Book
/
Poetry
Room Tone
Year
2021
By
Linden & Fog
Format
Paperback, 96 pages ISBN 978-0-000000-03-5
Language
English
Description
On a film set, after the last take, I ask everyone to stand still for thirty seconds. Nobody talks, nobody moves, and the microphone records the room itself: the lights humming, the traffic outside, the particular silence of that place. We call it room tone. Editors use it to fill the gaps, so a film never falls into true quiet.
Lena Müller worked beside me on sets for six years before she published a line. I always noticed that she was the only one who seemed to enjoy those thirty seconds.
This book is what she was listening to.
— Paolo Renzi, sound recordist, from the afterword
Excerpt
Before anyone speaks
the room has already said
everything it knows:
the fridge, the radiator, the far road,
a chair remembering a weight.
On set they ask for thirty seconds of it.
Nobody move. Nobody breathe like that.
We stand like furniture
and listen to the space
we are about to fill with lines.
I have kept every one of those thirty seconds.
Laid end to end, they are almost a life.
— “Thirty Seconds”, in Part III: On Set, p. 61
