A Film for the Ears An Experiment in Archival Listening and Sonic Ethnography on David MacDougall’s Tempus de Baristas

Abstract

Among the various tasks that shape my work as an ethnomusicologist, one of the most recurrent is a form of time travel—an encounter made possible by placing a reel of magnetic tape on a recorder and allowing past worlds to resound once again. One such journey recently took me to the countryside of Urzulei, in Ogliastra, Sardinia, through the high-definition digitization of the Nagra IV-S reels containing the original sound recordings of Tempus de Baristas, the 1992 documentary directed by David MacDougall. This process offered a rare opportunity to revisit a foundational work in the history of Sardinian documentary cinema and, more importantly, to immerse myself in its sonic dimension—an intricate constellation of signals, textures, presences, and absences that collectively delineate the film’s acoustic map and construct an autonomous representation of its protagonists and their world. This encounter created the conditions for an experiment: I chose to watch the finished film only after completing the full listening and digitization of all the reels, experiencing the documentary first as “a film for the ears.” Through this listening-first approach, I attempted to imagine and reconstruct the film’s scenes solely through sound, and only afterward compared this auditory experience to the visual structure of the edited work. The article examines how this methodological inversion illuminates key elements of MacDougall’s Transcultural Cinema, particularly the ways in which sound articulates the documentary’s narrative architecture. It argues that the multiple layers of sonic production—environmental, conversational, ritual, and mechanical—demarcate the boundaries of filmed action and shape the ethnographic field of the documentary. Through an analysis of these acoustic strata, the paper demonstrates how Tempus de Baristas operates as a cinema in which listening becomes a critical form of knowledge, revealing dimensions of pastoral life that remain latent or peripheral in the visual domain.