Ioannis Tsirkas’ sound design for the two minutes length short film which he created using parts of Seouls (d.Thierry Knauff and Olivier Smolders, Belgium, 1989) is not just in harmony with the obvious requirements of the moving images, but also gives him a cause for reflection on them. What we see is some autistic children in the mostly closeted chambers of an asylum using their bodies and their environment to create sounds. Tsirkas seems to perceive their actions as a desperate effort against stagnation, silence, the absence of time and childhood, against death at last.
Therefore he chooses to accompany their images with repeated, monotonous and even disturbing sounds. When the image doesn’t give reasons or call for sound action, he leaves the silence of an interior space as the only ground. In the final scenes he doesn’t hesitate to break this by keeping the sound of the previous ones intervening to the possible narrative [1]. The absence of dramatic evolution reflects to the absence of the evolution of the accompaniment of sounds. Tsirkas seems to be interested in the expression of the primary emotions of the characters refusing any proximity between them and the audience. Nothing seems to reach a completeness, but the message is not indispensably pessimistic.
It is worth mentioning that although we can hear the sounds that they force we do not listen to their breaths [2]. This may sets up a claim of a possible consideration of the children as manes who through the causing of sounds try to implement the phenomenon of their presence, to live or just to be. Tsirkas through a conscious minimalistic way exalts their sounds as the third dimension of their images which connects them with the passiveness of the audience.
[1] This is happening again (in the scene with the music toy and the next one with the kid who plays with it) in a more remarkable way where he uses continuous sound to amalgamate two separate in time events.
[2] Although this could be justified by the text of the images.
'And no, not writing either, I don't think that this is work. I thought so far a long time, I don’t think so anymore. I think it is non-work. It is getting to non-work. The text, the equilibrium of the text, is in itself a space you have to rediscover. Here I can no longer speak of economy, of form, no but of a relationship of forces. I can't say more than this. You must manage to control what suddenly turns up. To struggle against a force that sweeps through and that you must pin down or else have it go beyond you and get lost. Or else have it destroy its disordered and irreplaceable coherence. No, to work is to create this empty space in order to allow the unforeseen, the obvious, to come. To let go, then pick up again, to retrace your steps, to be as remove oneself. And then sometimes, yes, to write. Everyone does, looks for these moments when one retreats from oneself, this state of being anonymous to oneself which one hides. You don’t know nothing about what you're doing.
More than anything else, writing attests to this unawareness of what is liable to happen when you are there, sitting at the so-called work table, of what is caused by this material fact of sitting in front of a table with whatever you need to compose letters on the still untouched page.'
Marguerite Duras, Green Eyes, translator: Carol Barko, publisher: Columbia University Press