Whether I’m covering film festivals, art fairs, or exhibitions, I always use the lens of design, architecture, and the built environment, seeking how these elements are used in creative, interesting and unexpected ways. At MoMA’s Doc Fortnight and Film at Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films festivals, I came across several films that made me reconsider the designed environment we often take for granted.
Doc Fortnight, MoMA’s annual international nonfiction film festival, featured two films particularly interesting to the design-minded.
Preemptive Listening is the culmination of a multi-year project by Aura Satz, an artist who works in moving images, performance, drawing, and sculpture. She explained the project as “An experiment in listening forward… to reimagine the sound of the siren, to think of it as a prompt: a call to attention, a call to action, an instruction towards the possibility of future.”
Satz invited over 20 collaborators to create new siren sounds, including composers Evelyn Glennie, FUJITITTITA, BJ Nilsen, Laurie Spiegel, and Raven Chacon.
But does a siren mean safety or danger? Historically, sirens have been used to warn and alert —air raids, nuclear attacks, burglars, and ambulances —but now they can also signal extreme weather events. Sonically, many orchestral instruments originated for warning, war, or the hunt. Alarms often go hand-in-hand with physical barriers like seawalls, doorways, or prison walls.
Still from Preemptive Listening, directed by Aura Satz
In Preemptive Listening, we view drone footage of siren structures from across the world shot in 19 locations, from Japan (Fukushima) to Chile (Villarrica volcano) to the Netherlands (dikes) to the U.S. and the Middle East that look and sound entirely distinct from each other and signify different meanings. (Think of European sirens with their in-and-out plaintive wah-wah versus the American version’s ear-piercing blare and accompanying visual flares.) We see manufacturing plants making emergency equipment, such as the flashing lights and sirens on police cars.
Israel civil defense sirens are both a warning and a remembrance; on Holocaust Day and Memorial Day, a 2-minute warning sounds. However, in Palestine, there are no defense sirens. Instead, Palestinians commemorate the Nakba (meaning “Catastrophe” in Arabic) by broadcasting a siren through minaret loudspeakers with a duration in seconds equivalent to the years since their mass displacement in 1948, so 75 seconds in 2023. In light of the current war in Gaza, this part of the film takes on a whole new meaning.
Some sirens are enormous structures like those in Japan, Lapland, and other far-flung places. Khalid Abdalla, an Arab Spring activist, said of sirens, “It changed my experience of scale.”
The film ends with Colombian-American anthropologist and environmental philosopher Arturo Escobar declaring, “For me, design is emerging as a very interesting and hopeful space for thinking about life and for constructing the world in a different way…We are all, in this sense, designers. Every community practices the design of itself.”
“Arturo puts forward a wonderful suggestion that emergency contains within it the possibility of emergence—the arising of something genuinely new and that in a crisis, there is also an opening,” Satz says. “The film is a prompt, an invitation to shift and recalibrate what we understand as worthy of attention—a score for listening with the future in mind.” (Ocula, February 2, 2024, conversation with Tendai John Mutambu)
In The New Ruins, Manuel Embalse is both the director and star, as an amateur archeologist obsessed with waste, particularly the electronic kind — carcasses of old computers, phones, and circuit boards. Having documented this trash photographically since 2013, he has a vast archive, making “notes” on video and numbering each entry. Embalse uses electronic detritus as a form of memory. As an Argentinian, he is concerned that 85% of the world’s lithium (a quartz he calls “little stone,” used for cell phones, e-bikes, etc.) is from Latin America; in his home country, it is extracted from the Dead Man’s Salt flat. “In times of environmental crisis, overproduction and acceleration of consumption, he wonders: How will history be written in the future?” (Antes Muerte Cine, ARG. 2024. 89’). His approach is the micro as the macro: The world in a cell phone.
Still from The New Ruins, directed by Manuel Embalse
By Satz calling attention to everyday sounds with specific, emphatic purposes that integrate into our daily lives, we understand the intentional design of these “background” sounds and that different cultures have adopted different solutions for the same problem. We develop a consciousness of the unconscious soundtrack to our lives, and we hear the soundscape around us anew — someone composed the subway door closing alert, the crossing signal when street lights change, ambulance sirens, and more. These are design choices. Similarly, Embalse calls attention to discarded designed elements, wanting us to reevaluate their importance as things that are alive, not just debris.
Other Doc Fortnight films of interest include Jin Jiang’s Republic, a nation in a Beijing apartment belonging to Eryang, a nouveau-hippie. Eryang calls his republic a “Subculture Hub,” “Trashie Center,” “Homeless Children’s Shelter,” and “Revolutionary Base for Cosmic Bros.” “I am a Bolshevik outside the Party,” Eryang says.
Sam Drake’s Terminal Island showcases palm trees, a non-native species to Los Angeles, a paradise in the thick of ecological dread, and features Phillip Johnson’s Crystal Cathedral (below).
The Sojourn (funded by the Prada Foundation and directed by Tiffany Sia) is a road movie about searching for Taiwanese locations in King Hu’s 1967 film Dragon Inn.
The 2024 New Directors/New Films, a joint initiative of MoMA and Film at Lincoln Center, featured All, or Nothing at All, directed by Jiajun “Oscar” Zhang. The film takes place entirely at a large, flashy shopping center in Shanghai called Global Harbor—the exterior sports flashing lights in vertical strips with a large dome. The shopping center’s interior features Western classical sculpture, big green columns and pilasters with Corinthian capitals, gigantic gold columns with Ionic capitals, ceiling scrolls, medallions, and marbled floors (stills, below).
Malu, directed by Pedro Freire, is about a Brazilian actress who wants to turn her house by the beach into a cultural center with a theater and shops to sell art. Otro Sol is a reinvention of a heist of stolen artifacts from the Cathedral of Cadiz in Andalusia, Spain, directed by Francisco Rodríguez Teare.
Intercepted by Oksana Karpovych is a harrowing tale of intercepted phone calls from Russian soldiers in Ukraine speaking to their families back home. Some are honest about what they see in this war and its futility, as they casually talk about shooting people in the street. Others parrot Russian propaganda. The soldiers’ families in Russia are often under the spell of propaganda, thinking the Ukrainians deserve slaughter. Accompanying these audio messages are images of the destruction of Ukraine, shot while traveling on roadways around the country.
These documentaries give a sense of place, with the locations at the core of the films’ meanings, which help to tell stories through visual means.
Susan Morris works across media — film, television, radio, exhibitions, public programs, print, digital media — specializing in the arts and culture with a special emphasis on architecture and design. She has worked at the Ford Foundation, NEA, NY Times Television, Louise Blouin Media (Editor-in-Chief, Modern Painters), WNYC/PRI (founding Executive Producer Studio 360), WNET/Thirteen, IFC, Bravo, J. Paul Getty Trust, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cooper Hewitt, MoMA, International House, Rockefeller Foundation, and has written for Architect’s Newspaper, Design Observer, Dwell, Artbyte, Documentary, House & Garden, Eye.