The music and sound of experimental film

Description

This book explores music/sound-image relationships in non-mainstream screen repertoire from the earliest examples of experimental audiovisuality to the most recent forms of expanded and digital technology. It challenges presumptions of visual primacy in experimental cinema and rethinks screen music discourse in light of the aesthetics of non-commercial imperatives. Several themes run through the book, connecting with and significantly enlarging upon current critical discourse surrounding realism and audibility in the fiction film, the role of music in mainstream cinema, and the audiovisual strategies of experimental film. The contributors investigate repertoires and artists from Europe and the USA through the critical lenses of synchronicity and animated sound, interrelations of experimentation in image and sound, audiovisual synchresis and dissonance, experimental soundscape traditions, found-footage film, re-mediation of pre-existent music and sound, popular and queer sound cultures, and a diversity of radical technological, aesthetic, tropes in film media traversing the work of early pioneers such as Walther Ruttmann and Len Lye, through the mid-century innovations of Norman McLaren, Stan Brakhage, Lis Rhodes, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, and studio collectives in Poland, to latter-day experimentalists John Smith and Bill Morrison, as well as the contemporary practices of Vjing. Content: Absolute sounding images: abstract film and radio drama of the 1920s as complementary forms of a media-specific art / Dieter Daniels -- A primitivism of the senses: the role of music in Len Lye's experimental animation / Malcolm Cook -- An education avant-garde: sound and music in Julien Bryan's OIAA films on Latin America, 1942-1949 / James Tobias -- "bump...bup...bup": aural innovation in the films of Norman McLaren / Terence Dobson -- Sights and sounds of the moving mind: the visionary sountracks of Stan Brakhage / Eric Smigel -- Discontinuities and resynchronisations: the use of sound in Polish experimental cinema from the 1930s to the 1980s / Daniel Muzyczuk -- Grid intensities: hearing structures in Chantal Akerman's films of the 1970s / Paul Hegarty -- Meaning and musicality: sound-image relations in the films of John Smith / Andy Birtwistle -- Audiovisual dissonance in found-footage film / Holly Rogers -- Rebalancing the picture-sound relationship: the audiovisual compositions of Lis Rhodes / Aimee Mollaghan -- Sounding decay in the digital age: "audio-visions" of Decasia (2002) and Lyrical nitrate (1991) -- The sound of queer experimental film / Juan A. Suárez -- Avant-gardists and the lure of pop music / Carol Vernallis -- The music of Gustav Mahler in experimental film contexts: questions of visual music and intermedial theory / Jeremy Barham.