Noisy Spit
British filmmaker Vicky Smith is a representative of the current wave of artisanal cinema, in which bodily contact with the filmstrip is made prominent. Although not without precedents, such as, for example, Fuses by Carolee Schneemann, who impregnated the filmstrip with bodily fluids of all sorts, Smith’s “full body films,” as explained above, hold promise for a new paradigm in “expanded cinema.” According to film scholar Jonathan Walley’s recent reevaluation of expanded cinema, this term pertains to “moving image works that claim new territory for cinema, beyond the bounds of the familiar materials and practices of filmmaking” (Walley 2020: 10).
Noisy Licking, Spitting & Dribbling constitutes a distinctive piece of materialist filmmaking. The approximately three-minute film was made not with a camera but through direct contact between transparent 16mm sound film and Smith’s tongue. It measures its pace and rhythm in tongue-sized intervals. For the opening sequence, the artist used her tongue as a stamp, with food coloring serving as ink. The first imprint on clear leader was made 40 frames (one foot) into the film and then reduced by one frame with each new imprint, accelerating until the marks overlapped. Then, mechanical control was abandoned in favor of more random and improvised activities, the spitting and dribbling of the title. The regularly pulsing red splats from the stamping sequence are replaced by contingent blots in yellow, orange, and brown emerging from the colored saliva shed from inside her mouth and onto the filmstrip. Enlarged on the screen, the saliva, usually contained inside the oral cavity, resembles “scientific microscopic images that bring us into an uncanny physical proximity with the artist’s body, which evokes “both fascination and discomfort” (Knowles 2013: n.p.) in the “audio viewer.”
The two parts (licking and stamping on one hand and dribbling and spitting on the other) are separated by a brief, violent burst of noise resembling a screeching car. As the filmmaker explains, at this point, she attached a short fragment of found optical soundtrack with the idea that it would act as a climax or bridge between the two parts.[10] But these are not the only sounds to be heard. Since the 16mm film was equipped with optical sound (also known as sound-on-film), and the stained fluids seeped onto the audio track alongside the edge of the filmstrip, her spit was rendered audible. She describes these sounds created by the irregular and colorful shapes as “noisy rasps and skidding sounds.” The attentive listener will also perceive faint sounds that come across as background murmurs. Smith recalls that to make the film, she struggled to get hold of clear film leader and bought some from a film lab that was in the process of ceasing operations. As the roll was quite warped, she assumed that it must have been bleached. And although the image had been removed, she could detect a faint residue of audio when the volume was increased on her Steenbeck editing table. According to Smith, it must have been harder to bleach away the bold monochrome graphic forms of optical sound than the colors of the image track.[11]
Noisy Licking incorporates three types of optical soundtracks, each with distinct qualities and functions. The jarring sound of a car screeching, found rather than created, had previously been used in a different context. In Noisy Licking this noise serves as a kind of caesura. The sudden burst of noise has a raw and startling impact on the audience. Canadian composer and writer R. Murray Schafer argues that the license to subject people to loud sound is a privilege held by those in positions of power, citing church bells as an example (Schafer 1994: 74). However, I view Smith’s cacophony not as a display of power but rather as an expression of a desire to jolt the audience, a concept cherished within the avant-garde. In contrast to the car noise, the undifferentiated background murmurs result from a serendipitous failed gesture of erasure on a piece of filmstock that the artist had managed to acquire. Both soundtracks are relics of past presences with their own histories. Finally, the third and most prominent soundtrack, caused by licking, dribbling, and spitting, can be seen as a specific and embodied form of sonic self-portraiture.
As mentioned, among other films of hers, Noisy Licking has been referred to by Smith as a “tactile film,” or more precisely a “full body film.” This type of film, totally dependent on touch, brings two organic bodies into close contact: the body of the film and the body of the filmmaker. Smith metaphorically regards the photochemical filmstrip as “a mortal body” (2012: 44), but it can also be considered organic in a more literal sense: it consists of acetate, which is derived from cotton or tree-pulp cellulose, deteriorating through chemical processes similar to those affecting nitrate film. Organic materials are subjected to the forces of time, and their life span is limited. Due to its inherent processual nature, organic film stock is permeated by the formless in Bataille’s sense and is constantly on the verge of falling-into-the-informe.
While working on Noisy Licking, Smith was also concerned with health issues. The food coloring she used contained “Sunset Yellow,” a substance known to cause hyperactivity (in children, at least). The filmstrip is coated with gelatin, and as she is primarily vegan, the taste of animal hooves was not welcome.[12] Smith also describes what the necessity of working close to the film did to her own body: “The 16mm gauge presents a very narrow surface area for the artist to create imagery that is made directly onto the filmstrip. The work is fiddly requiring cramped poses” (Smith 2012: 44). Another issue that arose was the challenge of fixing fluid substances onto the coated surface of the filmstrip, as well as the impossibility of registering the exact same mark in the same position over a series of frames. However, this lack of formal consistency contributes to the film’s vibrant visual quality.
Optical sound, or “tones from out of nowhere” (Levin 2003), is independent of external sound sources or recording equipment. It is a technique that produces rather than reproduces sound.[13] Its origins lie in graphic marks: artists in the early 1930s began experimenting with the idea of drawing directly onto the sound strip to render shapes audible. Graphic patterns were either painstakingly drawn by hand, then photographed and transferred to the soundtrack using contact copying,[14] or applied directly to the soundtrack with ink, a brush, or a pointed object. In other words, Smith revives an old experimental tradition with a decisive twist: She departs from both the manual method of mark-making on film (graphic or drawn sound) and the photographic method, instead employing her tongue and saliva as primary materials. This embodied approach to optical sound matters for several reasons. First, because it occurs at a time when analog film is becoming obsolete, which, in Smith’s words, forces the filmmaker “back to their own body as resource” (Smith 2012: 42). Second, because unlike a drawing or even a photograph, bodily fluids are not representations, but “raw” materials, and thus come close to Cox’s ideal of sonic materialism described above. Third, in some parts of the film the sound that emerges through the spit is not only audible but also visible. While in standard projection the optical soundtrack remains obscured from sight, with its visual patterns being transformed into auditory signals, in Noisy Licking, portions of the soundtrack are copied onto the visible area of the filmstrip and thus made available to the eye.
In her article “The Hitherto Unknown,” film scholar Hannah Frank discusses a specific category of synthetic sound that originates from photographic images. She gives the example of Hollywood director Rouben Mamoulian, who claimed to have captured the light of a flickering candle onto the optical soundtrack. But Frank also emphasizes that these “photographs” should not be considered photography in the traditional sense, as they are “images that offer nothing aesthetically or psychologically, images that are instrumental and nothing more (or less)” (Frank 2022: 80–81). What Frank calls “instrumental images” is similar to the concept of “operational images,” a term first coined in 2000 by German filmmaker Harun Farocki.[15] They are related to the expanded field of machine vision, from retail motion tracking in malls to automated pattern recognition systems in military drones, which serves a functional, rather than aesthetic, purpose and is not meant to be viewed. In a broader sense, whether photographic or not, the image of the optical soundtrack always fulfills an instrumental purpose. It facilitates the conversion of optical patterns into audible sounds. By presenting portions of the optical soundtrack on the screen, Smith blurs the line between operational and aesthetic images, countering our culture’s insistence on differences with de-differentiation. This affords the audio viewer a rare opportunity to visualize the sound of saliva, potentially prompting the converse question of what the sound of one’s own saliva might look like.