32 SOUNDS is seemingly custom-designed to be one of those tiles that lives forever in the scroll of your local library’s free online streaming service: An intriguing, brain-teasing but ultimately meagre documentary built to bestow a greater appreciation for the world around you, but may just end up being better suited to helping you fall asleep on the couch on a lazy spring afternoon. Award-winning documentarian Sam Green invites the viewer (or, more earnestly, the listener) on a journey through 32 individual sounds. You may wonder why that particular number. Do they correlate to octaves or other fundamental laws of sound? Are we cataloguing important moments in the history of sound innovation? Or, perhaps, is this a personal journey through 32 important moments from the filmmakers’ own life? Unfortunately for the audience, the answer is all those things and seemingly not enough of any one of them, either.
There is no grand thesis to 32 SOUNDS beyond tickling the viewer’s auditory ossicle and the film, for however genuinely noble its intentions, buckles under that assiduous weight. We’re treated to sounds from the womb, detours through the avant-garde scene of the 60s and 70s as seen through the eyes of pioneering sound artists like Annea Lockwood, peeks behind the curtain of Hollywood sound foley production and extended looks at Green’s own life and personal recordings with subjects of past documentary efforts. Any number of these angles would make for a solid focus to build a clean 90 minutes around, but Green opts for a poetic collage of all these ideas in addition to applying some aural glue to hold the vignettes together, like trees solemnly falling or church bells chiming in the distance.
What is meant to come across as an awakening experience to the beauty of nature and the miracle of hearing frequently comes across likely a shapeless This American Life episode, with Green whispering platitudes like, “Listening to a mixtape is like travelling through space and time,” or, “[We were] making films, which kind of means ‘marvelling at people and the world’,” at the audience. Such banal insights could be gateways in deeper discussions about our relationship to sound, but 32 SOUNDS frequently opts to skim from one surface to the next, barely clearing a bar for brain-tingling sensation set by any given Bose in-store demo room one could wander into at a mid-tier mall in the 2000s.
There are fleeting moments of inspired filmmaking that make 32 SOUNDS work better as an actual movie rather than a Calm meditation podcast, particularly in cuts that make the distant past feel much closer than it really is. For example, when we suddenly jump from watching Lockwood demonstrating one of her art installations in the 60s to witnessing her looking at footage of that event on an iPhone in the present day, 32 SOUNDS compellingly bridges an enormous gap of nearly 60 years in the blink of an eye. Elsewhere, however, 32 SOUNDS frequently declines to the offer to be a movie, even inviting the viewer to close their eyes and ignore what’s on-screen no less than five separate times.
While not unexpected given the subject matter, this approach puts cracks in the foundation that 32 SOUNDS never reconciles, often inhibiting its ability to take full advantage of film as an art form. In the homestretch, Green even admits to the viewer that he was having trouble understanding how to wrap all of these ideas up into a resounding cinematic ending, remarking, “No, I don’t really know where this is heading,” to the viewer. He eventually lands on making the film temporarily about himself, which is an approach that honestly would have been welcome as a throughline throughout the whole experience. Sarah Polley’s STORIES WE TELL is no less effective for exploring the impact of memory and identity through images and film taken from her own life, but Green often shies away from making his story the spine here even if when that vulnerability naturally invites itself as the most organic approach to take to get the audience genuinely invested in what’s happening.
32 SOUNDS amounts to a novel experiment that doesn’t add up to more than the sum of its parts. The approach is even treated flippantly on occasion, with title cards announcing what number we’re at, appearing unceremoniously at random (to paraphrase one moment: “We’re at sound #8, but who’s counting, really?” Green remarks ever so uncannily). 32 SOUNDS wants to be simultaneously carefree and profound, deeply reverent yet also playful. One moment stuck out to me that exemplifies these tones rubbing up against each other unsuccessfully, where Green presents an early-20th century film reel about the structure of the human ear. While the old-timey black and white footage plays, he dismisses their approach as clearly corny and outdated compared to what his film can teach us about the human ear. All I could think about at that moment was how 32 SOUNDS might be received over 75 years from now: would documentary filmmakers of the 22nd century be similarly dismissive of Green’s labouriously abstract, incohesive approach? There are a lot of carefully considered details to be seen and heard in 32 SOUNDS, but false notes such as these rang the loudest in my ears by the time the credits rolled.
– Joe Hackett