Make a Silence: Musical Dialogues in Asia
Barley Norton
2020
Duration: 28:59
Keywords: Transnational; Hanoi New Music Festival; Experimental Music; Multimedia Performance; Underground Music
Link to trailer: TRAILER Make a Silence – Musical Dialogues in Asia (2019)
Link to film: View of Make a Silence | Journal of Anthropological Films
Make a Silence: Musical Dialogues in Asia (Barley Norton, 2020) centres itself on the Southeast Asian experimental music scene, as seen in the 2018 Hanoi New Music Festival. Over the course of its runtime, the audience is shown various performances interlaced with conversations between the artists themselves. Make a Silence seems to offer a digital tour of the music festival itself, moving the audience from the performances to commentary from the actual performers. The titular “silence” is important, much of the movie has no narration, and the viewer is invited to really listen and engage with the festival’s performers and their art. Even in scenes where the film has music, it is selected from the festival’s performances. In a way, the film itself reads as a collaboration with the pieces inside it; many of the performances are mixed media, combining music with dance, art, and theatre. By filming the festival, these pieces that would have been lost to the sands of time are preserved for the future, the fleeting nature of these improvised performances is mitigated. The importance to the Southeast Asian experimental music scene of multimedia art is enhanced further by the conversational segments; in the interviews many of the artists speak about the collaborative nature of both the art they produce and the traditional art of their cultures. While what they do is unconventional, it has its roots in many genres and their personal spin allows them to escape from more “western” views of music and to imbue it with conventions that are more familiar to a Southeast Asian audience.
The technical execution of the film leaves nothing to be desired, with the composition of the shots and the editing adding further to the experimental tone. While the lighting trends dark for the majority of its duration, it only adds to the underground feel, and allows the viewers to immerse themselves in the festival experience. The filmmakers also effectively incorporated the idea of collaboration through their layering of different pieces of footage. Every time it was done, it either emphasized what a performer was saying, or it added to the mood of the performance we were seeing and made for a smooth transition to the next section. Every segment is given enough time to sink in for the audience and no shot overstays its welcome. While the lighting and the setting feels underground and unique, the camerawork is reliably steady. Much of the film is shot straight on or from a low angle that gives one the feeling of being in the audience at the festival. As previously mentioned, there is no “voice of god” narration in this film, the pieces and the artists are allowed to speak for themselves and through this the audience is encouraged to observe and interpret the art for themselves, and to consider how the performers view what they do and what these kinds of festivals mean to them.
Overall, Make a Silence allows for an intriguing and immersive experience. The audience is invited to listen and observe, and to listen to the meaning of the art and the festival from the artists own mouths without ever being explicitly told what to think. It effectively showcases many different kinds of experimental art while adding to it through the medium of film. The conversations between the artists also show the ongoing negotiation between both eastern and western musical traditions, and Asian musical styles with each other. It invites a lot of speculation on what has happened since, and what may have been created specifically because of the dialogues that occurred during that festival in 2018.
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