Film Forum

An immersive, amusing, and moving journey through 32 soundscapes by filmmaker Sam Green (THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND, A THOUSAND THOUGHTS) in collaboration with electronic musician JD Samson. Green samples sounds inside the womb, the mating call of a now-extinct bird, the audio effects created by a Hollywood Foley artist, the hush of snow falling in Japan, and John Cage’s famed piece, “4:33.” Experimental musician Annea Lockwood (her Piano Burning performance captured the sounds of a piano on fire) suggests — as she records “wild” sounds from a marsh — that we should be listening with the environment, rather than to it. A freewheeling exploration of how sound shapes and moves us, the film is “full to bursting with humor, emotion and curiosity...a uniquely mind-expanding plunge into a dimension of the human experience so many of us take for granted, a rare and rewarding sonic journey.” – Peter Debruge, Variety

Read “Learning to Listen with Annea Lockwood,” filmmaker Sam Green’s multimedia essay for Pioneer Works’ magazine, BROADCAST, about how his friendship with the artist helped inspire 32 SOUNDS.

With support from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Fund

2022     98 MIN.     USA     ABRAMORAMA

 

Reviews

On headphones-only screenings:
“Each audience member is also given a pair of headphones — Green and his crew travel with 500 of them — to better immerse themselves in the film’s soundscapes, and particularly for its experiments with binaural audio. Among the lively cast of characters Green meets in his wide-ranging meditation on sound and human memory is the Princeton physicist Edgar Choueiri, who experiments with recordings that mimic three-dimensional sound. He demonstrates this viscerally, shaking a matchbox at various points around a binaural microphone; wearing headphones, the listener can detect the clattering matches moving around in space. It’s heady and spine-tingling, like high-tech ASMR.”
– Lindsay Zoladz, The New York Times

On 32 SOUNDS:
“A relentlessly curious documentary. A wide-ranging meditation on sound and human memory. Heady and spine-tingling… engaging and richly visual. A 95-minute exploration that leapfrogs across several dozen scintillating surfaces.”
– Lindsay Zoladz, The New York Times
 
“Sam Green’s 32 SOUNDS is a playful, thoughtful documentary… a delightful, joyous film that changes the way you look at — or maybe listen to — the world”
– Alissa Wilkinson, Vox

“Touches on sense memory…and it dares to tackle the question: If a tree falls in the woods, does it really make a sound?... probably the only movie to ever turn a Moho braccatus’s mating call into something that could move you to tears.”
– David Fear, Rolling Stone