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Fear of Deaf Cinema

Alex Burns ([email protected]), 2010

[Note: Accepted for publication in M/C 13(3) (2010) but undelivered to publisher at final edit stage due to illness.]

The French experimental film composer Michel Chion has proposed ‘deaf cinema’ as a new aesthetic framework to interpret film dialogue, multi-layered soundtracks and silence. This article suggests Chion’s aesthetic theory is fragmentary. Through a sampling of Hollywood films in different historical periods, the article explores the implications of Chion’s ‘deaf cinema’ versus Robert Bresson’s ‘tactics of silence’, for the boundaries of film soundtracks; aesthetic strategies of silence; the variations in silent, experimental, genre and contemporary films, and the absence of deaf filmmakers and perspectives. Film Studies scholars who use these aesthetic strategies to develop more emancipatory and inclusive frameworks, as demonstrated in the work of deaf filmmakers Samuel Dore and Robert Hoskin.

“Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tactics of slowness, of silence.” ‐ Robert Bresson (Bennett, Hickmann and Wall, 15)

Defining Deaf Cinema

Michel Chion (www.michelchion.com) the French experimental music composer has proposed ‘deaf cinema’ as a new aesthetic framework to interpret film dialogue, multi-layered soundtracks, and silence. “The silent film may be called deaf,” Chion observes, “insofar as it prevented us from hearing the real sounds of the story. It had no ears for the immediate aural space, the here and now of action.” (Chion 7).

As a past assistant to ‘musique concrete’ composer Pierre Schaeffer, Chion is sensitive to how inductive theories can shape how we perceive film and music. Is ‘deaf cinema’, however, a new analytical category for Film Studies theorists? How does it fit with other recent scholarship that attempts to redress the perceived historical bias of Film Studies to the visual image, rather than a more holistic synthesis of film aesthetics? Is it as emancipatory as Chion might claim? This article explores the tensions between Chion’s ‘deaf cinema’ and Bresson’s ‘tactics of silence’, in terms of Hollywood’s aesthetic strategies for distinguishing between sound and silence. To do so, I examine a sample of primarily Hollywood films from different historical periods, to show how the choice of aesthetic strategies is made.

Problematically, Chion has not yet fully articulated what he actually meant. Instead, ‘deaf cinema’, like many other aesthetic theories in Film Studies and similar creative fields, remains fragmentary and an unexplored, normative idea. In coining ‘deaf cinema’ he was trying to resituate the phenomenological or interior, subjective experiences of film audiences during Hollywood’s formative, silent period until 1927. Regrettably, Chion did not mean deaf filmmakers like Samuel Dore (www.bursteardrum.net) and Robert Hoskin (www.innersense.com.au/mif/hoskin.html), nor initiatives such as Joshua Flanders’ Festival for the Cinema of the Deaf.

At the outset, ‘deaf cinema’ normatively could be what Dore, Hoskins and Flanders envisage: films created by deaf filmmakers about the lives and experiences of deaf people. Yet Hollywood and Film Studies theorists have a fear of this ‘deaf cinema’. Despite the inroads made by feminist, cult, queer and other theoretical frameworks, ‘deaf’ is more likely to mean non-deaf actors who play deaf characters, and the use of silence in films as a deliberate aesthetic strategy, usually to evoke a major event or human experience.

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Film history also conveys this fear, of unexplored possibilities. Hollywood’s silent era perhaps attracted Chion’s attention because silence was a choice imposed by technological constraints. During the classical era of major Hollywood studios, it became an aesthetic choice in experimental, underground films, and then either in genre films, or as a deliberate contrast to multi-layered soundtracks. In contemporary film, Chion’s ‘deaf cinema’ is treated as a design rule, similar to the explicit limitations that the ‘Vow of Chastity’ imposed on Dogme 95 filmmakers including Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg (von Trier and Vinterberg 1995).

In researching this article, I found a similar self-limitation. My attempt to evoke the authenticity of Dore, Hoskins, Flanders and others failed. Instead, I found the same reflexive ignorance that Ken Booth described in his conscientisation about the assumptions of political realism in academic strategic studies (Booth 1994). Instead of knowledge, I found anti-knowledge based on self-ignorance (Taleb 2007). What follows is an attempt to trace this fear of ‘deaf cinema’ through a sampling of Film Studies literature and films in different historical periods, and that articulate various aesthetic strategies to deal with sound, silence, and in rare cases, the experiences of deaf characters and viewers. In doing so, I highlight some knowledge processes of how Film Studies scholars undertake theory-building, and under what conditions their aesthetic theories can fall apart (Dick 1995).

The Silence That Surrounds Sounds

Over a decade later, I still remember the film viewing that was possibly the closest that its audience would have to empathise with deaf filmmakers, and more generally, with deaf people. The event was a mid-1990s undergraduate class in cinema studies at La Trobe University: a 16mm copy of F.W. Murnau’s influential Sunrise (1927). The student audience had expected a piano accompaniment similar to Buster Keaton and Keystone Cops comedies. Instead, we experienced near-silence; this was just before laptops and mobile phones became common in classrooms. A fifth of the audience experienced cognitive dissonance (Festinger 1957) and walked out of the Sunrise film screening.

Years later, colleagues would compare this film screening to John Cage’s 4’33” in which the audience is confronted with the “subtle awareness of the silence that surrounds sounds” (Toop 141). What some of the Murnau and Cage audiences experienced was a kind of sensory deprivation that altered their phenomenological, subjective experience. In fact, this was the very psychological effect that Cage intended to convey to his audience, after encountering and reflecting on the silence of “Harvard University’s anechoic chamber” (Toop 140). Medical researcher John Lilly had a similar goal to Cage when he designed the flotation tank as an immersive environment to enhance self-awareness and to support human potential (Lilly 1977). In doing so, Cage and Lilly both developed environments and stratagems that foreshadowed Bresson’s ‘tactics of silence.’

The near-silent and all-encompassing environment of Lilly’s flotation tank however, never became a mainstream lifestyle accessory outside health spas and sports science facilities. The flotation tank was wrongly equated with Cold War research into sensory deprivation, hinted at in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010), which Lilly abhorred. Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980) also depicted Lilly’s research as hallucinogenic sensory overload, foreshadowing later films such as Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007). Aesthetic strategies in film can thus influence how frameworks and tools for self-liberation diffuse from subcultures into mainstream ‘contexts of use’.

The exponents of Silent era cinema may already have understood what Cage, Lilly and Bresson were struggling to achieve. In the 1920s, the Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein and Russian formalists called attention through cinematography and editing to how aesthetic choices can shape viewer’s attention. After 1927, Chion believes that the turning point for many audiences from silence to film sound was Fritz Lang’s thriller Das Testamament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse) (1932), in 3

which Lang used the soundtrack to foreshadow major characters and plot changes (Chion 9; Gunning 2000). Consequently, film form became synonymous with radio and voice rather than silence (Chion 168- 169).

In the late 1930s the aesthete and film critic Rudolf Arnheim expressed a different view to Chion. “People took the silence of the movies for granted because they never quite lost the feeling that what they saw was after all only pictures,” Arnheim contended (36). Thus Chion, and the Sunrise audience evaluated Silent cinema from a different aesthetic frame, shaped by the experience of contemporary film and multi-layered soundtrack. The next section considers three further aesthetic strategies: dead soundtracks, and experimental and genre films.

Dead Soundtracks, and Experimental and Genre Films

Hollywood films developed a new aesthetic strategy to ‘normalise’ the boundary between sound and silence: the ‘dead soundtrack’. Films such as Tony Richardson’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979) used a dead soundtrack --- complete silence --- to emphasise the tragic deaths of major characters (Beaver 8). In doing so, Richardson and Fosse adopted the auditory equivalent to the visual freeze-frame that ends Francois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962) or the burning film stock which closes Monte Hellman’s existentialist road film Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). In all four films the ‘non-diegetic’ or off-screen world invades the ‘diegetic’ or on-screen world in the film.

Chuck Jones animated short ‘Duck Amuck’ (1953) is amongst the most self-conscious films to explore the ‘diegetic’ versus ‘non-diegetic’ boundaries. During the Warner Bros. cartoon, Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck remove all sounds from the soundtrack, reveal the edges of the animated frame, and play with film editing. Jones shows consciously and humorously how ‘diegetic and ‘non-diegetic’ elements can affect viewers, notably how dead soundtracks can highlight the absence of sound (Toop 144). Although critically regarded as the most influential and important cartoon, ‘Duck Amuck’ might have another role: to provide a phenomenological ‘moment of insight’ for non-deaf audiences about what a deaf experience might be like.

Experimental and underground films developed their own aesthetic strategies to use dead soundtracks. Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962) used ‘kinestasis-photography’ or still images, and a dead soundtrack at the film’s ending that would influence Terry Gilliam’s time-travel thriller 12 Monkeys (1995) (Beaver 139-140). Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) is a 45-minute zoom across a room that captures ambient sound only, until Snow’s camera zooms into a seaside photograph. Marker and Snow continued Cage and Lilly’s experiments with silence and ambient environments, yet in an underground film context.

Film Studies scholars in cult and genre studies have long understood how these aesthetic choices can diffuse into and influence mainstream culture. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) illustrates this process, for horror and science fiction films. Despite his mastery of formal elements, Kubrick relied on classical music by Johann and Richard Strauss, and modernist composer Gyorgy Ligeti, rather than ambient sounds or silence. In two scenes Kubrick deviated from this. When Dr. Haywood Floyd (William Sylvester) encounters the TMA-1 black monolith in the Tycho Brahe crater, it sends a mysterious, high-pitched signal toward Jupiter that deafens the research team. Later, on the Discovery mission sent to Jupiter, Dr. Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Dr. Frank Poole’s (Gary Lockwood) meet furtively in a pod to disconnect the rogue computer HAL 9000, who lip-reads their plans, and then murders Poole during a reconnaissance mission. In these two scenes, Kubrick’s soundtrack evoked humanity’s encounter with extreme environments, and with paranoiac undercurrents in human society about confronting the ontological unknown.

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In the next two decades, filmmakers in horror and science fiction took divergent paths from Kubrick’s aesthetic vision. One group adopted the Bresson-evoked speed and noise, when George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977) popularized ‘high concept’ blockbuster films. A second group adopted Bresson’s tactics of slowness and silence, and Kubrick’s themes. Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972) featured silent, panning shots of Earth’s last remaining forests, housed in a geodesic dome on the spacecraft Valley Forge bound for Saturn. Kubrick’s template also influenced the purgatorial planetoid and derelict craft in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), whose marketing tagline was “In space no-one can hear you scream”, and the secluded mining base in Duncan Jones’ Moon (2009), whose production design referenced both Kubrick and Trumbull. Collectively, these films fused the lineages of experimental and underground films to influence how silence and sound are used in horror and science fiction films. They also highlight how a cumulative tradition of genre conventions can unfold, and thus also, the predictability of how theoretical sub-disciplines arise in Film Studies scholarship.

Avoiding Silence in Contemporary Film

In recent years, Film Studies scholars have shifted their attention from ‘auteur’ theories of film directors as the dominant creative force to ‘below the line’ crew members. This included the role of dialogue coaches and actors in co-developing the film soundtrack (Kozloff 2000) and the sound mixers who created the multi-layered soundtracks (Lobernito 1994) that are exemplified in Robert Altman’s Nashville (1974), and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979). In doing so, this scholarship captured a nearly-forgotten lore about Nagra tape recorders, how to layer an audio track, and the use of rhythm, timbre, tempo and pitch as sound motifs. Chion’s ‘deaf cinema’ framework however suggests unexplored alternatives. For example, The Conversation could have used silence in several key revelatory scenes but Coppola and film editor Walter Murch chose not do so.

The Silent era use of disabled characters as plot devices has also taken on new forms. In The Book of Eli (2010) the hero Eli’s (Denzel Washington) comments about the ‘diegetic’ sound of weapons is used as a red herring before the final plot twist. “This doesn’t sound good!” Eli exclaims to heroine Solara (Mila Kunis) in a battle with post-apocalyptic barbarians and cannibals. After being wounded and reaching the remnants of civilization Eli is revealed, in the film’s final plot twist, to be blind and to possess the sole remaining King James Bible written in Braille.

The Book of Eli continues a long Hollywood tradition of using disabled characters as quirky plot devices rather than engaging deeply with their communities of support. Chion observes that Hollywood directors appear to prefer a ‘mute’ cinema rather than to authentically evoke the lives of dead viewers (Chion 7-8). In the Film Studies scholarship surveyed for this article, two films kept arising as cited examples of deaf characters in Hollywood films: Raida Haines’ Children of a Lesser God (1987) and Jane Campion’s The Piano (1987) (Chion 168-169; Stadler: 189-191). Haines’ film however was the only one to feature a deaf character played by actress Marlee Matlin, who has campaigned on disability issues and greater industry awareness of artistic contributions from deaf actors.

Hollywood genre films also continue to depict the extremities of human experience with a bias toward sound rather than silence. James Cameron’s undersea research laboratories in The Abyss (1989) and Kevin Macdonald’s Touching The Void (2003) documentary on a near-fatal mountain climb are vivid examples. In Kathryn Bigelow’s war film The Hurt Locker (2008), Sergeant First Class William James (Jeremy Renner) experiences silence and perceptual shifts whilst defusing the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) of Iraqi and Afghanistan insurgents. James however is addicted to the adrenaline rush of disarming IEDS, leading his colleagues into a shootout with insurgents. He is unable to readjust to family life in the United States nor to re-enter civilian society, depicted in a supermarket trip and sleeping with the television left on white noise and static. Bigelow’s aesthetic depiction of war becomes clear when 5

compared to Kim Mordaunt’s Bomb Harvest (2007), which follows an Australian team in Vietnam, and their training of Thai and Vietnamese bomb disposal specialists.

Louie Psihoyos’ documentary The Cove (2009) is amongst the most confronting of recent films to explore the boundaries between sound and silence. It differs from earlier films in that The Cove uses sound in an operational rather than an illustrative sense. Former Flipper trainer-turned-activist Ric O’Barry, Psihoyos and a collaborative team investigate the annual covert killing and harvesting of dolphins in nationally protected marine areas of Taiji, Japan. Psihoyos calls in special effects experts from Kerner Optical who use hidden cameras to photograph, film and to document the dolphins’ fate. The night before, Kerner Optical’s audio picks up the Taiji fishermen, reflecting on past seasons and the demise of whales and other aquatic life. During the hunt, the soundtrack is first silent, and then Kerner Optical’s audio captures dolphin sonar frequencies. “It’s weird to still hear their voices,” activist Ric O’Barry remarks, “because the dolphins are already dead.” The soundtrack transcends Altman, Coppola and Murch’s multi-layered soundtracks to underpin The Cove’s final, emotional revelations. Here sound rather than silence creates a crisis of personal conscience.

Fear of Deaf Cinema

This article has outlined several alternative explanations of Michel Chion’s ‘deaf cinema’ and examined its implications through a sampling of films throughout Hollywood’s history. An in-depth analysis of Chion’s ‘deaf cinema’ remains to be undertaken, in part because this is one of many undeveloped aesthetic theories in Film Studies and similar fields. Rather, this article highlights several aesthetic strategies that film directors used to distinguish sound from silence. In turn, Film Studies scholars have used these aesthetic strategies as the basis for normative theories.

One issue that Film Studies scholars miss is the influence of career pathways and creative environments in shaping aesthetic strategies. Many of the film directors mentioned above followed the Classical Hollywood model of developing technical expertise before becoming film directors who can experiment with film form. Fritz Lang, Stanley Kubrick, Douglas Trumbull, James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow each undertook this pathway. Others such as Ridley Scott and Duncan Jones had exposure to creative environments like advertising. This combination of technical expertise and creative environments may also have shaped the Film Studies scholarship that deals with aesthetic and normative theories.

Intriguingly, there is some overlap here in the career paths of independent, deaf filmmakers Samuel Dore and Robert Hoskin. Both Dore and Hoskin shared some commonalities with the Hollywood directors mentioned above. They mastered a technical craft like editing or cinematography. They chose projects such as documentaries and small features where there is role flexibility and small teams. As independents, they scope their projects around the available resources and situations. However, a major difference is that Dore, Hoskin and other deaf filmmakers do not necessarily have access to equity investors, or to distribution and exhibition guarantees for their films. This also remains a gap in the Film Studies literature surveyed.

There are many opportunities for future research in Film Studies scholarship. What prejudices exist in normative theories of Film Studies about different ways of perceiving film? What other lessons might Chion’s framework provide? How could Chion’s model inform critical pedagogy? (Hammersley 2007). Perhaps, as a still-formed theory that film scholars can use in an open-ended way to explore narrative, identity, and subjective interpretation of films and other media artifacts (Stadler 242-245). Film Studies scholars might develop more rigorous normative theories, and that have a greater awareness of the different perspectives explored above. Perhaps one of the best outcomes could be for deaf actors and filmmakers like Marlee Matlin, Samuel Dore and Robert Hoskin to share their insights with us, on their own terms. 6

Despite these unresolved issues, the sampling of films above suggests that more emancipatory possibilities may still come into being. Film remains a powerful medium to realise more critical, inclusive, alternative futures (Sardar 1999). Disturbingly, though, this process of creating alternative futures can have unanticipated side-effects. James Cameron spent a decade in research and development for Avatar’s immersive world (Goodyear 2010). Cameron’s beneficiaries though will be the consumer markets for 3D cinemas and televisions. Such an immersive media environment will be a barrier to Michel Chion’s ‘deaf cinema’, and also to empathy and mutual understanding between deaf and non-deaf film audiences, for years to come. 7

References

Articles and Books

Arnheim, Rudolf, 1958, ‘A New Lacoon: Artistic Composites and the Talking Film’, Film as Art. Faber & Faber, London, pp 164-189.

Beaver, Frank Eugene, 2006, Dictionary of Film Terms: The Aesthetic Companion to Film Art, Peter Lang, 2006.

Booth, Ken, 1994, ‘Security and Self: Reflections of a Fallen Realist’, YCISS Occasional Paper 26, Centre for International and Strategic Studies, York University, Toronto.

Bresson, Robert, ‘Notes on Sound’, Trans. Jonathan Griffin, in Bennett, Peter, Hickman, Andrew, and Wall, Peter (Eds), 2007, Film Studies: The Essential Resource, Routledge, New York, 14-15.

Chion, Michel, 1995, The Voice in Cinema, Trans. Claudia Gorbman, Columbia University Press, New York.

Dick, Philip K., 1995 [1978], ‘How To Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart, Two Days Later’, in Sutin, Lawrence (Ed), The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, Vintage Books, New York, pp. 259-280.

Festinger, Leon, 1957, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, Row and Peterson, Evanston IL.

Goodyear, Dana, 2009, ‘Man of Extremes’, The New Yorker (26th October), accessed 30th April 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/26/091026fa_fact_goodyear

Gunning, Tom, 2000, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity, BFI Publishing, London.

Hammersley, Martyn (Ed), Educational Research and Evidence-based Practice, Thousand Oaks CA, 2007.

Kozloff, Sarah, 2000, Overhearing Film Dialogue, University of California Press, Berkeley.

Lilly, John C., 1977, The Deep Self: Profound Relaxation and the Tank Isolation Technique, Warner Books, New York.

Lobernito, Vincent, 1994, Sound-on-Film: Interviews with Creators of Film Sound, Praeger Publishers, Westport CN.

Sardar, Ziauddin (Ed), 1999, Rescuing All Our Futures, Adamantine Books, Twickenham.

Stadler, Jane, 2008, Pulling Focus: Inter-subjective Experience, Narrative Film, and Ethics, Continuum, New York.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 2007, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Allen Lane, Camberwell.

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Toop, David, 1995, Ocean of Sound: Aetheric Talk, Ambient Sound and Imaginary Worlds, Serpent’s Tail, London.

Von Trier, Lars and Vinterberg, Thomas, 1995, ‘The Vow of Chastity’, Dogme 95 (13th Marc), accessed 30th April 2010, http://www.martweiss.com/film/dogma95-thevow.shtml

Wood, Aylish, 2007, Digital Encounters, Routledge, New York.

Films

12 Monkeys. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Perf. Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe and Brad Pitt. Universal Pictures, 1995. Film.

2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Perf. Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, and William Sylvester. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968. Film.

The Abyss. Dir. James Cameron. Perf. Ed Harris, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Michael Biehn. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1989. Film.

Alien. Dir. Ridley Scott. Perf. Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, and John Hurt. Brandywine Productions, 1979. Film.

All That Jazz. Dir. Bob Fosse. Perf. Roy Scheider, Jessica Lange and Leland Palmer. Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1979. Film.

Altered States. Dir. Ken Russell. Perf. William Hurt and Blair Brown. Warner Bros., 1980. Film.

Apocalypse Now. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Perf. Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, and Robert Duvall. Zoetrope Studios, 1979. Film.

Avatar. Dir. James Cameron. Perf. Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver and Stephen Lang. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 2009. Film.

Bomb Harvest. Dir. Kim Mordaunt. Perf. Phonesai Silevan, Laith Stevens and Linthong Sypavong. Lemur Films, 2007. Film.

The Book of Eli. Dir. Albert Hughes and Allen Hughes. Perf. Denzel Washington, Gary Oldman, Mila Kunis and Ray Stevenson. Alcon Entertainment, 2010. Film.

Children of a Lesser God. Dir. Randa Haines. Perf. William Hurt, Marlee Matlin and Piper Laurie. Paramount Pictures, 1986. Film.

The Conversation. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Perf. Gene Hackman, John Cazale, and Allen Garfield. American Zoetrope, 1974. Film.

The Cove. Dir. Louie Psihoyos. Perf. Ric O’Barry, Louie Psihoyos, and Joe Chisholm. Diamond Docs, 2009. Film.

Das Testamament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse). Dir. Fritz Lang. Perf. Rudolf Klein- Rogge and Gustav Diessl. Nero-Film AG, 1932. Film.

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Duck Amuck. Dir. Chuck Jones. Perf. Mel Blanc. Warner Bros., 1953. Film

The Hurt Locker. Dir. Kathryn Bigelow. Perf. Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, and Guy Pearce. Voltage Pictures, 2008. Film.

Jules et Jim (Jules and Jim). Dir. Francois Truffaut. Perf. Jeanne Moreau, Oskar Werner, and Henri Serre. Les Films du Carrosse, 1962. Film.

La Jetee (The Pier). Dir. Chris Marker. Perf. Jean Negroni, Helene Chatelain, Davos Hanich and Jacques Ledoux. Argos Films, 1962. Film.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Dir. Tony Richardson. Perf. Michael Redgrave, Tom Courtenay, and Avis Bunnage. Woodfall Film Productions, 1962. Film.

Moon. Dir. Duncan Jones. Perf. Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey and Dominique McElliott. Liberty Films UK, 2009. Film.

Nashville. Dir. Robert Altman. Perf. David Arkin, and Ned Beatty. ABC Entertainment, 1975. Film.

The Piano. Dir. Jane Campion. Perf. Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill, and Anna Paquin. Australian Film Commission, 1993. Film.

Shutter Island. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Perf. Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow. Paramount Pictures, 2010. Film.

Silent Running. Dir. Douglas Trumbull. Perf. Bruce Dern, Cliff Potts, Ron Rifkin and Jesse Vint. Universal Pictures, 1972. Film.

Star Wars. Dir. George Lucas. Perf. Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher. Lucasfilm, 1977. Film.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Dir. F.W. Murnau. Perf. George O’Brien, Janet Gaynor and Margaret Livingston. Fox Film Corporation, 1927. Film.

Sunshine. Dir. Danny Boyle. Perf. Cliff Curtis, Cillian Murphy, and Michelle Yeoh. DNA Films, 2007. Film.

Touching The Void. Dir. Kevin Macdonald. Perf. Brendan Mackey, Nicholas Aaron and Richard Hawking. Darlow Smithson Productions, 2003. Film.

Two-Lane Blacktop. Dir. Monte Hellman. Perf. James Taylor, Warren Oates, Laurie Bird and Dennis Wilson. Michael Laughlin Productions, 1971. Film.

Wavelength. Dir. Michael Snow. Perf. Hollis Frampton, Lyne Grossman and Naoto Nakawaza. Audio- Visual Preservation Trust of Canada, 1967. Film.