In Sam Green’s ‘32 Sounds’ Documentary, Sound Opens Doors Across Space and Time

There are at least 32 potential stick-with-you moments in Sam Green’s inventive and contemplative documentary 32 Sounds. One might be the magic of the Foley artist at work: a person who uses everyday objects and their own body to create what we think things should sound like on film. One might be the lonesome, futile mating call of the last of a species. Or the life-affirming and joyous beat of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.”

But the moment I’ve carried with me over the past year since first experiencing 32 Sounds comes from a quieter, more ordinary scene. In it, a child speaks to his adult self on a recording not meant to be heard until the year 2000, the audio equivalent of a time capsule. “Although you exist in a different time, I am talking to you through this machine,” young Edgar Choueiri says sometime around 1972, to his much-older self. “I hope you have remained like you were in the past. Like you were at age 11. And also, I hope you have made my dreams come true.”

Sound, this film repeatedly demonstrates, is transportive. 32 Sound’s cast of charming audio-adjacent characters are often shown simply listening to recordings, their bodies here and now, but their minds somewhere else entirely: at the bottom of a river, 50 years in the past, or in a country from which they have been exiled. We watch them absorb those noises and feel, through them, how incredibly powerful sound can be — in its absence or its presence — both socially and emotionally.

For only the second time since its February 2022 Stanford Live debut, Bay Area audiences have a chance to experience 32 Sounds in both its live and theatrical versions. Green is not an ordinary documentarian, but a creator of live films, events at which the constituent parts of a piece have been split out to make them visible and semi-spontaneous — narration here, score there, images projected above. As he explains by phone from New York, “There’s a kind of looseness that comes with a live event.” At the Stanford premiere, for example, a computer died on the spot, but was calmly switched out within minutes. For the audience, the combination of so many moving parts fosters a sense of risky thrill.

In the live version of 32 Sounds, playing July 27 at the Exploratorium, Green will narrate his film in person. In both this and the versions playing July 28–30 at the Roxie, the Smith Rafael Film Center and the Rialto Cinemas Elmwood, some portions of the documentary are heard collectively in the theater while others come via binaural headphones handed out before each screening.

In lieu of their physical selves, a warm prerecorded greeting by Green and JD Samson (who did the film’s music) encourages audiences in the theatrical version to break out of their normal theater-going behavior and respond to interactive cues by dancing, closing their eyes or letting out a good, cathartic yell.

Coming off a nine-week theatrical run at New York’s Film Forum, Green says it’s tough to get people to disobey movie etiquette, even with a film that’s as self-reflexive as 32 Sounds. “Sometimes there’s got to be a real kooky person who will get up and dance, because there’s a kind of unspoken decorum in movie theaters,” he explains. “You’re not supposed to talk. You’re not supposed to get up. People will shush you if you do. So it takes a real weirdo to do that, but sometimes it happens!”

Green has made a practice out of breaking conventions, and even in the more traditional version of 32 Sounds, the interactive cues are meant to clue audiences into all the aspects of movie-making and movie-watching that often get willfully ignored.

“In general, I like pulling the curtain back from the filmmaking process,” Green says. “There’s a lot of silly conventions of filmmaking where we’re all pretending this is not a movie, and we all know it’s a movie. Sometimes it’s nice to just admit it and kind of go from there.”

In 32 Sounds, this means direct references to the quality of a theater’s sound system, and how removed that is from the way we actually hear things near, far, up and down. It means showing shotgun mics and boom mics within a shot, along with the people who skillfully wield them. It’s a scene of Samson playing guitar while Green talks about the difficulty of scoring a film, of making a film, of making this film.

The guiding philosophy of 32 Sounds’ non-narrative narrative comes from composer Annea Lockwood, a huge figure in the avant-garde music scene who has recorded rivers around the globe for 50 years, putting out albums like A Sound Map of the Hudson River (1989). Her calm, eloquent wonder at the natural world, its sounds and secrets grounds the film in generous curiosity. And her approach to listening — to listen with the world rather than to it — is a stick-with-you moment that lasts well beyond the chirping crickets of the film’s final, beautiful scene.

‘32 Sounds’ plays July 27–30 at select Bay Area theaters. The live version plays at 7 p.m. on Thursday, July 27 at the Exploratorium with live narration by Sam Green. The theatrical versions play July 28–30 at the Smith Rafael Film Center, the Roxie Theater and Rialto Cinemas Elmwood with Q&As with Sam Green after most screenings. Check each theater for screening details and tickets.