The Sound of Venice: Il silenzio di venezia
by Ariane Dick Bellosillo & Jonas Winkler

Ariane Dick Bellosillo & Jonas Winkler

Searching silence in Venice

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With more than 5 million tourists a year, the Italian lagoon city of Venice is one of the most visited cities in Europe. Holidaymakers and day-trippers fill the city with noise and rubbish, while squares, cultural monuments, museums and cafés seem to be bursting at the seams. Only in the evening do the streets empty out and make way for the nocturnal deceleration that can otherwise only be found in the few hidden and inconspicuous places in Venice.
Our experimental documentary Il Silenzio di Venezia explores Venice in the floods of tourism and away from it.
On the one hand, we follow the human hustle and bustle to romantic places, on the other hand we withdraw from
the tourist crowds to observe the fish in the canals, a local pianist playing and the spazzini cleaning the city in the
morning. A couple also take us on a ride in their gondola through the quieter canal systems of the Dorsoduro neighbourhood.

In order to make the interaction between restlessness and stillness in our film even clearer, we incorporate changes
in speed and content into individual shots with the help of different exposure times, frame rates and compositing.
This allows us to switch from a crowded and rushed situation to an almost deserted scene in one frame. The main inspiration for this stylistic device was the photo and video series Memories of a silent world by the artist
duo Simon Brodbeck and Lucie de Barbuat. From 2008 to 2011, they exposed well-known locations around the
world for several hours, causing all moving content, such as groups of people, to disappear from their images.
To further support the plasticity of the project, we recorded the sound on location using different microphone
setups, including stereo ORTF and binaural, and mastered it in Dolby Atmos 7.1.4.
The jostling and blocking of the crowds of tourists, as well as the extremely limited public sanitary facilities, added to
the time pressure and stress on our filming days. Carrying around the heavy and sometimes bulky equipment also
made us tired more quickly. In addition, we produced such a large amount of data in the seven days in Venice that
the project set-up in the editing program, as well as the overview and synchronisation of the image and sound material, took up a lot of time.

We also had to overcome small technical and creative blocks during the editing process. This made it all the more
enjoyable to get to know "real" Venetians and work with them. This included, for example, being accompanied by
staff from two osterias, i.e. traditional Italian restaurants. We were also very pleased to be able to spend time with
the couple Anna and Maurizio Campagnari, who took us on their gondola tour. Lorenzo Liuzzi, jazz pianist and graduate of the world-famous Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello, played a few improvisations and two of his pieces for us, enriching our project enormously. But we also enjoyed working with the team from Mainz and the students from the Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello. Willi Bücking and Lorenzo Vesconi helped us out with the sound recordings during the gondola ride. Lorenzo Scagnolari was our sound engineer on site and then visited us in Mainz to help us with sound design and mastering in post-production. To summarise, we can say that we are very happy that we faced the challenges challenges and found new international friends. We want to stay in contact with them in
order to continue working on joint projects in the future