Capturing the Senses
What happens when documentary meets travel research
BY Ron Nurwisah
Photography by Courtesy of Giraffe Productions
Last May, a pipe organ in the German city of Halberstadt changed notes. As a musical experiment, the organ is playing a slowed-down, 639-year-long version of avant-garde composer John Cage’s As Slow as Possible — notes can, and do, last years. Canadian filmmaker Scott Smith was documenting the event, but it wasn’t just the organ that brought him to this site of musical esoterica—Smith was on hand to help his friend, Vancouver author Ryan Knighton, explore a question: If, presumably, most of us travel to see more of the world, just what does it mean to travel if you’re blind?
Knighton was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease, when he was 18 — something he wrote movingly of in his 2006 memoir, Cockeyed. Now 34, he has only about one percent vision in one eye, but he’s a travel nut. “If you had to go somewhere just to touch something, what would you go touch?” Knighton asks me over the phone. Extend the question to the rest of your senses, and you’ve got the premise for Knighton’s future project, a travel book that focuses on using senses other than sight.
First on the list: sound. Early last spring Knighton learned that the pipe organ in Halberstadt would change notes in May, and thought it would make an intriguing story. When he mentioned the idea to Smith over drinks, the filmmaker became inspired to make Knightons’s trip the subject of his first documentary, As Slow as Possible. Within weeks they were on their way to Germany. Smith got to see first-hand how Knighton travelled; sometimes just with his cane, and sometimes with Smith discreetly filming strangers helping Knighton. This became a bit of an inside joke between the pair. “Sometimes we’d separate and I would just shoot him finding his way, and I’d always run up at the end and often get real crazy looks from people who just helped him,” Smith said.
Eventually Smith got a more complete understanding of Knighton’s abilities. “It reminds me of moments in the film where we simply see him sit down and rest. The relief that comes from finally just being able to stop is significant; it’s when you realize how hard he’s been working.”
In the end, Knighton, Smith and the film crew found their way to the church in Halberstadt in time for the note change. Knighton is overcome and cries just before he enters the church, a moment that Smith movingly captures on film. “It’s like a prayer that’s constantly going. Over there I know there’s this note always playing with no ego attached to it,” Knighton says.
The similarities between the organ in Halberstadt and Knighton were not lost on Smith. Thousands of people will be needed to ensure that the Halberstadt organ finishes the Cage piece sometime in 2639. “Ryan, not unlike the organ, is being handed from one person to the next. People always emerged to help him,” Smith explained.
As Slow as Possible is now being edited, and Smith hopes to release it in the spring. As for Knighton, the trip only seems to have heightened his wanderlust. “It struck me as a really deep irony that to go far away is a better way of learning where I am,” he says. As for the next chapters in what will one day be his travel book, Knighton says he would like to visit a durian orchard to explore his sense of smell, or get a traditional Japanese tattoo to explore his sense of touch. There are trips closer to home, too, like visiting a rattlesnake roundup in Sweetwater, Texas, “I’ve always wondered what a tonne of rattlesnakes sounds like.”
