Historical Markers of the Modern Soundtrack

6	Contact	2000 – Robert Zemeckis
	Transcendence & diffusion	Hyperspace & surround sound; dimensional transgression; radar and sonar activity

Contact opens with a visualization of much we could never see, but most of which we have heard. What at first appears to be a gratuitous computer-generated track through space is an astronomical journey through sonic time capsules, dotted across outer space in a line which documents the moments of their emission. A wash of song and noise is jettisoned through the screen's frontal zones and spurts into the rear surround sound field. The direction of the dynamics becomes clear: we are not travelling into outer space: we are listening from outer space. Contact inverts audiovisual relationships as key leverage for proposing the realignment of cultural, textual and even mystical precepts. This scene is a suggestion not of who we as central beings are in contact with, but whom from beyond is contacting us.

Contact's central figure, Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) is from the beginning searching for something: an unjustifiable existence which she cannot see. Crucially, she is not interested in the encoding of a past event: she scans the airwaves in the present, fishing for sonic signals which intersect her moment of seeking across radically displaced zones of time and place. She replaces the camera and the microphone with radar. She does not wish to 'find out' something; she wants to find something - directly, unmediated, unconditionally. If astronomical charts map what exists where, Ellie's obsessively pin-covered charts map what might exist but doesn't reside there.

Many rich images in Contact affirm this, as Ellie closes off her terrestrial world while plugged into another realm, erotically lulled by a continuum of noise spiting through her headphones. Just as her space maps grow in scale and density, so too do her ears: from a single set of headphones to the earth-shaking moment when she commands a phalanx of gigantic satellite dishes to rotate in synch with her as she rushes in a pick-up truck to snare the location point of an extraterrestrial sonic emission.

When she finally makes contact, a dimensional pulsation grows which totally re-territorizlizes the cinema's auditorium. As auditors, looking at a spectral analyser with its pumping LEDs while hearing this sound, we occupy the fused headphonic/radarphonic space of Ellie: a primed and imaginative place where the desire to hear external presences creates the net wherein signs of the beyond can roost. Here, surround sound activity precisely captures all that the screen cannot show. If we are to be contacted by something beyond, it is likely it will first make us realize the limited recording range of both our mental facilities and monitoring technologies.

The complex phenomenological and technological ramifications of Contact's hypothesis mark it a first in employing surround spatialization not merely for Judeo-Christian mystical spookery, but for the investigation of how one shifts from a centred existence to a decentred one. Contact's mystical pondering is broad enough to not be thematically rooted in either religious or humanist dogma, and open enough to state the vitality of sound as a life-force whose energy fields and physical expansiveness affect us deeply despite the thinness of our ocular rationalism.

From the BFI book 100 Modern Soundtracks.

See also CONTACT - The Truth of Sound.