His analysis can equally apply to the role of the artist and the cultural values of a society. What his work postulates is that one
becomes oblivious of the obvious which nevertheless dominates our view of world. The procession of conspicuously exotic images in déjà vu is,
apparently, structured to enable a change of paradigm. It does not do this by satirising the amateur film makers, but by distilling an essence from their
cinematographic diaries. This only becomes clear, however, when one looks at the relationship of the sound to the pictures. As the old Chinese proverb
says - ‘Pictorial art is the art of mixing the visible and the invisible and sometimes the speakable with the unspeakable’. Déjà vu is
the result of an experiment linking all four.
At the outset of the film, the sound effects work together with the images, enhancing their documentary character and colluding with
the quasi-narrative flow. It is worth bearing in mind that we are dealing here with cinematographic sound - approximations and outright falsities which
have an authentic ring to them. Aural tricks and sleight of hand ascription (the all big ships must sound their horn in the harbour syndrome) we mutually
agree to treat as reality. The courtship does not last very long. In many places it is punctured by something approaching unsettling irony. Two examples.
A shot from the railing of a ship ploughing through southern seas. Sacred choral music wells up from the soundtrack. It has an emotional impact that
sends a shiver down your spine. At the same time as it functions as ‘film music’, it has a narrative function and communicates significant information.
The associations are manifold. Big ships have visited these waters for hundreds of years, bringing Columbus, Cortez and Cook, but always bringing the
missionary word and often the vessels of gun-boat diplomacy in their wake. Coincidentally or not, the shadow of the ship on the ocean evokes battlements
of the kind we draw as children. |
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The second sequence of shots shows docks and Africans loading bananas (hard work, if you can get it). The sound track gives us a work
song from a prison in America. Not surprisingly it is an Afro-American singing.
These correspondences occur frequently enough to be significant, and, in view of the rest of the sound track, act as life belts to be
ignored at your peril because the second layer has a strong undertow.
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