Danny Hahn speaks about the film style ‘Grain’, which involves his forthcoming short film projects, his collaboration with Detlef Hahn, and his work on a Finnish feature film co-produced by NeoKitsch.

There is so much mystery and magic in an image, which reveals less clarity. Marlene Dietrich clouded in smoke in a 1930’s film seems to evoke more imagination and eroticism than Reese Witherspoon in high definition. My love for analogue is not a rejection of digital media. It is a way of approaching digital media.

The birth of ‘Grain’

After working with Mika Rantonen on his feature film And White Was The Night, I was inspired to brush off the dust on a forgotten project of mine. I began working on a short film composed entirely of VHS footage, which I shot as a boy in the early 90’s. Mika’s film instigated this idea, as he had used old video degeneration effects to create the idea of a progressive memory and dream state in his protagonist’s mind. This technique, coupled with my experience of writing about how we perceive audio and visual information in a philosophical/neurological book on creativity with my father Detlef Hahn, had awakened a potentially visionary concept for the film and music world during its digital age, as I gradually witnessed the remains of analogue media eroding as fast as my old, over-watched video collections.

The idea came to me when I started using the film style and technique which I called Grain. The term became a buzzword in my film vocabulary after seeing the potential in the effects of downgrading video or audio quality. But as I explored further, I soon began to realise that there was a much bigger world to discover than I had expected. I quickly reconsidered the approach of Grain, by taking a reverse vantage point: it wasn’t about downgrading; it was about avoiding technical augmentation of quality. There is a difference, despite how confusing it may sound at first glance. This journey into understanding the film style began with my father.

The philosophical background

My father had written about his experiences in the recording studio, which sparked a fruitful collaboration with me over the course of three years in our book, Playing the World into Existence. He explored the possibility that digital media may interfere with our levels of brain interaction when appreciating art.

“We seem to believe that more information is better. The great fallacy of our digital age is the assumption that the degree of reality increases by showing more and more details. High Definition sports on TV, show not only the golf player’s elegance and precision in his movements, but also every grain of sand that passes the lens – and nowadays, even in 3D. But this is entirely counter-productive. Too many details hinder the natural creativity of the brain. Brains need space to play their own world into existence. For this reason, we need to limit information to such a degree that the creativity of the brain cannot be drowned in details. After all, a painting lacks artistic qualities in the appreciation of its technique, if it is just like a photograph, which gives no room for interpretation other than a conceptual one ”

While both my father and I are certainly not anti-digital, (in fact, we embrace the emerging era), we still believe it is vital to approach digital technology, with an analogue attitude. This becomes clear when describing his experience with sound engineers, who presented him with the notion, that if they created a scientific replica of sound distribution in a concert hall, then the studio recording would be accurate. But what they failed to realise, was that the listening process of a recording, lacked the visual process of a concert, which consequently alters the way we hear. Try it yourself. The next time you go to a concert, watch a particular player in an orchestra for example, and you’ll find that you can hear them seemingly louder than other players. This is simply because the auditory cortex in the brain is choosing to interpret these audio frequencies as a priority due to your visual engagement.

“Listening is as much to do with knowledge, as it is to do with frequencies vibrating through the room. We hear only what we know – the rest goes unnoticed. We do not listen with our ears. We listen with our brain, which creates everything, from dynamic range, to tone colour, expression and meaning.”

These ideas brought me closer to the cinematic style of Grain, as I began to realize that the effects of an old 8mm film, or an old record of Toscanini, or even my VHS films as a boy, were to do with understanding how you consume its information rather than comparing differences in technology. I wanted the audience in my VHS short film project to think what it felt like to make a movie as a boy, and not think that I was being arty-farty by using a grainy texture to impose a pretentious intellectual concept, or fashionable style.

Since working on my father’s book, I was introduced to Geoff Miles of the Norwegian Academy of Music. He shared our ideas on how to interpret digital recording, and consequently revealed to us that he had been developing a revolutionary horn microphone for that very purpose.

Usage of Grain styles

My journey through understanding audio and visual mediums ultimately led me to the film style Grain, which I had developed with Finnish film director Mika Rantonen.

Typically, Grain films often emerge in times of transition in movie technology, where old forms of recording such as videotape and 8mm are used. Their main usage is to describe memory, abstract thought and dreams in a surrealist style. Notable film-makers who use the style are Guy Maddin, who shoots in 8mm, and even Werner Herzog, who has used 8mm for dream sequences in films such as The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, and later, has used low quality digital cameras like that of a mobile phone for psychedelic visuals in Bad Lieutenant.

I prefer to describe Grain using the word style, rather than genre, as I believe that during a period of remakes, sequels and genre fusions in cinema, it’s too easy to fall into the trap of creating entirely new genres. When there is a stalemate in creativity, it seems that reinventing and redefining things from the past, and questioning art itself by trying to come up with new definitions rather than interpretations, precedes nurturing originality within successful conventions. Grain is a style – just like Noir or Giallo are, despite what some may say. I am reminded of a talk I had with screenplay guru, Robert McKee, who spoke to me at a book signing event about genre. There was a man with a goatee beard and a Hawaiian shirt who put his hand up for a question. Robert and the audience rolled their eyes as he boasted that he was in Cannes speaking with Tarantino. “Me and Quentin were chatting, and he told me that his films had created a new genre. Do you think this is true Mr. McKee?” He answered by telling us, that you can’t really make a genre, just style. Genre is what life itself already presents to us. We take Romance, Horror or Drama, and make sub categories out of them, be it Kitchen Sink movies, or Exploitation films.

Going against the grain

Since using the Grain style in my films, I have yet to explore further the effects this approach may have on an audience.  Without too much thought, it is almost immediately considered to be an abstract, dream like effect on first viewing. But perhaps the concept behind the style could extend beyond psychedelia, nostalgia and the fashionable love of all things retro. Perhaps Grain could be a style that helps artists cope with the inevitable fast passed transitions of technology, era and audience expectation. The use of Grain in my work has helped me rest for a little while on the bridge between to worlds. There I can swing my feet at the bridge’s peak to look over at the passing stream beneath, and understand that my journey has as much to do with the past, as it has with the future.

Written by Danny Hahn. 2012 ©

Links

Video and audio showreels for classical musicians - classicalreel.com

Music for film and television – soundtrackreel.com

Detlef Hahn’s official website – detlefhahn.com

Danny Hahn’s official website – danny-hahn.com

Saint-Saens, Ravel & Lekeu Violin Sonatas

This recording won a CD choice in the Daily Telegraph

Some background about this recording:

I received money from a sponsor. As my sponsor was relaxed and left all the details up to me, I decided to find a producer and record three French violin sonatas: Saint-Saens, Ravel and Lekeu.

Simon Rhodes, the young sound- engineer I booked from EMI, was already behind the stage when John York and I arrived. He was deeply involved with gadgets, a cigarette, coffee and chocolate coated hobnobs. My first question was concerned with microphones. I saw only one, quite far away in the auditorium, and one pointing into the grand. I expected a different setup – similar to when I recorded about a decade ago as leader of the chamber orchestra – where many microphones surrounded the room, positioned very close to the players. But this was it! No more microphones, just two. Times and techniques had obviously changed.

Simon had an excellent ear. He was highly sensitive to intonation and tone quality. Most importantly, he never lost the big picture of the musical landscape, an important ability necessary to unify retakes and editing. But I was surprised about the balance of the recording. Not that I expected something like the old recording techniques – with the violinist in the foreground and the pianist in the remote background. But for my ears, the piano was still nevertheless overpowering. When I aired my reservations, I was shown on a gauge that the balance was fifty-fifty, and this, so I was told, gives an accurate representation of how the listener hears a violin-piano recital in a live concert hall. I gave in after seeing the evidence, and when I listened to other recordings from around the same time (the early nineties), I could hear the same kind of balance.

In hindsight, however, and without any doubt, the simple truth is that the human world is not measurable with a gauge. It has its own agenda. I experienced this when I sat under a large balcony far back in Covent Garden Opera. Mozart’s ‘Figaro’ was on the programme. The singers were so far away from me that they looked like Lilliputian child things. But it was not only the visual impression that was remote – the singing sounded also small and far away. When I used the opera glasses however, the visuals were not the only aspect of the performance to be augmented – the sound, almost magically, became louder too. As soon as the singers came visually closer, my auditory cortex raised my awareness of their voices as well.
This made perfect sense, for what after all is listening, except that the ears pick up a very limited amount of information whilst the brain makes up all the rest. Listening is as much to do with knowledge, as it is to do with frequencies vibrating through the room. We hear only what we know – the rest goes unnoticed. We do not listen with our ears. We listen with our brain, which creates everything, from dynamic range, to tone colour, expression and meaning. In the opera, my brain seemed to know from experience, that distance makes the sound faint whilst closeness makes it louder – as if the volume switch in my brain worked as soon as it was altered by the visual appearance.

Something similar happens also with violin-piano recitals. The violinist stands always conspicuously in front of the pianist. This prominent visual position makes the sound appear louder than it really is. If this visual side of a concert is omitted, as with a CD, the recording has to reproduce a similar experience by positioning the sound of the violin slightly closer to the listener.

But there was something else in modern recording techniques, be it audio or video, which I found difficult to understand. We seem to believe that more information is better. But I think this to be wrong. The great fallacy of our digital age is the assumption that the degree of reality increases by showing more of it. High Definition sports programmes show not only the golf player’s elegance and precision in his movements, but also every grain of sand that passes the lens of the camera, and every blade of grass on the golf course – and nowadays, even in 3D. But this is entirely counter-productive. Too many details hinder the natural creativity of the brain. Brains need space to play their own world into existence. For this reason we need to limit information to such a degree that the creativity of the brain cannot be drowned in details. Only this is creative, and, ultimately real, for the only possible reality we can be sure of in a human world lies in the creative processes of the brain and its interaction with this strange construct of our intellect, which we assume to exist independently of us and which we believe to be the real world. This, and nothing else, is real for us. All the rest is speculation.

As soon as our recording sessions were over, Simon asked me which company this disc was recorded for. And then it dawned on me that I recorded without even thinking that someone is needed to sell it! I just shrugged my shoulders. Simon laughed, because he understood the naivety with which I had approached this entire project. But he promised to think about a firm after he had done all the editing. After a few weeks I got a call from him. He was very pleased with our work and told me that ASV were happy to take the disc on their list of recordings. Some time later, the disc was awarded a ‘CD choice’ by The Daily Telegraph and shortly afterwards I was invited by ASV to produce two more discs, one with the entire oeuvre for violin and piano by Szymanovsky and one with the works by Korngold.

Links

Video and audio showreels for classical musicians - classicalreel.com

Detlef Hahn’s official website – detlefhahn.com

Creative in Resident

Links

Video and audio showreels for classical musicians - classicalreel.com
Music for film and television – soundtrackreel.com

As part of Detlef Hahn’s 60th birthday tribute concert, NeoKitsch presents Anders Nilsson performing Krzysztof Penderecki’s Cadenza for solo violin.
Recorded and filmed by Danny Hahn in Boswil, Switzerland in September 2011.

Links

Video and audio showreels for classical musicians - classicalreel.com

Detlef Hahn’s official website – detlefhahn.com

Playing Chamber Music is one of the most rewarding activities for a musician. Provided the right partners come together, it is as if a small universe is played into existence. I always wondered why it is easy to play with certain players, and difficult and awkward with others. What I observed straight away was something in their timing. The easy-going players seemed to anticipate what is going to happen, whilst the more difficult partners listened first, and responded later. Now if you wait until someone has played a note, and then respond to it, you will be always late. This is plain common sense. You cannot wait until you hear a sound from your partner. If you do, you will be too late! Here is a good example from physics:

You and your friend want to be absolutely sure that both your watches show precisely twelve noon at the same moment – not one second earlier, not one second later. Unfortunately, however, you live in London, and he lives on the Moon. You solve this problem as follows: You send a light beam up to your friend precisely at twelve o’clock. As light needs one second to travel the distance between London and the Moon, it will hit your friend’s clock precisely at one second past twelve. So, to make sure that both watches show twelve-noon precisely at the same time, your friend’s clock has to show one second past twelve when the light beam reaches it. If not, your clocks are not synchronized. Something similar happens also when we play chamber music. A sound takes time to travel through the air and into your ear. In other words, you hear a sound only after it had been played. So, not dissimilar to my friend on the moon, if I want to synchronize my playing with that of my partner, my inner musical clock has to show a slightly different time than his. But, as ‘Playing the World into Existence’ shows, this is not the only delay we have to deal with. The ear takes roughly half a second to process a sound. In other words, reality (whatever this might be) unfolds on a different level than our perception of it. We exist thus not in reality, but in reality minus half a second. When we become aware of reality, it is already somewhere else! Consequently, we live not in reality, but somewhere outside of it – in our senses and our brain, that is. In other words: our world in neither here nor there. We exist in ‘terra nullius’, or, as the Germans call it: ‘Niemandsland’- a country that belongs to nobody. We call this strange country in our book the ‘Neither-Nor’.

It seems now that everything we do, from walking, eating and drinking, playing chamber music, to observing the universe as a scientist – all this can happen only from inside our ‘terra nullius’ and thus never directly, but only in a permanent state of ‘Neither- Nor’.

The book you are following for the last nine chapters explores this ‘Neither-Nor’ of our human world and develops a different picture of reality and a different picture of creativity. For, in our opinion, creativity, quite contrary to what common sense tells us, is the only reality we can go by. And as everything, from our simple daily activities to playing music – and to discovering physical laws: as all this happens inside this creative world of ours, reality is quite different from what we happen to believe it to be.

It is in search of this creative reality, which this book has been written for.

Written by Detlef Hahn ©

Links:

Detlef Hahn’s official website – detlefhahn.com

Danny Hahn’s official website – danny-hahn.com