Sounding the Archive: Sonic Strategies in Panorama Ephemera (2004) and The Natural History of Destruction (2022)
Students taking the course Global Media (Film 145) in Spring 2025, taught by Deniz Göktürk and Kayla Rose van Kooten, learned about everyday practices of documentary film production in works from around the world. A key question arising in discussions of documentary cinema is the relationship of the audiovisual medium to real events. In the following blog post, Yansu Tan reflects on the indexicality of sound, and how acoustic techniques give new meanings to repurposed archival footage.
by Yansu Tan
Sergei Loznitsa’s ten-day residency at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) and Rick Prelinger’s Les Blank lecture on March 5, 2025 brought the work of these two filmmakers into conversation for me. I was intrigued by the different impressions left on me by Prelinger’s Panorama Ephemera (2004) and Losnitza’s The Natural History of Destruction (2022), both of which are reassembled from archival footage. In each film, sound functions not merely as an accessory to image but as a structural and epistemological force—one that guides, disturbs, and reanimates the historical record. Though both films are pedagogical in their aims, their opposing approaches to sound design expose different modalities of engaging with history: Prelinger preserves the sonic grain of history to invite a reflective critique, Loznitsa reconstructs sound using the inherent properties of film sound to appeal to morality and pathos. This essay examines how each filmmaker mobilizes sound to construct meaning, shape time, and position the viewer—either as a critical analyst confronted with the ideological scaffolding of media, or as a witness immersed in the visceral realities of destruction and loss.
In his edit, Prelinger retains the sound (or the lack thereof) that originally accompanied the archival material. Loznitsa, on the other hand, takes the diametrically opposite approach of foleying the entire film. With minimal linguistic cues, the film’s “dialogue” is rendered through a reenacted symphony of metallic clangs: the loading of bullets, the roar of engines, the clicking of missiles locking into place, and the rumble of bombers across a turbulent sky. Despite the artificiality, Loznitsa’s film feels just as, if not even more, real than Panorama Ephemera.
The reflex to ascribe reality to sound is, according to Rick Altman (qtd. in Greiner 3), a fundamental fallacy in our understanding of sound. Unless specific attention is drawn to film sound, audiences are easily led to accept any modification by sound design as natural acoustic qualities of the represented object. Film sound is not an objective index to reality, yet it operates as if it were because of the established audiovisual codes in our media environment (Chion 107). These cues include not just the “signifying elements” of sound but also information coded in noise or timbre. When the audio effects of technical decay or technological deficiencies in early recordings are encoded in the sound or sound design, the audience subconsciously situates the piece of audiovisual representation in a historical era. In Panorama Ephemera, the images appear as distant archival artifacts to us due to audio qualities such as a compressed dynamic range, the crackle of a high noise floor, or even performative elements like the hyper-articulated mid-century intonation. Altogether, these signal to a historical period before digital sound.
Sound design in The Natural History of Destruction draws on this property of film sound to locate itself temporally. Moreover, it is used in conjunction with other codes of editing in audiovisual representations to establish spatial continuity. In an early sequence, the shot of the Rathaus-Glockenspiel is accompanied by ringing bells, muffled voices, and footsteps passing by. A crackling noise encrusts this soundscape, imitating analogue media. The next shot shows onlookers gazing up at the belltower, while the stereophonic sound design repositions the sound of the bells to be directed from above. Without an establishing shot of the plaza, Loznitsa’s foley immerses the viewer in the diegetic space by creating a dimensional awareness. This effect is further amplified when, coming from the left channel, the sound of a man’s footsteps precedes his entry to the frame from the left, and can still be heard in the right channel after he exits. Many such instances can be found throughout the film, gesturing towards the prefilmic reality beyond the borders of the shot.
The spatiotemporal continuity in The Natural History of Destruction is further reinforced through the treatment of sound between shots. One important element is the uninterrupted presence, also called room tone. Although it is hardly noticeable, keeping this background sound constant across a picture cut implies that although the point of view has changed, we are still in the same space (Holman 162). To build the extensive sequence of the airstrike with shots of all angles and shot sizes, the filmmakers needed to source from a number of different archives—this is evident in the disparity of appearance from shot to shot in color and film stock. Nonetheless, all this footage, which was likely taken by many different pilots in different operations, is anchored in a continuous diegesis by the same, consistent presence of what the audience might imagine is the sound of a rumbling engine heard from the pilot’s seat. From wide aerial shots of black smoke clouds bursting into existence, to handheld shots of bombers zooming past, the abundance of documentation envelops the spectator in the cockpit. Archival images are reinvigorated with a horrifying tangibility.
While Losnitsa’s meticulously crafted sound heightens the immediacy of the images, Prelinger keeps the temporal grain of the archive intact, embracing the degraded quality of the original soundtrack. In his creative reuse of ephemeral films—films sponsored by corporations and organisations, educational films, and amateur and home movies—Prelinger adheres to minimum editing and offers no additional voiceover commentary. Audiences are reminded that they are listening to the past as it was represented. Thus in Panorama Ephemera, sound appears as distant historical artifacts. Prelinger’s editing does not follow a linear narrative; instead, it uses a montage that allows the viewer to engage with a free-flowing series of images that make sense when united by their sonic associations. The carefully arranged sequences rely on the auditory landscape—be it ambient noise, music, or the original archival voiceover—to create thematic continuity and contrast.
In the film’s opening sequence, we first witness a series of shots detailing the production of ham: workers on a factory line methodically repeating the same laborious motions. The image is accompanied by a jolly jingle—a sound that glazes over the monotonous pulse of American capitalism. This sequence then cuts abruptly to silent instructional footage of animal testing produced by the Department of Psychology at Yale University in 1939. In this clip titled “Experimentally Produced ‘Social Problem’ in Rats”, mice organize themselves into a “class society” after behavioral conditioning. The sudden muting of the joyous tune serves as a sonic reinforcement to the suggested similarity between assembly line labor and laboratory animals. By opening with this dialectical montage, Prelinger comments on the efficiency-oriented Taylorism of industrial work, suggesting that the repetitive patterns of labor create hierarchies of society through social conditioning.
This reliance on sound to guide meaning is evident in another sequence. Initially, newsreel footage of large public gatherings, produced by Bell System in 1939, captures collegiate sports events as a mass of indistinguishable bodies performing a single motion at once. This original clip is accompanied by a voice that praises the spectacle of communal unity with an obvious undertone of American nationalism, appealing to “us.” “For anyone curious about our national enthusiasm, our pleasures, our relaxations, the obvious procedure is to gather where they are spontaneously displayed,” the voice said. Abruptly, this jubilant imagery is replaced by footage from a labor union protest demanding fair wages. The original voiceover then fades and is replaced by an opposing one of dissent, sourced from a Union Film for United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, 1946. Over a deep, rumbling noise, a solemn voice narrates the scenes of protests, which later morphs into a marching band symphony at the words “but later, trouble began.” The rapid shift in sound and image disrupts the earlier narrative of national unity, alienating us from its supposed exaltation, and exposing a more complex and conflicted reality. The sound, which draws a connection between the two originally unrelated pieces of media artifacts, fractures the facade of false meaning to reveal an underlying tension, a commentary on the disparity between idealized patriotism and the lived reality of working-class struggle.
Panorama Ephemera touches on a broad array of themes, from the moral duties of American citizens in wartime to urban life, the devastating impact of the atomic bomb, and the evolution of technology and youth romance. Clips are arranged in a free flowing stream of associations, contrasts, and chronological comparisons. In the ending sequences, Prelinger seems to borrow the voice of a woman in the archival footage as she states, “I’d like to think it all happened because our land loves us.” Then, in a close up, she delivers a monologue about family love as well as the horrors “we” have done to the land. The salon of guests at her house falls silent as they absorb this sentiment—a moment that encapsulates both the beauty and warning of Prelinger’s message. Is this his final comment on American history, or is it a re-earthing of a timeless sentiment? As Prelinger writes in his manifesto: “we cycle through new iterations of fear—communism, terrorism, socialism, deflation, secessionism, generational divides. We can’t go back to the world of the past, but sometimes the past overtakes us” (Prelinger).
Like Prelinger, Loznitsa’s method involves reappropriating material for a pedagogy that destabilizes meaning and encourages inquiry. In The Natural History of Destruction, the absence of the spoken word forces the viewer to engage with the film’s auditory elements as the primary carriers of meaning. The workers in the footage remain silent; the war machine, with its relentless sounds, speaks for itself. The intentional erasure of any possible original commentary invites us to meditate on the very process of filmmaking. The inherent mismatch between the intentions of the original cinematographers filming for the military, and Loznitsa’s re-editing, underscores the complex relationship between the creator of archival material and its modern reinterpretation, casting the spectator simultaneously as a complicit bystander and an active witness to endless cycle of war and violence. It challenges the dominant narrative of World War II as an arena of winners and losers by prodding the viewers to gauge the shared moral consequences of mechanized destruction.
Loznitsa’s sound design is key to achieving this pedagogy as it relies on affective persuasion. Whereas Prelinger maintains a temporal distance from the material, Loznitsa collapses this separation, immersing the audience in a cohesive soundscape. We may be watching the past, but we are feeling it now. In contrast, Prelinger’s sound approach underscores the constructedness of media. The segmentation of clips produces a dialectical friction between them placing the audience at an analytical distance, and cueing its attention to the underlying ideologies that inform historical media. If Prelinger positions the viewer as an analyst, Loznitsa’s viewer is a witness. If Prelinger’s pedagogy foregrounds media literacy, Loznitsa’s is testimonial, naturalizing archival images to force an ethical spectatorship with a sweep of affect. Sound is felt rather than critically questioned.
Ultimately, both Prelinger and Loznitsa reveal that the logic of archival film is not anchored in any single individual voice. Instead, the archival director assumes a stance that transcends time and individual identity. In Panorama Ephemera, Prelinger’s minimal intervention preserves the ruptures and contradictions of the original materials, letting the archive speak for itself and allowing the cracks in ideology to surface through sonic juxtaposition. Sound operates both as a historical index and a marker of tonal shift, inviting the viewer to adopt the stance of a dispassionate observer. Conversely, Loznitsa’s foley work in The Natural History of Destruction not only reconstructs a historical soundscape, but also creates a space of affective testimony, where the viewer is no longer a distant observer but a participant in the ethical burdens of memory. The contrast between these two films underscores the elasticity of sound—not as a fixed trace of the real, but as a pliable medium. Sound, in both cases, becomes a means of orienting us in time—whether by keeping us at a distance or pulling us closer. Archival cinema teaches us how to read the past, feel its reverberations, and confront its implications in the present.
Works Cited
Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York, 1994.
Greiner, Rasmus. “Sonic Histospheres: Sound Design and History.” Research in Film and History, 2018, pp. 1-34. http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/14810.
Holman, Tomlinson. Sound for Digital Video. Burlington, Massachusetts. 2015.Prellinger, Rick. “On the Virtues of Preexisting Material.” Contents Magazine, https://contentsmagazine.com/articles/on-the-virtues-of-preexisting-material/.