Memoria

9,5 / 10

This review contains spoilers.

An essay about the expanded sense of hearing and touch

Memoria creates a level of hypnosis to a point at which I begin to recognize its concise, acoustic leitmotif in other objects around me on the following day. But do the other objects already inherit fragments of the leitmotif or am I projecting this sound onto them and does this film manipulate your sense of hearing to that effect? How is sound connected to one person in general? How does it stay in the mind and what does one associate with it? How are harmonies perceived by an individual through the rhythmic use of sound? It’s both weird and fascinating to ask this series of questions after viewing Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s audiovisual art installation – disguised as a 136-minute long mystery adventure – which can be described as a spellbinding sound journey through the nature of Colombia and its capital city Bogotá.

The questions keep piling up after exiting the cinema and while I had one of the most calming, ear-sensitive night walks through the city in quite some time, I could not stop thinking about Thomas Riedelsheimer’s documentary “Touch the Sound” from 2004. It portrays the creation process and philosophy behind the work of the near deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie and five interesting statements from the documentary seem to overlap with Weerasethakul’s careful take on sound in Memoria.

1. “It’s [like] trying to find the sound way down in the surface. We want to get under the surface in order to find the sound, rather than just simply striking that surface.”

Throughout the story, a leitmotif appears in the form of a sonic boom – a loud, deep noise which not only haunts the protagonist in the person of Scottish emigrant Jessica Holland – played terrifically by Tilda Swinton – it transfers this feeling to the viewer as well. The boom shoots through the ears and shakes one’s body, immediately creating a sense of disharmony within a near-silent, peaceful picture of Jessica waking up in the midst of the night. She travels from her residence in Medellín to Bogotá not only to visit her ill sister Karen in a hospital, but she also begins to retrace the boom while managing a market flower business and studying the effects of fungi, bacteria and viruses on plants. It appears that the sound infects her mind in that regard and it cannot be heard by other surrounding people. One day, she meets Hernán, a young sound engineer and together, they try to recreate the boom inside a professional recording studio. She starts to break up the aforementioned surface and delivers a surreal description of the sound: “A ball of concrete hitting a metal wall surrounded by seawater… a rumble from the core of the earth”. Hernán looks slightly stunned, but he plays a few examples which match her words. As the line moves towards the fishbone-formed soundwaves on the computer screen, you can compare your own reaction to the soundwave with Jessica’s flinching body. Is it precise enough and how does it resonate within you? As you start to judge and adjust the sound replica for yourself, you empathize more and more with the deeply affected protagonist. Weerasethakul creates a mental connection between the viewer and Jessica and continuously dissects our sense of hearing.

2. “If someone asks me: How do you hear that? Then I simply say: ‘I really don’t know, but I just basically hear that through my body, through opening myself up.”

Memoria plays a lot with the perception of sound. One scene early on demonstrates that effectively: During a normal, cloudy day in the downtown of Bogotá, a bus engine fails which draws the attention of the pedestrians nearby. While most of them stare at the bus with a sense of curiosity and no fear, one man starts to run away in panic, unintentionally absorbing all of their attention. For him, the sound of the engine’s failure could resemble a gunshot executed in a drive-by which he either witnessed himself or has seen something similar on television in the past. These are just assumptions, but it shows the spectrum of perception, how that sound stays inside of one’s mind and might be linked to a trauma. Some may laugh at this man, but most of us wish to not have these kind of associations. Do we deny the other side of reality or are we aware of it, but don’t think about it too much in order to maintain the harmony of our everyday life? That would imply a suppression of our sense of hearing.

3. “Hearing is a form of touch. You can feel as though you can almost reach out to that sound and feel that sound. You feel it through your body and sometimes it almost hits your face.”

Another integral part of our hearing and listening is the brain which tries to structure visual and acoustic cues at any given moment. The spontaneous car horn ensemble, which emerges in a neighborhood somewhere in Bogotá at night, plays with that behavior. The horns start to shout their individual alarm tone, each one with a different pitch, which turns some cars into a bassline or a contrabass whereas others imitate a high-singing piece of a choir. It appears like a banal scene in which Weerasethakul indirectly asks the audience whether they want to embark on his sound journey. The percentage of viewers who don’t feel that same connection, will have a hard time following the overall very laid-back vibe of the film. Later on, Joe actually asks the audience a second time to listen and observe when a jazz quartet gives a rousing improvised performance inside a relatively small room of a musical facility with listeners and spectators surrounding them, including Jessica. While she learns beforehand that Hérnan surprisingly doesn’t work there, she starts to wander through the building and hears the quartet’s performance.

There are two things at play here: Seeing the dedicated musicians who touch the sound physically via their respective instrument and how they react to the invisible waves of frequencies which circulate in the air and flow through their body. The drummer in particular sticks out who is so immersed into their performance that every beat changes his mimics while he swings his head in all directions. It’s akin to the example of musical flow shown in the band rehearsal scene from Pixar’s “Soul”: Joe Gardner being in the zone on one end and the band members on the other reacting to his performance. In Memoria, this similar connection to music is brilliantly portrayed in Jessica’s consternated posture and slightly opened mouth in contrast to the more scrutinizing look of the other musicians-turned spectators. British composer Fred Frith describes it in “Touch the Sound”:

4. “I believe Richard Long said: ‘Artists are people who are in touch with the energy they had when they were children. That’s never left them.’ And so that sense of seeing something or hearing something for the first time and being excited by it… you should try to hang on to that. In the end it’s about listening, period. It starts from listening and it ends with listening.”

The listening journey certainly does not end there for Jessica, who starts to question her mental wellbeing due to the fact that the sound engineer, the only person who could rebuild the sonic boom, does not exist. But that disruptive sound still haunts her, whether it’s at a dinner with her then recovered sister Karen or after a game of hide and seek with a stray dog at night through the streets of Bogotá. Is she imagining Hernán and can she still find a possible answer to the sound? With her sense of hearing opening up, she begins to explore the landscape of Colombia for herself.

Jessica encounters a small river flowing through nature and along a small house inhabited by an older man. What’s really interesting to see is the way she tests her “improved” ability to listen to her surroundings. This is also a test for the viewers, but this apparent improvement is actually Joe removing the thoughts and expectations which occupies our senses over the course of the film. He slowly paves the way for an experience purely based on our feeling. Jessica begins to bend her body sideways and in doing so, the sound design in Memoria transforms her body into an antenna, using a non-diegetic sound whose pitch shifts as her ear approaches the water. Suddenly, the boom appears again and she twitches. She bends her body again and ends up with the same result. The origin of the sound seems to be close, but she is no longer scared by it. After crossing the river, she meets the older, introverted man, perhaps in his fifties, who scalps fish in a calm manner. He mentions that he never left the village, but is able to remember the history of everything and the people around him, citing Jessica’s current residence in Bogotá as an example. The name of this man is Hernán.

5. “The form of communication is about touch. Touch is a little bit like hearing, it’s just so vast. We need all of our senses for the others to function. To take away the eye, it’s not a big deal. To take away the ear, it’s not a big deal. All the other senses will become that particular sense that you have lost. […] It creates a type of sense we never knew existed until one or the other disappears.”

What is this kind of touch which Evelyn Glennie talks about? It’s not just a literal way of touching an object with your hands, feet or your whole body. Touch can also be found in conversations in which words travel through air vibrations in order to make contact with a person. In an argument, air vibrations from both sides might also collide in mid-air. This is basically hearing which creates a feeling, an emotion inside the brain which travels through the body afterwards. The jazz quartet feels the music through every part of their body. The gunshot-resembling sound of an engine failure touches the male pedestrian’s ears who panics while his brain processes the sound. Both senses are deeply connected to each other. You could elaborate on this and say that molecules from a smelling substance touch the tissue in the nasal cavity, the tongue touches and analyses food and in a more abstract way, an object or entity visually touches our field of view when we see it. With this theory in mind you can assume that touch can be found in every sense. Communication and connection are about touch.

Glennie speaks about the loss of a sense through her disability, how the other senses compensate that and make way for an unknown, unifying sense which was enabled by the loss. But what if you still possess all your senses and the touch unifies them? It would still create a “sixth sense” for thoughts and memories which they hear inside their mind. The sonic boom functions like a loud bang reaching out to Jessica’s mind.

Eventually, Hernán touches Jessica by placing his hand on her lower arm. She touches her forehead, the surroundings go silent and it activates her sixth sense. As she dives into his childhood memories, she starts to shed a tear because it’s an unprecedented level of empathy for her. His memories are connected to the boom, making him the “owner” of the disruptive sound. The sonic boom acts like a detection tool for their special relationship. During the finale, Jessica actually sees the thing that creates the boom in the first place which will probably bamboozle every viewer, no matter how much they are immersed into the meditative vibe. Is she hallucinating? How can Jessica give a trustworthy explanation of that event to another person in the future? She is the only witness, so it might be better for her to keep it a secret. But the ending appears to question that as the boom seems to transcend into reality as an earthquake registered in the Colombian jungle. Then again, she would aptly describe it as “a rumble from the core of the earth”.

I would like to thank Apichatpong Weerasethakul for this exciting journey in which he shapes sound in many different ways. Starting off with the sonic boom which is portrayed as a scary, immaterial antagonist, but slowly connects with the viewer and materializes in an unbelievable way in the end. Furthermore there is a variety in the perception of sound and Joe offers the viewer to expand their sense of hearing by observing the environment and the people’s reaction to sound and music. This goes without saying that you have to be in the mood for this film. He lets the pictures breathe with very long shots, some of them lasting for several minutes inside a still frame. Patience is required and expectations will destroy the viewing experience. Connectivity is the key topic here which Joe takes a step further with the psychic bond between Jessica and Hernán. This only works because Joe forgoes any sort of detailed backstory about her character, her relationship to others and the environment which is why she feels lost in every moment, but it enables this extraordinary communication. The precise sound design is a perfect companion for their encounter. Memoria is a wonderful, relaxing experience which shines a light on an invisible layer of acoustics and its linked associations found within ourselves, within objects and within nature.