Seeing the listening. The audiovisual enunciation in R. Murray Schafer’s Listen/Écoute

Abstract

The paper presents a semiotic analysis of the short film by director David New Listen/Écoute. The work was produced by the National Film Board of Canada during the Governor General's Performing Arts Award 2009 to celebrate the artistic career of R. Murray Schafer, the most important Canadian composer and also father of Soundscape Studies. Resuming Schafer's philosophy of listening, this short film represents the semantic condensation of his artistic and pedagogical career and it looks for a perlocutionary effect to the public, using a series of refined strategies on the enunciative and enunciational levels: the aim of the work is to lead the spectator to listen to his/her soundscape giving value to silence. Silence is created both through the interruption of visual and audio playback systems, starting to the same short film, and asking the spectator to be silent. To achieve this goal, the spectator's listening competence is built step by step, scene by scene, shot by shot, following the direct example of Murray Schafer as protagonist, and thanks to a trajectory in which the vision become a heuristic metaphor for the listening. Trying to have an effect on the spectator, creating an extra-textual space outside itself and, so, being a sort of “jutting out text”, this work represents an interesting case study to discuss the main theories of enunciation dealing with cinema and audiovisual arts. In fact, if this short film shows a very strong deixis “I/you”, nevertheless it presents many different “figures of enunciation” that play their role all along the work. At the same time, it remembers us that the audiovisual enunciation is a syncretic one, not only visual but auditory too, asking and giving birth to a specific kind of fruition: the audio-vision.