In a work that bills itself as ‘a transcendent meditation on death and life,’ Peter Liechti’s admirable attempt at the film essay turns out to be more recitation than meditation, and offers an important lesson about the place of narration in film.
One might very well say that, at bottom, the so-called film essay is nothing new—it has been around for as long as motion pictures have, and with very good reason. The visual format, in order to distinguish itself and depart from the novelistic and epic narrative devices that had been ingrained in the human mind over the course of almost three millennia ends up taking more than a few cues from that other literary mainstay, Montaigne’s ‘essai,’ or attempt. And the essay and the poem are of course the most natural model for cinema to adopt because, unlike the novel, they do not require anything like an overarching logic, and if they require any logic at all it is almost always an internal and hermetic kind of logic, a logic the reader (and in this case the viewer) has to discover over time rather than demand it up front. Given all of which, it is rather dispiriting to come to a film like The Sound of Insects and have so much be put forward so quickly and so unsubtly as it is in the opening sequence, in which a man’s body is being led out of the forest as the viewer is shown the advance of the men carrying the swaddled corpse from several oblique angles. At which point the camera recedes a bit and we see the vehicle in which the body will be transported from a distance in a field replete with snow under a leaden winter sky.
And then comes the narration, telling us everything, namely, that this is the account of a man’s suicide by, of all things, starvation. No mysteries, no suspense, no doubts allowed. The concept strikes one immediately as rather morbid, but at the same time very fertile and suggestive. Over the next hour and a half, the would-be film essay seems to go out of its way to shoot down every single interesting angle and idea, offering up an imagistic phantasmagoria without contextualizing it properly for it to mean anything at all. And then there’s the narrator that takes over after these first few minutes: the man committing suicide himself, speaking to us through an almost clinical chronicle of the deed.
Does it make for a dull experience to say that The Sound of Insects, a Rotterdam, Vision du Reel, Hot Docs, Silverdocs and Karlovy Vary selected docu comes out and once and again reminds the viewer, “No, I’m not that interesting”? To start with, the narrative voice of the suicide may very well be the least impassioned and least compelling narrative voice in recent European cinema. Even in the meandering films of someone like Pedro Costa, where there is a very self-consciously ascetic and pared-back aesthetic at work, there is not the same level of disregard for the power of expression as there is in this model. It’s entirely permissible to choose to narrate a film, although it does bring with it a few burdens, namely, making the narration engaging and meaningful, and, perhaps more importantly, making certain that the narrative voice never feels as if it is existing on a separate plane from the visual narrative itself.
In The Sound of Insects, neither of these burdens is met very competently, or at all: the voice is so calm that it might be reading out a very long grocery list. Remember, this man is supposed to be a suicide. He is also supposed to be starving himself to death. But even as the film wears on, which is the only accurate way of describing its progress, and the man is slowly starving, the voice remains more or less unchanged. There is an almost physically painful lack of inflection, at any rate, rather as if the film were committed to starving the viewer of interest in the process of killing off its narrator by the same means.
It bodes no better for the film that the handful of stylistic homologues in European cinema are Tarkovsky’s ruminative masterpiece, The Mirror, in which hearing the narrative voice is, even in a different language, a striking and almost visceral experience, and Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Sans Soleil, frequently packaged together. In each of these films there is a narrator but the voice never feels like an afterthought, as it does in The Sound of Insects; in La Jetée the burden on the narrator is even more difficult to bear because what is being narrated is a series of black and while stills, and yet even so it manages to be compelling. To Liechti’s credit, however, Marker’s film is less than thirty minutes long, whereas this goes for a feature-length runtime of almost ninety minutes. But it may in itself be a failing as well since as it is the material cannot sustain a languorous hour-and-a-half-long monologue with dreamlike imagery on the side, which is what The Sound of Insects ends up being.
It should come as no surprise that the film is hardly a gleeful one, given the subject matter, but to cinematographer Matthias Källin’s and director/cinematographer Peter Liechti’s joint credit, as a visual experience this is actually quite startling. The camerawork sticks mostly to a sober documentary-like style, but even then the composition is often striking. The patter of rain, the buzzing of insects, the rustling of trees—all of these things the viewer experiences as a welcome break from the tepid onrush of the narration, and one is often tempted to set the film on mute to see what a difference it might make. As it is, though, The Sound of Insects is a very taxing aesthetic experience, and one which does not appear tax with an eye to rewarding the viewer in the end, but which seems content merely to tax and toss out a few nice images at intervals. As an adaptation of a novel which was itself an adaptation of a diary, it almost provides a template of what not to do, namely, to let the narration overwhelm the visual aspect of the work, which is finally the raison d’être of cinema.
The disc comes with no extras besides the film itself and a chapter selection menu. Everything else on the main menu, which is to say two of the four options offered, are promotional in nature, which hardly seems justified, given the cost of the entire package. There are no subtitles; the narrative voice has simply been overridden by an English narrator, which may in fact be the cause of many of the film’s shortcomings, all of which stem from the narration itself.
The specter of Tarkovsky’s The Mirror haunts this film and makes it very difficult to enjoy on precisely the terms that it seems to want itself to be enjoyed—in other words, as ‘a transcendent meditation on death and life.’ There is nothing transcendent about the droning narration, and whatever transcendence there may be to the admittedly stunning, do-it-yourself lyricism of the cinematography is stifled and even called into question by the ever-mundane voice of the narrator. There is surely a problem when a film that only goes on for eighty-odd minutes feels so much longer than it actually is.
