In the documentary-feature Listen to Me Marlon (2015), chronicling the life, career and opinions of acclaimed Hollywood actor Marlon Brando (1924 – 2004), tape recordings (in particular, recordings he conducted himself) navigate and calcify the impressions that were acquired over the course of his life. Uniquely subtitled as ‘the definitive Brando. In his own words’, the film is composed out of ‘over 300 hours of audio material’ that were recorded by Brando himself, privately – whether personal messages, executive business meetings, hypnosis, or words spoken during press interviews – the documentary assembling a collaged texture of his own voice, at varying ages, that function as a type of self-commentary to his own experiences (each tape is addressed to himself: “Listen to me, Marlon …”). ‘I didn’t know the tapes existed,’ spoke Rebecca Brando in an Observer interview, ‘he didn’t talk about his personal life to us children ever. So a lot of it was a just a therapeutic way to find some kind of truth.’ Listen to Me Marlon, nonetheless – in its staged, visual reconstruction of memory, moving through old rooms, photographs, as well as the clips of recording selected – projects a ‘truth’ of voice mediated through tape, the director, as well as that of Brando himself. In ‘talking to and about himself […] [as] a kind of confession work’, as writes Mark Kermode, the recordings achieve a reality beyond the sound of its own voice. Truth, coincidentally, is a prime concern of the tape recordings: each tape presents an effort of seizing what it means to be alive, in the present, somebody with responsibilities toward family and the natural world. In addition to the posthumous voice, a blue, digitized map that Brando made of his own face in the 1980s is drawn on to animate its spoken recordings. One such gallery remarks, at the beginning:
Okay, now, listen, let me tell you something that I did. I’ve had my head digitized. And they put this laser and they put it around you like this and they digitized my face. And I made a lot of faces and smiled and, and, made a sad face. So they’ve got it all on digital.
Out of words does the image of Brando appear, pixelating at the edges. In attending to what we hear spoken in the tapes, we receive a non-linear timeline of life, (it is difficult to discern at what points in time the sound is being recorded,) transitioning forwards and backwards in recollection and experience, whilst equipoised against the fixed moment of his own, sculptured face; the tape recorder, in regard to what is selected by the documentary, qualifies a form of time travel for the listener to participate. ‘You are the memories,’ Brando reflects, and yet it is important that we consider which ‘memories’ in particular are being remembered, perhaps imagined, or at least edited for the purpose of the documentary to deliver its specific narrative. In tape we receive a portrait of the voice in the act of remembering:
Now let your mind drift way back in time […] it is like a wonderful, soft dream, and that soft wind blowing, that’s a wind that you can trust.
The tape ‘is a soft, semi-imaginary space’, confers Steven Connor, ‘soft, and ‘live’ in a sense that the groove of the record [is] not’, a quality of sound that captures, much like a photograph, an aspect of time in the moment of its happening. Tape is predicated on taking voice, as well as its eventual loss – the semblance of a former voice, dream or thought – enabling us to recall what can no longer be remembered, or at least an effort toward such a state. Similar to Listen to Me Marlon, the essayistic documentary Nick’s Film: Lightning Over Water (1980), directed by Wim Wenders, is also one ‘created in the cutting room’, the assemblage of its material ‘functioning on a principle of shifting levels of reality.’ Lightning Over Water navigates the final days and memories of the life of Nicholas Ray – the director of films Rebel Without a Cause (1955), King of Kings (1961)– whose production of We Can’t Go Home Again (1972 – 1979), and attitude toward his own, impending death, is traced by interviews, VHS and select tape recordings. Lightning Over Water is less a documentary and more a thinly-fictionalised, collaborative exposé of the real-life relationship between the two directors, a document of suffering and tragedy as much as an essayistic self-portrait of a fallen American icon. ‘Like other Wenders film,’ writes Timothy Corrigan, ‘the confrontation is the subjective one between a lost body and a consciousness attempting to retrieve it’, a revival secured in the various chemical and material formats employed by the feature. Early in the documentary, an aged Nicholas Ray wakes and picks up a tape recorder:
I had a dream …[singing]I had a dream the other night, sing on, brother, sing … [normal]I had a dream about a goddam musical, in Venezuela.
Out of recollection is lyric found – the phrase ‘I had a dream’ replayed by the speaker, only now to unheard music (‘I had a dream the other night’) – loose fragments of song in slippage to the state of memory; in such music we locate ‘the other night’, otherwise that which can only resurface to the individual once sung. After the second command to ‘sing’, the lyric trails off, an interruption to the informed experience and yet one that is crutched on absence: the ‘brother’ sung to, and the remote, exotic landscape of ‘Venezuela’ are reduced to silence, captured only be the lyric and tape itself. Voice finds no company in lyric, and nor does Ray seek to replay the words spoken. After the words are spoken the tape recorder is paused, not to be heard again for the remainder of the film. In preservation of tape so is lyric vulnerable to being forgotten.
Over the duration of Listen to Me Marlon, (in likeness to Ray in Lightning Over Water,) the image of Brando as a youth (the bold presence in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), or the charming under-dog of On the Waterfront (1954)) is suspended against the aged, tired voice that we receive in tape – voice is superimposed upon voice, age upon youth, phantasmal layerings of time and experience. The relationship of voice to tape, it can be argued, stages ‘the phenomenon of ‘print through’, caused by the fact that, when wound on top of one another, the magnetic patterns deposited in one part of the tape could print themselves by induction on a neighbouring part of the tape’, a behaviour of ghosting that ‘embodies a spreading and thickening of the present moment’. Not dissimilar to Krapp’s Last Tape, voice and body do not match in performance – the pockets are ‘capacious’, size-ten boots ‘surprising’, and the voice itself is a ‘quavering’ display of unease – the afterimage of Brando, likewise, out of sync to his youthful, beautiful voice. Lyric does not compromise or seek to balance, in either example. In tape survives the afterimage of a happier Brando, or the dream-like lyric of Ray, only now mismatched to the fading body with which we are presented, sound in friction to its remembrance. ‘Just think of all the good things that you like, like apple pie and ice cream, and brownies and milk,’ Brando whispers, comfort associated with the past and the consuming of food, a tense of memory that is carried forward to influence the present. It is uncertain, much like in Krapp’s Last Tape, which is in fact the final tape, and what recordings are absent from the documentary itself. Tape lulls us its own immortality, it is the ‘wonderful, soft dream’, but to what end the recordings will be played, re-heard or recollected is unknown, the blue afterimage of Brando’s digitized face felt even as the credits roll onward. Listen to Me Marlon is as much a testament to pain and sufferings as is it to greatness. [Since its release, the documentary has garnered much critical praise (Vulture review: ‘the greatest, most searching documentary of an actor ever put on film’,) and yet it is difficult not to feel that our access to the recorded tape is unauthorised, exploitative in its resurrection of memory.]
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