Béni’s Noise

Béni’s mother is working late again today. For her, noise is all those sounds that structure everyday life, that instead of being listened to, are tuned out. Her child sees things differently. Béni collects sounds: birdsong; the hum of high voltage power lines; the vibration of the asphalt below which, water secretly blazes its trail. What the desert wind that drives the kites up into the sky sounds like. The rolling of beads from a torn necklace. The sound of one’s own footsteps. The heartbeat throbbing in your ears. Sometimes, when she’s recording, the ten-year-old closes her eyes and imagines the thing she’s caught in her net this time, what it might look like.  

Valérie Pelet doesn’t invite the audience on a holiday, the film is far too interested in restlessness, excitement, and simultaneity. Nonetheless, Béni’s Noise can be seen as a journey; one that not only skillfully connects different places but also explores the diverse relationships reverberating within the audiovisual medium of film. Whether under the earth or up in the air, this analog-shot documentary miniature is devoted to the processes of searching and finding, losing and preserving. With great sensuousness, Pelet approaches the utterly political question of where we stand in the world, and from which perspective we grasp it, while it is in the process of disappearing.   

What escapes the gaze? How can we describe what’s there to hear? Where does noise begin? What remains when the statues stay silent? The film casts a net of sounds, images, colors, people, animals, things, spaces, impressions, and memories, to spin stories of its own. Béni’s Noise wanders through both the day and the night, when it seems to Béni that people might be able to hear better. (Anne Küper)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt