Passage of Sound eschews narrative, establishing instead co-ordinates which are principally those of modernist poetic cinema; long takes sometimes in slowed motion

fixed camera positions with the figure moving through space in ‘real’ time, no sense of

a contextualised narrative, no character motivation, no causality, and no dialogue.

The soundtrack establishes an evocative register that connects the Irish viewer

with the saliences of a memorialised past and a memorialised landscape.

The opening image is of a dense wall of wind-undulated trees, dreamlike, intense,

a partial view of a monolithic wood observed from without. The film progresses to

an interiorised forest space - a clearing with a gap from which a figure emerges.

The figure dressed in black and white, is austere, deliberate, a canvas satchel

variously slung over a shoulder or carried

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Cinematographer Editor and director Shelagh Honan

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