"One day in 1948 while riding a crowded subway I came up with the idea of mixing random noise with composed music. More precisely, it was then that I became aware that composing is giving meaning to that stream of sounds that penetrates the world we live in." [Toru Takemitsu, Confronting Silence, p 79]

*Outer Space* [1999] dir. Peter Tscherkassky

Mainstream film production values demand a kind of maximum closeness. Every image and sound sparkles with reassuring clarity and sharpness. In post-production dialogue editors surgically remove undesirable elements from the production sound. Clicks, pops, lip-smacks, microphone bumps, passing planes, belly growls, all such extraneous sounds are suitably air-brushed out to create an intelligible, clean dialogue track. Careful balancing of levels and use of background fill tracks help to stitch together picture cuts, smoothly unifying the action in time and space. At every such stage throughout the post-production sound process, clarity and consistency is sought towards the creation of a coherent, unified soundtrack, a highly organised composition of sounds serving a narrative arc.

Filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky presents an altogether different kind of audiovisual experience. A central figure in the Austrian avant-grade, Tscherkassky has been making films since the early 1980s. Often using found 35mm footage as his source material, he constructs densely layered textures through extensive editing, celluloid maltreatment and film processing from his dark studio in the remote Austrian countryside. Out of these long seasons of labour emerge films of incredible beauty; twisting, repeating and fragmenting found narratives into new and unusual compositions. From the outset he writes:

“I wanted to unravel and dissolve the medium, “destroy” is not the right expression, but, yes, some type of “breaking”, and in breaking, allowing something else to become visible”.

These are dynamic film soundtracks of volcanic surfaces; the delicious crackle and hiss of celluloid, like the turntable escapades of Christian Marclay or Otomo Yoshihide. What we hear are the raw optical distortions of the medium itself, breaking up and contorting into new sonic shapes. From within these granular nettles emerge fragments of original soundtrack - grainy voices and snatches of music, footsteps, sounds of doors, broken glass and gunshots. These ghostly sounds of the past surface and resurface through a sea of optical clicks and pops, sometimes drifting into the foreground or repeating in time with the images. Elsewhere they erupt in violent bursts, building into chaotic layers of percussive noise.

Tscherkassky’s work can be situated within a whole history of avant garde and experimental filmmaking practices that stretch back to the early 1900s. Many filmmakers exploring the moving image technology of the time arrived at film with a background in fine arts, and so perhaps naturally graviated to exploring the purely visual potential of the medium. However, a number of individuals turned their attention towards investigating the synesthetic dimension of the image and soundtrack of celluloid. Many of these early experiments were described as a kind of “visual music”. What follows is a very brief historical overview of some of the major innovators in the field of film and optical sound.

Early innovations in optical sound began extensively in Russia and Europe. Russian composer and theorist Arseny Avraamov was a major pioneer in sound-on-film techniques, experimenting in the early 1930s with hand-drawn soundtracks directly on to film. In 1930 Evgeny Sholpo developed the Variophone, an optical synthesizer that used sound waves cut onto rotating disks. The resulting sounds were photographed on to 35mm film stock and reproduced via a projector and loudspeaker system.

Other notable works to emerge during this time are Rudolf Pfenniger’s five-part documentary film series Tönende Handschrift (Sounding Handwriting) and Oskar Fishchinger’s Ornament Sound, both from 1932. At the National Board of Canada in the mid-1940s, Evelyn Lambart and Norman McLaren began experimenting with “animated sound”, photographically shooting prepared graphic cards, frame-by-frame, on to the optical soundtrack area of a 35mm film strip.

In 1959 ex-BBC Radiophonic composer Daphne Oram began developing her Oramics optical sound instrument. For this she employed a drawn sound technique that was performed directly onto 35mm film. As the film strip passesd through the machines various photo-electric cells, different geometric shapes and patterns produced different sounds.

1966 and The London Film-makers' Co-op is established, where artists such as Lis Rhodes and Guy Sherwin produced filmworks that explored the interplay between sound and light. Super16 film technology was commonly used, allowing artists to translate an image into sound as the picture track passed through the exciter lamp of the projector’s optical sound head. Many of Guy Sherwin’s early structuralist films explore this synesthetic relationship.

Film Selection:

Outer Space [1999] dir. Peter Tscherkassky
Perfect Film [1986] dir. Ken Jacobs
Soundtrack [1977] dir. Guy Sherwin
Dresden Dynamo [1971] dir. Lis Rhodes
Schlechter [1958] dir. Peter Kubelka
Tönende Handschrift [1932] dir. Rudolf Pfenniger
Ornament Sound [1932] dir. Oskar Fishchinger