The
Sun
Film
Comment Vol.42 No.3, New York, 2006
(Opening
excerpt only currently published online)
How
does a god hear? The Christian ideal imagines god as one
capable of hearing everything in detail, from the deeply
submerged voices in our head to the cries of those interred
in remote closures. Emperor Hirohito - the 'sun god' figurehead
during Japan's involvement in WWII - may have garnered
similar sonic capabilities. But Alexander Sukurov's The
Sun (2005) presents Hirohito less as a towering terror
of sonic surveillance and more as a being afflicted with
hyper-sensitivity to his sonic surroundings.
It's
easy to miss this aural sensibility in The Sun. The soundtrack
ambience has been mixed so low that one strains to hear
the seeming complexity in its diffused nothingness. Hums,
crackles, splutters, groans and hisses anxiously flitter
at inappropriate moments. Their palpable absence of clear
detail activates in the audience a sense of doubt as
to the audible surface of the film. This displaced act
of listening invokes an unsettling sense of how a god
might be a supreme contact microphone responding to every
unheard sound in the expanse we mortals presume to be
silence. When such aural omnipotence is encased within
human form, the result is likely to be severely traumatising.
No wonder The Sun depicts Hirohito as a shuffling shell-shocked
mute despite his remove from the detonations pock-marking
Japan.
