Rose of Nevada’s Mark Jenkin on ghost ships, time slippage and aural omens • Journal • A Magazine • , Life in canada

Within the audiovisual mosaics of your films, there’s time travel—or perhaps a type of temporal layering—related through sound and image. I recall, in Enys Men, the sound of a smashing glass is the same sound of the daughter crashing through the skylight. There are key instances of this in Bait, with its flash-forwards, and within the time-slip structure of Rose of Nevada as well. What’s exciting to you about using sound and image simultaneously and also separately, in manipulating an audience’s sense of reality?

Because I record all the sound after filming, a certain amount of experimentation I get into is out of necessity, rather than out of choice. I can’t create a realistic world sonically for 100 percent of the runtime. I abandon the idea of capturing it in a realistic way, then I abstract it.

I very much like flashforwards. I’ll use a flashforward more than I would use a flashback. I would only use a flashback to contradict action within a moment or to mislead the audience, because I always think of flashbacks in very simple terms. Unless it’s doing something really specific, it’s quite patronizing to the audience; you’re saying, “Remember this,” and of course the audience remembers it—as audiences are sophisticated, intelligent and clever—whereas a flashforward makes the audience sit forward in their seat. It tells the audience, “Pay attention; you won’t understand it yet, but there is a reason why you’re seeing this.”

You can only do that so many times visually before it becomes a gimmick; but, in terms of sound, you can do it all the time, because the audience isn’t consciously processing what’s going on in the soundtrack to the same degree that they are looking at the picture. I like those moments where you can attach sound to an image that isn’t associated with that image; the audience might not even notice, but they might sense something is off.

In Enys Men, the sound of smashing glass—the same as the sound of the girl falling through the glass roof—is also the same sound effect of the gannet, the bird that is hunting and dives into the sea. In the film, there is no realistic sound effect on that; it isn’t the sound of a bird breaking the surface of the ocean, but it’s the sound of breaking glass. Where would I get the sound of a gannet, traveling 70 miles an hour, breaking the surface of the ocean from a kilometer away? I can’t realistically recreate that sound, so I instead tend to abstract that sound, which is why it’s replaced with the sound of broken glass—which the audience may or may not notice.