Tag: Sam Green

VIFF films explore humanity

Filmmaker Sam Green will narrate live his documentary 32 Sounds, which is part of the Vancouver International Film Festival. (photo by Catalina Kulczar)

“There’s a thing in documentary filmmaking where, after you’ve done an interview with someone, you need to get what’s called room tone,” shares director, writer and editor Sam Green in his film 32 Sounds. “Room tone,” he explains, “is basically just sitting still for about 30 seconds or so and recording the sound of the room; this can help out a lot with editing later. I’ve been making films, which is kind of just marveling at people in the world, for 25 years now, and there’s always something odd and wonderful about this moment. An interview takes a person to other times and places and, now, they’re just here in the present, sitting with the sound of the room.”

Watching some of his interviewees, as they struggle or embrace sitting in silence for a few seconds, is one of the many highlights of Green’s latest documentary, 32 Sounds, which screens Oct. 5, 7 p.m., at the Vancouver Playhouse, as part of the Vancouver International Film Festival’s specialty program VIFF Live. New York-based Green will be in town to narrate the screening in-person, and audience members will be given headphones to wear, to help make the experience as immersive as possible.

The film premièred in January 2022 at the Sundance Film Festival. It exists in three forms: one as described above, but sometimes also with live music by composer JD Samson, who wrote original music for the film; another designed for an immersive at-home experience; and a theatre version without the in-person performance aspect. Watching the film at home without headphones was not ideal, but it was still enjoyable and mind-opening. There are parts where it would have added understanding and had greater impact to have heard something in only the left ear or only the right one.

32 Sounds is not just auditorily stunning but a visual pleasure, and intellectually stimulating, as well. Though there are explanations of how humans hear and how sound affects our bodies, the documentary is more philosophical than scientific. It presents concepts like the idea that all the sounds that have been made in the world should still be out there somewhere, “tiny ripples vibrating,” as contemplated by mathematician Charles Babbage, who is credited with having invented the computer, in the 1800s. If we had the right device, mused Babbage, we should be able to listen again to every joke, declaration of love or angry word ever uttered, narrates Green. “The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered,” wrote Babbage in 1837.

In 2022, Green wrote: “I’ve made many documentary films over the years, and each one has changed me in some way, but none as much as the film I just recently finished called 32 Sounds. The film weaves together 32 different recordings as well as images, music by JD Samson, and voice-over to create a meditation on sound. Or, put a different way, the film uses sound to consider some of the basic features of our experience of being alive: time and time passing, loss, memory, connection with others, and the ephemeral beauty of the present moment.”

From the sound of a womb, to a cat purring, to fog horns, to a man who captures the sound of bombs landing nearby as he’s recording his music, Green masterfully takes viewers (listeners) on an emotional journey. We get to see how movie sound magic is made by foley artists like Joanna Fang. We meet sound and visual artist Christine Sun Kim, who talks about the deaf community, as well as hearing people’s perceptions of her work. Edgar Choueriri, professor of physics at Princeton, plays part of a tape he made for his future self when he was 11 years old. And we get to know a bit about composer and academic Annea Lockwood, 81 at the time of filming, who had been recording things like the sound of rivers for more than 50 years. Lockwood fundamentally changed how Green thinks about sound, especially a point she makes in the film: “There’s something I started writing about a year ago: listening with, as opposed to listening to,” she shares. “And it’s my sense that, if I’m standing here, I’m just one of many organisms that are listening with one another within this environment … we’re within it and we’re all listening together, as it were.”

32 Sounds has much to recommend it, including the chance to get up and dance, if you choose, when Green pumps up the volume on Sampson’s music, so you can “feel the sounds in your whole body.”

Accepting oneself

image - William Bartolo as Daniel, left, and Daniel Gabriel as his secret lover, Isaac, in a still from Cut, which is part of VIFF’s International Shorts: Nothing Comes Easy program
William Bartolo as Daniel, left, and Daniel Gabriel as his secret lover, Isaac, in a still from Cut, which is part of VIFF’s International Shorts: Nothing Comes Easy program. (image from VIFF)

Sound that you can feel in your whole body plays an important part in the short film Cut by Samuel Lucas Allen. In what may – or may not – be semi-autobiographical, Cut tells the story of Daniel, a high school student who tries to hide his Jewishness and his queerness. At key moments, the original score created by Sam Weiss thrums with tension, underscoring Daniel’s inner conflict.

Despite being somewhat heavy-handed – there is nothing subtle in this film, perhaps because it is only 19 minutes long – Cut is interesting, well-acted and put together. It opens with a Chassidic man holding a rooster, then shows Daniel cutting his hair, which falls onto a copy of Merchant of Venice, from which the teen will eventually have to perform, by memory, Shylock’s “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” speech. Daniel’s room has drawn images of men on his walls, in various poses, apparently his own work.

The film defines its three main elements: kapparot, as a “Jewish ritual where a chicken is blessed and slaughtered in the place of a person, to atone for their sins”; tefillin as a “pair of leather boxes containing portions of the Torah, worn by Jewish men in their morning prayers”; and cut, “a slang term for circumcision, the surgical removal of the foreskin, usually performed for religious reasons.”

It is mainly the Jewish aspect that Allen deals with in this work. Daniel is able to walk away from a gay slur, but not an antisemitic one, and, in the end, he is reconciled to himself and his Orthodox father by the mystical Chassidic man’s performing kapparot over him. We witness Daniel’s acceptance of being Jewish, but are left to wonder if he comes to accept his queerness, an aspect of his being that conflicts with Orthodox Judaism, though his soul would still be considered divine in religious circles, even if he engages in homosexual acts, which are prohibited by the Torah.

Cut is featured in VIFF’s International Shorts: Nothing Comes Easy, a program for viewers aged 18+, in which the films’ “protagonists discover that sorting out their lives can be much more difficult to achieve than they realized.” It screens Oct. 5, 6:45 p.m., and Oct. 7, 12:15 p.m., at International Village 8.

The Vancouver International Film Festival runs Sept. 28-Oct. 8. For the full schedule and tickets, visit viff.org.

Live doc portrays famous idealist

Buckminster Fuller in front of the Montreal World’s Fair geodesic dome. (photo from Magnum Photos)

Most of us know Richard Buckminster Fuller as “the dome guy” or, more formally, as the 20th-century genius whose life and vision eventually led to the creation of that most unusual architectural form, the geodesic dome. His early architectural designs, set in the 1970s, would go on to win him worldwide acclaim as an early pioneer in environmental stewardship.

Although it’s no surprise in a city that has always lauded ingenuity, that vision would eventually help remake both Vancouver’s skyline and our concept of enduring, smart, contemporary architecture. But what many 21st-century Vancouverites may not know is that Bucky – as he was equally affectionately called by friends and even strangers – was much more than an architect and a futuristic designer. He was a utopist, a scientist, an idealist, a linguist and probably one of the world’s earliest pioneers in sustainable living.

photo - Sam Green
Sam Green (photo by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey)

In fact, he was more than that, says filmmaker Sam Green. Green, who received an Academy Award nomination for his documentary on the Weather Underground in 2003, will be presenting his live documentary of Fuller’s life and accomplishments, The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, at the Vogue Theatre on Nov. 12. Green spent several years pouring through the archives of Bucky’s famous Dymaxion Chronofile to compile this synthesis of the futurist’s life, a legacy that is euphemistically reflected in the title of the film.

Fuller, Green said, “spent almost every waking moment trying to make the world a better place,” a vision that was reflective of the immense affection he carried for the world around him. “There was something about him that struck me as very loving about his enormous amount of energy he put into his projects.”

It’s vigor that seems incredibly relevant to today’s sustainability movement, and our increasing focus on climate change. “I was very struck by the fact that he had these conflicting set[s] of messages,” said Green. “His whole life, or the entire 50 years he spent working on this project [what Green sums up simply as his effort to make the world a better place] are more relevant now than they have ever been.” Doing more with less, smart design, harnessing our resources, “and at the core of all of that is this idea that we have all the resources now to make a high standard of living for everybody on the planet.” It was a viewpoint that not only reflected his unbridled idealism, but his intuitive understanding of the precarious balance of life on what he referred to as “spaceship earth.”

“He was a great poet,” said Green. Fuller instinctually understood the power of allusion. “[He] definitely had a fantastic way with words. A lot of his books have just the most wonderful titles.” Poems with names like “God is a Verb,” whose title might have seemed irreverent at the time, captured the drive of a nascent environmental movement. The name of early work An Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth “would have been a cool title in 1975,” said Green. The treatise clearly showed he was ahead of his time when it was first published as a scientific paper in 1967, and it took readers by storm when it was published as a book a year later. His poems, literary works and uncanny insights into human nature have stood just as much the test of time as his many inventions and forays into architectural design.

Green’s live documentary is an exploration into form and allusion in itself. While this isn’t the first time that the filmmaker has combined live narrative with a pre-recorded film to tell a compelling story, the unorthodox format he uses seems to lend itself to the tale of a man who was clearly not afraid to step outside of the bounds of convention. Green’s personal narration, combined with the live accompaniment by American indie rock band Yo La Tengo, seems to resonate with viewers who, like Green, seek the intimate experience of that old pre-digital-age theatre production.

“One of the reasons I like this form is it keeps the experience in the realm of a kind of cinematic context,” Green explained. “You come to the theatre – we’re going to travel all the way from New York – you’ll buy a ticket and come to the theatre. Everybody will turn their phones off [and] we’ll all experience this piece together. It’ll never be the same way twice, and there is something just wonderful and magic about that.”

For Green, who identifies himself as “culturally Jewish,” Fuller’s story resonates with an element that he finds drives much of his cinematic work: “a kind of yearning quality to it,” he said, “a combination of idealism and yearning, and a little bit of heartbreak that I think is very Jewish.”

It’s the same essence he said that drew him to Yo La Tengo’s emotive work. “I very much wanted to work with them because they had the sound that expresses that. Their sound is beautiful. They make beautiful songs with a little bit of yearning and melancholy to them. And that kind of emotional palate to me is very Jewish.”

Green’s earlier cinematic work includes Utopia in Four Movements, which was featured at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival in 2010; The Weather Underground (2003), which premièred at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award; and Rainbow Man/John 3:16 (1997), detailing the tragic story of unusual sports fan Rockin’ Rollen Stewart. His most recent live documentary, The Measure of All Things (2014) about the Guinness Book of World Records, has also been featured at the Sundance Festival.

But, to be sure, The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller isn’t just about an American idealist who helped broaden global viewpoints. The Vancouver première, said Green, is also about Vancouver’s intimate relationship with Bucky and the vision he helped create when he visited the city in 1976.

“There are some great Buckminster Fuller connections to Vancouver,” Green acknowledged, noting that Fuller was a frequent visitor to the city that would eventually lay claim to a geodesic dome of its own – today’s Telus World of Science (better known as Science World), one of this city’s most enduring symbols.

The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller will be presented by the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival Nov. 12, 8 p.m., at Vogue Theatre. Tickets, $30.50, can be purchased at voguetheatre.com or by calling Northern Tickets at 1-855-551-9747.

Jan Lee’s articles have been published in B’nai B’rith Magazine, thedailyrabbi.com and Voices of Conservative and Masorti Judaism. She also writes on sustainable business practices for TriplePundit.com. Her blog can be found at multiculturaljew.polestarpassages.com.