“Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt”

Abstract

This article addresses Indigenous film-maker, Lisa Jackson’s, skillful and strategic integration of selections of Western Art Music from the Early and Late Classical period in the soundtracks of her recent films. This strategy draws attention to indigenous perspectives on economic and cultural sustainability, as well as to the threat posed to indigenous continuity by colonialist legacies, past and present. In Jackson’s films, the excerpts from Western Art Music comprising the musical score “takes over” the narrative; their sound is pleasant, but unseen, insidious and triumphant, ultimately a duplicitous and malevolent dominating force. In my view, the selections from Western Art Music function as a metaphor for the unseen, insidious and ever-present forces of colonialism that control the negative behaviors and lives of the indigenous protagonists in the film narrative. This metaphor functions on both macro (formal and performative) and micro (melodic and chordal) levels. On a meta-narratival level, Jackson’s soundtracks draw attention to contemporary audience’s de-sensitization to the use of sonic repertoires in popular cinema and to the normalization of the congruence of sound and musical material and film narrative. Jackson’s adaptation of the musical material suggests that in order to shed colonialist legacies, we must also interrogate their often physical heard, but cognitively and critically unremarked, accompanying soundtracks.