The Music and Sound of Experimental Film

The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Western Arts, edited by Yael Kaduri, 397–425. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016., 2016

The aim of the present article is to map the territory of the contemporary audio-visual cinematic avant-garde, which arose at the very moment of celluloid’s passage from mass use to obsolescence. The first group of films bears witness to the avant-garde’s ongoing interest in the formal organisation of sound/image-relationships. If one of the main concerns of sound in conventional film is to ‘naturalize’ the image, experimental film is interested instead in an anti-naturalistic use of sound. Films without sound or even without images (which still can be called ‘films’), the use of audiovisual polysemy, asynchronous or even synchronous sound as well as the visualization of code-based music are all means of revealing the constructed nature of the cinesonic event. But to pursue a productive reading of the contemporary cinematic avant-garde we have to broaden the scope beyond the formal level and lend an ear to the sounding of film’s material and its technological base. With the second group of films discussed we will enter the realm of the sound of technology itself, while the third group points out the creative potential of optically synthesized sounds. The fourth and last group, live generated sounds and images, attests to the agility of current projection performances.

Popular Music and Society, 2014

Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico, 2019

Despite traditionally having been studied within the field of Musicology, the analysis of music in film should be approached as an aesthetic study of the relationship between «image» and «music» which is central to the cinematographic framework. From this interdisciplinary perspective numerous theoretical and methodologi-cal issues emerge. The aim of this article is to investigate, using both a synchronic and diachronic focus, some of the key issues arising from this joint music-image approach, in an attempt to develop a theoretical framework for a joint aesthetic of music and image: a study of «cinematographic expression» that brings together the visual and the sound dimensions and which we call the «musicalised image», a neologism of our own creation.

Surrealist cinema flourished in France in the late 1920s, but following the widespread adoption of synchronized sound in Europe in 1929, its future was uncertain. The anti-musical stance of many Surrealists (particularly André Breton), who believed that the abstract nature of music violated surrealism’s philosophical, literary, and aesthetic principles, made the very concept of surrealist sound film problematic. With the heightened realism of synchronized dialogue and the presence of a recorded musical soundtrack, music’s role in the new audiovisual form threatened to destabilize the dream logic that surrealist filmmakers had established in silent cinema. But the new technology also offered an opportunity for composers and directors to renegotiate music’s role in surrealist film. I argue that music became a crucial tool in early conceptions of surrealist audiovisual cinema, when sound film’s potential energy was at its height. I examine two of France’s first sound films—Luis Buñuel’s L’Age d’or (1930) and Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poète (1930)—both of which favored an audiovisual aesthetic relying heavily on surrealist principles. These controversial films deliberately avoided realism, employing music as a tool for audiovisual juxtaposition, pastiche, and shock value. For Le Sang d’un poète composer Georges Auric wrote a score that Cocteau proceeded to cut up and reorder, an experiment in “accidental synchronization” and a means of avoiding explicit musical signification. Buñuel incorporated preexisting classical works—by composers including Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner—into L’Age d’or and juxtaposed them with absurd, even offensive, images. Though their approaches to the soundtrack differed, both directors experimented with film rhythm and pacing, with contrasting synchronism and audiovisual counterpoint, and with violating expectations of audiovisual unity. This brief but productive intersection between avant-garde cinematic and musical modernist practices at a critical juncture in France’s nascent sound film production influenced subsequent French cinematic experiments, particularly those of the Nouvelle Vague. My analysis of the music in L’Age d’or and Le Sang d’un poète theorizes the audiovisual elements constituting surrealist sound film; it also highlights the inherently surreal characteristics of the sound film medium itself, characteristics that most mainstream filmmakers would later try their hardest to erase.

2019

Despite traditionally having been studied within the field of Musicology, the analysis of music in film should be approached as an aesthetic study of the relationship between «image» and «music» which is central to the cinematographic framework. From this interdisciplinary perspective numerous theoretical and methodological issues emerge. The aim of this article is to investigate, using both a synchronic and diachronic focus, some of the key issues arising from this joint music-image approach, in an attempt to develop a theoretical framework for a joint aesthetic of music and image: a study of «cinematographic expression» that brings together the visual and the sound dimensions and which we call the «musicalised image», a neologism of our own creation.

Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 78-87., 2013

Notes, 2018

Animation Journal 22, 2014