Introduction

Summary

‘What does it mean to exist according to listening, for it and through it?’ (Nancy 2007: 5). This is the question that contemporary French philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy, poses at the start of his text Listening (À l’écoute) in his attempt to lead philosophy away from the order of understanding and instead ‘tug the philosopher's ear’ towards a more unknowing, receptive engagement with the world (3). In posing this question, Nancy implies listening designates both a mode of thinking and a way of being in the world that is distinct from hearing, and indeed from other forms of attention. Nancy figures listening as a way of being ‘on the edge of meaning, or in an edgy meaning of extremity, and as if the sound were precisely nothing else than this edge, this fringe, this margin’ (7). The listening ear emerges as a responsive openness and receptivity that strains towards sense, to what is between the intelligible and the sensible. The question of what it means to exist according to listening is one of the questions I use to frame particular instances in which contemporary European filmmakers have appealed to and constructed spectators as listeners, a state in which they become ‘all ears’. In turn, the filmmakers I examine in this book –Catherine Breillat, Gaspar Noé, Arnaud des Pallières, Tony Gatlif, Lars von Trier and Peter Strickland –offer various ways of answering Nancy's question: what it might mean to ‘exist according to listening’, its possibilities and limits. The ear is the organ we imagine to be open. It is constantly registering sound. Yet the openness of the ear is also a fantasy of perception, one that resonates with the fantasies of perception that have marked the cinematic medium since its inception; the ear could always be capturing more.

Resonant Bodies asks how these post-millennial European filmmakers have used sound to rethink all aspects of the filmic experience. I consider how they have used ‘noise’ to reconfigure the relations between spectator and screen and, by extension, spectators and their worlds. Noise, as a form of unpleasant, unidentified or inconsequential sound, has been deployed to frame our listening and tune our attention to various bodies sounding in our environment.