This film from the London-based artist Aura Satz is an exploration of sirens – as in the warning devices, not the mythical creatures that lure unsuspecting men to their doom. Really it’s an art film, and might have been more at home in a gallery where audiences would be able to engage with its striking images and experimental soundtrack for as long as the mood takes them. As a feature-film experience it becomes an endurance test, a battle to pay attention and concentrate for the whole thing.
It opens with a drone shot of a huge siren in the middle of what looks like a residential neighbourhood, ready to alert residents to heaven knows what threat. Over the top, a shrill, insinuating track from composer Laurie Spiegel buzzes with the nagging whine of an electronic mosquito. There are some interesting ideas here. British-Egyptian actor Khalid Abdalla muses on the role of sirens in the 2011 Arab spring protests, and we learn that in Palestine loudspeakers in mosque minarets sound a siren every year on Nakba day – one second for every year that has passed since Palestinians were displaced from their homeland after the creation of the state of Israel.
There’s more. An activist in the US explains that for her, as a black woman, the flashing blue light of an emergency vehicle is not safety and help – it means danger. At Fukushima, the clocks are left hanging, frozen at the time of the nuclear disaster in 2011. A Maori activist talks about reframing our relationship with nature – and there is a sense here of a siren clanging loudly, mostly unheeded for impending environmental catastrophe. All fascinating stuff, but these ideas are strung together without too much of a coherent sense of what the film is all about.
Preemptive Listening is on True Story from 8 May.