One of the ways in which the film work of avant garde and moving image artists differs from narrative-based filmmaking is how sound and music is used. In rejecting concerns of story or character development, filmmakers operating in this interdisciplinary region between cinema (film), performance (expanded cinema) and gallery exhibition (video installation) free themselves to examine the medium inside and outside the confines of linear time. *
The Movement of People Working [2003] dir. Phil Niblock (2 stills from DVD version)
An elastic approach to the temporal arrangement of moving images and sounds opens up opportunities for interesting and unusual audiovisual juxtapositions. The use of contrapuntal sound in this way can have the effect of registering a floating, dream-like atmosphere that departs from the grounded, synchronous interaction of image and sound. Located within such a dreamscape lies the mind of the filmmaker who, in the expressive stream of consciousness, is capable of achieving a highly personal sensibility to filmmaking. In this space images and sounds drift in and out of focus like fading memories, fragments of a passing life. Here the expressive diarist work of Jonas Mekas comes to mind.
With the freeing up of time and the relinquishing of synchronous image-sound relationships, the conventional distinctions between diegetic/non-diegetic, music/sound, signal/noise begin to unravel and blur. Operating in this sonic territory - one that historically covers video art, sound art and experimental music - we locate moving image artists and filmmakers, many of whom arrive at film with a background in fine art or contemporary and experimental music. In some cases respective film and music activities co-exist (e.g. Phil Niblock), while for others, an interest in sound and music is a starting point in a trajectory that moves them further towards moving image and video installation (e.g. Bill Viola).
The Birds [1963] dir. Alfred Hitchcock • The Red Desert [1964] dir. Michelangelo Antonioni
The electronic film score belongs to any discussion concerning alternative and experimental approaches to working with film sound and music. Amongst some of the most famous examples of commercial films that deploy a purely electronic palette of sounds is Alfred Hitchcock’s horror classic The Birds from 1963. Utilising the Mixtur-Trautonium electronic synthesizer, composers Oskar Sala and Remi Gassmann were commissioned to produce the eery, atonal textures that would score the birds fluttering and cawing. In her book The Silent Scream: Alfred Hitchcock's Sound Track Elisabeth Weis writes about the relationship between the film’s atmosphere of fear and the uncanny quality of the electronic sounds:
"The Birds deals abstractly with fear; thus it is especially dependent on sound because of the non-specific quality of sound effects."
We find the “non-specific quality” of electronic noises and tones put to novel use in other films of the time, such as Forbidden Planet (1956), considered the first completely electronic film score, Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Red Desert (1964) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972).
In Jack Clayton’s gothic psychological drama The Innocents (1961), electronic feedback and delay effects are put to great effect in a memorably tense and atmospheric sequence midway into the film. Described as the sound of the governess’ encroaching madness, "…what really disturbs us, at the very moments when the film is at its most disturbing” writes Robert Barry,
“are the eerie electronic noises that creep around the edges of Auric’s lush impressionistic score. These noises, though unmentioned in the film’s credits, were created by Daphne Oram.”
Oram (1925-2003) was a pioneering British electronic composer, inventor of the Oramics Machine and co‑founder of the highly influential BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
Often where experimental and electronic music interacts with film we might find the use of continuous sustained sounds. Whether such soundtracks are considered music, sound or noise is prone to subjective standards and an unimportant here. Instead, what remains significant in this context is the non-diegetic, sound or music, dimension of what's being heard and how this correspondingly relates to what is being seen.
How does the image and soundtrack synthesise in film to express something - a meaning or a sensorial experience - for the spectator? Consider the use of sustained, layered drones in Phil Niblock's video work The Movement of People Working (2003). This ia an extended 16mm piece in which the camera records the repetitive manual work of labourers working in fields. Faces cropped, location sound mute, silent moving limbs set to the sounds of shimmering microtonal drones. (Or perhaps the other way round). What is this experience? +
Film Selection:
Tectonic Plate [2016] dir. Mika Taanila
The Movement of People Working [2003] dir. Phil Niblock
In Absentia [2000] dir. Quay Brothers
The Black Glove [1996] dir. Maria Beatty
Solaris [1972] dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
Entrance to Exit [1965] dir. George Brecht
The Red Desert [1964] dir. Michelangelo Antonioni
The Birds [1963] dir. Alfred Hitchcock
Ai [1962] dir. Takahiko Iimura
Speak {1962} dir. John Latham
Notes:
* Hitting the 'non-linear button' in film school was often an indication that it was time to depart from script and begin experimenting temporally in an attempt to uncover new ideas in the material.
+ Additional Thoughts: In some sense continuous sound has the uncanny effect of delineating the soundtrack from the image, setting up independent streams of sensory information; a return to a more primitive state in which film sound and image are decoupled from one another. In such instances, the absence of any significant points of audiovisual synchronisation can perceptually suggest a flattening of a sequence of moving images. The image lacks a kind of acoustic depth. Consequently, it seemingly lacks a three-dimensional presence (an inability to conform to realism) in the listening space of the cinema. Perhaps the sum effect of this is to establish a soundtrack that acts as a spatio-temporal frame through which the changing images are performed.