Haptic Vision and Haptic Listening
Since the 1990s, a growing number of studies have been concerned with the bodily and affective aspects of the film viewer’s interaction with moving images (Sobchack 1992, 2004; Shaviro 1993; Marks 2000, 2002; Barker 2009; Elsaesser and Hagener 2010; Bruno 2014). With a few exceptions, most notably film scholar Laura U. Marks’s (2000) seminal contribution to the haptic visuality of intercultural cinema, experimental cinema remained largely unexplored.
In art and media studies, the phenomenological approach places its emphasis on the sensory impact on the audience’s body. In The Skin of the Film, Marks argues that certain onscreen images call upon multiple senses, most prominently touch. She says that “[f]ilm is grasped not solely by an intellectual act but by the complex perception of the body as a whole” (Marks 2000: 145). This “embodied vision” is able to bring us closer to things that awaken personal and cultural memories of touch. Drawing on nineteenth-century art historian Alois Riegl’s distinction between haptic and optic images, Marks explains: “Optical visuality depends on a separation between the viewing subject and the object. Haptic looking tends to move over the surface of its object rather than to plunge into illusionistic depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture” (Marks 2000: 162). The concept of embodied, haptic visuality[2] depends on tactile proximity, wherein looking is reframed as a form of caressing –a departure from the objectifying gaze that controls and penetrates the image. The concept of haptic visuality also suggests that a film or video can convey haptic images. Examples include surface textures resulting from a variety of factors, such as enlargement, extreme close-ups, hand processing, the properties of the support, or the transfer of images from one format to another (Jutz 2019). All of these factors can impair the image’s representational qualities and its straight “legibility.” This rematerialization of perceptual objects through a haptic approach gains its actual relevance from the current media constellation, where “optical visuality is being refitted as a virtual epistemology for the digital image” (Marks 2002: xiii).
Marks’s phenomenological approach has one considerable limitation: It only concerns itself with the visual aspect and disregards sound. To remedy this shortcoming, we need to incorporate theories of “haptic listening.” It is only recently that audiovisual scholarship has begun to turn toward the bodily experiences of the listener (Coulthard 2012, 2013; Mera 2016; Leimbacher 2017). In a 2012 essay, audio visual scholar Lisa Coulthard, inspired by Marks’s “haptic vision,” introduced the terms “haptic aurality” and “haptic listening” while discussing certain films of Michael Haneke. In a 2016 article on two films by Paul Thomas Anderson, composer and musicologist Miguel Mera rehabilitated noise in instrumental music and its connection to hapticity and embodied listening within current phenomenological discussions. Finally, audiovisual scholar Irina Leimbacher, in her 2017 article “Experiments with Documentary Listening,” explored the speaking voice in contemporary works by artists and experimental filmmakers. Although she focuses on spoken language, her definition of “haptic listening” also applies to nonverbal utterances:
By using the term “haptic listening,” I want to suggest that sound, and specifically voice, can become a conscious medium of affective and existential contact. We are touched by voice, and this voice, even when recorded, physically and ontologically matters. […] Haptic listening deemphasizes the referents of speech to attend to embodied and nonverbal aspects of spoken language, the act of vocalizing itself. […] Haptic listening prioritizes engagement with how something is said […]. If haptic visuality pushes our looking to the surface of images, haptic listening pushes our listening to the surfaces of sound and the nonsemantic qualities of vocalized speech. (Leimbacher 2017: 298–299)
Haptic listening is a useful concept in sound studies. Understood as an interaction between biological and technical agents, it underscores texturality and engages the listener in a more bodily, visceral way. It emphasizes a “being with” sonic material – a form of “complicity” (to use Lange-Berndt’s term) with the sonorous world – and collapses the hierarchical separation between the listening subject and the object, which has ethical consequences for the position of the human subject.
The textural qualities of sounds and their emotional impact were already addressed by author and composer of musique concrète Michel Chion as early as in 1994. In Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, he proposed the concept of “materializing sound indices” (Chion 1994: 114–117). When, for example, in a film, the sound of a footstep gives “the impression of leather and cloth, and cues about the composition of what is being walked on – gravel crunching,a squeaking wood floor” (Chion 1994: 115), it contains a high number of materializing sound indices. These indices are “the sound’s details that cause us to ‘feel’ the material conditions of the sound source, and refer to the concrete process of the sound’s production” (Chion 1994: 114). Material sound indices should not be confused with another concept of Chion presented in the same volume, namely “causal listening,” which is interested in identifying the source of a sound. While causal listening treats the recorded sound as a dispenser of information or data, material sound indices “pull the scene toward the material concrete” (Chion 1994: 14). They prompt reflection on how sound resonates with the human sensorium. For all these reasons the concept of material sound indices is well suited to complement the concept of haptic listening. The notion of haptic listening and what it means to be touched by sounds will be developed further through the more rigorous discussion of the case studies.
Let’s take a quick look at the consequences of new technologies for haptic listening as demonstrated by Lisa Coulthard’s investigation of haptic sounds in films grouped under the term “European New Extremism.”[3] The author draws specifically on Dolby digital surround sound with its promise of unpreceded perceptual richness. As her interest lies in body-vibrating, low-frequency droning that occurs in moments of relative silence, Dolby’s noise repression is not always welcome. To achieve an equivalent acoustic effect to the visual extremism of the films under scrutiny, it is necessary to thwart the purity and quiet of digital technologies. As Coulthard points out, “rather than mining the cleansed precision of Dolby digital, a number of recent films subvert (or at least play with) the technological developments offered by digital sound through deliberate sonic imperfections, a celebration of noise, and an avoidance of pure silence on the audiotrack” (Coulthard 2013: 115). Considered more broadly, the abatement of noise, be it sonic or visual, is synonymous with the repression of materiality. Film scholar Juan A. Suárez emphasizes a strong “potential for noise” (Suárez 2008: 71) inherent to the photographic image and analog media at large. This may manifest as dust, scratches, or lesions resulting from the passage of time on the filmstrip. Noise in digital media (in the sense of imperfections), however, conflicts with these medias’ promise of a cleansed future. In the case of Dolby, noise must be “squeezed out” by dirtying total silence with the disturbing hum of low-frequency drones, as shown by Coulthard’s exploration of haptic noise in the New Extremism.
When dealing with haptic experience and materiality, we must also consider related sound and image technologies. The artworks examined here were created using relatively straightforward, unsophisticated technical means, such as a tape recorder, an optical soundtrack, a cell phone, medical ultrasound, and microphones. With the exception of Mes bronches, all of these pieces are contemporary and avoid contemporary digital production methods almost entirely. The consistent use of analog methods prompts inquiry into the enduring appeal of analog media and photochemical film in today’s media landscape, which will be briefly discussed next.