Abstract
In discussions of slow cinema, it is often claimed that the use of extended takes provides spectators with space and time to contemplate the image but, in this essay, I shall argue that, for these films, sound is also an important part of the experience of cinematic duration. In slow cinema, soundscapes composed of location sound recording, field recordings and an absence (or minimal use) of musical score, foreground the material and sensory nature of matter on-screen thus enabling a sense of 'connectedness' between the acoustic space of reception and that of the diegesis. Films by 'slow' directors, such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jia Zhangke, and Lisandro Alonso, for example, capture the mundanity of the everyday while creating an immersive experience for the spectator through long takes and a sound design that produces a dense auditory field. Shifts in pitch and timbre draw in the spectator more deeply, submerging us into the diegetic world of the lm that is at times populated by the heavy drone of insect life, the violent sway of leaves in the trees or the reverberation of traffic noise. At other times, however, the films grant a sense of intimacy (sometimes uncomfortably so) through very localised sounds that appear too near or strangely audible considering their point of origin within the visual field. Often recalling the use of sound in structural/materialist lm, in slow cinema ambient sound can become noise; detached from signification, the auditory dimension loses 'meaning' and becomes 'feeling', experienced on and through the body of the spectator, at the same time as it is experienced by characters on-screen (Suárez, 2008: 86; Lovatt, 2013: 65) . 1 Unlike those of the filmmakers mentioned above, the films of Beijing director Liu Jiayin do not feature expansive rural landscapes or urban cityscapes in which the sounds of the natural or industrial worlds permeate and help shape the characters' day-to-day existence. Instead, Liu's stories take place within a confined interior and yet her use of diegetic sound and extended duration to communicate her characters' subjective experience of space and time in contemporary Beijing have a similar effect to that described above. Drawing from the fields of acoustic ecology and phenomenology, this chapter will discuss sound, duration and labour in Oxhide (Niupi, 2005) and Oxhide II (Niupi er, 2009) , addressing their significance in the context of contemporary independent Chinese cinema, and, more broadly, it will attempt to open up some questions about what kinds of knowledge or understanding this embodied experience of sound in slow cinema might produce. Oxhide was made in 2005 when Liu was twenty-three and still a student at the Beijing Film Academy. It takes place in her family home, a small apartment near Guangqumen in the Dongcheng District of Beijing, and she plays a fictional version of herself, named 'Beibei', while her father Liu Zaiping and mother Jia Huifen play themselves. The film tells the story of her father's failing leather-work business and the family's reaction to it over the course of 110 minutes in twenty-three static, carefully composed shots. Oxhide II concentrates the action on just one room within the apartment and takes place solely around the table on which Liu Zaiping handles the leather, and later, the family prepares dumplings together as part of their New Year rituals. This lm ventures further into minimalism, as over 133 minutes, the camera moves 360 degrees around the table in just nine shots at 45 degree increments filming from above, across and below the table to reduce time and space. Within this framework, we are witness to the anxieties, disappointments and affections that bind the family together. Like other examples of slow Chinese films discussed in this book, such as Wang Bing's West of the Tracks (Tie Xi Qu, 2003) and Jia Zhangke's 24 City (Er shi si cheng ji, 2008), Oxhide I and II present a profoundly humanist perspective on the impact of capitalism on ordinary people's lives in the People's Republic of China, and seem to offer a particular kind of resistance to the accelerating velocity of the country's market-driven reforms. Set against the backdrop of Beijing's rapid development in the mid to late 2000s, when many of the older parts of the city were being demolished to make way for new skyscrapers and commercial properties, Liu's films are a record of cultural memory and heritage that persist despite the threat of obsolescence. 2 This chapter contends that the acoustic dimension of the films plays a particularly important role in capturing the poignancy of this historical moment because of the material nature of sound itself. As Walter Ong writes, 'Sound exists only when it is going out of existence. It is not simply perishable but essentially evanescent, and it is sensed as evanescent . . . If I stop the movement of sound, I have nothing -only silence, no sound at all' (Ong, 2002: 32 ). Ong's words describe the durative temporality of sound, at the same time as evoking its fragility, thus echoing and underscoring the films' treatment of the disappearance not only of space and time but also of cultural practices and shared heritage. First-person Film-making and China's New Documentary Movement Luke Robinson describes the recent shift in China's New Documentary Movement away from films recorded in public spaces, that focus on 'public topics' (gonggong huati) such as the nation, history, ethnicity, or the state, towards 'what is increasingly described as the siren, the "private" documentary' (Robinson, 2010: 177) . While Oxhide and Oxhide II are fictional dramas based on real events, the connection between Liu's work and the documentary movement that focuses on 'individual, sometimes even autobiographical, emotional experiences; the familial; and internal domestic spaces' is important (177). In her essay 'First-Person Documentary in Twenty-First Century China', Tianqi Yu takes this point further and explains that the development of first-person filmmaking by women at the beginning of the twenty-first century corresponds with China's move towards decollectivisation and individualisation. Yu explains that films such as Oxhide I and II, Wang Fen's They Are Not the Only Unhappy Couple (Bu kuaile de buzhi yige, 2000), Yang Lina's Home Video (Jiating luxiang, 2001) , and Song Fang's Memories Look at Me (Ji yi wang zhe wo, 2012), differ from the documentaries made by male filmmakers because they 'highlight a personal vision, by bringing their own intimate familial spaces to wider audiences and reflexively turning themselves into key characters in the films' (Yu, 2014: 23) . I have discussed elsewhere how sound design can communicate the atmosphere of the era in which a film is set at the same time as expressing characters' subjective experiences of it (Lovatt, 2012: 419) . The formal aspects of Liu's films and, specifically, her use of synchronised sound and the long take, foreground her protagonists' anxieties around the commodification of time in postsocialist China. As in 24 City, this anxiety presents itself sonically through the recurrent motif of a ticking clock which occurs at the very beginning of Oxhide and is heard intermittently throughout both films. Like the vibration of the nearby train that we hear (and sense) each time it rumbles past bringing commuters into the economic centre of Beijing, the sound seems to embody China's metanarrative of progress and development that conceptualises temporality as linear and forward moving, encoded historically by the rhythmic sounds of industry and production (Lovatt, 2012: 435) . This understanding of time is, as Bliss Cua Lim describes: 'a means of exercising social, political, and economic control over periods of work and leisure [that] obscures the ceaselessly changing plurality of our existence in time' (Lim, 2009:11) . This tension is evident in the extended prologue before the title sequence of the second film when Beibei's mother, Jia Huifen, returns from the marketplace and obliquely criticises her husband, suspecting him of being idle while she was away. Their dialogue reveals in particular the subjective experience of duration as well as an internalised pressure not to 'waste' time by being unproductive. Offscreen, we hear the bang of the door outside the apartment and again as Huifen opens and closes the inner door to their home. They then decide to move the table slightly to create more space to work before the title, Oxhide II, appears on the screen after just over twenty leisurely minutes of running time.
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