95 min | NR | April 28, 2023 | Abramorama
Sam Green builds a documentary you are supposed to hear before you see. He hands the audience headphones and spends ninety minutes proving that sound is the closest thing we have to a time machine. Then he reminds you that everything you just heard is already gone.
32 Sounds is a documentary organized around exactly that. Thirty-two recordings. Sam Green narrates and counts them off, moving from the buzz of a single neuron to a recording of an extinct bird that no living person will ever hear in the wild. The film is built for headphones and binaural audio, so the sounds arrive with a physical specificity that flattens the gap between the screen and the inside of your skull. What it is really about is loss. Every sound on the soundtrack is proof that something happened and then stopped happening, and Green keeps pulling that thread until the whole project becomes an essay on time.
Green narrates the film himself and treats his own voice as one more instrument to examine. He stays calm and exact, refusing to perform wonder, which makes the wonder land harder when it arrives. The standout presence is composer Annea Lockwood, who appears as herself and walks Green through her decades of recording rivers and submerging pianos. Lockwood listens to her own old tapes on camera, and her face does most of the work. She is a woman hearing the dead through a recording, and the film holds on her long enough to let that register.
Green writes and directs, and his structural choice is the engine of the whole thing. He instructs the audience to close their eyes during certain passages, and the screen goes dark while the binaural mix takes over completely. The sound design by Mark Mangini fills that darkness with a three-dimensional space that the image could never produce. JD Samson’s score threads through the recordings without smothering them, and the editing counts the thirty-two sounds as discrete chapters that accumulate into a single argument. The form is the content. A film about how sound disappears refuses to let you take any of it for granted.
This is a documentary that understands its own medium is a recording, and it turns that fact into its subject. Green is not interested in explaining how hearing works. He is interested in the fact that every sound is already a memory by the time you notice it. The film asks you to sit in the dark and listen to things that are vanishing, including your own attention. It is a rare nonfiction film that makes the act of perception feel like the plot.