The spectacle of twenty four animated images a second suggests a familiar sensorial experience of everyday reality. This establishes the suspension of disbelief, the fundamental condition for attentional immersion in the flow of images. What the film re-presents appears to be happening in the present.
La Jetée [196]) dir. Chris Marker
The photograph often has the feeling of depicting something that happened in the past. Frozen in time, photography suggests a thing that “is already dead” (Barthes).
Filmmaker Peter Kubelka describes time as “a measuring system for a change in position of material objects.” Sound is an articulation of time. In and out of synchronous allignment, from jack-hammer to synesthetic rupture, the temporal unfolding of the soundtrack re-imagines what we see through rhythm and meter.
The contrapuntal use of sound infuses a series of still images with a unifying atmosphere and emotional tone. Elsewhere it performs the intellectual montage. Discrete sonic events direct attention to visual details, while unfolding sound, located both within and beyond the frame, spatially and temporally expand each image. This summons all the movement and activity attributed to familiar reality.
Film Selection:
GUO4 [2019] dir. Peter Strickland
Nostalgia [1971] dir. Hollis Frampton
Viet Flakes [1965] dir. Carolee Schneemann
Ishi no Uta [1963] dir. Toshio Matsumoto
Salut les Cubains [1963] dir. Agnes Varda
La Jetée [1962] dir. Chris Marker