A night in my neighborhood in Los Angeles during a half-year stay in 2008. As it was home to a nearby street gang, police helicopters would often circle around the area. On one noisy night I cautiously moved towards the centre of activity to record some sounds. After I had started the tape, I heard shots, and shortly after met one of the residents, who had come outside to see what was going on. I taped our conversation trying to figure out everything we heard and saw.

While listening to the conversation on the soundtrack of Noir, one can only see the doubled text that was spoken in front of a black background. The complete absence of images aims at creating an empty projection surface for the cinema inside the viewer’s mind, and at forcing viewers to listen intently and reconstruct things for themselves.

The soundtrack contains things we recollect from film history: helicopter sounds, gunshots, footsteps, breathing—and the kind of dialogue that might be heard in a gangster movie. In bearing reference to a film script, the recorded sounds and dialogue possess a quality of the absurd for me.