Shot on 16mm, its carefully graded black tones echoing the shadowy, ever-shifting levels of diffused light-and-shade as experienced by unsighted people, A Blind Song documents the tac-til Choir on their visit to Japan to explore the ancient tradition of the Goze – blind nomadic female musicians whose tradition dates back to medieval times, but which no longer exists today. BDE talks to directors Stefano Canapa and Natacha Muslera, along with Cécile Sans, responsible for both writing and voice.
The Goze travelled from village to village, originally to appease and console the dead, but later evolved into popular musicians who sang of colours and of landscapes that their audience could never have visited, and of course the musicians themselves could never have actually seen the lands they were describing.
A Blind Song does not follow a traditional narrative arc; rather, as the filmmakers state, ‘over the course of the journey their paths, their voices, and moments in time intersect. And our eyes gradually get accustomed to the depths of darkness.’
And so, the film opens with ‘a clap, a gesture to ensure that sound and image are in sync. A self-evident principle that, in fact, is a false start. For in this film, sound and image do not create synchronicity, but rather an interval where visual or sound vibrations circulate, to be felt rather than seen or heard,’ the directors stress.
We are immersed in the world of the tac-til choir as they explore sound and song, first in France, riffing and improvising on what they hear around them, then later in Japan, singing the whoosh of the Kyoto train, the call of a bird in the pine forest, the wind through the trees, and even the ticking of the film reel as it turns.
Director Natacha Muslera, whose work experiments with the relationships between sound and image, image and voice,has long been involved in working with unsighted people, exploring the ways that they perceive music, and how sighted and unsighted people inform each other musically, all of which led her to her work with the tac-til choir.
“We would go out into the streets, into nature, and improvise with the choir and there was a constant exchange between the sighed and unsighted people,” she tells BDE. One of the choir members who travelled frequently to Japan told Muslera about the Goze, and she was intrigued by the parallels between this ancient tradition and her work with the tac-til choir.
Stefano Canapa and Natacha Muslera, who have in the past collaborated as co-directors [L’année qui vient, 2021], began to work on the idea of taking the tac-til Choir to Japan.
“There was a lot of common points between the two practices – not just that they sing, but they sing with the sound of the ecosystem, with the sound of the nature, with the sound of the human landscape,” Canapa adds.
“There was perhaps a political dimension,” Cécile Sans [writing and voice] interjects. “Natacha always said there was no chief in the Choir tac-til. With the Goze it was a solidarity between women that had difficulties to live in their society.”
In fact, we learn in the film that Goze women were obliged to share their earnings amongst others of their tribe. They always travelled in ‘trains’ of three. At the front, one partially sighted woman led the way, behind her an unsighted woman touched her back to be guided, and another followed in turn.
The film is an audio and visual feast, slipping in and out of shadow, its starkly beautiful images flashing and fading as we travel through the landscape, soundscapes and sonic textures accompanying us throughout. Writer Cécile Sans adds a third dimension with her words, providing a voiced description for unsighted people. But not in the conventional sense of simply describing what they can’t see. It’s another experience to accompany the sound and vision, an artistic interpretation to enhance the perception and bring it to another level.
It makes it more of a collective experience, the filmmakers explain. Usually, an audio description is delivered through headphones individually. This way, unsighted people are side by side with sighted people, experiencing the same thing and – like the tac-til choir -each informing the other.
At one point in the film, as a Goze-inspired woman musician plays the sawari (a three-stringed lute), we hear and see Sans’ words interpret and inform about the Goze. ‘She says the first string must be allowed to resonate, that at a certain moment, if the sawari is properly tuned, the vibration will never stop, and that is the goal.’
The women, the Goze, still say that they want impure sounds, songs mixed with snow, walked over by grasses and water and wind, and that even the sound of crickets would infiltrate their voices.
We see some more conventional documentary scenes, such as when the tac-til choir first meet a Goze scholar in Japan, who is himself blind. This is where, around a table in a meeting room with interpreters, we see the choir delight in the similarities they discover between their own practices and that of the Goze.
We also see re-enactments of the Goze undertaken by the choir, walking in their ‘train’ of three in traditional costume, echoing the sounds they ‘see’ around them. We follow them through urban landscapes where every trace of the old Japan is erased, singing the song of the construction site, the whirring machine, the sounds of the streets – and out in nature, in the pine forests, along rivers and mountain paths where they ‘read’ the pattern of bark with their fingers and sing what they perceive.
The effect of the 16mm black and white film enhances the ‘other worldly’ experience, particularly the scenes of black, which aren’t quite black, which flicker and almost imperceptibly change in tone and depth. Stefano Canapa, whose practice is to work with this medium, tells BDE how this grainy black was not just a feature of the film stock.
“Actually, we spent a lot of time to make the black segments, inspired by [the artist] Soulage and his series of ourtrenoir[beyond black] paintings. “I really make the choice of the black so in a way you can have the sensation of going inside the film,” he says.
In terms of funding, the Marseille-based team (where the tac-til choir also reside) received support from the City of Marseille, as well as, amongst others, the Intitut Francais, alongside private funding.
The film, produced by Volte Film, co-produced with Off-Cells and Daltonica, was made on a shoestring budget, but the selection for Cinéma du Réel was equally important for the film in terms of the support, explains Canapa. “When the selection arrived, it was more powerful, a gift for the film.”
“It’s a film we want to share of course, and it’s important to see it in a cinema,” adds Muslera.
“Being able to share a movie theater with blind people and for each person to have their own experience is what we want for this film,” Canapa concludes.
