Listen, You'll See...
1983 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Gaston Sarault
Genres: animation, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal
Animated sequences divided into game, conflict and flirtation show how sound alters the perception of identical images and how eye and ear influence each other.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1983 essay film about synesthesia sounds like it should be insufferable academic navel-gazing, but Sarault's actually doing something weirder—using identical frames as a control group to show how sound rewrites what you're seeing, which means the premise IS the subversion.
Sarault positions this squarely in the lineage of avant-garde cinema's formal investigations into perception, particularly the structural film tradition; the restraint of reusing imagery to isolate the sound variable is rigorous curatorial thinking masquerading as a simple game.
The gambit here is repeating the same animation sequences while swapping the audio track—a single production-level decision that forces the audience to become the experiment, and it works because nothing else needs to be precious about it.