Conclusion

Summary

There, precisely, is the origin. Noise and nausea, noise and the nautical, noise and navy belong to the same family. We mustn't be surprised. We never hear background noise so well as we do at the seaside.

Serres Genesis, p. 13

I want to begin with a series of aqueous reflections:

French filmmaker Lucille Hadžihalilović set her most recent film, Evolution (2015), by the sea. The film is a weird and wonderful ‘nightmarish lullaby’ of sensations channelled through the body of a young boy who finds himself in a nauseating, uncertain world made up of maternal figures, medical interventions and underwater visions and experiences, evoking loose ties to the genres of horror and sci-fi (Grozdanovic 2015). The film, in many ways, is exemplary in linking together the relationship between noise, nausea and the nautical that Serres identifies in the epigraph to this conclusion. In speaking of her approach to the sound design, Hadžihalilović revealed her desire to work exclusively with natural sounds, particularly the ‘wind and noise from the sea’ (Sélavy 2016). However, as I argued for Antichrist, the source and destination of the noise is unstable. This background noise of the ocean attaches to the film's other images and sensations through sound bridges. In interview, Hadžihalilović admitted that she had not always intended to set her film by the sea:

in the beginning it was only the hospital –a hospital in a city, with nothing outside. Then at some point it seemed obvious I needed to get out, and suddenly, of course, the seaside and the ocean seemed a perfect echo of what was happening inside. (Bradshaw 2016: 32)

When the camera approaches the little boy's body in close-up, the same sound of the ocean evokes his interior. The noise of the sea becomes the sound of blood coursing through veins, and likewise the same noise attaches to the buildings of the white medical facility as it becomes the wind whipping through and around its corners. As such, this sea noise variously attaches to human bodies, bodies of water and man-made, cultural or institutional bodies and continuously renegotiates the boundaries between them, using the image as a support that facilitates this shift.