Disoriented: A Fog Film About Fog Without Fog

October 2024 Newsletter

Disoriented: A Fog Film About Fog Without Fog

Someone is playing a mandolin downstairs. The soothing aroma of coffee mingles with the music on its way upstairs to my room. My room is in a lighthouse, tucked on the eastern side of an island along Maine’s Penobscot Bay. It’s 6:00 am, and the sun hasn’t made it up over the horizon, although the clouds are already tinged with pink, rose, and purple, all colors collecting in the furrows of the sea. This is the third day of our fourth shoot for a film we’re producing about industrial sounds.  A foghorn is our star character.

Except the foghorn is a no-show. The foghorn installed on this island is a sad stand-in for a fog horn that bellowed across the ocean for over a century. The digital, automated foghorn here now hasn’t worked for months, its chips and electronics all hidden in an ugly metal capsule. A recent visit from a US Coast Guard repair team failed to resuscitate the poor thing. These digital horns appear to be perfunctory, of little importance now that mariners no longer need to hear from the landscape, confident that their GPS and radar systems will bail them out in a thick fog. This island, by the way, sits along one of the foggiest coastlines in the US. 

Our film team consists of a cameraman, two sound engineers, a producer, three musicians, and visitors who periodically show up on our island by invitation. On this shoot, we visit with an acoustic neuroscientist and a historian of science. We want to hear about how humans understand and perceive sound, how sound creates memories, and how the brain processes sound. We ask our visitors about industrial sounds, sounds humans construct for a purpose, their history, spectrograms of fog horn sounds, old lighthouse log books, and old books. As you can see, our team is curious about how to capture how we humans make, interpret, and sense sounds. We’re on the hunt for meaning.