LOVE SOUNDS
2015

"...As long as no image corrupts the integrity of the relation between black and sound, and above all between black and speech, between black and life."
—Marguerite Duras

Cinema remains the last medium for speaking and performing love culturally. While much emphasis has been placed on the visual iconography of love, with the exception of music very little attention has been given to love as an aural phenomenon since the tradition and practice of amour courtois. LOVE SOUNDS is a 24-hour, 8-part film-essay and audio history of love in English-speaking cinemas that dematerializes cinema’s visual legacy and reconstitutes it as an all-tonal history of listening. There is also a 4-hr theatrical cut of the film (2014).

In 2011, Masha Tupitsyn commenced her immaterial series with LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film, the first book of film criticism written entirely on Twitter. LACONIA experimented with new modes of writing and criticism, updating traditional literary forms and practices like the aphorism and the fragment. Re-imagining the wound-and-quest story, the love narrative, and the female subject in love in the digital age, Love Dog, published in 2013, was the second installment in Tupitsyn’s trilogy of immaterial writing. Written as a multi-media blog and inspired by Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse and Mourning Diary—a couple in Tupitsyn’s mind—Love Dog is an art book that is part love manifesto, part philosophical notebook, part digital liturgy.

LOVE SOUNDS was also accompanied by a catalogue, featuring essays by Masha Tupitsyn and contributors McKenzie Wark, Berit Fischer, Isiah Medina, C. Spencer Yeh, and Yaniya Lee.

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Praise for Love Sounds

“With Love Sounds, Masha Tupitsyn has gone the full otaku, building an enormous 24-hour database of audio clips covering the whole English-speaking history of the talkies, organizing it by relationship categories. Love Sounds is closer to what Hiroki Azuma would call a database than a narrative understanding of media. It’s a sort of epic forensic device for hearing what the whole mythic structure of the cinema era was, but breaking it down into its affective audible granules, and recomposing those granules by type rather than arranging them in narrative sequence. But it is not just a work about cinema. It also an instance of a post-cinematic form. Another media for another life. In the voice, one can hear at one and the same time the possibility of disarmament, of love; but also all the wars, over who owns who; of who is whose property. To listen, rather than look, at cinema, is to hear the struggle over the script itself, over which words are meant to matter, and which are mere convention. It’s a struggle over whether love is real. It’s one continuous dialogue on whether love, like God, is dead, and who killed it.”
—McKenzie Wark

"In ways perhaps not completely anticipated by Michael Chion in his advocacy of 'masking methods' of research into film sound, Masha Tupitsyn’s extreme and beautiful experiment with 'acousmatic listening' in her astonishing video-work Love Sounds sets out constitutively to break the synchrestic audiovisual contract of sound and image. This monumental work succeeds in pointing up not only the expressive worth of audiovisual essays for audio/visual studies, but also their performative and experiential potential. As I have written before of the “sensuous methodologies” and forms of videographic film and moving image studies, it is precisely because, audiovisual essays, unlike written texts, “don’t have to remove themselves from film-specific forms of meaning production to have their knowledge effects on us [that] we can feel, as well as know about, the comparisons these videos enact. […].” It is their affective and phenomenological added value that convinces me not only that digital videographic studies of audio-vision are here to stay, but also that we can’t yet begin to guess at all of the very interesting places to which they might take our discipline. Turning up the volume of such studies, in coming years, sounds like a deeply audio-visionary prospect."
—Catherine Grant

"Love Sounds is also about listening closely enough to the history of cinema and the statements it has produced to be disappointed by them. Masha Tupitsyn enters into this space of disappointment and re-formulates what has been said about love in cinema, producing new listenings–new sayings, new possibilities–that forge and ground new couples. In the end, Love Sounds is not only a movie or a history. It is, more importantly, a documentary of an act of love, and a generous, patient listening by its creator."
—Isiah Medina

"Part of Masha Tupitsyn’s concern is with the act of listening, and the time, the act, or event that listening takes. One of her other interests is ‘pop’, and the shifts from 80s to 90s consciousness. This attention to the past of popular culture may look retro in an age that feeds on super-contemporaneity. But more accurately, what Tupitysn focuses on makes the super-contemporary itself look old. Life is too contemporary now...The listening work here is to do the least damage possible, as if to heal from art. Love Sounds presents a labour: I myself have only just begun it. I have not yet heard it through. But I can say that this film came to me at the same moment I needed to at least see if I could move on from the damage of my eyes, the damage the cinematic image does, the damage done by the language of cinema and internet drive. What love does here is to archive itself as sound. Love sounds, in the transitive. It bears less on the eyes—though there are the important titles, 8 of them, no less—and more on what can be remembered though the ear, what can be recalled beyond any sense of ‘retro’. When something pops in the ear, we hear better. The Afar tribe believe that your eyes see the present but your ears hear the past. In Love Sounds the past of love does make sounds, and might be heard, bearing its own trace to term, a Parmenidean earworm. And yet, we also see our ears hearing the present too, seeing it through the past, hearing it through. Love Sounds lays low for the present."
—Jonty Tiplady

Trailer 1
Trailer 2
Excerpt