Alarm Notes

Alarm Notes is an experimental documentary film, a poetic memoir and political report, exploring history, landscape and sound, its narrative building out from an event compromising the life and work of pioneering sound recordist, Ludwig Koch. Its two parts juxtapose Koch’s persecution in Nazi Germany with his experiences in exile recording birdsong and other sounds in Britain. Sound is foregrounded within the filmic and sonic dialogue created between our contemporary recordings and the qualities of Koch's archive sound as gathered 'in the field'. Koch’s recordings, marked out by their evident sense of materiality (for example, the surface noise of the early recordings sourced from shellac discs), are thus placed in context with the time of their original publishing (on gramophone records), or as broadcast on BBC radio. Birds, their calls heard over shots of landscape – landscapes where Koch recorded them – become like ghosts inhabiting the filmed present. Although the film centres on Koch (and, in its first part, Giorgi Dimitroff), it juxtaposes images of contemporary place with details of archive documents to bring into play, interjected into the narrative, tangential detail – with the aim of momentarily bringing to the fore small, forgotten, events in history. The film’s voice-over also confounds convention, in terms of its mode of address (2nd person), with the intention of relating present to past and past to present in ways that seek to challenge and activate the viewer – offering an alternative approach to the notion of the biographical film. Through the development of the film’s often playful though rigorous form, the notion of documentary is thus questioned in relation to notions of veracity. At the same time, the strategies evolved and applied are intended to bring the audience closer to Koch: his political and professional experiences and his development of recorded sound as a new medium.