Flicking through: Musician Msaki and artist and composer Neo Muyanga collaborate on her film Kuthi Mandithethe at Sounding Pictures, an exploration of live scores to short silent films.
The evening began with William Kentridge’s short film Fugitive Words, animating the pages of his notebook — charcoal smudges, self-portraits, fleeting dates and phrases. A grand classical melody plays over the speakers.
Applause.
“Wait … wait,” the screen reads, evoking laughter from the audience.
The film begins again, this time with the live orchestra, a cacophony of percussion replacing the easier music, rhythms churned with anxiety. The scenes, once measured, now felt hurried. As if the film itself had been sped up slightly.
My eye noticed different images from the first iteration. Had Kentridge altered the ending? Or had I missed something in my first viewing? Like an illusion, the film was shifting.
It was a nod to the illusion built into the medium of modern-day film itself — that its visuals and sounds are inseparable. At the cinema, we tend to take it for granted that the noises, musical scores, and even spoken dialogue that we hear naturally accompany what we see on screen.
This year, the Centre for the Less Good Idea, in a project curated by artist and composer Neo Muyanga, turned its attention to playing with — and, possibly, dispelling — that illusion.
Sounding Pictures, a three-day festival earlier this month, unfolded as a dynamic exploration of live scores to short silent films, celebrating Muyanga’s first anniversary as the centre’s impresario.
The Johannesburg event marked the culmination of a two-part series that played with sound and image: Visual Radio Plays brought visual acting into the traditionally aural world of radio; Sounding Pictures reversed the relationship, infusing sound into a medium steeped in the visual.
“We live in such a visually centric culture now,” explains Muyanga reminiscing about a time when that was not the case.
The soundtrack to his childhood, he says, was made up of the myriad radio plays he listened to with his grandmother — a format that calls on the listener’s imagination to illustrate sounds with mental images. There, the tricky relationship between the audio and the visual was clear — the slightest discrepancy in tone could suggest a completely different vision in his mind’s eye.
“This is an opportunity for us to separate, deconstruct this mechanism … to ask ourselves anew, what is the role that sound plays in giving a meaning to the moving picture, and, more than that, what does sound change?” Muyanga says.
Until the 1920s, cinema was closely tied to live music, with silent films often accompanied by individual musicians or entire orchestras, using bespoke instruments like the photoplayer or theatre organ to create sound effects such as drumrolls and gunshots.
Cinema audiences never expected to hear the exact same thing twice. Film scores were improvised or based on a repertoire of classical pieces, with only the most expensive films featuring original scores, which varied with each performance.
However, as sound technology advanced, and audio and video became more integrated, this live music element gradually fell away.
Sounding Pictures featured 11 diverse filmmakers, from heavyweight multidisciplinary artists such as Kentridge and Penny Siopsis to artists known for other disciplines like musician Msaki, whose music videos intrigued Muyanga as a potential starting point for cinematic experimentation.
“I wasn’t just approaching professional filmmakers — I was also approaching people who I know think filmically but who don’t yet call themselves filmmakers.”
Msaki’s film Kuthi Mandithethe would make use of the centre’s signature Pepper’s Ghost technique, which blends live movement with holographic projection. By nature of the device, which extends beyond a two-dimensional screen, the work was freed from conventions of filmmaking and set into experimentation, with her and the musicians interacting in front of, below and inside the footage.
For Siopsis, Sounding Pictures provided an opportunity to debut her new short Events on a Timeline while revisiting her acclaimed 2010 film Obscure White Messenger, presenting it in a fresh context of collaboration after years of being shown in a fixed format.
“Even though it’s iconic as a film and well-known, its form is very open,” says Siopsis referencing the collaged found footage and interview transcripts used to tell the emotional narrative behind Dimitrios Tsafendas, who assassinated South African prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid.
“I think that’s particularly true in respect to the musical sound and dialogue.”
Billy Langa, orator of Obscure White Messenger, chose to access the English subtitled film through his home language of Sepitori (an urban mix of Pedi and Setswana spoken around Pretoria), both reading and improvising responses to the subtitles that appear.
“My first thought was to respond in English,” says Langa referencing the English subtitles that indicate the narrative of the film and exclude non-English speakers.
“But my spirit knows Sesotho, Setswana, Sepedi … I began to tap into that intuitive knowing that begins to make me utter words …Words then become song, become melody, become part of the scene.
“And it is freeing, from a writing perspective.”
Siopsis’ Events on a Timeline was paired with experimental composer Aragorn Eloff, who was tasked with viewing the film and conceptualising how he might direct an orchestra improvising to the film live.
He joked “that’s probably the most neutral title you can give a film …but it kind of connotes, for me, the sense that the film wasn’t supposed to impose any strong interpretive structure … I didn’t feel my role as the composer was to sort of assert signification or representation onto the form.”
Through his modular synthesiser, an electronic instrument that measures the musician’s heartbeat and in turn the environment around them, he creates a co-participation.
“There’s a kind of feedback loop between me and what the other artists are doing.”
Looking into the viewfinder of a 19th-century folding camera is how scenic designer Nthabiseng Malaka described the set. Darkened cardboard reshaped the centre’s white-walled performing space, jutting down from the lowered ceiling in folds, drawing the audience’s eyes to the 12 musicians and the projected images on the brick wall up front.
“Here you see a fractured scene,” Muyanga says. “The work of an audience is to see all of this as one. You are not seeing a finished product, you are creating a synthesis of disparate parts.”
Sounding Pictures is not meant to offer clear answers to the question it asks: “What happens to film when the relationship between sound and image is altered?” Instead, it challenges us to reconsider how we engage with film, inviting us to see the medium as a collaborative act between creators and audience.
By lifting the veil on the musicians themselves, the audience can not only hear the music but to see it take shape — an intimate revelation of sound in motion, leaving us to wonder why we hear what we do and how it affects what we see.