscure just how constructed the ‘history’ Jackson is telling actually is?” John Akomfrah’s video/sound three screen performance/display installation Mimesis: African Soldier uses silent actors, archive film and photographs, ethnographic sound recordings, new filmed footage with and without actors, and a sound track by Trevor Mathison, to document the experience of those, among many, left out of Jackson’s film: colonial subjects as soldiers. Akomfrah “does not put colour back in the cheeks of the dead”, but rather warns the viewer that remembrance can come in many forms, some of them unrealiable. All of this leads to a conclusion, as Avishai Margalit put it in Ethics of Memory, that “memory…is knowledge from the past. It is not necessarily knowledge about the past.”

Differential diagnosis of gallbladder opisthorchiasis and cholelithiasis in a teenager

Relevance. Parasitic invasions of the biliary tract, such as opisthorchiasis, are one of the significant causes of the formation of pigment calculi in the gallbladder, which is known in territories endemic for these diseases. However, visualization of the dynamics of the development of the pathological process using ultrasonography does not allow differentiating gall stones with a high degree of accuracy from the stages of development of the feline fluke. In the absence of an epidemiological history, this invasion can proceed under the guise of gallstone disease, which leads to an unjustified surgical intervention with the removal of a practically healthy gallbladder from a child. Before surgery, differentiation of calculi in the gallbladder from the stage of opisthorchiasis will significantly improve the quality of life of the child.The aim of the study was to demonstrate a clinical case of opisthorchiasis invasion in a child in a non-endemic territory, proceeding under the guise of cholelithiasis.Material and methods: the case history of a 17‑year-old girl with opistochiasis invasion is presented.Discussion. Parasitic invasion (opisthorchiasis) caused the formation of «calculi» of the gallbladder in the child. Not every hyperechoic formation of the gallbladder with the presence of a sound track is a «calculus». Timely diagnosis of the cause of cholelithiasis is important, as well as timely treatment of parasitic invasion to avoid relapse of the disease and errors in treatment, including surgical treatment.

Hearing and Teaching Soundtracks as a Mother and a Daughter

This chapter analyzes embodied listening from a pedagogical and unusually personal, feminist point-of-view. It explores how two parts of the author’s identity (being a mother, and being a daughter whose mother died) teach her to hear cinema anew along with her students. By extension, it builds upon other sound scholarship (especially the work of Michel Chion), by stressing that every person’s experiences leads them to rehear all cinema with meaningful results. In this chapter, the author first draws from her experiences of motherhood while teaching the sound track of Babies (2010). Second, she reflects on witnessing her mother’s death in relation to teaching the sound track of a death scene from Ten Canoes (2006). Third, the author connects being in the presence of her mother’s silent body with teaching a conversation from An Examined Life (2008), featuring queer theorist Judith Butler and disabled artist-activist Sunara Taylor.

Interaction of sound and image in modern audiovisual culture

The article analyzes the possible types of combination of sound track components with the visual track, namely diegetic and non-diegetic sound, actual, commentative sound, etc., reveals the main positions and opinions of foreign and Ukrainian authors studying the problem, types of sound in screen projects, and their significance and features in the context of audiovisual culture are indicated. Examples of creative application of audio track in modern Ukrainian and foreign audiovisual culture are considered. The following methods were used during the study: analysis was used for consideration of the components of the sound track and certain types of interaction of sound and image, comparative method was used to study different concepts of scientists to more fully present the issue, systematic approach was used to study a set of types of the combination of sound and image in audiovisual projects. The scientific novelty of the article is to highlight the current state of theoretical approaches to the interaction of sound and image in audiovisual culture. The results of the study are of practical importance to scholars studying film, audiovisual culture, as well as to sound engineers and other creative professionals working on screen projects, in order to be able to master possible techniques to combine sound with the visual component of the project.

A sound track to ecological crisis: tracing guitars all the way back to the tree

Analyses of music and environment are proliferating, yet new conceptions are needed to make sense of growing ecological crisis in the Anthropocene. From an empirical project tracing guitars all the way back to the tree, I argue for deeper conceptual and empirical integration of music into the material and visceral processes that constitute ecological crisis itself. Musicians are not only inspired by environmental concerns for compositional or activist purposes. They are entangled in environmental crisis through material and embodied relations with ecosystems, especially via the musical instruments we depend upon. I foreground three ‘more-than-musical’ themes to make sense of unfurling forces: materiality, corporeality and volatility. Musical instruments are gateway objects that invite contemplation of material and corporal relations. Such relations bind together musicians and non-human others. Material and corporeal relations with increasingly threatened upstream forests, and endangered tree species, are being confronted and reconfigured. In the context of ecological crisis, guitars do much more than make pleasing acoustic sounds. Via guitars we co-generate, with non-human others, a sound track of crisis both melancholy and hopeful.

Amour

This chapter is the culminating analysis of the book because Amour incorporates many sonic patterns that are representative of Haneke’s work, though it also handles these same patterns in surprising ways. The film features Haneke’s most subtly and tenderly demanding sound track to date, and this chapter explores how it rewards close analysis in relation to the director’s previous work. The chapter also provides extended consideration of Emmanuelle Riva’s performance as the female protagonist, emphasizing her subversively strong sonic presence. Along with refusing to reduce the ailing and aged woman to an image of decay, the film repeatedly amplifies her sonic power. In connection with the compassion of Amour, we return to misunderstandings of Haneke’s work that have led to critical presumptions of his emotional coldness. Ironically, we will find that Amour is Haneke’s most moving and aurally nuanced appeal to our imaginations and hearts.

The White Ribbon

This chapter explores the psychoanalytic resonance of the sound track for The White Ribbon. The film is among Haneke’s most ambitious feature productions, with over a hundred elliptical scenes. Its coherent thematic logic becomes clear through psychoanalysis, especially with regard to Lacanian concepts of the Symbolic and the Real. The Symbolic realm of the film is within a small village in Germany in the lead-up to World War One, where the voices of tyrannical patriarchs and the sounds of their violence dominate. The Real realm of The White Ribbon is even more fearsome, for it is shockingly, sonically attached to the bodies of children that ultimately resist their oppressive elders. The chapter establishes how every aural detail of The White Ribbon is loaded with repressed and subtextual meanings that constitute an ultimate warning: the oppressive Symbolic engenders the nightmarish Real.

Code Unknown

This chapter analyzes Code Unknown from a postcolonial perspective, with particular emphases on multiethnic voices, disempowered sonic presences, and cross-cultural possibilities of communication in the context of racial politics in contemporary France. The analysis considers how the sound track amplifies diverse characters’ choices to hear or not to hear, along with providing patterns and resonances that invite us to make interpretive leaps beyond the characters’ individual capabilities. Code Unknown reminds us how much our efforts to communicate matter, especially through the multiethnic, deaf-mute children who bookend the film with their extended efforts to physically “speak.” By contrast, many hearing-speaking adults of the film fail to speak or listen with patience, good will, or moral kindness, and sometimes with awful consequences. After considering many sonic moments of social discordance through the film, this chapter dwells on the tentative hope of those scenes in which the deaf-mute children create percussive music together.